1. Christian—The fundamentalist message:
Illness is basically a punishment from God for some sort of sin. The worse the
illness, the more unspeakable the sin.
2. New Age—Illness is a lesson. You are giving yourself this disease because
there is something important you have to learn from it in order to continue
your spiritual growth and evolution. Mind alone causes illness and mind alone
can cure it. A yuppified post-modern version of Christian Science.
3. Medical—Illness is fundamentally a biophysical disorder, caused by
biophysical factors (from viruses to trauma to genetic predisposition to
triggering agent). You needn't worry about psychological or spiritual treatment
for most illnesses because such alternative treatments are usually ineffectual
and may actually prevent you from getting the proper medical attention.
4. Karma—Illness is the result of negative karma; that is, some non-virtuous
past actions are now coming to fruition in the form of a disease. The disease
is "bad" in the sense that it represents past nonvirtue; but
"good" in the sense that the disease process itself represents the
burning up and the purifying of the past misdeed; it's a purgation, a
cleansing.
5. Psychological—As Woody Allen put it, "I don't get angry, I grow tumors
instead." The idea is that, at least in pop psychology, repressed emotions
cause illness. The extreme form: illness is a death wish.
6. Gnostic—Illness is an illusion. The entire manifest universe is a dream, a
shadow, and one is free of illness only when one is free from illusory
manifestation altogether, only when one awakens from the dream and discovers
instead the one reality beyond the manifest universe. Spirit is the only
reality, and in Spirit there is no illness. An extreme and somewhat off-centered
version of mysticism.
7. Existential—Illness itself is without meaning. Accordingly, it can take any
meaning I choose to give it, and I am solely responsible for these choices. Men
and women are finite and mortal, and the authentic response is to accept
illness as part of one's finitude even while imbuing it with personal meaning.
8. Holistic—Illness is a product of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual
factors, none of which can be isolated from the others, none of which can be ignored.
Treatment must involve all of these dimensions (although in practice this often
translates into an eschewal of orthodox treatments, even when they might help).
9. Magical—Illness is retribution. "I deserve this because I wished
So-and-so would die" Or, "I better not excel too much, something bad
will happen to me." And so on.
10. Buddhist—Illness is an inescapable part of the manifest world; asking why
there illness is like asking why there is air. Birth, old age, sickness, and
death-- these are the marks of this world, all of whose phenomena are
characterized by impermanence, suffering, and selflessness. Only enlightenment,
in the pure awareness of nirvana, is illness finally transcended, because then
the entire phenomenal world is transcended as well.
11. Scientific—Whatever the illness is, it has a specific cause or cluster of
causes. Some of these causes are determined, others are simply random or due to
pure chance. Either way, there is no "meaning " to illness, there is
only chance or necessity.
~ Ken Wilber
