Our School of Medicine just celebrated our White Coat Ceremony, a symbolic transition of our second-year medical students from work in the classroom to the clinics. From student to physician.
The white coat ceremony was established in 1993 at Columbia University. We had our first white coat ceremony in 1996 and in 1999, we named our white coat ceremony for the former Dean of Medical School students, John W. Traubert.
I talked about the symbolism of the white coat as connecting the finite and infinite parts of our training and of our existence as clinicians and healers.
In a finite manner, the white coat is a symbol of being a physician. From many surveys, patients trust professionals in white coats more than in suits or in a shirt and pants with no coat. The white coat is a protective covering from the bodily fluids our students and graduates face daily on the hospital wards. These student-doctors will learn the science and techniques of medicine during their clinical training.
But as has been taught for centuries, the real healing in medicine is beyond the finite. In his famous address to Harvard Medical School, Dr. Francis Peabody, said, “The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
Thus, the healing properties of the white coat are those brought by the clinician wearing the coat.
Empathy. Compassion. Love. Connection. Wholeness.
Infinite things.
Like the white light made up of every color of light, the white coat is a compendium of every emotion, feeling and thought that promotes healing given from clinician to patient. In this way, the coat represents the infinite.
It is important to note the root word of heal, holy, holistic and health are all the same and mean whole.
As one. In unity. Wholeness.
Health is infinite and is based on love and connection.
However, our daily lives separate us into individuals, teams, tribes, political parties, religions, businesses, and creates competition, anger, envy, judgement, and criticisms of others.
What is the root cause of this separation?
FEAR. Fear is finite and creates the perception of separation and individuality.
Fear also creates dis-ease and makes us sick.
As we age, we identify with our deeply engrained stories that lock us into our identity as an individual. To earn our safety and futures, we are driven to compete with others to feel seen, valued and whole.
We often never feel we are enough, despite often having great success.
Not feeling we are enough translates to our constant need to achieve and prove ourselves worthy of whatever prizes we seek.
We compete in finite games to help us transcend the limited stories that make up our lives.
We seek the infinite through finite actions: feeling loved, safe, abundant, hopeful, joy, fulfillment. However, we seek these infinite states through finite approaches, which do not re-establish unity or wholeness.
Infinite states promote healing, but healing requires that we begin to trust in the universe and allow the changes in our lives to occur without resistance. To flow with our abundance.
It is interesting that many great works of art, literature and philosophy give us insight into this:
“Know thyself” - Socrates.
“There is nothing that is good nor bad, it is only thinking that makes it so” - Shakespeare in Hamlet
“The lamps are different, by the Light is the same. One matter, one energy, on Light, one Light-mind endlessly emanating all things. One turning and burning diamond. One, one, one. Ground yourself, strip yourself down, to blind loving silence. Stay there until you see you are gazing at the Light with its own ageless eyes” - Rumi
“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are” - Anais Nin
“You are not a drop from the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop” - Rumi
These poets and philosophers tell us what quantum physics reinforces:
Our existence is not limited to what we can sense. In fact, we, like the white coats handed out at the ceremony, are both infinite and finite.
Neils Bohr, father of quantum physics said, “everything we call real is built from things that cannot be seen as truly real."
All that we perceive as mass is really just energy. Energy is infinite. Neither created nor destroyed. Never ending, but only transitioning forms.
If energy is infinite, so are we.
The sages and philosophers tell us that our universe, lives, and experiences are also deeply interconnected and intertwined. Thus, we are part of a single unified world and universe.
This is likely the reason why the strength of ongoing relationships and community are the strongest predictors of longevity. Reducing our fragmentation and separation back to our intrinsic wholeness is healing for us.
It is also the reason why service to others is such a great driver of success for oneself. If we are all really an interconnected, single entity at a deeper level than we can directly experience, then service to others, love to others, acceptance of others is really just that for ourself.
As the sage Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing (the infinite), Love is knowing I am everything (the finite), and between the two my life moves.”
This is the balance between the infinite and finite.
Our nothingness represents the energy broadcast at frequencies too rapid for us to detect by our senses (the infinite, giving rise to the concept that I am nothing).
When energy vibrates slow enough for our senses to register, we interpret this as the existing world and universe of nature, mass and man (the finite, giving rise to the concept I am everything).
All connected. All energy.
All as one.
The finite and the infinite.
The everything and the nothing.
It is what we are and how the white coat, the clinician and each person has the power to heal.
By connecting to our infinite roots to heal and be healed.
Clay B. Marsh, MD, is the Chancellor and Executive Dean of the academic health sciences center of West Virginia University, including five schools and numerous allied health programs and clinical operations around the state.