Contents:
Preface
Introduction
The Dinosaur of Acupuncture
Yin and Yang
The Theory of the Five Elements
Oriental Diagnosis
Ki Energy and the Meridians
Important Treatment Points
Appendix: The Unique Principle
The words of the Orient and the Occident are opposite ends of the same pole. In the Orient, the direction of East corresponds to what is west in the Occident. Thus it follows that in many ways the Oriental mentality is the mirror image of the Occidental way of thought.
One need learn only two concepts--yin and yang. With these alone, one can distinguish the two fundamental, antagonistic forces of the universe and lean to apply them immediately and with an ever increasing joy at each moment of daily life. In doing so, one can establish an equilibrium between the universal antagonistic forces. This is the goal of the way of eating, which is one of the simple applications of this practical, dialectical philosophy of the Far East.
Although the unique principle appears dualistic it is based on a binary classification system, it is essentially monistic. Yin and yang are not only opposed but, in all cases, are also complementary. For example, examine these phenomena: love and hate, beauty and ugliness, agreement and disagreement, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion, joy and sadness, electron and proton, matter and non matter. All of these couples are more or less contrary and incompatible in appearance but closely bound in their depths. This is one reason that they can transform themselves from one into the other so easily. Everything--in each domain of life--eventually changes into its opposite in this relative world which lies within the oneness of infinity.
If a person has not decided to abandon his own faults as soon as possible, regardless of the effort, faults which together equal a total incomprehension of the order of the universe, he must abandon all hope of happiness. If, on the other hand, a person has truly decided to help himself, he has only to study the wonderful unifying principle and apply it to every aspect of his daily life, beginning by learning to choose and prepare nourishment in accordance with the order of the universe: this is the way of eating.
Today the world is in a crisis because the analytic method predominates; in fact, for many it is a way of life. Even with the current trend toward more Eastern ways of thinking, all religion, art, philosophy, and scientific technique of the Far East are still imitations or superstitions--mere approximations of what used to be. The Eastern way of life has disintegrated because people have ignored the unique principle; in addition, Eastern tradition has been overthrown, abandoned, condemned, mutilated, misinterpreted, and replaced by medical philosophy imported from the Occident. Yet, as history has revealed, this modern medicine from the West has nor cured man's sickness. The current renaissance of traditional Eastern medicines and therapeutics attest to this fact: many people, condemned by Western physicians as incurable, have been relieved and cured by methods like acupuncture; but because present day acupuncture is only a distillation of the truth--a fossil of the extinct dinosaur--it cannot compensate for the loss man has suffered.
Man has lost the joy of living, the gratitude that one should feel in this omnipotent, omniscient universe. He has ignored the unique principle which teaches that to know infinite liberty and infinite gratitude is to know supreme joy, to have eternal life! Life and the universe are one, and both are infinite; man's body, on the other is finite. It is only because of infinity that man can live in this finite world. Thus, for us to be egocentric is presumptuous since our life depends for its existence on earth, water, air, light, and the universal "magnetism" produced by the two poles of yin and yang, which unite as the creator of everything. We should realize that all life and certainly our own bodies are not individual but universal. Universal life is like a symphony, while individual life is but a single sound in this great melody and, alone, has no value at all. Individual man, like all animals and plants, is interdependent, relative to life everywhere. We cannot exist without our environment, without the earth, without the sun, without the universe. We should see, then, that we are the infinite universe which expresses itself through a form called a body. (1.)
1. Acupuncture and the Philosophy of the Far East - George Ohsawa - 1973
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