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ISSSEEM ConferenceAuthor: Dr. Siegfried OthmerI decided to attend the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine, meeting this year in Colorado Springs, in order to catch up with where this organization is presently, and while the principals that gave life to the organization originally (Elmer Green and the Menninger group) are still around. I went with mixed feelings. First of all, we’ve got quite enough controversies on our hands without going out of our way to find new conundrums, and yet new ways to discomfit the medical mainstream. Also, I feared a beguiling proselytizing rush from the right-brain people. On the other hand, this organization is home to people even more fearless, people who are willing to do quite bizarre experiments to prove their theories. If one needs to recharge one’s batteries with dollops of courage, this is the place to go. The initial talk I heard was not reassuring. It was by Elizabeth Rauscher, who started out life as a physicist. Why is it, incidentally, that so many of these researchers started out as physicists? One reason may be that if these bizarre things were said by anyone other than a physicist, less attention might be paid. Another may be that physicists are more fearless when it comes to the exotic frontier. We’ve had a revolution or two or three under our belt already, and we’re getting used to it. In any event, some outlandish phenomenology from quantum mechanics punctuates the discussion from time to time, which then entitles the speaker to make great leaps into the unknown. The connection is often lost. For example, Rauscher showed EEG data that was ostensibly influenced by waves of solar radiation, even phase-locking to it. One had to take her word on the phase-locking part, which was not obvious from the figure. Rauscher also showed data indicating that low-level periodic electromagnetic radiation had the effect of desynchronizing the EEG. No context for these data was provided. We know from work with audio-visual stimulation and ROSHI and LENS that such effects are commonplace, and readily explainable in left-brain terms. They do not serve as a compelling springboard for a discussion on the cosmic unity of consciousness. Science is sprinkled onto the discussion somewhat like I sprinkle pepper onto my salad. The science is the spice; it is not the salad. The agenda is something else, a project for which science is recruited for support rather than illumination. It simply has to be acknowledged that the other of the two cultures is in charge here, and provides the guiding spirit of the organization. Science is respected, but the culture of science is not in charge. So one needs to be somewhat on guard, or pretty soon you find yourself beating drums at the campfire of a strange new tribe. On the other hand, outsiders from Big Science also come up with the most salient critiques of that enterprise. The closer things get to what actually matters to us personally in our lives, the less scientific tools are able to help. “You cannot really know who you are through science,” said one speaker, and whether one agrees or disagrees with that sentiment has entirely to do with one’s vantage point. The enterprise of science tends to leave unaddressed those issues to which its tools are not suitable, and that includes in particular any issues involving subjectivity. Most emblematic of that dichotomy is the question of consciousness itself. Peter Russell, in his invited talk, recalled one conversation in which a scientist came close to denying the reality of consciousness itself, the possibility of it being an illusion not having been entirely ruled out. This just illustrates the difficulty we have as scientists in even admitting subjectivity to the discussion, and the further difficulty of acknowledging that the material world has given rise to something so immaterial. But one can proceed by making the hypothesis of consciousness and then going on to describe it. This has now been done by various people, and a number of “reductionist” models of consciousness have appeared. Russell himself went down the path of treating consciousness as an “emergent property” of a sufficiently complex system. Consciousness can be constructed out of a hierarchy of awareness. At some point, sufficiently complex systems allow “awareness of awareness,” and there we are. I personally like the metaphor of the mirror, in which having one mirror permits the chimpanzee to have a new awareness of himself. (Seeing a star pasted on his own forehead, he reaches for it directly, rather than groping behind the mirror. He knows he is looking at himself.) Two mirrors then allow the reflection of the reflection, out to infinity—effectively the awareness of awareness. Once a feedback/feedforward nervous system is sufficiently complex to permit a certain level of parallel processing, then the capacity is present for the emergence of awareness of awareness, of the watcher also being the watched, and once the capability is available at all, then it is available in infinite regression. In this manner, the whole matter of consciousness can be somewhat demystified. We know that if we lop limbs off a tree, the whole “physiology” of the tree will quickly become aware of the assault. And it has been found that trees react even to the felling of their neighbors in the forest. So they may be said to have a certain level of awareness. Similarly, one could take the particle model of the electron and assert that the wave function reflects an awareness of the entire space in the neighborhood of the electron (as in the two-slit experiment, which works for electrons just as it does for photons). But it takes a hierarchical organization of regulation such as we have in our synaptic system to provide for the “observation” of one level of regulation by another, and such hierarchical organization could prepare the ground for the awareness of awareness. But that cannot explain all of the phenomenology of consciousness because nothing in that model allows for the possibility of the breaking of the boundary of the self. The emergent-property model makes the boundary of consciousness identical to the boundary of the CNS. Even a single provable and reproducible demonstration of the breaking of the boundary of the self in consciousness would render the “emergent-property” model incomplete. And the folks at this conference believe that such evidence is plentiful, once it is attended to. On the other hand, the scientific enterprise never seems to miss an opportunity to pass up the larger issues (to paraphrase the late Abba Eban). So it is not helping. I digress for a moment in this discussion to report that I found a little gem in the bookstore at this conference: “Mental Radio,” by Upton Sinclair. It was brought back into print by Hampton Roads Press (which also published the book “Getting Rid of Ritalin”). I was not aware of this side of Upton Sinclair’s interests, but his wife had had life-long gifts of powers of telepathy, and the two of them simply set about to document this ability in some well-controlled designs. For example, one setup was for the brother to hold a particular object intensely in view and in mind in Pasadena for an agreed-upon period of fifteen minutes, while the wife was in Long Beach at that moment, clearing her mind and concentrating on incoming imagery at that same time. In three out of four such trials, she was unambiguously successful in identifying and drawing the envisioned object. As it happens, Albert Einstein was a family friend, and he wrote an introduction to the German edition of the book. He writes: “The results of the telepathic experiments carefully and plainly set forth in this book stand surely far beyond those which a naturalist holds to be thinkable. On the other hand, it is out of the question in the case of so conscientious an observer as Upton Sinclair that he is carrying on a conscious deception of the reading world. His bona fides and reliability are not to be doubted….In no case should the psychologically interested circles pass over this book heedlessly.” Einstein had himself witnessed some of these experiments on his visits with the Sinclair household. How does it reflect upon the enterprise of science that an experiment of such incisive potential is considered just as much beyond the pale now as it was some 75 years ago? Either there is something here with revolutionary implications equivalent to that of the Michaelson-Morley experiment, or Upton Sinclair was a charlatan and a fraud. The breaking of the boundaries of the self by consciousness must by now be regarded as proved, given the plenitude of independent corroborating lines of evidence. Consequently, it should not be surprising that those who find themselves on the other side of this fundamental divide will consort with each other and try to move on as best they can. It is just unfortunate that the world of science does not provide neutral ground for those things not yet proved or disproved. We do better than that in sports! In light of the above, it is timely to discuss the following experimental results, which were presented by William Bengston. His research topic was the issue of whether energy healing could be taught. The healing technique was the laying-on of hands. So Bengston taught a number of initially non-believing students in the techniques that he wanted used, which were to take an hour a day for a month. The technique was to be used on mice that had been injected with lethal doses of mammary adenocarcinoma. This dose is well-known to be 100% fatal, and in fact no mouse ever survived longer than 27 days under the challenge of such an injection. The mice indeed developed the tumors, as expected, but then the tumors took a surprising course. They blackened and ulcerated, and then were resorbed. The mice went on to live a full lifespan. In fact, subsequent trials with the lethal elixir did not even elicit tumor formation. Lifetime immunity to this kind of cancer seemed to have been conferred. The experimental mice survived the challenge at the rate of 88% out of some 33 mice involved in a number of separate trials. The trials were run in different universities, by different groups of students. Looking just at these data, one would be tempted to conclude that first of all there is merit to the “laying on of hands;” secondly, that the skill can be taught; and finally, that even belief in the so-called “treatment” is not required. But this is not the end of the story. It turns out that the controls did just about as well, responding at a 70% rate despite not having had the benefit of the laying on of hands. There were replications with another strain of tumor that is equally fatal, with similar results. But now Bengston was running into a curious snag. When he approached the same groups of researchers about doing replications, he was rebuffed. After all, the first time they agreed to do the experiment it was a matter of proving that Bengston was nuts. They were perfectly happy to cooperate in doing that. On the other hand, if they agreed to do a second similar experiment, it would just prove that they were nuts! Thus the enterprise of science protects itself from deviance. Bengston reluctantly concluded that his carefully done experiment did not answer the question about whether healing techniques could be taught to the naive, since there was no significant treatment interaction, but it left him with the dilemma of explaining the results obtained with the controls. He is postulating that a kind of herd immunity was acquired by the group of mice that had once shared a common bond, a kind of resonant bond. It’s not like the data can be readily explained away. All of the mice did grow the tumors, after all, at least in the first administration. And the tumors are known to be 100% fatal. So there is clearly a need for an explanation. Finally, there was the fact that the experiment had in fact been done “triple-blind.” On their own initiative the students had established yet a third control group, unbeknownst to Bengston, so if Bengston was somehow intervening with the controls surreptitiously, this third group would be unaffected. They were healed as well! This is doubly ironic, since the students were the real experimental animals here rather than the mice. So we actually had a case of the experimental animals running a blinded, controlled experiment on the experimenter. That may be a first. Other experiments were ongoing in the same universities in which groups of mice were continuing to succumb to the tumor-kindling procedure as expected. Something was causing these particular groups of mice to respond differently from all the others. And they have done so now in six independent trials. So there you have it. If these data are taken at face value, then the “hygiene” that normally attends controlled studies is called into question. It may very well be insufficient for us to rely on standard methods. There is once again the possibility of a shared or distributed consciousness playing a role. However that may be, it also illustrates once again the nature of our scientific culture. Whereas these experiments will cause some people to lean forward and want to know more, others will want to back off and have nothing to do with it, lest they be contaminated with implications of unorthodox science. It is true that if researchers spent their lives chasing anomalous results, they might end up do little else during their careers. Science must aim its shots. But this is different. It is one thing not to bother to pursue arcane hypotheses de novo, but it is quite another to neglect confounding data when you are already entangled with it. An unsavory bias appears to be at work here that militates against the pursuit of the ground-breaking, paradigm-shattering result. Long live orthodoxy! Breakthrough science is almost always opportunistic in character, seizing upon the disagreeable factoid that cannot be made to go away. And the most securely blinded experiments are those that were oblique to the original design. Sterman’s cat experiments were a case in point. Bengston’s experiments are another. We have just witnessed what is likely to be the highest recovery rate among fatal tumors ever seen anywhere, and it was done with a technique most scientists would regard as the purest quackery. Even if the “quack technique” is entirely put aside, we have here an existence proof in which the body was triggered somehow to recognize the tumor as non-self and to mount a response. That would seem to have the makings of a general strategy against a variety of tumors. How can any oncologist turn away from such a tantalizing finding? The usual manner in which mainstream science accomplishes such splitting is to credit the result while putting the method into the infinitely indulgent bin we call the placebo. Or the bin may be labeled “spontaneous remission” (which must surely rank as the pre-eminent oxymoron in the annals of medicine). Operationally that’s fine. Compartmentalize if you must; but don’t ignore the data! As time goes on during the conference I am getting more of a handle on this organization. It is largely composed of energy healers, not of scientists. Putting the word “study” in the name probably had the same purpose as it did for the original International Society for the Study of Neuronal Regulation, i.e. as a fig leaf of respectability. (“We’re only studying it; we’re not actually doing it…”) In reality the disinterested study of the subject has to coexist here with lives of passionate commitment and of overt spirituality, which are what really energizes this community of professionals. This group faces the same issues that our biofeedback community does when it comes to professional ethics, self-policing, standards-setting, etc. The problems here are even greater because there is even less homogeneity among the professionals; licensure is even less commonplace among energy healers than among biofeedback therapists; and they are even further down on the reimbursement food chain. Moreover, many feel subject to a divine imperative. Standard-setting in that realm becomes problematic. So I attended a session devoted to the topic of professional ethics. There is never a problem in articulating lofty principles; the difficulty comes in reduction to practice. One case was cited in which a healer was approached by a young woman who asked for help in the relationship with her mother. The healer helpfully pointed out that her mother had cancer, which might explain the newly strained relationship. As it happens, the healer was correct in her intuition, but had no right to disclose to the daughter what the mother did not want disclosed. Since she had acted in her professional capacity as a healer, this was an ethical violation. It is easy to see how a healer, aware of many things that have not been voluntarily disclosed, could slip into such ethically murky terrain. A number of ethical challenges were surfaced later in the session when an energy healer rose to tell her story. She admitted that she had no expertise in the area of health, but at the end of a “dark night of the soul” emerged with the power to see other people’s energy. She did not like her new state, and early on even suspected mental illness. But she felt compelled to help others on the basis of her new awareness, so she became a healer. At one point some time later she came to see her own energy---a rare event among energy workers. She was moving in a dark cloud. She could dispel it for a time, but it would always return. She therefore “knew” that it implied a physical ailment. As it happens, she had been a medical correspondent for the BBC, and thus was well-connected within the British medical establishment. She went to see one specialist after another. Nearly everyone had a different explanation for what ailed her. One suggested lingering post-viral fatigue. Another thought that she had had hepatitis at some point, and was now experiencing lingering effects. A homeopath (mainstream in England) intimated that she might be suffering early menopause. A Chinese physician also suspected hepatitis, and offered a potion which he assured her was the only thing that would solve her problem. On going home she experienced shocks in her spine, and was therefore not motivated to continue with the potion. The doctor was not interested in seeing her further. “Come back when you are ready to take the medication.” Yet another doctor referred her to his wife for counseling. And one other doc found nothing upon an exam and suggested counseling also. She did actually undertake three sessions of spiritual counseling with this doc, but since this was by now her line of work, she left unimpressed. Another doc, this one a favorite of Prince Charles, undertook a manipulation of her spine that indeed gave her ten minutes of relief, but in retrospect could also have injured her severely. Acupuncture was tried and abandoned. A foray into osteopathy led to unwanted sexual advances. She lamented that the intuition she had available for others was not available for herself. At one point, however, she did get a message to return to the place where she was born, and to do so before her next birthday. She had been born in South Africa. Medically disabled and with two children at home, she was not in a position to casually run off to South Africa, but nevertheless she arranged her affairs and did so. There an old family doctor referred her to a gastroenterologist. However, the fellow was on vacation for two weeks, having left on February 19, her birthday. She waited. A thorough exam was done upon his return, but the doc picked up on something else. Why are you winking at me, he asked? She was unaware. He touched her eye with a piece of cotton, and the eye did not blink. Further sleuthing led to the discovery of a tumor on the brainstem, an acoustic neuroma. It had already impacted the innervation of one eye. Emergency surgery was carried out at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. She was of course grateful to survive the surgery, but she was left with many deficits, in particular in aspects of memory. In reflecting back on this ordeal, she said that nearly everybody got it wrong along the way, including ultimately the surgeon as well. All were blinded by their own bias. Not one doc in England referred her on to anyone else. Everyone persisted in his or her particular view of the condition, and when that was not fruitful, was prepared to just let matters rest. Nobody said, “I don’t know what’s going on.” When she told her surgeon of the memory loss, his response was “your tumor was nowhere near where your memory is located.” End of discussion. This is the real world, one that an ethics regime will not even scratch. It is as if medical knowledge is being purchased at the price of escalating compartmentalization. The mandate to avoid error drives one to increasing specialization, to that small portion of the knowledge real estate where one is unassailably expert. It also seems as if the drive toward clinical certitude, on the one hand, and legal defensibility on the other, is constructing a particularly virulent kind of scientific fundamentalism. Generalizing theories represent a fundamental threat to such constructions. They also lack the kind of specificity that is now called for. And worst of all, they cut the ground of certainty out from under the specialists. No wonder we are not wanted… And neither are the healers. They represent the very antithesis of the medical ideal. They proceed with large dollops of intuition. Their perspective is integrating and holistic. They draw upon the mystical and meditative traditions, and on traditional shamanic and ancient medical traditions that modern medicine thought it had left behind. In the face of a commitment to diagnostic specificity and procedural exactitude they proceed with a passionate commitment to the healing journey. They mobilize hope in the patient, and recruit all of the person’s resources in the enterprise of healing. And they are frequently very successful even in the face of the darkest of prospects. The healers do have one advantage over us in biofeedback/neurofeedback. They do not fundamentally threaten medicine. They may be found in the operating theater alongside the surgeon, but they do not threaten the surgeon’s worldview. Having a healer in the operating room is a bit like having chaplains in the army. On the other hand, we do shake the foundations. Our work will compel a reorganization of much of medical knowledge, and to a certain extent that threat is already being perceived. So it should be no surprise that we will continue to have the more difficult road toward acceptance. It is precisely because we are potentially mainstream that we remain such a threat. We are the enemy within. We are more like the parasites, the protozoa that by virtue of being so much like us are much harder to eradicate from the body. The healers are more like the bacteria. They are different stuff, more easily segregated. The healer I talked about above works in total commitment to her strictly non-medical healing techniques. Yet her own life was saved by the very best that modern medicine had to offer. Her case illustrates the way forward. There must be room for the untrammeled working of the healing arts, on the one hand, and for the availability of standard medicine on the other. But neither is owed our sole allegiance, and neither is entitled to an exclusive truth claim. We are dealing, rather, with “independent magisteria,” in the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould, each with its own distinct domain of validity. There were many MDs in the room, many who had thoroughly changed
the nature of their practice over the years and had become healers.
Nevertheless it is difficult for me to envision Big Medicine making
such a transition. We are at a time when MDs are getting acting
lessons so that they can simulate empathy with their patients.
Even at the crucial and intensely personal interface between patient
and doctor, we backslide to a procedural remedy. It is enough
to chill the spine. One does not decide to become a healer the way one decides to go to medical school. So the field of medicine as a whole cannot go there. The vocation of healing must, therefore, continue to stand apart, and it must be recognized as such. Matters are very different in the case of biofeedback, where it is only a matter of time that medical schools will absorb and teach everything that we have come to know. Nevertheless, I found myself speculating about the powerful combination of the heart and “presence” of the healer with the skills and techniques that we have learned over the years in biofeedback and neurofeedback. So it is unsurprising that the scientific enterprise should play a subsidiary role in this community. In fact, I am now surprised the other way, about how big a role the scientific issues are allowed to take up on the agenda. I have already mentioned the role of science as a spice, as a grace note in the composition. There is also the role of science as a kind of mosquito repellant, to ward off pesky critics from the mainstream. And then there is science as metaphor. The non-locality that is part of quantum mechanics at least prepares the ground for the non-locality of consciousness, even if what we know of quantum-mechanical non-locality today cannot be stretched that far. And string theory helpfully opens the door to the possibility of collapsed dimensions, which at least admits of a theory of consciousness that likewise seems to violate normal spatial relationships. This role of science as metaphor becomes apparent if we were to hypothesize the appearance of a paper in the Physical Review that discredited the major assumptions of string theory. In that event, this group of practitioners would not suddenly abandon certain practices for having lost their theoretical foundation. Things would go on as before. In addition to science as metaphor, however, the need to explain the extraordinary findings in subtle energy medicine have led to some real and ground-breaking scientific research. These results were discussed on the last day by William Tiller, the Stanford emeritus professor of materials science and former Chair of the Materials Science Dept. at Stanford. If the content of consciousness can be communicated among people, can the mobilizing of intention also influence animal behavior? It turns out that it can. In carefully done experiments, it was found that the ATP/ADP ratio in fruit flies could be altered through such human interventions merely through the workings of intention. If consciousness can play a role outside of the boundaries of the body, then such communication must be mediated by a kind of field, although clearly not a conventional one. Can such a field interact with inanimate matter? It turns out that it can. It was found to be possible for long-term meditators to change the pH of water through the collective activity of their intention. To prove the effect was real, they were asked to change the pH upward on one occasion, downward on another, starting with highly purified water on each occasion. This could be systematically accomplished, and the effect size was huge. The range from top to bottom exceeded one unit on the pH scale, equivalent to an order of magnitude change in the hydrogen ion concentration. If you tasted the water, you could readily tell the difference between the two. Things get even more bizarre. The careful attempt was made to imprint the intention on an electronic device (an oscillator) built for the occasion. Then the device was shipped to distant parts, and allowed to change the pH of water in other locales. The researchers in those facilities were entirely independent of the original researchers. Again the experiments were successful, and these results have by now been replicated in a variety of locations around the world. It is typical of experiments done against the grain that the experimental procedure is meticulously thought out with a view toward the critics. This is not a place where one would want to leave himself open to being the laughingstock because of obvious experimental flaws. So if there are flaws in the design here, they are subtle indeed. I tend to take scientists like Tiller seriously because he is of my tribe, in that I started out as a materials scientist myself. These kinds of experiments are what people like Tiller do well. The objective may have been to study intention as an aspect of consciousness. But what was being measured was the pH of water. This is easier to get right. On the other hand, Tiller was also one of the group of meditators who imposed his intention onto the electronics. Clearly he thought all along that a positive outcome to his experiments was actually possible, or he might not have bothered. But if the communicability of intention is being tested here, then the presence of negative intention is a potential confound. The presence of “The Amazing Randi” in the room could indeed bring about the negative result that Randi would fervently wish for. In other words, there can be a truth here, and there can be truth on Randi’s side as well. Randi may keep his $1M after all, even if the above turns out to be valid. Once again, one is compelled to think of experimental hygiene in larger terms than we have been used to. Whether or not one accepts these results, the possibility must now be accommodated that intention may not be inert. If we translate this back to the clinical world, we have yet another argument that the true healer must be allowed to function “in his or her own space.” And with regard to research on therapies where intention plays a role, we have yet another reason for the “dispassionate” or “disinterested” researcher to study the clinician/client dyad at arms length and without interference, as opposed to doing the research himself (gender neutrality implied). Biofeedback is an obvious case in point. The very attempt to segregate intention from the healing process must now be seen as flawed, and psychologists in particular should have nothing to do with such an enterprise. By the end of the conference, I realized that there in fact a great respect for science here, and there is in fact good research, even if it does challenge the materialist and reductionist assumptions of the modern scientific enterprise. I do not find it easy to go here at all, but as an experimentalist I have to take the data the way it comes. Once having found the design to be reasonable, one cannot come along afterwards and decide not to accept the data. So I return now to reappraise the opening talk by Elizabeth Rauscher that had set me off on the wrong foot. Clearly her talk was intended to be more of an energizing, opening salvo that touched all the hot buttons for the already committed, something like the keynote address at a political convention. It was not intended to be a systematic introduction to the new initiate. Finally, in reflection on my whole experience at this conference, let me suggest that those in our readership who find the environment at the biofeedback meetings too constricted, or who may have adopted biofeedback/neurofeedback out of their own impulse toward a healing vocation, may find here a chance to shed protective armor and to connect with like minds. A lot of first-generation biofeedback therapists are already there. There was flute playing I danced… For additional information, see www.issseem.org Dr. Siegfried Othmer |
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