Chopra extends as possible through Åyurveda. Working from the Vedic
premise that intelligence is the basic force underlying all of nature,
Chopra’s efforts to help restore Åyurveda in contemporary health-care
invoke the Indian concept of the supreme Self (Pa ra matman), ̄ which
Åyurveda says is free of dysfunction: “The soul is essentially devoid of
abnormalities.... is eternal and the observer who sees all actions” [CS
1:1.56]. Chopra writes:
There exists in every person a place that is free from disease, that never
feels pain, that cannot age or die. When you go to this place, limitations
that all of us accept cease to exist.^6Chopra explains Åyurveda’s recommendations for a range of traditional
practices of Åyurvedic physical culture, infused with the mental cultiva-
tion of meditation and the waking of body/mind intelligence. The “quan-
tum mechanical body” is Chopra’s model of a body of intelligence, which
unites the ‘river’ of quanta comprising the physical body, with the ‘river’ of
thought that is the mind.^7 Healing in quantum terms is grounded in
knowledge (notably knowledge of oneself as a body of intelligence), and
utilizes meditation and mental techniques “to control the invisible pat-
terns that order the body.”^8 Perfect health may not be possible, but the no-
tion of it calls us to question what health could be like ideally. Åyurveda
offers practical means of caring for one’s body/mind that can help us live
with more vitality, calmness, and well-being than we might have imagined.
In clarifying meanings concerning the relation of health and illness,
it is worthwhile to acknowledge the ambiguities that make health and ill-
ness poles in a dialectical tension where one or the other may predomi-
nate. Our participation in the kingdom of the sick and the kingdom of
the well is not as simple as occupying one realm and then the other. Con-
ditions of sickness impinge to greater or lesser extents on states of health,
and they even serve to mobilize the forces of health. The presence of dis-
ease or disability does not exclude health. As Caroline Whitbeck says, “a
high degree of health is compatible with some degree of disease, injury, or
impairment.”^9 The “ambiguity of life” is Paul Tillich’s term for the source
of inevitable intrusions by destructive factors that cause illness and in-
jury. In Tillich’s view of the dialectic processes that constitute life, every
creative process implies a destructive trend, and every integrating process
implies a disintegrating trend. Threats exist even in the assimilation of
food, breath, and communication. Intrusion of destructive forces, and
thus malfunctions—physical and psychological—are inevitable. Disease,
Tillich says, “is a symptom of the universal ambiguity of life.”^10 In present-
ing determinants of health, I note ambiguities inherent in various aspects
one line long
48 religious therapeutics