by Rolf Sattler
I consider health the central theme of my website – health in the most comprehensive sense including physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. I emphasize spiritual health and mental health (especially healing thinking and healthy thinking) for two reasons: 1. because I have more knowledge and experience in this area, and 2. because they can have a great impact on physical and emotional health.
Although at first sight “Ken Wilber, the AQAL Map, Health and Laughter,” the title of my website, may appear like a hodgepodge of topics, closer inspection reveals an intimate relation. Laughter generates and sustains many aspects of health. And Ken Wilber’s AQAL map implies much healthy thinking (besides some unhealthy dogmatism). Furthermore, Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity to which I refer in my book manuscript on Healing Thinking and Being (Chapter 4), in Healthy Language-Behavior and Spirituality, in Korzybski Quotes, and elsewhere, places great emphasis on sanity, health and healing. Other Quotes also involve health and related concepts.
Besides health, balance constitutes another unifying theme of my website. Balance is, of course, closely related to health. It may be considered a crucial aspect of health or even its definition according to Chinese medicine. Ken Wilber’s AQAL map is balanced in many ways: it aims “to cultivate body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature” (Ken Wilber. 2007. The Integral Vision. Boston: Shambhala, p. 217-218). The dynamic mandala that I proposed in Wilber’s AQAL Map and Beyond shows even greater balance because it balances hierarchy (holarchy), the most fundamental ordering principle in Ken Wilber’s AQAL map, with other ordering principles such as Yin/Yang, continuum and network views. Ken Wilber also recognizes these other ordering principles, but not with regard to the most basic structure of the Kosmos, which to him is hierarchical (holarchical). Therefore, in this respect his thinking is not well balanced.
Healthy thinking and healing thinking is balanced thinking. And laughter also generates balance.
Since balance is not static but rather dynamic, dynamics, flow, fluidity, change, impermanence and related concepts play an important role throughout my website.
Besides balance, health implies or is related to wholeness and integration, which characterize not only holistic medicine, integral medicine, and integrative medicine, but also the integral movement, including integral philosophy, integral spirituality, and other domains of integralism. The idea and experience of oneness (non-duality) reveal our most basic connection with the Kosmos – I refer to them throughout my website.
Wholeness, dynamics and related concepts are central to my open book on Wholeness, Fragmentation and the Unnamable: Holism, Materialism, and Mysticism - A Mandala. On the one hand, I contrast them with opposite concepts such as fragmentation in materialistic/mechanistic mainstream culture. On the other hand, I point out how both materialism and holism arise from the unnameable mystical source.
For a comprehensive article on health see Health and Sanity of Body, Speech, and Mind.
