For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

As Will Farnaby gets to know more and more about his Palanese hosts and the culture that shaped them, so do we. One of the children who finds him injured in the jungle after his shipwreck, Mary Sarojini, asks him what happened to him. He is too horrified to tell her, so she sensibly tells him to think back to when he was a child. “What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?”

His response—she said, “My poor baby, my poor little baby”—horrifies Mary in turn. “But that’s awful!” she replies, shocked. “That’s the way to rub it in! It must have gone on hurting for hours. And you’d never forget it.” She then insists that he tell the story over and over again until he sees that it’s in the past and can no longer hurt him in the present.

Having been recently injured myself—I broke my ankle on the last day of my vacation 2 weeks ago—I can vouch that the “poor baby” treatment doesn’t help at all. “Poor baby” inevitably leads to “why me?” and that is a question with no satisfactory answer. Why not me? Why not any of us? Suffering comes into every life and it seems far more sensible to learn how to handle it rather than wallow in it.

Shortly after Mary Sarojini helps Will to laugh at his recent danger and fright, the adults arrive with a stretcher, and he is taken through the jungle, down to the Experimental Station, then to the home of Robert MacPhail, a doctor, researcher, and wholehearted supporter of the Palanese way of life.

He also makes the acquaintance of almost-18-year-old Murugan, who will soon be Raja of Pala. Farnaby had met him the previous week in the neighboring country of Redang-Lobo, a typical third world nation complete with military rulers, oil contracts, and a crushing gap between rich and poor. Murugan has been raised to despise the Palanese way of life and obviously thinks that letting consumerism and oil money into Pala is the way to progress.

Throughout the book, Murugan and his muslin-swathed mother, the Rani, are held up as examples of all that is wrong with the world. The Rani supposedly seeks to make money off of Palanese merely to support her Spiritual quest, but in reality both hold a deeper contempt for the Palanese culture. They are both greedy and short-sighted, but their motivations are wrapped in the cloak of Spirituality.

Once Will Farnaby is installed in Dr. MacPhail’s home, his daughter-in-law, healer and poet Susila MacPhail comes calling. Her husband, Dr. MacPhail’s son Dugald, has died recently in a climbing accident, and Huxley shows us her internal struggle to fully participate in her life while bearing the pain of her loss.

She has much support in this endeavor. Friends and family offer her love and truth rather than platitudes. Her own memories of the love she shared with Dugald, while painful, also remind her of the beauty possible in life. And of course she has children and work, both good reasons to stay alive and present in the moment. Her internal and external support structures—provided by her culture—help her handle her emotions while still seeing goodness in life.

She comes to Will Farnaby and puts him in a trance by talking of a beautiful place they both know in England. Once he is breathing easily, she gives his body suggestions of cool air to combat fever and infection. She also suggests that his body is large and miraculously powerful, his injured knee small in comparison.

In a later conversation, she explains to Will that what she did was akin to getting the children—his thoughts and emotions—out of the way so that the adults—his body and its deep intelligence—can do their work.

This relationship to healing, both psychological and physical, stands in contrast to the Western way of healing. These distinctions are brought to light with even more force a few chapters later, when Nurse Radha comes by to assist Will, giving him an injection of anti-biotics and an explanation of the Palanese way of healing, which is viewed as giving the person the support they need to heal on their own.

Palanese medicine—both psychological and physical—sees a person as an entire organism. Doctors are paid for keeping people well. Farnaby asks how and Radha replies:

“We’ve been asking that question for a hundred years, and we’ve found a lot of answers. Chemical answers, psychological answers, answers in terms of what you eat, how you make love, what you see and hear, how you feel about being who you are in this kind of world.”

“And which are the best answers?” asks Will.

“None of them is best without the others.”

Radha goes on to describe the visit of both medical doctors and psychologists to Pala, and laughs ruefully remembering how the MDs didn’t seem to realize that their patients had minds, while the shrinks didn’t see that their patients had bodies. “They never attack on all the fronts; they only attack on about half of one front.”

Taking a holistic view, not only of a person, but of the entire context in which a person exists, means that Pala has very low incidences of heart disease, hypertension, psychosis, and neurosis. It also means that there are no silver bullets, no little pills to solve little problems, just large amounts of perception and care coupled with small amounts of judgement and blame.

Above all, it’s an extremely humane way to approach each other. Instead of treating them as machines with broken-down components, Palanese people look at each other as whole people, living in a particular context. Pre-judgements are not made. Instead, factors are perceived personally, with every sense and intuition.

This ties into the spiritual aspect of Palanese culture as well. Instead of focusing on problems, diseases, or aspects of the negative unconscious, people in Pala are taught from a young age to focus on deeper intelligence, trust in the life process, and the good aspects of the unconscious, or “the Buddha Nature,” as Nurse Radha puts it. As we discussed last week, supporting these positive forces seems to work better than trying to dismantle the negative ones.

As I undergo my own healing process, I am keeping these ideas in mind. Some say that broken ankles have a long recovery period, but I know that my body understands how to mend this bone, and am keeping my entire mind-body focused on supporting that through good nutrition, meditation, and as much exercise as I can do while adhering to my doctor’s orders.

Allopathic medicine and connection to Life Energy itself are working hand-in-hand to get me on my feet again, just as they do for Will Farnaby and Susila MacPhail. Focusing on Island and the possibilities raised in it can only help.