A thought experiment...

To illuminate the current situation with regards to the controversies in Chiropractic surrounding the profession’s many stances with regards to philosophy, I put forward a thought experiment.

Imagine 3 human tribes, which have 3 different lifestyles and ways of coping with problems.  The members of the first tribe are called the “Conservatives”.  They have a long written history, and the young members of the tribe are obliged to memorize this history and learn the lessons of the past.  The past is sacred, and past actions form a binding example for the members of the Conservative tribe to follow.  Many of the tribe’s men and women are busy maintaining their vast archives, memorizing and transmitting the wisdom written in their books.  These books have the answer to the changing patterns of life.  When things change, the Conservatives rely on their knowledge of the way their ancestors handled the situation, and do the same.  This often solves the problem, but when facing the totally unknown or unpredictable, the Conservatives are rather helpless.  Only very rarely and by accident (or by some hidden order) do some members of the tribe stumble on a solution and manage to survive such an emergency.  The survivors then become sanctioned as “ancestors”, and their deeds are added to the sacred books.

The people of the second tribe, the “Explorers”, have the very opposite philosophy.  They see that the world is in constant flux and often changes, and believe that, for many things, past experience is limiting and misleading, so should be forgotten.  The present and future require a constant process of reevaluation.  The Explorers stress the central role of individual discovery, and the lack of any preconceived ideas.  When they encounter an emergency, whether similar to past emergencies or completely new, they respond by encouraging everyone to find new creative solutions to the problem.  Usually someone does find a solution, which is then adopted by all the members of the tribe, but often many perish before this solution is found.

The members of the third tribe, the “Interpreters”, respect the past, just like the Conservatives, but they are not bound by it in the same way, and encourage exploration and controlled deviation from tradition.  According to their philosophy, their ancestors had divine wisdom, and their sacred words must be the inspiration for all times, but the deep wisdom of the ancestors is written in metaphorical language.  This means it requires a new interpretation in each generation, according to the changing needs of the society, but still in accordance with certain rules.  When they face a state of emergency that is similar to one described in their books, interpretation is easy and they act more or less like their ancestors, slightly updating their behaviour according to the needs of the present.  They give freedom to their interpretative imagination, and try to find new solutions that do not contradict the old wisdom.

Which tribe do you belong to?

The Basic Principles of Life

*One of the habits I have in making my writings public is to minimize naming the source of the materials I use when connecting ideas.  It is not to try and pass it off as original to me but to minimize the bias that tends to emerge when source and content are presented together.  People will often allow their prejudice of the source cloud their judgment on the content solely on its merits.

The term "Revolution" means to "revolve", or to turn around.  So in the context of a "revolutionary idea", it would represent an idea that would figuratively "turn around" your current view of reality.  In this light, I present to you a quote I read recently,

"Nothing in a person's race, gender, nationality, religious persuasion, sexual orientation, or any other aspect of individuality, shall disqualify that person from participating fully and equally in the human experience at the highest level."


If I were to create a new "Declaration of Independence" or "Constitution" for not just this country but the Earth, I think I might have to include the above as one of its main tenets.  I could add at the end "...so long as that participation does not impinge upon the rights or safety of others.", but somehow it seems to take away from the aesthetics of how it was written......and it should probably be implied anyways.

So now we must ask- What (or who) would prevent this type of  seemingly logical solution to persecution, hatred, violence and war from manifesting itself?  If we agree, as a whole (or even a majority), that this would be a path to peace on earth, assuming that is what we all say we want, how do we go about achieving that goal?  I can suggest three 3 concepts that are exclusive to humanity and therefore created by man that could point to some insights.  I say exclusive and man-made because I see absolutely no evidence of these concepts existing in other lifeforms that exist in nature.
1.  Morality
2.  Justice
3.  Ownership

Just about  every form of social convention, custom, political institution, economic system, punishment system, philosophical concept, religious doctrine that there exists , either all or some faction of these concepts, drives its existence and sustains its influence.  We have stitched together this tapestry of interweaving spiritual, philosophical, political and economic concepts and given it the power to govern our collective experience.  Its "the way things are", we say.  Beliefs, which perhaps are false.....Mental constructions, which perhaps are harmful literally producing our outer experiences of the world.  Beliefs which drives Conventions.....Conventions which drive behaviours.....Behaviours which produce our "reality".

No doubt, for humans to change their most basic beliefs and value systems that no longer serve us remains our most difficult challenge.  It took the Catholic Church 300 years to grant Galileo an official pardon for his confirmation of Copernicus' discovery that the earth "revolved" (there's that term again) around the sun.  We are a stubborn bunch.

To illustrate best these concepts in action, lets use examples:
-  The father kicking out his unwed pregnant daughter.
-  The rebuking of a son or daughter for marrying outside his faith or race.
-  The beating or disownment of a son for being gay.
-  A 23 yr old woman strapping a bomb to her body and walking into a crowd in Jerusalem.
-  A nation occupying the land of another for decades, essentially subjugating them, and then taking desperate measures and becoming angry because they became angry.
and the list goes on........

There is a set of Basic Life Principles that seem to lie behind all of existence and humanity could potentially be on the cusp of understanding them at a deeper level.  All of life demonstrates them.  It has been suggested that the human mental constructions of Morality, Justice and Ownership are clouding these Basic Life Principles and preventing their expression.  The expression of which would make all the difference between what we seek to evolve to and what currently is reality today.  What if,

We could elevate the concept of Morality to the Principle of Functionality.
We could elevate the concept of Justice to the Principle of Adaptability.
We could elevate the concept of Ownership to the Principle of Sustainability.

It would of course require that we continue (I believe this process has been going on for awhile) to lift the veil of separation between our choices and its consequences, our behaviours and others.....our bodies and the bodies of others.  For instance, and this may be too esoteric for some, but what if we considered the idea that "Your body is yours, but it is not you."  That the essence of "you" extends beyond the boundaries of our physical bodies, and that this "essence" or "energy field" has no physical place where my energy stops and your "essence" or "energy field" begins.  Essentially its like the air in our house- there are separate rooms but only "one air".  Well thats just Spirit or Soul you're describing, you say.  Yes, perhaps...but I am less concerned about the labels you may give it than the implications this idea has if ever we were to adopt it from a practical point of view.  If that easily visible concept reminds me that what's Functional, Adaptable and Sustainable for human life should be first and foremost in how I choose to live than I can stay congruent with Life's Principles and not potentially harmful mental constructions.  It may just be that I am rehashing the idea of interconnectedness and expressing it in another way but some things are worth repeating, don't you think?

The Philosophy of ADIO and the Neuroscience of OIBU- Irony at its best.

*For the purpose of this piece, I will use brain as a term to include the nervous system in its entirety which is prudent since you cannot separate the two anyways.

Traditionally, one of the philosophical constructs considered sacred by many in the chiropractic profession is that of Above Down Inside Out.  This mental construct plays a dual role- on the one hand it,  describes how the flow of intelligence (via impulses) starts from the brain, projects down to the spinal cord and flows over the nerves to end at a specific end tissue or organ to regulate its function.  On the other hand, the pneumonic is a representation of the chiropractic approach to health and well-being, in that the cause of health comes from inside the patient.  On a more subtler level it is used to make the distinction between the biomedical model of "getting the disease" and the vitalistic model of "losing health".  Therefore, the term ADIO became a rallying cry for the chiropractic profession and Outside In Below Up was used to describe the biomedical approach (maybe even vilify it to some extent).

Before I get to the irony part, I'd like to bring a conceptual model to the table- The Cone Model.  I was first exposed to the Cone Model by John DeMartini and like any model, I prefer to not say whether its true or false, just whether it is more or less useful.  The Cone Model represents a proposed universal law, put forth by many philosophers, known as the Law of the One and the Many-  This idea suggests that all is one, completely unified, at a high enough level of abstraction and development, and that everything else consists of varying degrees of dichotomy and contradiction.  It is also referred to as the law of  "similars and differences" or my favourite, the law of Entropy-Syntropy.  As a quick  attempt at definition and clarity- Entropy is the tendency for disorder, randomness or disorganization to submerge out of order and organization while Syntropy is the tendency for order or organization to emerge out of disorder or chaos.  Nature maintains equilibrium between these two governing and directive forces.

So what does this have to do with ADIO-OIBU?  Well I wondered if the anti-chiropractic concept of Outside-In-Below-UP could exist somewhere in Chiropractic as a balance to ADIO.  And this may have occurred to some of you already, but having gained a tremendous amount of new knowledge and insight into the areas of evolutionary biology, epigenetics and neuroscience for the last year or so, my mind made some new synaptic connections regarding the development (ontogeny) and evolution (phylogeny) of the human nervous system as a representation of OIBU.  NO!  YOU SAY, BLASPHEMY, YOU SAY!  Yes, the very system we claim is the "master system", "the seat of the human experience" and the one system the gods of chiropractic has charged us with the mighty task of being experts and caretakers of.

Let's review what the world of the sciences are thinking with regards to the human brain in 2012 in point form:
-  The brain can no longer be considered a fixed structure, with spatially distributed light switches (neurons) and well placed fuseboxes (control centres) that just get turned on and off.
-  Disease and disability cannot just be explained through localized lesions to specific  centres in the brain (including subluxation).  It turns out we cannot explain all that the brain is capable of through localization of function alone.
-   The brain is a much more dynamic organ than previously considered.  Because of this, it created a much more complex problem which drove more questions such as-  How does the brain take all of these individual areas with their individual sensory inputs and merge them into one coherent perception of the world?  This became known as the Binding Problem.
-  It would seem that some brave evolutionists (despite what wikipedia says)are bringing back the once ridiculed Recapitulation Theory that states- Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny-  which, in plain english, means that in developing from embryo to adult, animals (including humans) go through stages resembling the successive stages in evolution of their remote ancestors.  Long live Ernst Haeckel (the modern originator of this theory)!
- What this means is that the development of cognitive abilities in a child mirrors the phylogenetic evolution of cognition in the human species.  It is built on MOTOR DEVELOPMENT.  Human children only achieve self awareness after they have successfully achieved bipedalism and have developed a smooth coordinated gait.
-  So in essence, as Golden Brain award winner Daniel Wolpert says, the only reason we have a brain is for complex and adaptable movement ("its why sea squirts eat their own brains", he says).  This demoralized the entire Artificial intelligence and technology community because they realized that nothing truly intelligent is going to develop in a bodiless mainframe.
-  Now the "Embodiment theory" of cognition is a hot buzz word in Neuroscience and it has spurred on other hot buzz words in the community such as "Default Mode Network" (which is gravity-induced consciousness which ties into posture and alignment...woohoo!!).
-  And those HGP (Human Genome Project) people keep revising the number of genes we have downward.....ummmm.

So we have a situation (or theory) where bipedalism evolved initially because it conserved energy, but the awesome exaptation (or unintended (?) byproduct) of that was a larger, more complex and more developed brain because to achieve a habitual bipedal posture we would have to evolve the most coordinated and synchronized motor system of any animal in history.  And in order to do that we would have to build the brain from the bottom up.......wait......what?!.....did you say build the brain from the BOTTOM UP?!  Yes, I did and in order to do that, we have to gather sensory input from the environment  (OUTSIDE) and bring it IN......GASP!!!  Did you just say that our brains develops from OUTSIDE-IN-BELOW-UP?  Yes.

"And thats why primitive reflexes exist- so that in order to sense our environment, we have to move in our environment?"
Yes.
"And thats why our genes only provide the most very basic scaffolding structure in our brains and that environmental experience provides the stimulation needed for more sophisticated processing?"
Yes.
"And thats the reason we don't remember our early childhood and that mirror self recognition only begins at age 2 is because this sophisticated processing doesn't exist prior to that?"
Yes.

Outside In stimulation leads to Bottom Up vertical integration in  the developing brain before  horizontal integration and more sophisticated lateral processing occurs.  Then.....and only then... can we get Above Down Inside Out regulation.  So here's my new Cone Model,

"Well that's ironic."
I know.