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SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN ENERGY FIELD
James Oschman is one of the leading
authorities
on the scientific understanding
of hands-on healing.
The following is a reprint from
Reiki News Magazine
James L. Oschman, Ph.D. is interviewed
by William Lee Rand
His extensive
background as a scientist
and experience of holistic healing
places him in a unique position between
the academic/medical
world
and the healing community.
I was led into the field of energy medicine
from talking to
my practitioner Peter Melchio
who I visited for help with the back problem
I had.
He told me about
a whole field of research
into human energy that I had not encountered
during my years in academics.
This
led me into the field of energy medicine.
I met many therapists who seemed to know a lot
about energy, and
I was curious about what
science, if any, there was to explain their
observations.
I learned that
science can help the practitioner
develop a better understanding of the effects of
their work at the cellular and
molecular levels.
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As We Discuss This Subject ...
...I am sure you will
see that Reiki
and the other methods certainly
do not violate the laws of physics.
While we obviously
have much to learn,
we are beginning to develop logical
explanations and testable hypotheses
about these
methods, and this is the
hallmark of good science.
The body emits light, sound, heat,
and electromagnetic
fields and,
like all other matter, it has a
gravitational field.
WLR: Can you give us a definition
of
energy medicine?
JLO: In a sense, all medicine is
energy medicine.
This may seem trivial,
but it makes an
important point.
Any intervention with a living system
involves energy in one form
or another.
We are interested in how the body produces
these different kinds of energy, and how
these
energies can be applied to the body
for beneficial effects.
The best minds in science,
including Albert
Einstein,
struggled to understand what energy
really is and how the various forms
of energy relate to each
other.
Reiki and other forms of hands-on
healing are another form of energy
medicine based on scientifically
measurable energy fields emitted
from the healer’s hands. | REIKI
WLR: The Reiki attunement is a unique part of Reiki training. A person does not have to train to gain the ability
to give Reiki energy treatments. The ability is passed on to the student through an attunement process given by the teacher.
The attunement seems to turn on the student’s ability to channel Reiki and there is a noticeable difference
in the strength of healing energy students have before and after the attunements. Is there anything in your understanding
of biology or science that would provide an explanation
for how this is possible?
JLO: As with other aspects
of energy medicine, it is possible to suggest hypotheses for testing. My suspicion is that what is being passed during the
attunement process is a frequency or a set of frequencies
that can be transferred from a teacher to a student via the
energy field and that will always be remembered by the student.
The existence of a particle of
physical
matter is dependent on its
interaction through quantum waves with all
other particles in the universe.
JLO: Energy medicine is coming of age now that the old arguments about vitalism vs. mechanism have been resolved and methods
have been developed for measuring the human energy field. In my opinion, the study of the fields produced during Reiki and
other energy healing methods will be some of the most interesting research that can be done with present measuring devices.
It is also important to realize that healing may not always involve projecting healing energy into a person;
in some cases it may involve removing energy from a site of injury or disease. So it is also important to study the kinds
of fields that can be detected radiating from damaged or diseased tissues.
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HOW
DO YOU EXPLAIN THE WAY REIKI
IS PASSED?
WLR: Once these biofields are created in the hands
of the healer,
how do they heal?
WLR: Reiki healers note from experience that the
Reiki healing energy seems to guide itself
and in
fact seems to contain a higher intelligence or
higher power that creates exactly the right
frequency
or frequencies needed by the client.
This higher intelligence also seems to guide the practitioner to place their
hands in the right
locations and to remain in a location for the
right length of time.
Is there anything
in your research that would
indicate this possibility— the existence of a
higher intelligence that guides
the Reiki energy
and also guides the practitioner?
JLO: From the scientific perspective,the higher intelligence
you refer to is none other than the
innate intuitive inner wisdom we all possess and
can access when we relax our
mental processes and
allow our subconscious to sort out what is really
going on.
In The User Illusion,
Tor Nørretranders describes
how each second, our consciousness reveals to us
a tiny fraction of the eleven
million bits of
information our senses pass on to our brains.
Intuition
Most of the information
from our senses goes
to our unconscious, where it is processed below
our level of awareness.
Therefore
if we trust our hunches and intuitions,
we are relying on information that is closer to
reality than the way we
sense reality, simply
because they are based on far more information
and on information that has had time to be
processed within.
So if you are able to leave your thought processes behind, you will find that your hands will
go to the right places as if they were drawn there by a magnet, and you will move on to other locations when the time is right.
Quantum Reality
There is a quantum phenomenon which seems to run counter to common sense, or else that
tells us that common sense is not really the way the world works.
The reality of this phenomenon has been established
experimentally, notably by the French team of Alain Aspect, in 1983.
One experiment demonstrating quantum non-locality
involves atoms of calcium that are put into an
unstable energy state so that they emit a pair
of identical
photons traveling in opposite
directions at the speed of light.
Since they are both moving apart at the
speed of light, their velocities add, so they are actually separating
at twice the speed of light. Modern technology
allows
us to track the behavior of these two photons as they
move apart. The behavior seems very strange.
As one of the photons passes through a polarizer that changes a property called spin, the spin of the other photon changes
also.
The first photon appears to send its twin a message describing what happened to it, no matter how far away
they are from each other or how fast they are separating.
Since relativity theory does not allow for any kind
of message that is faster than the speed of light, one can only conclude that there is some means of instantaneous communication
between the two photons that were once together in the original calcium atom.
EINSTEIN`S SPOOKY DESCRIPTION
Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.”
It is as though the separation of the particles
is
an illusion—once particles are paired they will
always be paired.
Since all matter in the
universe was once gathered together in one place, before the big bang, all
matter in the universe continues to be in
relation
to all other matter. | HAS THE HUMAN ENERGY FIELD BEEN
DEMONSTRATED TO EXIST?...
JLO:
In a few decades scientists went from a
conviction that there is no such thing as an
energy field around the human
body to a
certainty that such fields exist and are
medically important.
There is a fundamental law
in physics
that says that when currents flow through
conductors such as wire or living tissues,
magnetic fields
must be produced in the
surrounding space.
Since living tissues are conductors
of electricity, the
well established laws
of physics require that the currents set
up by the heart and other muscles, and
the
brain and peripheral nerves, will
produce fields in the space around the
body.
These are called biomagnetic
fields.
Biomagnetic measurements are a lot more
informative about what is happening inside
he body
than are the bioelectric measurements.
This is an important point for therapists
because a magnetic sense,
if it exists, will
provide much more information on what is goin
on within the body than will measurements of
electrical fields from electrodes on the
skin surface.
And there is a good scientific basis
for
the existence of a magnetic sense
in the human body.
JLO: The discovery that pulsing magnetic
fields
can stimulate repair of bone and
other tissues led to a whole series of
careful studies on how the methods work.
As a result, we have a detailed under -
standing of how energy fields can jump start
the healing process.
I will describe the hypothesis that has been
most thoroughly studied.
There are two parts to
the story.
First, we have a detailed picture of the cascade
of reactions taking place from the cell surface
to the cytoplasm and on to the nucleus and genes,
where selective effects on the DNA have been
documented.
Secondly, there is a phenomenon called
amplification that enables a very tiny field
to produce a large
effect.
What has been discovered is that a single
hormone molecule or neurotransmitter or a
single
photon of electromagnetic energy can
trigger a cellular response.
The most important aspect of this research
is that very tiny fields can produce the
best effects.
This is actually a profound and vital
realization
that has implications for every
branch of medicine.
Living tissues are actually far more sensitive
to
external fields than we ever imagined.
It was thought that observed sensitivities to
energy fields were
physically impossible,
we now know that biological systems defy the
simple logic that larger stimuli should produce
larger responses.
For many living systems, extremely weak fields
can be far more effective than strong
fields.
I suspect that energy therapies such as Reiki
are valuable for preventing and even curing some
of the serious diseases that are so costly in
terms of human suffering and health care dollars.
One of
the ways these methods work is by opening
up the communication channels that enable cells
in the body to talk to
each other, and opening up
the terrain through which cells are able to migrate
to places where they are needed
to initiate repair
or to fight diseases.
Another effect of these methods is to calm the
person so their
immune functions can operate
smoothly. |
Healing Energy
Faraday’s Law of Induction is a basic law of electromagnetism.
It is the basis for a modern science called
magnetobiology, which explores the effects
of magnetic fields on living systems.
What is important about all
of this that
Reiki Practitioners can emit
ELF signals from their hands.
This was discovered in a valuable
study
by Dr. John Zimmerman.
He found that this pulsing field is produced
by the hands of Energy
Practitioner, but
non-practitioners do not produce such signals.
Zimmerman found that the pulsing field produced
by the hands of practitioners is not steady in frequency, but varies from moment to moment.
The frequency sweeps
up and down through the very same range of frequencies in the ELF band that medical researchers have identified as being effective
for jump starting the healing process in the various tissues they have investigated.
Hence we have uncovered a
major synergy between clinical
biomedicine and complementary medicine.
The basic physics of induction is
important because it helps explain some of the effects of Reiki.
In essence, the biomagnetic fields produced by
a practitioner’s hands can induce current flows in the tissues and cells of individuals who are in close proximity.
Evidence that this actually can occur is nicely
summarized in a fascinating paper entitled
“The
Electricity of Touch”
and in a book entitled `Science of the Heart`
As a result of these discoveries,
I have suggested a definition that is also a hypothesis:
Healing energy, whether produced by a medical device
or projected from the human body, is energy of a particular frequency or set of frequencies that
stimulates the
repair of one or more tissues.
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Link to Reiki and Quantum Healing
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