Our Past
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
- Richard Feynman
In the previous section of the HumanaNatura program, we explored the idea of natural health and framed our approach to natural health promotion as scientific in orientation. Our use of science includes employing an evidence-based approach to understand our natural past and pre-existing natural health requirements, the subject of this section of the program, as well as to improve upon and surpass our original natural conditions of life and health.
As suggested in the last section of the program, our use of science also includes adopting its (and evolution’s) inherent approach of natural progressivity. In our case, this means using and encouraging a strategy of continually probing for new health awareness and expressions of our health.
In this way, HumanaNatura’s goal of renewing and advancing our health and well-being is cast in part, as science inevitably is, as a creative and inventive human endeavor. We may have to deconstruct physical evidence to understand the world and our health, but also must construct and synthesize the information we obtain to attain each new level of applied scientific knowledge, and individual and collective states of health.
Many of us assume that a scientific viewpoint implies one devoid of feeling, inspiration, and natural human emotion. We are apt to think of a scientific mind as a calculating and dispassionate one, even one that is spiritually restrained and withdrawn from the evocative experience of natural life. While perhaps true of some scientists, it is equally true of many non-scientific people in the modern world and there are many examples of emotionally inspired and deeply spiritual scientists. They remind us that emotionally rich lives and scientific orientations are not mutually exclusive conditions.
Looking back to move ahead
In this section of the program, we will summarize the science of our natural human origins and discuss essential principles of human health and well-being that can be derived from the study of this natural history. We will highlight essential facts from our past and then show that a complete and compelling worldview is now possible based entirely on natural science and progressive natural life.
As part of this discussion, we will also introduce ideas that may begin to foster new outlooks and feelings in you, and even a new natural harmony or modern spirituality. This alternative perspective taps into your natural emotions and fulfills your health’s demand for engaging life, but is also consistent with modern science and natural human reasoning. This aspect of the program may prove valuable or superfluous to you now, but almost certainly will touch on issues that will arise over time in your natural health practice and in health promotion activities with others.
To accomplish these important goals for this section of the program, we will build on our discussion of natural health so far, keeping in mind the important gap we highlighted in the previous section between what we have called our pervasive social health today and our underlying natural health potential Our next step is to examine in some detail our origins and earlier human life in nature, and thereby identify key features from our past that prove essential to our natural health and well-being today.
From this discussion, we will be ready to introduce HumanaNatura’s four key natural health techniques – Natural Eating, Natural Exercise, Natural Living, and Natural Communities – each based on the emerging new science of our past and human life in nature, and augmented by contemporary scientific findings regarding optimal human health and quality of life today.
Although this section of the HumanaNatura program is entitled Our Past, we will nevertheless provide you with important new perspectives to expand your ability to examine the present around you and consider new directions for your future. Our discussion will ground you in critically-important scientific observations and findings about nature and natural life, including insights into our human nature and natural evolution. These observations that may be unfamiliar to you or perhaps still only partially considered and assimilated into your life.
This section will provide you with much of the information you will need to understand and pursue natural health in your life, and to appreciate why HumanaNatura’s system of health techniques are structured the way they are, and how and why they work.
A new modern honesty
As perhaps suggested by our strong scientific orientation, HumanaNatura believes that for each of us to understand our opportunities for new natural health and progressive well-being, we must see clearly and act in an informed harmony with our human origins, or in conscious, health-promoting transcendence of our pre-historic life in nature.
This process of progressive health-based living can be a significant challenge for many of us, and is often more wide-ranging in scope than we may realize at first. New, fully modern, and informed and forward-oriented expressions of our natural health require a significant appreciation of our new and still-emerging natural science and a questioning and progressive embrace of our new potential for universally healthier life today.
Natural health today thus often requires new personal attentiveness and honesty in our lives, and a willingness to re-think the world around us and our human and individual place in it. Progressive health is inevitably a path of new information and perspective, and the releasing of earlier personal and cultural conceptions – seeming certainties or accepted familiarities that we may unconsciously hold and experience as inseparable from our lives and identities. In this way, they thus hold us in turn.
Achieving new understanding and a personal commitment to action toward healthier natural life proves especially difficult for those of us who, either wholly or in part, still maintain strong traditional or acculturated views of the world. In these cases, we often have organized our lives, priorities, and relationships in strong alignment with these views, and perhaps more fundamentally and less flexibly than we may initially appreciate.
In working with health-oriented and health-curious people around the world, HumanaNatura practitioners find that inherited preconceptions and biases from our past still strongly influence a majority of people today. We might even say a near totality of people, if we include those of us who acknowledge the preeminence of science and scientific method in principle, but have not carefully considered and begun to actively integrate modern science findings into our lives – including the new life patterns it enables and the progressive worldview it presages.
Even when we comprehend our natural origins and the world scientifically and fully, often our knowledge can remain limited and superficial in important dimensions of life, an intellectual comprehension only and not one that forms the full basis of our personal priorities and choices. Often, we have not begun the essential process of creative synthesis of new scientific truths in our lives, or engendered a personal commitment to the progressive understanding and action that the progress of science now suggests to us. Often, despite our scientific knowledge, we continue to live, think, and feel as people of earlier times lived, thought, and felt – in both popular and intellectual life – significantly and unconsciously limiting us all as modern people.
To accomplish this partial denial of scientific progress and the new truths it affords us as modern people, we must either approach life hypocritically, turning a blind eye to reliable new certainties within us, or we must live ironically and dwell in our lives half-heartedly and passively, moving through the moments of our lives with distance and abstraction. Neither option of course reflects our full potential for emotional and intellectual authenticity, or even our natural capacity for primordial robustness and vitality in our lives. Neither reflects our natural health, and our innate ability and need to persevere curiously, courageously, and joyously amidst the inevitable challenges of life.
As we have suggested, as essential as a scientifically-based understanding of our origins in nature is to unlocking the principles and requirements of our natural health, it is as important to experience emotionally and connect spiritually with the enormity that is our human past, the natural world around us, and our individual and human place and potential in it. Only in this way are we able to move forward forcefully toward healthier and more compelling forms of life. Our ability to experience this greater truth of modern human life, lying beyond and enveloping the self, is made possible but is never fully achieved, through the intellectual study of science alone.
Only when our scientific knowledge is transformed into creative and spiritual feeling within us, and only when this feeling compels us to find new and truer life expressions reflecting our modern knowledge – for ourselves, our communities, and all people – can we say we have left behind the many false conceptions and irrational limitations of our pre-modern past, and the drag of diminished health and vitality these limitations now create today. Only then, can a new human philosophy based on the science of human life in nature, and on the science of our human health and potential for open-ended quality of life, begin to take root and flourish in our lives and society.
Only then, can we say we have arrived in the scientific age.