S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 7 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 1 2 7 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos of modernity’s Weltanschauung. Guénon (2004c, 68) speaks to how extensively this fundamental scission has permeated today’s intellectual climate: “[T]he Cartesian duality … has imposed itself on all modern Western thought.” [9] Descartes (2003, 58) compared the human body to a machine: I might consider the body of a man as kind of machine equipped with and made up of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way that, even if there were no mind in it, it would still perform all the same movements as it now does in those cases where movement is not under the control of the will or, consequently, of the mind. Comparing the human body to a machine is assuredly not a neutral position, as modern science purports to adopt. In fact, we need to remain constantly vigilant in the face of these Promethean forces. Rollo May (1960, 686) took very seriously “the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine.” By equating the human body with a machine, Descartes (1997, 17) hoped to devise “a system of medicine which is founded on infallible demonstrations.” He appeared to predict the future of modern science, including modern psychology, seeing as current mental health practices by and large push exclusively for treatments that are exclusively confined to empirically validated techniques. The Cartesian divide between res extensa (extended entities) and res cogitans (thinking entities) makes no allowance for overcoming this bifurcation, thus reducing all human experience to the private, subjective realm and obliterating any notion of objective reality. This mind-body dualism lives on in modern science, especially in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, where this notion is deeply embedded in its epistemological framework. It is especially to be found in the medical model of clinical diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, which separates the psychological (psyche) from the biological (soma). R. D. Laing (1927–1989), the Scottish psychiatrist, acknowledged how widespread the medical model is, calling it the “set of procedures in which all doctors are trained” (2001, 39). This model remains the dominant schema within these disciplines and is thoroughly reductionist as it views mental disorders as solely the product of physiological factors and treats them, accordingly, as physical diseases; it generally divorces itself from broader psychological and transpersonal realities and becomes fixed in a schema based only on a disease’s etiology (see Elkins 2009). Due to concerns with the excessively narrow outlook of the medical model, the biopsychosocial model emerged to encompass more dimensions of human reality, such as the social and cultural with a view to gaining a fuller understanding of illness and health. It was George L. Engel (1913– 1999) who popularized the biopsychosocial model when he observed a “medical crisis” that he thought was derived from the medical model; that is, an “adherence to a model of disease no longer adequate for the scientific tasks and social responsibilities of either medicine or psychiatry” (1977, 129). In this attempt to overcome mind-body dualism, he asserted that all three of the following levels need to be taken into account: “the social, psychological, and biological” (Engel 1977, 133). It was the pioneering work of influential psychiatrist Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) and American psychiatrist and neurologist Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) that contributed to the further development of the biopsychosocial model first established by Engel. With the limits of the medical model having been recognized, the biopsychosocial model was also found to have its limitations because it could not adequately explain the various factors that determine psychopathology (see Ghaemi 2009a, 2009b). Even though the biopsychosocial model is more inclusive than the biomedical one, it still falls short in failing to situate the spiritual dimension at the heart of the human condition. Some have advocated for a four-dimensional model or a biopsychosocial model that embraces spirituality and, while this is certainly more satisfactory, its assumptions are still ad hoc and are not properly integrated into the vertical dimension. What is not acknowledged here is that the spiritual domain transcends (while fully embracing) brain functioning, psychological dispositions, and social influences among other factors. This corresponds to the tripartite structure of the human being, although Spirit alone can fully bring into balance and harmonize all these aspects of our human nature. Nasr (1996, 259–60) makes an important point about modern medicine and its reliance on a mechanistic worldview: [T]he truncated understanding of the body in modern medicine [note: is] based on reductionism, which finally sees the human body as a complicated machine and nothing more than that … although the modern scientific and medical understanding of the body certainly corresponds to an aspect of its reality, it does not by any means exhaust its reality. The body, in fact, has its own intelligence and speaks its own ‘mind,’ reflecting a wisdom … Yet this misconceived division does not appear in traditional healing methods found throughout the world’s religions, which includes the spiritual heritage of the First Peoples
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