Chapter One: The System and Nature of Self-Care

Self-care, encompassing physical, psychological, emotional, social, spiritual, and divine dimensions, denotes the capacity to nurture the health and well-being of both body and soul, while preserving vitality and joy through individual agency and an innate protective disposition, with an emphasis on prevention during states of health.

By adhering to various forms of self-care, one can achieve a balanced diet, appropriate physical activity, and sufficient restful sleep; cultivate trust in divine truth and self-expression; mitigate stress and psychological pressures; constructively express joy, sorrow, and anger; fulfill the spiritual needs of the soul and uphold religious duties; foster kindness and harmony with oneself and others; and maintain constructive presence and relationships with family and cherished individuals, thereby attaining a balanced and high-quality life.

The advanced paradigm, imbued with the highest quality of existence and a harmonious balance between body and soul, is to be found in a self-care regimen that intelligently instills discipline, chastity, and sufficiency through self-regulation and personal openness, thereby elevating the cultural and intellectual caliber of life. The system of self-care perceives life as a unique and exclusive connection with the Divine, oriented toward divine guidance, manifesting through qualities distinguished by guardianship, love, and virtue. In essence, life is the love of the Almighty.

The needs of the body, along with illnesses and disorders, must be managed through access to clean and wholesome air, suitable material and spiritual nourishment, effective exercise, and hygiene, to prevent the body from being compelled to rely on chemical medications to sustain, preserve, or enhance its health. This is particularly critical, as continuous use of such medications weakens and hollows the body, impairs the nervous system, and disrupts functionality. While such drugs may extend average lifespan, they diminish the quality and comfort of life, leading to a decline in individual tranquility and driving the body toward exhaustion. An example is the drug Saridon, which disrupts the body’s natural rhythm and sleep-wake cycle, causing irregularities. Some individuals using sedatives or analgesics experience such profound disarray and excessive sleepiness that, for instance, they are unable to fulfill obligations such as performing the dawn prayer.

Proper nutrition, akin to exercise and hygiene, constitutes an effective therapeutic method within the framework of self-care, endowing human life with refinement, enhancing personality with superior quality and ease, and infusing existence with tranquility.

The Iranian self-care system, tailored to the climate, soil, and indigenous context of Iran, is grounded in a unique, creative, and non-imitative philosophy of existence-manifestation, fostering hopeful networked collaboration and collective synergy rooted in shared values within the Iranian ethos. It is neither effective for nor derived from other cultures. Indeed, an individual lacking a culture of self-care may fall prey to a disordered, unhealthy life devoid of appropriate quality, satisfaction, and joy.

The Essence of Self-Care

Embedded within every individual’s body is a natural and innate system of self-care and self-regulation, tasked with engineering and ensuring the health and security of the body, as well as its restoration. Dedication to the self-care system of body, psyche, and soul renders both body and psyche resilient, self-sustaining, self-protective, and self-servicing, minimizing the need for medical intervention or therapeutic intermediaries, except in cases of acute illness or severe disorders. This is contingent upon the conscious, deliberate, and willful adoption and implementation of self-care principles.

The nature and essence of the body constitute an intelligent, awareness-driven phenomenon. By virtue of its inherent, non-acquired knowledge, the body autonomously manages and cares for itself. In the face of disorders or illnesses, this natural and intelligent structure mobilizes the body to fight for its preservation and survival. This system is intrinsic to human nature, governing processes such as blood circulation, digestion, respiration, and an autonomous mind striving for individual survival and development.

Although termed natural, this structure is endowed with a spiritual essence that imbues the innate human with a divine and angelic constitution, receptive to inspirations, visions, revelations, and various forms of divine grace, rendering the human divine and transcendent beyond fears and regrets. Conversely, a merely corporeal human, devoid of this inner essence and unconscious of their innate nature, lacks such qualities.

The natural structure, or divine self-care, can be refined, enhanced, and elevated through education, acquisition, and training, coupled with resolute will and correct choices, to improve the hygiene and health of both body and soul. This is not to suggest that acquired or learned human attributes stand in opposition to the natural, innate, and divine self-care system, weakening or diminishing the innate, unconscious human essence. Rather, such attributes should not obstruct or misguide the conscious self through erroneous or invalid choices, leading to negligence or oblivion.

The self-care system harmonizes the voluntary, acquired, and chosen human with the innate and natural human, ensuring that the conscious, chosen self aligns with the unconscious, innate self. Naturally, this harmonization requires theoretical awareness and strong resolve to implement and manage bodily and psychological inclinations, as well as dysfunctions of the mind, heart, and soul, so that the true, spiritual, and natural human is not compromised or diseased by the chosen human—namely, the active body influenced by external environmental inputs.

An individual ignorant of self-care, or one who, due to weak will, frailty, or oppression, fails to prioritize and operationalize this noble pursuit, or lives under coercion devoid of freedom, undermines their true, natural, and divine essence—a divine determination—by succumbing to a weaker human defined by frailties, disorders, illnesses, and an oppressive environment.

The self-care system in certain animal species operates within an instinctive awareness structure, enabling them to maintain bodily health without requiring medicinal treatment or therapeutic intermediaries.

The Natural Disposition of the Body

Every human body possesses a unique disposition and ethos. If an individual has attuned themselves to this natural disposition, their choices and decisions will be valid and sound. The natural disposition guides the individual toward correct choices. In such cases, the individual is neither futile nor invalid; rather, their existence aligns with divine ordinances specifically ordained for their disposition by the Divine.

The body’s self-care system derives its form and path from these dispositional ordinances, coupled with the capacity for resolute will and correct choices, ensuring nutrition, respiration, movement, and sleep that are appropriate, measured, and of high quality, while fulfilling spiritual needs. These choices are either aligned with the individual’s disposition and nature, granting them identity, personality, and value, or they are not, in which case the individual lacks a path, and their lifestyle is devoid of human refinement, rendering them frivolous and reckless.

In the realm of psyche, soul, and spirit, discipline and discernment are equally essential. One cannot indiscriminately watch any film, read any book, listen to any sermon or speech, browse any virtual page, visit any recreational area, associate with every distressed or lamenting individual, believe in everything, adopt any religion, or live without order or plan—just as every body has a specific blood type and cannot exchange blood with incompatible types.

One must recognize the good of their body, psyche, and spirit that aligns with their nature and pursue the path of bodily well-being, rather than adopting a reckless attitude that assumes whatever comes is good and beneficial, attending every gathering or consuming any food without awareness or consideration of compatibility.

Without self-care and love for oneself, food, and phenomena, numerous delusions, visions, and fantasies arise in the body, shortening lifespan and hastening premature aging, as though an accumulation of disorders and incompatible substances has run over the individual like a high-speed vehicle. Certain foods, particularly incompatible combinations, when misaligned with an individual’s body, psyche, spirit, or disposition, can induce delusions or give rise to obsession, fear, anxiety, stress, nervous tics—especially in parts of the face—or extreme thinness, obesity, or weight gain. Examples include individuals who excessively blink, fidget with their fingers, or pick at their nose or navel, indicating psychological stress.

When an individual consumes mixed, disordered, or contaminated foods incompatible with their body without discernment, neglects sleep hygiene by sleeping anywhere and tossing restlessly, or lacks sleep disciplined to their bodily disposition, breathes polluted air recklessly, or fails to address their spiritual needs, such issues arise.

An individual lacking spiritual discipline, where the spiritual self-care system is inactive, who views everything, reads any book, recites any invocation, performs any worship, pilgrimage, or ritual without appropriateness or prescription, and does not practice religion according to their divine ordinance, becomes delusional and stressed, with their body lacking health, hygiene, joy, satisfaction, and contentment.

In the absence of self-care, the body’s beauty fades, and its flesh, moisture, warmth, and energy lose balance, preventing the skin from remaining vibrant and hydrated. The skin wrinkles prematurely, misaligned with age, leading to early aging and pallor. Without self-care, the body’s moisture and appropriate warmth are unregulated, damaging skin and bodily beauty, rendering the individual unattractive and unappealing to any taste. If the body’s required moisture decreases or it becomes cold, the first symptom appears on the skin, which contracts, wrinkles, ages, and appears lifeless, as internal organs draw the diminished moisture and warmth inward.

Taste is the appreciation of variety within a healthy and proper framework. Contaminated foods, poor sleep, impure or stagnant air, and the absence of proper, selective spiritual and meaningful engagement aligned with body and soul uglify faces, as the comprehensive quality of external and internal life and healthy well-being is neglected. Consequently, stress, complexes, and fear dominate individuals, uglifying their appearance and souring their disposition. Facial and bodily ugliness can be transformed into beauty through self-care, without resorting to cosmetic surgeries. The foundation of beauty lies in stomach nutrition, which channels food quality to the skin. Thus, consuming spoiled or incompatible foods, excessive fatigue, and lack of sleep hygiene and tranquility can contribute to ugliness, lifelessness, and pallor of the skin.

Conversely, engaging with meaningful pursuits such as correct knowledge or deriving joy from the purity of phenomena imbues the body with clarity, love, vitality, beauty, and intoxication. The intoxication of generous, supportive, and creative knowledge ranks second to divine bestowals and providential requisites. Beauty, too, carries intoxication, but if balanced, it is perfection. Excessive beauty, beyond proportion, where an individual can no longer uphold self-care, chastity, and sufficiency, becomes a source of various ailments, weaknesses, attraction to impure individuals, and indulgence in unchastity, akin to excessive consumption of spices like saffron, which causes agitation and convulsions.

The dispositional human embedded in human nature can govern the acquired, trainable human at a primary and general level, ensuring the self-care instinct safeguards the voluntary, discretionary human, allowing the acquired human to unconsciously adapt to diverse situations with engineered precision, preventing life from being subjected to undue pressure, coercion, or unnatural hardship. With advancements in industry and knowledge, the scope of human discretion and the capacity of will expand and develop.

Just as the body can adjust its internal temperature to external cold or heat, preventing strokes or cardiovascular and neurological incidents, the self-care system, on a grand and complex scale, calibrates the body to everything from subterranean depths to the earth’s surface, outer space, and the depths of the seas.

In individuals with disorders or illnesses, this internal system malfunctions, causing fluctuations in pressure or temperature, environmental sensitivities during relocation, and imbalanced self-regulation and immunity. To restore these settings to their original state, it is recommended, for instance, to consume local onions, which have high absorptive capacity, preparing the body to better assimilate compatible foods and adapt to local climate and water.

In the self-care system, the consumption of local foods and medicines is advised. Local foods and medicines have coexisted with the region’s inhabitants, sharing their joys and sorrows, making them more familiar and compatible with the body and psyche of local individuals. Such foods and medicines differ significantly from foreign, imported, or alien alternatives. Imported, non-local foods disrupt the body’s internal rhythm and harmony. Similarly, imported medicines, while potentially healing specific areas, ultimately cause bodily disarray and decline.

Ultimately, the human is a phenomenon endowed with an autonomous, natural, and dispositional self-care capacity, independent of therapeutic intermediaries.

The Invulnerability of the Body

The human body naturally possesses an invulnerable system capable of self-reconstruction and resolving its disorders and illnesses within the self-care framework, avoiding entanglement in the tainted commerce of industrial pharmaceuticals and medicine. This industry not only shows no mercy to patients and the pains and suffering caused by illness, imposing exorbitant costs, but also manipulates even some ethical and committed physicians into its schemes.

Just as the absence of cultural and social engineering necessitates coercive police presence and punitive measures like imprisonment to maintain societal security, neglect of hygiene and self-care leads to illness and the need for clinics and hospitals. These hospitals, overwhelmed by patient volume, lacking adequate welfare and hygiene facilities, and constrained by low physician and nurse salaries, government medical tariffs, and inadequate nursing compensation, may not precisely adhere to modern hygiene standards.

The Soul’s Dominion Over the Body

The body can draw vitality, blessings, warmth, and strength from an energy-filled soul, which holds dominion over it. This dominion is a responsive and dependent reaction of the body. If we mentally and imaginatively divide the body into minute components, each component possesses a determination (capacity and rank) and a distinctiveness (attributes) that can ascend, transforming into the soul and higher entities such as the inner heart and spirit, collectively forming the external identity and determination of a human individual. I have discussed this philosophically in the book Consciousness and the Divine Human.

What is termed the psyche comprises actions, reactions, signals, and vibrations emanating from the subtle inner body, manifesting in the body as signs. Just as the memory of sourness triggers salivary flow, the soul, through focus and concentration, can channel a fountain of awareness and energy into the heart, mind, and body with its unique dominion and grace.

Both the soul and the body, along with the mind, can be influenced by external inputs and reflections, shaped by pre-existing conditions and divine requisites. The portion tied to an individual and their self is referred to as their nature, disposition, or soul, or more loosely, their spirit, while another portion constitutes their material and genetic heritage.

Foundations of Personal Development

The three pivotal pillars of personal development are knowledge, worship, and sustenance.

Knowledge transcends mere intellectual awareness or academic learning; it is the capacity for transcendence, observation, and realization or attainment. Transcendence necessitates a healthy body, a purified soul, detachment from multiplicity, solitude, love, aspiration, and unity.

Ordained worship, realized through prayer, entails devotion to the Divine. An individual must designate a place for prostration and prayer, deriving vitality from it, and expelling negligence, stagnation, and weakness from their soul.

The foundation of healthy sustenance lies in balanced and lawful consumption, mindful of the proximity or distance of sustenance and food. Each individual should consume their own rightful sustenance, ensuring that the rights of spouse, children, relatives, neighbors, or strangers are neither mingled nor withheld in their wealth. Lawful consumption, pure and wholesome sustenance, and dietary variety can enhance brain function in focus, memory, and cognitive processes, leading to awareness and heartfelt wisdom.

Comprehensive and varied consumption, including spiritual nourishment, is prioritized to achieve knowledge and divine proximity. Healthy sustenance entails balanced consumption, mindful eating, and enjoyment of food while avoiding overeating or undereating. A healthy dietary lifestyle fosters the conditions for awareness and facilitates the attainment of divine proximity. Achieving short-range dominance over the mind and imagination, such as mastering phenomena or performing magic, is not overly difficult, but attaining spiritual proximity is arduous and demanding, requiring adherence to divine etiquette, piety, and acceptance into the divine school.

Heartfelt wisdom and spiritual knowledge differ vastly from intellectual knowledge. As articulated in Consciousness and the Divine Human, divine awareness requires the capacity for shedding burdens and living lightly, meaning living with love and free from greed or avarice. An individual weighed down by enmity, malice, arrogance, violence, or greed cannot attain wisdom or knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge require a soft and loving heart.

Knowledge is a short, pure, luminous, and trustworthy path to divine realization, rooted in faith and belief. The Divine engages with His servants through love, presence, and play, residing within the heart as its truth—a heart accessible to all. A heart balanced and capable of transcendence becomes divine-seeking and divine-possessing, exuding purity, love, kindness, morality, tranquility, humility, goodwill, and sacrifice, whether in solitude or amidst crowds.

Conversely, an individual tainted by malice, wickedness, bullying, or arrogance fails to achieve even intellectual knowledge, let alone wisdom or spiritual knowledge. A person with a polluted mind becomes dangerous, arrogant, rebellious, or criminal.

There is harmony and balance between the body’s exterior and its inner essence, with the body’s appearance reflecting its inner state. Strength, grace, proportion, beauty, and dignity in the body signify a balanced and healthy soul, indicating an individual capable of kindness, gentleness, humility, goodwill, sacrifice, compassion, and chivalry without pride. Similarly, physical ailments and psychological disorders manifest bodily symptoms, such as an insatiable appetite or compulsive overeating.

Abstaining from sin is the strongest shield and protective charm against the penetration of harmful spiritual influences. An individual vigilant against unlawful consumption, betrayal, violence, harm to others, or deceit is impervious to malevolent forces. Such a person is endowed with a sanctity and radiance that ensures their safety and well-being. Sin provides a pathway for the infiltration of malevolent spiritual forces, while abstaining from it creates a protective barrier, compelling malevolent entities to maintain distance. An individual dominated by such forces, or who becomes their companion, engages in their consumption, and certain misdeeds may result from the influence or manipulation of these malevolent spiritual entities that have infiltrated their soul. These entities may perpetrate misdeeds through the individual’s body, potentially leading to any manner of transgression.

Places such as ruins, bathhouses, cemeteries, and mausoleums are particularly susceptible to the presence of malevolent entities, increasing the likelihood of their influence over those who frequent such locations. An individual afflicted by a companion malevolent entity is perpetually beset by anxiety, distress, confusion, and bewilderment. The entity enters their body and heart, exerting dominance and inducing anxiety, fear, and stress. To safeguard against such spiritual harms, one must be resolute in life and exercise vigilant self-care and protection.

The Sagacious and Healing Nature of Self-Care

Chemical and industrial treatments, particularly when invasive or administered with haste and intensity, impose a coercive and unnatural force on the body, misaligned with its innate nature. In contrast, the self-care system operates with a gentle, harmonious motion, described in technical terms as healing and, more precisely, sagacious. Conventional medicine employs drugs that prioritize rapid, emergency, or stress-laden treatment, often termed abrupt or urgent. However, in sagacious medicine, the principle is the compatibility of remedies with the body’s nature, ensuring natural efficacy and impact. In conventional medicine, a sedative injection may alleviate pain, but because this relief is achieved forcibly and unnaturally, it induces stress and agitation in the body.

The use of chemical drugs can be addictive, habit-forming, and sometimes fraught with severe side effects and dangers. Certain chemical drugs stimulate the body and inflame the psyche. If an individual exhibits heightened sensitivity or reactivity to stimuli—whether people, circumstances, economic poverty, or excessive pressures that render them powerless, drained of energy, and consumed by self-doubt, eroding their will, body, soul, and faith—or is driven by excessive greed, wealth accumulation, or exposure to media depicting violence, cruelty, or betrayal, they become vulnerable to high-risk diseases, such as the activation of cancerous cells.

Cancer cells possess such potent energy, richness, and vitality that future science may harness them in controlled environments to meet energetic needs. To thrive in the modern world’s competitive and material realm, humans must be adaptable, gentle, compassionate, and flexible to ensure natural reconciliation and survival.

Using chemical drugs without a skilled physician’s prescription is impermissible, as they cannot facilitate self-treatment or self-care, nor can they enhance the immune system’s ability to distinguish between self and foreign cells, neutralizing or eliminating harmful agents.

The term “medicine” denotes skilled and sustained companionship, coupled with compassionate expertise, emphasizing gentleness and care. It recognizes as authentic and credible a form of medicine and psychology that is healing in nature. A physician is a specialist in affectionate and empathetic treatment. In the concept of medicine, two elements—gentleness and expertise—are paramount. Expertise defines its essence, while gentleness is its distinguishing quality. A physician is a knowledgeable, precise, and gentle expert, embodying kindness and compassion. Thus, a physician is neither superficial, naive, credulous, hasty, aggressive, nor swayed by initial signs, but rather exercises precision, patience, gentleness, and empathy, avoiding violence or aggression in prescriptions and treatment methods.

A physician is a devoted advocate for their patient’s recovery, employing a gentle approach that leads the patient to perceive them as a compassionate, benevolent, and caring ally. The term physician describes one who combines attention, precision, knowledge, and expertise with gentleness, care, and restraint from haste, aggression, or violence.

In the past, the term “medicine,” encompassing precision and gentleness, was also applied to “magic.” Physicians were called magicians because permissible magic could gently calm individuals afflicted with spiritual or psychological disorders, particularly those who were aggressive, volatile, or wild, guiding them toward tranquility, compliance, and acceptance.

Ancient knowledge of the body comprised two branches: medicine and magic. This science required gentleness and simplicity in both physicians and magicians, excluding those lacking such qualities from its master-apprentice and safeguarded system. Magic was the magician’s ability to connect with intermediate realms and forces, unlike prophethood, which involves direct communion with the Divine as the origin of creation. Thus, prophethood surpasses and can neutralize magic.

In ancient times, particularly in the Iranian tradition of the Magi, physicians and magicians operated under a highly selective and restricted system, unlike modern universities where medical and magical training is commercialized and corrupted. The science of the body deemed magic essential for health, as magicians could soothe the insane, the maladjusted, and those with psychological disorders, excelling in treating conditions like possession, demonic afflictions, or nightmares—issues neither resolved by exercise, dietary changes, conventional medical treatments, nor contemporary psychological approaches. These spiritual factors remain unfamiliar to modern science.

Contemporary empirical sciences, despite their breadth and complexity, specialize only in the training and care of the body—where the psyche is confined to the material realm—using purely inductive and experimental methods. However, some conventional approaches, particularly invasive surgeries or certain psychiatric prescriptions, can themselves induce psychological or physical disorders.

Modern medicine has lost some of the spiritual dimensions of ancient healing, particularly the detailed practice of self-care. In the past, sacred physicians diagnosed ailments solely by listening to patients, analyzing their speech, and employing acute auditory and visual precision, without relying on today’s complex tests or advanced industrial devices.

The Magi healers, in their medical training and practice, cultivated a philosophical, sagacious, spiritually therapeutic culture and promoted self-care—a skill now relegated to obscurity and obsolescence.

Modern empirical sciences struggle to access such knowledge, as it was the exclusive gift of devoted, vigilant, and sacred individuals, attainable only by those with the capacity for sacred endowment—the inner faculty required for religious scholarship, juridical reasoning, and sacred knowledge.

Humans are a spiritual composite of exterior and interior, existing in an environment similarly composed of material and spiritual dimensions. Human health, illness, or disorders are multifaceted, influenced by both meaning and physicality, necessitating a holistic approach.

Spiritual and meaningful sciences are effective in individuals with high vitality and energy—described in traditional terms as having a warm temperament—who, through purification and contemplation, can harness elevated energies. Iran’s fertile climate, characterized by warmth and moderation, supports such vitality. Individuals with low vitality or weak absorptive capacity—traditionally termed cold-tempered—cannot yield spiritual states, aging quickly and becoming frail.

Independence of Self-Care

In self-care, the individual is not dependent on others. Dependency on any power in a world rife with conflicting interests and clashing desires is detrimental, creating vulnerabilities for exploitation, stifling creative thought, and fostering inertia and self-loss. Such individuals, weak and stagnant, resort to imitation, dependency, or self-surrender in every endeavor.

Imitation in the path of self-care, where one can trust in oneself, is a disease of thought, a lack of identity, and a deficiency in self-belief and recognition of the body’s inherent capacities. The body, as an autonomous entity with self-efficacy and inner dignity, can create a foundation for hygiene and health, preserve and enhance it, and proactively diagnose needs before succumbing to illnesses or disorders.

The Innate Caliber of Self-Care

The human, a natural phenomenon in the realm of freedom and necessity, is endowed with will and choice based on their essence. The quality of these choices and lifestyle determines an individual’s value and rank. A life lacking quality diminishes the individual’s caliber, worth, and vitality.

The external appearance of life does not always reflect its true caliber or vital value. Illnesses, disorders, unrest, and fruitless suffering reduce a life’s quality. The distinction between lives lies in their caliber, which defines their quality, not their duration or age. Health, comfort, tranquility, hope, joy, and pleasure are the components of a life’s quality.

Achieving these qualities is a voluntary choice for every individual (except those divinely favored), requiring each to select the best within the self-care system to elevate and enhance their life’s caliber.

The human body, with its natural self-care system, possesses a capacity and determination to preserve itself in any environment and adapt to any circumstance, ensuring its survival in the material realm.

Modern science has recognized the nature of animals like dogs, training them according to their instincts with commands and codes, conditioning them with affection and rewards to serve human purposes. The primary aim of the self-care system is to align with the body’s dispositional attributes and spiritual health.

Contemporary non-pharmacological treatments utilize natural environments—greenery, trees, natural light, water, and connections with the sky and fresh air—along with joyful and uplifting natural elements. Sunlight, sunrise, and sunset, moving from east to west, regulate the body’s biological clock, normalize its rhythm, and improve sleep quality. Solar movement and natural light influence every cell, particularly bone cells, promoting healthy movement and vitality when timed and balanced appropriately.

Solar movement and light positively affect mood, reduce anxiety and negative emotions, and imbue individuals with vitality, enthusiasm, and a balanced capacity to confront life’s challenges, focus on necessary awareness, and solve problems.

Living in wooden houses is a therapeutic method, as science recognizes that homes built with iron, concrete, and stone have detrimental effects on the human brain.

If humans discover the dispositional and natural self-care system of body and soul and move in alignment with their innate, natural, and ordained essence, their hygiene and health are secured. Illnesses and disorders arise from the misalignment and dysregulation of the acquired body with its natural, innate essence. This innate essence must be preserved through generational self-care to avoid inheriting genetic defects or to correct genetic lineage.

Neglecting the innate human and failing to practice self-care can lead the acquired human to weak will, disorders, and illnesses. Such an individual lacks a natural path or dispositional faith, becoming reckless in thought and action, succumbing to whims and disorder. Living outside the dispositional framework, they encounter manifold external and internal issues, resulting in a life devoid of quality and unfit for eternal existence. Such a human falls below insects, which instinctively pursue their natural purpose within a structured framework.

The self-care system seeks to tailor lifestyle, particularly nutrition and hygiene, to each individual’s unique and diverse needs, rather than imposing uniform prescriptions that standardize individuals superficially, without choice or free will. Diversity in the consumption of food, medicine, and spiritual matters is a fundamental principle of an effective and efficient self-care system.

Neglecting or failing to adhere to self-care principles due to weak will or indecision afflicts individuals with physical, psychological, and spiritual issues, and societies with widespread stress, anxiety, fear, delusion, agitation, doubt, unrest, depression, obstinacy, aggression, sleep disorders, and life disarray. How can a life burdened with such pains be sweet, joyful, satisfying, or fulfilling? Yet, the body possesses an autonomous self-care system capable of self-management, pulsating with a natural and divine determination, consciousness, and awareness. The Divine governs the body through its autonomous system and divine determinations. In ancient times, without modern medicine, humans lived for centuries.

Corrupt and unsuitable nutrition, coupled with disconnection from spiritual and meaningful matters, has damaged the body and shortened lifespans. The inputs to the soul determine its quality, rank, capacity, and strength, either elevating it or casting it into decline.

A soul mired in materialism, multiplicity, and scattered endeavors succumbs to stagnation, arrogance, and earthly fixation. Conversely, a soul elevated toward transcendence, unity, and celestial contemplation can become rich with supreme awareness, authority, purity, and love, achieving divine proximity or realization. This authority is not self-centered, tainted by idolatry, arrogance, lust, or greed, which corrupt desires, knowledge, worship, and every virtue, yielding only cruelty, hardness, rigidity, and fanaticism.

Undereating, fasting-induced deprivation, poor eating, overeating, or unlawful consumption weaken and debilitate the soul. Mindful, balanced, appropriate, and lawful consumption of one’s rightful sustenance purifies and elevates the soul’s quality and caliber.

Humans who fail to respect themselves, love themselves, or recognize their potential to embody comprehensive and ultimate authority—capable of utilizing and transforming into anything, even becoming divine—do not value their true worth. Consequently, they derive no joy from their lifespan, and their lives, even from adolescence, are fraught with pain and illness. Liberation from these pains and sufferings requires a natural return to the inner human, harmonizing the acquired and learned human with the dispositional and spiritual human, and adhering to the laws of self-care.

Living Anthropology

Contemporary psychology and psychiatry have evolved into wholly industrialized disciplines, increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence. For these fields to achieve their fullest potential, they must incorporate a living, experiential anthropology into their expertise and practice. The industrial and artificial intelligence systems tasked with diagnosing psychological illnesses or disorders are enhanced by adopting a compassionate psychological approach and direct anthropological engagement, particularly through the psychology of self-care. In this framework, the individual becomes their own laboratory, utilizing the teachings and guidance of a skilled and experienced mentor to experientially, intuitively, and directly comprehend their psyche and its afflictions without the intermediary of a therapist, thereby taking action to ameliorate them.

Through heightened awareness and meticulous study of their body’s characteristics, traits, states, fluctuations, and symptoms, individuals can, alongside the use of advanced technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, identify and treat illnesses and disorders or prevent them during times of health and well-being. By virtue of their knowledge and skills, they become the physician of their own body.

In self-care, each individual continuously and systematically monitors their bodily manifestations, recording and inputting them into artificial intelligence programs to discern relationships among them. At times, a skin itch may correlate with a cough, or abdominal discomfort may relate to a sharp pain in the leg. The body’s components form a collective and interconnected structure, and uncovering the relationships among its manifestations and behaviors demands constant attention and care. The body, in interaction with phenomena, exhibits behaviors and manifestations within a collective and interconnected system, and determining the factors governing its behavior is an exceedingly complex task.

In Consciousness and the Divine Human, I have discussed the aggregation of primordial particles, paralleled by the influence of spiritual and divine factors, as a human phenomenon, exploring the marvels of creation, attraction, repulsion, reflections, and repercussions of these phenomena within the human body, particularly through a scientific descending journey and the creation of light.

Operations of Self-Care

Self-care is a form of practical wisdom, necessitating steadfast commitment to action. The intake of fresh air, sleep hygiene, nutrition, exercise, and the recitation of supplications, beyond mere awareness, must be accompanied by practice. Practical deviation from self-care principles is detrimental to the body. Just as maintaining a vehicle or mechanical machine requires technical inspections and operational servicing, the body’s capacity to function hinges on the practical and operational implementation of self-care.

Merely studying a few books does not make one a mechanic; operational training under a master’s supervision is essential. Similarly, self-care requires acquiring knowledge from a trained mentor and practicing it deliberately and proportionately, not out of habit. Its efficacy is elevated through mentor-guided practice. If self-care is not derived from a credible source, it will fail to prevent the body from succumbing to corruption, sins, illnesses, or disorders.

The self-care system is effective only when grounded in expertise. The challenge lies in its disconnection from the legacy of revered scholars and skilled Magi, having fallen prey to the superstitions of superficial thinkers devoid of substance and meaning. Superficiality and appearance-driven approaches, with the advent of scientific progress and new assurances, lose the prior social trust and lack public confidence and support.

Complementary Medical System

Meaning-based therapeutic methods are discussed within the realm of complementary or alternative medicine. Techniques such as pressure therapy, energy therapy, hydrotherapy, supplicatory therapy, exorcism therapy, and acupuncture are employed as complementary medicine in treating illnesses, provided they are approached with expertise rather than superficial, superstitious reliance on unqualified practitioners or charlatans, where deceit, fraud, trickery, and abuse replace genuine treatment.

This book does not advocate for alternative or complementary medicine, which may not align with national regulations, but rather promotes holistic self-care—a logical, rational approach endorsed by health systems and food and drug organizations. Self-care requires no intermediary or physician; individuals, equipped with knowledge of this method, care for their own bodies. Such an approach faces no legal prohibitions.

The self-care system is comprehensive and holistic, addressing not only the prevention or treatment of internal bodily disorders but also managing and healing spiritual injuries and disorders arising from external interactions. The holistic system for both industrial medicine and traditional healing is self-care, which integrates the exterior and interior, adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. It draws on universally accessible elements—fresh and clean air, dietary variety, appropriate lighting, and other uplifting natural factors—along with sleep hygiene, recreation, joy, vitality, and spiritual practices, particularly the proportionate invocation of divine names, to prevent or treat illnesses and disorders. This system operates without the intervention of a therapist, relying on the individual, particularly through preventive medicine during health and wellness, and is supported by modern technologies.

This book does not address conventional medical or psychological practices reliant on advanced laboratories, as such facilities and access, especially amidst acute economic challenges, are not available to the general public. Instead, the proposed approach enables individuals to identify their disorders and issues through reinforced self-care, accessible tests, metrics, and indicators, relying on self-belief through permissible and balanced preventive self-care actions. This empowers individuals to become physicians of their own bodies without encroaching on the specialized domains of professional medicine and psychology in acute illnesses or inadvertently engaging in self-treatment.

In conscious self-care, individuals treat their body and soul as an experiential and intuitive pre-laboratory, employing skills and actions executed by themselves to maintain and enhance hygiene and health, prevent illnesses, or limit their impact.

Self-care is the optimal system for the health and healing of body and heart. It is an injunction of the Holy Quran, which, in the singular form, states: “So look at your food and your drink” (Al-Baqarah: 259). This is a directive for self-care concerning observation and vision, which I will elaborate on later. The absence of a self-care system has escalated the prevalence of neurological and psychological disorders rooted in deficiencies of the heart and soul. This book endeavors to formulate and present a classified and systematic self-care framework to the scientific community for the first time, with permissible detail and alignment with contemporary hygienic culture.

The self-care system is capable of both preventing illnesses and detecting and treating them in their latent stage, hidden within the body, before their onset.

Distinction Between Meaning-Based Medicine and Traditional Medicine

The term “meaning” refers to factors unknown to today’s scientific world, invisible to scientific research tools, external to the human body and psyche, yet influential in health or disorder. Thus, “meaning” in this book is not synonymous with abstraction. Spiritual-psychological and spiritual-physical disorders originate externally through spiritual forces or factors, whether subtle matter or abstract, and their treatment lies beyond the purview of conventional scientific psychology, psychiatry, or medicine. Instead, it falls within the domain of sacred or saintly sages who can influence benevolent or malevolent spiritual forces, exerting authority and control over them.

Spiritual matters encompass anything beyond the reach of industrial observational tools and must be lived, not merely known. The more names and titles are ascribed to them, the longer the path, the more distant the understanding, and the harder the truth to grasp. To achieve spiritual health and meaning-based healing, spiritual matters must be experienced, not just comprehended.

Meaning-based medicine does not equate to reliance on prevalent traditional medicine, which is largely dominated by unqualified individuals disconnected from the Magian heritage and inept herbalists, operating without systemic oversight. Typically, herbs and herbal materials are sold unpackaged and in bulk, and if their expiration or consumption dates have passed, spoiled substances are distributed to the public. Herbal medicines spoil after a few months, losing their efficacy and should not be consumed thereafter, akin to food items with expiration dates. For instance, rice becomes stale after a year, losing its properties, evidenced by its lack of aroma.

Traditional medicine lacks appropriate industrial tools for research and commitment to science, and some claimed properties of natural remedies are asserted through rational analyses. The traditional medicine of Avicenna, one of the most brilliant physicians, is incomparable to the advancements of modern industrial medicine and the dominance of contemporary artificial intelligence. Today’s medicine has achieved remarkable success in treatment management and societal mental health and hygiene. Nevertheless, self-care derived from spiritual sciences lacks its rightful place in modern medicine, and traditional medicine, with its unclean or expired herbs, lacking proper oversight, standards, trained specialists, and industrial research or advanced technology, cannot even ensure the hygiene of its materials or practitioners, let alone serve as a suitable platform for promoting a self-care culture. Instead, Iranian and indigenous self-care must be independently institutionalized through the country’s educational culture and training system.

For a therapeutic drug to be effective, it requires pharmaceutical compounding, as no single substance or spiritual element possesses inherent healing properties for a specific illness. Traditional medicine is not updated or modern in pharmaceutical compounding, unlike modern medicine, which has access to diverse chemical compounds. A meaning-based healing sage thoroughly understands the properties of each divine name, supplication, and other spiritual remedies, as well as their pharmaceutical combinations. For instance, by compounding divine names tailored to the illness, they create potent and effective spiritual remedies.

Diverse pharmaceutical compounds necessitate a robust economy and international trade to procure essential raw materials and mastery of compounding knowledge. A country unable to engage globally, procure raw pharmaceutical materials, or understand the chemistry and science of compounding will neither excel in treating illnesses nor succeed in maintaining a comprehensive and complete pharmacy.

Medicine that is solely industrial, neglecting the non-superstitious application of meaning and a holistic approach—especially if tainted by commercial customization—is biased, directional, and incomplete, reaching an impasse in treating certain illnesses. Modern medicine is monopolistic, compelling individuals with the slightest pain or mildest illness to serve physicians and, regrettably, the profiteering of the medical mafia. The loss of self-care leads to self-inflicted suffering or medical dependency dominating lives.

Modern medicine, operating industrially and invasively, rescues patients from illness at an unnatural pace misaligned with the body’s rhythm, and current science aligns with it. It is effective for certain acute illnesses, and post-onset treatment necessitates its use. However, the contention is that its excessive and unregulated application, within a commercialized and deceitful medical landscape, is undoubtedly harmful to the body. Many medical visits could be replaced by a self-care system, as some consultations with unprofessional physicians initiate a broader spread of illness within a monopolistic and commercially exploitative trend, devoid of benevolent ethics or compassion, prioritizing only profit and trade. A hallmark of the flawed approach of modern industrial medicine is the emergence and global spread of new diseases.