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Issue Fourteen | Nov/Dec 2011 | 3.95 Issue Ten | March 2011 | 3.95
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Are you part of the One Mind of the cosmos? How NeuroModulation Therapy allows your body to speak
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as impressed as I am at the results this modality is achieving in harnessing the self-healing intelligence of the body. We offer several articles in this issue about consciousness. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf, better known in the mass media as Dr. Quantum, writes about his belief in, and the logical evidence for, our being part of the One Mind of the universe. Evolutionary biologist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris takes us on a journey from ancient cultures to modernday society, explaining how new communication technologies, such as texting, may be hastening our growth toward developing transparent minds (telepathy as a natural mode of communication) and moving us toward conscious connection. Dr. Rollin McCraty, director of research at the Institute of HeartMath, provided me with ample material to pen an article about the Global Coherence Initiative that is chock full of mind-expanding information about how our health is affected by natural and cosmic elds in and around the earth and how our thoughts inuence the state of our world. The Earth as generator of healing elds is also the subject of Dr. James Oschmans article on a modality called Earthing. As always, I urge you to contact me with your input, feedback, suggestions and ideas. This is your magazine, rst and foremost, and with your input I can work to shape it in the ways that best serve your wants and needs. You can write me at: joan@quantumhealthmagazine.com. I look forward to hearing from you!
elcome to another edition of Quantum Health! Before I talk about this issue, I want to ll you in on a conference I recently attended and hosted, the 2011 International Bioenergetics Conference, which was held in Greensboro, North Carolina, and created and organised by Joyce Cary, of Integrated Life Solutions (Clemmons, NC). It was the rst conference of its kind, of what we hope will become an annual event, and brought together frontier scientists, CAM practitioners and integrative physicians, businesspeople and vendors of CAM products and technologies, and the general public. It was a smashing success, with engaging and informative presentations on all aspects of CAM and energy medicine. Breakouts sessions by developers of CAM technologies allowed everyone to actually experience many of the modalities, and a gala dinner brought everyone together for less formal conversation and camaraderie. I urge you to watch for announcements next year and to plan to attend. You will be glad you did. I have spoken with several of the presenters about reporting on their research in upcoming issues of Quantum Health and, to my delight, all of them have agreed. In the pages of this issue, you will meet more of the movers and shakers in the world of CAM and energy medicine. Our cover interview is with Dr. Beverly Rubic, a pioneer in energy medicine and the coiner of the term bioeld. She discusses her long and illustrious career and the current state of energy medicine. Our other interview is with Dr. Leslie Feinberg, the creator of a form of NeuroModulation Therapy, a modality that takes talking to the body to new heights of healing efcacy. I think you will be
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Regular Contributors Sarah Turner Head of Research at NES Health Quantum Health Magazine Editor in Chief: Trina Hart TFT Dx
Disclaimer
All content in Quantum Health magazine is provided for general information only, and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional. Quantum Health magazine, or any contributors to Quantum Health magazine, is not responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this magazine. Quantum Health magazine is not liable for the content of any external website listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product or service mentioned or advised on any of the sites. The views expressed by authors of articles published in this magazine are solely those of the author and are not necessarily the views of or shared by the editor, publisher or directors, shareholders and employees of Quantum Health. Copyright. Quantum Health 2011 all rights reserved. No part of this magazine can be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publishers. Unsolicited contributions must be accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope if they are to be returned. We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs or for material lost or damaged in the post. Letters submitted to Quantum Health magazine or to its editors are assumed to be intended for publication in whole or part.
Managing Editor: Joan Parisi Wilcox Science Editor: Production: Sarah Turner Trevor Hart
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everly Rubik earned her PhD in biophysics at the University of California-Berkeley. She is an internationally renowned researcher into the subtle energies and the human bioeld. Author of more than 80 papers and two books, Dr. Rubik currently serves on the editorial boards of several respected journals, including the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and is the founder of the Institute for Frontier Science, a nonprot corporation for research and education. Her areas of research include the psychophysiology of extraordinary states; the energetic properties of water, including memory; and nutrition in health. She teaches in the doctoral programs in Interdisciplinary Studies at Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, OH; the Integrative Health Studies program at California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco; at Energy Medicine University; and in the Mind-Body Medicine doctoral program at Saybrook University. The recipient of several major awards for her pioneering work in frontier science, Dr. Rubik continues her research and teaching while also serving as a consultant to the health care industry and working with private clients as a holistic health practitioner and educator.
with myself, saying I will get through this. I will complete my dissertation work but I dont want to do more of the same. In fact, I had a holistic view that wasnt really supported in the university. I began to see myself as outside of the mainstream and took refuge under the term frontier science upon discovering that there were other scientists like me who didnt agree with the going paradigm. It was the dominant worldview in biomedicine, but it wasnt the sole worldview. So that, and watching my mother who had cancer when I was a young woman. She had a remission. What the doctor said to her really impressed me: Whatever you are doing for yourself is more important than what we are doing for you. And I thought, Wow! What could be more important than the big guns of conventional medicine for cancer, of chemotherapy and all that? But my mother had changed her life. She had a new purpose, she felt re-inspired, and she healed herself. This was in the old days of chemotherapy, back in the 1970s. So that doctor really impressed methat there was something more that we could do for ourselves that could turn us around when we were suffering from an earth-shattering illness like fourthstage cancer.
You are among the pioneers of energy medicine research. What rst got you interested in frontier science and was there a dening moment that steered you onto this unusual path?
BR: Every since I was a little girl I was interested in life as a whole and the network of life on Earth. Of course, I studied science but the going paradigm was looking at the bits and pieces, the molecular view of life, and frankly I was disappointed with it. I did it, but it didnt speak true to me. During my dissertation research at Berkeley I got very sick with pneumonia. I took antibiotics, but they didnt help much. I had been a very healthy adult and this was all very strange. And then I had the feeling that this work did not speak true to me. The work I did at UC Berkeley was of the old paradigm of molecular reductionism, and with that I had to make a pact
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Whats your view of the human bioeld and its structure and dynamics?
BR: Let me point out rst that I published a paper called The Bioeld Hypothesis, but its almost a decade old. I wrote it in 2002, and in it I stated that the bioeld is electromagnetic, within and around the body. But today I would like to add that it is beyond that as well. I think of the bioeld as an organizing eld of life that reaches into the metaphysical domains of mind and spirit as well as the physical domain of electromagnetism, which is an invisible energy eld governing how the cells and molecules of life respond, which regulates our physiology, that literally regulates our organism. But the conductor of this symphony of elds is the mind, and even above that the conductor is probably the emotions and at some level the soul and spirit. And, of course, as a scientist, here I am delving into metaphysics, and I am well aware of that.
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Science is very limited in restricting itself to the material domain, and I think as we move forward we will be reaching to the edges of consciousness, to the metaphysics of our being, to put all the pieces of the broken Humpty Dumpty together again. Because, looking at the parts mentalitythat is, the dominant paradigm of molecular reductionismhas taken us down a long street of enormous complexity of the parts. Nobody on Earth knows all of that biology. Its so formidable, the amount of information about any tiny aspect of a living thing in terms of all the parts, that nobody can comprehend it. So how useful is it when we think about this person and this disease and this particular situation? And yet, I think there is a simpler, higher level of order which is the bioeldthat puts it all together. If we can start doing more science from that level of organizing elds then we will have enormous control over physiological regulation and health, and thats why I am quite excited. The bioeld is an overarching regulator and the mind is certainly one important conductor of that symphony of elds. And ultimately, I think soul, emotions these higher-ordered levels of our beingare assisting in that regulation. So its not a molecular mechanism per se. The molecular mechanism snaps in place to a higher ordered regulation by the eld. And the eld is within the body, surrounding the body, and probably connected to higher dimensions of space-time. And there I am talking metaphysics, the soul , et cetera. Science doesnt go there, but I have this intuitive feeling that that is whats really going on, so I have to give voice to it, even as a scientist.
resonate with it. It helps us function. Our bioeld and our tissues sense that rhythm. Now, we have a lot of other rhythms or frequencies from the wireless world of manmade communication, and that concerns me. We have a new syndromeelectro-hypersensitivity syndromewhere more and more people are getting hypersensitive to wireless emissions from modems, smart meters, cell phones, and the like. They simply cant be present around this technology. It makes them jittery, gives them mind fog, insomnia, and other symptoms. And so, we are beginning to see that we are sensitive to energies from outside that are not just power lines. Somehow, this wireless world of energy that we have created in the manmade world seems to have an effect on our own energy eld and can dysregulate us. Electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light. There have been studies in energy medicine showing that when you stimulate an acupuncture point on the foot, the brain reacts, but not as if the waves have traveled up the foot to the brain through the nervous system. In a tall person, maybe six feet, that would take about a second or so. But its faster than that, much faster. So that shows that there must be another communication system in the body that is super fast, similar to electromagnetism that can travel at the speed of light. One that is much faster than the nervous system. So thats the kind of communication system within life that I am talking about. The other thing is that there are energies from the earth that we resonate with. The Schumann resonance is a natural earth frequency of about 7.8 hertz. That corresponds to the alpha rhythm in the brain, which is the frequency of relaxation and no thinking. When you close your eyes and relax, you can engage in alpha. Its the ground state of consciousness. Its interesting that there is a major frequency produced by the earth itself that seems to hold us in that rhythm. So, we are not independent, running on our own energy of the bioeld. We are drawing on the universal life force, drawing on the Schumann resonance of earth, and were sensitive to each others bioelds as well. . . .
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Would you speak to how you see this whole concept of quantum biocommunication beyond the body, with our environment, with the cosmos and the likethe entangled mind concept? I am thinking of Dean Radins books where he summarises many studies that show that the mind is not just an emergent property of the brain, but goes beyond the body, in a quantum nonlocal way.
BR: Dean Radin and others are looking at consciousness, and it seems to me that they are looking at a disembodied consciousness. My work is different, even though I think mind, consciousness and intent are very important elements of bioregulation. I am really talking about the force eld that conditions the space within the body and around it. Thats very different from a kind of nonlocal mind as espoused by Dean Radin, Larry Dossey and others. I think that work is fascinating, and I subscribe to that view as well. But I am really talking about something that is distinctly different. I think the mind has its nonlocal properties and people in parapsychology like Dean Radin have done a lot of exciting work there, but I also think that the mind orchestrates something locally where the body is, and that there is a eld that can be measured, and has been measured, with conventional tools showing there is another level of that eld that goes beyond it [the body]. In fact, I dont think we have to invoke quantum theory for the local bioeld. We can use the electromagnetic theory of Maxwell. . . .
It seems to me that information is like a signal conveyed by energy or matter or a molecule. For example, a hormone in the body conveys information. My voice is sound waves that convey information. But its not the energy of the waves per se thats the information, its that my mouth modulates words that you understand because you know the language. So, I think the universe works through information exchange, and we are in the age of information, so nally we made that small leap from a mechanistic universe to an informational one. I think its a good leap. It implies that there is intelligence decoding it throughout the universethat there is something more than machines or mechanistic ways of thinking. If there is information, there has to be an encoder and a decoder. And that means that there is sentience within everything. And that, I would say, is a breakthrough for science to admitthat consciousness is ultimate and predominant everywhere in the universe. I am all for the informational view, but most people dont go so far as to talk about the sentience of the cosmos. They leave it at some kind of information that could be decoded by a computer, but ultimately computers are made by humans. . . . So I think that information implies sentience sentient beingness throughout every morsel of the universeand that that is a beautiful new paradigm for us to embrace.
sentient, but about information transfer in water without the transfer of molecules.
BR: I am quite excited about the new science of water, because it is not just H2O, its not just some liquidness in which molecules move randomly, but there is an ultrastructure to liquid water that can store information. Of course, medicine such as homeopathy has known this for two hundred years or more. . . . But water apparently has coherent domains, where molecules are ordered in domains like ballet dancers all dancing pirouettes in phase. They are spinning around on one leg but they are always facing you as they spin around. There is perfect dynamical order. And thats how water molecules apparently act in the liquid phase. And they can be excited by
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There is a lot of talk today about how information elds may be more fundamental than energy elds. Whats your view on that?
BR: I think information can be conveyed by energy. Information per se, that doesnt have a carrier, in conventional science is harder to grasp. But when it comes to the mind, for example, if we have an intention, theres nothing that we know ofan energy or a moleculeconnected with such an intention. And yet it [the intention] might have an effect, as we see in experiments.
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energy imbued with information and they can move to a new pirouette routine, so to speak, so that now they are dancing slightly differently. And thats how water stores information, to use a colloquial way of speaking. Its really exciting, this new science of water, because now we see life as biomolecules dancing to the tune of water, rather than as water as an inert substance of no consequence except as a passive liquid support for the biomolecules, which was the old view. So water really has essentially all the properties of life. The biomolecules simply dance to the tune of water. For instance the biomolecules (DNA, RNA, proteins) get information from water about changing elds from the environment, and they then reorganise themselves and engage in biochemical reactions. Water shows long-range ordering features around lifes biomolecules, which are radically different from bulk water. The water properties give life virtually all of its properties when it comes right down to it. So thats really an exciting thing. Information storage in water then is implicit, because life works on dynamic information exchange.
a similarity. The water has apparently been shifted energetically when intent was applied.
BR: No, it didnt! There are changes in the tastes of water though. The group could taste the difference between charged and uncharged water. Without knowing which sample is charged and which is the untreated water, everyone can taste the difference. Its quite intriguing to consider that we may have a special relationship with water, because we have 70% to 90% water in our bodies.
There is new work, by Massimo Citro and others, in which they can actually transfer the healing information from pharmaceuticals to water, without any of the side effects. Its not done through succession, as homeopathy uses. It is done with electrostatic elds.
BR: I havent worked with pharmaceuticals and that doesnt interest me as much. But I have done workshops with groups of between ve and eighty people to energise water according to how they wish, for example with love, or even converting water to wine! By viewing the water with a special camera, called the gas discharge visualization camera, or GDV, we can see the changes in the energetic signature of water, in the light emission from a droplet of water. When I tell the group that the last exercise is to make water energetically into wine, they are at rst amazed but think that maybe it is possible. So I tell them, Do it! When I compare it [the light emitted from the water they have focused on] to a sample of the light emitted from white wine, there is quite
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For example, we can mitigate anxiety and depressionpromoting total healingwith a system like transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation. You treat either the earlobes or the temporal areas of the head with a small current composed of various irregular waveforms, rather than keeping someone dependent on drugs for these mood disorders. So, patients can get over anxiety and depression by shifting their energy dynamics with energy therapy. . . . I see energy medicine able to step in where pharmaceutical medicine could not move and effectively promote self-healing, because it is operating at a higher level of the bodys dynamics, at the level of the bioeld.
health status . If I am not quite right it will say, You need a ten-minute treatment over here that will balance your bioeld, lets say around the stomach area if something doesnt t quite look right there, and then you perform the treatment with your own home energy therapy systemand then you are good to go for the day. And so one can normalise ones bioeld. . . . By doing so, over time, one might be able to prevent disease due to improved energy regulation. I think some of the things we have seen in science ction, such as in Star Trek that the Doc useddevices to rejuvenate, resuscitate, revive, and to measure the life force of people who are illI think we are going to have more and more devices like that coming out. There are some black-box devices on the consumer market todayand a lot of people ask me about theseand its not clear how they work. Some of them seem to engage the consciousness of the operator, in other words they are operatordependent, which is a new thing, because we always thought machines operated on their own, independent of whoever operated them. But apparently there is a new level on which some of these devices in energy medicine seem to work with the operator, not only dependent upon the skills of the operator, but upon their intention and volition, and they get results accordingly. So I think we are going to see some really remarkable devices that can couple with human consciousness and can effectively assess the bioeld and move it dynamically to induce a healing mode.
Are there some other examples of energy medicine that excite you, perhaps from your research or working with clients?
BR: Another one is bone healing. People have fractures that do not heal, called non-union fractures. What they do in conventional medicine is operate and implant a steel pin or plate to strengthen the bone and then hope for the best. Well, energy medicine can apply pulsed electromagnetic elds outside the broken limb noninvasively without surgery and help the bone grow. And thats been FDA-approved [US Food and Drug Administration] for probably thirty years but few people know about it, and so most still get the surgery. Orthopedic surgeons know surgery, but they may not know about this device even though it has FDA approval. But of course, its a lot cheaper and less invasive to get this therapy for twenty minutes twice a day to help the bone grow back. So thats another example of an enormous success in energy medicine.
And what about us just working on ourselves using our intention and focused awareness? So we might not even need a machine. How do you see that playing out?
BR: Well, I think that is certainly a reliable thing. We have to go back to the ancient practices, particularly from the East, of meditation, yoga and qigong, because all of these were ways of mastering the chi, or the energy eld, and the mind in the case of meditation. I nd that people who have practiced these things for at least two years are much better regulated in their bioelds.
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BR: Well, I can imagine waking up in the morning and going over to my computer and having these various input and output devices that will study my bioeld and give me a report on my
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Someone who is a novice, lets say at qigong, which is an ancient Chinese practice of gathering and moving the chi around the body, when they rst start doing qigong I can measure an enormous shift in their bioeld. But it probably doesnt hold. Whereas the person who has been practicing for two years already looks really well-balanced in their energy eld and one more qigong class doesnt seem to make any difference in the bioeld. So, I have done research on bioeld assessments with yoga and qigong, and I am seeing how these Eastern practices can really make a different in how they can regulate people.
BR: The GDV camera is one of my tools. I have a number of instruments. One looks at acupuncture meridian stress, the electrical conduction within the ten major acupuncture meridians of the body. Another one is biophoton emission, looking at the visible light emitted from the body in key areas, for example, from the palms of the hands.
Some of the new devices, if they were to become approved in the US by the FDA, which is required for bringing medical devices into the mainstream, it would cost many hundreds of millions of dollars per device. And there is no industrial base for these instruments that would help fund that process, so they sit in limbo. . . . Thats the status of many energy medicine devices, but not the ones I mentioned earlier that are well researchedthe transcranial stimulator and bone-mending device. So we need a whole new way of bringing these devices into the medical system. I am not convinced that the FDA model is the best for reducing medical costs and bringing these things in. I think that many of these devices are not harmful or threatening to peoples health. I would like to see them legalised so that it is just between a patient and a practitioner . . . and they can go just go do it. We would also learn a lot from case studies, too, if such a process were made legal.
Whats your view about any progress, or lack of it, on integrating the two medicines conventional and alternative?
BR: We need more funding to be able to better understand how to use complementary and alternative medicine, and energy medicine in particular. The mind-body modalities have gotten a lot of press and interest, but energy medicine seems to be lagging behind. I think because it is perhaps one of the greatest challenges to the conventional medical system. Big business medicine doesnt want to hear about it because it may thwart their prots. So thats one thing. And I would say that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), even though it is a non-prot governmental entity, seems to be determined not to fund things that are going to rock the boat too much and possibly shift the paradigm. . . . So funding and lack of research are issues. They say, Is it proven? And I say, Well, we have some tiny studies, but we need bigger studies to make people really take notice. Larger studies are quite costly, too.
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One of the comments I hear all the time from the skeptics, and the press especially, is that there is a danger because people who go to CAM practitioners might not get conventional care, if they have cancer or some potentially fatal disease, and it could cost them their lives. Its a scare tactic that doesnt put any trust in the intelligence of patients to make their own best decisions. Whats your view?
BR: I agree with you. Most patients go to multiple practitioners. Chances are they go to a physician and they are getting conventional care, but maybe the conventional care is scary or doesnt work. Recently I met a woman who had a tumor of the spinal cord that was growing into her abdomen, and it was inoperable. If they were to operate, they would paralyze her legs. So there was very little she could do. She turned her attention to many other healing modalities, energy medicine and coffee enemas, which she said controlled her pain by doing them twice a day, and she was working on shrinking that tumor by holistic means, not by surgery or chemotherapy or any of the usual ways, but by working with energetic practitioners and
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improving her diet. And she was shrinking her tumor with all of this. She had no alternative that was safe, that was not going to cripple her. And there are other patients in situations like that.
efcacy to the skeptics. CAM ends up getting the most desperately ill people, who are out of options, and it skews the view on how it works or doesnt work.
that are safe, that have some efcacy as far as you know, that you feel intuitively are the right things, in addition to making changes at every level of your beingmind, body and spirit. That means nding a renewed sense of purpose in life, mending your relationships, rethinking the work that you do if you are still working or maybe even changing jobs if its not serving you. . . .
account for placebo, which is the belief that something will help you, or in the case of nocebo, harm you. In a sense our belief is the grandest energy medicine of all, isnt it?
BR: In a sense it is. And if the placebo effect is 70% or 80%, thats as good as our best pharmaceutical drug. Comparing placebo with a pharmaceutical drug is how they do it in the controlled conventional clinical trials, but then they throw out the placebo effect! They are looking for something that does a little better than that, which is kind of crazy because all we can really do in medicine is to activate selfhealing. There is no other healing.
BR: Well, if someone is ill, especially chronically ill, I think that its not enough to do just one modality. One important thing is to consider how a chronic, degenerative illness is a wake-up callthat its time to change your life, that the path you have been on is not serving your needs. When something happens to the body thats serious, its like the subconscious part of your mind trying to tell you something, to give you information. . . . So, look at illness as metaphor and then nd treatments that feel intuitively right. Even if there are studies out therewell, I have to say this: most of those studies are not very useful to the patient. [Clinical] studies . . . may not apply whatsoever to an individual because of biochemical individuality. Its quite an academic thing that we have all these clinical trials in conventional medicine [where] people sometimes say, Theres a ninety percent chance that this will work for you, based on these studies. Thats actually a misuse of statistics. You cannot go from the percentage efcacy of studies to an individual and say that the same percentage will apply [at the individual level]. Thats a false use of science. So its more important to pick things
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BR: Well, I am working on measuring biophoton emissions in health, disease, and healing states. We are building a new detector at my lab, and well be gearing up to look at a number of different energy healing practices with a more sensitive way of measuring the light coming out of the human body. Less light should come out of the body when its healthy. Its sounds paradoxical, but with biophotons you want less light coming out. More light coming out means more disorder, more bioluminescence due to free radicals for example. A larger amount of free radicals are common in cancer, heart disease and degenerative diseases. So there actually may be more light coming out of someone who has a chronic, degenerative disease than in a healthy person.
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BR: Well, maybe we should talk about how to make nourishing changes with medicine. I wish I knew the answer to that. Economies are crumbling all around us, but this is a time when I actually feel excited because quite possibly we might see society and various systems, such as the conventional medicine system, make space for new things to come in. You know, when we have a breakdown we can have a breakthrough, whether that is at the level of an individual who is sick and something new can come into their lives or whether its with a system. I think our system of medicine is very decient and expensive and not serving us optimally. And people are losing condence in it, by choosing to go to a lot of alternative practitioners at the same time that they still patronise [conventional medicine]. We need an integrative medicine that brings the best of both to people. I see young medical students who are really excited about alternative and integrative health. They will bring that integrative health paradigm to us. They are much further ahead than their professors and other people in the system. And they have nothing to lose, whereas the people in power may lose their position of power . . . because of the way the system sort of locks them in. The quantum physicist Max Planck wrote, Science advances, funeral by funeral. So it will be with medicine. . . . But the social and economic breakdown that is upon us, and I feel it will escalate, from a larger perspective it may be benecent in terms of bringing a new, more integrated medicine into vogue.
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property. I want to persuade you that a living organism is a quantum being, with a unied wavefunction, in the same way that an atom is. Notice the use of the word synch in the above quotation. The term refers to a synchronization of quantum states that leads to quantum coherence, as will be described later in this article.
Figure 1: The living matrix is a brous system throughout the body that connects with each cell.
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Earthing refers to making barefoot contact outdoors with the surface of the earth...
as Earthing. You will not yet nd Earthing discussed in conventional medical texts or clinical journals. The discovery is too new. However, a growing number of physicians and other therapists have become familiar with Earthing and are recommending it to patients. (To learn how electrons inuence human physiology, read the book Earthing.)* Earthing refers to making barefoot contact outdoors with the surface of the earth, or indoors with systems connected to the earth. Any sensible reader will wonder what this could possibly have to do with quantum physics and quantum health. Recent research has shown that standing barefoot on the earth, or sleeping with skin contact with a conductive sheet connected to the earth, has a wide range of health benets. To what extent are these changes traceable to conventional physiology, and to what extent can they be viewed as quantum leaps? The discoveries of the benets of Earthing, in the order in which they took place, are as follows: Improved sleep Reduced pain Reduced inammation Relaxation (autonomic nervous system) Faster healing Increased heart rate variability Less clumping of red blood cells and lower blood viscosity Science seeks cause-and-effect relationships, and physiologists will recognise many connections in the above list, as shown in Figure 2.
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Physiological systems always interact with each other, and the benets of Earthing seem to spread from system to system. People sleep better when they are connected to the earth because they have less pain. They have less pain because of reduced inammation. Pain and inammation diminish because of something omnipresent on the ground beneath your feet: the earth is a natural source of the most powerful antioxidant knownthe free or mobile electron. (We shall soon see that understanding the free or mobile electron requires a look at quantum physics). In any case, our big disconnect from the earth took place around the 1960s, when we started wearing shoes with insulating soles made of rubber or plastic. Today, in modern society, we rarely make direct contact with the earth, and this may contribute to many of our health issues. With less pain comes relaxation and reduced stress, documented by measurements of the day-night levels of the stress hormone cortisol and by shifts in brain wave activity. Relaxation, in turn, reects the status of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates many internal processes, including heart rate. Variation in heart rate, known as heart rate variability, in turn, is an indicator of healthy functioning of the autonomic nervous system and the processes it regulates, including the strength and frequency of the heartbeat. Heart rate variability improves with Earthing, and medical researchers view this as a positive indicator of longevity.
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Finally, Earthing has a direct and rapid effect on red blood cells. Mobile electrons from the earth increase the negative charges on the surfaces of red cells, increasing their mutual repulsion. This results in less clumping of the blood cells and a lowering of blood viscosity, both powerful benets for preventing and combating cardiovascular disease. Every aspect of cardiovascular functioning improves when the blood is less viscous, including blood ow and circulation. Medical research has shown that when the blood thins, blood pressure drops, and this is immediately detected by pressure sensors in the walls of arteries. Signals from these receptors lower sympathetic nervous system activity and slow the heart rate. Improved circulation has vast benecial implications for individuals with atherosclerosis and diabetes as well as those recovering from injury or surgery. The multitude of benets suggests that Earthing could improve ones chances of leading a longer and healthier life. The dominant scientic model of agingthe free radical theorystates that aging results from cumulative oxidative damage to cells and tissues. Free radicals, technically termed reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species, are produced during normal activities and are increased by injuries, toxic chemicals, and pollutants in the air. Because of its pervasiveness, the living matrix provides the ideal delivery system for mobile electrons from the earth that can neutralise free radicals anywhere they form in the cells and tissues of the body.
in a crystal. Through this rigid atomic matrix ows an electric current that carries energy as a stream of electrons, often likened to billiard balls. A closer look would reveal that none of these conduction electrons belongs to any particular atom in the lattice. In other words, the electrons are not localised (the quantum physics term is that they are delocalised) and are free to move about. From the quantum perspective, delocalised electrons are contained within a region, called an orbital, extending over several adjacent atoms, or even extending throughout a whole molecule (called a molecular orbital) or throughout the whole system, the unied wavefunction suggested by Mae-Wan Ho. The free electrons form a sort of electric uid, or a cloud, or a gas. Physicists have used all of these terms: billiard balls, delocalised electrons, uid or quantum uid, cloud, and gas to describe conduction electrons. The classical way of viewing thisin the Newtonian modelis a mechanical perspective in which the billiard balls are discrete and localizable entities with measurable properties like velocity, acceleration, and momentum, and that move when they are pushed. Quantum physics teaches us that there is another way of looking at the situation. Yes, if you look at the electrons in a certain way, they behave as particles. However, if you look at them in a different way, they behave as waves, with the capability of moving about very rapidly, although not as fast as the speed of light. During the 1980s, while I was elucidating the living matrix concept, my career took me into the fascinating world of Nobel Prise-winner Albert Szent-Gyrgyi and his colleagues at the Institute for Muscle Research in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Szent-Gyrgyi had recognised that something profoundly important was missing from modern biomedicine and that this fact was greatly retarding progress in nding the causes of serious medical conditions such as cancer and heart disease. What was missing was an understanding of the movements of energy and information within the human body. This led Szent-Gyrgyi to the study of quantum physics and the quantum mechanisms involved
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in the movements of electrons in proteins and the structures made from proteins. Szent-Gyrgyi and his colleagues discovered that proteins are semiconductors, materials with electrical conductivity intermediate between conductors such as copper wires and insulators such as plastic and rubber. Thus began a new eld of science, which Szent-Gyrgyi called electronic biology. As often happens with new ideas, the semiconductor concept was immediately rejected by the scientic community. Experiments were done in which proteins were puried, dehydrated, squeezed into pellets, and placed between two electrodes. These samples would not conduct an electric current. Proteins are therefore insulators, or so it seemed, and therefore Szent-Gyrgyi was mistaken. However, there was a aw in those studies. Water had been removed from the proteins. Without water, proteins are indeed insulators and essentially dead. If you study hydrated or wet proteins, you get a very different picture.
The importance of Szent-Gyrgyis seminal research was highlighted by microbiologist N. S. Hush, of the University of Sydney in Australia, in a 2003 overview of fty years of progress in molecular electronics published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. In his paper, Hush explains how Szent-Gyrgyis fundamental insights have coalesced into a thriving international research program in what might be called the ultimate nanotechnology. Hush is referring to the application of quantum physics in the design of molecular circuits that are fundamental to the development of the modern electronics and molecular electronics industries. Electronic biology readily integrated with the living matrix concept, leading me to conclude that the circuits involved in spontaneous healing, as mentioned by Weil in his book, might provide a paradigm for an exact holistic science of the living organism as a quantum being sought by Mae-Wan Ho. This exact science might lead to an understanding of spontaneous healing and other quantum leaps in health. Modern research shows that water is not just important for semiconduction. It also contributes remarkable system-wide quantum properties. The reason for this is that the collagen molecules in the human body are very long and thin and many millions of them join in precisely spaced parallel arrays that can be viewed as organic liquid crystals (see Figure 3a). Because of their regular spacing, these arrays yield sharp X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance images showing that the amino acid components of the proteins are spaced to make precise perfect ts for organizing chains of water molecules adjacent to them. This was rst noticed by H. J. C. Berendsen from Hollands University of Groningen in 1962 using nuclear magnetic resonance. Further research shows that there are about three layers of water molecules surrounding each collagen strand. Finally, because the water is so precisely organised around arrays of collagen strands, the water molecules themselves must be also regarded as a body-wide liquid crystalline system (see Figure 3b).
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there is growing interest in the physiological and spiritual benets of sun-gazing, as described in a number of documentary lms. For example, see the You Tube trailer for Eat the Sun. Note that it is unwise to simply go outside and look directly into the sun. One needs to have instruction on the proper way to do this. As with other ideas presented in this article, some readers will regard the concepts of the sun, earth and human body forming a unied coherent system, and the benets of sun-gazing as obvious, whereas others will be understandably skeptical. Having stated these ideas, I plan to detail their scientic basis in subsequent articles, so stay tuned!
*Clinton Ober; Stephen T. Sinatra, MD; and Martin Zucker. Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever? Basic Health Publications, 2010. The author expresses his gratitude to Nora H. Oschman and Martin Zucker for helpful comments on the manuscript. James L. Oschman, PhD, has degrees in biology and biophysics from the University of Pittsburgh, and has worked at major research labs around the world and taught at various universities. He is a pioneer in energy medicine research, with an aim of providing a Western scientic basis for CAM modalities. He has written more than 100 journal articles and authored two books: Energy Medicine: The Scientic Basis (Harcourt Brace/Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh, 2000), and Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance (Harcourt Health Sciences/Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, 2003). He is the president of Natures Own Research Association, located in Dover, New Hampshire, where he continues his writing and research. You can learn more at his webpage, www.energyresearch.us.
Figure 3: (a) Collagen molecules precisely align in arrays, (b) Water molecules align around collagen arrays, (c) Quantum coherent water molecules synchronise their spin direction.
Recent research from the laboratory of Emilio Del Giudice and colleagues, from the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Milano, Italy, and the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB) in Neuss, Germany, has revealed profoundly important quantum effects and relationships in structures such as these. Mae-Wan Ho has summarised these ndings in a series of articles published in Science in Society, the publication of her institute in London. The research shows that the water molecules associated so precisely around the collagen molecules form large quantum coherent domains. Here the word domain refers to a region characterised by a specic feature, such as spin. Moreover, there is a tendency for vast numbers of spinning water molecules to synchronise their spins, or to become quantum coherent (see Figure 3c). Among the exciting properties of such a system is the ability of coherent water domains to trap and store very subtle electromagnetic energy from the environment (a possible basis for homeopathy). Finally, these discoveries, and the fact that the excited electrons that are available from the surface of the earth originate in the Sun, point to an extraordinary possibility: that the Sun, Earth, and human body form an interconnected quantum coherent system. This could mean that the well-known benets of sunlight, for example for natural vitamin D synthesis, are synergistic with the natural benets of Earthing. Moreover,
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have a lot of faith in my common-sensible understanding of the world that we call reality. For example, I accept that the universe is not a machine and that it cant run entirely by cause-effect apparatuses, and also that human beings are certainly not machines and certainly dont run like machines. This simple insight provides my commonsense understanding in an ordinary senseand in a deeper sense as well. When we peel off the layers of this insight and go deeper into levels of what things ultimately mean, we can nally reduce our inquiry about what reality is down to the level of quantum physics, God and Spirit. At the deepest level, when I say that I have a rm belief in God, I mean not necessarily just blind belief in a supercial way, but from some profound experiences that tell me we all are experiencing a single mind. If you follow my thoughts to a logical conclusion, you nd that there is only one Soul in the universe, only one Consciousness that acts by blinking matter into and out of reality, as you do when you dream. You are part of that single awareness. Its not that you have a mind and Mr. Jones has a mind and Mrs. Smith has a mind, but that you, Jones, and Smith are all of One Mind. The recognition that we are all One Mind may sound spiritual but theres actually a logical proof that one can make according to the quantum physical point of view.1 The action of blinking on or off plays a very important role in my view, for it indicates that mind, or this One Mind, is very much part of the physical world.
But as for the perception of reality, quantum physics has rules that tell us something about how that works. For example, one rule says that matter takes on denable and reproducible characteristics only upon an observation or measurement. When a quantum entity is not observed, it exists in all possible states, or multiple states, which is called a superposition. But that is not our commonsense perception of the world. When we arent looking at a tree, is there only one tree or many trees? As I will soon show you, if we assume that the world is what it appears to be through perception (that is, a singular, not multiple, world) even when were not looking, we evoke an assumption thats fraught with problems.
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But, what if there are two separated and distinct minds in the world? Theres an ancient philosophical problem that goes something like this: Im standing in a room looking out of the window at a garden. I decide to leave that room and go into the room next door, where the window shades are already drawn so the room is completely dark and I can no longer see the garden. What happened to the garden as a result of that action? The answer, according to quantum physics, is that if I were the only mind that ever was, ever is, and ever will be, the garden would turn into multiple gardensappearing in all its possible statesthe minute those shades were drawn making the garden unobservable. Thats a very mystical result to people; most of us just cant understand that. So let me change the story a little. In the new story, suppose there was another person in the rst room with me, who remained there looking at the garden while I went into the other darkened room seeing nothing. From a commonsense viewpoint, one person sees light and a garden, and the other person sees dark and no garden. No problem, commonsense says, since two people with separate minds exist. But from the quantum physics viewpoint, both that other person and the garden should inhabit multiple worlds, since I am not observing either of them! Clearly we cant have it both ways. Either there are multiple gardens and people or not. According to the dictates of commonsense there arent; there is only one garden, one person in the lighted room, and myself in the dark. If that is true, then quantum physics must be incorrect. But, if quantum physics is correct, then multiple gardens existand my friend in the lighted room must also be in a multiple state, since Im not looking at him! Do we have to be schizophrenic to wrap our minds around this? If you asked my friend what state he was in while in the lighted room, hed say that there was only one of him, that he was perfectly normal and phrenic, not schizophrenic, and as sane as anybody else. And so we run into a paradox: the world according to the way I see it follows one set of rules but the world that others tell me about conicts
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with my understanding of the world according to quantum mechanics. How do we resolve this paradox? The paradox arises when minds are compartmentalised. If your mindor anyone elsesexists independently of mine, then it must follow quantum rules, just as my mind must. When I am not observing you, you must be in multiple states. And the same for me when you are not observing me. But then we are back where we started, as that must mean that any mind that each of us is not privy to must be schizophrenic! The only way to resolve the paradox is to realise that there must be One Mind that is capable of seeing everything simultaneously. Once that One Mind observes the garden and so changes the multiple gardens into a single landscape, then that single landscape registers in all minds. That still leaves a problem unresolved. How can one consciousness exist in what seems to be two or more parts (two or more individuals), and yet still be only One Mind? The answer is that even though that One Mind seems to be in two places, its really not. Whatever is conscious in the world cannot be just between my ears, your ears, or the ears of anyone else, but must exist non-locally. In quantum physics another rule deals with nonlocality, which refers to something that is not subject to classical cause-effect and so can have inuence on other things no matter the distance between them. In other words, a nonlocal entity doesnt have any single location. The One Mind is nonlocal. If thats so, then the obvious question becomes: How can the One Mind create the illusion of so many separate minds?
What Is Duality?
If you accept that there is only the One Mind, then the experience of the illusion of separateness from the One, of having your own singular existence seemingly separate from the One, must be maya. From this point of view, maya is based on the concept of duality. Without duality, there cant be any separation from the One. You might answer this paradox by saying that
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unity is inconceivable. Its unapproachable. It cant even be dened because the mere act of denition would distinguish between one thing and something else. That act of denition is, by its nature, dual, or duality, or separation. Yet, there is a way to look at duality that includes unity. In my earlier work on New Alchemy and according to Qabalistic thinking, the numbers one and two symbolise this paradox (one, the unity, is symbolised by Aleph, and two, the duality, is symbolised by Bayt). The symbol of unity or Aleph is the great, undivided power of Spirit. The
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symbol of Bayt, or two, is a house or container symbolised by the action that separates an inside from an outside, or denes a boundary between left and right, or up and down, or any distinction at all. In the tarot deck, the card with the number two often appears as the magician. The magician acts to suddenly bring into existence something from something else. The act of bringing into existence something from something else as if by magic represents duality. The paradox is in recognizing that if we can see a distinction, we are following the magicians trick and fooling ourselves. Theres something within us capable
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of being fooled by experiencing our sacred unity as profane duality. Maybe thats the way the game of life must be played. The ultimate new alchemical rule of unity is to rst form duality, for we cant even begin to conceive of unity without rst experiencing the illusion of duality (separateness)something arising from something else.
part of the One Mind and the current materialist and dualist view that is based on Marxism, Darwinism and Scientism, the prevailing materialrealist scientic paradigm. Its like our minds are being stretched in a kind of saran warp that is being pulled across the hands of time. Were caught in that warp. None of us can calmly think our way through this. We have to work through that warp, and feel the stress that continually reverberates every time we come up with some new insight as to the nature of what is real and what isnt. Although at times the world each of us lives in may seem to be a very dark place, the light of the One Mind will always be able to shine through. Theres never an end to the shining that comes through the aurawhat I call the magicthat is present. The mere fact that there is a world at all is so miraculous and so impossible to explain by anybody that we should, in recognition and in faith of that, be continually awestruck and continually joyful in spite of the obvious lacks we may feel in our lives from time to time. The fact that we have this material form is no less miraculous, and it may very well be that the common suffering that we see around us and that we feel within us may be concomitant to, or the result of, the fact that we are spirits living in a material form. If we are to reconcile the paradoxes raised by quantum physics and seemingly in conict with our common sense, then we must come to the understanding that while we may perceive the illusion of separateness, we are actually reections in the multiple looking glass of the One Mind.
1See
Fred Alan Wolf. (1) The Spiritual Universe: One Physicists Vision of Spirit, Soul, Matter, and Self. NH: Moment Point Press, 1999, chapter 12. Also see (2) Matter into Feeling: A New Alchemy of Science and Spirit. NH: Moment Point Press, 2002, and (3) Mind into Matter: A New Alchemy of Science and Spirit. NH: Moment Point Press, 2000. Dr. Fred Alan Wolf is known and loved as Dr. Quantum. He earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from UCLA and has taught at universities around the world. He is the author of fourteen books, including the award-winning Taking the Quantum Leap. He also was featured in the popular movie What the BLEEP Do We Know? To learn more visit Dr. Wolfs website at www.fredalanwolf.com.
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Researchers at United Arab Emirates University fed 24 mice saffron over a 24-week period. A control group of eight mice were given distilled water instead of saffron. Shortly after starting that regime, all mice, the ones getting fed saffron and the control group, were injected with two powerful chemicals known to induce liver cancer. Of the control group, six developed cancerous liver nodules, whereas only four of the saffron-eating mice did. None of the mice that ate the highest doses of saffron developed the nodules. In a separate experiment using human liver cells, the researchers showed that saffron caused cell death in cancer cells and inhibited the growth of certain proteins that play a role in cell inammation and proliferation. The researchers are planning to next test the efcacy of saffron in actual liver cancer patients. Saffron may be effective against liver cancer, but the crocus ower is providing a substance that can take on many different types of cancer. That substance, colchicine, has become the basis of a new drug that is able to ght cancer by cutting off the blood supply to solid tumors and preventing metastasis. Steve Connor, science editor of the online site for The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk) quotes study director Professor Laurance Patterson, of the Institute for Cancer Therapeutics at Bradford University: What weve designed is, effectively, a smart bomb that can be targeted directly at any solid tumor to kill it without appearing to harm healthy tissue. The new drug has been tested so far only in mice, and it has achieved a 70 percent cure rate on four different kinds of cancer after only a single dose was administered. Phase I trials in humans to test its safety are slated to begin within the next eighteen months.
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Lighting Up Cells
The September 16, 2011, National Public Radio (NPR, www.npr.org) online page features a story by Joe Palca called Shining Light (Literally) On the Workings of Cells that details a new way scientists can see inside cells to see whats happening in real time. It used to be that biologists had to destroy a cell to study it. Nowadays, however, various methods have been developed to study live cells as they function. Granted, most of the time the cells are still taken from the organism and grown in a petri dish, but these new methods are denitely a step forward in studying living cells. As Palca reports, one of the newest ways of imaging cell function is using chemicals to tag various molecules within cells to make them glow, allowing them to be seen in action. It has been difcult to do so in the past, and this new method, developed by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical School, in New York State, has devised a method to more easily tag RNA and watch it in real time within cells. The RNA was tagged with a chemical that made it glow green and so become visible when certain wavelengths of light were directed at it. In this way scientists were able to see the normally invisible RNA in the cell and to watch its reactions to various kinds of manipulations. For instance, scientists did not know how RNA would react when sucrose was added to the cell. When the RNA was tagged with the chemical that caused the luminescence, however, researchers clearly saw that after a half hour the amount of RNA had vastly multiplied in reaction to the infusion of sucrose. You can watch a time-lapse video of the RNA reaction at http://www.npr. org/2011/07/28/138784047/shining-lightliterally-on-the-workings-of-cells&sc=nl&cc=sh20110730 . Lead researcher Samie Jaffrey says that this development will allow researchers unprecedented access to viewing RNA function that may reveal important clues about the nature of this molecule and its link to disease: When do they move, in response to what signals in cells?
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And how is their movement affected in diseases? Knowing the answers, he concludes, will give us more insight into how those RNAs are linked to the disease process.
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A Danish study reported on by Nancy Walsh of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Schools online site MedPageToday revealed that plaques on the eyelids, called xanthelasmata, may be correlated to a higher risk of heart disease. The long-term study followed mostly Caucasian adults over a 22-year period and found that those people with the eye plaques, which look like small yellowish bumps scattered around the eyelid area, had increased risk for both myocardial infarction and ischemic heart disease, as well as for other heart-related problems and death from heart disease. The researchers said, Our results clearly establish for the rst time that people with xanthelasmata have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease regardless of plasma cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations. An additional eye condition, called arcus cornaea, has also been implicated as vidual evidence for a correlation to increased risk for heart disease. For the whole story, go to http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/ Atherosclerosis/28541.
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Dangerous Junk FoodWe know those burgers and fries, candy and ice cream are not good for us, and now we have a better idea of why. They can cause cellular changes that mimic the inammation normally caused by bacteria, viruses and harmful substances such as asbestos. University of North Carolina researchers found that mouse immune cells reacted to exposure to saturated fats, such as palmitate, which is found in many processed high-fat foods, by affecting proteins, called inammasomes, which are found in macrophage cells. The result was the release of interleukin-1 beta, which is known to blind liver, fat and muscle tissue to insulin. In people, this blindness to insulin ultimately leads to type 2 diabetes. The messagewhich is no surpriseis to avoid fatty foods. (210/2808)
...mice exposed to air pollution over a nine-month period experienced decreases in spatial learning abilities and memory...
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Note: Most of the information in this article is excerpted from the Institute of HeartMath document, Global Coherence Initiative: Facilitating the Planetary Consciousness Shift, a paper still being completed by the Institute of HeartMath and not yet published. Footnotes and references have been omitted. Illustrations were provided by Rollin McCrary, PhD, Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath, and are from the above mentioned paper or his presentation at the 2011 Bioenergetics Conference, Greensboro, NC.
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ts almost a clich to say we are all one. Thats a statement of metaphysics rather than of scienceat least of conventional science. But the fact is that some very good research is revealing the truth of global consciousness and of our connection with the cosmos. We are affected by energy elds, such as the magnetic elds from the earth and sun, and we in turn affect those elds. I am reminded of the Eastern metaphor that suggests that as the cosmos breathes out, we humans breathe in; and as we breathe out, the cosmos breathes in. This interchange may be true at many levels of structurefrom the cosmic, to the planetary, right down to the level of communities and families, and even to that of cells and molecules. Some of the best evidence of this interconnectedness at the energetic level comes from the research of the Global Coherence Initiative (GCI). GCI is a science-based, co-creative project to unite people in heart-focused care and intention, and to facilitate the shift in global consciousness from instability and discord to balance, cooperation and enduring peace. As Jack Caneld, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books and a board member of the GCI, says, The Global Coherence Initiative is perhaps the greatest experiment in the history of the world. The Institute of HeartMath is undertaking this greatest of experiments, and their results to date are cause of both curiosity and celebration.
foundation for practical, scientically validated solutions for stress reduction, building emotional resilience and quickly improving cognitive functions that are currently used by numerous Fortune 100 companies, several branches of the US military, Olympic and professional athletes, many university and private healthcare systems in the United States, more than 80 Veterans Administration hospitals and clinics, and, through IHMs educational program, more than 500,000 students and teachers. IHMs research has identied a psychophysiological state called heart coherence that is the underpinning of optimal physiological and emotional function. The discovery of this heart-coherent state led to the development of practical techniques, tools and technologies that help empower people to release stress and incoherence at any time, and connect with a deeper intelligence and intuitive awareness. Numerous studies have shown that learning how to shift into this psycho-physiological heart-centered state quickly improves cognitive performance, focus and effectiveness, selfresponsibility and social cohesion. The mission of the IHM is to provide these transformative tools and technologies on a global level to enable more people to connect with the power and guidance of their own heart, and to facilitate a global shift in consciousness from incoherence to coherence, and from self-centeredness to we-centeredness.
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a commensurate positive shift in the energetic eld environment on a local and planetary scale. As enough people move into greater personal coherence and are able to sustain that state, their elds create an even larger collective force and a standing wave is established that creates a selfreinforcing eld effect. Once this standing wave is established, reinforced and amplied through collective coherent intention, it in turn facilitates the process of amplication, making it easier for more and more people to increase their ability to selfregulate and take self-responsibility. The personal benets people experience when this happens are a powerful motivator that adds signicant reinforcement to the process. As more and more individuals in social collectives become increasingly self-regulated and grow in conscious awareness, the increased individual coherence increases social coherence, which is reected in increased cooperation and effective co-creative initiatives for the benet of society and the planet. This eld effect is a critical component required for a shift in global consciousness. To further the mission of facilitating the global shift, the IHM established the Global Coherence Initiative, which has as its primary focuses the measurement of earth, sun and cosmic elds, and the establishment of a more coherent planetary eld environment.
well as numerous other health indications such as depression, fatigue, mental confusion and the frequency of trafc accidents. There is a voluminous scientic literature indicating the this geomagnetic energy also effects important biological processes such as blood pressure, heart rate, heart-rate variability, melatonin levels, and the balance of the hormonal system. It has been associated with increased cancer, and cardiac and neurological disease and death. An important nding is that of all the bodily systems studied thus far, changes in geomagnetic conditions most strongly affect the rhythms of the heart. Whats more, just as geomagnetic elds and other kinds of elds, such as electromagnetic elds from the sun, can affect humans, it is becoming clear that bio-electromagnetic elds such as those radiated by the human heart and brain can affect other individuals and the global information-eld environment. There is also a growing body of evidence of an interaction between human emotions and global elds when a large number of people have a similar emotional response to large catastrophic events or organised global peace meditations.
Figure 1: We are not separate from each other or from our environment. Our interconnectedness creates a eld effect that unites us with our environmentlocally, on a planetary level, and at a cosmic level.
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bio-emotional energy can have a subtle but signicant (scientically measurable) nonlocal effect on people, events and organic matter. Nonlocal refers to what Einstein called those spooky actions at a distance, and it is becoming clear that a bio-electromagnetic eld such as the ones radiated by each human heart and brain can affect other individuals and their environments. For example, research conducted at the HeartMath Research Center has conrmed the hypothesis that when an individual is in heart coherence, the heart radiates a more coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment that can be detected by nearby animals or the nervous systems of other people. Of all the organs, the heart generates the largest rhythmic electromagnetic eld, one that is approximately 5000 times stronger than that produced by the brain. This eld can be detected several feet from the body with sensitive magnetometers. This magnetic eld provides a plausible mechanism for how we can feel or sense another persons presence and emotional state independent of body language or other factors. IHM researchers have also found that there is a direct relationship between the heart rhythm patterns and the spectral information encoded in the frequency spectra of the magnetic eld radiated by the heart. Thus, information about a persons emotional state is encoded in the hearts magnetic eld that is communicated throughout the body and into the external environment (see Figure 2). Further support for this hypothesis was provided in a study examining the possibility that people trained in achieving high states of heart coherence could facilitate coherence in other people in close proximity. The results showed that the coherence of untrained participants was indeed facilitated by others who were in a coherent state. In addition, evidence of heart rhythm synchronization among group participants was revealed through several evaluation methods, and higher levels of coherence correlated to higher levels of synchronization among participants. In addition, there was a statistical relationship between this synchronization and relational measures (bonding) among the participants. The authors of
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this study concluded that evidence of heart-toheart synchronization across subjects was found which lends credence to the possibility of heartto-heart bio-communications.
Figure 2: The heart emits a eld that broadcasts into the environment. When the heart eld is coherent, this eld has increased power to help create coherence in the environmental elds.
GCI researchers further hypothesise that when enough individuals and social groups increase their coherence baseline and utilise that increased coherence to intentionally create more coherent standing reference waves in the global eld, that increased coherence pattern will in turn will help increase a global consciousnessthe sense of oneness that metaphysicians so often speak of. This can be achieved when an increasing ratio of people move towards more balanced and selfregulated emotions and responses, which in turn can help facilitate cooperation and collaboration in innovative problem-solving and intuitive discernment for addressing societys signicant social, environmental and economic problems. In time, as more individuals stabilise the global eldand families, workplaces, communities move to increased social coherenceglobal coherence will also increase. In a kind of feedback loop, the growing global coherence makes it easier for more people who previously were not ready to make the shift to actually do so, which in turn further amplies the coherent standing wave, making it easier from the next wave of people and so on. Evidence for global coherence will appear as countries adopt a more planetary view, so that social and economic oppression, warfare, cultural intolerance, crime and
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cavity, and resonances that are generated by the vibrations of the earths geomagnetic eld lines as well as ultra-low frequencies that occur in the earths magnetic eld, all of which have been shown to impact human health, mental and emotional processes and behaviors. (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4: Rollin McCraty, research director at the Institute of HeartMath, in Saudia Arabia at a newly built GCI monitoring site.
Measuring the magnetic activity of the sun and plotting its correlation to human health and activity is of special signicance. Historically, many cultures believed that their collective behavior could be inuenced by the sun and other planetary bodies. This belief has proven to be true. The most likely mechanism for explaining how solar and geomagnetic inuences affect human behavior and health are a coupling between the human nervous system and the resonant frequencies generated by geomagnetic eld line resonances and the globally propagating magnetic waves called Schumann resonances, which occur in the earth-ionosphere resonant cavity. It is well established that the earth and ionosphere generate a symphony of resonant frequencies that directly overlap with those of the human brain and cardiovascular system. On a societal scale, increased violence, crime rate, social unrest, revolutions and terrorist attacks have been linked to disturbances in the geomagnetic eld of earth as inuenced by the sun. The rst scientic evidence of this belief was provided by Alexander Tchijevsky, a Russian scientist who noticed that more severe battles during WWI occurred during peak sunspot periods. He conducted a thorough study of global human history and constructed an index of Mass Human Excitability dating from 1749 to 1926, which he then compared to the solar cycles over the same time period. He found that signicant human events correlated to the solar cycle over these years. More recent plots
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Figure 3: The proposed GCI network of magnetic monitoring sites around the world.
Each site includes ultrasensitive magnetic eld detectors specically designed to measure the magnetic resonances in the earth/ionosphere
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reveal this correlation as well (see Figure 5). Iraq invaded Kuwait during the peak of the solar cycle 22, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States occurred during the peak of the solar cycle 23. Solar Cycle 24 has just recently started, and already social unrest (Tunisia and Egypt, and other places in the region) has occurred exactly in synch with the increased solar activity that has disturbed the earths elds.
Figure 5: The peak of the past two solar cycles (22 and 23) correlate with major events that have had a profound impact on the world. There appears to be a correlation between recent social unrest in Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia and increases in solar activity and geomagnetic disturbances associated with the beginning of solar cycle 24.
However, it needs to be emphasised that times of increased solar activity not only coincide with social unrest, but also give rise to the periods of greatest human ourishing, with clear spurts in architecture, arts and science and positive social change. Old structures that do not serve humanity might be replaced with more suitable and sustainable models. This is true for economical, medical, and other endeavors and for everyday activities and relationships at work and at home. At times of such pertinent change, we have the greatest opportunity to nd new ways of living and of using these energy inuxes to create periods of human ourishing and humanitarian advances.
Conclusion
The GCI theory of change is that increasing individual coherence leads to increased social coherence (family, team, organization, community, country), which in turn leads to increased global coherence, all of which is facilitated through self-reinforcing feedback loops between humanity and the global eld environment. Every individual contributes to the global eld environment, and each persons attitudes, intentions and emotional experiences counts. This interconnection is empowering to many individuals who often feel overwhelmed by the current incoherent standing wave on the planet, as they realise that their actions can make a difference and that by increasing their own coherence, they can make a contribution that has more power to help facilitate the transformative shift to the better future that many of us are now perceiving to be possible.
You can contribute to the Global Coherence Initiative or learn more about it at www.glcoherence.org or nd out more about its monitoring system at http://www.glcoherence. org/monitoring-system/about-system.html. To learn more about the Institute of HeartMath, visit, www.heartmath.org. The author wishes to thank Dr. McCraty and his colleagues for so generously providing the information and material that went into this article. Rollin McCraty, PhD, is Executive Vice President and Director of Research for the Institute of HeartMath. He also is Director of the GCI Scientic Advisory Board and GCMS Development Team. You can contact him at rollin@heartmath.org.
Another line of evidence for a global stress wave is provided from measures of the earths geomagnetic eld. Data recorded from two separate space weather satellites that were in geosynchronous orbit, positioned over the east and west coasts of the US, during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The data from the magnetometers on these two satellites revealed that a large shift occurred in the earths geomagnetic eld at the same time as the attacks. There was also a correlation with the earths elds and human activity in the days before and after the attacks. The incoherence and discord in the elds during the days after the attacks may reect the mass emotional turmoil that occurred as news of the attacks spread around the globe. Solar cycle 24 will continue to kick up in activity and reach its peak sometime in 2013. It is very likely that social activity, increased mass excitement, and social unrest will also continue in the years to come. This coming time is a critical period for GCI to expand its public educational mission and conduct its innovative research on the interconnectedness of life on Earth, and the interactions between solar activity, the earths geomagnetic and ionispheric activity, and human health and consciousness.
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I
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n a kind of mid-life retirement on the Greek islands, lasting from the late 1970s to the beginning of the 90s, I devoted most of my time to reecting, philosophising and writing. This gave me ample opportunity to rethink many of my beliefs and reassess the scientic knowledge I had acquired over many years of study and research, and to formulate a new way of looking at evolution in which I
did not have to sacrice my growing spiritual understanding of the cosmos in understanding biological evolution and human history. Patterns of human evolution in known history were among my preoccupations, and one puzzle I ran into was why the ancient Minoans, while inventing the technology of writing, had never used it to record their stories, poetry and songs. Finding no good explanation, I made up a plausible story:
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A roundtable gathering of elders and young techies was called to resolve the problem. The techies argued that people thousands of years in the future would know their songs and stories if put into the writing technology. The elders responded with dismay, saying, You want to reduce our songs and stories to chicken scratches on clay? Wheres the music, the feeling, the color and rhythm? No way! Your new-fangled technology is totally inadequate to the task! And so, they defeated the young techies proposal. Note that this could be a plausible scenario in other ancient cultures that followed a path of using writing at rst for simple accounting, then for law, and only lastly for literature. Now, fast forward to today, when we who are now the elders are dismayed at what the young are doing to written language as they wreck spelling and grammar, reducing the language to cryptic texting and silly symbols from owers to devils. But wait, arent those emoticon symbols that mushroomed from a simple happy face to a big alphabet of other symbols just what my Minoan elders found lacking in the technology of writing? Arent they the rst alphabet for feelings in all human history? And arent they given great weight by stripping the verbiage to give them prominence? It seems to me the Minoan elders, were they witness today, might nd themselves persuaded that written language has at last become adequate to the task they denied it . . . or at least is well on its way. My interest in evolution makes me pay attention to this new development because the resonance between texters set up by emoticons means that a feeling or emotion can be instantly and physically transmitted across any distance. Whether it works by mirror neurons or eld resonance, the anger or joy, jealousy or laughter is transmitted by the tap of a button and felt instantly by the recipient in empathy. Once connected in this way, a bridge is built for the ow of more complex information by direct mind-to-mind and heartto-heart transmission that includes the sharing
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of thoughts as well as feelings, which I like to call communion to distinguish it from overt communication by expression, gesture, or spoken and written word.
Transparent Thoughts
Years ago a successful businesswoman friend who perceives on levels beyond the physical and reads both the minds and emotions of people and of animals and plants told me she was certain that such direct transmission of informationa much richer linguistic/thought exchange than the word telepathy can conveywas coming back into the contemporary human world. One day my Minoan story clicked together with my new experience of the emoticon alphabet to give me a plausible hypothesis of how this could happen in our culture at large, aside from the relatively few people born with this natural ability who may or may not nd each other. Years of working with and learning from indigenous people had made me well aware that such telepathic communion was commonplace in a number of indigenous societies and possibly even universal in the deep past (more on that later). The book Amazon Beaming, for example, reports the contemporary experience of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre with the Mayoruna people of the Amazon, from whom he learned such communion, as it was practiced by the entire tribe, which used spoken language very sparsely, yet had extremely sophisticated understanding of both linear time and the ever-present Now. McIntyre reported that beaming gave him access to the tribes group knowledge, its collective history and information about the area, which later proved vital for him while planning an expedition to locate the Amazons source. Quite apart from cell phones and indigenous people, kindergarten teachers have been reporting that children do group projects without talking, yet quite obviously understanding each other. That the communion phenomenon is becoming widespread is attested to by TV shows such as Paranormal State and Psychic Children, not to mention the many websites by and about
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these children, so many of whom have other paranormal abilities as well that we will not be able to call them by that label much longer. Paranormal Daily News, for example, reports*: Perhaps the most helpful and valuable psychic ability for any child is the power of clairsentience, also known as empathy. Empathy is the capability to sense, feel, and comprehend the physical emotions of others, including animals or even spirits. Not just by body language, but by the channeling of feelings as well... Another useful and astonishing ability is the mental skill of telepathy. Telepathy is the ability to perceive the thoughts of a person, or being able to send your own. Other feats can be being able to implant a thought on someones mind or being able to project an image of an object or person in other peoples mind (which sometimes can be perceived by others to be real). All this, both empathy and telepathy (clairsentience and communion), suggests that the older childrens (and no few adults) texting is simply a way of bringing up to snuff those of us who were not born with these abilities openly displaying and/or not squelched by the dominant culture of non-believers. Note that the phenomenon of such communion requires a mental transparency that can spell disaster for those not sharing it, as in this sentence, part of the above quote: The downside for adults is that kids with a telepathic ability can become aware of certain things an adult, such as a parent, may not have want them to know. These children (and less frequently adults such as my friend) read each others minds in order to respond to each other directly. This means their minds are transparent to each other, as are the minds of other people to them. It is that transparency which often dismays the adults in their lives, sometimes to the point of having the children sent away because the transparency is intolerable to the adults, whose secrets are open to these children, who quickly learn that their abilities are not universal to all humans
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as they speak out the adults secret thoughts! Stop and imagine the world such that we are all transparent to each other; one in which we can no longer deceive each other. Think of all the changes this wouldand it seems ever more likely, willbring. In our culture at large, we have seen transparency come rst into the corporate world with Enron et al, followed by exposs of the banking worlds shenanigans. Transparency has struck the Catholic Church a huge blow, and now with the advent of Wikileaks, governments and their secret agencies are becoming ever more transparent as well. The Internet brings us all the news the press conspires to keep from us, and even dictators resort to the unfamiliar mode of Twittering like teenagers in feeble attempts to hold onto their power among the young, who seem increasingly open and fearless. It does seem that transparency and its attendant communion is on our human evolutionary agenda, and I believe we should welcome it!
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fundamental nature. It took nearly a century longer for even maverick theoretical biologists to see the inuence of consciousness on the material world, for example, on our DNA, as epigenetics now attests, and it is still virtually unknown in the practice of biology except in alternative medicine and healing. The ofcial assumptions underlying the modern and post-modern Western scientic worldview describe the universe as meaningless, purposeless, non-living matter/energy that accidentally evolved into a vast scattering of galaxies, each peppered with lone stars and planets. Upon the surface of one such planet, if not more, life miraculously sprang from random bits of non-life tossed about in lightning storms. Life can be understood by a reductionist process tracing it back to these original random bits and rebuilding it step by step, invoking theories such as Darwinian natural selection, an idea taken from intelligent plant and animal breeding, yet purportedly practised by non-intelligent nature. To explain natural selection, Darwin worked out a competitive struggle for existence in scarcitya notion he took from his economist friend Thomas Malthus, who was rationalizing colonialism. At the same time, Rudolf Clausius was studying steam engines and giving us the theory of universal entropic decline, derived from machinery but projected onto the entire universe. Thus we ended up being told that life could only exist in the universe temporarily as a competitive uphill struggle against this tide of decline that it would eventually lose. Yet, planet Earth has now increased life and its complexity for about a third of the age of the entire universe without showing any signs of entropy except for the depredations of our own species, thereby putting the concept into question as the very nature of nature. All in all, it is a dull and depressing scientic creation story to say the least: Life due to accident
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and doomed to heat death, a motionless, inconceivable coldness that ends it all. So we frail humans can do no more with our miraculous moment of life than to make the best of it by struggling to stretch out our meager natural resources a few more generationsor even a few more years, as it turns outconsuming all we can to comfort ourselves, hoping our technology will produce miracles to save us from our fate a little longer. As a child in love with Nature who became an evolution biologist to understand it all better, I was at rst awed by the amazing tools and authority of science, but eventually, realizing that its fundamental assumptions were both necessary and necessarily unproven, I began to question them, as, I soon discovered, did many of my fellow scientists, especially physicists. We discovered that there were much older sciences elsewhere in the world that had seen our universe as very different from what we had been taught. Many of us gravitated to the Vedic science assumptions of a living universe that was conscious, self-organizing, recycling, and not running down at all. Some, such as Peter Russell and Rupert Sheldrake, actually went to India to study; others read the literature and interacted with the increasing ow of gurus and yoga teachers coming to the West. And thus the scientic paradigm shift toward a conscious living universe began. It seemed increasingly strange to me that my academic colleagues could accept the idea that life can come from non-life, intelligence from non-intelligence, consciousness from nonconsciousness. How was it possible that these strange impossibilities did not disturb them? Even now, most microbiologists peer into their electron microscopes at the insides of cells, watching a vast complexity of itsy-bitsy molecules do the most incredibly intelligent things with and to and for each other to make that cell workand still
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We discovered that there were much older sciences elsewhere in the world that had seen our universe as very different from what we have been taught.
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dont get it that those molecules know what they are doing, that they are conscious and intelligent. The description of a universe of Cosmic Consciousness densifying into energy and then worlds of matter is very ancient, known, for example, to Chinese Taoism, Indian Vedanta and Japanese Kotodama, not to mention many indigenous cosmologies. It is the antithesis of what Western science assumes about the universe: Consciousness gives rise to matter versus matter gives rise to consciousness; participatory universe versus objective universe, living selforganizing universe versus non-living accidental universe. As I adopted the alternative assumptions, my favorite metaphor for reality was a vast curving piano keyboard, with matter in the low keys, electromagnetic energy in the mid-range, and mind, spirit, consciousness in the high keys, the whole thing curving up from the sea of Cosmic Consciousness that gives rise to it. Spiritual people, or Vedic scientists, I realised, see the universe from the perspective of the high keys, while science studies the universe from the perspective of the low keys and has by now come up into the midrange with Einsteins famous E = MC2, showing how music played on the keyboard can be transposed between the matter and energy regions, all being a matter of frequencies. As we evolve we see more and more that we are on the same keyboard, in the same universethat we need not integrate science and spirituality so much as remove the unnatural barriers we set up between them. Western science assumptions, clearly colored by cultural ideas about invented mechanisms, have given us the scientic spinoffs of amazing technologies we would not like to do without, from microscopes and telescopes to airplanes and space ships, to recorded music and movies, to communications systems up to the Internet, and on and on. I do not want to replace Western science in a paradigm shift, but rather to let it exist in a consortium of equals, so that a science built on the assumption of a living universe can have equal status with it and can be heard in the debate about how Western science is going
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astray as it tries to improve on life mechanically, as in genetic and agricultural engineering, and to some extent drug-based medicine, all of which are proving dangerous to humans and our planet. In my view, then, science should no longer be monolithic, limited to one cultures science. The methodological tools of sciencefrom theorising to research protocols to formal analysis of resultscan be used to study a universe described by any set of clearly stated, formalised assumptions based on the human experience of our universe. Human cultures simply see the universe differently and that must be respected. Many of them developed sciences, some of which exist to this day, such as Vedic and Islamic sciences, and they have a right to be acknowledged as such by Western science in the spirit of cooperation that must now replace our obsolete notions of hostile competition. Toward that end, I convened two international symposia of scientists and philosophers of science, one in Japan and the other in Malaysia, to identify alternative sets of cultural assumptions on which different sciences are based. My next step is to begin global research demonstrating the effective existence of this consortium of sciences to gain more acceptance and visibility for it as the real next evolutionary step of science. As for society, let us all envision a world in which technology becomes sensitive to the needs of our living Earth and our species health, and in which we can afford the transparency that can bring us together in communion with each other and all life.
*Website is http://paranormaldailynews.com/2009/06/20/153/ Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD, is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, author and speaker. With a post-doctoral degree from the American Museum of Natural History, she taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts, contributed to the NOVA-Horizon TV series, is a fellow of the World Business Academy, and a member of the World Wisdom Council. Her venues include the World Bank, UN, Boeing, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, South African Rand Bank, Caux Round Table, Tokyo International Forum, the governments of Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, Sao Paulo business schools and State of the World Forums. She is the author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution; A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us; and Biology Revisioned with Willis Harman. You can contact her through her website, www.sahtouris.com.
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THE BASIC CODE OF THE UNIVERSE: THE SCIENCE OF THE INVISIBLE IN PHYSICS, MEDICINE, AND SPIRITUALITY.
By Massimo Citro, MD Reviewed by Joan Parisi Wilcox
If you are familiar with the work of the late Jacques Benveniste in imprinting water with information, or the more current experiments by Luc Montagnier, then you will want to know about Massimo Citros research, which follows on the heels of this prior work and Emotos memory of water research. Citro has collaborated with most of the major players in this eld, and in this book he recounts his ground-breaking experiments in imprinting information into the structure of water. Citro is a medical doctor specializing in psychotherapy who has additional substantive training in literature, philosophy, quantum physics, herbalism and acupuncture. He also has studied metaphysics, alchemy and Susm. His book is an amalgam of all these interests, although its focus is his research into imprinting water. His area of concentration is with pharmaceuticals: he has developed a process called pharmacological frequency transfer, in which he is able to transfer the information from pharmaceuticals to water so that people receive the healing effects without any of the adverse side effects associated with the use of pharmaceuticals. Citro carefully builds his case, providing substantial background about his theory of the basic code of the universe, which he calls the form that gives signicance to matter. He clearly identies the fundamental theoretical tenets of information transfer and communication in the universe, all of which are based on this basic code. The basic code, he writes, is the set of essential data that dene the eld of a substance, then the form, serving like a rst draft of form, providing the informational building blocks from which nothing becomes something. This code then becomes the primary enegertic and informatinal regulator of the body, guarding its form, unity, features, and functions. It also gives matter a rhythm, making the space around it vibrate. From these vibrations information radiates out into the universal information eld. Finally, the information eld allows that body to communicate its being and characteristics to others through eld interactions. The book goes into great detail about the dynamics of each of these fundamental aspects of the basic code, as well as exploring the philosophical and
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The Basic Code of the Universe; Park Street Press; ISBN 978-1-59477-391-4 UK: August 2011, 21 US: August 2011, $24.95; Kindle edition available.
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metaphysical implications of the code and the pervasive informational eld that underlies reality and informs the cosmos. He covers the science of the invisible, the strange world of water, the living vacuum, nature and molecules, rhythms and vibrations, and the nature of space itself. At times, however, there are rather abrupt shifts from physics and biology to metaphysics and alchemy, and this reviewer found those shifts distracting, and at times maddening. These frequent forays from facts to belief systems seemed to undercut the science. Citro certainly is a renaissance man in terms of the range of his training and interests, but this catch-all aspect of his book weakens its impact, diverting attention from the breakthrough science. That said, Citros research is immensely interesting, and if you want to stay current on whats happening in the world of the memory of water research and of imprinting information onto water for healing effect, you will want to read this book.
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Energy Medicine East and West aims to provide a comprehensive overview of human bioenergetics for students and practitioners of energy medicine. The main thrust of the book is revealed in the subtitle, A Natural History of Qi. Qi (or chi) is a term widely recognised in the West as the Oriental concept of the life force or ow of energy that animates the physical body, a mysterious source energy which is the fundamental essence of all living things. Lack or blockages of qi is considered in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to be the root cause of all illness. A small but ever-growing number of Westerners are taking up Chinese martial arts such as qigong and tai chi, which aim to increase the ow of qi in the body, bringing greater health, vitality, balance and inner peace. Many have attested to their efcacy. Even so, Western physicians have long objected to the notion of qi, meridians and the like. It simply didnt tie in with what they could measure, observe and predict with their medical devices, so in true scientic style, they ignored it. But today this life force energy is not so easy to sweep aside because modern instruments and scientic research methods are increasingly nding evidence for its existence. This is what much of this book is about. The pedigree of the contributors is rst rate. The editors are experienced medical practitioners, actively involved in bioenergetic research, teaching and practice for several decades. The other twenty-ve contributorsall experts in their eldsinclude clinicians, research scientists, psychotherapists and practitioners of acupuncture and oriental medicine, mainly based in Europe and North America, sadly none from the Far East. First off is an introduction from that champion of bioenergetic medicine, Dr James Oschman. He points out that most Western physicians simply do not understand the concept of energy. Medical schools would pay more attention to the medicines of other cultures, he argues, if they taught physics, biophysics and quantum mechanics alongside traditional biology. The next three chapters (Section 1) discuss the historical context of Asian and Central African medicine, and nd parallels in Western traditions as disparate as
the ancient Greeks, Anton Mesmer, D. H. Lawrence and the Christian mystics. Fascinatingand in places challenging stuff! Section 2 focuses on traditional Chinese medicine, synthesising qi with the chakras of the Ayurvedic tradition and explaining how tuina (Chinese massage) and qigong promote health and well-being. It also provides a concise explanation of the key differences between Western medicines focus on the material and chemical structure of the body and the energycentred outlook of TCM. The two approaches are hard to reconcile, because traditionally Chinese medicine has focussed on function not physiology, hence the difculty in drawing direct comparisons between qi and strictly bio-mechanical explanations of the bodys functioning. Section 3 discusses theory and experimental ndings on qi, incorporating the insights of quantum physics, electromagnetism and philosophy. As a non-scientist, I occasionally got lost in the detail, although the main message is clearthe driving force beneath the quantum world is information; the physical body can no longer be viewed as solid and xed, but must also be seen as plastic and uid, and directed by information. Section 4 is about various modalities of energy medicine. It describes in detail a range of therapeutic techniques for which qi is central to practice. Examples discussed include distance healing, Reiki, hands-on approaches such as Therapeutic Touch, homeopathy, acupuncture, Zero Balancing, shiatsu and energy psychology (TFT, kinesiology, etc.). Case studies and evidence of efcacy (when available) are provided. Section 5 looks at clinical applications of qi and energywww.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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based modalities for children and adults, including an interesting chapter on the psychoneuroimmunology connection and a paper by Peter Fraser on Health and the Human Body-Field. Most Quantum Health magazine readers will be aware of Frasers thirtyyear quest to prove the physical reality of qi and his mapping of the human body-eld. His paper describes his theory of the body-eld and uses chronic fatigue syndrome and bromyalgia as examples of how this knowledge can be applied. The concluding chapter offers a selection of denitions of qi, ow, energy and other concepts, seeking a consensus of meaning. Energy Medicine East and West is detailed, comprehensive, well presented and authoritative. It
is not written for the layperson, many of whom, I suspect, will nd some parts of it too technical and taxing. However, there is much to gratify and inform practitioners and would-be practitioners, and to contribute to the understanding of the subject among serious students.
Energy Medicine East and West, Churchill Livingstone, ISBN 978-0-7020-3571-5 UK: Elsevier Ltd., May 2011, 31.99 US: June 2011, $54.95; Kindle edition also available. David Lawrence Preston is the Quality Training Manager for NES Health, Course Manager for the Institute of Bioenergetic and Informational Healthcare (IBIH), and author of 365 Steps to Self-Condence (How to Books, 2001) and several other titles. He is also a regular workshop presenter.
RADICAL MEDICINE: CUTTING-EDGE NATURAL THERAPIES THAT TREAT THE ROOT CAUSES OF DISEASE
By Louisa L. Williams, MS, DC, ND Reviewed by Joan Parisi Wilcox
In this substantial hardcover book, Dr. Louisa Williams provides encyclopedic coverage of the issues of environmental toxicityfrom vaccines to dental amalgams to beauty productsand provides over 500 pages of information on natural treatments for a variety of diseases and illnesses that may be related to toxicity. Her jumping off point is that our teeth are focal points for health issues, especially concerning the alleged dangers of mercury dental amalgams, and it is this theme that provides the pathway through the terrain she covers on health and natural medicine. If you are interested in the issue of teeth and their relation to overall health and in the issues of dental toxicity, then I doubt you will nd a more comprehensive discussion. If you are, however, looking for an encyclopedia that covers natural therapies in general, this is not the book for you. In this regard, this reviewer nds the title misleading. It simply does not give adequate information that this book is looking at health primarily as an issue of dental toxicity, although the inside ap text does. While this book is directed at both the public at large and CAM practitioners, its subject matter is specialized enough to be better suited to those in the CAM healing elds or people with diseases that
have no explanation from an allopathic perspective and are searching for other possible root causes of their problems, especially as relates to environmental and dental toxicity. That said, if you can wade into the book, you will nd discussions relevant to all kinds of issues on health and wellness, especially to how environmental toxicity impacts health and how allopathic medicine falls short of considering this as a root cause of disease. Williams is extremely thorough, providing well-rounded discussions of the issues, including their history and the approaches of both allopathic and complementary medicine, and if you want to know more there is a comprehensive reference and footnote list at the end of each chapter. She also provides Recommended Reading lists, a fairly substantial glossary of terms, and a Resources section, which, unlike the other end matter, is rather slim and seems arbitrary in terms of choices. This is an ambitious book, and the author succeeds in her goal of almost exhaustively covering the issues of toxicity in relation to disease, especially as regards dental amalgams.
Radical Medicine; Healing Arts Press; ISBN978-1-59477-411-9 US: $75; UK: 64
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wed have more possibilities to enhance healing. So, I began developing a method based on a semantic dialogue. This is what NMT isits a therapeutic dialogue based around particular structured pathways, as we call them in NMT. And those pathways revolve around particular areas of function. For instance, there are pathways that deal with allergy and inammation. Other pathways deal with our response to infection or our sensory-motor function, etc. . . . So we have this catalogue of clinical pathways that allow us to investigate in a very structured, in a very informationally rich way, the particular ways in which the mind-body has become confused that are blocking its innate healing response.
LF: Neuromodulation Technique (NMT) is based on several key points, one of those is that health and wellness have an informational basis, and when we become ill, it typically represents some kind of confusion within the mind-body that comprises its ability to adapt to change in its internal and external environment. The ability to make that adaptation efciently is what keeps us in a homeostatic balance, within that physiological sweet spot where we are optimally well. When our perceptions of those changes, or our decisions internally about how to respond to those changes, become confused, then we move further and further away from that sweet spot until we nd ourselves ill. So our approach is to try to identify what the informational basis of that inefciency of maintaining and responding to that internal and external environment is, and to coach the mind-bodyto instruct it and direct ittoward better, more efcient choices that allow it to heal properly and to efciently utilise its innate ability to heal and maintain itself.
LF: I developed the technique after years of studying other types of what were typically called energetic medicine methods, but what I really recognised were informational medicine methods. I studied a number of the techniques based on radionic vials and used those with some success, until I realised that what was really going on was a kind of dialogue, or communication, between the practitioner and the patient. I came to realise that this was really the basis for many kinds of therapeutic interventions going back to shamanism. . . . So, when I realised that it was really all about the informationreally about a dialogue to enhance the awareness of the mind-body of its conditions and physiological choicesit appeared to me that many of the methods I had learned were somewhat limited. If we could nd a way to communicate with the body that was not so constrained, that was more open and exible, that
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using various dialogues that our testing indicates would be of the greatest value and, by doing that, we allow the mind-body to come to a more accurate perception of its internal conditions and a more informationally rich view of its options in terms of selecting a physiological response to those conditions.
LF: You know, typically when we think about healing and disease we think about it from the disease perspective. I think thats a mistake. We think about catching a disease or we externalise the process of being ill to the point that the disease looks like some kind of predator thats stalking us. I think theres another way of looking at it that may give us better opportunities and that is to look at it from the standpoint of healing and wellness. Were constantly involved in monitoring our internal and external conditions because to be alive, to be well, our physiology has to stay within a certain narrow parameter of internal conditionstemperature, chemistry, etc. Everything has to be regulated very precisely for us to be well. Consequently, when there is any kind of confusion of perception or of the available responses to keep us within that homeostatic balance, we drift away from wellness. Our view then is that illness is really the failure of the homeostatic mechanisms, and, consequently, NMT is appropriate for a patient who is suffering from any kind of problem, because the ultimate solution is for the body to most efciently apply its mechanisms for healing and maintenance for homeostatic balance. Ill give you an example. There are certain conditions . . . where the explanation for the condition has to be informational. Certainly allergy and autoimmune disease fall into that category. In the case of allergy, we have a self-destructive response in the mind-body to something that is not inherently toxic or damaging. Its the result of a misperception of the thing we are exposed to in our environment or in our food. By using the NMT dialogue for allergy and adverse information, we are able to make the body aware that its creating an
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inefcient and self-destructive response and to change the way it responds to these substances. The result is that the body comes back to greater balance in its immunological response. Sometimes the results of doing this work are really quite startling, and on the Internet you can nd a number of cases that I treated at our seminarspeople who are anaphylactic to particular foods. Anaphylaxis from a medical point of view is not considered something that can be treated except by avoidance of the thing that one is anaphylactic to. What youll see in these videos is that a patient who previously had severe anaphylaxis to even the slightest contact with a particular food, we are able to treat them, and within a twenty- to thirty-minute treatment session with NMT to create a situation in which they are able to eat the food with really no reaction at all.
Thats quite incredible. It completely goes against the current scientic modelcertainly the biochemical model. How do you think its working on a quantum level?
LF: Well, you know, the key aspect of quantum mechanics is that the universe is nonlocal, right? And non-locality carries with it certain inferences, one of which is that although we perceive and interact with the universe and everything in it as if it were actually of a physical nature, quantum reality says its really not. If we could see down to the very nest level at which all things are organised, wed see that they really have an informational basis. Also, that because the universe . . . is nonlocal, there cant be a separation of anything that exist within the universe. There was research done by Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s in which he demonstrated that spontaneous communication occurs when two people come together with the intention of creating a wordless, other-than-conscious kind of dialogue. There are other studies that show this kind of spontaneous communication occurs all the way down to the bacterial level. And so there is an opportunity for a communication to open up on
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this other-than-conscious level and to be created by the intention of the people to come together and dialogue in this way.
LF: Absolutely. I think intention and belief hold that which exists within a eld of innite potential which pulls those things that have not yet manifested . . . into our experienced reality. In other words, the idea is that when we change the way we look at things, the things that we look at change as a result of our observation. There were some interesting studies done by physicist Bill Tiller, from Stanford University, and published in a number of peer-reviewed journals and in his book Conscious Acts of Creation. The experiment used experienced meditators to focus their intention on discrete physical systems to try to change a physical parameter within those systems. In one particular experiment the meditators focused on beakers of water with a pH of 7, which is a neutral pH, and tried to shift the pH. Tiller was able to demonstrate statistically signicant changes in the pH of water strictly as a result of the meditators intentions. Another of his experiments used meditators focusing their intention on fruit y larvae to try to change the rate at which they matured, and he demonstrated that the fruit y larvae that were the focus of that intention matured at a signicantly faster rate than those that werent the subject of intention. So it appears that whatever we look at with focused intention and belief is modied by the effect of that intention and belief. It occurs at these very small levels, but it occurs at very large levels as well. There was an experiment done by Dean Radin, and reported in his book Entangled Minds, in which he looked at data retrospectively. This was data from random event generators, and there are many of these all over the world and data is collected continuously. So, he was able to very conveniently access data from a number of random event generators [REGs] that were running over a period of time. [One] period he looked at was . . . when the American football player OJ Simpson was on trial, which the whole world was watching, and what he found was
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that the result of millions and millions of people focusing their attention, intention and belief of this particular court case actually produced a skewing of randomness in these REGs. The implication is that all of us continuously feed into this collective pool of consciousness and move it one direction or another. We move it by way of our fears, of our positive expectations and beliefswe cant participate and live in this world without inuencing things on that level.
From the therapeutic point of view, is it the responsibility of the therapist to be in that positive and healthy state while treating a patient? If there is no separateness, then the therapist inuences the patient via intention and belief and so on.
LF: From a therapeutic point of view, when anyone, whether they are using NMT or any other kind of informational or energetic method, dialogues with a patient, theres a certain perspective that they have to have in order to be optimally effective for that person. Its important that they see themselves within their patient, that is, that they not look at the patient through the lens of separation; rather, that they look through the lens of non-duality, that we are all part of the same undivided universe. And that they look at the patient not in a cold way, but through the lens of love and empathy.
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or in another part of the world, should it? But because of our conditioning, which tells us we are individual and separate, do you think it is more effective for a therapist to actually be with a patient, because then the therapist is more comfortably within his or her own belief structure?
LF: Absolutely. If this reality of quantum mechanics is true and there is no external, objective reality and instead we are all part of this vast pool of consciousness within which all things are possible, and that what becomes real and becomes experienced for us is that which we look at with belief and intention and attentionand thats what we pull from a state of potential into a state of experienced realityif thats so, then as we interact with patients our beliefs and intention guide them in a direction toward a particular transformation that we are trying to achieve.
than there is if I believe that our separation is absolute and concrete and that there is no natural link between us.
Do you think we are moving toward people more openly embracing these quantum science concepts in biology and medicine?
LF: Absolutely. We see that the word intention is popping up more and more in popular culture. We see movies like The Secret and What the BLEEP that have become very popular. They help people understand this different way of looking at the universe. I denitely think we are in the middle of a paradigm shift. It takes a while for that to happen, but when the tipping point occurs . . . the effect of this will be felt throughout society. . . . We have these thousands of years of history, culture, language, mythology and belief, and so change happens slowly. Its like using the rudder to turn a big ocean liner. Once the rudder is turned, the ocean liner doesnt change course immediately. It has inertia for a particular direction. Similarly, I think that our culture has a great deal of inertia. . . . But now we can begin to see that its beginning to turn a little bit. That turning, that shiftI think will become greater and greater. In the UK, you have a brilliant fellow named Rupert Sheldrake, who has done a lot of study about intention, and one of the things he notes in the world of biology, a world he is intimately aware of as he is a biologist, is that 90% of all biologists look at their science from the mechanistic perspective. And yet here we are, nearly fty years after Bells Theorem showed us that every level of reality is in fact nonlocal and not mechanistic in its actual nature. So it does take a while for these new ideas to percolate through. . . . Orthodox science is based on the idea of objectivity. Its based on setting up experiments where you can step back and observe the experiment and the conditions of the experiment through a glass window. The physicist John Wheeler once said that we used to think there was this big, six-inch-thick plate of glass that separated scientists from the world they were observing, but we nd out now that
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LF: I teach this work, and people around the world, as they become familiar with NMT, often call on me and request that I treat them [healing at a distance], so my practice is about 95% nonlocal. This morning I worked with three patients in Germany. Yesterday, I worked with a number of patients around the United States, a woman in Canada, several people in Mexico. You know, this idea of separation seems so real to us in the way we perceive the world through our physical senses that its hard to see that in reality its any other way. But if indeed the world is [quantum] nonlocal, then there is no actual distance, there is no true separation between those two consciousnessesthe patient and the practitionerwho are attempting to engage in this therapeutic dialogue. . . . If as I dialogue and interact with a patient using NMT at a distance, if I recognise that that distance is only apparent and not real, if I recognise that our consciousnesses although distinct from each other are not separate from each other, then there is a whole different opportunity for me to help that patient
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there is no separation and that our observations actually change the things that we are observing. We cant create an observation without creating an inuence. . . . So, from that perspective, there really isnt an ability to be perfectly objectively scientic. Our expectations and beliefs always inuence our outcomes.
I understand there have been studies that have shown with NMT there is this effect with focused intention. Tell us about those please.
LF: There was an article published in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, I believe in January 2009, about a study in which we had ten patients who had dental cavitations, which are areas of bone in which the teeth are embedded that have what is called osteonecrosis, where the bone becomes infected, looses blood supply, and an isolated area of bone dies. It becomes a repository of anaerobic bacteria and has a lot of bad effects because of the toxicity. We worked with a dentist who was using something called the Cavitat Imaging System, an ultrasound imaging system used to create a picture of the bone within which each tooth is embedded and shows whether the bone is healthy or if it has deteriorated and there are areas of necrosis. In the study we had a control and we had nine people who would use NMT treatment. What happened was that 80% of the lesions in these patients healed spontaneously as a result of their NMT sessions over a period of a low of about four and a half months to a high of about a year. To my knowledge there is really no other documentation of spontaneous resolution of this type of osteonecrosis. It is typically treated surgically. So we were very happy with that outcome.
possible for that change to be instantaneous because the actual anaphylaxis is more of an immediate, functional phenomenon in which the particular behavior either gets triggered or doesnt depending on the bodys awareness and programming. So, if we can change [the mind-bodys] awareness, we can change its programming and that [anaphylactic] triggering often wont happen, and in fact thats what we see. . . . Well, in the situation of the cavitation, where sections of bone are dead or decayed, theres a whole process that occurs over a period of time that involves growing new blood vessels to the area of dead bone, removing the infection by way of immunological processes, stimulating the cellsthe broblaststhat lay down the matrix that turns into nished bone. This process occurs over a period of some months, just as it would take some number of weeks or months to heal a bone that had broken. So depending on the kind of situation we are trying to intervene with, we see results that are relatively more rapid or unfold over a period of weeks or months.
What about practitionersdo they have to be especially skilled in focusing their intentions or being in a specic meditative state or such to dialogue with the body to effect this transformation?
LF: Well, there isnt in terms of studying NMT. The purpose of our trainings is to teach the people how to focus their intention, structure their intention, in a way that will allow them to be effective. In fact, our NMT seminars have just opened a new type of training called NMT Universal Care. One of the things that I think was a limitation early on in the development of NMT was focusing on technical language and physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, et cetera, so that people training in NMT were already healthcare professionals. And even within that group, the training favored people like medical doctors or chiropractors, people who had training in the hard sciences. What we have realised is that its not necessary to have that specic scientic knowledge; that other things are more important. We are dialoguing with an intelligent system that knows itself, so for instance if I
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It took that long to change? You change the information system and then the physical body has to catch up?
LF: Yes. Think of it this wayyou know I gave you the example a few moments ago of patients I have treated with anaphylaxis to a food and how the change was instantaneous. When you think about it, it makes sense that it would be
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were working with a patient and I wanted to make some reference to the sensors within the skin that read pressure I could make a reference to Puccinis corpuscle, which is the name of a sensory end organ in the skin that reads pressure, but I could also say the sensory end organs that read pressure and the body interprets that meaning exactly the same. When we dialogue with the body we are having a dialogue with an intelligent system that knows itself and so we can make references that are more generic.
It comes back down to language, doesnt it? And how we are restricted by our language sometimes, but on the other hand we dont need to get tangled up in complicated language.
LF: We dont, if we realise that language is only a pointer. Then we realise that the more generic reference in the type of dialogue we are talking about will be as effective for us. Consequently, weve opened up our training to laypeople . . and weve found that people without prior training in the health sciences are sometimes able to learn even better and practice it more effectively than people trained in the sciences, because they havent been trained to understand whats not possible. Because they dont have those limitations, they are able to structure their beliefs and intentions in a less restrictive way.
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Conferences of Note
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