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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?
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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.
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