Monday, April 16, 2018

EXPERIENTIAL PHYSIOLOGY

I have coined the word as a necessary complement to expounded and objectively experimented physiology.

Right now, this tremendous computer called your brain is filled with information supplied by society to enable your body to be used to serve its needs. Whatever big words are used - objective, scientific - this information fed to you is the precipitate of the lowest common factor of the largest number of nice ladies and gentlemen like you and me to earn bread, to marry, to retire, to grow old gracefully, to murder one another according to rules, to rebel, to revolt - all geared to this idol, the common good of the largest number.  

Experiential physiology means to take some trouble to educate your own cortex to become aware of its patent and latent connections with the numerous parts and functions of your body.

One has at one's disposal a huge central computer and array of inputs - eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch, pain, vibration, relative balance, tension and so on; an array of parts, hands, feet, neck and so on; an array of fortunately invisible dynamos - heart lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines, brain and so on.

I said fortunately invisible. The divine architect knowing that an ape is still sitting in the control made them invisible, otherwise everyone would have been constantly trying to make up and trim their hearts and lungs to look more respectable, say they would have put golden bangles on the heart, trimmed the intestines to respectable size and applied green paint on the stomach and altered the rate of the heart to suit the recommendations of the cardiological society. Anyhow this what they are already indirectly doing. 

All that has happened in evolution is packed within you - some possibilities to enable a better and higher expression.

Man has no organs for swimming. he swims. He has no organs for flight. One day he might fly. Someone will flout the respectable normality and do it. Not so long ago swimming was considered unethical and only because sufficient numbers do it the swimmers are not burnt. Crossing the waters is unholy and an insult to the god of water - so Gandhi who crossed the oceans to reach England had to undergo some penance. 

Roger Bannister, who ran a mile under four minutes began systematising the hows and whys of it, became the president of Neurological Society and promptly stopped running, I believe.

"1896 Olympic marathon" by Burton Holmes, Licensed under Public Domain via Commons 

A few of my friends at the Ashram ran a cross-country race covering 26 kms. On the second occasion one of them asked me "Doctor, tell me is it true we must take some glucose before running, because a doctor from the medical college told us so. What do you think. If we don't take glucose some acids will rise or fall, they say."

"Has this doctor run 26 kms even once in his life? I asked. "So keep running and tell him how you did it."

The point I am making is that this body is a product in the laboratory of evolution. Whether it is true or not, it is your own body. Treat it as if it really belongs to you. 

Then, your own interest and concern will lead you to the correct contacts and experiences, books, etc.

The urge to exceed himself can never be quenched in man. He will never succeed in his efforts to remain pegged to the goal of being an average man or efficient beast.

Experiential physiology is the logical result of your behaviour as if you really own your body. the textbook of human physiology today is a salesman's trick - the book is to be truthfully titled as "A statistically tailored presentation of data collected about the organs and functions of animals cut up in the laboratory, and on a large number of human beings who volunteered to submit their bodies to be studied objectively by the best and latest techniques in magnification and manipulation of accessible areas of information ignoring all other information in the interests of objective science as defined by the specialists in objective science."This at least will be honest.

Such a heading will do much good. Meanwhile, all those who do not  the wish to be as helpless as average rabbit would get a better idea of human physiology by reading the lives of explorers, mountaineers, avatars and such other abnormals to see what the human body can really do.

I am not running a crusade against the popular statistical scientific approach. It has been so over emphasised that I feel the need to over emphasise the role of individual unit. 

I am a partisan in favour of personal autonomy, and my digs at the protagonists of the collective approach do not diminish my regard for their zeal or sincerity. The aspirant for personal autonomy and self-realisation can learn much from the wealth of systematised information. In any case, it will be one more item for him to deal with and he will learn how to deal with it instead of quarreling with it.

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