- The notion that holistic healing methods can be used to treat specific medical conditions is self-contradictory.
- Any attempt to study scientifically a specific method relative to a specific condition is doomed to failure – and that’s often the point when people call for scientific proof.
- Although classifying disease processes into specific conditions is a convenient shorthand, it ignores the complexity of the human organism and its interaction with the totality of its environment.
- This classification is convenient for reductionist studies and specific treatment methods, such as medicines, but not effective for maintaining health in the developed world.
- Reductionist approaches to investigation into causes and treatments are arbitrary and unrealistic, and therefore unscientific.
- Within the medical-physicalist model a number of conditions are incurable, outside of that framework we’re finding people can do very much better.
William Bengston used to say that his method can’t heal Parkinson’s or diabetes, but had better results with Alzheimer’s and cancer, the difference between up-regulating and down-regulating conditions. In 2022 he was saying PD could respond to his method. Lots of unanswered questions, though his approach to mind-matter interactions does have scientific validity, as Jeffery A. Martin acknowledges here. The disadvantage for the Bengston Energy Healing Method is that if you accept the medical model, it will have to test the method in turn against every single condition in the medical dictionary.
The neurobiology work is important, a source of fascination since the 70’s. Candace Pert’s Molecules of Emotion is a wonderful autobiography as well as documenting the early mapping of neurons —> neuropeptides —> actions. Later in the book, Pert briefly discusses how she came to appreciate the importance of information theory, since all physical processes are dynamic and take place within open systems, how information depends on the observer for its significance, transcends time and space, interacts with both mind and body, and puts to rest Cartesian dualism and reductionism. Then there was another excellent book, The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing by Frank T. Vertosick.
This was prior to The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia by R. Douglas Fields, which explored the importance of glial cells in the brain, including around the substantia nigra for Parkinson’s.
Our sense of neurobiology also needed to expand, for instance with The Rainbow and the Worm and especially Living Rainbow H2O by Mae-Wan Ho, and The Extracellular Matrix by Alfred Pischinger, ed. Hartmut Heine. Since humans retain more of their embryonic characteristics than other species, understanding our anatomy and development needed to change: Blechschmidt’s The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy was also part of the Biodynamic Cranial ‘syllabus’.
As a result of a fly hitting his eye one morning, Albert Szent-Gyorgi had noted that the signalling in the ECM – a.k.a. Connective Tissue Matrix – was faster than via the nervous system. The communication properties of the CTM precede the nervous system in evolution. 70% of the body / CTM is water, and it’s important: Water carries information into cells, and provides the energy for transfer in a wide variety of cellular processes. This relies on quantum coherence.
CranioSacral Therapy, Biodynamic Cranial Osteopathy and Biodynamic Cranial Touch (and others) all work by releasing restrictions in the connective tissue matrix, and the healer operates by matching and mirroring, applying a ‘centering’ signal rather than an opposing or corrective force.
Moving to the wider environment, we find for instance that Alzheimer’s is linked to excess levels of zinc in the brain, even when there are normal–low levels of zinc in the blood. A Swedish study also linked Alzheimer’s to cell phone use5.
Janice Hadlock’s pdrecovery.org was very helpful in indicating that PD isn’t caused by low dopamine per se, and the link to meridian flow as well as early trauma.
What Lies Beneath?
The true nature of mind is also the true nature of all phenomena.
“The stuff of consciousness is also the same stuff as the stuff of matter.” Sir Arthur Eddington
“Everything is alive, everything contains consciousness, contains divine consciousness…. The thing that moves all motion in creation is life force. Everything that happens is through the energy aspects of life force. … The whole universe is fueled by life force. Life force is the main fuel and energy that nature uses, it’s the energy of creation. BG3 (energy) is the life-giving center of life force.” Dr. Ibrahim Karim
“The information in an evident state of consciousness can affect the evident energy, or the evident mass, in the relevant system.”
“Consciousness is a substance that exists with energy and mass in a hidden state and information in an evident state. It is a substance that still cannot be received with any instrument. However, its existence can be cognized and confirmed in Qigong.” Dr Pang Ming
“At the level of essence, all illnesses are Qi [energy blockages and distorted information*]. And this diseased Qi space can open into and merge with the infinite universal entirety, which is so strong, harmonious, and unimaginably vast that any small part in the entirety — like an illness — can be transformed by this powerful entirety.” [* parenthesis added]. Wei Qifeng
“Mingjue is the awakened state of the universe. Everything belongs to the universe. Mingjue belongs to the universe. Out of our original hunyuan qi gradually consciousness appears. The universe […] is consciousness. When the universal consciousness knows itself, the universe wakes up, comes to Mingjue state. This is a Mingjue universe. When the universe consciously starts to develop itself, it starts to consciously organize information, sending information.” Wei Qifeng
“Tao is the generative process through which all things arise and pass away — Absence burgeoning forth into the great transformation of Presence.”
“With experience, the thought process slowed, and it was possible for adepts like Tu Fu to watch thoughts burgeon forth out of the dark emptiness, evolve through their transformations, and disappear back into it. The revelation here was that thoughts appear and disappear in exactly the same way as the ten thousand things appear and disappear in the process of Tao’s unfurling, and that both thought and things therefore share as their primal source the same generative emptiness, dark and silent. In this, meditation revealed that consciousness shares dragon’s nature, that consciousness is wild by its very nature — always already integral to the living tissue of a generative Cosmos. And so, it is always already awakened.” David Hinton
“…only by becoming Absence* and mirroring the whole can you return to the final-and-total enlightenment of inner pattern’s primal-unity.” (*Emptiness, no-mind, the primordial space from which all things arise into Presence). Hsieh Ling-Yun, quoted by David Hinton
We are part of nature, so, destructive as many of our actions as a species towards each other and towards the natural world may be, those actions are also part of nature. We are also part of the infinite entirety, and everything that human beings have done, are doing, and will do, are also part of the infinite entirety. This does not change the fact that we regularly operate from distorted reference frameworks, blocked or stuck energies, or haphazard integration – only that in spite of all the pain and misery we are capable of inflicting on each other, it does not change the underlying reality. This underlying reality of the infinite entirety is also called Dao/ Tao in Chinese, and although we may not recognize it, we are also – always – part of the Dao. The Dao is not a transcendental principle separate from the universe, and the entire universe is Qi.
Our true nature as individuals is self-cognizing awareness, a.k.a. True Nature, Primordial Awareness, Original-nature, Ch’an: chien hsing, Zen: kensho, Qigong: Mingjue, Yiyuanti. It is the only aspect of ‘me’ that is real. That awareness has also been integral to the Dao since beginningless time, is continuously self-cognizing, and spontaneously self-awakening.
As we know, it’s a natural state, a quiet spacious consciousness that is aware of itself, naturally peaceful, awareness returning home to itself. Your true self can bring in the information and energy the system needs to heal itself. The challenge is that true nature cannot be investigated by ordinary mind, although over many centuries we’ve devised countless different formulations and explanations. If it can be put into language, it’s only a mental construct. What we can do instead is experience and trust true nature. We can also apply its information and energy for healing, and the best starting point is “becoming Absence and mirroring the whole”.
Earlier in the presentation cited above, in this section Jeffery Martin talks about participants “becoming one with the laboratory apparatus”. Joe Gallenberger says something very similar: when trying to bend metal, you first have to get into Focus Level 12, then ask the molecules of the fork/spoon if they’d be willing to cooperate. The Bengston Energy Healing Method seeks to get people out of their “pea brain” with image cycling, and being in True Nature/Mingjue Awareness certainly meets the criteria.
Plus – since true nature is the real basis of our consciousness, it’s not something that only has to happen while we’re meditating or doing energy work. It’s likely to be the optimal way of operating. As Rastal put it on a recent POK talk: “There’s no sense of there being a difference between agency, and not-agency. It feels more functional than any time when we had agency before. Honestly, it feels significantly more functional than any time when I had a strict sense of agency before, or a sense of no-agency.”
When all else fails, trust True Nature, simply because it is the reality.
Seeing through our distortions and blockages benefits us by realizing our True Natures, and benefits the universe by letting it awaken more to its true nature. In turn this allows the universe to flow to us more easily the information and energy we need to awaken and heal.
It is precisely the reality of no-self-as-thing, in constant exchange with its environment, in which objects also lack ‘inherent self-nature’, which makes energy and distance healing possible in resonance.
Awakening / enlightenment is largely a function of dropping what is not real, which calls for social as well as personal deconditioning. This allows for undistorted intention and information from the universe or infinite entirety to heal the whole being.
Simply understanding the entire universe as Qi dissolves the duality of matter / consciousness, and makes the physicalism / idealism dichotomy completely unnecessary. It explains how the (very rare) Tibetan Buddhist practice of rainbow body is possible. It explains how ‘mind-matter interactions’ can occur, how inanimate objects can be influenced, for the strength of rebar and concrete to be increased, and for metal objects such as spoons and forks to bend on demand.
Qi is a continuum from consciousness through information, through energy, and physical matter. It is not one uniform substance, but all the way through the continuum, there are countless subtle variations, the infinite entirety expressing itself in an infinite number of ways.
With this as context, we can talk about how healing occurs in more specific ways.
We are open systems in constant energy and information exchange with everything around us.
We can say that we know (as opposed to having a belief or opinion) that we construct our perception1, our emotions2, and our sense of self3. Our brains find it more energy efficient to engage in prediction-simulation-recalibration than examine every perception and experience from scratch. We construct our experience, our emotions, and to some extent, our illnesses2.
These are some factors – not in strict linear sequence – by which healing occurs ( the healer and the healee may be the same person). All of these steps have been demonstrated scientifically, the ‘how’ is more open to interpretation.
The healer decides to send healing, and establishes resonance and entrainment. “MicroGenesis is a profoundly important theory for complementary medicine, with many practical applications, because it describes the origin of a quantum unit of consciousness in relation to waves of energy brain waves flowing up through the nervous system. The conscious unit is synthesized as a bottom up unfoldment, as a series of steps that retrace the evolution of the brain.”4
Healer sends the information signal by intention, made possible by resonance.
The information and energy first lands in the meridian system, with its connection to the electrical properties of tissues5. For instance, the electrical resistance of the skin drops twenty-fold over acupuncture points.
It proceeds deeper into the tissues by nerve impulses, the liquid crystal matrix6, and light7.
“Molecules do not have to touch each other to interact. Energy can flow through the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field, along with water, forms the matrix of life. Water conforms structures that transmit energy.” Oschman JL, Oschman, NH, 1995, Physiological and emotional effects of acupuncture needle insertion.
Conclusion: We have identified the factors necessary to establish a clear pathway from consciousness to physical matter by which energy healing occurs, and all of those factors have been established by scientific research. With Zhineng Qigong in particular, there is a large outcome review as well as biological studies. However, a direct correlation between a healing method and benefit in specific conditions is much harder to establish – especially as being the sole cause of any improvement. This is partly because of the incredible complexity of the human system, with 50 quadrillion processes occurring in the body every second in its 50 trillion cells. It’s also partly due to reductionist diagnosis, the insistence on disease processes as separate conditions – a view that medical researchers are increasingly coming to see as unhelpful2,8.
It’s also hard to limit the client to one intervention at a time! They may attribute their improvement to supplements, chamomile tea, even a change in the weather – and they may be correct!
The nature of any holistic intervention, and the state of consciousness most beneficial for healing, are not those involved in fighting against symptoms or fixing problems, and the training to be able to work therapeutically from this state typically ends up taking several decades.
The problem of research requires nonlinear whole-system thinking in a way that is difficult enough to comprehend, let alone apply in studies. A holistic science is needed, especially given the constant interaction of the human system with the totality of its environment. If we’re not quite there yet, we’ve made incredible progress in the last fifty years.
References
- Stephen Robbins: Time and Memory
- Lisa Feldman Barrett: How Emotions Are Made
- Thomas Metzinger: The Ego Tunnel
- Jason W. Brown: Self and Process: Brain States and the Conscious Present
- Arthur Firstenberg: The Invisible Rainbow
- James L Oschman: Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance
- Weisskopf, VF, 1968 Scientific American 219: 60–71: How Light Interacts with Matter
- David Skinner: Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To
- Wei Qifeng: Mingjue Awakening: Teachings on Pure Consciousness, Collective Field Qigong, and Energy Healing
© Malcolm Fraser 2024. All rights reserved.
