In his book Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound, Joachim-Ernst Berendt, the famous jazz researcher and cross-thinker in musical science, says that Japanese Zen masters asked their students to do the following meditation exercise: “If you delete purpose and sound, what do you hear?”1 In this exercise, the meditating person practices the art of excluding sounds entering from outside, and the ability to listen to what is inside. In this practice, with every step in which the adept succeeds in actually not hearing anything anymore, he or she enters into a new space of hearing, at first being filled with all the sounds of the body, like breathing, blood circulation, and the friction of muscles and bones. Withdrawing perception even further from this space of hearing, the adept will proceed to different inner worlds of sound, finally entering the innermost sanctuary of hearing, the vibration of atoms and molecules: “a bright, silver ringing.” Alfred A. Tomatis, the famous French ear, nose, and throat specialist, who did research on the secrets of hearing throughout his life, called this phenomenon “the sound of life.”2 Yes, the ear was actually capable of hearing the vibrations of elementary parts, because the cilia, the antennae through which the hearing cells receive information, have a radius the same size as a molecule.
An Indian healer was invited to a congress of psychologists to report about her therapeutic work. In her talk, she said,
If I wanted to illustrate to you my healing techniques in the words and terms of our culture, I would talk about ancestors, demons, spirits, and extrasensory powers, and you would push it aside as some superstitious nonsense. Therefore, I want to describe my therapy to you in your terms, designed by traditional European and American natural science and medicine.
She explained the theoretical foundations of her treatment:
As you all know, matter consists of elementary particles. Each of these particles vibrates at a certain frequency. Just imagine if you were able to hear these vibrations. Each vibration would have only one tone.
The individual atoms are chemically connected to molecules; viewed in terms of music, this is a chord. The molecules are built into cells; musically, these are larger combinations of chords. The cells form most parts of the body: bones, tissues, muscles, organs; together they create a symphony of high complexity, playing wonderful music. Human spirit, emotions, and desires shape the forces, which maintain this body music in a melodious and harmonic interplay. If a person gets sick, this interplay is disturbed, and body music sounds inharmonious and dissonant. In my culture, the healer has learned to capture the sound of body organs by way of meditation and concentrated perception, and to change it through appropriate procedures.
In this process, the healer is aware of the makeup of his own body, which he experiences in the same way as a vibrating and sound-producing orchestra. When he perceives the illness of the patient, he also experiences the pain and disturbance like the dissonant sound of a garbled piece of music. He has learned the correct remedy for healing the patient, and how disturbed harmony in the organism can be restored—through presenting a healing plant, a certain song, or a healing dance, or perhaps a change in life circumstances or the resolution of a social conflict.
This book by Changlin Zhang, professor of biophysics at Hangzhou University and the University of Siegen, about the invisible rainbow, puts an end to the time when the stories of Indian healers and Zen monks can be dismissed as esoteric. He is a proven insider of the treasure of experience from thousands of years of Eastern healing traditions, and at the same time is a highly qualified expert in Western natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. With appropriate skepticism, he describes the many research experiments with which natural scientists have tried to explain apparently inexplicable phenomena in the areas of acupuncture and homeopathy.
In ways similar to the Indian healer, he leads the reader step-by-step from the simplest physical data into increasingly more complex areas of human life and existence. By combining the results of modern physics, chemistry, and biology with the experiential knowledge of Chinese and Indian healing arts, a new holistic picture of the world and humanity develops. In it, acupuncture and homeopathy appear as treatments well established by natural science.
A colleague recently told me about a lively discussion at a psychology seminar about an old philosophical question: What is the true origin of human existence, spirit or body? While listening to her present the individual arguments that were presented for one side or the other, I felt these familiar viewpoints touch me in a new and unprecedented way. I mentioned that I had recently read the manuscript for Zhang’s Invisible Rainbow, and since then, human existence appeared to me in a completely changed light; this is what her presentation of the arguments about body and spirit had caused me to become aware of.
If all matter, and in the same way also the body, is nothing but vibrations of the smallest elementary particles interwoven with each other in complex and manifold ways, and the motions of our thinking, feeling, and acting can be understood as variations and especially modified expressions of such vibrations, then body and spirit, body and soul, immanence and transcendence, living and dying, death and resurrection, and many other elements that make up our lives must no longer be conceived as dichotomous. Rather, they represent different stages and forms of one and the same vibrating medium, which keeps changing in seamless transitions into constantly new dissipative and stable patterns of waves.
Zhang starts this book with the foundations of modern natural science, then proceeds from insight to insight and portrays impressive scientific and technological progress. At the same time, he points out the manifold forms of suffering, desolation, and loss of purpose connected with this progress. He perceives a central cause for these developments in the fact that decisive insights in modern physics about space, time, and matter are not being recognized by the applied natural sciences, especially medicine, and the humanities, especially psychology and sociology.
Instead, he discovered that this groundbreaking progress in physics was already circulating as anticipative knowledge in ancient high cultures. Even in European culture we find such context when we read in the first pages of the Bible, that in the beginning God created heaven—light—perhaps the original vibration, caused by the Big Bang, that determines the whole cosmos with its organizing and energizing effect, for us the invisible rainbow. Even before the creation of light, the Bible says, “And God said . . .”; was this act of speaking the Big Bang, which, up to now, keeps the whole cosmos vibrating, or was it the dance of Shiva in Indian mythology, or Nada Brahma in the Buddhist tradition?
The creation of sound as the first creative act permeates the creation myths of many cultures.3 This original sound and original light are the inaudible music and the invisible rainbow, and groundbreaking insight about them can be gained from this book.
A final note: this book does not stop at the level of foundational research and general theory. It demonstrates how new methods of diagnosis and therapy can arise through the context presented. A practical example happening right now, in the practical completion and field testing phase, is holistic measuring to conceive the total psychophysical state of living organisms.
HARTMUT KAPTEINA
UNIVERSITY OF SIEGEN