Cosmology and the Ageless Wisdom
“Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.”
–The Buddha (a.k.a. “The Awakened”, a.k.a. Siddhartha Gautama, Indian Religious Figure and Founder of Buddhism, c.563 B.C.E. – c. 483 B.C.E.)
I was very interested to see a paper in Science by Professors Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University and Neil Turok from Cambridge University.
Based on calculations and observations, the new theory proposes that instead of there having been one Big Bang that lead to the creation of the Universe, there are instead cycles of "Big Bangs" and "Big Crunches", meaning our Universe is merely a "child of the previous one". This proposal challenges the conventional view of the cosmos, which observations show to be 12-14 billion years old and may explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. It also suggests that there’s a continuous cycle of universes, with each a repeat of the last, but not an exact replica. This whole idea is so startling that it was picked up by the BBC.
However, there is another piece to this that does not seem to have been picked up yet. Various publications of the Ageless Wisdom seem to have done a good job on predicting many findings of contemporary science. There are some interesting papers here.
One of the key postulates of the ancient teachings is that the Universe goes through cycles. In the metaphorical language of the ancients, the Universal Mind breathes out the Universe that we can see around us, and then inhales, collapsing the Universe, before once again breathing out. Precisely what the new model is also saying.
I’ve previously reported about the speculations concerning “dark matter,” and whether this has something to do with the subtle systems of the body. This new model includes a consideration of dark matter.
This represents a remarkable confluence of the Ageless Wisdom and some of the most creative scientific thinking.
“Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.”
–Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor and Philosopher, A.D. 121-180)
Technorati tags: Ageless Wisdom Cosmology Subtle energy Qi Dark matter
Capacity
There’s a nice article at a website that I like a lot. This one recommends adopting an approach of examining our capacity for work in four different ways: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.
There are powerful reasons for using multidimensional perspectives to help people not just function at their best, but also to be resilient in the face of adversity. I would like to add two things to this article.
First is an exceedingly useful concept is the “complexity quotient” (CQ), which measures our ability to adapt to changing complexity. It is another way of thinking about a person’s “capacity.” Successful leaders, winning athletes and healthy individuals are extremely flexible and have a high CQ. They can raise their game and adapt quickly. On the other hand, they also have the ability to let go when the pressure is off. After recovering from a mental breakdown, the psychologist Carl Jung was known not only for his remarkable scholarship, but also for his extraordinary ability to relax and to become childlike and to think up all sorts of games for his children. These are signs of a well-rounded, balanced and integrated personality. Sometimes we see people in whom this ability goes haywire, and they overcompensate with drugs, alcohol or risky sexual behavior.
Second, I think that it’s valuable to also add the capacity of your relationships and your energy. Robust, dynamic and supportive relationships can enhance your capacity for work and play, and they buffer you from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We do not usually think about the capacity of the subtle systems of the body, but they are there and very real. Strengthening them with techniques such as breathing, yoga or qigong, can dramatically improve your quality of life and capacity for effectiveness and enjoyment.
Technorati tags: Capacity Complexity quotient Subtle systems Biofield
The Biofield
The biofield is a word about which you are going to hear a great deal in the years to come. It is a term that we use for the organizing Informational Matrix, which is the underlying field of life itself. If you are not functioning at your best, or if you’re ill, this means your Informational Matrix or as the ancients called it, your Inner Light is being hidden and not expressing itself. We decided upon this new term several years ago because it best explained our observations. The Matrix underlies the energy fields of the body, which themselves support molecular and biological processes. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this issue in Healing, Meaning and Purpose.
Information is a form of energy. But when we use the term “energy,” I must issue a word of caution. The term itself is fuzzy, conveying multiple meanings, with many people discussing “energies” and “vibrations” with little clarity. There is a potent reason why this matters: When healers only visualize energy flowing from them into a receiver, like water flowing from a pipe, they are limiting what they can do to help. When we use self-healing, it is essential to use the bigger idea of the Informational Matrix to help us focus our mind and our attention. Yes, there is a flow of “energy:” I can see and feel it, as can thousands of other people. I can train most people to sense it within an hour, and it can probably be photographed. But the energy flow is secondary to a correction in the Informational Matrix.
For centuries, most of the traditional forms of healing have relied upon the notion that there is a “Vital Energy,” an “Essence,” a “Life Force,” forming the basis for a person’s health and healing. Many scientists around the world are now re-investigating this life force, now re-labeled the biofield, or, as we prefer it, the Informational Matrix. A recent paper in a prestigious journal has advocated the importance of integrating “energetic” therapies into cancer care. Here are just seven recent and very interesting papers on this incredibly important subject: 1. 2.3. 4.5. 6.7.
“The cause is hidden, but the result is known.”
–Ovid (Roman Poet, 43 B.C.E.-c.A.D.18)
Technorati tags: Biofield Informational Matrix
A Mini Experiment
Well we consumed the first of the squash, cooked with onions and walnuts: delicious! And I’ve been a real bore telling everyone about my horticultural adventures.
But there’s another small piece to all this. It’s almost ten years since I became a Reiki Master. The person who performed the final initiation worked in the business world and told me that all the plants in her office leaned toward her desk, rather than the sunlight. Since then I’ve known a number of Reiki practitioners who have told me that they have used it to help the growth of plants.
So I thought that I would try it on the new vegetable garden. But being a good scientist, I just used it on half of the vegetable garden. Look at the picture, and see if you can guess which half of the vegetable plot got the treatment.
You can certainly see that one half has a luxurious growth of corn, beans and squash, and the other half a great deal less.
I’m not going to read too much into this little experiment. Although the whole plot has received identical care, and the pH of the soil is same from one end to the other, there could still be some other factors influencing the growth of half the plants. But it has made me think about doing a more formal experiment. And for now I’m going to do a typical crossover study: I’m going to go out and use reiki on the half of the garden with the less impressive growth and see if we can get some catch-up growth.
Technorati tags: Reiki Plant growth Experimental method
Human Evolution
For more than a century, the received wisdom has been that humans finished their physical evolution between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago, and that there have been only minor changes in cognitive abilities over most of that time.
I have always found those assertions to be fundamentally flawed. Our bodies have changed beyond all recognition in the last few hundred years, as I’ve pointed out in my last book and CD series Healing Meaning and Purpose. Even more than that we have changed and are changing mentally. If we were to go back in time ten thousand or even one thousand years, we would find that people were cognitively, emotionally and morally quite different from modern humans. Not simply because of technology and the explosion of knowledge about the external universe, but because there is a dynamic relationship between our development as a species and our creations, with each feeding off the other.
It is only recently that a number of theoreticians, philosophers and psychologists have begun to look at the ways in which we are continuing to develop and what it means for all of us.
The German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers first pointed out the great moral leap forward in what he called the Axial Period, between about 700-200B.C.E., during which the foundations of many of the world’s great religions first appeared, probably in response to the prevailing violence and unpleasantness of the time. More recently the Polish-born Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser started developing intriguing models of the transformations of human consciousness. In the United States, the psychologist Clare Graves developed a revolutionary concept of developing levels of development of the personality, that has evolved into Spiral Dynamics. (You may be interested to look at a review that I have just written about an excellent CD program detailing the latest developments in this field.)
And then there is Ken Wilber whose work in this field is remarkable, and whose creation of the Integral Institute promises great things. To these luminaries I now add Dudley Lynch a writer whose work I have only recently discovered.
Dudley recently wrote a very sensitive blog item about the efforts of a person with a mental illness trying to keep himself integrated in a sea of psychic chaos. He was kind enough to publish my brief response, which needs a little more detail.
The reasons for raising these points about continuing human development are these:
1.The manifest physical changes in people over the last few hundred years have enormous – and largely neglected – implications for clinical medicine.
2. It is likely not just peoples’ physical bodies that have changed, but also their subtle systems. I pointed out in my last book and CD series that the chakra system has developed to its current point only within the last few thousand years. This continuing development is also one of the reasons why some therapies that once only worked occasionally are now becoming more stable and predictable, and why some new forms of therapy – like the tapping therapies – are now being discovered.
3. It is because of these profound changes that new forms of therapy are now being developed. Not just using a supplement here, or a breathing exercise there, but precise combinations that help guide the healing of every aspect of an individual and his or her relationships and spiritual connections.
4. Some people who appear to have psychotic illnesses are moving into new developmental stages without having passed through the necessary intermediate stages. I have just read a first person account of an English journalist who could easily have been diagnosed with a manic illness, but was almost certainly undergoing a spiritual emergence.
5. Major emotional, cognitive, moral, conscious and spiritual shifts can be profoundly frightening to many people, and are doubtless one of the reasons for the profound feelings of social dislocation and violent reactions that we are observing throughout the world.
6. It is no surprise that new spiritual pathways are now emerging. Many will doubtless be very helpful to many of the thirty million Americans who count themselves as spiritual seekers, but have not yet found what they are looking for.
7. Taken together, these new understanding about the longitudinal development of people, relationships and whole societies are already having extraordinary effects on our ability to guide them all in more healthy and integrated pathways.
Technorati tags: Human evolution Axial period Ken Wilber Karl Jaspers Alternative medicine Complementary Medicine Integrated Medicine Chakras Subtle energy
Tapping Therapies
Hearing that my friends in the United Kingdom at www.thoughtfieldtherapy.co.uk were about to have a conference on Thought Field Therapy (TFT) was all the encouragement that I needed to write a few more words about TFT and some of the other tapping therapies. I made mention of two of them in a blog entry for February 28th 2006, and I have dedicated several sections to it in my book and CD series Healing Meaning and Purpose.
TFT was the creation of the psychologist Roger Callahan, who discovered that stimulating a number of acupuncture points while connecting with an negative emotion, thought, impulse or memory, could initiate a cascade of healthy neurological, chemical, emotional, cognitive and even physical effects. There is an interesting sidebar here. When I first came across his work, it seemed absurd. It looked like a collection of unproven techniques cobbled together into some sort of system. I worry about sick people being treated by ineffective therapies, so I was determined to debunk TFT. I was a little taken aback when I sent for some of the Callahan materials and saw a smoker permanently cured in about five minutes. Undeterred, I flew to California to expose what I thought might be another scam. Within two days, I discovered that it was no scam. Roger has indeed made an extraordinarily important discovery that supports the notion that the laws of healing are changing. As a simple example, I used one of Roger’s simplest treatments on inveterate smokers. The first 11 whom I treated all stopped smoking, and when I followed up almost one year later they still were not smoking. This could have been beginner’s luck or a placebo effect, but both are unlikely. We know a great deal about the duration of the effectiveness of placebos.
TFT is based on the concept that thought is a form of energy, structured by a field and that psychological problems are manifestations of distortions within “thought fields,” which Roger defines as “a complex of forces that serve as causative agents in human behavior.” He conceptualizes psychological problems as the consequence of “perturbations” in the thought field. These perturbations contain the information that triggers negative emotions, and they also have relationships with specific major acupuncture points on the body. Fixing these perturbations involves tapping specific points in a specific order, while doing a series of other small tasks.
An important aspect of TFT is the concept of psychological reversal. Roger calls this the energetic blockade of natural healing, caused by reversals in the flow of Qi through the acupuncture channels. It now seems that much of what has been described as therapeutic resistance, self-sabotage or lack of willpower is a result of psychological reversal. He has devised some deceptively simple treatments that have shown us that people’s difficulties were often not a matter of a lack of willpower at all, but were the result of reversed energy. Deal with that, and many problems can melt away.
Like Roger Callahan, I emphasize the importance of toxins, of extending our concept of them, so that we conceptualize them as units of rogue information. In recent years Roger has done pioneering work into how to track down and deal with them.
Not everyone will be helped with any single form of treatment, and even with the best therapists, TFT is not for everyone. However, when someone says that he or she has not been helped with TFT, it most often for one of these seven reasons:
1. The treatment has not been done quite correctly.
2. The problem has been only partially treated.
3. Psychological reversal has not been dealt with.
4. There are still some toxins lurking around.
5. There is more than one problem, and they haven’t both been treated. (Somebody who said that he felt silly doing TFT needed to treat that fear of appearing foolish and then getting on with the primary problem.)
6. The problem may need the help of someone trained in TFT.
7. The person may have needed a combination of therapies.
TFT is the original tapping therapy, but others have now sprung up, including Emotional Freedom Techniques, and I have just read a new book called the Tapping Cure that claims that tapping an array of points on the surface of the body, while at the same time doing a specific affirmation, can be just as effective.
I have tried all these techniques, with varying degrees of success. Not just for clinical problems, but also for sports and other types of performance. While I was recording the CD series Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I several times found places where I fluffed my lines. On each occasion, the problem was resolved by tapping the border of my hand, because I was developing psychological reversal.
Unfortunately, proponents of each of these – and there are others – tend to be competitive with proponents of other techniques. And some enthusiasts have made some pretty incredible claims about what they claim to be able to cure. The competing claims really need to be resolved through empirical research.
Until we have that, I strongly suggest exploring the tapping techniques as adjuncts to other forms of therapy.
Technorat tags: Alternative medicine Complementary medicine Integrated medicine Thought Field Therapy Emotional Freedom Techniques Qi Subtle Energy Biofield
Happy World Tai Chi & Qigong Day!
Saturday, April 29, 2006 is World Tai Chi & Qigong Day . The day is going to be celebrated in 60 countries around the world as well as all fifty states. The event has been recognized by the United Nations World Health Organization, and proclaimed officially for 17 US states by their governors, as well as senates, legislatures and mayors of various countries.
I taught Tai Chi and Qigong for several years, and had the privilege of studying with teachers in China and Malaysia whose methods were part of an oral tradition. Much of this material has still not been published. I recently reviewed a very nice book at the Amazon.com website. One of the things that impressed me about the book is that it contained exercises and techniques that I had been taught by Chinese Masters, but which to my knowledge have never been published anywhere else.
I thought that it might be a good moment to review the world literature on the medical effects of Tai Chi and Qigong. My search has turned up over 2,200 published reports, of which about a third are the reports of clinical trials. I have been able to analyze the data in about a half of those trials. The data now suggests that Tai Chi is genuinely useful for:
- Preventing falls in the elderly
- Improving functional mobility and some aspects of immune function
- Improving blood pressure and lipid profiles and subjective wellness
- Improving overall physical performance
- Stress reduction in HIV positive individuals
There are many other studies indicating the value of Tai Chi, but these give you a sense of some of the research that is going on at the moment.
As I mentioned in another post, qigong is both a personal practice and is used as a form of therapy. It has recently been shown to help:
- Chronic pain
- Cardiac rehabilitation in the elderly
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Overall immune function
- Asthma
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but as you can see, this is an active area of research.
Learning some Tai Chi and Qigong could be one of the best investments that you ever make in your own health.
Technorati Tags: Tai Chi, Qigong, Wellness, Asthma, Chronic fatigue, HIV
Toxins and Information Medicine
In Healing Meaning and Purpose, I twice mention the impact of toxins: first I mention that environmental factors are now generally believed to contribute to many tumors. Three years ago the World Health Organization estimated that environmental factors are responsible for between one-quarter and one-third of the global burden of disease. Since the creation of synthetic inorganic and organic chemicals in the late 19th century, the global community has faced an enormous rise in the production and subsequent exposure to environmental chemicals, many of which are potentially toxic. The concentrations of many of these chemicals remain quite low, but a key observations if that combinations of chemicals may produce significant health hazards not generally seen with small concentrations of each individual chemical. There is a synergy that forms between them.
Secondly I mentioned the intriguing hypothesis that environmental toxins are a factor in the obesity pandemic.
The first of these has just received significant support from a study by Tyrone Hayes and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. They studied frogs in York County, Nebraska, and found that a mixture of nine chemicals found in a seed-corn field killed a third of exposed tadpoles and in the survivors lengthened the time to metamorphosis by two weeks. This work confirms the point that I made: individually low concentrations of the chemicals have little effect on developing tadpoles. But add them together and the effects can be devastating. This study is cited together with several others in a thoughtful article in the current edition of Scientific American.
Understanding the damaging effects of combinations of chemicals, or the disease-producing effects of a combination of minor risk factors, was one of the planks that allowed us to construct the new and growing science of Information Medicine, in which combinations are the key to successful treatment.
Technorati tags: integrated medicine, toxins, information medicine
Thoughts on Qi
The essential idea that there is some subtle force or "energy" associated with the body is very ancient, and was discussed in India where one form of it was known as prana. Yet there are many types of prana, and there are other forces and energies of increasing degrees of sophistication. The most comprehensive investigations of subtle fields took place – and continue to be explored to this day -in China and Japan, where they have been known as Qi, Chi or Ki. Yet many other cultures also described something similar. Indeed paintings of the Christian saints with golden halos has been thought to be an interpretation of a highly developed subtle energy system. The subtle systems appear to be the bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.
My book Healing, Meaning and Purpose makes the point that this idea of subtle systems is not some quaint notion belonging to an era of folk medicine and superstition, but is instead a vibrant area of academic research.
Some years ago, before I had started visiting China, I asked the apparently naive question: "What underlies Qi?" I was told that the question was meaningless, because Qi is everywhere and in everything. But I was not so sure, and so began the development of the concept of an "Informational Matrix," that permeates and animates the Universe. Over the years I discussed this concept in great detail with dozens of scientists, intuitives, and then some of the finest acupuncturists and qigong masters in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, as well as in the United States in Europe. I discovered that many people had similar evidence for this underlying principle. And this fundamental animating force has also had many other names: the Inner Light, Mind, Love and God.
I have posted an extract from my book on my website. If you choose to read it, let me suggest leaving all of your current knowledge and beliefs at the door. You can pick them up again on your way out!
With any luck, you will never again look at things in quite the same way.
Enjoy!
Technorati tags: Qi, chi, Inner light, subtle energy
Monday Folly: Don't try this at home!
Technorati tags: Qigong
