The Wolf Science

Toni Bunnell (1997) suggests that the linking of energy fields between practitioner and earth allows the practitioner to draw on the “infinite energy source” or “universal energy field” by the Schumann Resonance. Prof. Paul Davies and Dr. John Gribben in “The Matter Myth” (1991), discuss the quantum physics view of a “living universe” in which everything is connected in a “living web of interdependence”. All of this supports the subjective experience of 'oneness' and 'expanded consciousness' related by those who regularly receive or self-treat with Reiki.

Becker explains that 'brain waves' are not confined to the brain but travel throughout the body via the peri-neural system, the sheaths of connective tissue surrounding all nerves. During treatment, these waves begin as relatively weak pulses in the thalamus of the practitioner's brain. They gather cumulative strength as they flow to the peripheral nerves of the body, including the hands.

The same effect is mirrored in the person receiving treatment, and Becker suggests that it is this system, more than any other, that regulates injury repair and system re-balance.

This highlights one of the special features of Reiki (and similar therapies):
Both practitioner and client receive the benefits of a treatment, which makes it very efficient. It is interesting to note that Dr. Becker carried out his study on a world-wide array of cross-cultural subjects, and no matter what their belief systems or customs, or how opposed to each other their customs were, all tested the same. Part of Reiki's growing popularity is that it does not impose a set of beliefs and can therefore be used by people of any background and faith, or those with none at all. The body also emits light, sound, heat, and electromagnetic fields and, like all other matter, it has a gravitational field.

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 all have our specialties and interests, and it is challenging to take the step into the energy domain simply because it is the most multi-disciplinary pursuit we can undertake. This domain can always provide new insights, regardless of our main focus.

Energy medicine involves understanding how the body creates and responds to electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic fields. This includes light and sound, as well as other forms of energy such as heat, pressure, chemical and elastic energy, and gravity. 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.

It is important for Reiki and other energy therapists to realize that modern materialistic science does not really understand the origin of these various kinds of energy. So if you feel uncertain about what the words mean, if you are bewildered by materialistic science, you have good company. The best minds in modern materialistic science, including Albert Einstein, struggled to understand what energy really is and how the various forms of energy relate to each other. The problem is still unsolved at a fundamental level. We say that an electron has an electrical charge, but why it has a charge and just exactly what a charge really is, continues to be a mystery to science. When allopathic physicians and materialistic scientists react negatively to the term “energy medicine”, they are forgetting that there are many medical allopathic technologies using different forms of energy for diagnosis and treatment. Two such examples are X-rays and MRI's.

Passive measures of the fields produced by the body are also important in diagnosis: electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, electroretinograms, and electromyograms. Each of these diagnostic tools has a recently developed bio-magnetic counterpart: magneto cardiograms, magneto encephalograms, magneto retinograms, magneto myograms, and so on. Every allopathic medical doctor has used an electrocardiogram, an energy medicine diagnostic tool we have had for nearly a century.

Modern researchers have developed the magnetic biopsy, the electrical biopsy, and the optical biopsy. Transcutaneous nerve stimulators (TENS), cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, lasers, electrocautery, and pulsating magnetic field therapy are examples of energy treatment modalities that are part of conventional modern allopathic medicine. Controversial or not, energy medicine based on the use of medical equipment is alive and well in allopathic hospitals, clinics, and medical research centers.

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. In a few decades modern materialistic 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. Now even an allopathic medical doctor is making treatment decisions on the basis of these bio-field measurements.

The first human energy field to be well-documented was that of the heart. This research led to the electrocardiogram and was done a century ago by Einthoven, who received a Nobel Prize for his accomplishments in 1924. About a quarter of a century later, Berger measured the electrical fields of the brain, resulting in the medical field of electroencephalography.

The research of Einthoven, Berger, and others established that organs such as the heart and brain produce bioelectric fields that travel through the tissues of the body and that can be recorded with electrodes on the body surface. The signals which produce the electrocardiogram, for example, can be picked up with electrodes placed anywhere on the body, even on the feet.

Ampere’s Law, a fundamental law in physics, explains that when currents flow through conductors such as wires or living tissues, magnetic fields must be produced in the surrounding space. Since living tissues conduct 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, produce fields in the space around the body. These are called bio-magnetic fields. The bio-magnetic field of the heart was first measured in Syracuse, New York, in 1963, using two coils, each with two million turns of wire.

At about the same time these measurements were being made, a discovery in Cambridge, England, revolutionized bio-magnetic field measurements and resulted in a Nobel Prize for Brian Josephson a decade later. Josephson’s discovery led to the development of a very sensitive magnetometer.

In 1963, Baule & McFee, at New York’s Syracuse University, detected the magnetic field of the heart using two coils, each with 2 million turns of wire. Called a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), it determined that the heart's field is about one-millionth that of the Earth's field. These magnetometers are now used in medical research labs worldwide to study the human energy field.

It is important to add that the standard methods of recording electrical fields with electrodes on the skin surface (as in the electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram) provide much less information than the corresponding bio-magnetic measurements. The reason for this is that the electrical resistances of the various tissues vary by a factor of about thirty. Bio-electric fields generated within the body by tissues such as the heart and brain take the paths of least electrical resistance, so the patterns measured at the body surface are sort of smeared out and difficult to interpret. In contrast, the magnetic permeability of the various tissues is all about the same, as in a vacuum. In essence, the tissues are transparent to magnetic fields. So the bio-magnetic measurements are much more informative about what is happening inside the body than are the bio-electric measurements. This is an important point for energy therapists because a magnetic sense, if it exists, will provide much more information on what is going on within the body than will measurements of electrical fields from electrodes on the skin surface.

The term “healing energy” has long been forbidden in academic circles, but attitudes are changing due to recent basic medical research. Much credit is due to the late C. Andrew L. Bassett and his colleagues at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. They persisted and overcame entrenched skepticism and daunting regulatory hurdles to bring pulsing electromagnetic field therapy (PEMFT) for bone healing into mainstream medicine. Their research showed that certain magnetic fields can jump-start the healing process in fractures that have failed to heal, even for as long as forty years.

Bassett and his colleagues at Columbia also researched the use of PEMFT on other musculoskeletal problems, with considerable success. These problems include osteoarthritis, osteonecrosis, osteochondritis, osteogenesis imperfecta, and osteoporosis.

In the early 1980s, Brighton, Bassett and others demonstrated that fracture “non-unions” could be stimulated to heal using electric and magnetic fields. The FDA approved the method as safe and effective. The first FDA approval for magnetic field therapy was obtained in 1979. Subsequent work showed that healing in other tissues can be jump-started with fields pulsing at different frequencies.

Zimmerman (1990) in the USA and Seto (1992) in Japan further investigated the large pulsating bio-magnetic field that is emitted from the hands of energy practitioners while they work. They discovered that the pulses are in the same frequencies as brain waves, and sweep up and down from 0.3 - 30 Hz, focusing mostly in 7 to 8 Hz, alpha state.

Independent medical research has shown that this range of frequencies will stimulate healing in the body, with specific frequencies being suitable for different tissues. The important frequencies for stimulating tissue repair are all in the biologically important extremely low frequency (ELF) range. For example, 2 Hz encourages nerve regeneration, 7Hz bone growth, 10 Hz ligament mending, and 15 Hz stimulates capillary formation.

Physiotherapy equipment based on these principles has been designed to aid soft tissue regeneration, and ultrasound technology is commonly used to clear clogged arteries and disintegrate kidney stones. Also, it has been known for many years that placing an electrical coil around a fracture that refuses to mend will stimulate bone growth and repair. The induction phenomenon was described by Michael Faraday in England in 1831. He showed that moving a magnet near a conductor induces a measurable current flow in the conductor. Faraday’s Law of Induction is a basic law of electromagnetism; it is the basis for a modern materialistic science called magneto biology, which explores the effects of magnetic fields on living systems.

This new knowledge is significant because it provides evidence that practitioners of various hands-on and hands-off therapies such as Reiki, acupressure, aura balancing, Bowen, cranial sacral, Structural Integration (Rolfing), healing touch, Polarity Therapy, massage, and Zero Balancing, 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 practitioners of Therapeutic Touch and Healing Touch, while non-practitioners do not produce such signals Zimmerman also discovered 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 frequency range in the ELF band that medical researchers have deemed effective for jump-starting the healing process in the various tissues they have investigated.

Thus we have uncovered a major synergy between modern allopathic clinical biomedicine and traditional medicine. It appears that various hands-on and non-contact energy therapies introduce the same healing frequencies into tissues that medical researchers have identified as key to tissue healing. Moreover, careful medical research on the mechanism by which these signals affect cells applies equally to conventional and traditional therapies and helps explain some of the effects of Reiki, laying on of hands, and other hands-on and hands-off therapies.

Evidence that a practitioner can induce current flows in a person in close proximity is nicely summarized in a fascinating paper entitled "The Electricity of Touch". It is also described in a book entitled “Science of the Heart” published by the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California.

As a result of these discoveries, a definition of the term "Healing Energy" was derived - energy projected from the human body of a particular frequency or set of frequencies that stimulates the repair of one or more tissues. The bio-magnetic field arises from the pulsing electric currents set up by the tissues. The overall field, seen from a distance from the body, is a composite of all the fields, the largest being the field of the heart.

Because the blood is a very good conductor of electricity, the whole of the circulatory system pulses with electricity each time the heart beats. The second- strongest source of electricity is the retina, which acts like a large battery that changes in polarity when light falls on it. The third-strongest field is that produced by the various muscles; the larger muscles produce larger fields and tiny muscles, such as those that move the eyes, produce tiny fields. The field of the brain is about a thousandth as strong as that of the heart. Even weaker are the evoked fields produced by the brain when a sensory stimulus is provided, such as a sound, a light, or a touch. Finally, the weakest fields are those of the conducting system of the heart, (the Purkinje system), the bundle of this, and bundle branches. Again, the overall field is a composite of all these fields.

Bio-magnetic measurements generally require expensive equipment and shielded rooms to make sure you are not detecting noise from the electromagnetic environment. An exception seems to be the emissions from Qi Gong masters and others who are able to project very strong bio-magnetic fields. These are strong enough to be picked up with two 80,000-turn coils of wire and an amplifier. Seto and colleagues demonstrated this in Japan in 1992.

Additionally, there are fascinating measures of the electrical field of the heart that can be made by anyone, using do-it-yourself equipment, as described by Shawn Carlson in "The Amateur Scientist" in Scientific American, June 2000. There are also software and hardware for monitoring an important measure known as heart rate variability. These instruments may well be valuable for research on Reiki if it turns out that the energies involved are associated with the energy field of the heart, the strongest field.

The Institute for HeartMath pioneered a study of the relationship between the energy fields of the heart and emotional states. In essence, feelings of love, compassion, and appreciation produce particular harmonics in the frequency spectrum of the electrocardiogram that show up in the field of the body, beneficially affecting every cell. Likewise, fear, anger, and anxiety affect the field, and this, too, is communicated via energetic pathways to every cell.

Many Reiki practitioners feel that Reiki energy enters the system through the heart and travels to the hands. Thus, when a Reiki practitioner begins therapy, emotions of compassion, love, and other healing feelings are created in the heart. These feelings modify the heart’s electrical energies, which travel through the nerves and especially through the electrically conductive vascular system into the hands, where they create healing bio-fields that are induced into the client. My guess is that the fields produced during Reiki treatments will be tiny and very precisely tuned to specific frequencies that stimulate the immune system and other important body systems.

Though the laying on of hands is an ancient healing method, the various energy therapists must be regarded as true pioneers. I believe their experiences, such as the sense that the aura has layers to it, will someday be proven accurate. We will also find out what chakras really are. From a practical perspective, the science of the bio-field has lots of catching up to do. Once these bio-fields are created in the healer’s hands, a cascade of reactions takes 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.

This story is a part of the lecture given by A. G. Gilman in 1994 when he accepted the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine. It was discovered that a single hormone molecule or neurotransmitter, or a single photon of electromagnetic energy, can trigger a cellular response. One of the key steps in the amplification process is the activation of a calcium channel, so that hundreds of calcium ions flood into the cell. There they activate various cellular processes involved in the repair of injured or diseased tissues. The most important aspect of this research is that very tiny fields can produce the best effects. This profound and vital realization has implications for every branch of medicine.

When a therapist does not get a desired effect, there is a tendency to do more, to push harder, to turn up the intensity of the device or give a larger dose of a drug. Modern research points in the opposite direction. Living tissues are actually far more sensitive to external fields than we ever imagined. After a period when many scientists were certain 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, which is very similar to homeopathy.

Energy therapies such as Reiki are valuable for preventing and curing some of the serious diseases that are so costly in terms of human suffering and health care dollars. These methods work 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 can migrate to places where they are needed to initiate repair or to fight diseases. These methods also calm the person so that their immune functions can operate smoothly.

In physics there is the Faraday Effect. Named for Michael Faraday, it states that magnetic fields alter the polarization of light. Since the eye is very sensitive to the polarization of light, some people are able to sense the body’s energy field by tuning into the way the field alters the polarization of light. Some are born with a heightened sensitivity of this kind and others pick it up later in life. I think it is this kind of vision that enables some people to see the layering of the human energy field.

Another mechanism that may be involved is the discovery by a number of scientists that the retina of the eye is a magnetic receptor as well as a light receptor. Some of the best research has involved honey bees, bats or owls, which use magnetic information for navigation. This research is quite sophisticated in that neurophysiologists have found specific nerves from the eye that send signals when a magnet is brought close to the eye. An interesting topic for further study would be to determine if the visual system can actually form a magnetic image of its environment.

A new device, the orgonometer, has been developed to measure the aura given off by the human body as well as other life forms. For example, it has measured the energy field emanating from fruits to demonstrate the decay that starts as soon as the fruit is picked. It is possible this device will be able to measure the energy given off through the Reiki practitioner’s hands. Regardless, it is another development that shows promise in helping us to better understand the human energy field.

These approaches give somewhat different kinds of information about the human energy field. However, the resulting observations can be combined to provide a more complete picture than any one approach alone, and this is precisely what is happening.

The role the consciousness plays in energy medicine, that we refer to as mind, is a three-dimensional neuro-magnetic field that is the real substance of consciousness. The way this impacts energy medicine is important. There is no problem more urgent than the resolution of trauma and traumatic memories. This is so at the individual level and at the level of societies, nations, and ethnic groups. Given the present state of the world, energy medicine approaches to trauma may well hold the key to our future survival.

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 practitioners to place their hands in the right locations, to visualize the right location and to remain in a location for the right length of time. The healer’s hands will go to the right places as if they were drawn there by a magnet, and he or she will move on to other locations when the time is right.

One reason this works is that damaged or diseased tissue gives off signals that are induced into the hands’ energy systems that serve to guide the practitioner to the right places. Possibly there is an inner mechanism which automatically adjusts the bio-field in the hands of the Reiki practitioner according to the needs of the client.

When you recognize that living tissues are composed of semiconductor materials that form a sophisticated electronic circuit, it becomes clear how different frequencies can be both sensed and projected. This is a system that works quietly and invisibly in the background, coordinating all the tasks the healer accomplishes. It might adjust the frequency of its internal circuits to those most appropriate for the situation. In the case of a Reiki treatment, this would involve the tuning in of the practitioner’s operating system to the signals being emitted by the client and projecting into those tissues another signal that serves to balance the system.

Reiki II students learn how to send Reiki at a distance to others. The strength of the Reiki healing energy does not seem to diminish regardless of the distance involved. Sending a signal across the room can be as strong as sending a treatment to someone on the other side of the planet. This goes against the normal scientific theory about the radiation of energy, in which the greater the distance from the energy source, the weaker the energy becomes.

Actually, there are several phenomena in physics that could mediate healing at a distance. For example, scalar waves have the extraordinary property of affecting the structure of space everywhere, instantaneously. Scalar waves therefore do not have a velocity as such, and their effects do not diminish with distance. Though predicted from physical theory a century ago, physicists generally dropped the scalar wave from their equations because they could not contemplate a phenomenon with such remarkable properties.

Now that there is growing experimental evidence for healing at a distance, as well as for the benefits of prayer, the scalar wave is being re-examined for its possible role in mediating such phenomena. A valuable perspective comes from a quantum physicist, Dr. Milo Wolff, who has described the interdependence of all matter on all other matter in the universe. His articles are written in a language that is quite accessible to the layman, while being quite precise and perceptive on a scientific level. His fascinating concepts integrate the properties of the cosmos, matter, and physical laws.

For its existence, the particle depends on the interactions between its own out waves and the waves coming in from all of the other particles in the universe. The particle is therefore dependent on its interaction with all other particles. Another aspect is so-called quantum non-locality, or inseparability, or Bell’s inequality, or the EPR effect (for Einstein, Podolski and Rosen, who wrote an important paper in 1935). This is a quantum phenomenon which seems to run counter to common sense, or else it tells us that common sense is not the way the world really works.

The reality of Wolff’s 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 increase, so they are actually separating at twice the speed of light.

Modern technology allows us to track the strange behavior of these two photons as they move apart. 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 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 ("Creation"), all matter in the universe continues to be in relation to all other matter. Milo Wolff’s concepts describe the basis for this.

Since these discoveries seem to run counter to common sense, physicists have carefully dissected the experiments to find flaws. The discussion of quantum non-locality continues in the physics world, its reality accepted by some physicists and rejected by others. A readable account will be found in a book by F. David Peat entitled Synchronicity.

The Reiki attunement is a unique part of Reiki training. A person does not have to train to be able 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 attunement. As with other aspects of energy medicine, it is suggested that during the attunement process, there is a frequency or a set of frequencies that can be transferred from a teacher to a student via the energy field that will always be remembered by the student.

The memory process is probably similar to that involved in homeopathy, in which the electromagnetic signature of a substance is transferred to water. While some scientists have viewed the idea of memory in water with great suspicion, others are doing research to find out how it works. The human body contains a water system that is a veritable antenna for fields in the environment, and it could well be this water system that picks up the frequencies and remembers them, much as water can remember the signal from a homeopathic remedy.

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. The study of the fields produced during Reiki and other energy healing methods will be some of the most interesting research possible 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.

Another fascinating area is opening up for the study of quantum holography. Edgar Mitchell, the former Apollo astronaut who founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences, has taken a keen interest in this topic. He has written a fascinating chapter about it in the book Clinical Applications of Bioelectromagnetic Medicine. One idea from quantum holography is that all bio-matter information, from simple cells to organisms, is interconnected internally by non-local quantum coherence (e.g. soliton waves) and externally with the larger environment by coherent quantum emissions. Another is that photonic emissions from living matter carry information about the whole organism.

From what we have seen so far, the study of quantum coherence is going to take all of medicine to an entirely different level, and many of the seemingly miraculous healings in the past will be easier to understand, explain, and replicate. It may well hold the key to spontaneous healing, the topic of a best-selling 1955 book by Andrew Weil. He concluded that "...all the circuitry and machinery is there; the problem is simply to discover how to turn on the right switches to activate the process."

I believe we are coming to a time when quantum coherence and other scientific approaches will teach us how to turn on these switches. We have the methods with which to do all of this research, and we have every expectation that it will lead us into a new medicine that is more effective, less expensive, and easier to perform than the system we have at present. The research center of the future will do nothing else but study the kinds of fields emitted by tissues that are diseased or injured and the physiological effects of the signals produced by Reiki and other energy therapists.

The answers to all of these important questions will emerge when modern materialistic science begins to listen to and study the people who have been making practical use of energy medicine since long before there even was such a thing as modern science.