Chapter 3

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Man has long sought an understanding of how the world works, and all cultures have developed a perspective
or worldview, now called a paradigm. The ancient worldview from approximately 150,000 years ago began
with the rise of modern man, Homo sapiens. This view still persists in many indigenous cultures today: that our
world is alive with energy; that all things have an energetic aspect, not only plants and animals but also the
earth and air.

Early western view

The western view of our world has two distinct phases: the early view and the modern view. The early western
view, like the eastern view, was largely phenomenological and based on observation of the natural world. It
was clear to our ancestors that the world is full of forces that cause actions to occur and that a special vital
force animates living organisms, hence the term animism. However, in the western view Man always stood
apart and to a degree separate from the other animals and plants, as only he appears to be able to possess
sophisticated communication of speech and be conscious of himself, and thus be able to control the
environment in ways no other living organism appears capable of. Most importantly, only he appears to be
able to have a personal relationship with a higher power, or powers, that control him and the world.
Initially in the western view, there were many gods with fairly human personalities but possessing
superhuman powers, whom mankind had to appease so as not to experience the wrath of these often vengeful
and angry gods lurking in an unseen world. However, these gods had a hierarchy, with normally a supreme
god more powerful than the rest; for the Greeks, this was Zeus, and for the Romans, Jupiter. This was a
largely mysterious world populated by powerful unseen forces that controlled mankind. In Europe and the
Middle East, these polytheistic views gave way to a monotheistic view with the life of Jesus Christ and then
later, Muhammad.
The early Greeks developed the pondering on the nature of the world and Man’s place in it into a science
called philosophy. Then all further western thinking was based on the work of these early Greek philosophers
and their deductive intellectual process. One of the most famous of these philosophers was Plato, and
Platonism reigned from antiquity until well into the early Renaissance. The core belief of Platonism was that
the world of form, the material world of the five senses, is an imprecise material representation of ideal forms,
or plata, that exist in a non-material and timeless dimension.
The immaterial plata in Plato’s view are the source of the real things in our world, because the shape of
material objects is dependent on the information contained in the plata, of which the physical object is but an
imperfect copy. If couched in more modern terms, you could say that the plata provide the energy template
guiding the construction of the physical object or thing.
A later contemporary of Plato, the great healer and philosopher Hippocrates, developed vitalism to its
highest form in the ancient world. The Hippocratic school saw healing arising from natural adaptive powers
within the organism, the physis. In Hippocratic thought, the physis was perceived as a healing power or self-
adjusting power within the body that ‘though untaught and uninstructed, it does what is proper to preserve a
perfect equilibrium’. Physis is also the root of the word physician, and in Hippocrates’ view, as a guardian of
the physis, the physician had a clearly supporting role: ‘Not a ruler or violator of nature … he stands ready to
aid the healing power that is inherent.’1
In more recent schools of the early view in western thought, the physis was called vital energy, life energy,
élan vital, etc., all denoting that this property is essential for life. When there is sufficient physis or vital
energy, health is maintained; lack of health is caused primarily by a diminished supply of this essential
substance. Again, the non-material, energetic physis was seen to provide an energetic template necessary to
maintain physiological health, with blockage of this ‘body energy’ the primary cause of ill health.

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