CHAPTER I

The New Paradigm in Science and Medicine

We seek the simplest possible scheme of thought that can tie together the observed facts.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

There is a widely discussed “paradigm shift” underway today. It brings a two-fold revolution—actually parallel strands of a radical “evolution.” First and most basically, an evolution in our understanding of the fundamental nature of the world. Second, a logically entailed but still largely independently researched evolution in our understanding of the nature of health and disease. We consider both (r)evolutions, and begin with a review of science’s emerging understanding of the world.^*1

The new concept surfacing at the cutting edge of science is radically new and at the same time millennia old. It is new in relation to the dominant paradigm in science and society, but it is old in its “re-cognition” of intuitions that have hallmarked inquiry into the nature of reality for thousands of years.

The classical paradigm is the inheritance of Newtonian physics. In light of that paradigm the world consists of individual bits of matter interacting in passive space and indifferently flowing time. This view has been challenged by the “relativity revolution” in the first decade of the twentieth century and by the “quantum revolution” in the third. The paradigm emerging today consolidates these revolutions. It sees the world as a whole system in which all things in their ensemble constitute an entangled macroscopic quantum system. The “global realism” of the new paradigm contrasts with the “local realism” of the old. In the old paradigm, all things occupy unique positions in space and time and are affected only by local forces transmitted through mechanistic interactions. By contrast, in the perspective of global realism, all things are instantly and mutually “entangled” across all points of space and intervals of time.

THE NEW PARADIGM IN PHYSICS

In light of the concept emerging at the frontiers of the physical sciences, the universe is not an arena for structures and entities of matter moving in passive space and indifferently flowing time. As astrophysicist James Jeans noted over a hundred years ago, the universe is more like a great thought than like a great rock.

The concept of a thought-like universe is familiar from the annals of history. Philosophers, scientists, and intuitive people in all walks of life have often questioned that the world would be just as it is presented to our senses. The intuition that it is more thought-like than rock-or machine-like proved to be well founded. The universe is not an ensemble of separate bits of matter obeying mechanistic laws, but an intrinsically whole macroscopic quantum system where all things are in-formed and interconnected beyond the conventional bounds of space and time.

In the new paradigm of physics, the things that exist and persist in the world are sets and clusters of vibrating energy. These clusters are what we experience as the physical furnishings of space and time.

The idea of the world as vibration has been known to the classical wisdom traditions. It was present in the Sanskrit concept of Akasha and was taken up in the Vedic texts of India as early as 5000 BCE. In the Vedas its function was identified with shabda, the first vibration, the first ripple that constitutes the universe, and also with spanda, the “vibration/movement of consciousness.” The contemporary Indian scholar I. K. Taimni wrote, “There is a mysterious integrated state of vibration from which all possible kinds of vibrations can be derived by a process of differentiation. That is called N.da in Sanskrit. It is a vibration in a medium which may be translated as ‘space’ in English. But it is not mere empty space but space which, though apparently empty, contains within itself an infinite amount of potential energy.”¹

This traditional notion is sustained and elaborated at the cutting edge of quantum physics. Research on the ultrasmall dimensions of the universe reveals that space is not empty and smooth, but filled with waves and vibration. At the subquantum level physicists do not find anything they could identify as matter. What they find are standing and propagating waves—clusters of stationary and propagating vibration.

Previously scientists assumed that it is matter that vibrates. There is a ground substance that vibrates, and that substance consists of matter-particles and assemblies of matter-particles. The world is material, and vibration is the way matter behaves. But the contrary turned out to be the case. There is no ground substance. The universe is a system of variously complex and coherent clusters of vibrant energy, and matter is just the way the vibrations appear on observation.

The great physicist Max Planck said this clearly. In one of his last lectures in Florence, he noted, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.”²

Planck was not alone in stating the concept of the universe as force and vibration. Two years prior to Planck’s pronouncement, the maverick genius Nikola Tesla said that if you want to know the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the materialist concept of the physical world has been definitively transcended. The new physics tells us that it is not from bits of matter but from clusters of ordered energy-vibration that the things we find in the world are built. Ordered vibrations make the furnishing of the universe into what it is: a system of coherent entities and processes, rather than a welter of random unconnected events.

The vibrations that surface in the universe are a consequence of the excitation of the ground state of a wider reality. The universe is no longer considered to be all that is. It is the phase and domain of a wider reality we can best call cosmos. The excitation of the cosmos was most likely the effect of the Big Bang. The energies released in that singularity polarized the cosmic ground state and brought it into vibration. The phenomena we observe in the space-time universe are clusters of vibrations of the polarized cosmic ground state. The vibrations are spatially as well as temporally related, and their relations introduced space and time into the undifferentiated oneness of the cosmic ground state. The universe we observe is a spatial and temporal domain of spatially and temporally related clusters of vibration.

The vibrations that emerged fill the space-time of the universe. As far as we know, there is no empty space and no empty interval in the universe. Space is a foaming, turbulent medium filled with fields and forces. The term “vacuum” does not apply to it: it is a plenum.

The observed, and in principle observable, dimension of the universe is the ensemble of the vibrations resulting from the excitation of the cosmic ground state. Everything we perceive and observe is a pattern or cluster of vibration created by the excitation of that primordial state. The known and knowable clusters range in size and complexity from quarks and quanta to biological organisms, and from biospheres and planets to galaxies and the metagalaxy. They are particulate entities, but their particularity does not signify separateness. The clusters of vibration in and of the ground state are nonlocal. They are locally differentiated but globally “entangled” elements of the sea of vibration that patterns the ground state of the cosmos.

THE NEW PARADIGM OF EVOLUTION

An estimated 13.8 billion years before our time, the Big Bang excited the ground state of the cosmos and produced ripples in what must have been a seamless primordial state. The ripples were sets of vibrations of coinciding phase and frequency, forming cognizable and re-cognizable “things” against a “background” of undifferentiated, seemingly chaotic vibration. The thing-like clusters interacted and created ever larger and more structured and differentiated “macro-things.” These are what we perceive as the material furnishings of the universe. They come into being in the processes of progressive ordering and structuring we call evolution.

Evolution took off in the universe following the inflow of the staggering energies released by the Big Bang. Coherent clusters of vibrations were created, and they produced integral, relatively enduring clusters. Physicists know these clusters as leptons (electrons, muons, tau particles, and neutrinos), mesons (pions), and hadrons (baryons, including protons and neutrons). In the course of time they formed more complex clusters: the atoms of the elements. Atoms in turn clustered into molecules and molecular assemblies. The clusters that appeared as quantized micro-particles attracted or repulsed one another and created larger and more complex entities. On the astronomical level these appear to us as stars, stellar systems, and galaxies.

Evolution manifests in perceptible form the ensemble of the laws and regularities that make the universe into what it is: a nonrandom, and at least partly intelligible, domain of space and time.

In modern science, thanks to the work of Darwin and Wallace, evolution was first recognized in the domains of life. Its recognition as a cosmological process had to wait until the first decades of the twentieth century, when Einstein’s hopes for an eternally unchanging matrix-universe proved illusory and time entered as a factor in the cosmological equations. Through the work of physicists such as Willem De Sitter and Stephen Hawking, and of thermodynamicists Ilya Prigogine and Aharon Katchalsky, nonlinear but overall irreversible change came to be seen as fundamental in the universe. It appeared that evolution encompasses not just the living world, but the world as a whole.

The factor in the cosmos that structured and evolved first the physical and then the living world was not clearly understood. Physicist Henri Bergson speculated that it is an élan vital that counters the trend toward energy-degradation in complex systems, and biologist Hans Driesch suggested that it is a counter-entropic drive he termed entelechy. Philosophers Teilhard de Chardin and Erich Jantsch postulated a dynamic tendency called syntony, and others spoke of the structuring factor as syntropy. Eastern thinkers identified it with the Sanskrit term prana, a cosmic energy that permeates all things, and in the West psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s concept of orgone proved to be a close approximation, the same as spiritual philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s etheric force. Newton himself recognized the presence of this factor and sought to integrate it with his mechanistic laws. The mechanical laws, he said, are not full descriptions of reality; they need to be completed with the recognition of an “enlivening and ensouling spirit in all things”—a spirit of “vegetation” in the Latin sense of “animating” and “enlivening.”³

The nature of this universal structuring factor has not been definitively established; current definitions remain controversial. However, that such a factor is present in the universe appears to be beyond reasonable doubt. In the most general and least speculative definition we can call it an “attractor” acting on systems in space and time.

The presence of such an attractor is supported by observation. The systems we observe in the universe cannot have been the result of a random concatenation of disconnected elements. There must have been “something” that biased random interactions and created a trend toward structure, form, and coherence. The observed universe is highly, indeed staggeringly, coherent. This is not likely to be the product of random interactions, no matter how widespread and enduring they may be. A dynamic attractor appears to be at work, biasing the interplay of otherwise random interactions.

This concept comes from physics, where an attractor is defined in reference to the state or behavior toward which a dynamic system tends in space and time. Consider a dynamic system such as a living organism, an ecology, or even an economy. That system is changing over time. If the change does not follow a discernible logic, the system is chaotic and not representable by attractors. But if a logic can be discovered in the evolution of the “phase-space” of the system—its sequence of states or behaviors—then that system can be represented by one or more attractors. The attractors define the state or condition toward which the sequence of states or behaviors tends. If the sequence exhibits elements of repetition over time, the attractor is said to be “periodic.” If it exhibits a tendency toward a single state or behavior, the system can be represented by a “point attractor.” The evolution of the system can be complex, including unpredictable elements and incomprehensible sequences. In that case, the attractor is said to be “strange” or “chaotic.” A complex system can obey diverse attractors at the same time.

Rather than speaking of a higher will or purpose, or of an unexplained élan vital, prana, or etheric force, we can least speculatively assert that the nonrandom evolution of systems in the universe—and the evolution of the macrostructures of the universe themselves—is governed by attractors.

The presence of an attractor that biases interactions in the universe toward complexity and coherence is clearly evident. The universe we observe cannot be the product of mere chance. Already in the middle of the twentieth century physicists Arthur Eddington and Paul Dirac noted curious “coincidences” among the basic physical constants of the universe. For example, the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force, which is approximately 10^40, is matched by the ratio between the size of the universe and the dimension of elementary particles: that ratio, too, is approximately 10⁴⁰. It is not evident how these ratios could have been produced, and then maintained, by random processes. The ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force should be unchanging (as these forces are constant), whereas the ratio of the size of the universe to the size of elementary particles should be changing (since the universe is expanding). In his “large number hypothesis,” Dirac speculated that the agreement between these ratios, one variable and the other not, is more than coincidence. Either the universe is not expanding or the force of gravitation varies with its expansion.

Cosmological research unearthed an entire array of similarly mind-boggling elements of coherence. The mass of elementary particles, the number of particles, and the forces between them display harmonic ratios. Many of the ratios among basic parameters can be interpreted on the one hand in reference to the relationship between the mass of elementary particles and the number of nucleons (particles of the atomic nucleus) in the universe, and on the other in reference to the relationship between the gravitational constant (the factor of gravitation in the evolution of the universe), the charge of the electron, Planck’s constant (a unit of measurement used to calculate the smallest measurable time interval and physical distance), and the speed of light.

Also the microwave background radiation—the remnant of the Big Bang—turned out to be unexpectedly coherent. When one maps its sequence of values, there are peaks and troughs, and these follow a definite, nonrandom logic. There is a large peak followed by smaller, harmonic peaks. The series of peaks ends at the longest wavelength that physicist Lee Smolin termed R. When R is divided by the speed of light we get the length of time that independent estimates tell us is the age of the universe. When we divide the speed of light by the value of R (c/R), we get the frequency that equates to one cycle over the age of the universe. And when R is squared and divided by the speed of light (R²/c), we get the value equal to the acceleration of the expansion of the distant galaxies.

These observations are more than coincidental. The universe is coherent beyond expectation, and its coherence allows life to emerge on suitable surfaces. Life requires a universe of which the basic parameters—the “physical constants”—are precisely and enduringly correlated. Variation of the order of one-billionth of the value of some of these constants (such as the mass of elementary particles, the speed of light, the rate of expansion of galaxies, and two dozen others) would have resulted in a sterile, lifeless universe. Even a minute variation would have prevented the creation of stable atoms and stable relations among them, and this would have precluded the evolution of the complex systems that manifest the characteristics of life. Yet living systems show up in more and more places in the universe, under more and more diverse conditions.

The clusters of vibration that are the fundamental reality of the universe create in-phase, harmoniously structured ensembles that observers such as the human perceive as material—more exactly, matter-like—structures. It appears that the universe evolves under the influence of coherence-generating dynamic attractors. What we observe today is a highly coherent ensemble of clusters of vibration, appearing to us as a universe of staggeringly coherent quasi-material structures.

Not only is the universe as a whole a system of coherent structures; it is also the ground or template for the evolution of a vast array of subsidiary ensembles of coherent clusters of vibration—coherent structures, ranging in size and complexity from atoms to galaxies. These complex and yet coherent clusters could not have come about through a random mixing of their components. Statistical analysis of the complexity of even relatively simple biological systems indicates that to produce them by a random mixing of their components would have taken on the average longer than the age of the universe.

The complexity of the DNA-mRNA-tRNA-rRNA transcription and translation system is such that the probability that living systems would have been produced by random processes is astronomically improbable. Its probability, according to mathematical physicist Fred Hoyle, is equal to that of a hurricane blowing through a scrapyard and assembling a working airplane. Even 13.8 billion years for the evolution of matter-like structures in the physical domain and four billion or more years for the appearance of living systems are not sufficient to account for the presence of stars and galaxies, and the complex and supremely harmonious web of life on this planet.

If random interactions cannot account for the existence of the coherent complex systems we encounter in the universe, we need to recognize the presence of attractors acting on phenomena in space and time. The explanation of their origins and nature is secondary to the affirmation that they exist. Their existence is consistent with the quantum theory developed by physicist David Bohm. According to Bohm, the observed “explicate order” is “in-formed” by the underlying “implicate order.” The implicate order is the attractor that governs—“in-forms” in Bohm’s theory—the unfolding of events in the explicate order.

The implicate order is the beyond-space-time domain of laws and regularities that govern events in space and time. These laws and regularities are “beyond” the space-time universe in the sense in which the laws of chess, for example, are beyond the games played according to those laws. The laws govern the way the games are played but are not part of the games. They do not physically move the pieces on the board—rather, they regulate the way the pieces can be legitimately moved. The effect of the implicate order on the explicate order is in the form of “active information”—meaning “in-formation.” It does not involve physical action such as the action of a force field, whether electric, magnetic, gravitational, or nuclear.

The effect of the attractors (that is, of the implicate order) is universal: it in-forms the entire space-time domain. It is irreducible and illimitable: there are no entities or processes that could be shielded and exempted from it. It is the governing, ordering, and structuring factor religious-spiritual traditions identify as the will of God, Tao, Brahman, or the Great Spirit. It is the factor that makes the universe what it is: an evolving nonrandom system of individually as well as collectively coherent entities and events. In the here suggested conceptual frame, it is the formative (“in-forming”) action of dynamic attractors on the space-time universe.

INFORMATION MEDICINE: THE NEW PARADIGM IN HEALTH AND HEALING

Things and events in the universe are not haphazard and chaotic: they are formed—“in-formed”—by universal attractors. The recognition that the manifest world, and thus the living organism, is “in-formed,” suggests a new definition of bodily health and disease.

The New Definition of Health and Disease

Health is the full (or at any rate adequate) condition of in-formation in the living organism. Disease is the condition of blocked, reduced, or otherwise flawed in-formation. Healing, then, is the reestablishment of the condition of full (or adequate) in-formation.

The task of medicine is to heal by reestablishing a condition of adequate in-formation in the organism. This does not necessarily call for artificial measures; in many cases, it can be performed by recourse to the in-formation already present in nature. In the global context, doing so is to access and abide by what the religions call the will of a supreme intelligence. In the context of healing, it is equivalent to accessing what the Eastern healing arts name the chi or qi of the organism.

The living organism is an irreducibly whole system, with all its parts and elements nonlocally—intrinsically and instantly—interconnected. A blockage or other flaw in any part of the organism is not confined to that part. Whatever happens in a cell or in an organ of the organism also happens in all its cells and organs. A cellular or organic malfunction in one part indicates a flaw in the functioning of the organism as a whole.

A healthy organism is intrinsically as well as extrinsically coherent. Its intrinsic coherence comes to light in the cooperation of all its cells, organs, and organ systems in maintaining the whole organism in the living state. Conflict or disharmony between the organism and any part of its environment indicates extrinsic incoherence, and it reduces the health and viability of the organism. The following definitions can be put forward:

1) Health is an adequate level of coherence in the organism, a condition brought about and maintained by adequate access to the information that “forms” the living organism.

2) Disease is a level and form of incoherence in the organism, indicating inadequate access to in-formation. (Diseases can be classified according to the types and levels of the blockages that cause them.)

3) Diseases are pathologies of in-formation, and they are simultaneously individual and collective. They are individual when they appear to affect a single subject. This, however, is illusory. Given that organisms are dynamic elements in the biosphere, which is an intrinsically whole system, the notion of individual disease is an abstraction. Disease is a factor in the collective condition of living organisms on the planet.

The organism communicates with other organisms in its external environment consistently with its internal environment. This communication does not have definite boundaries. In the final count there is communication between every living organism and the rest of the universe. The following definitions apply:

1) The universe is a coherent system, in-formed by universal attractors.

2) The forms of life that emerge and evolve in the universe are organized along principles of complexity, coherence, resonance, and analogy, rather than of linear causality and mechanistic interaction.

3) Living systems are sensitive, complex, and whole. They are cognitive networks composed of the interaction of their parts and of the interaction of the systems themselves with their environment.

The properties of living organisms are not properties of mechanical or even biochemical systems. The most important among them are the following:

a) The properties of the organism are systemic properties; they are properties of the whole system constituted of the parts, and not the properties of the parts.

b) Interactions in the organism form a complex integral network of relationships that make up nonlocally correlated wholes; the properties of organisms are intrinsically nonlocal.

c) The organism is a whole in regard to its parts, and it is a part in regard to its environment, which is a whole constituted of its multiorganic parts. It is at the same time a part of the larger system, which is the system of life on the planet. A single synchronic scheme connects the macroscopic world of living organisms with the microscopic world of quantum particles.

d) Living organisms are nondecomposable quantum systems. The correlations that connect their elements are destroyed when their parts are separated from each other and from the systems that embed them.

e) In the mathematical formalism of quantum physics, relations between the parts of the whole system are expressed in terms of probability, and the probabilities are determined by the dynamics of the system in which they occur. Thus concepts of “entanglement” apply to living organisms, which are entangled quantum-systems entangled with other organisms in the biosphere.

The Task of Information Medicine

Information medicine upholds many of the insights that hallmark the wisdom traditions. First and foremost it “re-cognizes” the vital role of contact with nature—and hence with the universal attractors present in nature—in preserving the health and integrity of the organism.

The task of information medicine is to purposively further the preservation or restoration of coherence within the organism as well as between the organism and its environment. In traditional societies this task involved restoring contact between individual organisms or tribes and their natural environment. It was entrusted to shamans, gurus, and medicine men and women. In the modern world, the preservation and restoration of health is the task of medical doctors and other health professionals. They apply a wide range of health technologies that substitute for direct contact with nature.

However, the health-preserving and restoring effects of contact with nature, known for millennia, are irreplaceable, and they are being rediscovered. For example, the practice of “forest bathing” (shinrinyoku), originating in traditional Japan, is spreading in the modern world. It is found to bring significant health benefits: lowering heart rate, reducing blood pressure, reducing stress hormone production, and improving overall well-being. Thomas Miller, editor of the Findhorn Foundation’s magazine, noted: “Studies have linked even relatively small amounts of time spent in nature to better mental health, improved empathy, lengthened attention span and boosted immune system, to name only a few benefits. As more artists, writers, business people and others wake up to the benefits of ‘forest bathing,’ nature retreats and other ways of immersing themselves in nature, they are finding that their creativity and inspiration return.”⁴

As the clinical studies cited in part two of this book testify, effective contact with natural substances that convey whole-system in-formation to the diseased organism produces remarkable healing effects. It cures, or at least increases resistance to, a wide array of autoimmune and degenerative maladies, including tumoral diseases and diseases of the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, and the digestive system. It slows the processes of cellular senescence and extends the span of healthy human life. Contact with nature furnishes the kind of guidance that the GPS (global positioning satellite) does in regard to position on the surface of the planet. This guidance is produced by nature and not by man-made technology, and it concerns the coherence—the health—of the subject and not its spatial position.

Clear and robust contact with nature is becoming difficult to achieve. This is due partly to access to nature becoming more and more remote for people in cities, and partly to the compromised quality of the nature to which people have access. As a result fewer people practice effective forest bathing, nature meditation, and other ways of entering into contact with nature. Such contact as they do achieve often proves insufficient to maintain or to regain their health.

For modern people, contact with pristine nature is becoming well-nigh impossible to achieve, and our health suffers the consequences. Not surprisingly, a significant number of compensatory measures are being developed. Modern medicine is largely focused on applying compensatory measures. Faced with a disease, or a condition of less than optimum health, physicians turn to biochemical remedies, to radiation therapy, and if necessary to surgery, to reestablish the coherence of the organism.

Modern medicine’s therapeutic measures offer cures to scores of ailments, but they are not the simplest and the most effective way to preserve and restore health. A simpler and more effective way is to bring to the organism the in-formation that would in-form it in nature. The effectiveness of doing so is shown by the technical studies published in chapter two, “Information Medicine in Clinical Practice.” It appears that introducing extracts from the embryo of a living organism—in this case, a Zebrafish—into a diseased or imperfectly developed organism amounts to bringing whole-system in-formation to that organism. These complex in-formation-carrying proteins exhibit remarkable healing powers: they act as stem cell differentiation stage factors (SCDSFs), reprogramming human pathological stems cells to normalcy. Reprogramming stem cells prolongs the life cycle of normal cells, reinforces the cellular and organic vitality of the organism, and slows the growth of imperfectly differentiated mutant cells.^*2

This in-formation-based therapy promises to be the basis of an effective, efficient, and low-cost medical technology coming online in the foreseeable future.

References

1. I. K. Taimni, Man, God and the Universe (Madras: The Theosophical Society, 1969).

2. Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], speech in Florence, Italy, 1944. Archiv zur Geschichte der Max Planck Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797.

3. B. J. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

4. Thomas Miller, Editorial in the 2018 issue dedicated to “Transforming human consciousness in everyday life,” Findhorn Foundation.