From Chapter 5. The Healing Field

Our Findings

Although the cases that we have covered so far constitute only a tiny subset of the thousands of cases that we have dealt with on a daily basis for the last twenty years or so, they are typical. The experiential evidence is clear and unambiguous. A range of biofield energies exist that lay outside those acknowledged by mainstream science. These fields are deeply implicated in all mental, physical, and emotional health issues and in all effective healing processes.

Disciplines and practices for using these energies underlay the world’s many natural healing, martial, and spiritual traditions. They have done so for millennia. Despite this, even the possibility of the existence of such energies is largely ignored by mainstream science. This is due in large part to the common prejudice that these traditions are the products of a scientifically unsophisticated, pre-modern phase of humanity’s evolution. Needless to say this common prejudice is only sustainable by ignoring the available research and extensive body of experiential evidence.

Biofield energies form cocoon-like fields around all life forms. Somewhat like the phenomenon of blind sight--the ability of the physically blind to sense the properties of objects--these fields are not perceptible to mechanical perception but are perceptible to the psychically gifted or as a result of inner cultivation. Disharmony within these fields arises as a result of mental, physical, and emotional trauma and stress. Since these energy fields represent a more fundamental level of existence, healing on this level is disproportionately more effective. What conclusions can we now draw from the cases that we have looked at in the previous chapters?

Our first conclusion is that the healer receives information that is critical to the healing process through empathic engagement. This deeper level of engagement is not just a passive, receptive state of mind and the insights it gives rise to are not guesswork. It is a dynamic, empathic opening of one’s humanity to understanding and helping another person. The healer’s empathy is also an energetic state. Reaching out to and interacting with another person is to shift awareness and energetically interact with their energy field. It is through the medium of this shift that the healer may become aware of information that proves critical to the healing process. This intuitively derived information has a number of specific attributes:

- It is often represented symbolically or pictorially; it may involve “hearing” a name or seeing an object that is intimately related to a specific traumatic event.
- It may initially appear to be irrelevant, both to the healer and to the client.
- It provides the key that enables a client re-connect to a past trauma.
- It emerges at just the right time to facilitate the healing process.

The important point here is that this information must be stored or held somewhere. Although it is private information, so private, in fact, that the client may have completely forgotten it or be otherwise unconscious of it, it is nevertheless accessible in the context of healing. Because of this, we have little alternative but to suppose that this information resides in an information-bearing field connected with the client. The healer’s intention to help is sufficient to facilitate a shift of awareness that allows the unconscious retrieval of information from the client’s field. The act of “playing back” that information to the client allows them to remember and re-connect with their feelings about any event underlying their problem. Once this past (distressed) energy state has been “activated,” energy psychology techniques can then be used to clear the distress. As we noted previously, the efficacy of these energy psychology techniques, even with the most intractable of problems, can be as high as 90%.

The healer’s intention and desire to facilitate healing provides sufficient “navigation,” for want of a better word, of the client’s consciousness field for the retrieval of relevant information. This is clearly a reversed or goal-governed process. It starts from the goal--the intent of healing--and works to directly retrieve the information that will initiate or facilitate it. This type of goal governed, reverse causation is called “teleological.” As the scientific method was developed during the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, teleological forms of causation were rejected as contrary to the newly emerging scientific paradigm. Mainstream science is founded on a view of causality based on reductionist materialism, which is to say that all phenomena can be explained in terms of their emergence from interactions between smaller units of matter. From this perspective the existence of abstract “end states” or “goals” that dictate behaviors and outcomes at lower levels is simply “unscientific.” Although this point of view has been recently challenged by such major figures in the philosophy of science as Thomas Nagel,1 it nevertheless remains the orthodoxy within mainstream science.

Robust evidence from remote viewing, dowsing, and energy healing points quite clearly to the existence of teleological processes that, given some goal or objective, work backwards to retrieve relevant information. In healing, this process depends heavily upon the personal qualities of healers and their ability to connect empathically with their clients. Such capabilities are not, therefore, evenly distributed amongst a population or readily repeatable and for this reason tend to elude formal investigation. Nevertheless, once developed and honed, they work reliably to facilitate healing and integration. Extensive practical experience indicates this “teleological faculty” stands alongside, and fully equal to, our analytic faculty for discerning material causation. Given the thrust of modernity over the centuries, and specifically its neglect of inner cultivation in favor of instrumentalism, our faculty for direct knowing has been neglected and, ultimately, come to be despised by the dominant and, within its own sphere of operation, highly successful reductive materialist worldview.

It is important to stress that these processes do not involve guesswork. Guesswork requires effort. It tends to proceed by placing the available information in some context and trying to work out what the missing parts could be. The spontaneous emergence of information that facilitates the healing process through empathic engagement is quite unlike this process. We now need to move on to examine the information and affect bearing fields within which the healing process takes place.

The Deep Structures of Consciousness

The accounts of healing that we have covered during the last two chapters entail the existence of a number of layers or strata of integrated information and emotional affect. In most conventional accounts three to four layers of consciousness are recognized: present moment awareness, biographical memory, and the biographical unconscious (forgotten and suppressed biographical material). These layers constitute the biographical field of consciousness. Optionally, a collective layer is sometimes recognized. This is the “collective unconscious” defined by Carl Jung. It acts as a repository for the shared “archetypal” material that recurs throughout human cultural history and is thought of as structuring processes of profound personal transformation; but to account for the experiences associated with the cases that we have been exploring we need to add at least four, and possibly more, “fields of consciousness.” The existence of these extra layers is a challenge to, if not a refutation of, the mainstream understanding that consciousness only arises during the final three months prior to birth.2 Two of these extra layers enhance our model of the personal field of consciousness. The other two are collective layers of consciousness. Together I call these fields the Healing Field (or the Healing Fields) since they are regularly implicated in cases of healing, especially once the healer is aware of or attuned to their existence. Many cases of failure to effect healing are attributable to a failure to connect with disturbances held within these fields. The first two (personal) fields within the Healing Field are:

● Field of perinatal memory. Forgotten and suppressed fetal memories during which our experience is, in certain respects, inseparable from that of our mother. It is “biographical,” its affects constitute a vital part of our identity, but at the same time it is shared with and indistinguishable from our mother’s experience. This area has been extensively researched by the psychiatrist and one of the founders of the transpersonal movement in psychology, Stanislav Grof.3 The emergence of perinatal memories is usually associated with a variety of energy healing techniques such as rebirthing breathwork or any of the meridian therapy techniques.

● Field of past life memory. An extended biographical timeline encompassing past lives. This layer manifests as bodily defects, health and relationship issues that can be traced directly to traumatic deaths in previous lives. These cases have been extensively researched by the psychiatrist, Ian Stevenson.4,5 The emergence of past life memories is usually associated with Past Life Regression Therapy but also tend to surface in the context of a variety of energy healing modalities such as rebirthing breathwork or those involving any of the meridian therapy techniques.

The other two (collective) fields within the Healing Field are:

● The field of the family unconscious. An inherited field that affects the members of the immediate family. We have seen that siblings often “inherit” an unconscious guilt concerning a dead sibling or are burdened with the effort to “live” a dead sibling’s life in addition to their own--even when the sibling died before they were born and they were consciously unaware of their ever having existed. These types of issue typically manifest in the context of Family Constellation Therapy, originated by psychiatrist Bert Hellinger.6 They also surface in other forms of energy healing, especially those involving the use of meridian therapy techniques.

● The field of the ancestral unconscious. Another inherited field that affects the members of the extended, multi-generational family. It manifests as emotional, physical, and relationship issues that can be directly traced to unresolved traumas and injustices in the ancestral line. These types of affect are typically surfaced in the context of Family Constellation Therapy.

It is important to note that the idea of these additional fields did not emerge from theoretical or philosophical considerations. The ideas emerged in order to explain recurrent cases of healing that hinged on information and traumatic affects from beyond a person’s biographical timeline. When these affects were integrated they triggered the healing of present-day emotional and physical problems that had otherwise persisted through many attempts to deal with them. The existence of these fields, and especially the collective fields, goes far towards confirming the overall “field-like” nature of consciousness and the reality of the “extended mind.” But unlike the philosopher’s “extended mind,”7 which is only “extended” in as much as physical media (diaries and electronic media) can capture information, this “extended mind” is the real article--it is extended in a quite literal sense. Just how far-reaching are these fields--how far does consciousness, and therefore the potential reach of our awareness, extend?