|
A number of years ago I was walking along with a friend when a street sign caught my attention.
It was simply a No Parking sign and seemed no different from any of the other No Parking signs that dotted the city streets. But for some reason it held me transfixed.
I wasn’t even aware that I was staring at it until my friend suddenly exclaimed, “That sign is misspelled!” Her announcement snapped me out of my reverie, and as I watched, the i in the word Parking quickly changed into an e.
Visual information entering our brains is edited and modified by our temporal lobes before it is passed on to our visual cortices. Some studies suggest that less than 50 percent of what we “see” is actually based on information entering our eyes. The remaining 50 percent plus is pieced together out of our expectations of what the world should look like (and perhaps out of other sources such as reality fields). The eyes may be visual organs, but it is the brain that sees.
This can be quickly demonstrated with the illustration shown in figure 15.
FIGURE 15. To demonstrate how our brains construct what we perceive as reality, hold the illustration at eye level, close your left eye, and stare at the circle in the middle of the grid with your right eye. Slowly move the book back and forth along the line of your vision until the star vanishes (about 10 to 15 inches). The star disappears because it is falling on your blind spot. Now close your right eye and stare at the star. Move the book back and forth until the circle in the middle of the grid vanishes. When it does, notice that although the circle disappears, all the lines of the grid remain intact. This is because your brain is filling in what it thinks should be there.
Even when we look at the world around us we are totally unaware that there are gaping holes in our vision. It doesn’t matter whether we are gazing at a blank piece of paper or an ornate Persian carpet.
The brain artfully fills in the gaps like a skilled tailor reweaving a hole in a piece of fabric. What is all the more remarkable is that it reweaves the tapestry of our visual reality so masterfully we aren’t even aware that it is doing so.
For example, although spiderwebs look drab and white to us, we now know that to the ultraviolet-sensitive eyes of the insects for whom they were designed, they are actually brightly colored and hence alluring.
He thinks that when mystics have transcendental experiences, what they are really doing is catching glimpses of the frequency domain.
The Human Energy Field
The notion that there is a subtle field of energy around the human body, a halolike envelope of light that exists just beyond normal human perception, can be found in many ancient traditions. In India, sacred writings that date back over five thousand years refer to this life energy as prana.
In China, since the third millennium B.C., it has been called ch‘i and is believed to be the energy that flows through the acupuncture meridian system.
Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical philosophy that arose in the sixth century B.C., calls this vital principle nefish and teaches that an egg-shaped bubble of iridescence surrounds every human body. In their book Future Science, writer John White and parapsychologist Stanley Krippner list 97 different cultures that refer to the aura with 97 different names.
In his book on miracles Thurston devotes an entire chapter to accounts of luminous phenomena associated with Catholic saints, and both Neumann and Sai Baba are reported to have occasionally had visible auras of light around them.
The great Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, who died in 1927, is said to have sometimes given off so much light that people could actually read by it.3
The first time I saw the distinctive mist of light around my arm I thought it was smoke and jerked my arm up to see if I had somehow caught my sleeve on fire. Of course, I hadn’t and quickly discovered that the light surrounded my entire body and formed a nimbus around everyone else’s as well.
It is generally believed that the etheric body, the body that is closest in size to the physical body, is a kind of energy blueprint and is involved in guiding and shaping the growth of the physical body.
As their names suggest, the next three bodies are related to emotional, mental, and intuitive processes. Virtually no one agrees on what to call the remaining three bodies, although it is commonly agreed that they have to do with the soul and higher spiritual functioning.
It ranges from a few inches to a foot or more in height. When people are in a joyous state, this whirlwind of energy grows taller and brighter, and when they dance, it bobs and sways like a candle flame. I’ve often wondered if this was what the apostle Luke was seeing when he described the “flame of the Pentecost,” the tongues of fire that appeared on the heads of the apostles when the Holy Ghost descended on them.
Brennan began her career as an atmospherics physicist working for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and later left to become a counselor. Her first inkling that she was psychic came when she was a child and discovered she could walk blindfolded through the woods and avoid the trees simply by sensing their energy fields with her hands.
Several years after she became a counselor, she began seeing halos of colored light around people’s heads.
After overcoming her initial shock and skepticism, she set about to develop the ability and eventually discovered she had an extraordinary natural talent as a healer.
In another case Brennan was able to see that a man had problems performing sexually because he had broken his coccyx (tailbone) when he was twelve. The still out-of-place coccyx was applying undue pressure to his spinal column, and this in turn was causing his sexual dysfunction.5
She says that in its early stages cancer looks gray-blue in the aura, and as it progresses, it turns to black. Eventually, white spots appear in the black, and if the white spots sparkle and begin to look as if they are erupting from a volcano, it means the cancer has metastasized.
Drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine are also detrimental to the brilliant, healthy colors of the aura and create what Brennan calls “etheric mucus.”
In one instance she was able to tell a startled client which nostril he habitually used to snort cocaine because the field over that side of his face was always gray with the sticky etheric mucus.
According to Brennan, a person’s psychological condition is also reflected in their energy field. An individual with psychopathic tendencies has a top-heavy aura. The energy field of a masochistic personality is coarse and dense and is more gray than blue. The field of a person with a rigid approach to life is also coarse and grayish, but with most of its energy concentrated on the outer edge of the aura, and so on.
Swiss psychiatrist and thanatologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross says Brennan is,
Bernie Siegel is equally laudatory:
As a physicist, Brennan is keenly interested in describing the human energy field in scientific terms and believes Pribram’s assertion that there is a frequency domain beyond our field of normal perception is the best scientific model we have so far for understanding the phenomenon.
That the human energy field exists everywhere and is nonlocal until it is plucked out of the frequency domain by human perception is evidenced in Brennan’s discovery that she can read a person’s aura even when the person is many miles distant.
The longest-distance aura reading she has done so far was during a telephone conversation between New York City and Italy.
She discusses this, as well as many other aspects of her remarkable abilities, in her recent and fascinating book Hands of Light.
Dryer says she has been able to see auras for as long as she can remember, and indeed it was quite some time before she realized other people couldn’t see auras.
Her ignorance in this regard frequently landed her in trouble as a child when she would tell her parents intimate details about their friends, things she had no apparent way of knowing.
She is well known in the media because her client list includes many celebrities such as Tina Turner, Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, Judy Collins, Valerie Harper, and Linda Gray. But even the star power of her client list does not begin to convey the true extent of her talent. For instance, Dryer’s client list also includes physicists, noted journalists, archaeologists, lawyers, and politicians, and she has used her abilities to assist the police and frequently does consultation work for psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors.
This does not mean that she sees the aura only in her mind’s eye.
However, she does not see the precise stratified layers described by other clairvoyants, and she often doesn’t even see the outline of the human energy field.
But beyond seeing the etheric, Dryer says that instead of seeing the layers of the aura like tiers of cake piled one on top of the other, she experiences them as changing textures and intensities of visual sensation.
She compares this to being immersed in the ocean and feeling water of different temperatures wash by.
This does not mean that Dryer’s perception of the human energy field is in any way less detailed than Brennan’s. She perceives a dazzling amount of pattern and structure - kaleidoscopic clouds of color shot through with light, complex images, glistening shapes, and gossamer mists. However, not all energy fields are created equal. According to Dryer, shallow people have shallow and humdrum auras.
Conversely, the more complex the person, the more complex and interesting their energy field.
Like Brennan, Dryer can diagnose illnesses by looking at a person’s aura, and when she chooses she can adjust her vision and see the chakras.
But Dryer’s special skill is the ability to peer deep into a person’s psyche and give them an eerily accurate status report of the weaknesses, strengths, needs, and general health of their emotional, psychological, and spiritual being. So profound are her talents in this area that some have likened a session with Dryer to six months of psychotherapy.
Numerous clients have credited her with completely transforming their lives, and her files are filled with glowing letters of thanks.
By the end of the two-hour session I was convinced that Dryer had not been looking at my physical presence, but at the energy construct of my psyche itself.
I have also had the privilege of talking with and/or listening to the session recordings of over two dozen of Dryer’s clients, and have discovered that, almost without exception, others have found her as accurate and insightful as did I.
One medical professional who takes the energy field seriously is neurologist and psychiatrist Shafica Karagulla. Karagulla received her degree of doctor of medicine and surgery from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and obtained her training in psychiatry under the well-known psychiatrist Professor Sir David K. Henderson, at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders.
She also spent three and a half years as a research associate to Wilder Penfietd, the Canadian neurosurgeon whose landmark studies of memory launched both Lashley and Pribram on their quest.
She put out various feelers among her friends and colleagues, but at first the going was slow. Even doctors who were said to have the ability were reluctant to meet with her. After being put off repeatedly by one such doctor, she finally made an appointment to see him as a patient.
Realizing he was cornered, he gave in.
Then he scanned her body and gave her a quick run-down of her health, including a description of an internal condition she had that would eventually require surgery, a condition she had secretly already diagnosed.
He was “correct in every detail,” says Karagulla.10
As Karagulla’s network of contacts expanded, she met doctor after doctor with similar gifts and describes these encounters in her book Breakthrough to Creativity. Most of these physicians were unaware that other individuals existed who possessed similar talents, and felt they were alone and peculiar in this regard.
Nonetheless, they invariably described what they were seeing as an “energy field” or a “moving web of frequency” around the body and interpenetrating the body. Some saw chakras, but because they were ignorant of the term, they described them as “vortices of energy at certain points along the spine, connected with or influencing the endocrine system.”
And almost without exception they kept their abilities a secret out of fear of damaging their professional reputations.
At the end of her report, she concludes,
Not all health professionals are so opposed to going public with their abilities. One such individual is Dr. Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University. Krieger became interested in the human energy field after participating in a study of the abilities of Oscar Estebany, a well-known Hungarian healer.
After discovering that Estebany could
raise the hemoglobin levels in ill patients simply by manipulating
their fields, Krieger set out to learn more about the mysterious
energies involved. She immersed herself in a study of prana, the
chakras, and the aura, and eventually became a student of
Dora Kunz,
another well-known clairvoyant. Under Kunz’s guidance, she learned
how to feel blockages in the human energy field and to heal by
manipulating the field with her hands.
The first class she taught on therapeutic touch was a master’s level course for nurses at New York University entitled “Frontiers in Nursing: The Actualization of Potential for Therapeutic Field Interaction.”
Both the course and the technique proved so successful that Krieger has since taught therapeutic touch to literally thousands of nurses, and it is now used in hospitals around the world.
A second group with no training would pass their hands over the bodies of another group of heart patients, but without actually performing the technique. Quinn found that the anxiety levels in the authentically treated patients dropped 17 percent after only five minutes of therapy, but there was no change in anxiety levels among the patients who received the “fake” treatment Quinn’s study was the lead story in the Science Times section of the March 26, 1985, issue of the New York Times.
Instead of seeing the aura, Joy initially was only able to feel its presence with his hands.
Joy went on to discover that all his patients had palpable cylinder-like radiations emanating not only from their stomachs, but from various other points on their bodies. It wasn’t until he read an ancient Hindu book about the human energy system that he found he had discovered, or rather rediscovered, the chakras. Like Brennan, Joy thinks the holographic model offers the best explanation for understanding the human energy field.
He also feels that the ability to see auras is latent in alt of us.
To prove his point, Joy now spends most of his time teaching others how to sense the human energy field. One of Joy’s students is Michael Crichton, the author of such bestsellers as The Andromeda Strain and Sphere, and the director of the motion pictures Coma and The First Great Train Robbery.
In his recent bestselling autobiography Travels, Crichton, who obtained his medical degree from the Harvard University Medical School, describes how he learned to feel and eventually see the human energy field by studying under both Joy and other gifted teachers.
The experience astonished and transformed Crichton.
Over the past twenty years Valerie Hunt, a physical therapist and professor of kinesiology at UCLA, has developed a way to confirm experimentally the existence of the human energy field. Medical science has long known that humans are electromagnetic beings.
Doctors routinely use electrocardiographs to make electrocardiograms (EKGs) or records, of the electrical activity of the heart, and electroencephalographs to make electroencephalograms (EEGs) of the brain’s electrical activity. Hunt has discovered that an electromyograph, a device used to measure the electrical activity in the muscles, can also pick up the electrical presence of the human energy field.
In addition to these, Hunt discovered that the electrodes of the electromyograph could pick up another field of energy radiating from the body, much subtler and smaller in amplitude than the traditionally recognized body electricities but with frequencies that averaged between 100 and 1600 cps, and which sometimes went even higher.
Moreover, instead of emanating from the brain, heart, or muscles, the field was strongest in the areas of the body associated with the chakras.
Hunt also discovered that when an aura reader saw a particular color in a person’s energy field, the electro myograph always picked up a specific pattern of frequencies that Hunt learned to associate with that color.
She was able to see this pattern on an oscilloscope, a device that converts electrical waves into a visual pattern on a monochromatic video display screen. For example, when an aura reader saw blue in a person’s energy field, Hunt could confirm that it was blue by looking at the pattern on the oscilloscope.
In one experiment she even tested eight aura readers simultaneously to see if they would agree with the oscilloscope as well as with each other.
Once Hunt confirmed the existence of the human energy field, she, too, became convinced that the holographic idea offers one model for understanding it.
In addition to its frequency aspects, she points out that the energy field, and indeed all of the body’s electrical systems, is holographic in another way. Like the information in a hologram, these systems are distributed globally throughout the body. For instance, the electrical activity measured by an electroencephalograph is strongest in the brain, but an EEG reading can also be made by attaching an electrode to the toe.
Similarly, an EKG can be picked up in the little finger. It’s stronger and higher in amplitude in the heart, but its frequency and pattern are the same everywhere in the body. Hunt believes this is significant.
Although every portion of what she calls the “holographic field reality” of the aura contains aspects of the whole energy field, different portions are not absolutely identical to each other. These differing amplitudes keep the energy field from being a static hologram, and instead allow it to be dynamic and flowing, says Hunt.
People who can go into trance and apparently channel other information sources through them, skip these “psychic” frequencies entirely and operate in a narrow band between 800 and 900 cps.
People who have frequencies above 900 cps are what Hunt calls mystical personalities.
Whereas psychics and trance mediums are often just conduits of information, mystics possess the wisdom to know what to do with the information, says Hunt. They are aware of the cosmic interrelatedness of all things and are in touch with every level of human experience.
They are anchored in ordinary reality, but often have both psychic and trance abilities. However, their frequencies also extend way beyond the bands associated with these capabilities. Using a modified electromyogram (an electro myogram can normally detect frequencies only up to 20,000 cps) Hunt has encountered individuals who have frequencies as high as 200,000 cps in their energy fields.
This is intriguing, for mystical traditions have often referred to highly spiritual individuals as possessing a “higher vibration” than normal people. If Hunt’s findings are correct, they seem to add credence to this assertion.
Eventually the structure of the stream breaks down and becomes turbulent. Turbulent smoke is said to be chaotic because its behavior can no longer be predicted by science. Other examples of chaotic phenomena include water when it crashes at the bottom of a waterfall, the seemingly random electrical fluctuations that rage through the brain of an epileptic during a seizure, and the weather when several different temperature and air-pressure fronts collide.
One of these involves a special kind of mathematical analysis that can convert data about a chaotic phenomenon into a shape on a computer screen.
If the data contains no hidden patterns, the resulting shape will be a straight line. But if the chaotic phenomenon does contain hidden regularities, the shape on the computer screen will look something like the spiral designs children make by winding colored yarn around an array of nails pounded into a board.
These shapes are called “chaos patterns” or “strange attractors” (because the tines that compose the shape seem to be attracted again and again to certain areas of the computer screen, just as the yarn might be said to be repeatedly “attracted” to the array of nails around which it is wound).
Realizing that chaos analysis might reveal whether she was right or not, she sought out a mathematician.
First they ran four seconds of data from an EKG through the computer to see what would happen. They got a straight line. Then they ran the same amount of data from an EEG and an EMG. The EEG produced a straight line and the EMG produced a slightly swollen line, but still no chaos pattern. Even when they submitted data from the lower frequencies of the human energy field, they got a straight line.
But when they analyzed the very high frequencies of the field they met with success.
This meant that although the kaleidoscopic changes taking place in the energy field appeared to be random, they were actually very highly ordered and rich with pattern.
Hunt believes her discovery was the first true chaos pattern to be found in a major electrobiological system. Recently researchers have found chaos patterns in EEG recordings of the brain, but they needed many minutes of data from numerous electrodes to obtain such a pattern.
Hunt obtained a chaos
pattern from three to four seconds of data recorded by one
electrode, suggesting that the human energy field is far richer in
information and possesses a far more complex and dynamic
organization than even the electrical activity of the brain.
What is this undiscovered energy? At present we do not know.
Our best clue comes from the fact that almost without exception psychics describe it as having a higher frequency or vibration than normal matter-energy. Given the uncanny accuracy talented psychics have in perceiving illnesses in the energy field, we should perhaps pay serious attention to this observation.
The universality of this perception - even ancient Hindu literature asserts that the energy body possesses a higher vibration than normal matter - may be an indication that such individuals are intuiting an important fact about the energy field.
He confesses that he does not know whether the human energy field exists or not, but in commenting on the possibility, he states,
It is worth noting that we really don’t know what any field is.
As Bohm has said,
When we discover a new kind of field it seems mysterious. Then we name it, get used to dealing with it and describing its properties, and it no longer seems mysterious. But we still do not know what an electric or a gravitational field really is. As we saw in an earlier chapter, we don’t even know what electrons are. We can only describe how they behave.
This suggests that the human energy field will also ultimately be defined in terms of how it behaves, and research such as Hunt’s will only further our understanding.
One of these is evident in the human energy field’s nonlocal characteristics. Another, and one that is particularly holographic, is the aura’s ability to manifest as an amorphous blur of energy, or occasionally form itself into three-dimensional images.
Talented psychics often report seeing such “holograms” floating in people’s auras.
These images are usually of objects and ideas that hold a prominent position in the thoughts of the person around whom they are seen. Some occult traditions hold that such images are a product of the third, or mental, layer of the aura, but until we have the means to confirm or deny this allegation, we must confine ourselves to the experiences of the psychics who are able to see images in the aura.
As often happens, Rich’s powers manifested at an early age. When she was a child, objects in her presence would occasionally move about on their own accord.
When she grew older she discovered she knew things about people she had no normal means of knowing. Although she began her career as an artist, her clairvoyant talents proved so impressive that she decided to become a full-time psychic. Now she gives readings for individuals from all walks of life, from housewives to chief executives of corporations, and articles about her work have appeared in such diverse publications as New York magazine, World Tennis, and New York Woman.
The woman laughed and handed Dryer her business card.
These images don’t always just hover in the aura, but sometimes can appear to be ghostly extensions of the body itself.
On one occasion Dryer saw a wispy and holographic-like layer of mud clinging to a woman’s hands and arms. Given the woman’s impeccable grooming and expensive attire, Dryer could not imagine why thoughts of mucking around in some kind of viscous sludge would be occupying her mind.
Dryer asked her if she understood the image, and the woman nodded, explaining that she was a sculptor and had tried out a new medium that morning that had clung to her arms and hands exactly as Dryer had described.
Nonetheless, the holographic-like image that enveloped my body was real enough that when I lifted my arm I could actually see the individual hairs in the fur and the way the canine nails protruded from the wolfish hand that encased my own hand. Indeed, everything about these features was absolutely real, save that they were translucent and I could see my own flesh-and-blood hand beneath them.
The experience should have been frightening, but for some reason it wasn’t, and I found myself only fascinated by what I was seeing.
She reacted immediately and said,
We compared notes and discovered that we were each observing the same features.
We became involved in conversation, and as my thoughts strayed from the novel, the werewolf image slowly faded.
Dryer says she also sees what look like three-dimensional movies in a person’s energy field.
I can attest to Dryer’s accuracy.
I have always been an organized person, and when I was a child I was quite precocious in this regard. Once when I was five years old f spent several hours meticulously storing and organizing all of my toys in a closet.
When I was finished I showed my mother what I had done and admonished her please not to touch anything in the closet because I did not want her messing up my carefully ordered arrangements. My mother’s account of this incident has amused the family ever since. During my first reading with Dryer she described this incident in detail, as well as many other events in my life, as she watched it unfold like a movie in my energy field. She, too, chuckled as she described it.
Dryer’s holographic vision is not limited to events from a person’s life.
She sees visual representations of the operations of the unconscious mind as well. As we all know, the unconscious mind speaks in a language of symbols and metaphors. This is why dreams often seem so nonsensical and mysterious. However, once one learns how to interpret the language of the unconscious, the meanings of dreams become clear.
Dreams are not the only things that are written in the parlance of the unconscious. Individuals who are familiar with the language of the psyche - a language psychologist Erich Fromm calls the “forgotten language,” because most of us have forgotten how to interpret it - recognize its presence in other human creations such as myths, fairy tales, and religious visions.
And both practice and her natural, intuitive gifts have made her extremely skilled at deciphering the language of the unconscious.
In addition, Dryer has a special way of knowing whether she has interpreted an image correctly.
Dryer thinks this is because it is a client’s own unconscious mind that chooses what images to show her. Like Ullman, she believes the psyche is always trying to teach the conscious self things it needs to know to become healthier and happier, and to grow spiritually.
At first the phantasmagoria of images was only mysteriously familiar, but as she unraveled and explained each symbol and metaphor in turn, I recognized the machinations of my inner self, both the things I accepted and the things I was less willing to embrace. Indeed, it is clear from the work of psychics like Rich and Dryer that there is an enormous amount of information in the energy field.
One wonders if this is perhaps why Hunt obtained such a pronounced chaos pattern when she analyzed data from the aura.
Swedenborg could also see portrayals in his own energy field:
As Brennan puts it,
California clinical psychologist Ronald Wong Jue agrees. Jue, a former president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and a talented clairvoyant, has found that an individual’s history is even contained in the “energy patterns” inherent in the body,
Like Dryer and Rich, Jue has the psychic ability to tune into movies about the important issues in a person’s life, but instead of seeing them in the energy field, he conjures them up in his mind’s eye by laying his hands on a person and literally psychometrizing their body.
Jue says this technique enables him to determine quickly the emotional scripts, core issues, and relationship patterns that are most prominent in a person’s life, and often uses it on his patients to facilitate the therapeutic process.
In addition to using it in his clinical practice, Jue also gives seminars in which he teaches others how to use the technique.
X-Ray Vision In the last chapter we explored the possibility that the body is not a solid construct, but is itself a kind of holographic image.
Another faculty possessed by many clairvoyants seems to support this notion, that is, the ability to literally look inside a person’s body. Individuals who are gifted at seeing the energy field can also often adjust their vision and see through the flesh and bones of the body as if they were no more than layers of colored mist.
One, a woman she identifies as Diane, was the head of a corporation.
Just before meeting Diane, Karagulla wrote,
Karagulla put Diane through a lengthy series of tests, introducing her to people and having her make on-the-spot diagnoses.
On one of these occasions Diane described a woman’s energy field as “wilted” and “broken into fragments” and said this indicated she had a serious problem in her physical body. She then looked into the woman’s body and saw that there was an intestinal blockage near her spleen.
This surprised Karagulla because the woman showed none of the symptoms that usually indicated such a serious condition. Nonetheless, the woman went to her doctor, and X rays revealed a blockage in the precise area Diane had described. Three days later the woman underwent surgery to have the life-threatening obstruction removed.
On one of these occasions Diane looked at a patient unknown to both of them and told Karagulla that the woman’s pituitary gland (a gland deep in the brain) was missing, her pancreas looked as if it was not functioning properly, her breasts had been affected but were now missing, she didn’t have enough energy going through her spine from the waist down, and she had trouble with her legs.
The medical report on the woman revealed that her pituitary gland had been surgically removed, she was taking hormones which affected her pancreas, she had had a double mastectomy due to cancer, an operation on her back to decompress her spinal cord and relieve pains in her legs, and her nerves had been damaged, making it difficult for her to empty her bladder.
She saw the state of the intestines, the presence or absence of the various glands, and even described the density or brittleness of the bones.
Concludes Karagulla,
Brennan is also skilled at looking into the human body and calls the ability “internal vision.”
Using internal vision she has accurately diagnosed a wide range of conditions including bone fractures, fibroid tumors, and cancer. She says she can often tell the condition of an organ by its color: for example, a healthy liver looks dark red, a jaundiced liver looks a sickly yellow-brown, and the liver of an individual undergoing chemotherapy usually looks green-brown.
Like many other psychics with internal vision, Brennan
can adjust the focus of her vision and even see microscopic
structures, such as viruses and individual blood cells.
On one of these occasions she not only accurately diagnosed an internal medical problem I was having, but offered some startling information of an entirety different nature along with it. A few years back I started having trouble with my spleen. To try and remedy the situation, I began performing daily visualization exercises, seeing images of my spleen in a state of wholeness and health, seeing it being bathed in healing light, and so on. Unfortunately, I am a very impatient person, and when I did not have overnight success I got angry.
During my next meditation I mentally scolded my spleen and warned it in no uncertain terms that it better start doing what I wanted. This incident took place purely in the privacy of my own thoughts, and I quickly forgot about it.
Nonetheless, she immediately described what was wrong with my spleen and then paused, scowling as if she was confused.
And then suddenly it hit her.
Dryer all but threw her hands up.
She shook her head with concern.
The incident not only revealed Dryer’s skill at looking inside the human body, but also seemed to suggest that my spleen has some sort of mentality or consciousness all of its own. It reminded me not only of Pert’s assertion that she no longer knows where the brain leaves off and the body begins, but made me wonder if perhaps all of the body’s subcomponents - glands, bones, organs, and cells - possess their own intelligence?
If the body is truly holographic, it may be that Pert’s remark is more correct than we realize, and the consciousness of the whole is very much contained in all of its parts.
Among the Araucanian Indians of Chile and the Argentine pampas, a newly initiated shaman is taught to pray specifically for the faculty. This is because the shaman’s major role in Araucanian culture is to diagnose and heal illness, for which internal vision is considered essential.34
Australian shamans refer to the ability as the “strong eye,” or “seeing with the heart.” 35
The Jivaro Indians of the forested eastern slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes acquire the ability by drinking an extract of a jungle vine called ayahuasca, a plant containing a hallucinogenic substance believed to bestow psychic abilities on the imbiber.
According to Michael Harner, an anthropologist at the New School for Social Research in New York who specializes in shamanic studies, ayakuasca permits the Jivaro shaman,
Indeed, the ability to “see” an illness - whether it involves actually looking inside the body or seeing the malady represented as a kind of metaphorical hologram, such as a three-dimensional image of a demonic and repulsive creature inside or near the body - is universal in shamanic traditions. But whatever the culture in which internal vision is reported, its implications are the same.
The body is an energy construct and ultimately may be no more substantive than the energy field in which it is embedded.
Because an illness can appear in the energy field weeks and even months before it appears in the body, many psychics believe that disease actually originates in the energy field. This suggests that the field is in some way more primary than the physical body and functions as a kind of blueprint from which the body gets its structural cues.
Put another way, the energy field may be the body’s own version of an implicate order.
But, as we have seen, ideas that are prominent in our thoughts quickly appear as images in the energy field. If the energy field is the blueprint that guides and molds the body, it may be that by imaging an illness, even unconsciously, and repeatedly reinforcing its presence in the field, we are in effect programming the body to manifest the illness.
Our current scientific understanding is at a loss to explain such a biological capacity, but again, constant prayer and meditation may cause such images to become so impressed in the energy field that the constant repetition of these patterns is finally given form in the body.
Gerber believes that the distinct layers some psychics see in the aura also play a factor in the dynamic relationship among thought, the energy field, and the physical body.
Just as the physical body is subordinate to the etheric, the etheric body is subordinate to the astral/ emotional body, the astral/emotional to the mental, and so on, says Gerber, with each body functioning as the template for the one before it.
Thus the subtler the layer of the energy field in which an image or thought manifests, the greater its ability to heal and reshape the body.
Physicist Tiller agrees.
Tiller believes the reason illnesses often recur is that medicine currently treats only the physical level. He feels that if doctors could treat the energy field as well, they would bring about longer lasting cures.
Until then, many treatments,
In a wide-ranging speculation Tiller even suggests that the universe itself started as a subtle energy field and gradually became dense and material through a similar rachet effect.
As he sees it, it may be that God created the universe as a divine pattern or idea.
Like the image a psychic sees floating in the human energy field, this divine pattern functioned as a template, influencing and molding increasingly less subtle levels of the cosmic energy field “on down the line via a series of holograms,” until it eventually coalesced into a hologram of a physical universe.40
It may even explain synchronicities, or how processes and images from the innermost depths of our psyche manage to take form in external reality.
Again, it may be that our thoughts are
constantly affecting the subtle energetic levels of the holographic
universe, but only emotionally powerful thoughts, such as the ones
that accompany moments of crisis and transformation - the kind of
events that seem to engender Synchronicities - are potent enough to
manifest as a series of coincidences in physical reality.
They could also work even if the subtle fields of the universe are a smooth continuum. In fact, given how sensitive these subtle fields are to our thoughts, we must be very careful when trying to form set ideas about their organization and structure.
What we believe about them may in fact help mold and create their structure.
She admits that the structure she sees in
the energy field is thus but one system, and others have come up
with other systems. For example, the authors of the tantras, a
collection of Hindu yogic texts written during the fourth through
sixth centuries A.D., perceived only three layers in the energy
field. There is evidence that the structures clairvoyants inadvertently create in the energy field can be remarkably long-lived. For centuries the ancient Hindus believed that each chakra also had a Sanskrit letter written in its center.
Japanese researcher Hiroshi Motoyama, a clinical psychologist who has successfully developed a technique for measuring the electrical presence of the chakras, says that he first became interested in the chakras because his mother, a simple woman with natural clairvoyant gifts, could see them clearly.
However, for years she was puzzled because she could see what looked like an inverted sailboat in her heart chakra. It wasn’t until Motoyama began his own investigations that he discovered what his mother was seeing was the Sanskrit letter yam, the letter the ancient Hindus perceived in the heart chakra.41
Some psychics, such as Dryer, say that they also see Sanskrit letters in the chakras. Others do not.
The only explanation appears to be that psychics who see the letters are actually tuning into holographic structures long ago imposed on the energy field by the beliefs of the ancient Hindus.
Thus we must be extremely cautious about saying that we have discovered a particular structure or pattern in the human energy field, when we may have actually created what we have found.
That is, that we have two realities: one in which our bodies appear to be concrete and possess a precise location in space and time; and one in which our very being appears to exist primarily as a shimmering cloud of energy whose ultimate location in space is somewhat ambiguous. This realization brings with it some profound questions.
One is, what becomes of mind?
We have been taught that our mind is a product of our brain, but if the brain and the physical body are just holograms, the densest part of an increasingly subtle continuum of energy fields, what does this say about the mind? Human energy field research provides an answer.
The patient was also asked to push a button when he or she became aware of being touched. Libet and Feinstein found that the brain registered the stimulus in 0.0001 of a second after it occurred, and the patient pressed the button 0.1 of a second after the stimulus was applied.
Somehow their brains were creating the comforting delusion that they had consciously controlled the action even though they had not.42 This has caused some researchers to wonder if free will is an illusion. Later studies have shown that one and a half seconds before we “decide” to move one of our muscles, such as lift a finger, our brain has already started to generate the signals necessary to accomplish the movement.43
Again, who is making the decision, the conscious mind or the unconscious mind?
What does it mean?
Dryer has also noticed that the energy field responds before a person consciously registers a response.
As a consequence, instead of trying to judge her client’s reactions by watching their facial expressions, she keeps her eyes closed and watches how their energy fields react.
If the mind is not in the brain, but in the energy field that permeates both the brain and the physical body, this may explain why psychics such as Dryer see so much of the content of a person’s psyche in the field. It may also explain how my spleen, an organ not normally associated with thought, managed to have its own rudimentary form of intelligence.
Indeed, if the mind is in the field, it suggests that our awareness, the thinking, feeling part of ourselves, may not even be confined to the physical body, and as we will see, there is considerable evidence to support this idea as well.
The solidity of the body is not the only thing that is illusory in a holographic universe. As we have seen, Bohm believes that even time itself is not absolute, but unfolds out of the implicate order. This suggests that the linear division of time into past, present, and future is also just another construct of the mind.
In the next chapter we will
examine the evidence that supports this idea as well as the
ramifications this view has for our lives in the here and now.
|
