Originally published on www.sayerji.substack.com
How Leaves of Grass Reveals Wellness as the Ground of All Being
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170 years ago, a poet wrote twelve words that contain an entire philosophy of healing. They are not advice. They are not hope. They are a statement about the structure of reality itself--and they may be the most radical thing you read this year.
"What will be, will be well-- for what is is well."
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
There is a single line in Whitman's Leaves of Grass that carries the weight of cosmic consciousness. It is not optimism. It is not denial. It is ontology--a statement about the structure of reality itself: What will be, will be well--because what is, is well.
When I first read it thirty years ago, it blew my mind and heart wide open. To this day, it haunts me in the most beautiful way.
I invite you to read it again, as well. Let it settle into the bones. And if you wish to take the full journey he offers, the whole text of Leaves of Grass can be found here.
Whitman is not saying that suffering does not exist, or that pathology is illusion. He is saying something far more radical: that the fundamental grain of being runs toward wholeness. That existence itself--the sheer isness of things--is not wounded at its core. The universe is not tilted toward entropy alone, as the modern 'religion' of nihlistic logical positivism insists at every turn. There is a counter-current, a syntropy, a telos that bends all things toward repair, coherence, and perfection. This is the secret teaching hidden in plain sight: what is, is well. And therefore, inevitably, what will be must follow suit.
This insight is not Whitman's alone. It belongs to every mystic who has touched what Richard Maurice Bucke called cosmic consciousness--that state wherein the boundaries between self and cosmos dissolve, and one perceives the benevolent plenitude beneath all appearance. In such a state, there is no Pascal's void, no nihilistic torment before infinity. There is fullness. Radiance. A peace that does not depend on circumstance because it is rooted in the very fabric of what exists.
Whitman was among those who tasted it. His poetry is not ornament--it is a living transmission, still electric nearly two centuries later. When he wrote of the body electric, of grass rising from graves, of the divine in sweat, semen, and the open road, he was not courting controversy. He was reporting from the field of direct perception. And his message remains clear: the universe coheres. Reality repairs. What is, is well.
Here is where the word wellness recovers its primordial meaning.
Today, wellness has become an industry--a colossal one, in fact, now eclipsing the global pharmaceutical sector by multiples. It has also become a brand, a hashtag, and a market demographic worth trillions of dollars, annually. But before all this, wellness was something else entirely. It was not a commodity. It was a description of our natural state. Not something we achieve through purchase or protocol, but something we return to when interference ceases.
Consider the etymology. The words heal, whole, and holy are not merely poetic cousins. They are etymologically one--all tracing back to the Proto-Indo-European root kailo, meaning uninjured, entire, sacred. This is not coincidence; it is cosmology encoded in language. To heal is to become whole. To become whole is to remember the holy. Our ancestors intuited what physics now confirms: coherence is not added from outside. It is the baseline. It is the default.
And what is disease? It is dis-ease--a disruption of ease, a departure from the native flow. Ease is the ground; disease is deviation. Wellness, then, is not something we manufacture. It is what remains when we stop manufacturing its opposite.
But Western civilization has long labored under a different assumption--a philosophical wound that distorted our relationship to body, soul, and world.
René Descartes, in his Meditations, cleaved reality into two substances: res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). Mind here, matter there--mutually exclusive, ontologically alien. From this fracture emerged a civilization of splits: science versus religion, rationality versus heart, body versus soul. We were rent in two.
The indigenous peoples of the Americas have their own name for this rupture. In the prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor--kept by the keepers of wisdom from the Andes to the Amazon--the eagle represents the path of the North: the mind, technology, the masculine, the drive toward analysis and mastery. The condor represents the path of the South: the heart, intuition, the feminine, the wisdom of earth and feeling. For five hundred years, the prophecy says, these two would fly apart--and humanity would suffer for it. But the prophecy also promises a reunion. A time when the eagle and condor would fly together again, wing to wing, vision wedded to heart. That time, the elders say, is now. I agree.
The consequences were vast. Medicine became mechanical. The body was treated as a machine to be fixed, not a mystery to be honored. Symptoms were enemies to suppress--cut, burn, poison--rather than signals to decode. The living intelligence of the organism was overwritten. The soul became an embarrassment, the spirit a superstition, the felt sense of the body an unreliable witness.
But the wound is healing.
In our lifetime--this very era--we are witnessing a philosophical and experiential mending. What Descartes tore asunder, a thousand convergences are weaving back together. Quantum, scalar field, and torsion wave dynamics now echo the truths once voiced only by mystics. Epigenetics affirms the power of intention. Neuroscience bows before meditation. The disciplines are remembering that they were never truly separate--that the universe does not cleave so neatly, that mind and matter interweave in ways the old categories cannot capture.
This is the time prophesied by the keepers of the Americas--the reunion of the eagle and the condor. The time when vision and feeling fly together again. When the head bows to the heart, and the heart rises to meet it.
The great mystics knew this reunion was always available--indeed, was always already the case, waiting only to be recognized.
In Zen, which I had the privilege of studying in residence in upstate New York, the teaching is unambiguous: You are already enlightened. There is no summit to reach. There is no door to pass through. The Buddha-nature is already complete within you. The task is not attainment but recognition--the peeling away of obscurations to reveal what was never lost.
The Christian mystics speak of universal redemption--every soul worthy of love, every being capable of return. Meister Eckhart, Hildegard, Julian of Norwich--they did not teach that we must earn our way to grace. They taught that grace is the medium in which we already swim. What Teilhard de Chardin called Christogenesis--the cosmic unfolding of the divine through matter--is not a future event. It is the grain of reality itself, present in every atom, pressing toward love.
The Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Sufi poets--each, in their idiom, testify to the same truth: that beneath the turbulence of appearance lies a stillness that is not emptiness but incomprehensibly vast fullness. That the ground of being is not indifferent but benevolent, if not loving. That the cosmos has a direction, a telos, and that direction is repair.
Whitman stands in this lineage. His declaration--what is, is well--is not sentiment. It is gnosis. It is what you see when the veil parts. And from that seeing, a corollary follows with the force of logic: because what is, is well, what will be cannot be otherwise. The future inherits the nature of the present. Wellness is inevitable--not as naïve optimism, but as ontological necessity.
Here we must pause to feel the weight of what is being said.
If wellness is our ontological ground--if healing is the natural direction of being--then all the machinery of suppression, all the industries built on the assumption of brokenness, all the systems that treat the human body as a site of error rather than intelligence--these are not simply ineffective. They are dissonant. They work against the current. They will not, cannot, endure, and because they are not ground in the true nature of things and therefore participate in profound deception - a form of Pharmakeia ("sorcery")
Like a sprout cracking through concrete, the wellness impulse cannot be permanently suppressed. It may be delayed, distorted, commodified--but its root is too deep, its source too primal. Life's bias is toward increased order, harmony, beauty, and coherence. The cells know it. The heart knows it. The body, left to its own intelligence, moves toward repair.
Divine partnerships obey this same law. When two self-sovereign beings choose one another--not from lack, not from wound, not from fear of incompleteness--they do not merely combine. They generate. Sacred geometry holds the blueprint: the Vesica Pisces, where two whole circles intersect and birth a third form (the higher-dimensional mandorla) impossible to either alone. The whole transcends the sum of its parts.
This is the pattern woven into the fabric of existence--from the communion of lovers to the ecology of the cell. And any system that violates it, however dominant, carries within it the seeds of its own undoing.
This is why the pharmaceutical era, for all its dominance, carries within it the seeds of its own obsolescence. Not because drugs are without use, but because a paradigm built on symptom suppression and ignoring root causes rather than systemic coherence cannot hold. What opposes the grain of reality eventually gives way. What aligns with it flourishes.
And yet--and here is the miracle within the miracle--we are alive to witness this.
Joseph Campbell once remarked that people are not so much seeking the meaning of life as the experience of being alive. This is the pulse beneath all seeking--the desire not for explanation but for vivification. To feel life from the inside. To know one's own aliveness as undeniable.
I think of standing among the Sequoias in their cathedral groves--those ancient ones who were saplings when Rome was young. You cannot remain in your small self in their presence. The sheer scale of them, the silence they hold, the millennia encoded in their rings--it does something to the nervous system that no concept can accomplish. You are filled with an awe so immense that the boundaries of self and other begin to dissolve. This is not metaphor. This is physiology transfigured by encounter. And this is the truth of the ontology of wellness: it is not merely feeling good, or even happy. It is to be so saturated with awe, with love, with gratitude, that the container of the separate self can no longer hold. You spill into the world. The world spills into you. And in that mutual overflow, you remember what you are.
Consider: you woke this morning. Your heart beat without instruction. Your lungs drew breath without committee. Some ninety trillion cells coordinated their activities with an intelligence that dwarfs any supercomputer. You are not merely functional--you are alive. And that is more than enough. It is infinitely more than enough. It is astounding.
This is what we celebrate when we speak of wellness--not the absence of symptoms, but the presence of this astonishment. The sheer audacious beauty of existing at all. The fact that something rather than nothing is here, and that the something is radiant, self-organizing, tending toward more life. Living this awareness is a natural, continuous form of gratitude for all things and experiences one encounters.
Even the hummingbird--that luminous emissary of joy--embodies this principle. In its iridescent blur, it carries the full blueprint of coherence: motion as stillness, effort as grace, the impossible made effortless. Sacred technology, encoded in feathers. If this can exist, then wellness is not optional. It is the nature of things.
The Hummingbird: Techno-Sacred Emissary of Light
Sayer Ji · April 15, 2025
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In the still air between moments, the hummingbird hovers--not merely as a bird, but as a fractal of creation, vibrating between time and timelessness. Read full story From this ontological ground, we can understand sovereignty differently. Wellness, like freedom, is not conferred. It is not granted by institutions or bestowed by constitutions. It is recognized innately. The founding documents of liberty do not create rights--they acknowledge them. They say: these truths are self-evident; these freedoms are inalienable; they belong to you by nature, not by permission. As I explored in depth recently, the body is not merely a symbol of liberty--it is a constitutionally protected domain, a jurisdiction in which the state has no authority without due process, informed consent, and narrowly defined justification.
So too with wellness. No medical system gives you health (especially not those premised on the intellectually faulty and implausible view that it can only be injected). No state apparatus confers vitality. These institutions can support or obstruct, but the source is within--prior to all systems, older than any law. Your body's intelligence to heal predates every hospital. Your being's coherence predates every diagnosis.
Individual sovereignty is the root from which all other sovereignty grows. Before there were nation-states, there was breath. Before there were global organizations, there was the singular choice of a singular being to move in one direction rather than another. That choice--to align with one's own heart, conscience, rhythm--is world-making. It is universe-defining. Call it the butterfly effect or call it what the ancients knew: each act of free will ripples outward, shaping fields we cannot see.
The recovery of this sovereignty is the work of our time. We see it in movements like MAHA--the impulse to reclaim health as a birthright, not a prescription. We see it in the growing refusal to surrender the body to agendas that forget the miracle it carries. Never again, this rising says. Never again will we allow the penetration of our bodies, minds, and spirits by forces that disregard the sanctity of what we are.
This power--the power of sovereign choice, the power of self-possession--is all-powerful, and is one of our time's greatest kept secrets. But it must be wielded with humility, with reverence for the vast responsibility it carries. The free, self-aware being shapes worlds. This is not metaphor. It is the structure of things.
How, then, do we live from this truth? How do we embody the ontology rather than merely describe it?
It begins at birth--that sacred threshold where spirit crosses into flesh. The perinatal window is not merely a medical event; it is a cosmogenic moment. How we birth encodes how we trust. A child born through violence learns the world is coercive. A child born through reverence learns the world is safe, coherent, welcoming. This is where the ecology of wellness begins--not with interventions but with initiations. With honoring the body's ancient intelligence to bring forth life.
Take a moment to watch the Global Wellness Forum's vision, recited by my dear co-founder Marla Maples--whose heart as a mother and grandmother carries the very frequency of this remembrance:
And from that moment forward, the question remains: how do we remind the body of its natural state rather than override it? How do we support the organism's return to coherence rather than impose external agendas? This is the difference between medicine as violence and medicine as listening. Between suppression and support. Between symptom management and systemic remembrance.
As Chairman of the Global Wellness Forum, I hold this question as central to our work. We are not an institution prescribing protocols. We are a forum--a space of invitation, a gathering of diverse expressions and wisdom traditions, all united by the recognition that wellness is primary. Our task is not to impose but to remember together. To catalyze the return. To celebrate the audacious, impossible, benevolent fact of being alive and tending toward wholeness.
And how does such remembrance become global, collective, civilizational? Gandhi gave us the answer: Be the change you wish to see in the world. Wellness is not something we advocate from a distance. It is something we emit. We embody the policy. We become the signal. And in that becoming, the change becomes contagious, radiating outward through a field that recognizes coherence as its native tongue.
My friend Charles Eisenstein speaks of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. I would go further: that world is not possible--it is ever-present for those with the eyes to see. It is what always remains when the interference stops.
Thich Nhat Hanh called it inter-being. Not something we build, but something we uncover. The illusion was separation. The truth is communion.
And from that truth, a simple practice follows: the smallest things done with the greatest love. This is not prelude to wellness. It is wellness itself. Sovereignty and humility, infinite power through finite gesture.
We are living through an epochal cycle of remembrance. The old paradigm--fragmentation, suppression, the myth of scarcity--is exhausting itself. Not because it was argued down, but because it ran against the grain of reality. What opposes wellness eventually gives way.
The negentropic current of the cosmos cannot be permanently dammed. Like the sprout through concrete. Like the hummingbird's impossible flight. Like the breath that arrives each morning without being summoned.
We are not inventing a future. We are uncovering what was always here.
Because we are not only beings--we are portals. What we remember becomes culture. What we embody becomes invitation. What we emit becomes medicine.
We are not here to persuade. We are here to radiate.
And so we return to Whitman. What is, is well. And therefore--inevitably, ontologically--what will be, will be well.
References & Notes
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Notably the 1855 and 1892 editions.
Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901).
Etymology of 'heal,' 'whole,' and 'holy' traced to Proto-Indo-European root kailo. See Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary.
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
The Eagle and Condor prophecy from Andean and Amazonian cosmologies.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man (1955).
Eisenstein, Charles. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013).
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth (1988).
On the hummingbird as sacred technology: see GreenMedInfo article by Sayer Ji.
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