Alignment of Mind, Body and Soul may appear too ambivalent or ambitious in scope. I suppose I have to credit the years of studying philosophical, psychological and social issues, that let me to a recent epiphany. I believe that psychology and psychiatry have gone needlessly far afield in their search for the causes and cures of psychological pain. I find our scientific approaches have generated seas of data, but little that is conclusive or helpful in my eye. We are taught to focus on pathology, to look at human behaviour, examine childhood event, study genetic influences and chemical imbalances, to no avail. I believe our intellectualisation and earnest investigations have led us away from the basics and obvious. With this paper it is my intent to ask (if not provoke) you the readers to stop judging and think differently.
My intent is for you to think differently as I did after reading Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos and What Does It All Mean. I began to think that even with the extraordinary success of science, there is no obvious way it could account for things like consciousness, rationality, or moral values. We can disagree with Nagel that those things need to be part of our picture of reality. But I ask, can we keep gesturing to science’s great pragmatic value as a way of papering over its incomplete metaphysics? Can we continuously expect something so new (modern science) to prove something so old (cosmic and cosmos)? We are not just mind and body, but a whole human being when in alignment with our mind, body and soul. After all, Nagel does suggest that philosophers, or scientists who wish to provide philosophical insight look at the relationship between mind and nature in a different way. The main message is to shift our old paradigms and start thinking anew to incorporate other methods of explanation into our worldview.
In What Does It All Mean? Philosopher writer Thomas Nagel argues that the best way to learn about philosophy is to tackle its problems head-on and he turns to some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves. Do we really have free will? Why should we be moral? What is the relation between our minds and our brains? Is there life after death? How should we feel about death? In a universe so vast billions of light years across can anything we do with our lives really matter? And does it matter if it doesn’t matter? He clearly stated his own opinions, nevertheless, he leaves these fundamental questions open, allowing his readers to entertain other solutions and what I like most, is that he encourages his readers to think for themselves.
