The Myth of Normal 48

Then we have the man born 2,500 years ago as Gautama. “Contemplate the nature of interdependent co-arising during every moment,” the Buddha said. “When you look at a leaf or a raindrop, meditate on the conditions, near and distant, that contributed to the presence of that leaf or raindrop. Know that the world is woven of interconnected threads. This is because that is. This is not because that is not. This is born because that is born. This dies because that dies.” The leaf, as the Buddha implied, is both a discrete entity —a thing—and a process that derives from sun, sky, and earth: light, photosynthesis, rain, organic matter, and minerals and perhaps even the activity of humans and animals. “The one contains the many and the many contains the one. Without the one, there cannot be the many. Without the many, there cannot be the one.” These are not merely esoteric wisdom teachings; they accurately describe the physical and organic universe, including health and pathology. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche once called the Buddha “that profoundest physiologist.” The pioneering U.S. internist and psychiatrist George Engel argued nearly half a century ago that the “crippling flaw” of modern medicine “is that it does not include the patient and his attributes as a person. Yet in the everyday work of the physician the prime object of study is a person.” We must make provision for the whole person in their full “psychological and social nature,”[1] he said, calling for a biopsychosocial approach: one that recognizes the unity of emotions and physiology, knowing both to be dynamic processes unfolding in a context of relationships, from the personal to the cultural. [2] The great traumatologist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has noted that “our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms.”[3] This will certainly be news to the average ego. The word “ego,” as I use it here, refers not to the trait of arrogance or conceit in certain “egotistical” people but to the internally perceived separate self with which we each identify: the “me,” “myself,” and “I” we mean when we use these personal pronouns, as we do hundreds of times a day. Even a healthy ego is convinced of its separateness, an entirely reasonable perception: the capacity to experience individual selfhood in all its