A System Out of Balance
In 2003, there was the SARS virus; in 2009, the H1N1 pandemic; and in 2012, the MERS virus. Despite having learned about epidemics throughout my whole career, there have only been a few, relatively small ones in the last few decades. Aside from seasonal influenza epidemic, they are really quite rare. So why a pandemic now?
A pandemic is a global reset. Whether you believe the virus was surreptitiously man-made in a laboratory or incidentally jumped species in a Chinese wet-market doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we are susceptible to its effects because of dramatic imbalances in our own world. 600,000 people will die because we aren’t prepared for this type of onslaught.
All of our systems are out of balance. Our bodies, minds, spirits, communities, cities, and world are all dangerously off-kilter. We have allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by the dogma that faster, better, and cheaper is the answer to our world’s needs. The byproduct of this behavior is toxicity. Our air is full of chemicals, our water is full of plastics, our soil is poisoned with glyphosate, our minds race with useless thoughts, and our homes are toxic with electromagnetic frequencies.
Reductionism has earlier roots, but since the Industrial Revolution, the United States has habitually adopted a reductionist attitude toward most systems. We apply these attitudes to most processes in our world. This is done in medicine, industry, banking, and real estate. Like the bacteria in our bowels, the attitude is ubiquitous. Reductionism might work well in watchmaking and organic chemistry but, by focusing on the smallest parts, it is hard to see the big picture. We don’t see the forest for the trees. As a result, we show very little concern for anything not within the little piece of a system we are observing. When you approach a problem with a reductionist attitude, you stand in juxtaposition to Wholism.
Wholism: a theory that states that all the parts of a whole are intimately interconnected. These parts cannot exist independently of the whole.They cannot be understood without reference to the whole. This also implies that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Because we are not looking at the whole, we have very little concern about the collateral damage to the rest of a system. We can see this in historical stock-market crashes or the current massive waste from retail industry. For example, consider the inflation in medical-procedure prices in our country. This is all waste. And in the process of reductionism, with all of this waste, we have destroyed our only home, Mother Earth.
At the breasts of our Mother, we are suckling all of the chemicals we have dumped into her blood stream. We are literally stewing in a bath of artificial substances made from petrochemicals. Among the many patients that I have checked, I have found some combination of mold, Roundup, metals, and plastics: every single person!
How can our immune systems possibly handle this toxic onslaught? How can we fight infection with such a compromised immune system? I believe this is why we are suffering in a pandemic. It is Mother Earth trying to right the ship. It is our bodies rebelling against foreign chemicals that have no place in our sacred vessels.
Dr. Chris Chlebowski