***image1***Modern medicine is struggling. There’s a growing dissatisfaction with traditional healthcare, leading many to seek alternative treatments. There is, however, an insidious illusion here. There’s the hope and faith that “holistic” treatments better integrate spirit in healing and foster “whole” health.

We are still seeking someone who will do something to us, or for us, with an “intervention” that represents an alternative “technology”.

Truly “holistic” treatment will transcend the current model of healer applying something to the healee. Both will participate in a healing “process”.

The nature of the healing relationship–which may still include treatment interventions–will involve both physician and patient in a journey of healing. The spirit will be incorporated in that transaction. The body will be recognized as the nexus where the immaterial is expressed in the material dimension. The body will be honored as the expression of that spirit. It is the expression of the divine.

The practice of medicine, healing, and healthcare represent a sacred venture. In living in a body we touch the divine. Thankfully, molecular biology and modern biochemistry can now describe us, via quantum physics, as bodies of light.

The field of “psychoneuroimmunology” (PNI) describes our bodies as an intricate “psychosomatic network” made up of a constantly shifting, changing, balance of chemical substances that used to be called “brain chemicals”. These “neuro”transmitters are proteins or peptides that, on the molecular level, fine tune our whole system.

These “brain chemicals”, better thought of as “information substances” act in every cell of the body: immune cells, heart cells, in bone and blood, in lung and gut. These substances regulate emotions and are the stuff of thought. The “mind” has always been considered immaterial enough to escape much scientific scrutiny.

Now, however, we see that we have been looking at the “mind” under our microscopes all along. The conclusion is obvious. These neuropeptides render the body “intelligent” in ways that we used to confine to the brain. So, we can conclude that our minds are not located in our bodies. Our bodies exist in “mind”. That mind can be best described as pure energy.

We are a field of energy. The exciting bit is this informational exchange–that represents the stuff of feelings as well as thoughts–operates on a molecular level that illustrates a quantum level of thought, emotion, and physiology.

Quantum physics describes the action of atoms and sub-atomic particles in a realm that is more energetic, vibrating, and formless than it is hard, fast, and material. We can touch the vibrating world of “energetics” in describing the action of these molecules that make up our material, as well as our non-material selves.

Quantum physics tells us that light is energy and that it permeates everything everywhere all the time. We are made of the same stuff. We inhabit our bodies in a sea of energy. It is in and of us. It is us. Our bodies are light.

In her book, The Quantum Self, Danah Zohar describes the quantum level of our bodies and our consciousness. She says,

“…we conscious human beings are the natural bridge between the everyday world and the world of quantum physics… (There is) the possibility that consciousness, like matter, emerges from the world of quantum events, that the two, though wholly different from each other, have a common ‘mother’ in quantum reality. If so, our thought patterns , and beyond that our relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the world at large might in some ways be explained by, and in other ways mirror, the same laws and behavior patterns that govern the world of electrons and photons.”

***image2***Photons and electrons are light. This light energy is the substance of and substrate of all matter including our body’s “information molecules”. These are the “molecules of emotion” described by Candace Pert in her PNI research mapping the body’s peptides and their action in the intelligent bodymind network.

Candace Pert describes our bodies as “flickering flames” that shift and swirl and adjust and adapt constantly as the energy exchanges in our bodies fine-tune the vibrations that are our physical expression. Our body is the medium through which spirit manifests in real form. It moves through us and we feel it viscerally.

We inhabit our bodies in a sea of energy that is in and of us. It is us. Our bodies are light. Light is energy and both can be best described as love. We are made of it. Finally, molecular biology, biochemistry, and quantum physics allows us to name, describe, define, and celebrate the part of us that is part of everything. This field of light energy is the spiritual essence of us.

Our bodies are in our mind and mind is universal. The ever-present quantum energy that is in and of everything is what physicist David Bohm calls the “implicate order”. Our expression of that energy–the spirit that is the stuff of life–is the “explicate order”, the manifest, our bodies.

Matthew Fox describes this energy field as the spirit or psyche that forms a bridge to the soma or physical body. He talks about that “gut feeling” of the divine. He explains, “The West has always tried to tell us that spirit is up in our heads someplace. We want to shoot up through the chakras as fast as we can to get up into our heads.

But the fact is that the archetype, the metaphors of finding divinity in the earth, is also about finding …..divinity (is in) in our own bodies, in our sensuality, in our sexuality, and in the first two chakras that connect to all the vibrations of the fields of the Universe. So it’s a call back to prayer that comes out of our guts and then reaches our hearts and then also reaches our minds, but it does not just sit up in our heads.”

Fox tells us that “… the term field connects psyche and cosmos together again. Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher, says that psyche and cosmos are the same thing. In other words, the world we choose to live in is our soul. -So the fields we choose to play in, to struggle in, to redeem, these are our soul…Our souls are not in our bodies, our bodies are in our souls.

Maybe we should start saying our bodies are in the fields. .. What other images are awakened in us in hearing this metaphor of soul as field? What about the notion that divinity permeates the field? The pasture of the divine is, as Jesus said, among us: “The Kingdom of God is among us”. The fields are among us.”

Our bodies are like tuning forks. We vibrate to the hum of the energy of the universe that is us. We mediate this same essential energy into material form. We are the manifestation of divine stuff. We transmute the form of the energy of love. We are translucent — if only we can adjust our vision to appreciate the quality of light…to appreciate the lightness of our being.

The heart is the center of gravity. “I love you” is the song of the universe. It is deceptively simple. This love is effortless and the most familiar you have ever known. And you have always known it because it is, essentially, what we are. It is the energy that connects us all. It is the world of energy and form that has always been and always will be. There are countless ways through the ages that this story has been told.

***image3***PNI and the “new physics” are newer forms of the same story told from time immemorial: in Mayan tales, quantum equations, Jungian archetypes, personal stories, religious visions, creation myths, shamanic songs, Hindu sacred mantras, and any song that lifts your heart and tells us of the meaning of life. Light is energy and this energy is love.

We need to rewrite the story that modern medicine tells us about who we are and how we work. We need to reintegrate psyche into soma. We need healing that is spiritual. Physical healing will follow. We need to train a new generation of physicians. “Physician heal thyself” and the rest of us will heal with you!

I think we are all coming to realize that there is no health without spiritual health. Hopefully a truly “modern” medicine will be a quantum medicine that describes the spiritual bodymind in a truly holistic model of healthcare.

“I felt myself expanding at the speed of light, ballooning, exploding to the outermost limits of existence until I was the universe. Nothing separate remained. I had become everything. I was Consciousness, recognizing itself; I was the pure light that physicists equate with all matter, and poets define as love. I was one, and I was all, outshining all the worlds. In that moment, the eternal, the unknowable had been revealed to me as an indescribable certainty….I saw a prism shaped like a human heart, which dwarfed every galaxy. It diffracted the light of consciousness into an explosion of radiant colors, sparkling splinters of every rainbow hue, spreading throughout the cosmos.

And it came to me that the highest purpose of the human body is to become a clear channel for this light – so that its brightness can dissolve all obstructions, all knots, all resistance. I felt the light diffracted across the system of my own body. Then I knew that awareness is how the human being experiences the light of consciousness…I felt my body again, as a hollow vessel. I looked at my legs; they filled with warm, radiant light, disappearing into brightness. I looked at my arms, with the same result. I focused attention on every part of the body, until I became wholly light once again. Finally, I realized the process of real meditation – to expand awareness, to direct attention, to ultimately surrender to the light of consciousness.”

–Dan Millman from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science (New York: Doubleday, 1996).

Candace Pert, Non Fiction, Molecules of Emotion (New York: Scribner, 1997).

Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Tiburon, California: H.J. Kramer, 1980) Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990)

Article by Louisa Walker, Ph.D. (2004)

Contact: 3 Puriri Road

Beachlands

Auckland

New Zealand

e-mail: louisa.walker@xtra.co.nz

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