In his work with hundreds of dying patients, Dr. Mitsuo Aoki has learned one great lesson: "Your priorities change when you know you’re about to die."

Dr. Aoki’s work is to help patients and their families live through the death process. His goal is to "make death a work of art, a great achievement" for the patient, and "a time of growth, understanding and closeness" for family members.

Aoki admits this seems a contradiction, and can be difficult for the logical mind to accept.

"This is a great paradox," Aoki said. "Death is an event, an end, but it is also a process. Our body cells, the T-cells, die and are replaced every five months. Only our brains remain the same. Death is a constant that can give sharpness and sensitivity to our actions."

Some, about to die, allow death to swallow all other concerns. They forget their human qualities, forget to laugh, forget to relate to one another. Yet death is also liberating, according to Aoki. It frees us from the world, from matters that ultimately matter very little.

"Death will always have the last say in our lives," Aoki said. "Why not realize we are in the process of dying and set our priorities now?"

Aoki, a native of Hawaii, began to develop this philosophy in 1936, when he converted to Christianity from Buddhism. Such conversions were unusual fifty years ago, Aoki said, and his conversion was at first more cultural than religious. "To be American was to be Christian," he said. "I asked many radical questions then, and until I got into it more, I didn’t have much missionary zeal. I’ve had a busy life since then, with many interesting years."

Those years included two at the University of Hawaii, then two more at Drury College, where he graduated with honors in 1940. Aoki then graduated from the Chicago Theological Seminary, and did further graduate work at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York. His subject was "The Meaning of Death."

Dr. Aoki was a minister of the United Church of Christ in Hawaii for six years, then a teacher at Elmira College in New York for two years. The next thirty years were spent in the University of Hawaii’s department of religion, from which he semi-retired two years ago. He still teaches a class called "The Meaning of Death and Dying."

Dr. Aoki is the founder and president of the Foundation for Holistic Healing, an organization that uses a holistic approach to help people gain personal insights about themselves, the art of self-healing, and their relationship with death.

"We help our clients develop their own resources of wholeness — their bodies and minds, their feelings, and their spiritual dimensions," Aoki said. "We give people hope, more quality in their lives, not only as they are dying, but in preventing and healing illnesses as well."

The holistic view, the assumption that the whole universe operation is one, and is interrelated by a coherence of harmony, is not new, according to Dr. Aoki. "But our generation needs a new way of seeing to understand this," he said. "The Greeks were holistic; they saw the whole. Plato said the idea was the whole, and that particulars were only parts, and were seen in context with the idea, with the whole.

"Einstein was also a holist. His quantum mechanic theory — which upset previous scientific beliefs — said the world operates as a whole, as a unified field of energy. He said the world was one, and everything was interrelated."

Dr. Aoki’s Foundation applies those same principles in treating patients and their families.

"We use that methodology, that philosophy that embraces the understanding that what is true of the universe is true of man," Aoki said. "To be truly human, a person must be expanding towards his or her potential, using the body, the mind, and the spirit equally. Just like that old song — ‘the hip bone’s connected to the leg bone’ — everything is connected. Humans are tied to the medical field, which is tied to technology is tied to economic concerns is tied to political is tied to military is tied to geophysical is tied to culture is tied to religion is tied to morals is tied to humanity. It’s all one."

This unity can lead to self-fulfillment and eventual world peace, according to Aoki.

"Holism can be applied to everything — jobs, stress, education, social relations, religion — and not just the medical field," Aoki explained, "because, like death, life is a process. We must see larger perceptions, the patterns and systems to our lives and our world. We must see the consequences of our actions."

Holists like Dr. Aoki agree that technology is a valid part of the treatment, but it is only one part.

"We don’t deny the medical approach," Aoki said. "We teach people how to use the technology, the drugs and the chemotherapy, in a holistic way, to use the body, the mind, and the emotions to deal with the illness. Most of my patients have cancer, and so often cancer is a metaphor for dying, for suffering. I tell my patients they are more than cancer, that they are still the same people. I help change their perception of the disease, of death and of themselves.