As I have grown older I have gradually come to realise that my entire life so far has been motivated by a desire to heal - to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soil; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind, body and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame; to level the monstrous artificial barrier erected between Tradition and Modernity and, above all, to heal the mortally wounded soul that, alone, can give us warning of the folly of playing God and of believing that knowledge on its own is a substitute for wisdom.
HRH The Prince of WalesThis statement by the Prince of Wales from a recent article in Temenos gives the fullest expression of his basic motivation and aspiration: that healing the soul and listening to her intuitive voice is the prerequisite to a wider healing of the divisions and collateral damage brought about by an exclusively rational and mechanistic understanding of life. Not all Caduceus readers will necessarily agree with this diagnosis or agenda but most will acknowledge that modern life has resulted in undesirable imbalances that do require some correction or rebalancing.
The work of the Temenos Academy, founded by the great poet Dr. Kathleen Raine, is underpinned by ten principles, which the Prince of Wales himself espouses:
The Work of Temenos could not be more important. Its commitment to fostering a wider awareness of the great spiritual traditions we have inherited from the past is not a distraction from the concerns of everyday life. These traditions, which form the basis of mankind's most civilised values and have been handed down to us over many centuries, are not just part of our inner religious life. They have an intensely practical relevance to the creation of real beauty in the arts, to an architecture which brings harmony and inspiration to people's lives and to the development within the individual of a sense of balance which is, to my mind, the hallmark of a civilised person. |
The Prince himself has shown exactly that courage and conviction to which he himself refers. He has consistently defended a spiritual and ecological world-view against all-comers, which includes the many powerful proponents of Enlightenment rationalism - people who believe that the world is purely physical, that there is no underlying spiritual dimension to life and that reason can properly operate without being informed by the intuitive wisdom of the heart.
As the Prince remarks: 'It seems to be becoming harder and harder in this age to stick to what we believe - or feel. We are told constantly that we have to live in 'the real world' - but 'the real world' is within us. The reality is that 'Truth, Goodness and Beauty' in the outer, manifested world are only made possible through the inner, invisible pattern - the unmanifested archetype.' Here the Prince reveals himself as a true Platonist, with his insistence on the primacy of the inner invisible pattern and the principles of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. It is these Platonic principles that are consistently applied in the work of the Prince's Foundation, especially in the Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts programme and in projects connected with architecture and town planning such as Poundbury on the outskirts of Dorchester.
The Prince argues that modernism in all its forms has performed a comprehensive cultural demolition job by literally pulling up our traditional roots and sense of identity: This has affected 'the very ground of our being which had been nurtured for so long in the soil of what I can only describe as perennial wisdom. And I think the destruction was utterly comprehensive and deadly in its effect and it has particularly affected the four areas in which I have battled away about for the last 25 years or so - that is agriculture, architecture, medicine and education'.
The Prince elaborates:
As far as agriculture is concerned, I remember when I was a teenager, miles of hedges were uprooted, ancient meadows and woodlands ploughed up and removed in a matter of days. You try putting them back, it takes hundreds of years - I'm trying. |
The land was forcibly drained and laced with chemicals of all descriptions - look at the problems now. Familiar landmarks, as far as architecture is concerned, ancient town centres that escaped Hitler's bombs, entire streets housing cohesive communities, great complexes of finely designed 18th and 19th century cotton mills for instance, were all swept away and comprehensively re-developed.
In medicine, as in architecture, the doctrine of man as a machine has held sway. God was declared dead - I remember it happening. The soul was declared moribund and redundant. Ancient well-tried therapies and diagnostic techniques were simply abandoned and thrown away. The balance of the rational and the intuitive was destroyed.
In education, I believe, the same doctrinal brutality reigned supreme resulting in a complete wasteland of moral relativism and the deliberate disruption of an approach that had always ensured the transmission from one generation to another of a shared body of knowledge, of a cultural, historical and moral heritage. And what has been the result of all this brutal vandalism for the sake of, I believe, a gigantic social experiment?
I believe that it has created a profound malaise, a deep dis-ease, a dis-integration and a dis-functioning of the natural harmony in human existence all because modernist ideology demands that all history and all tradition be pulled up by the roots so that we can all start again with what they like to call a tabula rasa, a clean slate.
As readers may be aware, one of the principal areas of the Prince of Wales's work has been in complementary medicine and integrated health. The Prince has played a sustained pioneering role in the development of the holistic (now integrated) health movement since his seminal speech to the BMA in December 1982. At the 2001 Penny Brohn Memorial Lecture, the Prince recalled this occasion:
I thought I'd just briefly describe why I got so involved in this whole area. I'm so glad to find that Dr Caroline Myss says the same thing about the question of how you integrate the best of the old and the best of the new, which I think is so important: the best of the ancient aspect of our humanity, the inner aspect of it, and the best of what we have discovered in the last 100 years or so. I remember being asked to be president of the British Medical Association in their 150th anniversary year in 1982, going to the dinner and making a speech. Some of you may remember that all I did was to beg for a little bit more understanding about the need for a more holistic approach towards the way in which we carry out our health care. I quoted a certain amount from Paracelsus and at the end of it all I was absolutely astonished to find what a reaction it had caused amongst the medical establishment. All hell broke loose! |
The British Holistic Medical Association was formed in 1983, and a series of dialogues on complementary medicine were held at the Royal Society of Medicine under the Presidency of Sir James Watt in 1984. The Prince wrote the foreword when the corresponding book was published a few years later. The Marylebone Health Centre, of which the Prince has been Patron since the early days, was set up by Dr. Patrick Pietroni in 1987 in the crypt of Marylebone Church, and the Marylebone Centre Trust was established in the following year, as was the Hale Clinic in London, which the Prince opened. He has also been closely associated with the Bristol Cancer Help Centre since its early days. In 1996 he founded the Foundation for Integrated Medicine, which is now called the Prince of Wales's Foundation for Integrated Health, and is the leading organisation of its kind in the country.
In one of his early speeches, the Prince quotes Dr. George Engel - founder of the biopsychosocial approach - to the effect that modern medicine is predominantly mechanistic in its outlook, with 'the body as a machine, disease as the consequence of breakdown of the machine, and the doctor's task as repair of the machine'. He continues:
By concentrating on smaller and smaller fragments of the body modern medicine perhaps loses sight of the patient as a whole human being, and by reducing health to mechanical functioning it is no longer able to deal with the phenomenon of healing. And here I come back to my original point. The term "healer" is viewed with suspicion and the concepts of health and healing are probably not generally discussed enough in medical schools. But to reincorporate the notion of healing into the practice of medicine does not necessarily mean that medical science will have to be less scientific. Through the centuries healing has been practised by folk-healers who are guided by traditional wisdom that sees illness as a disorder of the whole person, involving not only the patient's body, but his mind, his self-image, his dependence on the physical and social environment, as well as his relation to the cosmos. |
It is important to note that the Prince is - as in agriculture - advocating a both-and and not an either-or approach here: the science and the art of medicine, curing and healing. His words might seem self-evident these days, but this was certainly not the case twenty years ago. He quotes a saying often attributed to Paracelsus, 'nature heals, the doctor nurses'. In the 18th century, Voltaire made the same point in a more barbed fashion when he remarked that the task of the doctor was to amuse the patient while nature effects the cure.
The Prince's main contention was that 'the whole imposing edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes is, like the celebrated Tower of Pisa, slightly off balance'. This is emphatically not to deny the undoubted benefits of modern medical science but to suggest that it needs complementing with a more qualitative, patient-centred approach beyond a fascination with 'the objective, statistical, computerised approach to the healing of the sick'.
The Prince has also been involved in mental health, and in 1991 was President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He gave a major speech in which he argued for the benefits of the psychological rather than the purely drug-based biological approach. If drugs represent an approach of active intervention, then, he contended, listening is a more sensitive process that can enable healing and spiritual growth:
Sometimes there is a need for doing, but equally there are times for being with, for waiting, for being patient and for allowing spiritual healing to occur. There is a sense, too, in which suffering, if handled sensitively, can be transmuted into a positively redeeming process. I was talking recently to the wife of a Church of Scotland Minister who told me that as often as not she and her husband are left to pick up the pieces with people who have failed to respond to psychiatric treatment. She told me that she has only witnessed a true transformation in such people when they finally discover within themselves that transfiguring dimension we define (or perhaps I should say that some of us define!) as God. Above all, perhaps, students need to be taught that growth and healing are natural processes. Science can accelerate them, but it can also retard or prevent them. |
This brings the Prince to the heart of his message, the need for a rebalancing within medicine, prompted by the motto of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 'Let Wisdom Guide':
For what it is worth, I believe we need to be reminded occasionally that wisdom has a far more profound meaning than just the acquisition of knowledge in the modern scientific-materialist sense. Should we not be asking ourselves pretty carefully where scientific materialism has been leading us - and, indeed, what kind of society it has been creating? Is there not an imbalance that needs correcting; an abandoned element that requires rehabilitation? It is perhaps worth recalling that Jung himself told one of his associates that he did not want anybody to be 'Jungian'. "I want people above all to be themselves. As for 'isms', they are the viruses of our day, and responsible for greater disasters than any medieval plague or pest has ever been. Should I be found one day only to have created another 'ism' then I will have failed in all I tried to do. |
In recent years the Prince has put forward the case for an integrated healthcare system that combines the best of modern technology with the more human art of healing:
Complementary medicine could have an important - indeed, vital - role to play, in supporting and complementing current orthodox medical practice. Often it seems that complementary medicine can bring a different perspective and fulfil a real human need for a more personal touch which, in turn, can help unlock the individual's inner resources to aid the healing process. The goal we must work towards is an integrated healthcare system in which all the knowledge, experience and wisdom accumulated in different ways, at different times and in different cultures is effectively deployed to prevent or alleviate human suffering. |
He concludes: 'I believe that we have a unique opportunity to take stock and consider how we can make the very best use of all our precious healthcare resources. We must respond to what the public are clearly showing they want by placing more emphasis on prevention, healthy lifestyles and patient-centred care. Integrated healthcare is an achievable goal. It is one we cannot afford to miss'.
In addition to his work in various branches of medicine and healing, the Prince has been active in hospital design. In a speech at the NHS Estates Conference at The Prince's Foundation in November, 2001, the Prince explained that his interest in architecture and health care stemmed from the simple fact that he believes that our environment - which in this country is very largely man-made - has a profound influence over our physical, psychological and spiritual well being.
The basic principle underlying the Prince's approach, as elsewhere, is 'to restore the "soul" - the psychological and spiritual element if you like, - to its rightful place in the scheme of things'. 'In other words, the Prince continued, 'as with the need in a new century to emphasise the pedestrian rather than the car as the central feature in the design of new settlements, so is there a need to place the patient at the centre of hospital design. As the individual patient has a unique character, so should the building that provides the healing environment'. He goes on to suggest that 'in our restless search for new ideas for both building and health care, we have tended to ignore some of the more traditional, or timeless truths that can complement the remarkable progress in building and health care technologies and techniques. These help create the benign environments that will engender a sense of ease, harmony and, dare I say, health. There is little doubt, it seems to me, that in both the built environment and in health care, there is room for both the best of the inherited wisdoms and techniques and the best of new methods.'
Work is now being carried out in five hospital pilot projects. The team from the Prince's Foundation is working alongside the commissioning Health Trusts to develop a design vision and prepare project design briefs and specifications. The Foundation Team is addressing all aspects of good design, from accessibility and therapeutic internal environments through to urban and social integration.
The Prince of Wales not only embraces a spiritual philosophy of healing in the widest sense, but has also supported and initiated major projects in integrated healthcare over a period of more than 20 years, culminating in the current activities of his Foundation for Integrated Health. Recently the Prince was honoured by the Rosenthal Centre at Columbia University for his international leadership in the integrated health field. Although the title of my book is Radical Prince, it could equally have been The Healing Prince, whose work has involved a range of activities designed to heal the splits of modern culture by working in harmony with Nature and its regenerative powers.
David Lorimer is author of Radical Prince: The Practical Vision of Prince of Wales (Floris Books) and Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network (www.scimednet.org)