Innate Intelligence: a unifying principle?

Dave Simon BSc MPhil DipASS     {An article published for humans!} 

Innate Intelligence is defined as the life force within the body.
It holds all the knowledge to allow living creatures to function. This allows us to live without conscious control of the billions of electrical, chemical, and physical processes that we are made of. It helps all life disobey the laws of physics by collecting and using energy, rather than simply losing it like a hot kettle cooling down. Once born, we depend on being self-healing organisms. We only die when injury or disease overwhelms this ability.

Understanding of the life force seems global. The Chinese know it as 'chi' and use it as the basic principle in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture. In ancient India it was known as 'pranna' and it is still the basis of ayurvedic therapies. The native Americans call it Energy Medicine. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates believed that 'illness' was the result of a battle between injuring forces and innate healing abilities. In 1833, writing in Germany, Hahnemann said in his Philosophy of Homeopathy, 'without this animating, spirit-like power the organism is dead'. And John McTimoney, founder of the McTimoney Chiropractic College, defined chiropractic as ‘restoring the cohesive force'.

The body instinctively knows how to live!

Complementary therapies aim to release or enable the body's natural remedies. Even the 'talking therapies', started by Dr Sigmund Freud a century ago, aim to help us with emotional problems this way. None of this condemns orthodox medicine. Working from different principles and with different methods, complementary therapies do something different. Sometimes orthodox methods are necessary.

Occasionally, a combination of therapies can achieve progress where one alone cannot. A great benefit of this overlap is that patients get choice. Informed choice gives people control over their lives. This is known to help recovery in its own right. So, being able to choose what feels right can actually be best for you.

 Information and choice are vital!

Systemic thinking...

“What we are seeing today is a shift of paradigms not only within science but also in the larger social arena...

The social paradigm now receding had dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world...

This paradigm consists of...the view of the world as a mechanical system, the view of the body as a machine...

In science, the language of systems theory, and especially the theory of living systems, seems to provide the most appropriate formulation of the new ecological paradigm.” (Capra, 1983).