Semiotics and Medicine

I was so fortunate to speak this weekend at the Romania Conference of Semiotic – here you will find out what semiotic has to do with medicine

and you will see that countries like Romania have a lot to offer in an area, about which many people in the USA have not even heard about, being inundated constantly by low-density information

Part 1:

Part 2 :

[scribd id=41765956 key=key-1qvtu51qil5y18zr186o mode=slideshow width=100%]

Here are some of the Presentations that were given :

(only 10 pages out of 123 pages of the summary catalog)

The “gods’ tears”:

on the creative and unifying power of sacred signs

Tiberiu Brăilean

“Al. I. Cuza” University, Iaşi

Romania

The ancient Egyptians believed that people were gods’ tears. In the sacred language of the beginnings, Erme meant both man and tear. Hence, this would be the ontological status of the human being, capable of crying and thus of approaching gods. Their tears turned into beings; men’s tears are the art of making gods.

Everything is engraved in us, but men have forgotten the Word and keep wandering in the night of meaninglessness. But anamnesis is within reach and we can recover our primordial status if we let the Imago Dei do its work in our souls.

Every material reality in the universe has a spiritual correspondent and every spiritual reality has a reflex in the material world. The union of the two aspects has culminated in Jesus Christ, the God-man, in the divine love, essential moment to the whole cosmic evolution.

The origins of the “old language”

George Cadar

Baia-Mare, Maramureş,

Romania

It is not known exactly when the Mighty God decided to make man understand the sounds, to sow them in his mind, turning them first into roots, stems and then into flowers. For what could be more fascinating in the act of creation than the perfection of the flower as a crowning of the grandiose Sefirot tree.

The study that I have been carrying on for more than thirty-five years made me  reconstruct the route covered by our ancestors from the Egyptian – Aramaic-Eritreic to the Summerian-Babylonian-Parso-Hyndo-Nepalese lands. Along the river Amu-Daria the Great Camp was completed. Here the great tribes of massageths, tissagets and euthaliths or White Huns built the hearth of DACIA BACTRICE. As the climate was warming the shepherd tribes turned to the Europe region of today, so that Noah’s flood took the white people in the nowadays’ Black Sea area by surprise. The great historian Nicolae Densuşeanu was right when he said that we are on the lands of Europe since we traveled by raft and we called ourselves tattoo-Mamoole.

To resume, such a historical approach is difficult and risky at the same time. The reading my book, entitled, Origins, will throw some light in the understanding of the history of “the river of our existence”. It is worth revealing that I managed to reconstruct  the Valach people’s old language, the root out of which all the other languages of the European peoples have emerged.

In my book, I first presented the etiological-explanatory dictionary of the ARATRO language, the old language. It is in this language that I want to introduce myself: Aham SATMA IZA AS VEKTU DAKŞA. AND MASNA ARGEGE ALAHVA. I am from the Water Village and  I speak Dacian. My name is Valach the Peasant.

Chinese cultural signs and cognition:

Chinese characters as an example

Shushan Cai

Tsinghua University Beijing

China

Culture is something related with the way beings make use of signs, systems, models, processes and results. Cognition is also a kind of institutional acts, that is, symbolic acts. Therefore, there are close relations between cultural signs created by humans and human cognitive acts. Chinese characters are the most basic Chinese cultural signs. In this paper, Chinese characters will be investigated in syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the view of semiotics. Then, the structure, meaning, usage of Chinese characters and their effects in Chinese cognitive activities will be released. Finally, we will compare the pictographic and alphabetic writings, and discuss their different roles in cognitive activities by comparing the Eastern and Western worlds.

The Brâncuşian pattern:

a Romanian creative modeling

Mariana Caluschi

“Petre Andrei” University, Iaşi

Romania

The paper is an attempt to introduce the reader to the Brâncusian Creative Pattern, elaborated, tested and applied into the educational process of teaching/learning, training, counseling and therapy. The principles insisted on refer to:

–          continuous education through creativity;

–          synergetic education and learning;

–          the revealing and awareness of personality;

–          the realizing of the “I” unity or self-realization through creativity.

There are also discussed aspects such as main fields, opportunities and limits of the pattern as well as the relationship between this type of creative pattern and the process of personal development, a first rate target of man’s existence.

Solar-terrestrial impact assessment activity on accident onset risk patients with coronary diseases

1. Cosovanu, G. Ungureanu, V. Ambăruş, R. Ghiuru, S. Ionescu, A. Moldovanu, M. Macoviciuc

UMF, ITF, Iaşi

Romania

The paper analyzes the possible influence of the solar-terrestrial activity on coronary accidents, taking into account the degree of cardiovascular risk of patients according to Anderson’s skirt. The study includes 412 patients with AMI hospitalized in “I. Enescu”, III Cardiology Clinic in Iaşi. Aspects such as: the terrestrial solar activity,  the influence of geomagnetic activity on the onset of AMI, the correlation between the energy emitted by the sun to the earth and environmental conditions, types of transmitted energy, DST-index are dealt with in the paper.

There have been investigations on the influence of solar-terrestrial activity on cardiovascular diseases. Recent work highlights interplanetary disturbances and geomagnetic triggering MI, geomagnetic disturbance effects on the platelet function, blood flow and capillary coagulability of patients suffering from ischemic disease. Biological experiments performed on rabbits during strong geomagnetic storms have highlighted the cardiac activity indices eleven days, and at the cellular level and even mitochondrial alterations.

Formalization and sub-categorization of natural language.

A semio-logic model

George Ceauşu

“Al. I. Cuza” University, Iaşi

Romania

When speaking, the human agent works on two levels of articulation (enunciation and phonology). Noam Chomsky designated the two levels of construction by the logical form (LF) and phonological form (FF). The two forms may suggest the parallelism between two senses, eyesight and hearing [Chomsky, 1996].

The requirements of a general syntax and semantics closely drawn around a set of primitives, are essential in specifying the universal grammar rules. Faced with semantic difficulties arising from transformational grammar, Noam Chomsky developed in the ‘80s a larger analytical system, Government and Binding grammar (GB) [Chomsky, 1981]. The post-generativist approach since 1990 (Jerry Fodor, Jerry Katz) leads to an overall situation of universal grammar rules: native people are predisposed to learning these rules and the initial state of language learning not only satisfies the rules, but it also  embodies it, as a specific device of language learning [Devitt; Sterelny, 2000].

X-bar theory is a basic component of GB grammar [Black, 1999]. If we note X an element of the set {Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb}, Noam Chomsky proposes a linguistic category X, an arborescence with three vertical levels and three branches vertical structure adapted (and expanded) by Nicolae Curteanu, Oana Popârda, Ioan Oprea for the case of the Romanian language [Curteanu; Popârda; Oprea, 1988]. XP is the maximum projection, parameter X is X-bar and X is most often a feature of morfo-syntactic category. The constituent structures treated by the scheme (adjectival phrase, nominal phrase, verbal phrase, prepositional phrase, sentence) prove the orientation of the central nervous system towards linguistic performance.

The two levels of articulation may be illustrated also through two fundamental logical categories, notion and sentence, and through four derived logical categories (strictly speaking operators, connectors, subconnectors, preachers) [Ioan, 1999]. In this paper, we try to establish a connection between the two models of language, linguistic (Noam Chomsky) and logical (Petru Ioan) and to apply for the language of intelligent animals [Sebeok, 2002], where we detected two fundamental logical categories and two derived logical categories [Ceauşu, 2009].

Experiment as “trial”: the ways of meeting

between a mistic`s and a scientist`s experience

Dan Chiţoiu

“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iaşi

Romania

The paper aims to clear up the degree of the real and effective approaching between religion and science. The working hypothesis is that the effective approach between the mystic’s experience and the experiment of the scientist is underlined by the uncommon, limit-cases. This paper analyses such situations. The thesis I wish to defend is that we should not look for artificial bridges to connect the fact that characterizes the mystic experience to what pertains to the scientific experiment: ultimately, both are ways of approaching  what we could call ‘reality’

Down the White Rabbit’s hole.

With Alice in Wonderland on limit(ation)s, divides, diversities, differences

Doina Cmeciu

“Vasile Alecsandri” University, Bacău

Romania

The paper deals with the divides and limit(ation)s of the allegorical text and adventures into examining the creative wonderland of questions posed by a girl’s inquisitive mind and (apparently) innocent eyes. Alice’s fall “down the hole” turns her into a (wo)man significans, driven by the curiosity of finding and giving a meaning to all she sees. What is meaning; does a single word stand for something else to somebody  or does a whole sentence represent something in the real world; is there one or diverse realities that are reflected; what is the function of language; how is the (w)hole interpreted by Alice; what makes things be different in the world? how does/can Alice relate to the differences she encounters in the (w)hole world? why does something stand for something else to diverse beings? what relations are there established between name, referent, perceiving eye, mind and image? are some of the questions haunting Alice’s mind in wonderland, questions pertaining to Saussure’s semiology, Peirce’s semiotics or Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s social semiotics.

Semiotic research: what is the role of the observer?

Paul Cobley

London Metropolitan University

United Kingdom of Great Britain

This paper asks how future semiotic research, particularly with a biosemiotic orientation, will incorporate a theory of observership. Constructivism, particularly in its radical form (see, for example, Watzlawick 2008, Poerksen 2004) envisages a theory of the observer which amounts to a form of nominalism. Semiotics, I would argue, necessitates a theory of observership which differs from that of constructivism while, in fact, having a constructivist tinge akin to Peirce’s suggestion of the affinity between realism and an extreme form of nominalism. In particular, this paper will take its cue from Sebeok’s (1986, 1991) comments on John Archibald Wheeler’s conception of the ‘participatory universe’ and will try to explicate the relevance of Wheeler’s (1994, 1998) philosophy of science for semiotics. The paper will contribute to recent key debates in the field on ‘knowing’ sciences (Kull 2009) and on relation and the semiotic animal (Deely 2010). This paper develops some of the themes foreshadowed towards the end of my article ‘Cybersemiotics and human modelling’ in Entropy 12 (9)

http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/12/9/2045/pdf

Signs of magical tradition:

sacred (psycho)geometry

Serghei Danisin

“Delta Inform” Institute, Moscow

Russia

The creative imagination, the ability of clairvoyance and telepathy, prayers and  incantation, and last but not least the power of “sacred geometry”, represented archaic rituals practices that even our ancestors managed to control.

The “secret geometry” of forms deciphering, in analogy with letters, words and sentences, as signs of the “universal alphabet”, represents an art that semiotics and hermeneutics may recuperate in the use of nowadays’ knowledge.

All magic symbols, such as mandalas are – starting from the Dacian sanctuaries and up to the models engraved on cult or laic objects – offered to the ancient people a “vibrating environment” of objective power, with various effects, starting with the psycho-physiological ones and up to the energo-informational structure of the life environment.

Semiotics as a state of mind

Olatoya Doya

University of Ibadan

Nigeria

The basic semiotical concepts are indefinable in a similar way as the basic concepts of mathematics, such as point, set, number etc. Moreover, the sign cannot be considered an initial concept because it is not elementary. It is a composite concept consisting of, at least, the “name”, “referent”, and “relation” between them. However, any study of semiotics begins with an explanation of sign as a primary object of the science.

Yuri Shreider, in one of his works of the 1970’s, suggested to consider as initial (though also indefinable) concept of semiotics not the sign but the “sign situation”. What is “sign situation”? If semiotics has everything as its object, then the first question must be: “under which condition something is perceived as a sign, that is, semiotically?” The situation when something is perceived by somebody as a sign is called “sign situation”. It is evident that such “situation” takes place when something is perceived in its duality. As such, its strength_emphsizes not so much the properties of “something” as the mental state of the perceiving “somebody”.

Hence follows that semiotics is nothing else than an objectification, or self-expression, of a certain kind of mind. It is dualistic mind, or mind in the structure of duality. If we accept that reality is self-existent, that it simply is in itself and by itself, i.e. beyond duality, then semiotics is a creation and apologetic self-assertion of the blind mind, separated from reality, unable to see it as it is, without mediation, that is, of mind in the state of ignorance.

Semiotics, ontologising the “binary oppositions”, can deal only with illusory, or relatively real, phenomena. It denies, or is blind to, the deeper, ultimate reality, reality as it is. The semiotic mind, which has governed the Western culture approximately the last six centuries and acts as an almost universal “censorship of understanding”, cares about that what is not really real.

It is not by chance that the problems of ideology and persuasion are between the favourites for modern semiotics. Both ideology and persuasion possess the same nature as semiotics itself – they are possible only in the realm of ignorance. Only those who cannot see what and how reality is can be persuaded or manipulated. I think that such persons as, for example, the Buddha or Christ could not be manipulated at all. And it is not by chance that the “semioclastic” (i.e. intended to crush the relations of power concealed in language) endeavours of Barthes and Derrida ended in creation of very strong and aggressive ideologies. It was inevitable because semiotics is an ideology itself, imposing a narrow and exclusive world-view upon its unfortunate adepts.

The pretensions of semiotics to be a universal key lay in the main-stream of the evolution of Western science (at least, up to recent times), which has forced out the quality by the quantity, immediate seeing by “interpretation” of things, loosing its ability of clear vision and proudly ousting it by the short-sighted dogmas of “positive knowledge”. Science is, of course, of great public benefit. However, as one Indian guru said, “To think is necessary but not enough. One must know to live also!” Or as one Russian philosopher said, “Such utterances as ‘we live in the world of signs’ or ‘man live in the world of signs’ are as much unreal as such utterances as ‘man lives in the world of things’ or ‘man lives in the world of ideas’. It would be more correct to say that ‘man lives in the world of choice’”.

And the last question. Why is semiotics so enduring and attractive? One of the reasons, I think, is that it makes life more predictable, and, therefore, more comfortable. It acts as an effective psychological defence – defence against reality. Reality in its nakedness is too overwhelming and too dangerous for our limited egos and our cherished “fixed ideas”. It is much easier to deal with it, if first it is reduced to “signs”.

Homeopaths’ role as psychotherapists in a global mental health crisis: a plea for an efficient semiosis

Christopher K. Johannes

Akamai University, USA

Kansai Gaidai College, Japan

Homeopathy, while being the second most popular system of medicine in use around the world, is a healing system with an exceptional capacity to alleviate mental health suffering that nonetheless remains under-utilized and largely unrecognized by the mainstream conventional and even integrative health community for its value in mental health care treatment and prevention.  Homeopaths already provide a type of counseling and psychotherapy – a very efficient therapeutic semiosis – in addition to the remedy that affords healing value beyond and synergistic to the remedy. However, homeopaths are not recognized by health authorities as ‘mental health care providers’, and therefore a serious gap remains between the capacity of homeopaths to respond to the mental health crisis and the public, professional, and formal recognition of that response capacity across all types of mental health, trauma, collective trauma, adaptation, stress, functional, somatoform, psychosomatic, emergent, and mind-body-spirit issues of our times.

This present paper outlines several reasons to formally recognize and endorse the homeopath as a mental health care provider with calls to acknowledge a new frame of “registered homeopathic counselors/psychotherapists” ready to meet the needs of our current transitional era.  Homeopathy’s common factors in meeting the formal criteria of the counseling and psychotherapy profession to warrant the title “counselor” or “psychotherapist” are outlined, including seven factors unique to homeopathy’s method of counseling and psychotherapy.

Homeopathic counselor / psychotherapists’ role in addressing integral health in its methodological, phenomenological and philosophical alignment with mindfullness and relational practices are seen as a positive and needed response to the increasingly challenging nature of mental and mind-body-spirit issues seen in practice.

Acupunctural semiosis:

an integrating energy-information therapy

Ka-Nam Lay

Akamay University, USA

Traditional Chinese Therapy Clinic (IoM)

Isle of Man, UK

The human body is a station where energy-information in the form of biophotons is generated and spread out to the environment and the same in the environment is taken into the body. One way this energy-information flow is taking place is via the acupuncture points and meridian and collateral systems to effect a constant homeo-dynamic equilibrium of the human body. This equilibrium is achieved via the well documented TCM theories. Energy-information input afforded by acupuncture to affect the Qi (bioenergy) generates a cascade effect inside the human body. This effect can subsequently restore the energy balance within human body. This effect can be illustrated in the application of acupuncture for symptoms of mental health disorders.  The observed effect can help formulate more effective acupuncture for symptoms of mental health disorders. The effect mechanism of TCM acupuncture as explained by TCM theories integrated in the biophotonic theory helps to explain the nonlocality effect of energy-information therapy (and also perhaps the holographic nature of the living system).

Psychosomatic profile estimation methods based

on the symbolistic of the  “law of 5 elements”

Beatrice Lucache

“Alternative Medicine” Center, Iaşi

Romania

Situated at the border between medicine, psychology, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the psychosomatic deals with the study and treatment of the diseases with two components: a psychological one and a physical one, which reflect the body-soul duality. After a long period dominated by mechanical ideas, characterized by high-level specialty and high-level technology, the modern medicine suffers a humanizing process, a return to the human personality. This way, the determination of the patient’s psychosomatic profile becomes one stage of the way towards treatment and healing.

There are different methods to outline the psychosomatic profile, both in allopathic medicine and complementary medicine. This paper’s purpose is to point out these methods, particularly  the techniques of the Extreme Orient’s medicine – techniques which are based on the “Law of the 5 elements”.

Euclidean versus non-Euclidean Signs

Solomon Marcus

Romanian Academy, Bucureşti

Romania

Both the Euclidean and the non-Euclidean signs are very important in the contemporary society and in our personal life, but it is not always easy to recognize and to capture them, many of them being still controversial. The emergence of the non-Euclidean geometries, in the 19th century, did not occur at the expense of the Euclidean ones. They are both important, their features spread much beyond the borders of geometry, in the field of literature and visual arts (see Cubism), in the new trends in music, at the beginning of the 20th century, in physics (mainly in the theory of relativity, in its two variants), in fact, in all fields of mathematics, from real and complex analysis to algebraic geometry, where William Thurston (Fields laureate) proposed a new way to look at the 3-dimensional manifolds, having hyperbolic geometry as a basic term of reference; in computer sciences, the nature of the computational space-time involves sometimes the non-Euclidean geometries; in bio-computing, hyperbolic geometries are involved; the structure of the visual space is still controversial, but arguments in favor of its non-Euclidean nature are very strong. It seems that the visual perception of the child, immediately after its birth, is non-Euclidean. The fourth dimension metaphor fascinated many authors already in the 19th century. Both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries challenged the main ideas in philosophy.

Where and when are we “ourselves”?

Luminiţa-Diana Mavropol

Secondary School no 4, Iaşi

Romania

In everyday life we are overwhelmed by thoughts. The compulsive thinking is associated with anxieties concerning the future.  We project ourselves in the past or in the future, but we forget that we are living here and now. We do not dare to live and enjoy the gift which God gives every moment to us.

The divine essence is in us, in the very moment of the eternal present – the time of  God. When we are listening to our hearts, we have access to the divine state of the wholeness of our being (Tolle 2008; Welwood 2006).

Our minds dislike the inner peace and try to resolve problems incessantly.The Ego is intimately associated with our mind. The Ego depends on conflicts, it cannot survive in the divine peace (Grof 2007). The necessity for conflict creates the dependence on suffering. Living in the present allows us to see the reality, not the illusion. In this moment the life appears. We really live and feel the life in the divine space of our hearts.

Rollin McCraty

HeartMaths Research Center

Boulder Creek, California

USA

Over the past 20 years, our research center has investigated heart brain interactions; how the heart and brain communicate with each other and how that affects consciousness and our perceptions.  One of the things we have identified in our research is the state we now call coherence.  What we found was that when we are feeling positive emotions, like we are really appreciating the sunset or really feeling love or compassion or care for someone, that the heart beats but a very different message.  The heart generates by far the largest rhythmic electromagnetic field produced in the body.  What we have now found is that if we look at the spectrum analysis of the magnetic field created by the heart that emotional information is actually encoded and modulated into those fields.  So by learning to shift our emotions, we are changing the information we are encoding into the magnetic field radiated by the heart.  And that can impact
those around us.  We are fundamentally and deeply interconnected with each other and with the planet itself.  What we do individually really does count.  It matters.

Shapes and forms in Nature,

from the perspective of Complexity Science

Florin Munteanu

Center for Compelxity Studies

UNESCO Center

The collection of models, theories and measurement and control techniques provided by the Science of Complexity (Érdi 2008) enables a new way of perceiving and understanding Reality, seen as a structured network of complex and interdependent systems that evolve far from thermodynamic equilibrium may manifest coherence on a large scale, and for whose study a special, holistic approach is required. Such complex and interdependent systems coevolved, displaying phase transitions, spontaneous restructuring, and even generating new structures that are neither the sum of, nor the exact image, of their ‘parents’. Additionally, and most importantly, the Complexity paradigm can be considered an important step in understanding Life and the relationship between Living & Non-Living entities/systems. Those new concepts, theories and computational techniques are more than useful for a new approach in morphogenetic studies.  The pattern recognition technique and different types of methods for pattern generation are now together the basis for what it is labelled as infodynamics (Ceruti and Stuart 2007) and biosemiotics (Favareau 2010). In this respect, the semiology of nature has in the science of Complexity an important support.

The paper tries to focus on some theoretical aspects on morphogenesis phenomena (DLA, Cellular Automata, chaos theory) in order to find out some characteristics of natural patterns (in opposition with the shapes and forms of artefacts). Due to the sensitivity of the initial conditions, in some cases, this semiotic approach is able to discriminate/decode some very subtle properties of the environment. In this way, the paper suggests a nonconventional approach to characterise/discriminate some geomorphologic arias (Harrison and Dunham 1998), trying a link with culture and the socio-economic behaviour of the inhabitants. This quite “strange” correlation between the shapes and forms of natural objects and the geophysical environment is now under scientific attention due to the Gaia vision (Planet Earth as a living holistic system) (Karnani and Annila 2009). Again, the Science of Complexity plays an important role because it allows the understanding of the structuring role of recursive processes that can model feedback loops and implicitly, auto-regulation processes. The negentropy production, generated by living beings through metabolic processes that ensues the homeostasis of living systems, is put into balance with the implacable trend towards entropy growth, the fundamental property of non-living matter. This “competition” between order vs. disorder, information production vs. entropy growth, etc., induces a special dynamic in Living systems that develops on a non-living ‘substrate’, and this non-trivial dynamic must be studied using a special methodology. Our paper tries to improve the GAIA theory by revealing natural codes, defining special methodologies in archetype finding.

Telematic constitution of the

human body in virtual reality[1]

Teodor Negru

„Al. I. Cuza” University, Iaşi

Romania

The increasing diversity of the communication means and speed of dissemination of information in the contemporary world  have led, among other things, to changes of the human body status as part of this permanent communication process. This has been possible due to the theory of information and cybernetics which allowed for the transcendence of the material substrata of the human being by thinking it in terms of information units. The contemporary technology has contributed as well; in order to extend the limits of our natural senses, it has facilitated the transmission of information over ever longer distances. This has further allowed for the emergence of the virtual world which completes and enriches the world we live in. Consequently, these transformations triggered the re-thinking of the human body in terms of flows of information that allow for its integration into the virtual world, which tends to become more important than the real one around us. The virtualisation of the human body has also altered the signifier and the signified relationship, hence opening new paths to signification.

The Inergetix-CoRe System:

Energy-informational medicine

Kiran Schmidt

Inergetix Inc., Oregon

USA

If the nineteenth century was mainly about discovering the power and use of substances – of chemicals – and the twentieth century is about exploring energy in the area of medicine, the term Informational Medicine has been more frequently used since around the turn of the century.

Substance and, consequently, Energy is under the limitation of time and space, therefore energy decreases with the inverse square of distance from its source in density. In this way one can quickly discriminate that modalities like distant healing, which do not diminish with distance, are in fact not energetic in nature but are actually informational. So, it has become clear that informational components have always been important in healing. Homeopathy is just such a rudimentary beginning of Informational Medicine in recent history, one that is starting to be explained and extended by the new developments of “virtual medicine technologies”. However, the use of Information in all of its still largely un-researched semiotic forms such as words, symbols, music, pictures, videos, and patterns, is the field of informational medicine and has completely different possibilities and limitations.

Inergetix Inc. has taken new steps that do not lean on the use of traditional concepts of physics – like energy, frequency and vibration – and its associated laws to establish the principles and objectives of a complementary science now called Informational Medicine.  We did not make only theories or philosophies, but created a new technical system, the Inergetix-CoRe System, that applies these new ideas and tests their validity in real-life situations. There are now already countless testimonials of dedicated users that show that the Inergetix-CoRe opens up new and truly complementary avenues for healing, because it is able not only to generate frequencies in its various forms of sound, electricity or light, but also transmit the information connected to these frequencies. This is a technological plea for an integrative Energetic-Informational Medicine, a synergy of “and-and” medicine.

Sacred geography and cosmic geometries:

interfaces between religion and landscape in India

Rana P. B. Singh

Banaras Hindu University

Varanasi

India

The deeper sense of geographic concerns employ to investigate the inherent power of sacred places by searching for cosmic geometries embedded in ritual landscapes and the spatial orientations towards astronomical phenomena. Such sacred cities can be considered to be a mesocosm, geometrically linking the celestial realm of the macrocosm with the microcosmic realm of human consciousness and cultural traditions. Through case studies of Khajuraho, Gaya, Vindhyachal, Varanasi, and Chitrakut, using Global Positioning System (GPS) we demonstrate with precision how natural topography, ritual movement and festival calendars combine to establish large-scale geometries. With the case study of the pilgrimage circuits and the cosmic geometry related to various gods, the web of Self-Organised System can easily be illustrated. The process of self-organised complexity in establishing interactions between spatial structure and symbolic meaning has also been considered and illustrated with the functional human networks of the pilgrimage mandala that refers to the sacred dimension of landscape and human belief systems. The results will further help to explain the unity among religious landscape, notion of science and the design of ritual arts