This sums up what drives me these days...

The uniqueness of human beings is in being, simultaneously, subjects and objects. Humans are self-sensing and self-moving objects while, at the same time, they are observable and manipulable objects. To yourself, you are a soma. To others you are a body. Only you can perceive yourself as a soma- no one else can do so. But everyone else can see you as a body. Even you can see yourself as a body looking into the mirror.

The great calamity of the human sciences is that we have, as it were, ganged up on ourselves. Only one person can see himself or herself as a first-person somatic being, but millions of people can see that person as a third-person bodily being. Consequently, these millions can join together and observe, measure, and diagram the objective body of the human person. That is the easy and obvious way taken by the sciences.

But what is easy and obvious is not necessarily true or effective. It is all very well for millions to study our objective bodies: There are some fundamental essential facts to be ascertained about how humans are subject to the same physical and chemical forces as are all other bodies, from atoms to asteroids. But if these millions pursue their studies of human bodies as if humans were only third person, objective bodies and not simultaneously first person, subjective somas, then they are somewhat both blind and dangerous. They are blind because they have trained themselves only to see only one side of whole people: they ignore our somatic side. They are dangerous because their observations, predictions, and practical methods are based on an incomplete view of the human being.

The reason that physiology and medicine have failed to perceive the myths behind aging is that they have failed to recognize the fundamental fact that all human beings are self-aware, self-sensing, and self-moving: they are self-responsible somas. The somatic viewpoint recognizes that not only human beings are bodily beings who can become victims of physical and organic forces, but also that they are equally somatic beings who can change themselves. Humans can learn to perceive their internal functions and improve their control of their somatic functions.

By adding the somatic viewpoint to our human sciences, we not only become capable of overcoming major health problems mistakenly attributed to aging, but we are capable for overcoming many of the major health problems that plague all of humankind.

--Thomas Hanna, Somatics