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Healing Today (NFSH magazine), Issue 112, May-July 2008 - Why Healing Isn't Superstition.
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Healing spirit and the scientific paradigm shift |
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Written by Howard Jones
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Monday, 31 March 2008 16:12 |
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Developments in science over the last century have provided us with the realistic possibility of explaining spiritual and psychic phenomena in terms of rational science. Phenomena like spiritual healing, telepathy, clairvoyance, mystical vision and communication with spirits in the afterlife, so long rejected by most scientists, are becoming increasingly the focus of experimental study.
If the still rather speculative ideas can be further substantiated, this will give immense comfort to the bereaved and to those nearing the end of earthly existence. It will also provide authentication of many of the practices familiar to indigenous peoples since the evolution of our species, but which are still regarded with suspicion, if not rejected outright, by Establishment science, religion and medicine.
In living today we have become too attached to Establishment systems, perhaps because in enriching our lives with diversity they have also become more complicated. In many facets of our lives it is expected that we will follow established procedures – or perhaps, these simply represent the easiest, most readily available solutions.
If we are ill, it is expected that we will go to an orthodox medical practitioner to be treated with government-approved synthetic drugs. If we have beliefs it is assumed that we will ‘belong to’ a formal organised religion.
When we seek knowledge, we turn to the empirical discoveries of science, because we have come to rely on the fact that each new observation will be fitted into an established theoretical framework. This way of looking at the world on the basis of a set of accepted principles scientists call a paradigm.
From time to time over the past four centuries of scientific exploration of the natural world, there has been a monumental shift in the existing paradigm. The medieval belief of Earth as the centre of the universe was replaced by the discoveries of Copernicus that Earth was just one of a number of planets revolving around a sun. We cannot conceive today what a huge shift in world-view this must have been for the scholars of the day, and it certainly met with great resistance from the Church.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, there was another monumental paradigm shift. The laws that governed the behaviour of objects in the material world, which had been established in the seventeenth century by Galileo and Isaac Newton, were found not to apply to the constituent particles of which those same material objects were made up. These fundamental particles or atoms were not even indivisible and indestructible as had been believed for over two thousand years, and the strange behaviour of the constituents of atoms created the new paradigm of quantum physics.
At first, even the physicists themselves couldn’t believe the findings of quantum physics because so often they seemed to defy the laws of common sense – like particles appearing successively in two different places without crossing the space between, or particles that behaved as particles only some of the time but then disappeared into waves of energy.
Gradually, this new world-view has provided explanations for events, not only in physics but in chemistry, in biochemistry and now even in realms previously considered outside the remit of science – that of psychic and mystical experiences.
So the new paradigm itself appeared a century ago. What is new now is an extension of its field of application that offers the possibility of bringing together ideas from philosophy, psychology, religion and science. We have heard much about the conflict between the world-views of science (objective rational empiricism) and religion (subjective divine revelation), and we are all too aware of the turmoil that is created by differences in outlook between different religions.
But we cannot thrive on conflict. We all live in the same universe, and the many faiths and reason cannot exist in parallel worlds, speaking different languages. The Earth is undergoing a transformation as a result of Man’s activity, and we must transform ourselves with it. We need to heal the wounds we have created in Earth and in humankind.
The healing we need applies to our secular lives as well as to the religious, and on three fronts – individual, social and environmental. Individually, more and more people are falling victim to the addiction of alcohol or food. Obesity is now rated as a national epidemic in Britain and America. For several decades now, society has been indoctrinated by the advertising industry to want more and more material goods.
The whole purpose of advertising is to create envy and discontent, to make us feel inadequate or inferior if we do not have possessions on a par with those of our neighbours or work colleagues. We, and others, measure our success not by our fulfilment at service to other people but by the goods we possess.
The third area of healing needing our attention is the natural environment. Our capitalist economic system is based on ‘growth’, and that means encouraging us all to buy more and more each year and to make equipment inoperable or obsolete as soon as possible. But all these manufacturing processes require energy and raw materials and, however ingenious we may be in finding new processing techniques, Earth’s finite limited resources are rapidly being used up.
The potentially unifying and healing aspect of the new scientific paradigm that I want to focus on here is the notion of Spirit. As I said above, the bits of atoms that behave like particles some of the time can also melt away into a sea of energy: and what is Spirit but a field of cosmic energy?
Two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Plato suggested that all of our worldly concepts were a reflection of Ideas or Forms that served as our templates and which existed in a spiritual realm. The greatest of the Ideas was the Form of the Good, which is a simplistic vision of the God of western religion.
Another philosopher called Plotinus saw his deity as a spiritual World Soul. All we can know of the world of matter, said Plotinus, is what is in our mind: this is the only reality – which sounds very like something out of the religious philosophies of the East.
Religions of both East and West have a spiritual vision of deity. In Christianity, it is called the Holy Spirit. The Kabbalah, the mystical division of Judaism, describes the spiritual emanation of deity as the S chechinah, and she is often viewed as feminine. In Hinduism, Atman is regarded as the breath of their deity Brahman, while in Buddhism there is a Universal Mind to carry over the karma of each incarnation to the next. What is it that Spiritualist mediums commune with if not the spirits or souls of those who have departed earthly life?
Other philosophers of the Enlightenment had their own visions of this spiritual domain. John Locke thought that behind the ‘nominal essence’ of each object – the collection of properties that caused us to give the object its name – there lay a ‘real essence’, forever unknown to our five senses. German philosopher Immanuel Kant called Locke’s real essence the noumenal dimension of the world lying behind the phenomenal aspect accessible to our five senses.
The psychologist Carl Jung, who was a firm believer in the reality of the spiritual component of existence, proposed that a ‘collective unconscious’ was part of the mind or spirit of every individual. We transmitted ideas, said Jung, through this spiritual dimension. The most persistent ideas, of symbolic significance in human life and recurring within many of the myths of religion, he called archetypes.
Philosophers, theologians, psychologists – all have had a vision of this spiritual domain relevant to the subject in which they were working. Now, quantum science has a concept that could explain rationally the nature of this all-pervading cosmic spirit.
Every particle of every atom continually pops in and out of material existence by alternating the nature of its being with a packet of wave energy, in accordance with Einstein’s famous E = mc2 mass–energy relation.. This energy is called the zero point field, or z.p.f. for short. It fills in the spaces between the bits of the atom.
Our body, and especially our brain and spinal cord, is a mass of electric currents that travel not only along these nerves but also along the proteins that make up our tissues and the DNA that characterises our cells. Nobel Prizewinner Albert Szent-Györgyi was the first to suggest this half a century ago and now the mobility of these electric particles (called electrons) has been established by scientists, together with the activity of biophotons (light waves behaving as particles in the body). Where we have moving electrons, we also have a magnetic field.
We are a mass of such electromagnetic energy fields. We should not be surprised therefore if we find that some people are particularly susceptible to electronic equipment or overhead power cables. The z.p.f. is not only within every material atom of our bodies and of the air we breathe, of every plant and animal, of every mountain and river, it is also out in space, where it is more commonly referred to as the quantum vacuum. The halo of the z.p.f. around our bodies comprises the aura that can be detected by some sensitives.
When a clairvoyant ‘predicts’ the future, they are tuning in to this quantum vacuum that forms part of a continuum of space and time. Spiritual healers channel the energy from this same cosmic energy field into the chi of the patient through the chakras.
Empathic people communicate their thoughts by telepathy through this spiritual energy field that Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls a morphic field. We have all gazed in awe and wonder at the myriad stars in the night sky, but cosmologists tell us that most of our universe is unknown to us in our mortal lives for it is undetectable by the appliances of science: they say it is made up of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ engaging in their own cosmic dance.
It may be that this is the domain of those who have left material earthly existence to transform into spiritual souls, but capable of assuming material form, as testified to by some mediums.
What this new scientific paradigm of quantum physics tells us is that the zero point field is everywhere, in everything, at all times, and it is indistinguishable from Jung’s collective unconscious or the Holy Spirit or Atman, or Communal Soul. It is the all-pervading motivating Spirit of the universe. What a unifying healing vision this would be if only we could all embrace it.
Published in Healing Today, the magazine of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers, Issue 108, May-July 2007 (www.nfsh.org.uk)
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