Introduction

Health and Wholeness
"According to the teachings of Hermes Trismegistos earth is a replica of the heavens. Man, as a microcosmos, represents the universe. He is made up of star dust, woven of the rays of the sun, and in his life-sustaining fluids the ratio of ions of the life-giving ancestral oceans indicate this universality; health and wholeness exemplify the totality of time."

Symbol

Green
"At an equal distance from the two absolute and unattainable colors, the blue of the sky and the redness of hell, green, as a mean value, a transition between cold and hot, height and depth, provides security and freshness; it is human. Every spring after the winter has reminded man of his loneliness and the uncertainty of his existence, after it has frozen the earth under his feet and turned it barren, in the spring this earth dresses itself in new green robes which bring hope and render the earth nourishing. Earth and man alike become warm. And with the melting of the ice and the coming of nourishing rains, spring arrives." (Source: Jean Chevalier - Alain Gheerbrant: Dictionnare des Symbols. Paris, 1973-74.)

Health and Society

Imre Márczi: 
Life Without Symptoms
"Each age and each culture creates a more or less unified concept, or picture, of the world and man within it. ... Perfect, whole world concepts, or explanations, are mainly provided by religions. To religions the world, the universe, is whole even if in practice we don't actually feel it to be so. Absolution is simple: man and demons, or bad ghosts, opposing God disturb the operation of the perfect order taking to pieces that which, according to the intentions of creation, is a perfect, complete, whole."

In Absentia, or Far From Existence. 
Records of a Discussion Which Never Took Place.
"This writing is a record of a dispute which never happened. The time: July, 1990; the place: the ornate baroque hall of the Teleki palace at Szirák. The gaunt aesthetist from New York, Susan Sontag, does not meet with the writer László Földényi, who cannot be present due to other obligations and sends a videotape with his message on it in his place, nor with one of the hosts of the conference, the psychoimmunologist (the writer of this very piece).
The meeting, which deals with the spiritual physiology of culture, spans broad concepts. The imagined version created in this text-collage fills the void of the non-existent meeting of the poet, the psychiatrist, the personality-psychologist, the neuro-anatomist, the human-ethologist, and the cultural anthropologist."

László Z. Antal: 
Is it Best if We Don't Know? On the Reasons of High Mortality.
"During the years following World War II mortality indexes in Hungary and the socialist countries of Europe improved dramatically. Until the mid-sixties it seemed that as a result of the radical political changes these countries will 'catch up' in this area as well. During the second half of the decade, however, the improving trend in life expectancy was broken. This break was kept secret for years by the leaders of these one-time socialist states, but due to international obligations to provide data the undeniable truth came to light in the statistical records of the WHO. For the past thirty years life expectancy rates in the ex-socialist block have remained stagnant".

James Robertson: 
This Mismatch Between Health and Economics
"Not only do traditional economic methods and business goals have no interest in improving and maintaining health; many times they have an adverse effect on it. Though they might acknowledge the necessity of maintaining health - for example by taking security measures and using environment-friendly equipment in chemical and power plants - traditional economics handles it as an added expense and considers it a burden obstructing the way of economic growth and business.
The very thought that raising healthy people and forming a social and physical environment in which people stay healthy ... is foreign to traditional economics. New Economics, however, has re-phrased the evolvement of economics to include the establishment of health."

Imre Baji Lázár: 
Suspended
"At the feast on Olympus the parvenu Tantalos eagerly reaches for the food of immortality and behold, the king drunken from the ambrosia receives his hellish gift: the unfulfillment, unsatisfied hunger and unquenchable thirst inherent in immortality."

Dr. Andrew Weil: 
Healing Medicine
"The biomedical model we have been applying for the past century has reached its limit of effectiveness. With only one exception contemporary medicine does not use the word 'healing'. ... In my book Spontaneous Healing one of the views I expound on is that the human body has its own healing system. ... Still, it is disheartening when I find that it is easier to talk with children about the body's capacity to heal, than with most of my fellow physicians. ..." (Source: The Whole Earth, Winter 1997)

Lajos György: 
Thoughts on Natural Healing. Differences and 
Similarities Between Two Cultures of Healing
"Today we hear a lot about natural healers, about their successes and their 'persecution'. We feel that there are two types of medicine, one being the official one, and the other being one that is not acknowledged, that those who've gone through medical school cry shame upon, with reason or without. Through this writing I would like to promote a balance between extreme and biased opinions."

Péter Szabó Szentmihályi: 
Self-Destructive Literature
"Hungarian literature, just as the Hungarian nation, is presently in a difficult position. They seem to be competing, which one is more effectively self-destructive. If writers would open the nation's eyes and help it realize what it is committing against itself, perhaps this diabolical vicious circle would come to an end, and there would be a peacefully prospering and developing nation with decent, responsible, civil, not heroic, writers and poets."

Health and Environment

Jenő Lőrincz: Environment, Health and Ethics
"Do active, morally correct, and adequate types of behavior exist at all, which would defend the global eco-system and our health from dangerous effects?"

László Hollós: 
Victims of Science. A Discussion about Animal Experiments. 
" 'I consider the protection of animals a serious, professional  problem which I am convinced deserves special attention today, in the age of animal exploitation of a never-before-seen magnitude,' writes Richard R. Ryder who was eye-witness to animal experiments first as an experimental and later a clinical psychologist. He has been fighting for the rights of animals since 1969. In his book Victims of Science, published in Hungarian two years ago,  ... he directed the attention of the international press and mass communication to the unacceptability of 'human chauvinism'. This was the first time a modern-day scientist challenged research involving experiments carried out on animals."

Hospitals that Poison
"Where does hospital 'waste' go: unused blood and body fluids, I.V. bags and rubber gloves, bacteria cultures, body parts, biopsy tissue; the 'pointy tools' (scalpels and needles), the bodies of animals that have been experimented on (some including radioisotopes); food scraps; handkerchiefs and sheets used by contagious patients; the mercury from thermometers and sphygmomanometers; batteries; and EVERYTHING made of chlorinated plastic?"

Veronika Móra: 
Conquering the Cell 
"The dictionary of environmentalists has increased over the past few months, or year; the term 'gene-manipulation', and the concepts belonging to it, have slowly but surely permeated our day-to-day lives. ... Ever since last summer, especially in Great Britain, articles have been published nearly weekly on the dangers of gene-manipulation, on activists 'occupying' experimental plantations, on stores and restaurants refusing to buy products made using gene-manipulated organisms. Meanwhile the other side tries to comfort us by proving the safety of technology, by promising new perspectives opened through developments in life sciences. Many speak of the 21-st century as the 'century of biology'."

Brian Tokar: Monsanto: 
A Checkered History. The Amazing Metamorphosis of a Chemical Plant
"What actually is Monsanto? How did it become the world's second largest agricultural chemical company, one of the largest seed grain producing company's in the world, and soon, through its merge with American Home Products one of the largest pharmaceutical company's in the United States? What do its workers, consumers and those, whose life it has an effect upon, do? Is Monsanto really as 'clean and green' as it's advertisements claim it is, or is this new image merely the product of smart brainwashing?"

Is Health Care Thinking Healthy and Wholesome? 
A Discussion with Dr. István Szolnoki, Chief Medical Officer. 
"When we talk about the harmful effects of the environment we generally mean our external environment: air and water pollution, soil pollution, and perhaps noise pollution. At the same time we must keep in mind that the direct harmful effects of indoor pollution, which is directly related to the levels of outdoor pollution, is in certain cases more dangerous than outdoor pollution."

The Gaia-House Charter
"In the interest of the future we need a 'back-to-earth' concept with disregard to technological dreams. We must apply life sustaining systems, materials, and spatial planning in the home, which fulfills conditions detailed" under the headings: Planning for Harmony with the Planet, Planning for the Peace of the Soul, and Planning for the Health of the Body.

Ideologies

Attila Végh: 
Philosophical Illness 
"Illness and sleep are the relatives of death. ... The ill person is immersed in his illness, his presence within the world is transformed into the world's presence within him. He feels his life processes to a magnified degree; the world in which he lives is a single great throbbing."

András Lányi: 
"This River is a Part of my Being..." 
To the Ecological Theory of the Personality 
"The following reflections on the science of cohabitance ... wish to prove that ecology, if it has philosophical ambitions, cannot remain a natural philosophy. It needs to be considered human-ecology..."

Bertalan Pethő: 
Disrupted Silence
"As once the Silence of the Logos and ideas ennobled to the rank of metaphysical existence was the true origin of speech, now speech originates from the disrupted silence of civilization and expires in its background noise."

Ways, and Ways Out

László Bóna: 
Homeopathy - the Art of Healing
"Homeopathy is a radically new and a radically old experiment in unifying the scientific and artistic, the scientific and faith-related characteristics of healing." The article is a historical review of the science of homeopathy. 

P. Krishna:
We Shall be Whole
"Science and spirituality are two aspects of the same reality. There is no irreconcilable difference."

Edward J. Madara - Tom Ferguson: 
Finding or Forming Your Own Self-Help Network
"It seems that in our accelerated society traditional forms of support - such as the nuclear or extended family, the neighbors and neighborhood - are beginning to loose their importance. It's no accident that with the weakening of these traditional ties we are witness to the quick development of self-help networks."

From Industrial-Age Medicine to Info-Age Health Care
"With the help of effective Consumer Health Informatics (CHI) systems the individual with health problems is able to conquer difficulties with these 'system maps' at the highest level possible."
(Source: The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, San Francisco, Harper, 1994.)

The Scenes of Our Lives

Health Centers 
"The health care system which is truly able to maintain the spiritual and physical health of individuals must place emphasis on health rather than illness. It therefore must be as decentralized as possible in order for it to be built into our daily lives."

Masters and Workshops

"My Ars Poetica is to Serve": The Teacher
"If the topic of conversation is the relationship between children and nature you can be sure Dr. András Victor's name will inevitably arise. András Victor is a teacher through and through. He has been teaching for decades, has written books and studies, has lead field work, and passionately cares for the future generation."

Suryodaya - Sunrise: 
Secrets of Natural Health 
"In Suffolk, England, there is a natural healing center where we can find ourselves or discover our new selves, where they use various therapies, and we can meditate. Dance, singing, laughing and talking are all a part of meditation."

Bookshelf

The Right to Life 
Book review of Public Health, Physicians, and Society, Volume 5 in the series Hungary on the Millennium. Factors Influencing the Quality of Life in Hungary. 
"In 1977, at the request of the Parliament, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences began a research program given the title 'Factors Influencing the Quality of Life'. ... The studies write about the importance of maintaining health and preventing illness."

Anna Jókai: 
The Healer and the Healed. Jung's Spiritual Healing - With Rembrandt
Book review of: C. G. Jung, Spiritual Healing. Five lectures. Budapest, 1998. 
"On the cover of the book we see a detail of Rembrandt's The Dinner at Emmaus. Christ, the healer, is a heavy silhouette carved of a single block; leaning back a little he casts his own light on the mortal opposite him ..."
In his essay published as an epilogue to Jung's work "the minister and psychologist Miklós Bodrog ... supplements and specifies Jung's recognition, that there is valuable healing power in faith, that religions are spiritual healing systems - unless they have become contorted."

Attila Malecz: 
The Second Medical Revolution
Book review of The Second Medical Revolution. From Biomedicine to Infomedicine by Laurence Foss and Kenneth Rothenberg.
"Foss and Rothenberg state that the whole organization of medical science is disintegrating, since the contemporary biomedical paradigm can only be applied in cases of contagious diseases, but does not work in chronic cases or cases where the illness can be traced to environmental damage."

Györgyi Bartók: 
Strong in Body, Cheerful in Soul 
Book review of Dr. Ingeborg Cernaj's Environmental Illness - Illness Without a Reason?
"What is environmental illness, and how can 'defenseless' man defend himself at the end of the 20-th century from all the harm which attacks the body and weakens the soul?"

Karl Grossman: 
The Poison Conspiracy
"By today most people have realized that we have poisoned our environment and that cancer is spreading like an epidemic. However, we are not quite aware of the fact that we have done nothing to stop this."

Neville Hodgkinson: 
Will to be Well. The Real Alternative Medicine
"The book is a guide for patients. It offers insight into the dynamics of our inner world... The author vows that all illness originates from the soul, and that a healthy spirit is capable of healing."

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