The Human Energy Field - Precursory Conversations

I post this video to offer a taste of the information I will be presenting on March 3 - to prepare your digestion of information and to open the discussion and parameters of this very large and dynamic topic - 'the Human Energy Structure' or 'BioEnergetics'. I do not agree with everything this fellow says but the content he shares is very intriguing and of a more philosophical quality that is easier to entertain or 'taste'.



(please note that this is video 3 of a three part series)

The Myth of AIDS

Relevant to our discussion of the HIV and AIDS:

Week 7 Inquiries - Cell Biology & Cancer Growth

1. How sophisticated is our understanding of cancers?
2. How does TCM approach cancer differently?
3. Are our genes still being shaped by natural selection?

1.
Our understanding of cancer and cell-growth aabnormalities appears to be EXTENSIVE. Just look at wikipedia's page on cancer. which is just a page in a grouping of pathologies that include tumors, neoplasia (synonymous with tumor), and oncology. We have a highly specific understanding of the the various forms of cell abnormality and all sorts of treatments yet I would bet that the fear of cancer is extremely high on people's list. What does not seem to be extensively or clearly understood is the cause(s) of cancer in the human body - the reason(s) why the human body would manifest such self-destructive tissue. Modern scientific medicine also fails to be able to treat cancer without destroying the immune and nervous systems of the afflicted persons. There is a gap between understanding the nature of the cancer cells themselves and the best way to heal the body that is manifesting such dis-ease.


2.
In my searching online for a comprehensive view of Cancer within the Traditional Chinese Medical View, I discovered on description that seems appropriate and accurate:

"The traditional Chinese treatment of cancer is based on the principle of Fu Zheng Gu Ben. "Fu Zheng" means strengthening what is correct. "Gu Ben" means regeneration and repair.

We also believe that every disease, including cancer, must have at least two causes. One cause may place stress upon the cells, another may cause a weakness in the body's defense. Other causes, such as the emotional environment and congenital susceptibility can also play a part.

Treating cancer with Chinese herbs requires diagnosing the probable causes of the cancer, then choosing the correct course of treatment. Diagnosis is made according to the four examinations. The aim of treatment is to harmonize the patient as well as it is to attack cancerous cells."

Within the Chinese Medical Field, there also appears to be a widespread acknowledgment that herbs can treat cancer effectively and safely, that is, without destroying the patient. Here are some links and articles that reflect this:

• http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/14997.php
• http://www.drshen.com/chineseherbsforcancer.htm
• http://www.alternativemedicinechannel.com/cancer/tcm.shtml

These sources offer the history of TCM as a sort of resumé, making it appear more worthy of serious consideration as an effective treatment method for cancers. Many herbs and various treatments have been shown to be effective and yet there are still articles like the alternativemedicinechannel.com site that denies the efficacy of TCM in the treatment of cancer. Why would they do such a thing? This is what they say with regards to TCM and Cancer:

"TCM plays an auxiliary role in cancer treatment. It treats side effects of conventional therapies, helps control pain, and helps keep the immune system strong."

At best, it is an auxiliary treatment. This seems to be rooted in a deep distrust of alternative medicines, even those founded on thousands of years of research, practice, and proven efficacy. Yet they do have a point - TCM does not cut out or poison the cancer cells and the body around it with the same intensity and aggression that Allopathic Medicine (western-modern) does. This is true and it is one of the virtues of TCM - it is a natural-based system of medicine that works with the pace of the body. The cancer cells didn't pop up overnight (or did they) and perhaps they should be removed, when it is safe to do so, in a less intense speed and with less damage done to the human we seem so concerned about.

TCM will prove itself without effort. It already has and will without concern.


3.
Every time a new human being is born, their genes are selectively chosen to manifest in a certain way. So yes, our genetic material is still evolving. Why would it stop? We are not in some special time or place that would cause genetic material to stop in it's seemingly endless process of replication and transformation. Our diets can turn DNA on and off and our diets have changed DRAMATICALLY in the last 100 years. We are beginning to see all sorts of new disorders and diseases that are SELECTING genetic material in the sense that some people are being born with psychological susceptibility or sensitivity that changes the way they interact with the world. This is natural selection is it not?

Week Six Inquiries - The Nature of Life

1. How do you distinguish between living and nonliving systems?
2. What do you feel is the significance of the use of language and tools in chimps?
3. "Chinese Medicine Gaining Respectability in West"?

1.
Living and non-living systems; with more recent discoveries and understandings of the nature of reality through biology, quantum physics, cognitive science, and mathematics, it has become increasingly clear to me that there is really no such thing as a non-living system. This belief/scientific hypothesis also matches my personal experience of reality. Basically, to describe a system as 'non-living' is to describe its relative non-activity or lack of energetic potential, while a 'living system' is one that contains some movement and action of energetic potential;

"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 78)

Due to the fact that everything is made up of energy, everything is active and carries the potential to organize and/or affect or be taken up into another network of energetic process(es). Consciousness, due to its being a form of energy and an every-present aspect of reality, whenever injected into the equation generates the necessary components needed to have a 'living system'.

Everything is alive in the sense that it is all capable of interaction and of carrying information into and through a process of transformation from one state to another.

2.
What is significant in the human observation of the use of language and tools by other primates (and animals in general) is the awakening of connection, empathy, and modesty on the part of human beings. Western religion and philosophical tradition has developed and progressed through our culture in such a way as to allow us an unabashed arrogance such that we allowed ourselves to separate from the Natural world and the Universe (and our full selves). I believe we are returning to an experience of deep union with ourselves and the natural world/universe. Articles and observations of the human 'realization' of communication and intelligence among other animals, plants, elements and energies is simply the observation of this return.

The Zhouyi - Yijing puts it this way:

FU::RETURN:: Supreme Blessing : the coming and going (cyclic return) : Friends come : nothing inauspicious : Following One's Dao : favorable for going forward -
Fu-Return is the guaranteed return of Spring after Winter and the light of sunrise (yang) after the darkness (yin) of night. Recognizing and following these circular patterns we experience the ease of a smooth and harmonious life. Short term plans succeed in the context of broad view. Things are turning for the better. Routine work comes to fruition. It is favorable to have a clear goal before setting out.

Good for remarriage, retirement, routine travel, vacations, and reunions.
Bad being innovative, ambitious and pressing ahead.

Comment: According to Fu, human happiness is easily found close to home (family & friends) in the simple, small, ordinary tasks of life. The great wisdom of life is found in the plain & routine details of everyday life. If we observe the natural cycle of things, like the seasons of the year, we can be calm and clear. With clarity and equanimity we can see that things naturally go up and down, back and forth - change by themselves. All journeys are circles within circles.

Business: Long-term investments, new businesses, review of business plans

Changing Line two: Return Contented. Auspicious. - Good fortune arises from a careful and timely return. As you advance you adjust your strategy, keeping the goal of return in mind. With this broad, but cautious view, you make satisfactory progress.

Changing Line six: Reversal. Disastrous. Battles lost. Princes dethroned. No recovery for ten years. - Return, in this case, is a complete reversal. From time to time, even great and established structures are naturally upended. Stability is destroyed. In this case, everything is lost. There is humiliation and confusion because you hang on too long to a situation (or relationship) that has ended (dead). Recovery will take a very long time.
(as taken from Liu Ming's translation)

3.
And we flow from the image of Return to discuss the same pattern on the subject of the influence and expansion of Chinese (and all 'Alternative'/Traditional/Eastern Medicines) through the Western cultural-infrastructures...

Just think how amazing it is that we are studying this knowledge and cultivating this wisdom in the United States after such a short time of it's introduction - less than 100 years. Just stop and think about how amazing it is to be studying a deeply rooted knowledge of the human body and its energy systems in a culture that is still unsure of its capacity to provide health-care for itself, to even care for itself.

There is no doubt in my mind that respect is and will continue to grow for the so-called 'alternative' healing traditions and their deep wisdom. my confidence comes from simply observing the truth of the medicine and the way in which it views, interacts with, and transforms the human body-mind.

Articles like the one's we see in the newspapers are little radar blips of the deep mycelial-movements of this knowledge. Just as the wisdom of the interconnections arose from the Taoist insights of 2000 years ago, it rises again; in the image of the mushroom - the mycelial matrix of fungal cells expands quietly underneath the top-soil, below the general awareness and then when the conditions are ripe, the mushrooms explode, quite literally, out from seemingly nowhere and reveal the power and intelligence of this amazing system of individual fungal cells.

Chinese medicine and other healing modalities act in this way. Just watch...

Week Five Discussion

1. Can diversification save species?
2. Do you vote for the chicken or the egg?
3. "I always eat my broccoli."

1. Of course diversification is a more sustainable and extinction-preventative way of being than singular and unilaterally focussed strategies like mono-cropping. I don't know what else to say really. Just look at fungi - while this isn't a directly correlating example, it illustrates an multidimensional approach that protects against failure. Fungi spread themselves throughout the ecosystems, hybridizing and joining forces with other organisms; if a section of their mycelial matrix is attacked, they have a billion super-fine cells all interlaced over massive areas to prevent total and complete vulnerability by putting all their eggs in one basket. Diversification in ANY context seems like a way to expand outward and create a multi-armed prevention of any possibility of situations that arise to contend with the normalcy and coherency of the 'thing being protected or maintained'. If we were to diversify our diets, diversify our crops and diversify our stocks, we would find ourselves less concerned about the coming and going of one of our many 'eggs' in our lovely baskets. Maybe we could then focus our creative energies towards productive and generative activities like developing new strains and species through breeding rather than investing so much energy in freaking out about losing the one and only kind of egg we have.

2. Maybe the problem with the chicken or the egg question lies in the question???
Has anyone considered asking what this question really aims to answer? Brian seemed to bring this up in class and I would like to explore it further -

What came first? The fully formed chicken or the seed of this form, the egg?
Spoken in a different way: What came first? the idea or the dream of the idea?

Which came first? Yin or Yang?
Which came first? Emptiness or Infinite Form?

The answer is found only in a enormous laugh!

3. As for eating greens, especially broccoli, I find this article and the discussion it prompts to be yet another laughable distraction from common-sense - ie. why do we need to dissect the broccoli to discover that it can prevent illness? We know it is healthy for us? Why do we need reasons further than the simple deliciousness, beautiful emerald flowerettes, and unending flavor possibilities of this and any other foods?

This study reminds me of science projects in which the student goes about testing something they already know the answer to - like, "Does the Sun rise every day?" and undoubtedly, they discover that it does... only to realize (or not) that they wasted their time NOT investigating deep and meaningful questions about reality and instead chose to be safe and answer a question they already knew they could prove.

4. Fritjof Capra - Is this guy on it or what?

Our new understandings of the fundamental unity of Nature and the new paradigm of consciousness as the basis for matter and all reality is changing "the way we relate to each other and to our living natural environment, the way we deal with our health, the way we perceive our business organizations, our educational systems, and many other social and political institutions. In particular, the new vision of life will help us build and nurture sustainable communities - the great challenge of our time - because it will help us understand how nature's communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms - the ecosystems - have organized themselves so as so maximize their ecological sustainability. We have much to learn from this wisdom of nature, and to do so we need to become ecologically literate."

"...the network is a pattern that is common to all life." - Reality is a infinitely potentiated space of multi-dimensional networks that interrelate and interreflect one another. Everything is connected to everything else. As my Aunt likes to say, "It's all connected." Well, it literally is yet simply knowing this as a concept is much different than actually living in a way and being in a way that reflects this understanding. It is going to take some time before we see this way of thinking grossly manifest in the ways of being throughout our conventional and shared reality. That is why patience is such a valuable way of being - it allows a human consciousness to remain still and unified without becoming disturbed by the apparent process of unfolding of each idea and each reality. Flowers take time to become flowers from a seed - this is a mysterious thing - SPACE-TIME-MIND

"In this new view, cognition involves the entire process of life - including perception, emotion, and behavior - and does not necessarily require a brain and a nervous system."

5. Moose World - I love how wonderfully inspired people can be by anything. what is there to learn about moose that can enrich my daily experience of life and its beauty? Well after looking at some photographs I can honestly express my deep respect and honor felt for the moose and their power and amazing presence. Even from photographs I get a sense of their amazing spirit! Wow.

The Immunse System and a New Theory of Cognition

In Fritjof Capra's essay on the Immune System's intelligence, he notes the web-like spreading of the immune system throughout our body:

"Instead of being concentrated and interconnected through anatomical structures like the nervous system, the immune system is dispersed in the lymph fluid, permeating every single tissue. Its components - a class of cells called lymphocytes, popularly known as white blood cells - move around very rapidly and bind chemically to each other. The lymphocytes are an extremely diverse group of cells. Each type is distinguished by specific molecular markers, called "antibodies", sticking out from their surfaces. The human body contains billions of different types of white blood cell, with an enormous ability to bind chemically to any molecular profile in their environment. According to traditional immunology, the lymphocytes identify an intruding agent, the antibodies attach themselves to it and, by doing so, neutralize it.

Recent research has shown that under normal conditions the antibodies circulating in the body bind to many (if not all) types of cell, including themselves. The entire system looks much more like a net- work, more like people talking to each other, than soldiers looking out for an enemy. Gradually, immunologists have been forced to shift their perception from an immune system to an immune network." (Capra)

This reminds me very powerfully of the way in which the fungi spread themselves throughout the ecosystems in which they take root. Stamets describes this complex spread as such, "Covering most all landmasses on the planet are huge masses of fine filaments of living cells from a kingdom barely explored. More than 8 miles of these cells, called mycelia, can permeate a cubic inch of soil. Fungal mats are now known as the largest biological entities on the planet, with some individuals covering more than 20,000 acres." (Stamets) Not only is this simply an amazing interconnected web of living micro-filament, Stamets describes this as the "essential wiring of the Gaian Consciousness".

Something I have noticed in my experience and observations of reality is a pattern of fractalized pattern. "As above, so below," is the basic idea but this concept appears throughout science, mathematics, and everywhere in nature. Try checking out the Fibonacci sequence:

Week Four Inquiries

Questions?

• Is there a drug around for just about everything?
• Can we raise our levels of dopamine ourselves?
• How do you think chimps and humans diverged as species?

a) There surely appears to be an effort by the pharmaceutical companies to manufacture a drug for every unsightly, unwanted, or inconvenient physical and psychological manifestation. Often times the disease isn't really a disease but rather a physical expression of stress - a release of energy (flowing of Qi) such as in the case of 'restless leg syndrome'.
Upon performing a Google search of 'restless leg syndrome', I came across this thread of people discussing various exercises, supplements, dietary changes, and drugs that have helped reduce symptoms or eliminate the restless leg. The search also pulled up hundreds of advertisements for drugs and methods such as "The Cure" and "All Calm". In TCM, there is a clear connection between muscle spasms and Liver Blood deficiency. This could be treated in a variety of ways in TCM without the use of pharmaceutical chemicals. I find the resistance to the simple and holistic approach offered by TCM to be almost completely based in ignorance. There aren't commercials selling acupuncture on television like there are for drugs to cure RLS. If, there were, we might see a flood of people rushing to Eastern and Alternative medical doctors.

b) We can alter our chemistry and we have a much more powerful effect on ourselves than we realize. In one person's explanation of placebo, they emphasize the archetype of the 'doctor' as being a contributing factor:

"The placebo effect illustrates the effectiveness of the physician's role in 'healing' a patient. Past research show that a patient's high opinion of the physician prescribing the treatment as well as the doctor's personality can invoke the placebo effect. Furthermore, research has shown that an amiable doctor with a positive outlook of a drug treatment would induce the placebo effect.

The power of the placebo is more readily explained as a function of the individual because the placebo effect can rely on the amount of faith an individual has for a given treatment. One suggestion is that placebo effects may be due to anxiety reduction. Stress and anxiety adversely affect the body and increase an individual's focus on symptoms. A decrease in the body's stress and anxiety level by a well-known doctor alleviates the patient's worry and pain leading to a 'curing' of the symptoms. It has been shown that placebos may be more effective among highly anxious people because the adverse effects interact with the physiological processing. There is evidence that there might be an alteration in the body's endogenous opioid release. Pain relief in patients provided via placebo, may be caused by a release of endorphins in the brain. Endorphins are the body's own morphine-like painkillers. Within the nervous system, there are specific pathways that modulate pain when stimulated by these endorphins. As a patient anticipates symptom relief, the expectation of receiving an active substance, alone, may be activating the pain pathway thereby reducing symptoms. The presence of a substance probably activates the pain-inhibition because unaware of the treatment group, the patient is led to believe that they have received an active substance." (1)

Ultimately I feel that this all boils down to our own capacity to directly affect the quantum reality surrounding and swimming within us through conscious or unconscious intention and emotional energy. Most people have yet to realize that they generate a series of electromagnetic fields around them which have direct effects on the atoms that make us up and move around us. See the film 'What the *&$@# Do We Know?' for a detailed explanation. There are many explanations and scientific studies that support this view. It is only a matter of time before it trickles through the collective mind.




c) How do I think Humans and Chimp diverged? Slowly and over mind-distortingly long periods of time, such that it makes the time that we have been assuming ourselves as the supreme authority over all of Creation a complete blip in the greater dream of it all.

I think that the process took much longer than we can truly understand and that there was a lot of experimentation, dead-ends, and unexpected leaps in genetic expression. It is a miracle that this process exists at all. Why is there even an argument about whether or not evolution is a valid explanation for how we came to be? It is so beyond understanding and beauty that it can still be considered of 'divine will' or whatever people are choosing to defend.

We are animals that have slowly arrived at a state of such high vibration and frequency that we are about to invert on ourselves in self-reflection and ever-new expansion.