Everyone wants a healthy body. How could anyone argue with that? And out there is a supermarket of choices to achieve a healthy body. There are the traditional methods of healing from going to a general practitioner, to seeing a psychiatrist to a paediatrician to a gastroenterologist, and countless other doctors and practitioners. There are also the ‘alternative’ methods of healing from acupuncture to Bach flower remedies to homeopathy, to astrology, herbal therapy, massage, crystals etc. There are countless New Age ‘energy’ medicine alternatives. There are even what people might term extreme alternatives — primal scream therapy and radical health diets to deal with all sorts of diseases.

But are the alternatives really alternative? Well, more or less, yes and no. Yes, they are alternatives in the sense that Labor is an alternative to the Liberals (Australia), Conservatives to New Labour (UK), and Democrats to Republicans (US). But, no, they are not alternatives in another real sense. As is shown in Western democracies, huge numbers of people do not even bother to cast a vote. Why? Because they say that there is no real difference between the parties. What do they mean? Surely the parties are alternatives to each other. I think people don’t vote because they are intuitively looking for a radical alternative, not extreme but radical. As Karl Marx said, “To be a radical means to go to the root of the problem”, and everyone knows that political parties do not go to the root of the problem. The root of the problem would be the current economic and social organisation of society.

It is the same with health. When we feel sick, whether mentally or physically, spiritually or emotionally, we don’t feel ‘ourselves’. Our bodily sense of self is disturbed. Huge numbers of people have given up on traditional medicine, yet many also feel that ‘alternative’ medicine is not much better. Neither traditional nor ‘alternative’ medicine gets to the root of the problem. When we are talking about healing our bodies, neither ‘alternative’ questions, “Just what is the human body?” Both simply take this for granted. The body is the physical body that we see, touch, taste, smell and hear. The one that we see in the mirror, that fleshly thing on the operating table, the thin or fat or erotic or old or young body displayed on our TV screens.

But is it so cut and dried? Is the body what we assume it is? It is the whole point of this website that the physical body isn’t what we believe (no, more than this — what we ‘know’) it is. Yet this sounds crazy. Surely one can’t question this? Surely the body is this fleshly thing that we regard ourselves as.

How can we get a handle on this? Think of the body as like the Tardis in Doctor Who. What is the Tardis? Is it a telephone call box with a much bigger interior space than it should contain? Or is it a huge living space with many rooms that looks like a telephone call box from the outside? Good question eh? Well, we know what it is. It is a time and space machine that looks like a telephone call box when viewed from the outside. In fact, it is supposed to look like whatever will fit in to the surroundings, so as always to be camouflaged. But the Doctor got it wrong and it always looks like a telephone call box, thus it sometimes stands out like a sore thumb.

What is the human body? It is an awareness body, a soul body that looks like the physical body when viewed from the outside. Just as the Tardis always appears as a telephone call box from the outside, so does our real body look like the physical body from the outside. And just as the Tardis always feels like a solid telephone call box (and would taste and smell like it) from the outside, so would we always experience and perceive our bodies just as we do because we only examine and see them from the outside.

Both traditional and ‘alternative’ medicine view the body from the outside, within space-time. So it always gets the same results. It is the physical thing that we perceive in front of us. But if we go to the root of the problem the body is like from within the time-space of the Soul. The real body is not even what the physical body feels like from within. That is still giving primacy to the physical body. The Tardis is not a telephone call box that is a time machine on the inside. It is a Time Machine that happens to look like a telephone call box from the outside.

The Tardis from the outside – from within space-time

The Tardis from the inside – from within time-space