I AM THE JOURNEY

“The Future of Integrative Health and Wellness for the Americas”

EnRico A. Melson, MD, MPH, FACPM, DAAPM, ABIHM, MHT, MBE, KSJ The topic we must all be talking about is Global Integral Medicine. What is this stuff of total health and whole person healing? What is new and what is different about these concepts from what has traditionally prevailed and characterized Health and Medicine in The Americas? We all have a mandate. That mandate is to create awareness of One Global Medicine as the direction in which the world is moving, and to deliver the highest quality education and service within this whole process.

This is the phenomenon of Globalization in Health. What is to be its Nature? This Paper is NOT intended to be a Summary Discourse of numerous statistics on the status of Health and Medical Services in The Americas. There is no shortage of academic, think-tank, and governmental Health Services Researchers on these matters. This paper IS intended to offer a perspective that captures MegaTrends understanding with a Call for Action – in Service to the Governments and Peoples of The Americas. We've been experiencing Globalization in political circles, in economic circles, in military circles.

We also are experiencing it in Health Care circles. It is important for all of the Americas (not just the USA) to be part of the paradigm setting process — and not just passengers on the train. The Global “Great Recession”. As of 10 March 2009, Reuters International News Service and Yahoo! News noted that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), officially declared that the World is entering a “Great Recession”. Despite the high-profile exposures of the leading developed nations (such as the USA and the EU) and their respective challenges, the lesser developed countries (LDC’s) of the World are taking even greater hits: “The ramifications of the growing financial crisis on the world's poorest nations will likely remain for some time, the bank said. Because richer nations are borrowing more, developing nations are being squeezed out and many financial organizations that have provided financing to lower-income countries "have virtually disappeared." (Reuters) This current Global crisis poses two contravening influences to the issue of Integrative Health and Wellness in The Americas.

On one hand, the limitation/lack of sufficient direct funding sources to modernize and replenish Health and Medical Care infrastructure may subject (particularly) Latin American and Caribbean nations to acceding and conceding greater control over Health Care orientation and delivery (e,g., in the direction of Harvard Medical International's motto: 'One World Medicine' — proliferating the capital-and-technology-intensive Allopathic model of Modern Medicine. On the other hand, costs of Preventive/ Alternative/ Complementary/ Integrative/ Indigenous Medicine and Healing practices have nearly always been substantially lower (and more cost-effective) than their counterpart Allopathic approaches. This, of course, favors the continuance and proliferation of the non-Allopathic dimensions of Healing systems in The Americas. Inclusivity. Global Medicine is, by necessity and nature, inclusive. It must be fully integrative and it must give attention to the harmony of the many different traditions of health and medical systems that exist in our global family of cultures. That is extremely important because what happens in all other cases of Globalization is a dominance effect that leads towards the hegemony of a primacy paradigm — whether it's economic, military, political, social, cultural — and the same thing with Health Care. It is important for us to make sure that Globalization in Health Care is an inclusive paradigm and kinetic and not one that's exclusive, causing a domino effect rendering all other health care systems negligible, Globalization era all sectors are being effected and as I say this Inclusivity and integration are key, rather than domination and extinction. Extinction versus Integration. Traditional health care systems that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years are also going extinct in the same way that animal species are increasingly experiencing. So preventing cultural extinction must include preserving health care systems. Healing systems are as intrinsic and important to any culture as the other key aspects such as its artifacts, language, science, and rituals. However, the progress in recognition, in corporation, and dissemination of a true system of One Global Medicine has been slow, encumbered, and even sabotaged around the world.

There has not been a universal embracing of diversity and integration of healing system methodologies, philosophies and processes with that of the dominant mode of Allopathic Medicine. Grids + Information and Communications Technology. ICT of course accelerates the pace of Integration. In this Globalization era, we must talk about National Health Care Informatics Grids, emerging due to the predominance of ICT.

We have to think of grids on multiple levels. For example, to experience the Energy Enhancement System is to be in a field of Scalar Wave technology. We must understand that this type of technology, more than one hundred years old, is finally proliferating around the planet. Eventually will come formations of grids of scalar dimensionality as well as other non-Hertzian grid and field phenomena. There are grids of electromagnetic nature, of social nature, etc. We are becoming a planet that is intensely accelerating the experience of grids. What is happening in any localized environment becomes globalized in it's experience, becoming accessible to many others, Irrespective of distance, culture, or language. It is what we call an InteGrid topology of Integral Utility Grid Supercomputing (IUGS – a term coined by Dr. Steven Chen and MySelf in early 2006). Integral Awareness Medicine Practitioners. IUGS is one form of the next generation grids that will carry forth informatics and the dissemination of information and processing of data. In the field of Health and Medicine this will lead to the emergence of what I call the Integral Awareness Medicine (I-AM) Practitioner. The "Active Intelligence Layer" (AIL) is another process-dimension of IUGS grids, incessantly operating and evolving, whether we are awake or sleeping, whether we are utilizing the system or not. These grids will develop and will actualize a continuous process of Universal data and energetic analysis. [CITE CHINA CODATA LECTURE ON BRAIN BANK DATA MINING.....] That means that the traditional paradigms of 'Expertise' and 'Experience' will be rendered ephemeral and outmoded.

Anyone who thinks they are an expert in any particular field, or thinks that their condition of awareness, or condition of health or illness, is relatively static, will come to experience a rapid and continuous shift in process of their state of being — such that, when they examine themselves the next day or examine their data the next day, much will be different from the day before. Shift happens — faster and faster. The old-paradigm 'Information Explosion' of the past four decades is becoming an 'Integral Awareness and Experience' (IAE) Explosion.

This is an actual process — a quickening — that we all witness, to varying degrees. Many people are wondering: "Why it is that I don't feel today the way I felt yesterday? I didn't do anything differently. I didn't have any objectifiable or conscious new experiences." Because we are in this continuous process of grid expansion, I'm only speaking of certain aspects of this. You'll have an opportunity to experience energetically some other aspects of this. If you experience the energy enhancement system and simply also know that when you step away from your local concerns and expand yourself into non local concerns you will also begin to experience other things going on within yourself personally on a physical level, on a emotional level, on a psychological level and on a social level and when you look at your system of expertise your paradigm of expertise and perception on the world, you will also recognize that is shifting even if you are not giving it conscious thought. Traditional Indigenous Medicine. Without a platform for integration, dissemination, modernization and evolution, TIM systems can get swept away and lost — casualties of Cultural Extinction in this web of Globalization. Part of the reason for extinction is a rigid Traditionalist dogma of clinging to elements of past preferences, values, and methods, and not willing to evolve a TIM system into the modern era. Also, many are not willing to apply new paradigms to the ancient systems so that we can build the proper bridges for integration of those ancient systems with the modern dynamics. This obduracy to innovation has become an obstacle to evolution. I introduce a certain kind of Integral Taxonomy Model for how we may begin to look at these different systems and be able to complete a common platform. From that common platform we can integrate these different systems, from that common platform we design the kinds of integrative (and ultimately Integral) systems of delivery of these services and ways of thinking, Thus We can assume Our proper place in ushering in the new millennium — the new Age of (Integral) Awareness. We must not allow modern (Western) scientific advancement to override cultural science and wisdom. How will this modernization imperative advance, while still preserving the integrity and sanctity of the ancient systems? We have to make sure that we are not discrediting Aboriginal systems. We are also ourselves subject to a certain kind retrospective chauvinism, wherein we look upon ancient aboriginal systems as if they should be preserved with a certain type of static nature. Remember — Everything that Exists, Exists to Evolve — including ancient systems. One can say, "Ancient Wisdom is the Mother of Modern Science". Therefore the initial premise of Global Integrative Medicine — Global Integral Medicine — is that the truth and validity of all ancient systems that have survived to this date must be preserved. Secondly, digitalization and computerization is a key dimension that is lacking with respect to older systems. So we must design a dynamic new platform that can integrate these kinds of systems, as well as modern Allopathic and non-Allopathic systems to be able to walk alongside one another, hand in hand in a full integrative — and then ultimately, integral — function. A little bit later in the program we'll talk about what it means to be Integral as an advanced stage of development over what is simply Integrative. I-7: An Integral Taxonomy for Systems This is a Seven-Tier structure. The elements are: Cosmology; Inventory; Systematization; Digitalization; Integration; Evolution; and Dissemination (CISDIED). In essence, this is a paradigm and methodology, an integral matrix, into which any healing system can be inserted (or any other Human Activity System, for that matter). As a result of that structure, we can then realize the true integration of healing systems, altogether as both matrix and operational/ delivery mechanism for that composite, into the modern era – particularly, for The Americas. [PAHO ON HARMONIZATION OF CONCEPTS] Cosmology. Western Medicine has a Cosmology, though it's not even aware of what it's own Cosmology is. Because we’ve gotten away from a Universal, a Spiritual, a Kosmic understanding of what ‘The Everything of Everything’ is. We must begin with that. It gives us a sense of starting at the biggest picture level. This is what a Cosmology paradigm has to be. We wonder why different systems go into conflict with one another. Generally that can be differences on the cosmologic paradigm level. If we are not willing to look at it then everything else is incidental. All other perceptions of differences are incidental and they are not resolvable unless one is willing to look on the highest level of cosmology and to see from there derives all of the secondary (and often conflictual) levels of differentiation. Therefore you can not resolve differentiation that is much further down the line, until you are looking at the first levels of where there can be resolution. and that is the highest level and that is the Cosmologic level. Inventory. Components of a system a science of healing, so the first thing is we have to understand what is that cosmologic perspective. And the second thing we have to do is figure out what is what in that particular system. An exhaustive inventory of an ancient system may contain thousands of elements, even though only a few maybe known to usual practitioners of that, but we must undertake the discipline to have an exhaustive inventory of each of these different systems what their elements are, what's included what is entailed in those elements. Once we have that inventory, then we begin to go into the systemization level in terms of in terms of understanding how the different elements of that system is organized. We don't have to impose our values on it.

we do not have to deal with comparisons etc… we just simply understand how they are organized within that particular system. That systematization process is essential. We do not do that when we are talking about usual approaches to complementary medicine and healing and usual approaches to integration. we just take something and we take the other one we sort of put it together and we are mixing and matching without understanding of the thought processes without understanding of systematization processes that occur within the particular systems without that understanding it's a hit and miss process and we get suboptimization and sometimes we get the reverse effect of what we had intended. Digitalization. The next thing. Once weve done the first things then we can begin to look at the digitalization process.of putting that ancient system into a digitalized format so that then can go into the field of inforamtics to be actualized and synergized with all other things You can't do that unless you have done the first 3 first. Then comes the Integration process.A whole lot goes into the Integration process. Essentially on the digital level the information of course is best achieved when you have the right kinds of metasystems of design that will allow all of this data to be integrated. On the awareness system level we'll talk about what it takes to have Integral Awareness, so that you are holding the construct that all systems are flowing in you, through you, you are of all of this, and what does it take to hold that kind of orientation. It takes a growth beyond our usual models of thinking which are usually exclusionary, dichotomous, fractional, and reductive. We must move into that new field of Integral Thinking. The Evolution issue is really important because once again as I'm saying, “"Everything that Exists, must Evolve.” It has its imperatives of integrity and Evolution. The Integrity is the feet firmly planted in The Now, and is that resistance to Change; it is the Being. The Evolution is that which changes, which Becomes. The Integrity of something means that We Honor it and allow it to be as it is. The Evolution is the imperative that it must continue to move forward as well. It is the balance of those two that we hold, and so by doing this we actually are for the preservation of ancient systems, by giving them the energy and the intention for their natural evolution as part of the growing, emerging Consciousness of Oneness. Dissemination. The concentric, hierarchic, politic, academic, mass media, etc. ways in which these new systems of Integrality are disseminated are the seventh, and final, layer. What are we doing? How are we teaching? How are we delivering the information? Are we publishing? Are we Podcasting? Are we designing new Centers? Are we designing new Spas? Are we holding new Conferences? Are we engaged in Activism? Are we integrating this within our own being and then the dissemination process is simply that of walking as an Integral Being. You are then having a field effect upon others and your environment in general. People will then notice as they walk around you and up to you, they feel an energy from you, Something is different about you. You have been in the process of Evolution and you practice a system of Healing which itself is evolutive, and you stand for something which is called Unity. New Imperatives of a Future Medicine System. Most of the first imperative is about systems-level structure and design: informatics, Globalization of data, mergings of systems, east and west, ancient and modern. We have new requirements. This second imperative is a revolution an analytic methodology. We must all be unafraid of applying our intellectual acumen. We must be unafraid of thinking differently. Because the traditional systems of statistical analysis are themselves dinosaur systems. Yet people are saying they are, although very few are offering new analytic methodologies. I would suggest that often we are frustrated with Aristotelian, Socratic, Cartesian, Stochastic, Heuristic, Reductionist and Fractionalist methodologies. And in our frustration we suppress our own intellectual creativity. So we must recognize that there must be, and is coming, a major overhaul even in statistics itself, even in mathematics itself, as so with all other institutions of thinking and practice. From that will come the kind of awareness we can put forth, the types of research and analytic methodologies which will substantiate these processes of energetic flow, human experiences, expanded (Integral) awareness and healing which we know as real. It's an ultimate irony and ultimate form of hypocrisy, actually, to stand forth and say, “I know something is real, but I can't figure out a way to prove that it's real — therefore, I cannot say that it is real.” That is a denial of resonance within oneself. We must hold that resonance state so that we can advance and be one and in the oneness our science evolves rather than creating the impediments and imprisonments within which our intellect resides. We must expand ourselves in our awareness of oneness of our consciousness so that the new analytic methodology pours forth therefrom. ENRICO A. MELSON “FUTURE OF INTEGRATIVE HEALTH AND WELLNESS FOR THE AMERICAS” PAGE 1/ NUMPAGES 1