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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.
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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.
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1 -- And in one point of view that is all we are … a collective of billions of cells.
2 -- And perhaps through some divine guidance, however, that topic is beyond the scope
of the present investigation.
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