The flexing of our technological muscle seems to give us more domination over nature and science seems to be discovering the very nature of our essential biological makeups. Instant food, instant communication via mobile phone or Internet, fast transport, and robotic services in the home and at work. We seem to have everything to the extent that our physical activity has become limited as more and more things are being done for us by technology.

This seeming dreamlike utopia is the veneer or the tip of the iceberg because underneath we see a society alienated and out of touch with an environment that is being destroyed to such an extent that we are losing the biodiversity of species on the planet. Globally and nationally we see the results of our labours including increased social disintegration, failure to cure the degenerative diseases of our time, an increase in wars on a global scale, and with the mass of population, a vast increase in stress and depression to the extent that it has been predicted that by the year 2020, one in three people will be suffering from depression.

The problems of overpopulation, the global military machine, and the destruction of living and nonliving resources on the planet were never properly discussed at the UN conferences including the Rio Summit in 1992. Despite this constant need to control nature and exploit nature, we have no understanding of the effect of destruction of the finite resources on our planet, and economic rationalism compels us towards an imperative which is self destructive.

In the past, people relied on what is now considered to be hidden or unproven potential in human beings to heal themselves through mind over matter. Thus the Shamans had the ability to heal by channeling the life force to heal themselves and their patients. The Yogi was able to master his bodily functions through a conscious biofeedback that enabled him to monitor his health. The Buddhist Monk could change the phenomena of life around him and pray for the wellness of all beings, and send out loving kindness. There was a knowledge of the interconnectedness between the person and the environment, and with the advent of the thinker Descartes, in Western religion, there was a division between God and Man, i.e. Deus ex Machina, so God became separate and objective.

Science became pre-eminent. William Harvey discovered the anatomy of the heart and circulation and the whole body was mapped with precision so medicine became objectified and people were classified as organs and systems. People became diseases. Thus there is the heart victim, and the cancer victim, and the soul and the essential spirituality within the individual was lost to medicine, and we now have a situation whereby modern medicine reduces everything to illnesses and systems, and forgets that wellness is an integration between the body, the mind, and the environment.