Thinking about health, and all of our various perspectives, the question of: What is the proper way to merge these different views, has crossed my mind many times.
Coming from a technology perspective I always admired the philosophies of Chuck Moore and Jeff Fox. Which was simply: Keep things simple, iterate often, and factor code in meaningful ways.
Another way of saying it might be, keep things simple and find a balance between fast code and readable code.
A direct quote might be appropriate here:
While most of the Forth community has been working very hard to make Forth more like other languages to get it to fit into the niche the world has for it Chuck has been trying to go in an opposite direction. Rather than water down or dumb it down to look everything else Chuck has continued to make it smaller, simpler, faster and more productive in iteration after iteration. Just as Forth was in the face of conventional programming Chuck has chosen to not do what he thinks most everyone else is doing, making Forth look and work more like other languages. He feels that are plenty of people doing that. He wants to try to make Forth smaller, simpler, faster and more Forth-like again and again. That is in direct opposition to most of the Forth community who want to agree to set in stone the way things were done twenty years ago and then extend Forth further and further.
Now I can't quite explain why this resonates with me so much. To me the complete article reads much like the musings of a great philosopher.
Perhaps that's what ancient wisdom is, on a grander scale. Structures to classify reality, which have been iterated and rewritten over the ages. Until the simplicity, meaningfulness, and usefulness has been maximized.
The Hermetic Principles seem to be a great example of this. They are simple, useful, insightful, and provide a high level of understanding to the world around us. On both the smallest and the largest of scales.
Now to return the focus to health, we have the unique challenge of being able to access an immense amount of ancient wisdom. Yet many in our culture try to use modern science to simply invalidate it all. Then within modern science itself, there is a split among those who use it as a tool to understand our world; and those who see science as their data, knowledge, moral compass, and philosophy. Which are domains it wasn't designed to even comment on.
So there's all of that confusion going on, and then you have the more simple and practical challenge of just wanting to know what to eat. Before you know it, you're analyzing the nutrition label on every item you buy. Which not only adds to your stress, and takes a lot of time, it usually causes you to just chuck everything out. Which of course doesn't help with your stress and anxiety.
In thinking about this, it crossed my mind that we could just take traditional frameworks and try to add in some modern knowledge a little at a time. Looking for any contradictions, and slowly adjusting the framework to accomodate the new information.
Or one could take the inverse approach, and begin with modern knowledge, trying to morph it into a model which is compatible with traditional ones.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of both of these approaches (and more) throughout history. But regardless of the method, it takes a lot of human effort to achieve an integration of any kind. After all, how many physicists in the 20th century spent years trying to marry Einsteinian and Newtonian physics?
For the sake of keeping these ideas grounded and not too lost in the clouds, I'll use my own diet as an example.
First off here are the ideas I consider to be valuable and try to keep inside my awareness:
Not in any particular order
Now the perspectives of Balancing Minerals, have been drawn and refined from the use of Modern Analytics, so there is already a natural affinity there.
And from personal experience with constipation on the GAPS protocol, I can confidently say my next attempt will include Ox Bile as a supplement and higher amounts of fiber. Apart from that I did notice much less stress on my body, lower inflammation, and overall a sense of well-being.
Most recently, as I develop a meal planning system, Modern Analytics seem to be very useful in balancing various dietary principles, and in giving metrics to things which are usually tricky to measure.
This was more of a rant than anything, but hopefully you found some value in it!
