What is health? The word itself comes from wholeness. When we lack wholeness, we suffer; we are unhealthy. It follows then that healing is restoring the wholeness we are lacking. The body has an amazing ability to heal. What is surprising about all animals, all life, is not that we get sick from time to time or we aren’t healthy. What is surprising is how healthy we are! There are so many ways we could become sick. There are so many interdependent functions and parts of the body that can fail. The fact that it works so well for so long is a miracle. For this miracle to occur the body must be extremely sophisticated.
Wholeness – health – requires communication internally and the ability to move energy. The cells of the body [1] need to communicate with each other. When this communication breaks down we cannot remain whole. The same point applies to transporting energy and materials within the body. Consider the example of a city during a blackout. When the power is down, transportation is shut down, communication ceases, and the city stops functioning. The body is similar; we need information and energy to flow, whether this is chemical information in the form of substances moving from one area of the body to another or electrical information informing one area of what is happening in another area. Ill health can be considered, in this model, as a failure in the communication and transportation network of the body.
Disease and illness disrupt the flow of information and transportation within the body. For over five hundred million years complex life has been evolving and finding ways to improve the ability to communicate and transport energy and information within a body. Through trial and error [2] life has found ways to do this better and better. Better in this case means faster, more accurately, and with backup systems in case of problems. Nature and her laws of physics provide many possible methods and mediums to choose from. The most successful forms of life would naturally adopt as many of these mediums as possible.
The earliest multicellular life forms used chemical means to communicate. Materials were physically passed from one cell to the next. Then conduits were created within which these substances could travel farther, faster, and more surely. These conduits evolved into our blood system.
The nervous system evolved in a similar manner. On the surface of every piece of matter are atoms and their electrons. Some electrons are easily dislodged by a variety of naturally occurring events: sunlight, friction, chemical reactions, or nearby electrical activity. The atoms, when deprived of one or more electrons, are called “ions.” Ionized atoms may attract and absorb an electron from a neighboring atom, thus becoming neutral again: but its neighbor is now ionized, so it borrows an electron from the next neighbor. Repeating this process creates a cascading wave of electrical energy. Our nervous system evolved by taking advantage of this physical process. But why would we expect nature to stop there? There are many other forms of information and energy transfer that we haven’t considered yet. We use them in our machines every day: electro-magnetic energy, photonic energy, infrared energy, microwave energy, gravity this is not an exhaustive list.
A new paradigm is evolving in the West, one that broadens the scope of information and energy transportation mechanisms far beyond simple chemical and electrical models. This new paradigm includes many other forms of communication and energy movement, which could only be imagined in centuries past. With our modern, sensitive instruments, capable of detecting minute levels of energy, we are able to test these new models. We are going to explore just a couple of these new models, starting with electricity – not the electricity found in your home, but bioelectricity – the electricity of the body.
(Next: Bioelectronics )