Up-Welling

The same powers of creativity that gave birth to the universe and unfolding forms of the natural world are present and reflected in the human mind and imagination. Creativity in nature and mind manifests its power through "authentic exchange," nuances of operations emerging from creative center. In these exchanges, the kinds of emergent self-organization described in complexity takes place, leading to the power of "collective creativity." One manifestatin of this is the power to remold our social institutions including the healing arts.

A holistic Emergent Healing Paradigm is proposed rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories -- our models of nature's own forms of self-organization. It is suggested that emergent healing depends on nonlocal principles and self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mindbody of the organism. It is further suggested that the interactive field present in the healing situation can be amplified intentionally through resonant feedback -- therapeutic entrainment -- to facilitate intervention in the psychophysical healing process. A metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal mechanistic healing model. A viable research direction is indicated by examining cosmology, the role of the human family, epistemology, and a mode of ethical reasoning.

Each of us can learn to balance and optimize inner growth, intimacy, physical and spiritual health -- to discover emergence beyond our emergencies.

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"The main reason for healing is love." --~Paracelsus

"[Y]ou ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, nor the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul. ... [T]he cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they disregard the whole, which ought to be studied also, for the part can never be well unless the whole is well." --Plato: Charmides 156e

"[Though] the "clockwork universe" of Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has long been descredited by physicists, its vestiges linger on in the extant thinking of institutions, bureaucracies, economies, universities, software development methodologies, and general zeitgeist." --Munnecke

"All the biologicals are converting chaos to beautiful order. All biology is antientropic. Of all the disorder to order converters, the human mind is by far the most impressive. The human's most powerful metaphysical drive is to understand, to order, to sort out, and rearrange in ever more orderly and understandably constructive ways. You find then that man's true function is metaphysical." --Buckminster Fuller

For most of human history, healing has had to do with contact with spirit, with consciousness, with rituals intended to create a shared biofield with a shaman who seemingly could exert mind over matter. This spiritual technology has yielded to technological medicine governed by the rational protocols of science. But noting that medical intuition and therapeutic rapport are real forces in the healing process, many practitioners are moving toward a new paradigm or model of healing.

Anomalies such as the proven power of prayer, placebo effect, spontaneous remission, therapeutic intentionality, and remote healing hint that the irrational, the mysterious, is an inherent part of the natural healing process. When we become ill, the fundamental nature of consciousness is revealed as it relates to both mind and matter, psyche and soma.

Our life journey is an unpredictable series of chaotic twists and turns which mold our lives, despite our best intentions and plans, as we wend our way toward our certain end. The 'journey' is a core guiding metaphor for our multifarious experiences. It is a poetic journey of self-discovery. Chaos theory provides a natural yet scientific metaphor of this complex trajectory of emergent order from disorder, the complex dance at the edge of chaos.

Process-oriented therapies help us not only recover but make sense of our feelings and experiences by evoking our story, a meaningful narrative of our unique course. It is a combination of subjective healing fiction and our objective history, but expresses the reality of our psyche -- our embodied soul.

Even if many have embarked on a similar quest, each of us makes this dramatic voyage of discovery for ourselves -- we become our own Columbus of the soul, going where we do not know. It leads into the unknown where fearsome dragons (pain, suffering, loss, grief, illness, emotional devastation, mortality, our own personal demons) await to devour us. How we navigate those turbulent seas or traverse that undiscovered country is crucial to our wholeness and well-being...even as old explorers heading for the shores of death.

If metaphor is central to embodied experience, we can find healing meaning embodied in our personal tales, which speak from the soul of the resilience of human spirit.

Efforts to control a chronic condition are rooted in two ideas: that people can control their environment and that people should take responsibility for their health. The notion that chronic illness can be controlled is common whereas discussion of the limits of control are uncommon. Often couched in terms of illness management in both the medical and social science literature, control over the condition reflects interpretations of Western Cartesian philosophy, which, in contemporary thought, has been interpreted as mind over matter.

The responsibility people feel for controlling their chronic illnesses and the efforts they make to overcome the constraints such control places on everyday life affect self-perceptions and alter as the illness waxes and wanes. . .embodied knowledge is assaulted by the ethos of rational determinism. The imposition of another type of order leaves us without meaning in our lives.

The close relationship between embodied knowledge and meaning is thus relegated to a subsidiary position, while control over the body becomes preeminent. Metaphor is central to embodied experience.

THE QUANTUM SELF

We need to remold our healing institutions to conform with new physics to develop a contemporary understanding of the mind/body. A new model of the human organism is emerging ~ a holistic rather than mechanistic model that theorizes our basis in the quantum world; it means healing can happen in very subtle ways, perhaps even at the quantum level.

Emergence is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.

When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.

HEALING PHILOSOPHIES

The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine, and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical ~ essentially untestable.

Today's heresies are tomorrow's dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.

Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.

The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.

This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.

The emerging paradigm is a more subtle and energetic model of health. In the emergent healing paradigm, healing depends on the nonlocal principles of nature’s own self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mind/body of the organism. It appeals to spirit, soul, and body.

Recognizing the complexity of reality, the new paradigm includes a series of perspectives, which emphasize the positive rather than pathological, health rather than sickness, and a holistic approach to health care.

In this qualitative, rather than outcome-oriented approach, subjective experience and process are valued. The fusion of mind, emotions, body and spirit is recognized as central. In this ecological approach, the individual is embedded within larger systems, not isolated as a disease process. When we treat a symptom or disease rather than the whole person, we treat the part not the whole.

Interdependence of individuals, societies, and nature can be honored. As our knowledge of nature is increased, our knowledge of our own nature also grows correspondingly. Health, self-healing, and therapeutics is a balance supported by many disciplines, including physics, biology, and psychology as well as medicine.

We have all noticed that often the physical body is healed, but not the emotional trauma; or perhaps there is spiritual or psychological healing, but not physical cure. Therefore, it only makes sense to treat the whole person, rather than just the symptomology.


PARADIGM SHIFT

Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the conscious and unconscious, collective and individual level. These tacit belief systems act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception. Some perceptions arrive relatively undisturbed while others are subject to immediate characterization, distortions, and value-judgments.

Old ideas die hard. The established order, materialism, is entrenched. Establishment science is always resistant to new ideas. Science deals with models and metaphors of our perception of reality. We have had science less than 500 years, but in that time it has transformed much of the world technologically, intellectually and physically.

Scientific models change as exploration leads to the discovery of new facts and approaches that work. Still, new models are slow to be embraced. The dominant worldview hangs on as tenaciously as geocentric religious views did in the Dark Ages.

A paradigm is a working set of assumptions and postulates, (a disciplinarian matrix), about a field of inquiry or practice ~ such as healing. How we envision healing is as important as how we proceed to try to heal. It governs our protocols, what we notice and fail to notice, and how we evaluate the results. The theoretical construct defines our approach and methodology. It gains momentum over time.

Scientific exploration is not a linear process, but results from competition among theories. The best results of each system are then woven into a seamless fabric that, at least temporarily, defines the nature of that field. New observations can lead to complete revisioning of a discipline, like the emergence of quantum mechanics did in physics. Filling in theoretical gaps leads toward better explanations and solutions to problems.

Sometimes new paradigms coexist and develop alongside one another, until one supersedes the other. This is paradigm shift. Such has been the case in concurrent development of allopathic and alternative or energy medicine, also called integral medicine.

Both the conventional and integral approaches have long, noble histories, one rooted largely in western culture, the other in Asian systems. Allopathic doctors and patients themselves now recognize that strictly reductionistic and technologically-based medicine has its limitations in contemporary healthcare.

Objective science can be devoid of higher purpose and intentionality. Thus, we find ourselves with a host of ethical dilemmas in genetic engineering, transplant research, geriatrics, pharmacology, cloning, technological intervention, and molecular biology.

The relativism of postmodern deconstructionism has undermined all theoretical perspectives, turning them into or exposing them as social constructions. It is true that the healing arts are riddled with political, religious, and cultural biases. Health care has been delivered in terms of a power relationship over the body, superimposed on its biology.

There is a strong desire from the both the scientific community and public for a health system that values personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and beliefs. They connect body, mind, spirit, and society.

It is crucial to realize there is both rational and paradoxical healing, and both are vital to our well-being. Paradoxical thinking is unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, unrepeatable, and often indescribable. Breakthroughs are often paradoxical in nature, seemingly absurd, yet in fact true. Rational healing relies on doing, while paradoxical healing is rooted in ways of being. Physician Larry Dossey says it requires, “standing in the Mystery.”

There is a yearning to return “mystery” to the mechanistic arena of healing, so we can face illness and disease as whole organisms. Transpersonal forces have a valid place in healing, as they do in all areas of our existence. Many people have a sense of the importance of actively integrating spiritual principles with the material world.

The whole-systems approach co-exists with conventional medicine and is making inroads among its practitioners. Treating causes as well as symptoms, it mobilizes the patient’s will to live. It fosters the inner dimensions of the healing experience. The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations.

Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.

Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).


NEW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

No science or healing is independent of the realities of our fundamental consciousness. Consciousness is a process not an object. Neuroscientists have begun to study consciousness, both in its functional and universal aspects.

Some scientists try to reduce matter (brain cells) to consciousness while others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter. Some suggest (Newell), echoing ancient philosophies, that Absolute Consciousness may be a field that is always everywhere.

We are not discrete entities but deeply embedded within the fabric of the universe. The essence we share, more fundamental than matter and energy, may well be primordial consciousness. It may be the very basis of materiality, as the Vedas implied centuries ago. Consciousness involves the integration of information, not just a passive array of information itself.

We have many ways, besides our senses, of interfacing with reality, including intentionality, intuition, somatic perception, and direct apprehension. The new integral model of health and mind/body healing recognizes and operates from this expanded perspective and innovative medical options.

Consciousness -- the intersubjective dimension -- may be a stronger dynamic causal factor in healing than previously considered. Incorporating the full spectrum of human experience into healing promises new possibilities, new outcomes, which have been neglected in the biomedical model.

Conscious intentionality may influence subtle electromagnetic or quantum field energy processes. It affects the exchange of information at the cellular, organismic, and social level. Exceptional states of awareness (such as meditation, shamanic journeying, dreaming, dissociation, etc.) can lead to exceptional results, but they also require exceptional proof that may be difficult to produce in the laboratory or document objectively.

The emerging worldview extends our concepts beyond the domain of purely objective, reductionistic realism ~ materialism. The trend is moving from biophysical to psychophysical and psychospiritual dimensions without loss of scientific rigor.

Just as physics seeks a unified field theory, so the healing process needs a model that accounts for the mechanisms of natural healing and its anomalies such a placebo effect, spontaneous remission, even distant healing. Consciousness may just be an expression of such a universal field.

Models of healing in which disease is seen as an invasive process and the treatments are also invasive can give way to those following a natural, evolutionary course. Rather than comparing healing to a fight, or war on an external invader, we can imagine it as the creation of healthy processes. New forms emerge from adaptations after the breakdown of old forms. In this synergetic view, the organism interacts with its total environment.

Quantum Biophysics and Healing

Our contemporary task is to move beyond the apparent mind/body dichotomy of western mechanistic thought. This cannot remain a mere concept but must become part of our essence, a belief lived from our very core. Living from a holistic perspective is an experiential process, a Way of life.

"Consciousness" encompasses the potentially integrated healing aspects of brain, mind, emotions, and spirit, together with physiological and environmental influences that produce unique patterns. Healing is a physical or biological form of creativity. Nonlocal healing is a synchronistic event, which takes place in the presence of intentionality to share a common field of influence.

The "consciousness of healing" may be a pattern, or patterns, that can be identified in the anomalous energies associated with sensitive persons. Anomalous energies are one highly meaningful constellation of factors. Recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns, processes and temporal variations, influenced by the environment, are inherent in states of consciousness for better or worse.

Selected aspects of consciousness provide more reliable experimental replication and active integration of holistic investigations into the sources and processes of healing, other associated non-local phenomena, environmental effects and biophysical interactions of body, mind, emotions and spirit.

New developments on the frontier of science start with (1) observations of phenomenological effects, (2) collection of anecdotal information, (3) organizing the data into useful patterns and relationships from the experiential data, (4) developing a subsequent taxonomy for defining discrete phenomena and their various aspects, (5) forming research protocols and designs to test hypotheses and maximize successful and reproducible results, and (6) utilizing the research results in development of individual and group healing applications and expanding knowledge about the bioenergetic aspects of healing.

It has been suggested (Dossey; Krippner; Gowan; Motoyama; Beal and Gilula, 2004) that some individuals possess unusual capabilities and processes of consciousness. They are often considered intuitive about past, present or future events, and highly sensitive to body, mind, spirit and environmental influences, in and around other persons, as well other living and non-living systems. They may be admired, imitated, ignored, feared, suppressed or judged as "handicapped" or "mentally afflicted", depending on how they use their "gifts".

Associated with an individual’s abilities, there are aspects of, (1) emotional events, both life-changing (epiphany or tragedy), and sequelae, (2) and/or an inherited component, (3) a health issue, which may also serve to influence their unusual capabilities, and, (4) an environmental influence, positive or negative.

Please note that these people, by inheritance, accident, illness, discipline, or environmental influence manifest an incredible range of sensitivity, down to quantum energy levels. Many persons involved in healing processes are hypersensitive to chemical, electromagnetic, and electrical factors, whether acquired either naturally or artificially induced.

Strong psychosomatic overtones are related to electrical and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) as well as to multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). This type of adaptation and sensitivity may be one of the characteristics important to possess or develop in the healing process.

There are many answers to "unexplained phenomena." We are developing more sensitive instruments to measure, internally and externally, the electrochemical nature of living systems and the interacting variables of the environment. Every day we watch the impossible or nonsensical become useful and applicable through technological and conceptual quantum leaps in awareness.

The complex interactions of all these energy factors (holographic, quantum, electromagnetic and chemical) that shape life processes must be considered, along with genetic, biochemical, age, gender and health processes. All of these factors must be addressed in any exploration of unusual states of consciousness whether they occur in individuals or in groups. There is comparatively very little human perspective/awareness anywhere about our long-term relationship interactions with the earth and all other living systems.

We are a product of our natural earth environment and respond to some subtle degree (and sometimes not so subtle) to the same geoelectromagnetic, chemical and atmospheric factors which affect all other living things. We can, and are, affecting the balance of nature, which in the long-term affects us. This is a true form of biological feedback.

The field of healing sources and processes requires the development of taxonomy and protocols for analyzing and exploring inherited, spontaneous, controlled and stressful patterns of consciousness, and relating these patterns to potential environmental influences.

Areas of concern, which can respond to investigation, are the recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns of brain activity (before, during, and after healing events) related to 1) the consciousness of the healer (what psychophysiological patterns are required to produce optimal and repeatable healing, 2) environmental influences supporting the healing objectives, and 3) consciousness of the subject.

When both the patient and healer are co-equals in the process and on a “level playing field,” patient safety is optimized, but so is healer safety. This type of setting also maximizes the possibilities of bioentrainment of physiological signals belonging to both patient and healer.

A level playing field also allows patient and healer to co-create the process of healing from a position of mutual empathy, respect, and trust. Such a level field is created by an environment, which maximizes those traits. Interrelated patterns of consciousness are reflected in brainwave (EEG) frequency distribution, psychophysiological states, and environmental conditions, which affect the clinical healing setting (Gilula).

Unusual states of consciousness, controlled or spontaneous may occur due to: (1) external sensory induction, sensory deprivation or sensory over-stimulation, (by environmental influences); (2) internal changes that are self-induced by body and mind disciplines, (3) ill health, (psychophysiological aspects of electrical and chemical sensitivity), accident, injury or near-death trauma, (4) inherited CNS influences, for example, familial periodic paralysis (FPP) and recurring spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), or (5) interactive combinations of the previous factors.

Research suggests that RSPK incidents tend to occur under unusual emotional stress and on days of above average geomagnetic fields, modulated by EMFs from the agent and focused by the agent onto significant other objects. Krippner and Persinger also report anomalies and amplification of psi reports associated with periods of exposure to tectonic strain.

The RSPK process is similar to the electro-acoustic effect of movement induced in the diaphragm of a loudspeaker by an electric current. But, in RSPK, the EMF energy moves through space-time without the benefit of electrical wiring, presumably because it is highly focused.

Roll brings up Puthoff’s theory that the central person affects the zero-point energy (ZPE) that fills space and thereby the gravity/inertia that usually keep things in place. If the ZPE is affected during RSPK, this may suggest that the ZPE has a consciousness component.

Meditative or yogic practices would add a dimension of personal exploration to any investigation of the zero-point energy. Recent research studies of the nature of consciousness and the relationship to "quantum holography", requires a new perspective regarding time, space and energy interactions.

Persons who exhibit strong allergic responses, who are often chemically and/or electrically sensitive, may inadvertently affect tape recorders, computers, lights, TVs and other sensitive electronic equipment during their reactive episodes. This is strongly reminiscent of the “Pauli Effect.” Robert Morris has reported that some individuals are affecting electronic equipment when they are in an intense or traumatized emotional state. Effects on magnetometers, electrical, magnetic, and electromagnetic field detectors have been noted from persons who claim non-local energy projection abilities.

Pathological sensitivities can be either inherited or accidentally acquired. Spontaneous, non-local events may occasionally occur around FPP or EHS-afflicted individuals. The events seem causally related to RSPK, and include lights going on and off (usually solar-activated types), computers crashing, individual components burning up, and other similar effects on sensitive solid-state electronic devices. Stressful events that may be psychophysiological or environmental seem to help initiate both FPP and ESH reactions, with RSPK occurring sometimes as a side-effect.

New methodologies and taxonomies may provide more consistent replication, control, amplification, and exploration of the subtle energies associated with healing and other states of consciousness. In the efforts to understand the interrelated patterns of body, brain, emotions, mind and environment involved in healing processes, we may describe some sources of healing within the blend of consciousness and quantum cosmology.