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HOLOGRAPHIC HEALING in
THE FIELD OF DREAMS
Holographic Healing
Placebos and Consciousness Restructuring through REM
(c)1999 by Graywolf Swinney and Iona Miller
This paper first appeared in DREAM NETWORK, then in CHAOSOPHY 2001; reprinted with permission.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are two of the most powerful yet discounted healing phenomena known in the healing arts and sciences. Such healing occurs with any or all illnesses, yet nothing, no treatment or substances, has been administered that can account for it. In studies of new treatments, as a control, the placebo consistently brings about symptomatic remissions 30-50% of the time. If a test drug performs in the 60% range (as many, if not most, do) the placebo was also at work in the test group and accounts for at least half or more of the effectiveness of the test treatment. The proponent of the treatment generally prefers to claim it to be the entire 60% effective. The half or more that is accountable by the placebo effect is ignored and illusions created about the drug's effectiveness.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are consciousness events, and more specifically events in which consciousness and matter interact to naturally change or transform diseased structures into healing process or flow. At the level of reality at which this event takes place, it is not even an interaction, it is a reality in which consciousness-matter, or as it is more popularly known, mind-body, are not different but are virtualities not committed to either condition, yet the potential of both. It is, in other words, a level of quantum reality.
Quantum theory describes the state of reality in which something, for example, light simultaneously displays the properties of being both matter and pure energy waveform. Here, sudden shifts of state, quantum shifts, instantaneously occur, all is interconnected and uncertainty reigns. We too exist on this level, part of this natural process, influencing it and being influenced by it at subtle levels where outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
Dreams are our personal experience of REM consciousness and very much embody the quantum reality described above. There are a number of interesting facts that have come to light from scientific studies of REM that suggest it is probably the mechanism or consciousness-state which underlie the healing power of the placebo. There are clues from these studies that suggest that REM-Consciousness may also help in forming the roots of our diseases.
The Chaos-REM Process of Natural Healing
The CRP (Chaos-REM or Consciousness Restructuring Process of natural healing) is a healing process that resembles the placebo effect. Studying of its mechanisms has led to understanding how placebos may operate. This process (CRP) uses imaginative sensory imagery in wakened REM state to follow dream symbol or action to its root consciousness structure. This structure, stored deep in the subconscious, is a primal, existential, sensory self-image and it defines personal reality both inner and outer. It is a personal existential hologram that underlies perceptions of self and world.
This deepest sense of self is imprinted on the brain as neural firing patterns which, as suggested by Karl Pribram, create the interference wave pattern of this self-hologram. Our disease structures are incorporated within it. Reaching this root image and activating it while in REM draws it into implicate or chaotic consciousness field, and at this pre-quantum level of reality, it dissolves. A quantum shift occurs and from free or unstructured chaotic consciousness a new, more easeful image forms and becomes a transformed existential hologram except minus the disease structure. The shift is deeply felt on sensory and pre-sensory levels. One model of how the brain operates is that any action or behavior is first imaged in the brain, e.g. to turn this page one first creates an image of doing so and the hand then conforms to the image. The healed image is externalized in this way.
Access to the consciousness dynamics (hologram) that underlie our self and diseases is best accomplished in the Consciousness State associated with their formation. In the CRP, we have found that this requires working in wakened REM consciousness. We have also found that the basis of many disease structures is in consciousness structures formed while still a fetus.
REM Consciousness in Disease and Healing
How REM helps form disease at fetal levels is implied in the work and findings of several scientists studying REM. Dr. Allan Hobson, a noted sleep and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, states that, "REM may stimulate immature brains while they're in utero." Dr. Mark Manhowald of the Minnesota REgional Sleep Disorder Center states that: "The fetus is in REM consciousness during most of its term in utero. Because the new baby's brain begins development with only the basics, like a new computer, the life process, [REM], programs the brain with capabilities in each developmental state and continues doing so after birth."
Dr. Stanley Krippner and Dr. Montague Ullman, in their work at Maimonides Dream Laboratory, demonstrated that REM consciousness is a psi-conductive state. They demonstrated that two people in REM could share common dream experiences, even when separated by walls and space. All this suggests that a fetus in REM shares its parent's dream states and is preprogrammed by them.
Dreams are known to be necessary for dealing with waking traumas and events. Through REM sharing a fetus is therefore exposed to the past and present traumas and experiences affecting its parents' lives. In this way programming the fetal development is determined by both parents, and the events in their lives that require dream (REM) processing. This is in addition to physiological conditioning through the chemical environment created in the womb by the mother's personal life choices.
Through REM, the fetus taps not only into co-consciousness with the parents, but also into the collective consciousness of the species. These experiences ae imprinted into the neural network and developing cells of the fetus and form the basis of its existential self-hologram. (Physicist Amit Goswami believes all structure in the Universe is based in consciousness). This mechanism continues after birth, except also incorporates the post natal life experiences of the individual.
All the above affects both biology and mind. REM is associated with womb experience such as the generation and development of the nervous system and tissue-cells. Nervous system and personality developments are very susceptible to mood and experience. These are matters with which depth psychiatry and psychology deal. Tissue and cell formation and functioning are also associated with mood and experiences.
Dr. Carl Simonton demonstrated this in relation to the development of cancer and its remission. For example, many cancers develop within two years of a major loss such as death of a relative or loss of one's career through retirement. He also identified a psychological profile based on childhood experiences that are associated with cancer. He found that remission of cancer was very much facilitated by visual imagery combined with other informational and therapeutic psychological techniques. Norman Cousins demonstrated that healing was induced through laughter, peace of mind and positive attitude.
The Role of Chaos in Natural Healing Process
We know from chaos theory that any complex system is very much influenced by minor perturbations or differences in its initial conditions. This is known as the "butterfly effect." The human organism is certainly a very complex system and so very much influenced in its formation by influences in its earliest developmental conditions. Early conditions of REM consciousness in the womb greatly influence our future physiology and personality.
We suggest that the potential for our future illnesses is programmed into our consciousness structure and also our neurological and tissue structure during these sensitive initial conditions. It is incorporated into the person existential hologram into outer reality creating the somatic and psychic presentations inherent in it.
Returning to these consciousness structures in the REM state in which they were formed allows restructuring of this hologram. We suggest this restructuring occurs in REM sleep, for example, when a placebo has been administered and expectations for its effectiveness are held. This is also the consciousness-state required for the profound self-healing observed in the CRP Journeys.
Further validation of the healing powers of REM comes from dream deprivation studies which show that the mind, the nervous system and eventually the body and physiology deteriorate when the organism is deprived of REM sleep. Also, it has long been an observation in medical therapy that sleep is regenerative, and that people recovering from illness or surgery need more sleep and thus REM than usual.
Studies in neurofeedback addressing the interface of chaos with the brain and its role in the brain's functioning also provide validation. Although measurements of brain waves result in their division and categorization into certain frequencies or states such as the alpha state, the theta state, and delta, etc, such is not really the case. The frequencies of the brain waves vary randomly within a given state. The distance between peaks is highly variable and disordered around the average. When these varied frequencies are used to program a fractal (the mathematics describing chaos theory) it becomes possible to measure the degree of chaos or complexity in the brain's functioning. These degrees of complexity are known as dimensions and the higher the dimensionality, the more complex or chaotic the neural firing patterns.
Lower dimensionality is associated with such dysfunction of the brain as epilepsy, comas and strokes. Similarly, dysfunction such as obsessive compulsive behavior may be associated with linearity or lower dimensionally. On the other hand, high dimensionally is associated with healthy brain functioning.
Chaos theory itself implies that the more complex a system is, the more self-correcting it is. This is because disruption to a linear system will throw the whole system off, but only affects a portion of a complex system, which soon adjusts to "fill in the gap." In a way this is the reverse of the butterfly effect and operates in the complex system once past its initial conditions. It emphasizes the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e. at the organism's initial conditions. However, the important data to note here is that the highest level of dimensionality, complexity, or chaos measured in the brain, a dimensionality of nine, occurs only in REM consciousness.
The Chemistry of Natural Healing
Changing the neural firing patterns (hologram) of the brain through the aforementioned REM-chaos process affects the body's chemistry and the existential perceptions of the entire organism. Since the brain is known to operate holographically, change to any part affects the whole. Chemistry is modified through the pineal and pituitary glands, parts of the brain itself.
These glands affect the release of neurotransmitters, which control mood, and the hormonal chemicals which control how our various organs function throughout the body. Messages sent to and received by the brain throughout the entire nervous system are also affected. Fundamental perceptions of self and reality change. Outer soon follows inner. Somatic and personality presentation changes.
In CRP journeys, we infer that this chaotic, implicate or complex (REM-Chaos) consciousness is the state in which the healing chemical transformations are initiated by changes in the primal existential hologram. This model suggests a similar process for placebos.
Implications of REM-Chaos Natural Healing Process
Spontaneous healing is closely associated with REM. These clues all imply the mechanism through which dreams, placebos, and the CRP do their healing and regenerative work. Chaos is always associated with change and is usually seen as its aftereffect. Chaos is actually the mechanism of the change itself. REM-Chaos consciousness is the most chaotic or complex state of dynamics in the brain. It is the state that most supports its self-correction (the homeostasis effect) and the natural transformation of any organism to healthy flow. It is the state that supports profound self-healing.
This information also implies a major change in the way we can view illness and healing. Seen from a consciousness viewpoint and consistent with the new physics of quantum holographic, and chaos theories, illness and wellness are more a matter of basic consciousness structure than mere chemistry.
Chemical change are an effect rather than a cause, an associated phenomenon. We can no longer view illness as merely the invasion of the body by carcinogens or germs and viruses and healing as the mechanistic or chemical correction of these conditions.
Natural healing happens at quantum-implicate levels of reality. Accessing it through the REM-Chaos state brings about subsequent changes in brain chemistry and may be the mechanisms by which placebos heal. The CRP is an awakened means of doing this in REM-Chaos consciousness.
ERNEST ROSSI’S DREAM-PROTEIN HYPOTHESIS ON HEALINGRossi (1999) describes a mind/body communication channel that is pertinent both to bipolar disorder, but also to CRP in that it may describe another way healing manifests from REM. He describes how immediate-Early Genes (also called “Primary Response Genes” or third messengers) play a central role in the dynamics of waking, sleeping, dreaming, and mind-body healing at the cellular level.
There is evidence that “immediate-early genes (IEGs) function as mediators of information transduction between psychological experience, behavioral states, and gene expression. A wide range of behavioral state-related gene expression (from relaxation, hynosis and sleep to high arousal, performance, stress and trauma) culminate in the production of new proteins or homeostasis, physical and psychosocial adaptation.”
Behavioral states modulate certain patterns of gene expression. Interaction between the genetic and behavioral levels is a two way street. Genes and behavior are related in cybernetic loops of mind-body communication. How does this relate to manic depression?
A look at the systems related to IEGs, shows that they affect all the systems disrupted in bipolar disorder. They are expressed continually in response to hormone messenger molecules mediating processes of adaptation to extracellular signals and stimuli. Extracellular stimuli come from the outside environment, including temperature, food, sexual cues, psychosocial stress, physical trauma, and toxins. IEGs are fundamental in the sleep-wake cycle, appetite regulation, sexual response, and reactions to stress, trauma, and toxins.
There are persistent alterations in IEG expression in the process of adaptive behavior on all levels from the sexual and emotional to the cognitive. They can transduce relatively brief signals from the environment into enduring changes in the physical structure of the developing nervous system as well as its plasticity in the form of memory and learning throughout life. If external cues can modulate cell function through regulation of gene expression, this could also be true for internal cues.
IEGs are also fundamental in the regulation of REM-on, REM-off neurons, neuronal networks that are associated with REM sleep and dreaming. That makes them significant in CRP as molecules which can modulate mind, emotions, learning and behavior.
They influence the rhythm of the natural healing process and circadian and ultradian rhythms of the body, in general. Ultradian rhythms are those shorter than the 24-hour circadian rhythms.
Milton Erickson discovered that his therapy sessions usually took from one and a half to two hours to come to natural closure. Later it was discovered that this delineates the natural work cycle that is harmonious with our own internal rhythms. CRP unfolds in a similar time-frame. IEGs modulate this process. This ultradian time frame is related to the activation or deactivation of the expression of specific genes and can occur in a matter of hours or even minutes.
“Most arousing environmental stimuli that have been studied can induce immediate-early genes within minutes, their concentrations typically peak within fifteen to twenty minutes and their effects are usually over within an hour or two. These time parameters IEG expression and their ultimate translation into the formation of new proteins correspond to the parameters of a complete work cycle of mind-body communication and healing. The changes in gene transcription and new protein formation initiated in this time frame, however, can lead to lasting changes in the central nervous system by converting short term memory to long lasting learning by the process of long term potentiation. . .the activation or deactivation of the expression of specific genes can occur in a matter of hours or even minutes.
This mechanism assesses the duration and intensity of prior waking and/or the homeostatic or executive mechanisms that bring about sleep. This is likely the mechanism that is disturbed in the manic depressive which results in sleep disorders. Sleep deprivation leads to a wide variety of psychotic and non-psychotic symptoms. This system is also associated with the neuronal network associated with the dynamics of REM sleep. Deprivation of REM and dreaming creates its own phenomenology.
“The study of IEGs indicates that sleep and wake, as well as synchronized and desynchronized sleep, are characterized by different genomic expressions, the level of IEGs being high during wake and low during sleep. Such fluctuation of gene expression is not ubiquitous but occurs in certain cell populations in the brain. Thus...IEG induction may reveal the activation of neural networks in different behavioral states. Do the areas in which IEGs oscillate during sleep and wake subserve specific roles in the regulation of these physiological states and a general ‘resetting’ of behavioral state? Is gene induction a clue to understanding the alternation of sleep and wake, and of REM and non-REM sleep?”
In Rossi’s Dream-Protein Hypothesis, “new experience is encoded by means of protein synthesis in brain tissue...dreaming is a process of psychophysiological growth that involves the synthesis or modification of protein structures in the brain that serve as the organic basis for new developments in the personality...new proteins are synthesized in some brain structures associated with REM dream sleep.”
Rossi generalizes the dream-protein hypothesis, “to include all states of creativity associated with the peak periods of arousal and insight generation in psychobiologically oriented psychotherapy.”
Enriched internal and external environments leads to the growth and development of new cells. IEG cascades lead to the formation of new proteins and neurons along with increased synapses and dendrites that encode memory and learning. On the other hand, excessive trauma and psychosocial stress can lead to suppression of growth processes in the brain. When psychotherapy contributes to arousal, enrichment, and relaxation it facilitates actual growth in the brain to encode new memory, learning and behavior, optimizing growth and healing.
“Communication within the neuronal networks of the brain is modulated by changes in the strengths of synaptic connections...meaning is to be found in the complex dynamic field of messenger molecules that continually bath and contextualize the information of the neuronal networks in ever changing patterns. Most of the sexual and stress hormones...have state dependent effects on our mental and emotional states as well as memory and learning, a constantly changing dynamical field of meaning.”
CIRCADIAN CYCLES: The Biological Clock. In mammals the master clock that dictates the day-night cycle of activity is known as circadian rhythm. It resides in a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a group of nerve cells in a region at the base of the brain called the hypothalamus. But cells elsewhere also show clock activity (Young, 2000). Within individual SCN cells, specialized clock genes are switched on and off by the proteins they encode in a feedback loop that has a 24-hour rhythm.
The molecular rhythms of clock-gene activity are innate and self-sustaining. They persist in the absence of environmental cycles of day and night. Bright light absorbed by the retina during the day helps to synchronize the rhythms of activity of the clock genes to the prevailing environmental cycle. Light hitting the eye causes the pineal gland of the brain to taper its production of melatonin, a hormone that plays a role in inducing sleep. The fluctuating proteins synthesized by clock genes control additional genetic pathways that connect the molecular clock to time change in physiology and behavior.
This circadian cycle is disrupted in bipolar syndrome as evidenced by the sleep disorder and mood disorders it manifests. Identifying the genes allows us to determine the proteins that might serve as targets for therapies for a wide range of disorders, from sleep disturbances to seasonal depression.
Normally, the pineal rhythmically produces melatonin, the so-called sleep hormone. As day progresses into evening, the pineal begins to make more melatonin. When blood levels of the hormone rise, there is a modest decrease in body temperature and an increased tendency to sleep. Body temperature must be dropping for sleep to ensue. Levels of the stress hormone cortisol usually fall at night also.
Bipolars break the circadian pattern; it is fragmented or chaotic. They seem to have no circadian rhythm at all, resting and becoming active seemingly at random. Clinical research has isolated a single gene named period or per, which seems to be activiely involved both in producing circadian rhythms, in setting the rhythm’s pace. Another co-active gene is called timeless, or tim. The two proteins stick together when mixed, suggesting they might interact within cells.
The production of PER and TIM proteins involves a clocklike feedback loop. The per and tim genes are active until concentrations of their proteins become high enough that the two begin to bind to each other. When they do, they form complexes that enter the nucleus and shut down the genes that made them. After a few hours enzymes degrade the complexes, the genes start up again, and the cycle begins anew. We begin to wonder how the clock could be reset.
Jadwiga Giebultowicz of Oregon State University identified the PER and TIM proteins, and notes that biological clocks are spread throughout the body; each tissue carries an independent photoreceptive clock. In research, these clocks continued to function in tissue dissected from the host. The diversity of various cell types displaying circadian clock activity suggests that for many tissues correct timing is important enough to warrant keeping track of it locally.
In 1997 Joseph Takahashi’s research team isolated the Clock gene: “the CLOCK protein --in combination with a protein encoded by a gene called cycle--binds to and activates the per and tim genes, but only if no PER and TIM proteins are present in the nucleus. These four genes and their proteins constitute the heart of the biological clock...they appear to form a mechanism governing circadian rhythms through the animal kingdom, from fish to frogs, mice to humans.”
“It seems that some output genes are turned on by a direct interaction with the CLOCK protein. PER and TIM block the ability of CLOCK to turn on these genes at the same time as they are producing the oscillations of the central feedback loop -- setting up extended patterns of cycling gene activity.”
“Perhaps one of these, or a component of the molecular clock itself, will become a favored target for drugs to relieve jet lag, the side effects of shift work, or sleep disorders and related depressive illnesses.” (Young).
Rossi’s research suggests that the 90-120 minute ultradian rhythm is a fundamental “work cycle of life” that is entrained by the circadian cycle. The psychobiological basis of much psychopathology related to early sexual and stressful life events suggests that molecules of the body modulate mental experiences and mental experience modulates the molecules of the body. A sudden fright, shock, trauma and stress can evoke “hypnoidal states” that were related to amnesia, dissociated and neurotic behavior (ref. Bipolar, PTSD, MPD). Off their meds, bipolars forget how sick they can be.
Rossi suggests a new research frontier for the psychobiological investigation of many classical psychotherapeutic notions, such as repression, dissociation and emotional complexes. He suggests they are related to “(1) the primary messenger molecule-cell receptor systems of the psychosomatic network, (2) Immediate-early genes and target gene expression, (3) protein formation and learning and (4) state-dependent memory, stress and traumatically encoded mind-body problems.”
Enhanced memory associated with emotional experiences involves activation of the messenger molecules of the beta-adrenergic system, the arousal phase mediated by the rhythms of the neuroendocrinal system. He suggests a non-linear dynamics to the chronobiology of sleep, dream, and hypnosis.
The periodicity of self-hypnosis may be related to the psychobiology of ultradian rhythms or the natural work cycle. In bipolars, this self-hypnotic cycle may go awry and become non-rhythmic, nonrestorative. 90-120 minutes is the basic rest-activity cycle during both waking and sleeping. There is also periodicity in the imagery experience as demonstrated by REM.
Special stressors, motivations, demands and expectations in normal living can shift the normal ultradian and circadian pulsations in arousal and stress hormones on all levels from the behavioral to the cellular-genetic. This process is best described by non-linear dyanamics of chaos and adaptive complexity theory.
This research is integrating work on the creative dynamics of psychotherapy and holistic healing in theory and practice. It focuses on a chronobiological approach to the deep psychobiology of sleep, dreams, hypnosis, and healing in psychotherapeutic practice. When the 90-120 minute ultradian cycles of mindbody communication unfold over time they display alternating rhythms of activity and rest.
There is a normal peak in cortisol just before awakening. Also, ultradian peaks of cortisol secretion that lead to psychophysiological states of arousal every 90-120 minutes or so are typically followed by about 20 minutes of ultradian peaks of beta-endorphin that lead to rest and relaxation, that Rossi labels the Ultradian Healing Responses, a natural but flexible and highly adaptive ultradian rhythm of activity, rest, and healing.
The chronobiological dynamics of new protein formation are fundamental to healing and psychotherapy. For Bipolar Disorder, psychotherapy can entrain the ultradian and circadian rhythms by physical and psychosocial stimuli and recalibrate internal clocks, facilitating mindbody healing.
Rossi summarizes how “self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral could lead to a unified psychobiological theory of awake, sleep, dreaming, hypnosis, and healing.”
Research in the areas of behavioral state-related gene expression, psychoimmunology, and state- dependent memory, learning and behavior is integrated with the chronobiology of ultradian rhythms as a new window into the psychobiology of trauma and stress as well as brain growth and healing.
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EMBODYING
THE EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM:
Psi Mediated Exchange of Information
Iona Miller
(Extraordinary Claims and Strongly Suggestive Evidence)
1. Defining the Problem; 2. Moving Toward a Healing Solution; 3. Scientific Evidence of Psychic Phenomena; 4. Psi and Healing; 5. Rapport, Empathy and Co-Consciousness; 6. CRP and Theta Reverie; 7. Transpersonal Medicine; 8. Fractal Therapy and Holographic Healing; 9. New Physics; 10. Quantum Metaphysics; 11. Summary: the Emergent Healing Paradigm; 12. Postscript
by Iona Miller, Asklepia, Grants Pass, 2003
This year's Chaosophy Journal 2003 is an attempt to formulate a cohesive argument, to investigate the nature of the interactive field to deepen and broaden its scope as it applies to allopathic medicine, depth psychology and transpersonal medicine. We call this approach the Emergent Healing Paradigm. With a phenomenological eye toward field dynamics, this exploration demonstrates an additional theoretical framework within the interactive field applicable to paradoxical healing. It opens creative and healing possibilities and allows for the active, intentional liberation of the psychophysical imaginal realm. The genesis of the interactive field is rooted also in shamanic realms as a backdrop from which to see field theory. Shamanic expressions, ancient healing forces, of the unified field include mana, chi, prana, qi, kundalini, bioenergetics, psi faculty, universal energy, orgone, wakonda, etc. Field theory is also explored in the world of quantum physics where the universal field is examined from paradigms situated in varied consciousness models. The somatic unconscious, an intrinsic part of the interactive field in mutual engagement with two or more persons, is also woven into this fabric. In this study it is an intersection between the universal field and the psychodynamic field -- embodying co-consciousness in healing.
HYPOTHESIS: In the Emergent Healing Paradigm, healing depends on the nonlocal principles of nature's own self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mindbody of the organism. It is proposed that the dynamic interactive field present in the healing situation can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment (resonance feedback) to mobilize the psychophysical healing process.
Pythagoras said that the most divine art was that of healing. And if the healing art is the most divine, it must occupy itself with the soul as well as with the body; for no creature can be sound so long as the higher part in it is sickly. --Apollonius of Tyana
The lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend. --C.G. Jung
The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life. --Albert Einstein
Practice not-doing and everything will fall into place. --Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Psi reminds us that the world is profoundly richer and more subtle and more intensely numinous than our science or philosophy has imagined, that wonder and awe in the face of the Universe is not a sign of simple minds, but of those rare minds that have not congealed into lumps of paralyzed skepticism. -- Dean Radin, 1993, Parapsychological Association
All those who believe in psychokinesis, please raise my hand!
1. Introduction: Defining the Problem
The main reason for healing is love. --Paracelsus
The apparently "new" healing paradigm, which has been under discussion some 30 years or more, is actually a treatment philosophy. The Emergent Healing Paradigm is based in viewing humanity, not as separate entities but as complex adaptive organisms deeply embedded in the fabric of the universe -- the same essence as the universe. It is a radical departure from viewing ourselves as mechanical bodies within a clockwork universe, the prevailing model.
Just as traditional medicine identifies itself with the past through the Hippocratic Oath, this new orientation also draws on the ancient Greek and Egyptian healing cults and our collective taproot back into 50,000 years of shamanic healing culture. Like traditional physicians seek to identify themselves with the Hippocratic ideal, we can embody this paradigm, this philosophy, by embracing a worldview which is seemingly new, but older than history -- medical intuition and holistic spirituality. It doesn't negate or even supercede the Hippocratic orientation; in ancient Greece both the complementary methods of healing mind, body and spirit were part of the cult of Asklepios.
When conventional means failed, supplicants went to the dream temples to heal their psyches -- their souls -- they entered the Mysteries. These healing dreams somehow mobilized the nonrational elements of being and healing somehow emerged. But their notion of soul was not disembodied; it meant the whole psychophysical organism. Ancient Vedic healers based their treatment in the philosophy that the common essence of humankind and cosmos was consciousness. Altering that primal essence, consciousness, could change one's state of health. It isn't really a case of activating mind over matter, but mobilizing what undergirds both mind and matter.
What, essentially, is this consciousness of which we speak? Can it be more than our subjective awareness, our existential experience -- the result of perceptual input and self-referential internal processing? Is it the very basis of materiality, a neutral essence more fundamental than energy or matter, more than microstates of the functioning of human wetware?
Stapp (1993) argues that on the basis of certain mathematical characteristics classical mechanics is not constitutionally suited to accommodate consciousness, whereas quantum mechanics is. These mathematical characteristics pertain to the nature of the information represented in the state of the brain, and the way this information enters into the dynamics. This opens up the interesting possibility of representing the mind/brain, within contemporary physical theory, as a combination of the thoughtlike and matterlike aspects of a neutral reality.
Classical mechanics arose from the banishment of consciousness from our conception of the physical universe. Hence it should not be surprising to find that the readmission of consciousness requires going beyond that theory. The exclusion of consciousness from the material universe was a hallmark of science for over two centuries. However, the shift, in the 1920's, from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics marked a break with that long tradition: it appeared that the only coherent way to incorporate quantum phenomena into the existing science was to admit also the human observer (Stapp, 1972). But the recent resurgence of interest in the foundations of quantum theory has led increasingly to a focus on the crux of the problem, namely the need to understand the role of consciousness in the unfolding of physical reality. It has become clear that the revolution in our conception of matter wrought by quantum theory has completely altered the complexion of the problem of the relationship between mind and matter, (Stapp, 1995).
Western empirical descriptions of consciousness have been due largely to Descartes and Kant but William James and Hermann Weyl have also made important contributions. In the past couple of decades the emerging field of consciousness studies has taken up the multidiscplinary task of its investigation. It is often maintained that no-one can define consciousness but there exists a clear empirical description of consciousness as an observation of the space, time and content of our minds (where the content contains intuitions and feelings). Perhaps the most we can say is that consciousness is a process, rather than an object. Maybe the claim that no-one can define consciousness is frustration at the fact that no-one can explain 'Consciousness,' or 'Matter,' either, for that matter (Green, 2002). [1]
Of course, it would seem easy to assert that small-scale processes will be described quantum mechanically, and large-scale processes will be described classically. But large-scale processes are built up in some sense from small-scale processes, so there is a problem in showing how to reconcile the large-scale classical behaviour with the small-scale quantum behaviour. There's the rub! For quantum mechanics at the small scale simply does not lead to classical mechanics at the large scale. That is exactly the problem that has perplexed quantum physicists from the very beginning. (Stapp, 1995).
In our modern world, science has become our god -- but one that is fallible, that has failed to address our soul and spirit. Science has its own beliefs and superstitions, despite its claim to total objectivity. It has sought to eliminate the undeniable subjective factor of our existence --that which yeilds our awareness, our very consciousness of what it means to be human. The mechanistic healing paradigm no longer is even in harmony with what science tells us of nature and our own nature. Modern medicine can implant an artificial or substitute heart, but can it put the heart back into its own practice, heralding a return of spiritual medicine?
Based on the medical anthropology of cave painting and shamanism literature, consciousness has been a central component of healing since the beginning of human history. Recently, western medicine has re-established a priority of consciousness studies because of the failure of modern linear science to arrest the health crisis. Transpersonal medicine has again established a foothold in healing arts. Generations of distrust in self-appointed charlatans have eroded and almost destroyed the curriculum of skills inherent in consciousness healing. As students begin their educations into these ancient and contemporary skills, they do so under new criteria of being "scientific" if these skills are to earn their rightful place in a medical profession. Yet, the typical designs formulated on linear statistics do not apply to the non-linear characteristics of consciousness. The co-creative nature between consciousness and healing cannot be measured in three dimensions and innovative methodologies have to be developed with a full appreciation of scientific reasoning and the mysteries of healing. (Lawlis).
There is a crisis in the healing arts -- the kind of crisis that leads to paradigm shifts. Crisis science - as described by Kuhn - requires a fundamental criticism of the old paradigm.
Science proceeds by way of 'discovery,' as well as simple accumulation or even 'invention.' This is the basis of scientific revolutions, and paradigm shifts - "the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science," (Kuhn, 1962). A paradigm is a disciplinary matrix. Paradigms are essentially worldviews -- expressing our beliefs about the way things work, including tacit assumptions.
Scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. Normal science does not aim at novelty; discoveries are rare because expectation clouds our vision. Paradigms transform scientists' view of the world; new paradigms create new relationships. New paradigms are chosen for their promise of future success at problem-solving.
Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. The word 'revolution' as a political term is justified, as the political aspects of scientific institutions are often what restricts embracing new models. They threaten the old guard, whose perspective and credibility are wrapped up in their old models.
These new assumptions (paradigms/theories/models) require the reconstruction of prior assumptions and the reevaluation of prior facts. This is difficult and time consuming. It is also strongly resisted by the established community.
Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science. These depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defence. The resulting circularity does not, of course, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual, (Kuhn, 1962).
Kuhn states that the issue of paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone. We must examine the nature of the differences that separate the proponents of a traditional paradigm from their revolutionary successors. The history of science is riddled with fortuitous "accidents," dreams, and intuitions which led to breakthroughs which have advanced our knowledge and technologies. These breakthroughs come from a deeper source than mere logic and speak of our indissoluble deeper connection with nature. Inaccurate theories or hypotheses are rejected or adjusted once proven "wrong," when they fail to meet the tests of reproducibility and predictive value (Popper). [2]
Recent discoveries in physics haven't necessarily demanded the destruction of classical paradigms. However, we are still in the assimilation phase of the new theories and a consequent conflict between competing schools of scientific thought. Recent years have seen a revolution in the new sciences of complexity and the nonlocal perspective of post-quantum physics.
One defining work of this new paradigm was David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), describing a hidden, enfolded order within nature behind classical causality. Another watershed was Gleick's tremendously popular Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). These ideas have captivated a new generation of scientists and lay-persons, alike. The 'Information Age' does not merely refer to computer technology, but also to the subtle nature of Reality. Complexity is the study of complex adaptive systems, including humans, who inhabit the dynamic 'edge of chaos.'
Systems theory is general enough to be called a meta-theory or meta-framework. Systemic concepts include interdependence, relationship, dynamics, interaction, connectivity, linear and non-linear summation, emergent and non-linear prediction, circular (recurrent) interaction, complex order, state dependence, "and" logic as well as "either/or" logic, flexibility and creativity.
Living systems generate and process information that operate at multiple levels. In sysems theory all units are holistically coupled and constrained by other units. Energy does the "work" of information. Energy describes how things move or function in space and do "work," but energy is hard to interpret. So, to study the integrated whole or any complex adaptive system, including biological systems, we follow what happens to the information.
Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world. Information theory deals with the communicational aspect. It models the message from the external world (universe) to the individual and his reactions. Information is a quantity whose value depends on its usability, what it adds to a representation -- its originality, unforeseeability. The general study of information theory can be applied to human perception of the nature of chaos and order in reality. No "message" is really transmitted because of the nonlocal quantum phenomenon of consciousness (Miller, 1993a).
Information theory has been employed to model dynamic processes ranging from the entire universe (Ed Fredkin, 1988) to human neurological functioning (Pribram, 1991). Pribram's research on human perception culminated in a theory of neurodynamics based on nonlocal cortical processing -- holonomy -- a "holographic" perspective. According to Pribram, "space-time and spectrum provide the dimensions within which information occurs." The information theory of the universe models bits of information as fundamental, while neurodynamics conceives of quanta of information. Therefore, holonomy supercedes general systems theory and thermodynamics as models of brain/mind/consciousness, (Miller, 1993b).
So the nature of primordial reality is now understood to be an insubstantial realm of information, quantum waves and probabilities, where energy and matter share a common essence, other than "solid" matter. Information is as fundamental as matter and energy. All subatomic particles and cells theoretically store information, according to their nature and scale. There are many competing theories for the nature of that essential nature, and our own.
Chaos Theory and Complexity have disclosed the self-organizing inner workings of non-linear dynamics in nature and human nature. Systems (and subsystems) are always connected in various ways to various degrees; energy and information is constantly exchanged. In complex phase interactions and dynamical energy systems, resonance is the key dynamic which couples them, increasing dimensional complexity and leading to emergence of new properties.
Interactive resonance occurs both within and between material systems, through recurrent feedback encoding a complex interactive history. Circulating recurrent feedback interactions (cyclic information) are the fundamental bases of holism. The more rapid the feedback, the more stable the holistic system. This circulation of energy and information allows them to interact as a whole.
Information received is theoretically retained in some form forever (memory) and evolves over time, whether consciously retrievable or not. According to Bohm's insights on quantum foam, all regions of spacetime are seething with energy and information, as well as a virtual infinity of recurrent feedback interactions. Energetic connections help retrieve and make the information unfold in material reality.
Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. Complex self-organizing systems are spontaneously adaptive, turning whatever happens to their advantage. Chaos alone doesn't explain the structure, coherence and self-organizing cohesiveness of complex systems. The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. (Waldrop, 1992).
Only beginning to incorporate these new findings, modern medical healing arts and mental health practitioners are still caught in the outdated mechanistic scientific paradigm of Western culture. It is a holdover of Cartesian duality which splits mind and body. This treatment philosophy, its underlying assumptions, and its framework are obsolete.
These latest findings have yet to percolate into conventional healing and medical practice, much less touch on deeper issues of maladaptation and adaptation -- pain, suffering, loneliness and isolation -- from breakdown to breakthrough. This can hardly be blamed on medical and mental health personnel who are already giving all they can, based on their specialized training and the demands of the workplace. It is no one's "fault," but is a systems problem.
The ordeals -- a rigorous gauntlet -- of unsupported medical treatment often result in depression and despair where many feel they would simply like to go to sleep and just not wake up. Often it has nothing to do with treatment or prognosis but fear, pain and despair in the face of the unknown and eventual mortality -- issues of the heart and soul. It is crucial to realize there is both rational and paradoxical healing and both are vital to our health and well-being. Breakthroughs are often paradoxical in nature, seemingly absurd, yet in fact true. Rational healing relies on doing, while paradoxical healing is rooted in ways of being . As Larry Dossey says, it requires "standing in the Mystery."
Modern medical practice has meant functioning within a biomedical science that privileges quantity over quality, fragmentation over wholeness, disease over people, and matter over spirit. Even with all our modern technology, simply getting an accurate diagnosis and treatment often remains difficult. Our bodies are assaulted with a variety of drugs and protocols which are often as much toxin as cure, poison/panacea, and inspire medical terror in many individuals.
As a result, the emotional, spiritual, and soulful aspects of healing are often neglected, and the psychosomatic split perpetuated as dis-ease at all levels of the psychophysical organism, [3]. The physical trauma is compounded by indignities -- the often devastating emotional traumatization of sterile conditions and routinized treatment protocols. And yet there is no question that the curative powers of the physician today are vastly greater than ever before. But Siegel notes that "our power to heal people and their lives seems to have diminished dramatically as our power to cure diseases has increased. . .Science has become God, and separated itself from the patient. . .What has been lost is the human dimension."
Still, rarely is the patient listened to, offered alternatives, or treated as a partner in the healing process. Even compassionate care has its limits. Too often patients are managed with routine detachment, typically over-prescribed similar sedating or soporific analgesics or muscle-relaxants and given only temporary relief of symptoms through physical therapy. The symptom or disease is treated, rather than the individual, the part rather than the whole. Paradoxical healing, on the other hand, according to R.D. Laing, is "unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, always unrepeatable, and often indescribable."
This is no indictment of well-meaning humanitarian health practitioners, who often feel that they, too, are victimized by their narrow training, the healthcare system, long shifts, and the strictures of managed care. This schizm between mind and body has been summarized in a number of points by psychotherapists (Swinney, 1999) and in Transpersonal Medicine (Achterberg, 1992; Lawlis, 1996; Chopra, 1989, Krippner, 1992), attempting to restore a balance between science and Mystery, that fosters not only survival but resilience (Southwick, 2002).
HYPOTHESIS: Emergent healing depends on the nonlocal principles of nature's own self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mindbody of the organism. It is proposed that the interactive field -- therapeutic entrainment -- present in the healing situation can be amplified intentionally to mobilize the psychophysical healing process.
The science that currently drives the healing professions is out of date and not really appropriate to complex systems. New science provides far better models for the human condition. I.e. relativity, quantum, chaos and holographic theories.
Healing and disease are matters that involve senses more than mind and are matters of consciousness and its structures. The effects of empathic bonding transcend time and space. Dreaming, when the unconscious takes the stage on its own terms, can be a window through which healing enters.
Human beings, like all complex systems are self regulating (homeostasis principle) and will generally do so given the opportunity. Yet activity and the struggle to be healed are also natural. Healing flows from one's true center -- unself-conscious, focused, authentic, genuine, accepting of any outcome, uncontaminated by fear of death, and without guilt or blame.
Healing often depends far more on the connection between the practitioner and client than it does on the particular practice. "Doing without doing" facilitates cooperation with the natural order instead of trying to change it, allowing for "controlled accidents" to happen magically when we attune to or align with the intrinsic order in a certain way, complementing the more process-oriented, causal principles.
Symptoms are at their base attempts by the organism to solve problems. As such their isolated eradication can result in further symptoms arising in answer to the unsolved deeper issue. Paradoxically, acceptance and gratitude in spite of the presence of disease can heal without conscious effort -- a shift in being , not doing.
There are only self-healers; the best one can do is find and encourage that process in another, addressing the whole person. Spiritual perfection and health are not necessarily equated, and healing often involves surrender or letting go. Underlying the desire for total personal, conscious control and responsibility in health is frequently a narcissistic desire for power.
Consciousness prevails throughout all reality and is a basic field that is part of all structure in the space time continuum (Swinney). While the brain acts locally, consciousness can act nonlocally, at a distance.
Natural healing emerges spontaneously through nature's own self-organizing processes. It involves a dynamic, flowing state or "liquification" of consciousness and out-worn structure, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immerison in the vast ocean of deep unconsciousness. In this creative regression, destructuring or destratification proceeds by immersion in the flow of psychosensory imagery through identification with more primal forms or patterns. Chaos Theory provides a more-than metaphorical language for describing these complex, flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychophysical transformation.
Addressing this paradigmatic schism between mechanistic and holistic models (see Appendix for comparative charts), medical schools have included the humanities in education, pastoral workers have become active in hospitals, and psychologists tend to patients undergoing somatic care. But it is a paradigmatic shift in worldview across the healing arts that is called for to embody methods of healing which harmonize with our current scientific theories.
Meanwhile, individuals have also turned to various forms of alternative or complementary medicine, seeking to incorporate life meaning and spirituality within their illnesses and treatments. In transpersonal and energy medicine they seek a soulful, holistic treatment for the mindbody and spirit. How the flow and exchange of energy affect our health -- for better or worse -- is fundamental to most forms of non-allopathic medicine. What all the alternative therapies and "touchy-feely" practices have in common is more listening. Social support works through empathy by helping people navigate through life.
2. Moving Toward a Healing Solution
I believe there is no disease whose treatment cannot be enhanced by a doctor who knows how to inspire and guide patients and so to bring into play the body's internal healers. It is when I can help my patients find what Schweitzer called the doctor within -- when I play coach, as one of my patients put it -- that I am most fulfilled in my role as doctor and I serve my patients best. We become a team with joint participation and responsibility, (Siegel, 1989).
The essence of compassion which is the essence of healing simply means realizing (as more than a concept) that we are not so different from each other in the experience of being human. The ability to feel another's emotions is the essence of compassion. Just as healing and curing are not the same, neither are pain and suffering. Pain is a physical process; suffering is the perception of that experience. We all want to be happy and avoid suffering. Awareness is the first step in healing. Listening leads to empathy; empathy leads to compassion; compassion increases intimacy; intimacy is healing. We can only be intimate to the degree that we are willing to be open and vulnerable. (Ornish, 1998).
[A]nything that promotes feelings of love and intimacy is healing; anything that promotes isolation, separation, loneliness, loss, hostility, anger, cynicism, depression, alienation, and related feelings often leads to suffering, disease, and premature death from all causes. While the evidence on the relationship of psychosocial factors to illness is controversial, most scientific studies have demonstrated the extraordinarily powerful role of love and relationships in determining health and illness.
The classical Newtonian/Cartesian worldview has inculcated the outdated notion that a body is a mechanical collection of component parts, not an integrated whole. It has been treated as a collection of individual organs and chemical reactions, not a dynamic being. Most tragically, the mind has been viewed as completely separate from the body. Of course, the scientific method has its successes and advantages, but in some ways has led to losing sight of the concept of health care, of daily maintenance of health, and the promotion of overall well-being.
Although some individual practicing physicians, nurses and other healers have tried to include these alternative methods in standard medical practice (Simonton, LeShan, Ornish, Dossey, Siegel, Joy, Weil), most of the members of the medical profession have kept these soulful practices clearly separate from "scientific" medical care to preserve their 'credibility.'
Fortunately, there are now some healers in transition, attempting to create change and practice from a new paradigm. The era of nonlocal science and medicine is just being recognized. The mindbody relationship has come to the fore in areas such as psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, biopsychosocial medicine, and patient-centered medicine. Of course this mindbody synergy was always the basis of depth psychology, humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Consciousness is the biophysical bases of complementary medicine.
The important distinction has been made between curing, which is the scientific effort to change what is happening in the body, and healing, which is the human experience of the effort to recover. Healing is a process we're involved in all the time. It's very close to the process of education. "Educare," the root of "education," means "leading forth, wholeness, or integrity." Healing is also the leading forth of wholeness in people. Sometimes people heal physically, and they don't heal emotionally, or mentally, or spiritually. And sometimes people heal emotionally, and they don't heal physically, (Lerner and Remen, Commonweal).
Motivated by regrets over this dissociation of science and spirituality how can we restore meaning and inspire ourselves to build a bridge to connect science and spirituality in the medical healing arts? How can we redefine the healing roles and personal response-abilities of physicians, therapists, caregivers, and patients? We are all healers of each other. Sharing sorrow makes us "wounded healers," as C. G. Jung described people whose knowledge of inner healing came from experience with their own wounds. Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom (Moyers, 1993).
Profound healing involves an inner journey deep into consciousness to the core of being. The pilgrimage is just the first step, the commitment of one's energies and resources to healing. Healing the total organism involves yielding the diseased form or image to this paradoxically chaotic yet creative state and subsequently emerging from it with a new, more harmonious and balanced form.
The outer structure of the body and personality soon begin to restructure, to reflect the new form. In other words, healing is an act of creation -- a self-organizing emergence from our primal essence. From the descriptions of the subjective experience of this state, and from our personal journeys, it is a state of formless chaos, (Swinney and Miller, 1992). Healing and creativity are different aspects of a single dynamic. Creativity in terms of physical processes means physical healing (Green et al, 1971).
Can we identify and correct inherent problems in the healing environment and supportive community to foster and reclaim our sense of wholeness and empowerment? Can we still treat the anatomical, physical-mechanical parts of the body and do much more than simply appeal to the mind with new concepts? We have to travel beyond the "head trip" of mere conceptualization. Can we accept the existential challenge of entering our own pain and fear, diving deep into chaos, and discovering the hidden treaure of our healing?
During illness we almost always want to enter the forest of therapy at a place chosen by someone else -- a physican or health guru -- where it is brightest, where there is a well-trodden path, and where guides and rules already eixst. We want to eliminate ambiguity and uncertainty; we want only to know what works. ...In short, we want a formula, one that tells us what to do. ...But doing must also be supplimented by being -- looking inward, examining, focusing, wondering, asking. Being and doing are not incompatible, they can and should coexist. ...following the Formula of Being Genuinely Who You are, in which doing recedes into the background. The point is that action need not always be shoved reflexively and forcefully into the foreground as an automatic first-and-only choice when sick, (Dossey, 1993).
The medicine wheel of Native Americans, the primary healing model of western shamanism, suggests a four-part healing process which is a synergy of chaos and order. Healing here means widening the circle of our being, our interactive field. As Rocky Racoon said, "I'll be better as soon as I am able." :)
Its dynamic arc begins in the direction of the East with seeing the problem, moves to the South by surrendering and trusting the process or Higher Power through an ego-death that leads into chaos before the new vision is found. New vision is discovered in the place of the West, arising within the place of dreams, creative imagination, creative solutions. Finally, actualization is found in the North as integration and empowerment -- the fruition of the natural healing process which reconnects the soul with self, community and Universe, restoring balance and clarity.
This year's Chaosophy Journal 2003 is an attempt to formulate a cohesive argument, to investigate the nature of the interactive field to deepen and broaden its scope as it applies to allopathic medicine, depth psychology and transpersonal medicine. With a phenomenological eye toward field dynamics, this exploration demonstrates an additional theoretical framework within the interactive field. It opens other creative and healing possibilities and allows for the active, intentional liberation of the psychophysical imaginal realm. Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologies got here decades ago, but mainstream medical professionals are beginning to come to the same conclusions.
In the modern view, because of these profound interrelations between consciousness and the physical world, rather than attempting to extinguish the subjective element in the healing process, we tend to maximize it, for we see it as a potent force in exerting purposeful change. Furthermore, we reason that this change can be initiated by patients as well as professional healers. In our new view of health, therefore, each patient has the potential of being his own healer. Healing has become democratized in the new view.
Since the body-as-object is an idea we reject in the modern view of health, our notion of the patient changes. Patients are no longer seen as objects "to whom" or "for whom" something is done. In the new view patient and therapist form a unit through the processes that connect all beings. Patient-oriented therapy is a boomerang, affecting the therapist at the same time. From the modern therapist's perspective, thus, patient therapy is self-therapy. To heal another is to heal oneself.
In the new view of heath we cease to see disease as entirely negative. Health, too, is not altogether positive for us. Rather than seeing them as either good or bad, to us they seem to be simply a statement of the way things are. . .we can still change the physical state of the body. It is merely a feeling born of the recognition of the interpenetrating oneness of all things. (Dossey, 1982)
The genesis of the interactive field is rooted also in shamanic realms as a backdrop from which to see field theory. Shamanic expressions, ancient healing forces, of the unified field include mana, chi, prana, qi, kundalini, bioenergetics, psi faculty, Odic force, universal energy, orgone, wakonda, etc. Field theory is also explored in the world of quantum physics where the universal field is examined from paradigms situated in varied consciousness models.
A sense of empathy or emotional closeness appears to underlie many nonlocal events. This "heart connection" between subjects underlies transpersonal imagery, telesomatic events, and prayer-type healing, and it also appears to be a factor in human-machine interactions...This internal consistency is striking, and internal cnsistency is a quality highly prized in scientific investigation. If scientists can identify a "pattern that connects," a common thread tying together events that on the surface seem unrelated, this increases the scientific respectability of the events being studied and makes them appear "more real." (Dossey, 1993).
The somatic unconscious, an intrinsic part of the interactive field in mutual engagement with two or more persons, is also woven into the fabric of this study as an intersection between the universal field and the psychodynamic field. We call it 'therapeutic entrainment.'
Medicine is mostly concerned with mass, the material aspect. Matter is a kind of accumulation of energy in a fixed order. Chaos is energy but random, not in order. But when the energy is fixed, in order, in a certain frequency, etc, it becomes quantum, and this quantum is the origin of mass. So this quantum forms an electron or a proton or nucleus and thence an atom. The atoms combine and they make molecules and the molecules combine to make DNA and protein and then us: matter-with-consciousness (Motoyama).
Co-consciousness as a mutually experienced dynamic field in the therapeutic process is a psychological gnosis, initiating subtle body awareness from a depth perspective through the emergence of the interactive field. Synchronistic encounters are integrated into field theory as a threshold where universal fields engage the somatic unconscious, initiating numinous and sometimes transformative change in one's life. [4]
3. Scientific Evidence of Psychic Phenomenon
The incidence of spontaneous precognitive dreams of the percipient's future is greater than any other type of spontaneous ESP dream. . . A search for a general model of ESP must explore not only the dimensions of space and time, but also events that seem related and are inextricably interwoven with the human experience of psi, namely, meaningful coincidences. The experimental evidence for dream telepathy buttresses clinical evidence. Its occurrence leads us to conclude that the nature and fabric of the interpersonal field, and the nature of the dynamic exchanges that it encompasses, are far more subtle and complicated than current psychoanalytic and behvioral theory suggest, (Krippner and Ullman).
Intuition is perhaps our most common sense, if we simply listen to it. It is the way our inner self or unconscious teaches our conscious awareness -- inner tuition, inner sight. We all experience it more or less frequently. It appears unpredictably from "out of the blue," or through a dream, as an inspiration, or a "gift" of the Spirit. It is a sudden, unexpected, often illogical, internal form of perception that includes hunches, gut feelings, multisensory sensations, and emotional insights. Both the mind and body have a language of intuition that speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
Intuition is characterized by the following: 1) confidence in the process of intuition; 2) certainty of the truth of intuitive insight; 3) suddenness and immediacy of knowledge; 4) emotion/affect associated with intuitive insight; 5) nonanalytic, nonrational, nonlogical impressions; 6) gestalt nature of knowing; 7) associated with empathy; 8) difficulty putting images into words; 9) relationship to creativity, (Schulz, 1998). It may be associated with selflessness, letting down barriers, forgetting or going beyond the individual self, feeling united with the All.
There is a fundamental relationship between memories, dreams (REM), intuition, and healing. It's a sense we all share and can experience if we allow ourselves the opportunity to listen to the "still, small voice," which helps us gain insight and understanding. Yet even though intuitive knowledge is often healing, merely getting an intuitive hit is not what heals us, but it offers us practical information to enrich and improve our lives. There is a spectrum of expanded awareness that extends from simple intuition, to ESP, to co-consciousness, therapeutic entrainment and creativity. All can arise and are often operational in the healing process. They mobilize the mindbody network.
The question of psi mediation (ESP) in the therapeutic setting is a somewhat smaller question than that of general psi phenomena or other unexplained paranormal phenomena, such as ghosts or UFOs. The Chinese term for psychics is Wu Li, translated as "patterns of organic energy." Psi phenomena, besides seemingly telepathic exchange, also includes other elusive forms (often nonlocal) of mind over matter (PK or psychokinesis), or action at a distance, rather than the simple exchange of information we are concerned with here.
Telepathy may be defined as the transmission of thoughts, ideas, images or symbols from the mind of one person to another without the usual intervening sensory percepts. It may be distinguished from clairvoyance, in that telepathy is in the form of a message, whereas clairvoyance is in the form of a vision. Telepathy from the Greek word "tele" and "pathos," literally means "empathy at a distance.". . .Telepathy is a kind of intuition, a 'direct knowledge of distant facts.' 'It is a swift process of knowing through being,' (empathy), (Gowan, 1980).
The existence of rapport is a generally recognized phenomenon which can reach incredible intimacy as participants dive toward the root of being in deeper and more intense interaction. Co-consciousness in healing is unique in that the therapeutic interaction is generally characterized by proximity, allowing the therapist to read the psychophysical cues of the other. One need not invoke "spooky action at a distance" to account for such possibilities as phase synchronization of brainwaves and shared experiences of image/soma and meaning.
But, does psi or ESP even exist, or is it merely an optical illusion of the mind? There are volumes of research (Krippner, Motoyama, Honorton, Tart, Swann, Schwartz, Putoff and Targ, Radin, Utts and Nobel-winner Josephson) to suggest that it does, though skeptics staunchly maintain it does not. Because the issue is emotional and seemingly unresolved does not mean we should stop asking, looking for a deeper relationship of psyche and matter.
In fact, the mandate was laid down several decades ago by physicist Wolfgang Pauli when he worked with psychologist C.G. Jung: " We should now proceed to find a neutral, or unitarian, language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things."
Psi experiences have been reported throughout history, across all cultures, and at all educational and socio-economic levels. These experiences, variously labeled telepathy, clairvoyance, remote viewing, precognition, and psychokinesis, suggest the presence of a deep interconnectedness among all things. While the labels are descriptive of the experiences people report, they have not advanced our understanding of these phenomena. Historical persistence of these phenomena suggests that the scientific understanding of basic concepts like mind, matter, space and time may be incomplete, possibly in fundamental ways.
Until recently, many mainstream scientists have assumed that psi-like events could be completely explained as a combination of delusion, misunderstandings about coincidences, wishful thinking, or perceptual and cognitive distortions. Certainly the popular view of psychic phenomena, as portrayed in TV shows like the X Files , makes it difficult for any thoughtful person to uncritically accept the claims of many so-called psychics. And it is undeniable that what often passes for psychic actually is indeed fraud, delusion, or fantasy.
But the mainstream view is not completely correct (which should come as no surprise, for science involves theories and testable facts, and is constantly evolving). The modern view of the physical universe, as expressed in well-accepted physical theories and verified by experiments, allows for far-from-common-sense concepts like non-locality and the relativity of space and time. In fact, the physical universe, as best as we presently understand it, seems to support the very types of space-time anomalies that would be required for genuine psychic phenomena.
Beyond theoretical suggestions from physics, systematic laboratory evidence generated over the past century by scientists from reputable academic, government and private laboratories around the world has established that some psi experiences are what they appear to be. In recent years, because of the consistently accumulating evidence, even life-long skeptics (including the late astronomer Carl Sagan) have agreed that these phenomena are, at minimum, worthy of serious scientific study, (Radin, 1997).
However, as Carl Sagan also said, " Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Therefore, we will approach the notion from a variety of perspectives, from the "soft" science of psychology, and the "hard" science of physics, as well as the median position of alternative medicine -- transpersonal and energy medicine, with their holistic perspective. In this way we hope to create a circumspect view about and investigate the possibility of the role of co-consciousness in healing.
Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe forever lays to rest any question as to the experimentally demonstrated existence of at least some psychic (or "psi") phenomena. Using the statistical technique of meta-analysis, Radin methodically and forcefully examines the results from nearly a century of increasingly sophisticated experiments. Notwithstanding the possibility of thousands of researchers committing fraud in a massive decades-long conspiracy, or a complete misapplication and misunderstanding of meta-analysis, the existence of telepathy (mind-to-mind perception), clairvoyance (perception at distance), precognition (perception through time), psychokenesis (mind-matter interaction), and perhaps other psi phenomena (e.g., mental interactions with living organisms) is incontrovertible. Now, a statement such as "forever lays to rest any question" may, to a careful audience, seem extreme. But that's just the point. If carefully read, Radin's thorough, relentless, and pointed volume will -- or should -- win over even the crustiest and most skeptical (but open-minded) mainstream scientist. The hows and whys of psychic phenomena remain unknown, but whether they occur is now settled. Post-Radin, a refusal to accept the reality of psychic phenomena is itself prima facie unscientific and untenable.
New ideas are accepted in stages. The acceptance of a new idea occurs in four stages. First , skeptics "confidently proclaim that the idea is impossible because it violates the Laws of Science"; second , "skeptics reluctantly concede that the idea is possible but that it is not very interesting" and its effects are extremely weak; third , the mainstream realizes the importance of the idea and "that its effects are much stronger and more pervasive than previously imagined"; and fourth , those who were originally skeptical now "proclaim that they thought of it first." With psi, we are currently in the most important and the most difficult of the four transitions -- from Stage 1 into Stage 2. While the idea itself is ancient, it has taken more that a century to demonstrate it conclusively in accordance with rigorous, scientific standards. This demonstration has accelerated Stage 2 acceptance, and Stage 3 can already be glimpsed on the horizon. (Radin, 1997)
Preliminary research done by Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama in Japan has shown that a person emits very small amounts of visible light. The amount is so small that a photon counter is needed. Dr. Motoyama found that photon emission is higher at certain acupuncture points compared to a region of skin with no acupuncture point. According to unpublished research done by him in Japan, there is some indication that emission at certain acupuncture points is increased for persons with psychic abilities. The modern healer is moving away from epic, heroic models of power toward imaginative fantasy. Awareness is growing that image-consciousness heals (Miller and Miller, 1994).
4. Psi and Healing
In all the many hundreds of healing encounters I and the people in the training groups participated in, there was never developed an ability to tell in advance which ones would result in medically unexpected biological changes, and which would not. We observed these changes taking place shortly after the healing quite often (my best estimate is about 15 to 20 per cent of the time), but could never predict in advance any specific healing, (Krippner).
Another posture could be taken...; namely that all consciousness is basically "group consciousness." An individual's awareness, attention, memory, etc., is socially constructed. Without group interaction, an individual would never achieve "identification" with anyone or anything. From this viewpoint 'group consciousness" is the fundamental matrix from which "individual consciousness" emerges. ...We do not have to establish or invent these connections because they already exist. (Krippner, 1992).
The healing dyad is best characterized by its emphasis on intent. Both parties have the intention of engaging in a healing dynamic experience. This is the foundation or underlying raison d' etre of the therapeutic encounter. This intention can deepen into a linking or "hook up" of the individuals into a unified field, a shared resonant interactive field. This field seems to facilitate or mobilize the healing dynamic. This mutual process is reflected in shared gestalt impressions as both jointly and simultaneously engage the whole organism, manifest through the unconscious.
Co-consciousness is activated in the journey process through our deliberate interaction. There are frequent and intense shared references to what is happening, sometimes moment to moment verbalization and physical cues. The process often includes imaginal and bodily experiences -- the psychic and somatic unconscious, both activated, manifest and focused upon. We maintain focus on awakened bodily reactions and subtle body energies through the use of joint active imagination. There is spontaneous appearance of synchronous events in such exchanges and encounters.
The psychic unconscious expresses itself in those images and fantasies that originate in the unconscious. The somatic unconscious, however, expresses itself in those sensations and experiences arising from the body. These bodily or somatic symptoms are other than those occurring from normal bodily activity, but have a link to emotional conditions. . .emotions, via the autonomic nervous system, are central in linking psyche and soma. . .bodily energies being activated, the symptoms that occur in sessions (Spiegelman, 1991), [are] a manifestation of the somatic unconscious. [T]he interplay of psychic and somatic is just what the work toward union and totality entails. Mind and body, image and behavior, within and among, are all aspects of the opposites. They also frequently experience the subtle body, as a manifestation of the somatic unconscious, or as a union of the unconscious with consciousness [and] those apparently mysterious events [are] often felt as telepathic. (Spiegelman, 1995).
The facilitation of attentional resonance opens the participants to the simultaneous presence of both classical and acausal field phenomena. They are mutually connected through the unified field. The more mutual the process, the more the interactive field manifests. In this interactive field, we are embedded in an imaginally perceived whole situation -- an encompassing, infusing, and mutually interactive field, with conscious attention to the relationship.
Charles Honorton has pointed out, "... successful activation of ESP may be related to a relaxed, passive state of mind, one which is relatively devoid of visual imagery, and in which there is a decrease in externally directed attention, perhaps coupled with an increase in attention toward internal feelings and sensations. One or more of these characteristics appear in a number of mental states now called altered states of consciousness." The CRP journey process is one such altered state, which fulfills these conditions. Dreams are another.
If the urge toward oneness, unity, and wholeness lies at the heart of prayer -- and if this urge erupts consistently during dreams when the unconscious takes the stage -- we must consider seriously that prayer and dreaming are very closely related, and that we pray consciously night after night, dream after dream.
'Dream prayer' may indeed be our most effective prayer, because it occurs when the inhibitions and distractions of waking awareness and the ego have abated for a few hours. Unobstructed, the unconscious during sleep and dreams may be free to realize its natural, innate affinity with the Divine. ...One of the most common forms of prayer is for healing. If prayer and dreams are related, can dreams heal? ...Dreams of unity, wholeness, and healing can bring about healthy changes within our bodies. [Studies in dream telepathy by Krippner and Ullman] strongly suggest that one's conscious, dreaming state can be a window through which the thoughts of others may enter. If an image on a postcard can "get through," why not prayer? (Larry Dossey, M.D.)
Meier (1959) and Spiegelman (1996) point out that since therapy is a totalistic system, the therapist's capacity to sustain and integrate the difficult content him or herself induces a change in the system and thereby helps the other. This echoes ancient shamanic practices employing the 'mana' of the healer (Jung). Telepathy has even been demonstrated by physicians scientifically in the healing power of prayer and imagery, both locally and at a distance, (Dossey, 1993; Achterberg, 1985; Joy, 1979; Schwartz).
The shaman is the archetype of the wounded-healer and is perceived as having social or personal power for vision and healing. Healers learn not to exploit or identify egotistically with this process of mobilizing the unconscious. Rather, they let it operate through them as guides or mentors, so the other can discover that the healing resources are within and find empowerment -- the dramatic healing breakthrough, (Swinney and Miller, 1993).
Deeper and more intense interaction leads to quantum field-like phenomena the further the process goes. To be fully in the field requires a letting go, an openness to dreaming, feelings, intuitions, symptoms, sensations -- chaos -- all the products of psychic life often overshadowed by rational consciousness. There is a complementarity, a tension between rational understanding and total immersion in the virtuality.
It is possible that the vast depths of the dream can never be plumbed without the systematic and wide ranging application of the psi hypothesis. The psi-conditioned interplay between analyst and patient in this affect-charged situation provides a highly concentrated and sharply focused sample of what presumably goes on in the variegated interactins between people in other areas, (Eisenbud, in Murphy, 1993).
When the interaction moves into an even deeper level there is a qualitative shift to a more intimate connection. In the best conditions there is a spiritual epiphany, the field vibrating with power, emotion and meaning. The whole experience is an acausal expression of meaning -- more like a synchronicity. In this substantially deep interaction we all express the same objective psyche.
Both participants experience synchronization of phenomena, fluidity of mutual process and the subtle body is aroused. This subtle body, psyche and physical energy base combined, is the organ of perception of the field. Sense of separate identity diminishes. The field has been there all along, but the intense attention has activated it to signal its living presence. There is powerful interaction between the participants on this voyage of discovery and a diminishing sense of separateness between ourselves, world and cosmos.
By learning to facilitate our intuition to gain insight into the underlying meaning of our disorders and life challenges, we can learn our own body's unique perceptive language. By learning to pay attention to, read and understand our sensations, movements, dreams, memories and the signals of distress and disease, we can strengthen our mind-body consciousness. These are among the ways we can empower ourselves to create a healthier, happier life, (Schulz, 1998).
5. Rapport, Empathy and Co-Consciousness
In addition to the beliefs of healers that love is vital if prayer is to "get through" and facilitate healing, considerable evidence, both laboratory-based and anecdotal, suggests that empathy somehow connects distant organisms. These entities are of a vastly different variety, ranging from microorganisms to human beings. This fact is important. If empathy indeed connects a vast range of living things, it may be a built-in feature of the natural world, not just a human quirk or perhaps an erroneous observation. Empathy, compassion, and love seem to form a literal bond -- a resonance, or "glue" between living things. . . . Love is a kind of exalted but unspecialized telepathy; --the simplest and most universal expression of the mutual gravitation or kindship of spirits which is the foundation of the telepathic law, (Dossey, 1993).
Before the dawn of civilization tribal societies developed shamanic healing practices of a rather sophisticated nature. They were perpetuated because they "worked" for the community. These traditions suvive today where modern conventional help is unavailable or unaffordable, and have also been revived as unconventional counter-measures to depersonalized treatments or allopathic failures, (Krippner and Villaldo).
Imagery has been used in healing continuously since the times of ancient shamans. Mental images mediate between our conscious intentions and our physiology. Mental imagery can effect special body functioning -- including that of the immune system, and conversely our physiology can affect our thinking, feelings and imagery. Our psychophysical self is seamlessly welded. Imagery in healing is emphasized through the role of healing rituals and social reinforcement.
Ancient Egypt had temples where the healing art known as dream incubation was practiced. This mystery cult carried over to ancient Greece, home of the Hippocratic tradition. When external medicine failed, the ill resorted to the sacred precincts of non-interpretive dream temples for holistic healing from deep within by the god Asklepius -- spiritual healing. Thus, they reconnected with the source of being.
Often these primal practitioners, artists of the heart and spirit, evoked what has come to be known as "the placebo effect," the willingness of the ill person to let go of the source of the problem through a symbolic journey, gesture, ritual or image. In this "sacred psychology," all shamans use their power of personality (called 'mana' by C.G. Jung) to exert their healing prowess, and this persists in modern society as "white coat syndrome," a combination of credibility, awe, and dread in the face of our infirmity. In psychology it has been called the power of the "transference." Here we are calling it therapeutic entrainment.
Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another. It is experiencing the world through the same portal as the person you're communicating with. Rapport doesn't require understanding. Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. Rapport is the ability to bond instantly with others.
Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Empathy needs a face! This concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy understood as a unique kind of intentionality. Human empathy is inherently developmental. Only empathy makes a science of consciousness possible. Real progress toward understanding the nature of intersubjectivity challenges us to integrate the methods and findings of cognitive science, phenomenology, sacred psychology, and spiritual technologies of human transformation, (Thompson).
Consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded on empathy -- our empathic cognition of others and their empathic perception of us. Empathy is evolved biological capacity. Gestures and tones and sight of the other are recognizable to the infant. We learn and evolve by emulating, imitating, by mirroring. The mind isn't in the head, but the whole body. Our primordial sensory self-image helps us make the rudimentary distinction between self and non-self. Pre-verbal communication is through gestures and action. The face is an expression of a self available for others.
Human empathy is inherently developmental; we learn it in infancy in the CORE DYAD, coupled dynamics. It opens us to pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity -- shared virtualities. In process-oriented therapy, we share one dynamic pattern of neural-somatic activity. Empathy is essentially a "mimicking" of one person's emotional state by another. Our awareness of ourselves as embodied individuals embedded in the world depends on empathy, in particular our empathic grasp of the Other's empathic grasp of oneself.
This process reintroduces the safety, nurturing and fulfillment of the original Core Dyad, and allows us to return to the blissful "garden" which we inhabited prior to our sense of separation. Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other. It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading. To be empathic implies intersubjective openness. This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop. We experience another person as a unified whole through empathy; the more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified. We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.
This downward causation of spiritual experience, or incarnating energy works from global-to-local and is the basis of our personalized transcendent experience. It is the alchemical discovery of the Godhead in matter, through the union of opposites. It heals our cultural mind/body split in a unified experience of shared embodied minds. From birth our senses are linked to each other by an intra- and inter-personal body schema, or love map, which suggests the possibilities of action at the supramodal level -- cosmic consciousness.
The mind is not embodied in our head, but in our whole organism embedded, even entangled, in its environment. This embodiment is an emergent and self-organizing process that spans and interconnects the brain, the body, the environment, and in therapy, another special person. The therapeutic experience thus emerges through the common intentionality and dynamic co-determination of self and other. Self-other co-determination and co-creation is the foundation of the therapeutic interaction in medicine or psychology. Even seeing is a way of acting -- a visually guided exploration of the world. Inner representations also generate experiences which can guide us and show us a Way.
Empathy occurs through the immediate 'pairing' or 'coupling' of the subtle bodies of self and other in action. Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies of self and other in embodied action. At the level of intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation and participation mystique we engage consciously in the process. The empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation has been called 'sensual empathy' or 'sensing in.'
Facial expression of feelings and emotions are paradigms of some aspects of empathy. We all inherently understand them. Interwoven with this sensual empathy is the experience of the Other animated by the feelings of life. It is through sharing the sensory dimension of these feelings, our fields of sensation, that we find common ground and begin to merge. The deeper this experience, the greater the degree of merging. When the common ground is the ground state -- the Void -- we merge in cosmic consciousness.
Another ingredient of empathy is the experience of the Other as another center of orientation in space, in the world. Our experience of space and sense of self-identity are tied together, existentially and in the brain. We all live at the center or "zero-point" of our orientation -- always "here," present. 'Here' and 'there' emerge from identification with body-space. Others are perceived as 'there' in relation to 'here.' We perceive also that Others have their own 'here' in relation to we stand 'there.'
In process work or inner journeys, a melting of these personal boundaries is allowed to take place. In the intersubjective field there is no one single zero-point or bodily center of orientation. Or alternately, the intersubjective openness of consciousness and empathy are the preconditions for our shared experience of inhabiting a common intersubjective, spatial world -- a virtual reality.
Empathy provides a viewpoint in which one's center of orientation becomes one among others. Our locus of consciousness changes to "all over." The new, more universal zero-point is a new spatial perspective which contains one's zero-point as simply one spatial point among many others. Literally, no matter how we turn in our bodies, we are always 'here,' but we can also evolve toward a non-local perception of our embedded nature in Nature and Cosmos. It is through empathy as the experience of oneself as an Other for the alter-ego that we gain a viewpoint of our own embodied being beyond the first-person singular.
Reciprocal or reiterated empathy is a self-reflexive, mirroring process. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathetic experience of me. I experience myself as recognizably conscious from your perspective, the perspective of Other, and the feedback loop is closed. One's sense of self-identity, even at the most fundamental level of embodied agency is inseparable from recognition by another -- and grasping that recognition empathetically.
Empathy -- like imagination, recollection, and reflection -- can be described as a 'self-displacing' or 'self-othering' act. It involves a displacement or fission between my empathizing self and the empathized Other; recollection between my present recollecting self and my past recollected self. It is an imaginal process between myself imagining the Other's viewpoint of my self imagining. It is a house of mirrors of myself reflecting between my reflecting self and the experiences I reflect upon.
These spontaneous self-displacing experiences indicate that the ego is structured or inhabited by many 'inner splittings' or 'inner openings,' openings that intrinsically involve otherness or alterity. Thus, we experience our self as a complex interaction of sub-personalities with different agendas. This inner openness to differing points of view manifests the open intersubjectivity of consciousness. It is embodied in the feeling of being led by the Other's experience, empathically synchronized.
Emotions are our value feelings. We experience emotion only in regard to that which matters. Emotions mark importance, meaning. It is emotion or value feeling that makes one experientially aware of one's personal self, the depths of the 'I' from which emotions arise. Emotions, as value feelings, make possible the evaluation of oneself and the world. Emotions anchor us to the here and now. The ability to perceive how a situation affects the well being of all and react appropriately, meaningfully is the basic emotional faculty of empathy and the basis of morality. Values transcend personal concerns.
The embodied mind and the lived body are NOT two different entities, or belong to two different orders of reality. Rather, they are two aspects of one single spatiotemporal individual. The alchemists called this unification of spirit/soul and body, the unus mundus -- or One World. It emerges through empathy as a non-egocentric, self-transcendent mode of consciousness, we can call "interbeing." Compassion is the heart of interbeing, considering the suffering of others as one's own.
Just this intersubjective and empathic openness is the pathway of self-transcendence of the world's spiritual wisdom traditions. In transcendent mode the locus of concern is nowhere or outside of spacetime. Concern centers on the infinite and eternal -- the supreme value. Therefore, the response evoked is one of the deepest mindful emotion, forming one body with the Universe.
6. CRP and Theta Reverie
"The entrance, or key, to all these inner processes we are beginning to believe, is a particular state of consciousness to which we have given the undifferentiated name "reverie." This reverie can be approached by means of theta brianwave training in which the gap between conscious and unconscious processes is voluntarily narrowed, and temporarily eliminated when useful." (Green et al, 1971).
"In the 'experience of dual unity' a patient in an ASC [altered state of consciousness ] experiences a loosening and melting of the boundaries of the body ego and a sense of merging with another person in a state of unity and oneness. In this experience, despite the feeling of being fused with another, the patient retains an awareness of his or her own identity. Then, in the experience of 'identification with other persons,' the patient, while merging experientially with another person, has a sense of complete identification to the point of losing the awareness of his or her own identity. Identification is total and complex, involving body image, physical sensations, emotional reactions and attitudes, thought processes, memories, facial expression, typical gestures and mannerisms, postures, movement, and even the inflection of the voice. The "other" or others can be someone in the presence of the patient or someone absent; he or she can be part of an experience from the subject's childhood, his or her ancestry, or even of a previous lifetime." (Laszlo, 1996).
The theta range of brainwave activity is four to seven cycles per second. This is reportedly the 'psychic' range of the mind. The area from which psychic experiences emerge is the temporal lobe, source of most theta generation. In theta, learning is extremely rapid, and may be subliminal. Theta-entrainment, the resonance of two (or more) individual's brainwaves, is a probable source of co-consciousness in the Consciousness Restruturing Process (CRP).
According to Krippner and others, resonance between brain patterns leads to telepathy. The strength of the influence increases with the product of their complexities, and decreases with the difference in their patterns.
Co-consciousness, the shared virtuality of the journey process, is a telepathic rapport wherein both participant’s brainwaves become synchronized or entrained, in essence, into a single holographic biofield. Co-consciousness might be measured via the observation of spontaneously shared, matching or resonating brainwave frequencies. Experimental verification (through EEG monitoring of both participants) of these hypotheses is scheduled as the second experiment in our pilot study of CRP phenomena.
Previous neurological studies conducted for Asklepia by Thomas A. Blakely, Ph.D. [Neuropsychology and Clinical Electroencephalography] of Lake Oswego, Oregon indicated that co-consciousness reveals itself through unique brainwave patterns. The subject appears to be sleeping, but responds and remains internally focused, interactive within and without the shared Journey. This has implications for restructuring trauma patterns (state-bound learning), and the process of facilitating spontaneous psychophysical healing.
Alpha and Theta brainwave generation is associated with dreams, creative thinking, and twilight states. Theta is probably the best model we have for the shared nature of co-consciousness. Spontaneous psi phenomena have been associated with theta waves by Krippner (1977), the Greens (1977), and more recently Persinger (1997). These phenomena include but are not limited to telepathy or ESP and synchronicities. The left hemisphere of the brain is linear and logical, while the right hemisphere is non-linear and perceives gestalts. Theta generation entrains both hemispheres in a single activity that creates a harmonization and sense of deep-felt meaning and well-being.
Preparing for the co-consciousness process can be described as "emptying." Any preconceived notions about self, the mentored or the process are completely suspended, and the Journey is approached with a "beginner's mind." But one's experiential skills and wisdom are brought to the process. Though theta generally indicates a deep sleep, it is possible to maintain awareness and be interactive in the journey process. Brainwaves will fluctuate back and forth across the alpha-theta boundary as both participants move deeper into the journey.
The ability to generate theta and remain consciously aware has been demonstrated by yogis and experienced meditators. It's almost like falling asleep, but then something else happens, a lucidity . In order to produce theta consciously it is necessary to quiet body, emotions and thoughts all at the same time. This leads to integrative reverie, a deep focus of attention. Training in theta reverie leads to integrative experiences of physical and psychological well-being.
What we sense and control is not the brainwave itself, but the state of consciousness, a gestalt of subtle existential cues. The production of the brainwaves themselves do not constitute a "state," as such. Brainwaves, in and of themselves, have no sensory representation. What can be detected and restructured are factors such as focus of attention, thought processes, and feelings. Theta training is awareness training, or level of awareness training, and facilitates creativity.
Theta rhythms are usually associated with near-unconscious or subliminally conscious states. The presence of theta is often accompanied by hypnagogic or dreamlike images. It is not a daydream-type experience, but a projection of impulses from unconscious sources. Although most untrained people are unable to maintain full consciousness during theta production, almost everyone can maintain awareness during alpha.
In CRP there is a spontaneous rapport which kindles the participants’ oscillatory harmonization and therapeutic entrainment with one another. Theta probably does not occur in the subject until the later portion of the journey when the rapid eye movement indicative of REM, alpha waves, and the arousal phase has yielded to the profound paradoxical relaxation of chaotic consciousness.
Dr. Stanley Krippner, senior Asklepia Foundation board member, has demonstrated the reality of dream telepathy in his research on the subject, and we suggest this is the mechanism of co-consciousness in the mentoring of journeys. Ervin Laszlo (1996) has also attributed these properties to an existentially fundamental "psi field," which he likens to Jung's alchemical notion of unus mundus, where the realms of mind and matter merge. Such co-consciousness is a classical phenomenon in the practice of shamanism (see opening quote, this section).
Laszlo goes on to recount Stan Grof's (1988) extensive work penetrating beyond normal limits of personal sensory experience into "biographic-recollection," perinatal, and transpersonal domains. He reports identifications with groups and group consciousness, animals, plants and botanical processes, oneness with all life, and all kinds of natural processes, including waters of rivers and oceans, fire, earth and mountains; catastrophes such as storms, earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanic phenomena, as well as specific materials like diamonds, crystals, and other metals.
In fact, such experiences extend into the microworld, involving the dynamic structure of DNA, molecules, atoms, interatomic bonds, electromagnetic forces, subatomic processes, and the zero-point field. Cosmic dimensions include "planetary consciousness," and "extraterrestrial experiences" of stars, quasars, galaxies, even black holes, and "identification with the entire physical universe." All these processes are experienced in CRP as part of the organism and psyche of the all-encompassing dynamic universal process, or holomovement. These experiences are expanding, even spiritual, which begs the question of their source or origin.
Dr. Michael A. Persinger (1987) has demonstrated the temporal lobe as the biological basis of the spiritual experience, and intense meaning. The hippocampus and amygdala are within the temporal lobe, and have to do with remembering and evaluation, reward and punishment. The hippocampus becomes a gateway to the experience of images and its stimulation unleashes a vivid stream of past memories. It can initiate inundations of imaginal imagery.
Hypnagogic imagery is produced during theta rhythm dominance in the temporal lobe. Reverie or the “fringe of consciousness,” hypnagogic imagery, dreaming, and creativity are closely related. When consciousness is alert but unfocused, alpha is found. When a person becomes drowsy, or moves into a state of reverie, theta waves tend to appear.
As early as 1943, Kubie reports:
“The hypnagogic reverie might be called a dream without distortion. Its immediate instigator is the day’s “unfinished business,” but like the dream it derives from more remote ‘unfinished business’ of an entire lifetime as well...Whatever the explanation...with [hypnagogic reverie] significant information about the past can be made readily and directly accessible without depending upon the interpretation...of dreams...It is probable that in this partial sleep, in this no-man’s land between sleeping and waking, a form of dissociation occurs which makes it possible to by-pass the more obstinate resistances which block our memories in states of full conscious awareness, and which contribute to the distortion of memory traces in dreams...”
Theta is associated with a deeply internalized state and with quieting of the body, emotions, and thoughts. This allows usually unheard or unseen things to come to consciousness in the form of hypnagogic imagery. Typical imagery associated with theta is vague and diffuse, but includes a number of classical or archetypal features: images of tunnels, the experience of going through a dark tunnel, or a tunnel lighted at the far end; images of stairs or ladders and climbing up or down; images of a cave or pyramid; of eyes or a single eye, spirals or vortices, etc.
Hypnagogic imagery comes suddenly into the mind from some unconscious source; it may be visual, auditory or somatic, a fragrance or a taste. It has an autonomous character, seeming to follow its own course independently. Attempts to observe it too closely or control it voluntarily usually make it disappear. Pilot studies show that theta training increases the ability to be aware of the images and hold them long enough to report the hypnapompic perceptions.
Many theta trainees report spontaneously “going down there” into the figure, "becoming," or merging with the image. The borderline of alpha-theta means staying on that thin line between low-frequency alpha consciousness and high-frequency theta semi-consciousness. The stream of dissociated thoughts and images is constant, perceived as an autonomous flow. Images simply float by, coming to mind from an unknown source.
There may be dissociation from the body, and thoughts are quite detached--flowing along with the vague images with a feeling of perceptual change. Some subjects report their focal point changing from being in front of the eyes to behind the eyes, and a slight falling feeling.
The amygdala is the control center of emotions and moods, the heights of euphoria and depths of depression. Connections between the frontal lobes and temporal lobe means emotions become mixed with the experiences of the self. Hippocampal cells display the highest electrical instability of all portions of the brain. These cells are prone to repeated firing long after the stimulation has been removed.
The amygdala and the hippocampus can learn specific electrical patterns. One of the most frequent electrical patterns generated from this lobe is called theta activity. Theta is associated with alterations in temporal lobe function. These waves occur during dreaming, creative thinking, and twilight states, according to Persinger.
Transient electrical perturbations of the human temporal lobe (TLT) result in emergence of innate feelings of the God Experience. They range from mild cosmic highs, to knowledge infusions, to religious conversions, to peak experiences, and personal communions with God.
Psychic seizures appear without convulsions and the brain experiences vivid landscapes or the forms of living things, glowing forms, or bright, shining sources. The modality of the experience, that is, whether it is experienced as a sound, a smell, a scene or vision, or an intense feeling, reflects the area of the electrical instability. These endogenous sensory images are accompanied by a sense of conviction or meaningfulness, personal and profound significance.
The God Experience is a normal organized pattern of temporal lobe activity. It can be precipitated by personal stress, or loss and the fear of anticipated death, or the awesomeness of nature or sexual experience. It brings a sense of personal destiny; it feels ineffable as details remain fuzzy. All one remembers is that something important, profound, or deeply spiritual took place.
These divine seizures bring seeming insight into another realm; feelings of intoxication, lightness, flying, moving, spinning, or even leaving the body (OBEs). There is both a compulsive and euphoric factor--compulsive behaviors and thoughts, and euphoric or intermediately manic mood. Personal and natural events become fraught with meaning or symbolism. Fear and terror are also effects and frequent parts of the temporal lobe seizure experience.
Dreaming is intimately tied to the function of the temporal lobe because of the hippocampus-amygdala complex. Stimulation of the temporal lobe region can unleash dreamlike experiences over which the person has little control. Dream production can be induced directly by electrical peculiarities or by interfering with the chemical transmitters that effectively connect the neurons of the brain.
Certain drugs appear to induce dreams during the waking state, where they are experienced as real. All human cultures have developed some form of meditational technique to enhance the experience.
Psychological addiction to this type of God Experience occurs because of the brain’s chemical reaction to the intense motor agitation or to the seizure. The release of the brain’s own opiates can cause a narcotic high during the agitation in receptor sites for endogenous opiates within the amygdala. Elevation of brainstem levels of norepinepherine elevate mood for several days to weeks. The person can become addicted not only to the mystical experience but to the God high.
High altitudes, and low blood sugar can facilitate TLTs. Since the temporal lobe is very sensitive to changes in hypoxia (lack of oxygen), blood sugar (hypoglycemia), and blood flow, situations that produce these are most correlated with the spiritual experience. Another source of hypoxia is low-level breathing during meditation. A person trained appropriately can drive the temporal lobe into bouts of theta activity. Sometimes outright electrical seizures will occur, simultaneously with the meaningful experience.
Psychological stress, and radical existential change is the most common condition that facilitates the God Experience. Elevation of stress hormones in the hippocampus and amygdala influence fantasies to be stored as actual memories; vivid and realistic dream images can burst into awareness. In general, the more severe the disturbance, the more intense the God Experience. The most profound occur after the sudden loss (death) of a close loved one.
Depending on the degree of hormonal arousal and the instability of the temporal lobe, the experience can occur due to simple cumulative effects. They can be less spectacular, but just as impressive and meaningful. Music can trigger TLTs in a sensitive brain. Very loud sound patterns or flashing lights can drive the epileptic brain into seizures, as can repetitive sounds, such as white noise or mantras.
Conversely just the sound of ocean waves or even a gentle stream creates a soothing feeling; when the negative ions from actual water are present, the effect is magnified into well-being. Certain smells, perfume, or incense can be the trigger, as the temporal lobe is the “home” of olfaction. Thus, sensory cues can act as active drivers of theta.
In the context of the present hypothesis, there must be some feature of the temporal lobe that is involved with the experience or origin of the self-concept. The adult’s sense of “body image” is associated with the parietal lobe. But, for the first few months of life, the body image is not totally associated with the parietal, but is “stored” in the temporal lobe. During the time the infant is dependent on the behaviors of the mother and father and the pattern of those behaviors, the temporal lobe integrates and grows with that information.
Body image and sense of self spontaneously emerge during the Consciousness Restructuring Process. Usually locked away, they are there ready to be released by the appropriate key. The key is the temporal lobe transient. When it occurs the images and protosensations long locked within the old contexts of the temporal lobe are released. The adult experiences the old sense of the infant self. Basic images, long forgotten are retreived in the God Experience. The infantile sense of self is permanently shaped and bound to the pattern of parental behavior.
In CRP journeys after an initial stage of arousal (fear and pain), there is a paradoxical switch to a deep state of tranquility and serenity, described as a healing place. This switch is from the ergotrophic system to the tropotrophic system of arousal.
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We Got There Together by Randy Mack
Digital Fine Art by Science-Artist Randy Mack; see http://science-art-usa.50megs.com
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
Image title would go here.
These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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Image title would go here.
These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
Image title would go here.
These are a few of my favorite photographs from my different travels. Feel free to browse them as you like. If you want one click your right mouse button and choose "Save As" from the menu. |
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