Theory of Healing Intentions and Energies

  “This is the missing link between modern science and ancient mysticism.”
— From The Lost Symbol, 57

Many people, including physicists such as Amit Goswani and Fritoj Capra, and medical doctors such as Larry Dossey and Deepak Chopra, have championed the view that the noetic sciences are bridging the gap between science and spirit. Consciousness, they say, is an integral part of the cosmos, and indeed may be make up the very fabric of the cosmos. Although to some people they sound more like metaphysicians than scientists, we now know that no theory of the body or its biology will be complete without including consciousness, belief, and intention. It also must include fields of energy and information. The general premise in the noetic sciencies is that the universe—and human beings—are fundamentally quantum in nature. Thus, many of the theories explaining healing at a distance, intention influencing matter and other noetic realities are based in quantum physics.

We have already talked about entanglement and nonlocality in the Quantum Physics section, so you may want to review that information now. As a reminder, through entanglement, two systems can remain separate and yet act as a single system. Through nonlocality, everything in the universe may be connected at some deep, fundamental level, so that there is no separation through time and space. Nonlocality and entanglement allow for instantaneous correlation between two systems, such that something done to one system instantly affects the other. These physics concepts are at the core of noetic science explanations for how intention affects matter, especially in the case of healing.

However, there are other concepts that help explain energy healing and healing at a distance. These are more widely accepted by conventional scientists, although they are new to the study of biology. Biophysicist James Oschman defines healing energy in the following way: “‘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” (Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 87). Oschman’s two books are compilations of all the ways the human body uses frequency and vibration to function properly. This research supports the premise that healers can both alter the body’s frequencies to induce healing and project their own healing frequency out to another person. There are two main ways that vibration and frequency come into play in the discussion not only of healing energies but in just about every discussion of the noetic sciences. The first concept is resonance.

Resonance occurs when two separate systems begin to vibrate together. A classic example is with pendulums. In a room full of pendulums, if you start one pendulum arm swinging, soon other pendulum arms will begin to swing in concert with the first. A resonant vibration is set up, and whatever other systems match that starting vibration will begin to move in sync with it. Noetic scientists believe that energy healers are somehow able to resonate in sync with the person they are attempting to heal, and so the two systems are somehow connected, one affecting the other, each taking on properties—in this case, involving healing energies—that they might not otherwise have by themselves. As retired Princeton materials scientist and engineering dean Robert Jahn  (who is the founder of the PEAR laboratory) explains, everything in nature, and most things manmade, display resonance:

“All matter of physical systems, whether mechanical, electromagnetic, fluid dynamical, quantum mechanical, or nuclear display capacities for synergistically interactive vibrations with similar systems, or with their environment. Coupled harmonic oscillators, all common musical instruments, radio and television circuitry, atomic components of molecules, all involve ‘sympathetic’ resonance, from which strikingly different properties emerge from those that characterize their isolated components.” (Quoted in Dossey, Healing Beyond the Body, 250)
The second concept is coherence. Coherence means a greater level of order. Where there is increased order, there usually is enhanced communication. Much of the New Biology is based on discoveries of how coherence rules in the human body, from the coherent light emitted from our cells (biophotons) to the coherent molecular communication networks that run on the crystalline lattice-like structures of our nervous system (the living matrix). Mae-Wan Ho, a cell biologist, is one of the most vocal scientists touting the need for conventional biologists to explore the new “coherent” model of cell biology that is being formulated by noetic scientists. She and other scientists believe we have to delve into the quantum aspects of the body to truly understand biology and healing. Whereas conventional biologists study the body in isolation and have to kill cells in order to study them, the noetic scientists says to truly understand the body scientists have to study its living systems in a holistic manner. Doing so has allowed them to make remarkable discoveries and offer far-reaching theories. The theory of how molecules and cells communicate via coherent networks is among them. They are showing that, as Oschman writes, “coherent vibrations recognize no boundaries, at the surface of a molecule, cell, or organism. They are collective properties of the whole, and they radiate their messages into the environment in various ways” (Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, 195).

Disease, from the noetic perspective, is viewed as a break down of the body’s resonance and the coherence of its systems. Herbet Frolich, a physicist who devoted much of his professional life to detecting quantum processes in the body and its biology, says,“An assembly of cells, as in a tissue or organ, will have certain collective frequencies that regulate important processes, such as cell division. Normally these control frequencies will be very stable. If, for some reason, a cell shifts its frequency, entraining signals from neighboring cells will tend to reinstall the correct frequency. However, if a sufficient number of cells get out out-of-step, the strength of the system’s collective vibrations can decease to the point where stability is lost. Loss of coherence can lead to disease or disorder” (quoted in Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 135).

It appears from the research that healers can tap into another person’s resonant frequencies and affect that person’s overall coherence, thereby coaxing that person’s body back toward health. And, as experiments show and quantum physics allows, there is no limitation on distance, so that healers can use intention to send healing to someone in the same room or across the globe. Self-healing appears to be based on the same principles of resonance and coherence. At the very least, self-healing and healing at a distance by others appears to require some kind of new energy or information field, what systems theorist Ervin Laszlo calls “the fifth force” and Lynne McTaggart and others call “the Field.” (We will talk more about this in the Bio-Informational Healing section of this website.)

Conventional science is just now beginning to realize that energy and information fields at the quantum level are important to understanding biology, and as we have shown elsewhere in this website, they are starting to look for them and are finding evidence for them. The newest forms of imaging, such as fMRIs, are quantum in nature. However, noetic scientists have gone much further, as we will discuss in the next section on bio-informational healing. Noetic scientists believe our brains may be receivers for quantum information fields, as Dr. Dietmar Cimbal explains in the documentary The Living Matrix. Our brains “tune” in to one specific information field “transmission” or another, depending on where we place our intention and attention. Our cells are also communicating with internal and external environments nanosecond to nanosecond. They are able to transfer information to each other almost instantaneously in ways that cannot be explained by conventional biology.

This brief overview of noetic science theory will hopefully whet your appetite to find out more about the new biology. A physicists Sir James Jeans once said, quantum physics is revealing how the universe is more like a great thought than a great machine. The same may be said of the human body. Our thoughts matter, our intentions and beliefs change our biology, and our health is not controlled only by our genes. With this new understanding, medicine is changing—slowly but changing nonetheless. In the next section we highlight the research going on at the frontiers of health and medicine in a new science called bio-informational medicine.