The Western scientists who originally investigated the Eastern claims of meridians and nadis went back to their dissection tables looking for physical manifestations of these channels. Their dissections discarded the supposedly inert connective tissues. They looked past these tissues searching for something that just wasn’t there. They looked for channels and conducting tubes similar to nerves and blood vessels, and could not find them. Their conclusion: no channels, no meridians. Ironically, they discarded the very tissues that formed the channels they were seeking. The energies flow through the connective tissues, through the water-hugging fibers of the ground substance.
The ancient sages told us that there were seventy-two thousand nadis. Some said three hundred thousand. Some said three hundred and sixty thousand. They were wrong, of course. The number of connections between the billions of cells in our body is beyond counting. One estimate claims that there are over one billion trillion connections. That is likely to be a low estimate. These connections, of course, are the nadis and the meridians that the sages talked of. They are the conduits of the energies of prana and Chi. We can forgive these early sages for not getting the number right: but the point was taken. Calculators were rare two thousand years ago.
Chi Revisited
So far we have been looking only at the flow of information possibly encoded in the piezoelectrically generated energies of the body, and the associated electromagnetic energies that could travel along the crystalline structures of our connective tissues. The sages of ages past underestimated the number of channels; what about their claims that there are ten kinds of prana or thirty-two types of Chi? Were they exaggerating here?
The curious reader is directed again to James Oschman’s books. We have only touched upon the research he has gathered relating to electromagnetism. In his studies, Dr. Oschman also investigates gravitational information, infrared, photonic, microwave, and many other forms of energy that the body seems to employ to communicate information. It does indeed seem likely that, over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, life on earth has adapted to, and adopted, everything Mother Nature has made available to us. When we add these forms of energies to the ones we have already talked about (chemical, electrical, and magnetic) the total exceeds the number the sages gave us. Once again, rather than finding that the Indian and Daoist yogis were exaggerating, we can speculate that they were being rather conservative in their descriptions of what is going on inside our bodies.
(Next: Models are Just Models )