Our Future
We must be the change we wish to see in the world.
- Mohandas Gandhi
We began the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program with an extended discussion of natural health itself, highlighting the generally poor health and overall fitness of people living in both modern and traditional society.
We then contrasted this state of social health with the abundant natural health of life throughout wild nature – including humans living in, or in harmony with, our long evolutionary niche and natural design. We suggested that new perspectives on the natural world, and on our health and life in society today, are needed to understand and close this gap between our natural and social states of health.
Using modern science to explore the key sources or dimensions of our natural health, to uncover ways to restore our health to more natural and optimal conditions, and to consider how our health might be progressively advanced to unprecedented new levels in modern times, HumanaNatura has suggested important changes in the way we think about and approach many basic aspects of our lives.
These changes involve a fuller and richer understanding of our natural health and human condition. They involve better appreciating our human evolution in nature and essential cooperative and competitive dynamics of our ancient life there. They include new, more natural, and more health-oriented diet and exercise practices. And they include a scientifically-informed, progressively health-seeking, and open-ended approach to the goals, priorities, and processes we use to shape and guide our individual lives.
Toward new human flourishing
The total impact of the three, science-based natural health techniques we have discussed thus far – Natural Eating, Natural Exercise, and Natural Living – is often transformative and unexpectedly powerful. The techniques lead us to new vitality and personal flourishing, and even combine to form the beginnings of a new post-modern outlook and health-based approach to contemporary life.
These three elements of our natural health system achieve their result through a renewed and progressive harmony with essential natural human requirements for health and well-being. They take advantage of the new human freedom, affluence, and understanding that is an important part of our inheritance as people living in advanced technological society today. The techniques also immediately encourage us to live more attentively and creatively, and provide crucial health benefits and enhanced life opportunities to us from this fact alone.
As you will learn directly in your own natural health practice, and in helping others to pursue their potential for progressive natural health and life, enhanced physical health and fitness, and new emotional and spiritual well-being, quickly emerge from HumanaNatura’s natural health techniques. This reliable and recurring outcome from using our system underscores the validity of the new scientific findings about natural life and health we have discussed, and the power and correctness of HumanaNatura’s application of these findings.
Over time, particularly as we take up and sustain the practice of Natural Living, the pursuit of natural health through the HumanaNatura system reinforces and builds on itself, greatly expanding our personal health awareness, the scope of our health promotion efforts, and the impact of our actions on our quality of life. These changes can grow to encompass the entirety of our lives, even as they require from us only daily perseverance and a commitment to ongoing and progressive adjustments to our health landscape.
As we have discussed, because of the compounding method of the HumanaNatura system and the threshold level of scientific knowledge now available to us, we each need only act pragmatically, progressively, and persistently toward new health, in a sustained cycle of action and learning, to inform and greatly improve the quality of our choices, health, and lives. From this compounding cycle of applied science, we gradually but soon greatly expand our sense of what it means for us to be healthy and well in the modern age, and thereby can further recreate our lives in new and remarkable ways.
Breaking health's bonds
We have underscored in our Personal Health Program that substantial, even transformative and revolutionary progress toward new individual health and quality of life can be made through the measured and validating use of our first three natural health techniques.
We have also pointed out that important opportunities for still greater levels of natural health and vitality inevitably will remain out of reach, unless there is similar and even parallel health-based change in our communities, cultures, and global society. Without these changes, real natural limits to our personal health potential will remain despite perhaps remarkable personal change – in areas ranging from work opportunities to the quality of our relationships to our potential for health and life expression.
In this discussion, we have equally highlighted the principally cooperative condition of natural human groups and the many, often underappreciated “beta-cycle” dimensions of our natural health and well-being. The essentially communitarian and intergenerational nature of flourishing human life naturally encourages us to promote the health and development of others, if we are to fully express and experience our own individual natural health potential and if we are to create conditions for advancing health for all.
Our original natural health and progressive health potential today thus each require individual life ultimately lived for things other and larger than ourselves. By this, we mean that there is a natural requirement that we individually move beyond a principally self-focused life to one that is externally and socially focused and greater than us – naturally turning our focus to family, community, humanity, learning and teaching, the future, nature, and other extra-personal dimensions of healthy human life. We have summarized this needed movement with two triadic models – encouraging individual life focused on engagement, endeavor, and relationships, and social policies promoting transparency, equality, and reciprocity.
Without this critical shift in our focus, all of our health efforts, and even our potential for natural happiness and self-expression, inevitably will be bounded in two important ways. First, by the unnatural and palpable limits of an internally-focused and self-serving life, one lacking a natural and naturally-fulfilling focus on attentive engagement, skilled endeavor, and reciprocating relationships in the world. Second, without health promotion in the larger world, our health promotion efforts will remain significantly constrained by the very real limits of cultures and communities still bound to pre-scientific life patterns and a general state of social health, one lacking in information-rich transparency, the engagement fostered by relative equality and equal justice, and the mutually-beneficial general condition of human reciprocity.
Within the HumanaNatura system, there is therefore a natural requirement to emphasize outward and engaged life, rather than the inward and reflective life so common in our time, if our system is to be both complete and open-ended, and if it is to advance contemporary health to the fullest extent possible. As suggested before, there is even the opportunity to promote new human freedom and wisdom in the modern world, and to reveal a waiting perennial truth of natural human life, in encouraging understanding of a fundamental duality of all human existence: 1) we are not individually or collectively important in the greater natural universe, and 2) we are capable of personal and shared greatness in our lives and communities through principled action within them.
Realizing our need for external life and our making of the critical shift to health promotion in the world around is another critical milestone in the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program. As suggested, health promotion in others greatly expands the range of health enablers available to us, broadens and heightens our personal health landscape, and infuses our lives with essential new beta-cycle characteristics.
The move to externally-focused life can lead to profound changes in our life visions and planned actions, and to new freedom and greater natural enjoyment of life. Our shift to an outwardly-oriented life generally enriches and accelerates our natural health efforts, and often substantially improves quality of life in both us and the people around us.
Community health promotion
For these reasons, as we pursue progressively healthier life in the HumanaNatura system, health promotion in our communities and global society becomes a practical and personal health imperative.
To help us more fully pursue our progressive health and quality of life potential, health-based action in the world and for our future – which we simply call the technique of Natural Communities – is the fourth critical component of the HumanaNatura system. The technique of Natural Communities is more fully taken up in our Community Health Program, but can begin far less formally. For most of us, community health promotion actions can immediately be included in and help to enrich the content of our Natural Life Plans.
Before we conclude the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program, we would like to discuss and inform the prospects for your own movement, and the movement of others, toward the promotion of health-based life in the world today. Our goal in this discussion is to help you to understand essential dynamics that now limit progressively healthier and more adaptive life in modern society, and equally to see your individual actions against the backdrop our shared potential for health-based social change today. Included in this latter theme is consideration of potential roles you might personally take on as a natural health practitioner, living in modern conditions of social health and seeking to directly and indirectly enrich your health by promoting new natural health and quality of life around you.
In this final discussion of the program, we hope to encourage you to envision for yourself the possible ways your actions might unfold in your life and contribute to a larger movement toward health-based life in the modern world. We would like use the discussion to underscore that the principle of seeking progressively healthier life brings with it a natural need for all natural health practitioners to work to change and re-shape our modern world. This is needed both to unlock our full personal potential for natural health and fulfilling life, and to seize our new modern opportunity for beneficial and revolutionary human health advancement in our time and for our future.