FOREWORD

KARL H. MARET, M.D.

This first book by Eileen McKusick is a little gem, a valuable contribution to the field of sound healing and energy medicine. The author is a courageous pioneer in the emerging field of biofield science investigating the effects of tuning forks on the human energetic anatomy. It is also the very personal story of a searcher for truth, understanding, and synthesis at the frontiers of healing.

I first met Eileen in 2011 when she asked me to review the thesis for her Master of Education degree. This led to meeting her in person in the fall of that year. I found her to be scientifically astute with an inquiring mind, a well-functioning intuition, and an unusually well-developed sense of clairaudience, allowing her to hear and discern seeming imbalances in the biofield around human beings. To her credit, she sought to discover the significance of her unconventional observations in a scientifically grounded manner with a great deal of discernment, as you will discover while reading this book. Hers is a story of discovery leading from original observations gained through working with people suffering from various afflictions, to the search for understanding and explanation of her unique perceptions. Some of these stories are recounted in this book. It appears that she has been able to share her unique gifts with a growing number of students who are now also applying this new sound healing approach with their clients.

I have personally experienced the power of her healing approach with tuning forks and recognized early on that this method deserved further scientific investigation. When she worked with a number of clients at our clinic in California, she was able to make profound changes in their physiology as evidenced by a lessening of pain, greater mobility, and a sense of deep relaxation and well-being. One of my clients reported after an hour-long session of biofield therapy with Eileen, “It felt as if a weight had been taken off my shoulders.” Most clients were surprised at the level of detail that Eileen was able to perceive about their past history and trauma patterns held in their body. It appears that the body’s biofield either “stores” or has access to historical information that was encoded over a lifetime of experiences. If these sound healing approaches can be verified with further scientific studies, a new healing paradigm may be immanent.

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions making science aware of the nature of paradigm shifts. A paradigm serves as a pattern or model of existing belief that anchors consensual reality. A prominent paradigm in contemporary medicine is that we are primarily biochemical beings. Under this established paradigm, a whole pharmaceutical industry has emerged that essentially dictates that drugs are one of the most effective approaches to bring about symptom modulation and (hopefully) healing in an organism. This paradigm is now beginning to be questioned by increasing numbers of practitioners and patients alike.

Over the last two decades a new paradigm has been emerging—that we are more fundamentally energetic and informational beings with sophisticated, high-speed communication channels in our living connective tissue matrix capable of rapidly affecting tissues, cellular processes, and even nuclear DNA expression. These processes are better described using the language and principles of quantum physics including quantum resonance, entanglement, and non-locality or action-at-a-distance, which is beginning to be applied to macroscopic processes inside living organisms. This new physics describes a world that appears increasingly paradoxical, counterintuitive, and confusing to our fundamental sense perceptions. Our current medicine does not utilize these concepts but rather relies on more classical Newtonian physics and Lucretian biochemistry. From this more deterministic and materialistic perspective, modern medical science would view ideas of healing with tuning forks as outlined in this book with considerable skepticism.

Nonetheless it is now well accepted that we live in an invisible ocean of energy suffusing space. The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was won by Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for their theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass and diversity of the universe. This was recently confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle called the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. What today’s cutting-edge physicists are showing is that we exist in an ocean of potentiality and latent energy that is present in the quantum vacuum, or in reality the quantum plenum, the sea of almost infinite energy in which matter and mass manifest and disappear continuously. All manifestation, including our bodies, is immersed in this invisible energetic ocean. Ultimately we interact through quantum physical processes with these energetic fields that are embedded within space-time. Concepts of healing energy that were once viewed with suspicion and even ridicule are now beginning to gain a renewed respectability and are becoming the subject of active investigation.

One of the main reasons for this change in outlook is that sensitive electromagnetic instruments have been developed capable of detecting minute energy fields around the human body. One of these is the SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) magnetometer capable of detecting tiny biomagnetic fields associated with physiological activities occurring within the body. This is the same field that sensitive individuals have described for thousands of years but which was formerly ignored by scientists because there had been no objective way to measure it.

For over one hundred years, scientists have shown that cells and tissues generate electrical fields that can be measured on the surface of the skin. All cells generate tiny electrical currents as a result of charge flow that makes life possible. Electrical currents in turn generate tiny magnetic fields in the surrounding space. The electrocardiogram, measured from electrodes on the surface of the body, informs clinicians about the electrical activities of the heart. Even smaller currents and potentials are picked up around our head with an electroencephalogram, (EEG). In specially shielded rooms, using the SQUID technologies described above, scientists can also record the tiny magnetic fields originating in the brain or the heart at some distance from the body. These are called the magnetoencephalogram and magnetocardiogram, respectively. It is quite likely that in the future scientists will study the effect of sound fields on the body using such sophisticated instruments to gain further insights into the pioneering discoveries described in this book.

We now know that all tissues and organs produce specific magnetic pulsations that collectively are called biomagnetic fields. Mapping the magnetic fields in space around the body often provides more accurate indication of physiological and pathological states compared to more traditional electrical field measurements on the surface of the body. For example, in the 1980s Dr. John Zimmerman, then at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine, used SQUID magnetometers to measure the pulsing biomagnetic field emanating from the hands of therapeutic touch practitioners. He found that these energy healers produced frequencies of pulsations that literally swept between 0.3 and 30 Hertz (cycles per second), which is in the same extremely low frequency (ELF) range where the brain operates. These same frequencies are capable of creating powerful healing responses in any part of the body.

This work was confirmed in 1992 by Seto and colleagues in Japan who studied “Qi emissions” in practitioners of various martial arts and healing methods using magnetometers consisting of two coils of wire with 80,000 turns. Since then there have been further studies extending these investigations to sound, light, and thermal fields emitted by qigong practitioners. Specific frequencies stimulate the growth of nerves, bones, blood capillaries, ligaments, connective tissues, and skin. Orthopedic surgeons have used low-level magnetic bone stimulators for several decades to heal non-union fractures in bones.

Although we have known about brain waves since 1929 as a result of the pioneering work by German psychiatrist Hans Berger that led to the discovery of the electroencephalograph, we now know that these low frequency waves are not confined only to the brain but actually spread throughout the body via the perineural system, the connective tissue sheaths that surround all nerves. The late Dr. Robert Becker has described this system as regulating injury repair processes throughout the body.¹ From this perspective one can visualize the entire nervous system as a giant antenna that both perceives and even projects biomagnetic pulsations throughout the body and into the body’s biofield. The perineural system is embedded within the entire living matrix, the energetic communication system within the body.

The origin of the concept of the living matrix goes back to Claude Bernard, one of the nineteenth-century physiology pioneers, who coined the term le milieu intérieur or “the interior environment of the body.” Bernard did not believe in the idea of vital energy and sought to describe physiological regulation and communication strictly in biochemical and biophysical terms. He introduced the concept of homeostasis, a term that was actually coined in 1926 by Walter Cannon, as the inner regulatory capacity of the body that ensured a stable environment for the tissues and organs. Further research into the energetic aspects of this interior communication system was carried out by Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi. He concluded that organic communication could not be explained solely by the random collisions of molecules and purely chemical processes.

As early as 1941 he described quantum physical and bioenergetics processes accompanying complex regulation within the connective tissue matrix through electrons and protons flowing as charge transference along hydrated proteins acting as semiconductors. This idea was initially received with skepticism, but it is now generally accepted that most, if not all, parts of the extracellular matrix have semiconductor properties. This makes the living matrix appear as a complex information processing system analogous to modern computer chips, only vastly more complex.

In the 1950s Dr. Szent-Györgyi laid out the theory of bioenergetics in which he described how energy can flow through electromagnetic fields inside living organisms, which, as a result of the ubiquitous nature of water inside the organism, forms the matrix of life. He wrote, “The transmission of excitation energies between molecules through electromagnetic coupling is not a mere matter of speculation.”² These energies flow through water channels inside the body since over 99 percent of the molecules inside the body are water molecules and the body is two-thirds water by volume. Every protein, whether constituting bone, sinews, or any other tissue, exists in a hydrated form. When the water content of the body decreases to less than 50 percent, we die. Protons and electrons separate along membranes to create charged layers analogous to a tiny battery as the revolutionary work of Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington has recently shown.³ In this inner electrical environment of our bodies, the magic of life unfolds and this environment is also able to be influenced in a powerful manner through sound vibrations.

In the past medical students were taught that biochemical interactions are the basis of life and molecules fitting into receptors trigger cellular responses, both inside and outside the cells. Yet scientists like Szent-Györgyi, Jim Oschman, and Dr. Albrecht-Buehler have pointed out that life processes are too fast to be explained by molecules wandering around and diffusing in and out of cells.⁴ Instead molecules interact through electromagnetic resonances very similar to tuning forks or pendulum clocks that begin to oscillate in unison through resonance processes. Resonance phenomena occur with many types of vibration and in all kinds of media. Tissues have mechanical, acoustic, electrical, and magnetic resonances to name just a few. Nuclear magnetic resonances are used medically to excite hydrogen atoms inside the water of our body to create visible resonance pictures of our internal anatomy for diagnostic purposes.

Everything in the universe is in vibration. The science of spectroscopy allows us to characterize atoms and molecules through the emissions and absorptions of different electromagnetic waves including visible and invisible light. When electrons in molecules vibrate, they produce electromagnetic fields that depend on their frequency and on the ways they interact with their neighboring electrons and nearby molecules. Chemists use spectra to identify elements while biophysicists use them to describe the molecular interactions inside cells and tissues.

The work of the late Ross Adey showed that there are specific resonance windows at which biological effects tend to take place preferentially. Biological cellular reactions take place at just the right frequency and amplitude, often at very low intensities. Too powerful a signal might not create a biological response, but a tiny signal at just the right frequency is capable of triggering cell membrane proteins to create an amplified response inside a cell or its DNA genetic material.⁵ It is thus not surprising that the subtle energetic emanations from a tuning fork at a specific resonant frequency could have an unforeseen healing effect on the body.

It is also important to differentiate between energy and information, literally subtle energy. Information is patterned energy that can be carried by electromagnetic waves modulated in different ways. Consider a television receiver that is connected to an antenna on the roof. We can take a sensitive detecting device called a spectrum analyzer and measure a whole range of different frequencies and measure their various intensities over time. However simply measuring these energy or field intensities does not allow you to know very much about the data or information content carried on these electromagnetic waves. To understand how this information reappears as a television picture you need to know the unique algorithms used at the transmitting station to originally encode the information. Once you unscramble or decode this information inside the receiver, you can learn whether a certain channel contained a news program, a drama presentation, or a sports event. The information is what is important to the viewer even though the electromagnetic resonances or carrier waves are necessary to carry the data to the appropriately tuned receiver. The body works in a similar manner: it is able to decode complex streams of environmental information that can lead to health or disease. The human genetic code or genome, which is present in almost every cell of our bodies, can be activated by environmental signals through a process of epigenetic signaling.

Most people think of sound transmitted through the air as a succession of longitudinal pressure waves passed along by the molecules of air that show alternating areas of compression and rarefaction. A microphone is a simple transducer that translates pressure waves into electrical signals that can be amplified and reproduced through a loudspeaker. However, this view of sound waves is deceptive because sound is propagated through spherical wave fronts expanding as a series of concentric bubbles from the sound source. Viewed from this perspective, sound is analogous to electromagnetic waves, which also expand as spherical fields but travel much faster at the speed of light (300 million meters per second) compared to the much slower speed of propagation of sound in air (around 343 meters per second or 1234.37 kilometers per hour).

In water and watery solids, such as the human body, sound travels over four times faster in the form of phonons or sonic shear waves. As the sound emanating from tuning forks strikes the body’s skin interface, complex electrical and phonon interactions take place that can alter tissue dielectric properties including altering various acupuncture meridians. The meridians have different electrical properties than the surrounding tissue. Thus when a holographic sound field, such as produced by a tuning fork containing complex data structures of pure frequencies with changing phase relationships, strikes the biofield of a person, the cellular memories of various tissues can be reawakened, leading potentially to a healing response. Quantum physical field theory predicts the occurrence of a number of coherent dynamical phenomena in liquid water inside cells and tissues that may be stimulated by sound. This process affects the free electron clouds existing within these coherent water domains.⁶ Thus sound will interact with membrane regions called watery exclusion zones (called EZ layers) that can modify cellular processes through their interaction with the hydration shells surrounding cell membrane receptors.

Quantum physics applied to living systems is not a new concept. One of the earliest pioneers was Herbert Fröhlich who suggested that quantum coherence existed in living systems. Several groups working with him helped to elucidate that liquid crystalline components of the body can produce Bose-Einstein condensation of strongly excited longitudinal electric modes, long range coherence, and energy storage inside cells and tissues.⁷ This allows biological responses to extremely weak electromagnetic fields including subtle energetic interactions with the environment. Recently a new generation of quantum physicists has developed the self-field theory (SFT) applying new models of expanded quantum physics to biological molecules and biological evolution. The fields in SFT are discrete streams of photons with an internal bispinoral structure rather than the continuous fields of Maxwell’s classical electrodynamics.⁸ In this new model of the photon, the force carrier in electromagnetism, there are three types of interaction with matter, namely electric, magnetic, and acoustic fields. From this vantage point new explanations of acoustic interactions with matter might soon lead to a more acceptable theoretical foundation of the biophysics of sound healing. These approaches have already been applied successfully to healing with sound in animals.⁹

The Eastern yogic sciences have a long history of incorporating models of consciousness into their description of the nature of reality. Western science only began actively addressing the issue of consciousness and the observer effect in quantum mechanics during the twentieth century. This new physics has changed our whole view of reality by incorporating consciousness into the actual measurement process. Consciousness can affect micro- as well as macrocosmic phenomena according to quantum physicist Elizabeth Rauscher.¹⁰ An expanded model of quantum physical processes, involving conscious intervention, was proposed by Dr. Rauscher involving nonlinear processes in greater than four-dimensional space-time. Specifically she describes a complex mathematical, eight-dimensional geometric space that contains a domain of action of local and nonlocal aspects of consciousness. This alternative theoretical approach might help us understand how the use of tuning forks in the biofield, as described in this book, could lead to the unique results that this author has been able to achieve, which on first examination seem to defy modern scientific and medical logic.

Sound transmission exists inside the body from the earliest moments of embryonic development inside the womb. These sonic symphonies and pulsations transmitted from the mother to the developing baby help shape its sense of hearing and develop sense perceptions of vibration, touch, and texture. The latter senses form the major dorsal column pathways of the spine and the growing brain. Our whole nervous system is exquisitely conditioned from our earliest development to absorb therapeutic modalities of vibration through acoustic and vibratory resonances. Indeed, when sound penetrates tissues, every molecule within the region of the body being treated shares in the sound data, including integral membrane proteins and even the DNA within the cells.¹¹ The environmental sound signals may act through epigenetic signaling processes yet to be defined to modulate the genome, our genetic code inside each cell nucleus, analogous to the other electromagnetic fields that can affect membrane proteins.¹²

Bioelectromagnetic researchers have found out that digital electromagnetic pulses from our modern wireless devices can activate voltage-gated calcium channels which are embedded within all cell membranes.¹³ Today’s plethora of modern microwave electromagnetic signals has been shown to have potentially adverse effects on our cells and tissues. The background microwave radiation in our environment from wireless communication technologies is especially high in our cities. Today this background radiation is nearly a million times higher than it was just thirty years ago before the advent of cell phones, cordless phones, WiFi, and wireless smart meters that are saturating the air waves with microwave radiation. These technologies use pulsing electromagnetic fields that can adversely affect the nervous system and the brain. It is not unreasonable to suggest that pure analog sounds of continuous tones or melodious music might have the potential to correct the energetic imbalances that may be present in the body or the biofield of a person, perhaps even leading to the repair of imbalanced DNA or RNA genetic material inside our cells.

This is an idea that is not at all purely speculative. In 2007 U.S. patent 7280874 was granted to Charlene Boehm for a method to determine therapeutic resonant frequencies in a variety of settings. These therapeutic resonant frequencies are claimed to be useful in modulating complete genomes and partial genomic materials and may be used in various media having different refractivities. If these ideas take hold in our modern medical system, there may come a time when sound healing will be as commonplace as modern pharmaceuticals are today. It is hoped that this book contributes to a healing revolution using sound in a significant way. May it find wide readership in North America and the rest of the world.

DR. KARL H. MARET practices Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), specializing in nutrition, functional medicine, and energy medicine at the Dove Center for Integral Medicine in Aptos, California. He holds an M.D. from the University of Toronto, a Masters in Biomedical Engineering, and Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He completed a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at UCSD and developed the biomedical instrumentation for the successful 1981 American Medical Research Expedition to Mt. Everest. Dr. Maret lectures extensively in Europe and America about electromagnetic healing approaches, new water technologies, electrosmog challenges, and new integrative energy medicine therapies. As president of the Dove Health Alliance nonprofit foundation (www.dovehealthalliance.org), he promotes global research networks in energy medicine.