Although mystics have not spoken of energy fields or bioplasmic forms, their traditions over 5,000 years in all the parts of the globe are consistent with the observations scientists have recently begun to make.
Adepts of all religions speak of experiencing or seeing light around people’s heads. Through such religious practices as meditation and prayer, they reach states of expanded consciousness which open their latent High Sense Perception abilities.
Ancient Indian spiritual tradition, over 5,000 years old, speaks of a universal energy called Prana. This universal energy is seen as the basic constituent and source of all life. Prana, the breath of life, moves through all forms and gave them life. Yogis practice manipulating this energy through breathing techniques, meditation and physical exercise to maintain altered states of consciousness and youth far beyond their normal span.
The Chinese, in the 3rd millennium B.C., posited the existence of a vital energy which they called Ch’i. All matter, animate and inanimate, is composed of and pervaded with this universal energy. This Ch’i contains two polar forces, the yin and the yang. When the yin and yang are balanced, the living system exhibits physical health; when they are unbalanced, a diseased state results. Overly powerful yang results in excessive organic activity. Predominant yin makes for insufficient functioning. Either imbalance results in physical illness. The ancient art of acupuncture focuses on balancing the yin and the yang.
Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical theosophy which began around 538 B.C., refers to these same energies as the astral light. Christian religious paintings portray Jesus and other spiritual figures surrounded by fields of light. In the Old Testament, there are numerous references to light around people and lights appearing, but over the centuries these phenomena lost their original meaning. For example, Michelangelo’s statue of Moses shows karnaeem as two horns on his head rather than the two beams of light the word originally referred to. In Hebrew, this word can mean either horn or light.
John White in his book Future Science lists 97 different cultures that refer to the auric phenomena with 97 different names.
Many esoteric teachings—the ancient Hindu Vedic texts, the Theosophists, the Rosicrucians, the Native American Medicine People, the Tibetan and Indian Buddhists, the Japanese Zen Buddhists, Madame Blavatsky, and Rudolph Steiner, to mention a few—describe the Human Energy Field in detail. Recently many with modern scientific training have been able to add observations on a concrete, physical level.
Throughout history, the idea of a universal energy pervading all nature has been held by many western scientific minds. This vital energy, perceived as a luminous body, was first recorded in the western literature by the Pythagoreans around 500 B.C. They held that its light could produce a variety of effects in the human organism, including the cure of illness.
The scholars Boirac and Liebeault in the early 12th century saw that humans have an energy that can cause an interaction between individuals at a distance. They reported that one person can have a healthful or unhealthful effect on another simply by his presence. The scholar Paracelsus in the middle ages called this energy “Illiaster” and said that “Illiaster” is composed of both a vital force and a vital matter. The mathematician Helmont in the 1800s visualized a universal fluid that pervades all nature and is not a corporeal or a condensable matter, but a pure vital spirit that penetrates all bodies. Leibnitz, the mathematician, wrote that the essential elements of the universe are centers of force containing their own wellspring of motion.
Other properties of the universal energy phenomena were observed in the 1800s by Helmont and Mesmer, who originated Mesmerism, which became hypnotism. They reported that animate and inanimate objects could be charged with this “fluid” and that material bodies could exert influence on each other at a distance. This suggested that a field, in some ways analogous to an electromagnetic field, might exist.
Count Wilhelm Von Reichenbach spent 30 years during the mid-1800s experimenting with the “field,” which he called the “odic” force. He found that it exhibited many properties that were similar to the electromagnetic field that James Clerk Maxwell had described early in the 19th century. He also found many properties were unique to the odic force. He determined that the poles of a magnet exhibit not only magnetic polarity, but also a unique polarity associated with this “odic field.” Other objects, such as crystals, also exhibit this unique polarity without themselves being magnetic. Poles of the odic force field exhibit the subjective properties of being “hot, red and unpleasant” or “blue, cold and pleasant” to the observations of sensitive individuals. Furthermore, he determined that opposite poles do not attract as in electro-magnetism. He found that with the odic force like poles attract—or like attracts like. This is a very important auric phenomenon, as we will see later.
Von Reichenbach studied the relationship between electromagnetic emissions from the sun and associated odic field concentrations. He found that the greatest concentration of this energy lay within the red and blue-violet ranges of the solar spectrum. Von Reichenbach stated that opposite charges produced subjective feelings of warmth and cold in varying degrees of power that he was able to relate to the periodic table through a series of blind tests. All electropositive elements gave the subjects feelings of warmth and produced unpleasant sensations; all electronegative elements fell on the cool, agreeable side, with the degree of intensity of sensation paralleling their position in the periodic table. These sensations varying from warm to cool corresponded with the spectral colors varying from red to indigo.
Von Reichenbach found that the odic field could be conducted through a wire, that the velocity of conduction was very slow (approximately 4 meters/second or 13 feet/second) and that the velocity seemed to depend on the mass density of the material rather than on the electrical conductivity of the material. Further, objects could be charged with this energy in a way similar to charging by the use of an electrical field. Other experiments demonstrated that part of this field could be focused like light through a lens, while another part would flow around the lens similar to the manner in which a candle flame flows around objects placed in its path. This deflected portion of the odic field would also react like a candle flame when subjected to air currents, suggesting the composition is similar to a gaseous fluid. These experiments show the auric field has properties that suggest it to be both particulate in nature like fluid and also energetic like light waves.
Von Reichenbach found that the force in the human body produced a polarity similar to that present in crystals along their major axes. Based on this experimental evidence, he described the left side of the body as a – pole and the right side as a + pole. This is a concept similar to the ancient Chinese yin and yang principles mentioned earlier.
We can see from the preceding paragraphs that studies up to the 20th century were conducted to observe different characteristics of an energy field surrounding humans and other objects. Since 1900 many medical doctors have become interested in the phenomenon as well.
In 1911, Dr. William Kilner, a medical doctor, reported on his studies of the Human Energy Field as seen through colored screens and filters. He described having seen glowing mist around the whole body in three zones: a) a quarter-inch dark layer closest to the skin, surrounded by b) a more vaporous layer an inch wide streaming perpendicularly from the body, and c) somewhat further out, a delicate exterior luminosity with indefinite contours about 6 inches across. Kilner found that the appearance of the “aura” (as he called it) differs considerably from subject to subject depending on age, sex, mental ability and health. Certain diseases showed as patches or irregularities in the aura, which led Kilner to develop a system of diagnosis on the basis of the color, texture, volume and general appearance of the envelope. Some diseases he diagnosed in this way were liver infection, tumors, appendicitis, epilepsy and psychological disturbances like hysteria.
In the mid-1900s, Dr. George De La Warr and Dr. Ruth Drown built new instruments to detect radiations from living tissues. He developed Radionics, a system of detection, diagnosis and healing from a distance, utilizing the human biological energy field. His most impressive works are photographs taken using the patient’s hair as an antenna. These photographs showed internal formations of diseases in living tissue, such as tumors and cysts within the liver, tuberculosis of the lungs and malignant brain tumors. Even a live three-month-old fetus was photographed in utero.
Dr. Wilhelm Reich, a psychiatrist and colleague of Freud in the early part of the 20th century, became interested in a universal energy that he named “orgone.” He studied the relationship of disturbances of the orgone flow in the human body to physical and psychological illness. Reich developed a psychotherapeutic modality in which Freudian analytic techniques for uncovering the unconscious are integrated with physical techniques for releasing blockages to the natural flow of orgone energy in the body. By releasing these energy blocks, Reich could clear negative mental and emotional states.
In the period of the 1930s through the 1950s, Reich experimented with these energies using the latest electronic and medical instrumentation at that time. He observed this energy pulsating in the sky and around all organic and inanimate objects. He observed pulsations of orgone energy radiating from microorganisms using a specially constructed high-powered microscope.
Reich constructed a variety of physical apparatuses for the study of the orgone field. One was the “accumulator,” which was capable of concentrating orgone energy and which he used to charge objects with this energy. He observed that a vacuum discharge tube would conduct a current of electricity at a potential considerably lower than its normal discharge potential after being charged for a long period of time in an accumulator. Further, he claimed to increase the nuclear decay rate of a radioisotope by placing it in an orgone accumulator.
Dr. Lawrence Bendit and Phoebe Bendit made extensive observations of the HEF in the 1930s and related these fields to health, healing and soul development. Their work stresses the importance of a knowledge and understanding of the powerful etheric formative forces which are the foundations of health and healing in the body.
More recently, Dr. Schafica Karagulla has correlated visual observations made by sensitives to physical disorder. For instance, a clairvoyant named Dianne was able to observe the energy patterns of ill people and to describe very accurately what the medical problems were—from brain disorders to obstructions in the colon. These observations of the etheric body reveal a vital energy body or field which forms a matrix which interpenetrates the dense physical body like a sparkling web of light beams. This energetic matrix is the basic pattern upon which the physical matter of the tissues is shaped and anchored. The tissues exist as such only because of this vital field behind them.
Dr. Karagulla also correlated chakra disturbance with illness. For example, the sensitive Dianne described the chakra at the throat of a patient as being overactive, red and dull gray in color. When Dianne looked at the thyroid itself, it was too spongy and soft in texture. The right side of the thyroid was not functioning as well as the left. This patient was diagnosed through normal medical techniques as having Graves’ disease, which causes enlarged thyroid, the right being the larger lobe.
Dr. Dora Kunz, President of the American Section of the Theosophical Society, has worked for many years with the medical profession and in healing. She has observed in The Spiritual Aspects of the Healing Arts that, “when the vital field is healthy, there is within it a natural autonomous rhythm,” and that, “each organ in the body has its corresponding energetic rhythm in the etheric field. Between the spheres of the various organs, the different rhythms interact as if a transfer function were occurring; when the body is whole and healthy, these rhythms transfer easily from organ to organ. However, with pathology, the rhythms as well as the energy levels are changed. For example, the residue of a surgical appendectomy can be perceived in the field. The physical tissues that are now adjacent to each other have an altered energy transfer function from the one that was previously modulated by the appendix. In physics, this is called impedance matching or mismatching. Each adjacent tissue is ‘impedance matched,’ which means that the energy can easily flow through all the tissue. Surgery or illness changes the impedance matching so that the energy is to some degree dissipated rather than transferred.”
Dr. John Pierrakos has developed a system of diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders based on visual and pendulum-derived observations of HEF. The information from his observations of the energy bodies is combined with body psychotherapeutic methods developed in Bio-Energetics and with conceptual work developed by Eva Pierrakos. This process, called Core Energetics, is a unified process of inner healing which concentrates working through the defenses of the ego and personality to unblock energies of the body. Core Energetics seeks to balance all the bodies (physical, etheric, emotional, mental and spiritual) to effect a harmonious healing of the whole person.
I conclude from the above, and other, work that light emissions from the human body are closely related to health. I propose that it is very important to find a way to quantify these light emissions with reliable, standardized light measuring instrumentation to make this information available to the medical profession for clinical diagnosis and the energy itself useful for treatment.
My colleagues and I have conducted a number of experiments to measure the HEF. In one, Dr. Richard Dobrin, Dr. John Pierrakos and I measured the light level at a wavelength of around 350 nanometers in a darkroom before, during and after individuals were there. Results show a slight increase of light in the darkroom when people are in it. In one case, the light level actually decreased; someone who was very exhausted and full of despair was in the darkroom. In another experiment, done with the United Nations Parapsychology Club, we were able to show part of the auric field on black and white television, with the use of a device called a colorizer. This device enables one to amplify greatly light intensity variations close to the body. In another experiment, conducted at Drexel University, with Dr. William Eidson and Karen Gestla (a sensitive who worked with Dr. Rhine at Duke University for many years), in which we succeeded in affecting, either bending or attenuating, a small two-milliwatt laser beam with auric energy. All these experiments helped support the evidence for the existence of the energy fields but were not conclusive. Results were shown nationally on NBC television, but further research was not conducted because of lack of funding.
In Japan, Hiroshi Motoyama has been able to measure low light levels coming from people who have practiced yoga for many years. He did this work in a darkroom, using a low-light-level movie camera.
Dr. Zheng Rongliang, of Lanzhou University in the People’s Republic of China, measured energy (called “Qi” or “Ch’i”) radiated from the human body by using a biological detector made from a leaf vein connected to a photoquantum device (low-light measuring device). He studied the energy-field emanations of a Qigong Master (Qigong is an ancient Chinese form of health exercise) and the energy field emanations of a clairvoyant. Results of his studies show that the detection system responds to the radiation in the form of a pulse. The pulse emanating from the hand of the Qigong Master is much different than that of the clairvoyant.
At Shanghai Atomic Nuclear Institute of Academia Sínica it was shown that some vital-force emanations from Qigong masters seem to have a very low frequency sound wave that appears as a low-frequency fluctuating carrier wave. In some cases, Qi was also detected as a microparticle flow. The size of these particles was about 60 microns in diameter and they had a velocity of about 20–50 cm/second (or 8–20 inches/ second).
Some years ago a group of Soviet scientists from the Bioinformation Institute of A.S. Popow announced the discovery that living organisms emit energy vibrations at a frequency between 300 and 2,000 nanometers. They called this energy the biofield, or bioplasma. They found that persons capable of successful bioenergy transfer have a much wider and stronger biofield. These findings have been confirmed at the Medical Sciences Academy in Moscow, and are supported by research in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland.
The most exciting study I have seen on the human aura was done by Dr. Valorie Hunt and others at UCLA. In a study of the effects of rolf-ing on the body and psyche (“A Study of Structural Neuromuscular Energy Field and Emotional Approaches”), she recorded the frequency of low millivoltage signals from the body during a series of rolfing sessions. To make these recordings she used elementary electrodes made of silver/silver chloride placed on the skin. Simultaneously, with the recording of the electronic signals, Rev. Rosalyn Bruyère of the Healing Light Center, Glendale, California, observed the auras of both the rolfer and the person being rolfed. Her comments were recorded on the same tape recorder as the electronic data. She gave a running report of the color, size and energy movements of the chakras and auric clouds involved.
The scientists then mathematically analyzed the wave patterns recorded by a Fourier analysis and a sonogram frequency analysis. Both revealed remarkable results. Consistent wave forms and frequencies correlated specifically with the colors Rev. Bruyère reported. In other words, when Rev. Bruyère observed blue in the aura at any specific location, the electronic measurements would always show the characteristic blue wave form and frequency in the same locations. Dr. Hunt repeated the same experiment with seven other aura readers. They saw auric colors that correlated with the same frequency/wave patterns. Feb. 1988 results of research in progress show the following color/frequency correlations, (Hz = Hertz, or cycles/second):
| Blue | 250–275 Hz plus 1200 Hz |
| Green | 250–475 Hz |
| Yellow | 500–700 Hz |
| Orange | 950–1050 Hz |
| Red | 1000–1200 Hz |
| Violet | 1000–2000, plus 300–400; 600–800 Hz |
| White | 1100–2000 Hz |
These frequency bands, except for the extra bands at blue and violet, are in reverse order of rainbow color sequence. The frequencies measured are a signature of the instrumentation as well as the energy being measured.
Dr. Hunt says, “Throughout the centuries in which sensitives have seen and described the auric emissions, this is the first objective electronic evidence of frequency, amplitude and time, which validates their subjective observation of color discharge.”
The fact that the color frequencies discovered here do not duplicate those of light or pigment does not negate the finding. When we realize that what we see as colors are frequencies picked up by the eye, differentiated and allotted a word symbol, then there is nothing to indicate that the eye and the brain processing centers interpret color only in high frequencies. The ultimate criterion for the experience of color is the visual interpretation. However, with finer instruments, improved recording and data reduction techniques, these data, now primarily up to 1,500 Hz, may very readily contain much higher frequencies.
Dr. Hunt also stated that “chakras frequently carried the colors stated in the metaphysical literature, i.e., kundalini-red, hypogastric-orange, spleen-yellow, heart-green, throat-blue, third eye-violet and crown-white. Activity in certain chakras seemed to trigger increased activity in another. The heart chakra was consistently the most active. Subjects had many emotional experiences, images and memory recalls connected with the different body areas rolfed. These findings give credence to the belief that memory of experiences is stored in body tissue.”
For example, when someone’s legs are being rolfed, he may very well relive early childhood experiences of potty training. He will not only remember the experience, but emotionally relive it. Many times parents try to potty train a child before the child’s body has made the brain-muscle connections to actually control the sphincter muscle that regulates elimination. Since the child cannot physiologically control the sphincter, he will compensate by squeezing the thigh muscles. This puts a great deal of stress and strain on the body. Many times this strain is held habitually throughout life, or until deep bodywork like rolfing or bioenergetics is done. Then, when the muscle tension and strain is released, so is the memory. Another example of holding memory-tension is the tight shoulders that many of us live with. This comes from holding fear or anxiety in the shoulders. You might ask yourself, what is it that you are afraid you will not be able to accomplish, or what do you think will happen if you don’t succeed?
If we define the Human Energy Field as all fields or emanations from the human body, we can see that many well-known components of the HEF have been measured in the laboratory. These are the electrostatic, magnetic, electromagnetic, sonic, thermal and visual components of the HEF. All these measurements are consistent with normal physiological processes of the body and go beyond them to provide a vehicle for psychosomatic functioning.
Dr. Hunt’s measurements show definite frequencies for definite colors of the aura. These frequencies may have higher overtones that were not recorded due to the limitations of the laboratory equipment involved.
Measurements listed above also show the HEF to be particulate in nature and to have fluid-like motion, like air or water currents. These particles are very tiny, even subatomic according to some investigators. When charged minute particles move together in clouds they are usually called plasmas by physicists. Plasmas follow certain physical laws that lead physicists to consider them to be a state between energy and matter. Many of the properties of the HEF measured in the laboratory suggest a fifth state of matter which some scientists call “bioplasma.”
These studies show that the ordinary model of the body consisting of systems (like the digestive system) is insufficient. An additional model based on the concept of an organizing energy field needs to be developed. The model of a complicated electromagnetic field (EMF) does not completely serve this purpose. Many of the psychic phenomena associated with the HEF, such as precognition or being aware of past life information, cannot be explained with an EMF model.
According to Dr. Valorie Hunt, the body can be “viewed from a quantum concept of energy stemming from the atomic cellular nature of the functioning body, which cuts across all tissues and systems.” She suggests that the holographic view of the HEF would be a good one. “The hologram concept emerging in physics and brain research appears to provide a truly unifying cosmic view of reality which demands reinterpretation of all biological findings on another plane.”
Marilyn Ferguson declared in Brain Mind Bulletin that “the holistic model has been described as the ‘emerging paradigm,’ an integral theory that would catch all the wonderful wildlife of science and spirit. Here at last is a theory that marries biology to physics in an open system.”