Par le Dr Andrew Weil.

In an ideal whole, the components are not only there, they are there in an arrangement of harmonious integration and balance. Balance is the other aspect of wholeness that enters into the meaning of health,

The word balance comes from Latin bilanx, as it occurs in the compound libra bilanx, denoting a balance or scale (libra) for weighing, made of two (bi-) flat plates (lanx). The word libra will be familiar as a sign of the zodiac represented by such a balance, the only astrological sign associated with an inanimate object rather than an animal or human.

The sign of Libra is ruled by Venus, goddess of beauty and hay, suggesting that beauty arises from the balanced arrangement of components. Saturn is said to be “exalted” in this sign, that is, to reach its highest expression. Since Saturn is known to astrologers as the Greater Evil or Greater Misfortune (Mars being the Lesser), representing everything inimical to life, that relationship bears scrutiny.

In the heavens, the planet Venus is the brightest object next to the moon. Its light is warm, soft, and radiant, easily stimulating associations of feminine beauty, love, and peace. By contrast, Saturn's light is pale and cold, and that planet moves ever so slowly, barely changing its position against the stars from month to month. It is the outermost of the visible planets known to the ancients; its great distance from us and the sun accounts for its apparent slowness in our sky. I can see how our ancestors came to associate it with time and old age, with skeletons and cold, and other evils.

One image of Saturn is Father Time, holding an hourglass to measure out our allotted span of life. The Greek name for this old god who devoured his own children was Cronus; from it we get the combining form chrono-, meaning “time” (chronometer, chronic, synchronous, and so on). Another image of this same Force is the Grim Reaper: Death as an animated skeleton who cuts down life with his scythe. In medical astrology, Saturn rules the bones — the most fixed, material components of our bodies, the skeletons we carry around beneath our living flesh and that will endure when all else has decomposed. Saturn is the force of limitation, that which cuts off all that grows and opposes all expansion. No wonder it earns the title of Greater Evil.

Yet this same force is said to be exalted in Libra, the sign of balance. The suggestion of that statement is that balance and harmony result from correect placement and the use of limitation. To put the snakes of the caduceus into the mystic infinity pattern, you must oppose their tendency to stretch further outward when they have deviated just far enough from the midline.

If all this seems too abstract, consider a concrete example. I once lived in a country house in Virginia. On one side of the house was a huge, climbing rose, much overgrown, that did not flower. A professional gardener advised me to prune it. In late fall, when the plant was dormant, I cut it back extensively and with some regret, because I do not enjoy cutting living plants. From the point of view of the rose, the pruning was surely a dreadful experience, an assault by the Greater Evil. The next spring, however, it flowered magnificently, with a profusion of red blooms over many months. I think that story illustrates the practical meaning of the cryptical astrological statement of Sat-urn’s exaltation in Libra. (It is especially fitting, incidentally, that red roses are one symbol of Venus.)

Properly aligned, the forces of expansion and limitation show us the place of balance, from which we can glimpse the perfection of a higher reality. Balance is truly a mystery. Learn to stand on your head or to walk a tightrope, and you will experience the mystery. The balance point is nondimensional but quite real. At first you overshoot it grossly, then overcorrect and miss it again in another direction. Your movements are exaggerated and jerky, anything but harmonious. Eventually, you become conscious of the special point, if only momentarily while falling through it.

Soon you can stay in it for several moments, becoming familiar with the distinctive feeling of effortlessness it provides. Lose it even slightly, and you must put out tremendous effort to regain it, but when you are on target, there is no work to be done. You can just enjoy the grace of a magical zone where all external forces cancel out by virtue of precise arrangement, one against another. In balance there is stillness and beauty in the very midst of chaos .

This stillness and beauty at the hea of change is the magic of the hurricane’s eye, of the moment of totality of a solar eclipse, and, indeed, of the very stability of the earth itself, whose mo-tions on its axis, orbit, and path around the galaxy with the rest of the solar system are so complex that merely trying to imagine them makes one giddy. The equinoxes of the seasonal cycle are magical points, as are the moments of sunrise and sunset, the equilibrated times of day, when reflection and meditation are pos-sible with least effort.

The word equilibrium contains that same Latin libra. It is the state an analytical balance seeks as its two pans seesaw gracefully around the zero in harmonious motion. When the pans end their coupled dance and come to rest, they are in equilibrium, in this instance a static equilibrium, especially if the balance is enclosed in a protective glass case to screen out disturbing influences. In more complex systems, equilibriums are not static but dynamic, forged anew from moment to moment out of constantly changing conditions.

Dynamic equilibrium a formal concept in chemistry, where it describes certain kinds of reactions. If table salt and sulfuric acid are mixed, they react to form hydrochloric acid and sodium sulfate. In addition, the newly formed substances react with each other to form more sodium chloride and sulfuric acid, because this is a reversible reaction. Eventually, the rate of the forward reaction and the rate of the reverse reaction become equal, and chemists say that a state of equilibrium exists.

The rates of such reactions and the time required to reach equilibrium depend on the nature of the substances, their molecular concentrations and physical states, as well as on temperature, pressure, and the presence or absence of catalysts. Once equilibrium is reached, the concentrations of the reacting substances remain constant, but this situation is not static. Rather, the forward reaction and the reverse reaction are taking place at equal velocities, with compounds breaking apart and re-forming continuously. The equilibrium is dynamic, giving the appearance of rest, while based on constant change.

The balance of health is also dynamic. The elements and forces making up a human being and the changing environmental stresses impinging on them constitute a system so elaborate as to be unimaginable in its complexity. We are islands of change in a sea of change, subject to cycles of rest and activity, of secretion of hormones, and of the rise and fall of powerful drives, subjected to noise, irritants, agents of disease, electrical and magnetic fields, the deteriorations of age, emotional tides. The variables are infinite, and all is in flux and motion. That equilibrium occurs even for an instant in such a system is miraculous, yet most of us are mostly healthy most of the time, our mind-bodies always trying to keep up the incredible balancing act demanded by all the stresses from inside and out. Moreover, they do it dynamically, since equilibrium is constantly destroyed and recreated.

The achievement of balance adds an extra quality to a whole. It makes the perfect whole greater than the sum of its parts, makes it beautiful and holy, and so connects it to a higher reality. Health is wholeness — wholeness in its most profound sense, with nothing left out and everything in just the right order to manifest the mystery of balance. Far from being simply the absence of disease, health is a dynamic and harmonious equilibrium of all the elements and forces making up and surrounding a human being.

Référence: Andrew Weil, Health and healing, Cinquième Édition, Houghton Mifflin, USA, 2004, chapitre 5.

Reproduit uniquement à titre éducatif.