John J. McGraw-Mystical Medicine

The recent medical ‘revolution’ that confirms the interaction of the mind and body is an absurd one. Research studies seem to be ushering in a new appreciation that mood and outlook have important effects on our bodily health. This field of work, called psychoneuroimmunology, continues to amaze because most of us defiantly separate the mind and the body. When one recognizes the brain as the source of the mind, these findings cease to surprise. Hippocrates and other physicians of ancient times knew full well of the harmonious interaction between thoughts and healthy body function. The interconnection of our nervous and endocrine systems logically entails such an interaction—there is nothing mystical about this field whatsoever. Psychosomatic illness is ‘real’ not because studies confirm it so but because the ‘psychosomatic’ (literally "soul/body") is, in reality, only the somatic. There is no separation between the body and our mental life. We’ve been deceived into thinking that some mysterious and immaterial soul-substance, the source of our thoughts, interacts with the flesh and influences its healthy functioning. The media always relates these findings in language half-scientific and half-mystical. Many of the media’s darlings cater to this confusion, blending mysticism and science into a fashionable but always mysterious amalgam that they alone are privy to understanding, much to their profit.

The truth of the matter is more complicated. The body, with its fluctuations in hormone levels and other chemicals, causes the brain to perceive and feel in certain ways…and vice-versa. The person’s mentality—her complex of beliefs, thoughts, and feelings—affects hormone levels in the brain which go on to influence the body. As with all things complex, we’re dealing here with a complicated web of feedback loops—one thing influences another which, in turn, influences its source, ad infinitum. The heart of this new work will be to uncover the details: how much do various hormones change the mentality and how much

does the mentality affect the hormones? This science promises no revolutions, just a clarification of details.

The great challenges of unweaving this web cause some to remain steadfast in the grip of dualism. Such people deem our current challenges as the way God intended things to be—man lost in confusion, dependent on greater providence, and so forth. If we persist in disbelieving science in favor of outdated dogma, our knowledge of self will continue to be mediated by one guru or another as it has been since the beginning of time.