The only thing that interferes with my learning is
my education.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
We accept without question that we humans can learn to speak, play sports, use computers, build buildings, invent airplanes, create music, and devise a way to search the Web from our portable PDA cell phones.
But if you tell someone you’ve just read in a book written by a scientist that humans can learn to sense subtle energy fields around a human body, and even detect people’s intentions, they might think you had just gone off the deep end. Until fairly recently, I would have thought that way myself about anybody making such claims. My Western education in physics, psychology, and medicine dissuaded me from even entertaining this possibility.
As Einstein said, sometimes our education gets in the way of our learning.
In light of what I’ve presented already about detecting energy and detecting intentions, it seems prudent for us to go one step further. If everything is ultimately energy—the fundamental premise of this book—and we are all potentially energy healers—the core implication of this book—then it becomes essential to determine if we can learn to develop, and even master, the capacity to sense energy and intentions and use this ability for healing and health.
The Lesson from Wine Tasters, Musicians,
Radiologists, and Perfumers
My experiences in life have brought me to the firm conclusion that the human capacity for sensory discrimination and discernment should never be underestimated. Evidence supporting this conclusion is all around us.
Consider wine tasting. People can learn to become extraordinarily gifted in discriminating different qualities, regions, and years of wines. To the untrained palate, wine is wine. They all taste more or less the same. To the connoisseur, the world of wine contains a vast variety of possibilities. They find some wines crisp, others sharp, some predominantly nutty, others mostly fruity, some thin, others full-flavored. With advanced experience comes a dramatic magnification of distinctions and individualities among wines.
I never became a wine connoisseur, but I did spend a couple of years in my mid-twenties tasting different wines. I remember having dinners in Cambridge and Boston at which a group of us would compare and contrast three different years of a fine wine like a Château Latour, or three different wines of the same year like a 1964 Château Latour, Château Margaux, and Château Lafite Rothschild. With time I came to distinguish and appreciate some of the differences, and I even developed preferences for certain vintages and years.
Consider music. To the untrained ear, jazz is jazz. Improvisations may sound more or less the same. To the sophisticated jazz musician, the world of jazz contains a seemingly infinite variety of possibilities. As a professional jazz guitarist, I learned to discriminate subtle points of sliding, plucking, and making tonal adjustments on my guitar and amplifier, including combinations of sound pickups (my guitar had three), plus variations in treble, bass, and echo. As a new drummer in training, I’m currently learning to discern fine points in striking a cymbal or tapping a tom-tom. It’s a common experience among musicians that the more you learn about how to play a given instrument, the more sensitive you become to the richness and complexity of what, to the untrained ear, may sound like a lot of similar notes and noises.
Another example concerns X-rays and ultrasounds. To the untrained eye, an X-ray is an X-ray, and an ultrasound is an ultrasound. The blurry images may look more or less the same. To the radiology oncologist or echocardiologist, a world of information can be discerned, providing the details for making critical decisions about cancer or heart disease.
Probably the most amazing sensory discernment, at least to me, involves the creation of perfume. Just as the vintner knows how to bring out the best flavor in his wines, the perfumer has an uncanny sensitivity for bringing out the best fragrances.
In the mid-1980s I met the master perfumer who invented the men’s fragrance Polo. He told me that after he was given the task of creating this new fragrance, one day an olfactory image came to him that contained more than thirty different ingredients. He wrote them down in a list, with their associated amounts, and had his assistant mix them. He then smelled the mixture, decided it was not quite right, adjusted the formula, and had his assistant prepare another mix. He repeated this procedure, over and over, and eventually settled on a unique combination of ingredients that ultimately became a bestselling cologne.
Try as I might, I find it extraordinarily difficult to image how he does this. I have lived my life with a more or less constantly stuffy nose—my sense of smell is typically limited at best.
However, a dear friend of mine, Krishna Madappa, is a master creator of healing fragrances. Krishna not only creates exceptional aromatherapies, but he is a gifted energy healer as well. Though my sense of smell is crude (to put it mildly), when I sniff Krishna’s fragrances, I can’t help breaking out in smiles of joy. His mixtures are simply delicious; some of them I would call out of this world.
The human eye can discriminate millions of shades of colors. Retinal cells in the eye can detect single photons of light. Is it so far-fetched to imagine the possibility that people can learn to sense and discriminate images and feelings that many of us are as yet unaware of?
If we listen to what gifted healers are telling us, there exists a world of energy experience, latent in all of us, that can enrich our lives immensely.
Awareness without Awareness
It’s well established in contemporary psychological science that people can respond to information that they can’t consciously perceive and can even remember information received at the subconscious level. Scientists use the terms “implicit perception” and “implicit memories” when referring to these phenomena.
Studies on implicit memory, originally conducted at the University of Arizona and Harvard University by Dr. Daniel Schacter and colleagues, have demonstrated that people who are presented with auditory information while they are unconscious—either asleep or under anesthesia during surgery—later respond to this information as if they recognize it. They show evidence of implicit memory even though they have no conscious awareness of having heard the information.
In my psychophysiology laboratories at Yale University and the University of Arizona, we have conducted a series of EEG studies examining the brain’s responses to odors presented at subliminal concentrations. Subjects were presented with pairs of bottles to smell; both contained a solvent, and one also contained an amount of a molecule—isoamyl acetate—that smells like banana. If the concentration of the molecule was high enough, the subjects could correctly determine which of the two bottles contained the extra substance.
In some tests, we reduced the concentration of the molecule to the point where the subjects’ ability to detect which bottle contained the banana aroma was at chance—50 percent.
Here’s the surprising part: Even when people thought they were guessing, our measurements of their EEG showed that their brains were correctly discriminating between the two bottles.
Moreover, when people rated the confidence of their guesses, even though they were guessing at 50 percent chance accuracy, they would rate the confidence of their guess higher when they smelled the bottle containing the molecule!
In other words, even though they were not consciously aware that they had smelled the molecule, their brain detected its presence, and they intuitively sensed the fact, as demonstrated by increases in their confidence ratings. They were, so to speak, intuitively (implicitly) aware of the presence of the molecule without being consciously (explicitly) aware of the molecule.
What this tells us is that the new discoveries reported in chapters 4 and 5 involving energy and intention detection are actually not as strange or anomalous as they might first appear. Psychological science has now firmly established the existence of implicit unconscious perception and memory for conventional senses such as vision, audition, and olfaction. (For more details, you can read some scientific articles at the Web site for this book, www.drgaryschwartz.com.)
It’s important to understand that the sensation of light and sound—and yes, even odor—involves the processing of energy and information. All sensation, and ultimately all information detection, involves the registration and processing of energy fields that are vibrating in specific patterned ways. These specific patterned fields of energies are what convey detailed information that we ultimately experience as sight, hearing, or olfaction.
When I served as the first pilot subject in our initial hand-energy-sensing experiment (described in chapter 4), while my score was close to 80 percent, I rated my confidence level as near zero—showing that I was at some level clearly “aware” of Justin’s hand energy, even though I was not consciously aware that I was aware.
The questions arise: Can I be taught to become more explicitly aware of my apparent implicit awareness? Can healers, undergraduate students, even children be taught to become aware of other people’s energies and intentions? Are some people better able than others to learn these discriminations?
If our latent energy-and intention-detection talents can be developed, then who knows how far each of us can improve our abilities to become skilled energy-healing beings—at least for our self-healing, ideally for our loved ones, and possibly for others as well.
A Health-Care Experiment with Unexpected Results
Dr. Andrew Weil and a team of physicians at the University of Arizona have created a postgraduate training program for interested doctors to learn how to integrate conventional, complementary, and alternative medicine. To reach as many physicians as possible, they have developed an associate fellowship program that allows participants to receive much of their education via distance learning. The fellows convene in Tucson on a regular basis for in-person lectures and workshops led by health-care providers skilled in complementary and alternative medicine modalities, including nutrition, herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, osteopathy, and energy healing. Participants can also choose to participate in an intensive five-day workshop experience with gifted practitioners and healers. Often the workshops are open to other health-care providers, including nurses and psychologists. One of the healers who has offered a number of intensive workshops to the fellows is Rosalyn Bruyere, the author of Wheels of Light, a book that describes her unique approach to energy and spiritual healing.
For five years I served on the faculty of the Program in Integrative Medicine, giving lectures on biofield science and energy healing to the fellows. One group of fellows and other health-care providers who signed up for the intensive workshop with Ms. Bruyere decided that they wanted to be tested to see if any changes could be measured in their energy-detection abilities as a result of her training.
Twenty-seven of these health-care providers—twenty-four women and three men—not only volunteered to be pretested prior to the workshop and posttested immediately afterward, but they each personally contributed funds to help cover the costs of the laboratory tests. They were clearly motivated to obtain this knowledge. Fourteen were physicians; the remaining thirteen were primarily psychologists and nurses.
The participants filled out a battery of questionnaires before and after the workshop. They also worked in pairs, taking turns serving as experimenter and subject, testing each other’s ability to sense hand energy. They conducted a total of twenty-four hand-energy sensing trials, using the same procedures described earlier. We were able to collect posttest data on twenty-two of the participants.
To help interpret the meaning of any postworkshop increases in hand-energy sensing, we included among the pretest questionnaires an instrument that measures individual differences in what is termed “absorption.”
The Tellegen Absorption Scale, developed at the University of Minnesota by Dr. A. Tellegen and colleagues, assesses the extent to which people experience a connection with stimuli in their environment by asking questions about how often they lose track of time while listening to music, how much they identify with characters while reading a novel, whether they get lost in a sunset or become immersed in the plot of a movie. People who score high in absorption tend to be highly hypnotizable, are more likely to seek alternative-medicine procedures for treatment and prevention, and also report having increased paranormal and spiritual experiences.
A Note for the Technical Reader
Because it was not feasible to implement a randomized controlled design in this experiment, the findings must be viewed as exploratory. We were not in position financially to obtain a matched control group of health-care providers who would be pre-and posttested in the same way. Ideally participants in such a matched control would either not receive healing-energy training with Ms. Bruyere (called a “no treatment” control) or they would receive five days of intensive training in some other alternative-medicine modality, such as herbal medicine, that did not involve training in energy healing.
Lacking a matched control group, if we observed increases in hand-energy sensing following the workshop, we could not be completely sure that the increases were caused only by the workshop training. Increases in hand-energy detection might also have occurred for other reasons, such as the participants being initially stressed due to traveling to Tucson, getting over jet lag, and so forth, or the participants becoming more familiar with the laboratory and testing procedures and therefore more comfortable or in some other way better prepared during the posttesting as compared to the pretesting.
There are thirty-three yes-no items in the absorption scale; in principle people can receive total scores from zero to thirty-three. The participants in the Bruyere workshop had total absorption scores that ranged from a low of ten to a high of thirty-two. We predicted that participants who were sensitive to energy and became absorbed in stimuli—people with high absorption scores—might gain more from the workshop and therefore show larger increases in sensing hand energy following the workshop.
Consistent with the premise that energy-healing training can improve actual hand-energy detection, we found that, on average, subjects did indeed increase their ability to sense hand energy following the workshop. Though the average increase was relatively small (5.5 percent), it was statistically significant. Since we only included a proximal hand-energy task, we don’t know if their ability to sense intention also increased following the workshop as well.
The more important and meaningful finding that emerged from this experiment was that the participant’s pretest absorption scores predicted how much their hand-energy sensing would increase following the workshop.
For the low absorbers, there was no overall increase in hand-energy sensing observed following the workshop, but those in the high-absorption group showed an average increase of 10 percent. Moreover, four of the high absorbers generated an increase of 20 percent or more in their energy-sensing accuracy.
These findings were published in a special issue on energy healing in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2004. The paper describing the findings was significant because this was the first laboratory experiment ever conducted that investigated whether evidence for improvements in hand-energy sensing could be obtained in real-life health-care providers (as opposed to university undergraduates) who were obtaining state-of-the-art clinical training in energy-health techniques.
Moreover, this was the first experiment to explore the possibility that individual differences in sensitivity and openness to experiencing energy could predict aptitude for learning energy healing among health-care professionals.
A Call for Future Research on Energy-
Detection Training
I look forward to the time when the National Institutes of Health will provide funding for research to examine energy and intention detection in healers and laymen, to explore the role of energy and intention awareness in healing and health, and to develop methods for training health-care professionals in learning to sense energy and intention. At the present time the government is not funding research in these areas.
Despite the fact that the capacity of people to sense energy and intention is fundamental to the practice of energy healing, this potentially valuable area has been largely ignored by biomedical and behavioral investigators. This state of affairs needs to change.
One of my goals in writing this book is not only to help awaken readers to their natural capacity to become energy healers for themselves and others, but also to awaken open-minded biomedical and behavioral scientists to the great opportunity for conducting essential, seminal research in these areas in the years to come.