The Eternal Question Unravelled

Recently a new Psychiatric Manual came out, called DSM, which stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. No wonder they abbreviated it. Yet, even so, the manual misses the point. It fails to tackle the eternal question of the chicken and the egg.

Who cares?

Perhaps we can ask the chicken when it gets to the other side of the street.

The question remains, however, which came first: the mind or the brain. Is the mind a byproduct of the brain, or the other way around? Unless we can answer this question we ought to be very careful in our attempts to alter the chemical balance of the brain, which it took nature a few million years to develop. Unless we’re sure that nature has no idea what she’s doing, that we can do better, then the old adage should hold: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, or… we might make it a lot worse.

Yes, there are exceptions when psychiatry can help. There are always exceptions. But in Canada, during the last 5 years, the use of psychotherapeutic drugs has increased by 27.7%. Have 27.7% of Canadians gone crazy in the last five years? Or, perhaps, the psychiatrists suffer from normal brains. Normal means average, middling, ordinary…

We are all different.

Flooding the human brain with psychotherapeutic drugs is like trying to repair a car when the driver makes mistakes. If we diagnose mechanical malfunctions in the car, shouldn’t we repair it before drugging the driver…

Hence the Eternal Question, which came first, the mind or the brain.

Neuroscience assures us that, for the most part, ‘normal’ brains do not vary that much. If so, then why can’t I compose as Mozart did? Or write like Shakespeare? Or come up with the Quantum Theory?

Because their cars, I mean brains, had a different driver. The driver is the mind, the brain is the means through which it manifests itself.

It is the old story. The vast majority of medical profession, and that includes psychiatry, treats the symptoms, not the causes of malfunctions. Until that changes, we shall continue to tread the wheel of Awagawan, to walk in circles, without advancing on the evolutionary scale. The only benefit will continue to be derived by psychochemical concerns that will continue to make billions out of our ignorance.

Ancient religions made a feeble attempt to point us in the right directions. The Torah states that god created men and then… only later, gave us skins. It doesn’t take much intelligence to figure out that we existed before we entered physical constructs, our physical bodies, to continue on our evolutionary trek. My Dictionary of Biblical Symbolism attempts to unveil at least some of the truth lost in antiquity. Until we rediscover it most of us will not evolve, but continue to devolve until we revert to a primitive state. Then, perhaps, we shall start again. Perhaps we shall understand better the next time.

Good luck. 

If you’d like to write a brief review of the

Dictionary of Biblical Symbolism

  on Amazon you can ask for a free download at

 mailto:stan@stanlaw.ca