Good Vibrations
Dr. Grad’s experiments with barley seeds clearly showed that energy had been transferred somehow into water. Since then scientists have studied how water changes in accordance with thoughts and emotions. For instance, Professor William Tiller, Emeritus Professor of Materials Science at Stanford University, has analyzed water that has had a person focus intention toward it or even feel strong emotions in the vicinity, and has detected changes in its pH.
In a glass of water the atoms (H-O-H) vibrate, constantly coming together and bouncing apart. They also bend, stretch, spin, twist, and collide with other molecules. Other scientists have measured changes in some of these movements when a healer has placed his or her hands upon the water.
All of these results suggest that your own thoughts and feelings affect water, altering its vibrations. You might want to think a few kind thoughts the next time you are about to drink a glass of water. Could it be that your intentions will color it and you will nourish your body in a way you might never have imagined?
During a Thanksgiving meal with some friends a few years ago, including Dr. Glen Rein of the Quantum Biology Research labs in New York, a talented scientist who conducted some of the Institute of Heartmath’s research, I learned that Dr. Rein had even placed DNA in a jar containing water that had been held or focused upon and had detected subtle changes in its conformation.
Imagine you are sitting cross-legged on a chair and someone switches on a heater in the room. It gets so warm that you feel uncomfortable, so you change your position and place your feet flat on the floor. Dr. Rein showed that DNA changes the way it “sits” when it is placed in water that a healer has held or focused upon. This is called “changes in conformation” of DNA.
Our bodies are composed of about 70 percent water and contain thousands of miles of DNA. This research suggests that both might be affected by what we think about and how we feel.
Also, our intentions toward other people will affect the water in their bodies and their DNA. Of course the effects are very small and subtle. Loving others may not enlighten them, and a dislike of people is not going to switch on genes that make them grow an extra arm out of their forehead. But continued intentions may build up over time just as, say, trace chemical contaminants in food build up over time and can have toxic consequences.
On the positive side, consistently kind and appreciative intentions toward people will have a long-term beneficial effect upon them. It might make a little difference or it might make a lot, but even a little difference in the right direction is better than a little difference in the wrong direction. What are your intentions toward people?
Given the effects of thoughts and feelings on water, you can even use it as a programmable medicine. For instance, you could write the word “appreciation” on a label and stick it onto a bottle or glass of water before you drink from it. The word will unconsciously trigger a thought or emotion in you, however small, every time you drink from it and this will “color” the water and probably inspire internal coherence in your body.
It might also make you feel more appreciative toward yourself or others. You could try it with “love,” “peace,” “happiness,” “joy,” “forgiveness,” “passion,” “kindness,” or even “healing,” if you want to bring more healing into your body. Be creative! Any quality of intention you wish to add to your body can be written on a label and stuck to a bottle or glass. The effects may be subtle or significant!
Chemical Imprints on Water
Some aspects of homeopathic medicine and vibrational medicine utilize the transfer of energy into water. Plant essences, Bach Flower Remedies, for example, fall into this category because they rely, in part, on the vibrations (bending, stretching, spinning, twisting) of the substances extracted from the plants being transferred into water.
Manufacture of these medicines uses homeopathic “succussion” techniques where the plant leaf or flower is boiled up then diluted with water or alcohol. It is then shaken vigorously while a series of successive dilutions are made. Each episode of shaking, or succussion, is believed to “imprint” the vibrational energy of the leaf or flower onto the water.
The image of certain flowers and plants also brings about a degree of symbolism and emotion, and it is believed that this emotional energy is also imprinted on the water.
The same kind of thing has been done with rocks or crystals that have been shown to possess paramagnetic qualities or are believed to absorb qi or intention. Shaking the rocks, or ground-up chunks of them, in water and making successive dilutions is believed to imprint the magnetism or qi on the water, producing medicines that can have significant health-enhancing effects upon the body and even on plants.
In some “rough” and unpublished experiments of my own I have found that some rocks and crystals (particularly ground-up rose quartz) accelerate the rate of germination and growth of cress seeds. If they do this to seeds, there’s a good chance that there will be effects on the human body, too.
Some therapists imprint water with loving intentions through holding it while focusing on a feeling of genuine love and “concentrating” it through successive dilutions. When patients drink the water, they then receive a concentrated burst of love at a deep level in their body, often with miraculous results.
One of the real advantages of this type of medicine is that the effects go beyond the physical body and can heal emotions and spiritual challenges, which are frequently the underlying causes of disease in the body.
Relatively recent accidental research provided scientific proof of the power of vibrational medicine. During research into allergies, the late Professor Jacques Benveniste, then research director at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, was studying the effect of chemical solutions of allergens on the white blood cells of the immune system.
A chemical solution is basically a substance dissolved in water, alcohol, or some other solvent. For example, a chemical solution of salt would be a spoonful of salt in a glass of water. A chemical solution of allergens is allergens dissolved in water or dissolved in water plus something else like alcohol.
However, one of Benveniste’s students accidentally over-diluted a solution so much that, theoretically, it should not have been able to do anything to the immune system because there weren’t enough allergen molecules left in it. In fact, it was eventually diluted so much that there was no theoretical possibility of there being even a single molecule of allergen present, so it should have had no effect on the white blood cells whatsoever. Yet it did — and significantly so! The “overdiluted” solution affected the immune system just as much as the original chemical solution did. Some of the vibrational energy of the allergen must have been imprinted on the water during the dilution process. Professor Benveniste and his team had accidentally proven vibrational medicine.
Amid a degree of controversy, the research was reported in 1988 in the highly prestigious journal Nature, stimulating a degree of scientific debate into homeopathy and, in the eyes of many, lending genuine credibility to homeopathic medicine, because homeopathy relies on using very dilute quantities of substances to heal the body. One of the ways in which some homeopathic medicines work (although not the only way) is by imprinting the vibrational energy of a substance onto a solvent during the succussion process.
Professor Benveniste and his team then went further. Common sense would tell you that if you could reproduce the same vibrations in another way, then you could “fake” a chemical medicine — and that is what they did. In several experiments they recorded the vibrations of some chemical substances onto CD and discovered that by playing the CD they could trigger biological changes to the same degree that they could achieve using the chemical substances.
In one series of experiments, they adjusted the amount of blood pumping through a heart according to which CD they played. If, for example, they played the recording of a chemical called acetylcholine, which is known to dilate blood vessels, then more blood would pump through the heart. If they injected a real chemical solution of acetylcholine, they got almost identical results. The digitized signal increased blood flow by 21.5 percent, and the chemical solution increased it by 21.3 percent. It didn’t matter to the heart whether it received a chemical substance or just the energy vibrations from the substance.
The team even recorded a set of chemical vibrations and sent them by e-mail from the USA to their laboratory in France, downloaded the signal, and played it to an organism. Astonishingly, the signal produced just as many biological changes as a chemical solution. At the time of writing (2006), this research has not been fully embraced by the scientific community but, as is often the case with paradigm-shifting discoveries, I predict that “digital biology,” as it is called, will eventually have a huge impact upon medical science.
If you think about it, a similar thing happens when you play music. All sounds are vibrations, and hearing requires vibrations triggering biology in your ear, so all sounds most likely affect your body to some extent, just as Professor Benveniste’s CDs do. Hearing classical music, for instance, can alter a person’s mood, which involves a movement of neuro-peptides, and might even boost their immune system, smooth the rhythms of their heart, and switch sets of genes on and off.
Words and musical sounds are vibrations in space, as are digitized signals, while vibrational medicines are vibrations in water. But a vibration is a vibration — and all vibrations affect us. Some effects are obvious and some are not so obvious.
You probably haven’t considered it, but every word you speak, on account of its vibration, affects your body and affects the body of any person hearing it.
Sound and Meaning
Mystics have known and taught for thousands of years that sounds can have profound health-giving effects on the body. Some have said that the sounds “Ah” and “O” are primordial sounds, the sounds of creation, and so are found in the name of the creator in just about every culture in the world: God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Ra, to name but a few. In the New Testament, the Gospel of John begins with “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So, according to John, creation began with the Word — a sound vibration!
A meditation technique known as the Japa meditation involves vocalizing the sound of the creator, whatever that may be to you, over and over again. It is believed to bring you into conscious contact with the creator.
You may have noticed that certain pieces of music affect your mood. Some have a relaxing effect on your body and mind, while others have a stimulating effect. Some even give you “flashbacks” of past experiences, and flashbacks are visualizations, so they probably alter the expression of several sets of genes and alter the patterns of growth in your brain. In fact, you have probably heard of the “Mozart effect,” which popularizes research that listening to Mozart (Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K.448) can improve mental function.
It is not only Mozart that has such an effect, though. A 2007 study published in the journal Behavioral Pharmacology saw young adult mice exposed to slow rhythmic music for six hours a day for 21 days. While monitoring levels of a substance called brain-derived neurotrophic factor — a substance that aids the growth and survival of brain cells — the scientists found that it had increased in the hippocampus of their brains (the area that controls memory and learning). Thus, the brains of the mice showed a greater capacity for memory and learning, a finding that performance tests then supported.
Research has also shown that music can affect your immune system. A scientific study published in 1996 in the scientific journal Stress Medicine showed how certain pieces of music increased levels of the immune system’s salivary immunoglobulin A — remember that? One particular piece used in the experiment increased s-IgA levels by 55 percent.
Earlier we learned that a feeling of appreciation could raise s-IgA levels. The scientists put the two together, asking the test subjects to think “appreciation” while a specific piece of music was played, and the levels of s-IgA went up by 141 percent. Quite a therapy!
A study published in 2002 in the journal Alternative Therapies showed that group drumming facilitated by a music therapist also boosted the immune system, and even reported that there was a reduction in the levels of some stress hormones with shamanic drumming during the experiment.
Drumming is also used by some shamans to help them enter an altered state of consciousness. The sound vibrations (waves) presumably resonate with some of the body’s natural rhythms and cause the production of mind-altering opiate-type neuropeptides that fit into receptors in the emotional areas of the brain. Prolonged drumming probably even involves a number of genes being switched on and off.
In 2005, scientists from the University of Pavia and the University of Oxford found that listening to music affected the heart. When playing selected pieces of music to 24 men and women, they found that fast music increased circulation and breathing; and slower, meditative music caused a substantial fall in heart rate.
Similarly, in 2005, a research team led by Dr. Shmuel Arnon of the Neonatal Unit at Netanya Hospital in Israel studied the effects of music on premature babies. After playing music for 30 minutes, they found that the babies slept more deeply and had reduced heart rates. In particular, they found that live music (a lullaby, for instance) had the most powerful effect, which should come as no surprise to parents everywhere.
Lullaby music was also tested for its ability to reduce anxiety in children who were about to have a cast room procedure (having a cast put on or taken off). In the 2007 study, 28 children were played music in the waiting room, while 41 were not. The scientists found that the average increase in heart rate between the waiting room and the procedure was 22.5 beats per minute in the non-music group, but much less – 15.3 beats per minute – in the music group.
And a 2006 study involving 200 adults receiving a bronchoscopic examination found that when music was played during the procedure, then heart rate and blood pressure were significantly less than when it was not played.
But it is not only music that has this effect. A kind word said to people can be music to their ears and make them feel comforted, and such a feeling will have a positive effect on their health.
The meaning of your words is clearly important because it triggers thoughts, feelings, and mental images. The words “I love you,” for instance, may mean a lot to people and make them feel fantastic, and this will have residual health-promoting effects. But the actual sound of the words, the vibrations of the vowels and consonants, also affect the body, and this occurs independent of the words’ meaning. The sound of the word “love,” for example, contributes to its biological effect just as its meaning does. So words affect us on two levels, through what they mean to us and through the vibrations of their pronunciation. A word, then, is more than a mere description of something; it is a set of vibrations in space. These vibrate at various levels throughout your body. Some may be felt on the skin and some feel as though they go right through you. For instance, have you ever stood beside a loudspeaker in a nightclub? On a deeper level, some sounds may resonate with internal organs and, almost certainly, with the chemical bonds between atoms in DNA and in some of the vital proteins and enzymes in your body.
Have you heard of how the human voice can shatter glass? Ella Fitzgerald could shatter a wineglass by holding a specific note. The sound resonated with the internal structure of the glass, eventually causing it to explode into tiny pieces. In a similar way, ultrasound can be used to deliver a knockout blow to kidney stones, shattering them into fragments that can easily be eliminated from the body. In 2006, at Borders General Hospital in Scotland, Dr. Paul Syme reported a significant reduction of stroke symptoms using ultrasound.
Could it be possible, then, for human vocal sound to have a positive effect upon serious disease in the human body?
I once watched a video where three doctors from the Huaxia Zhineng Qigong Clinic and Training Center in Qin-haungdao, China demonstrated this. They stood behind a woman who had a cancerous tumor in her bladder that was approximately three inches wide, and a real-time ultrasound scan of the tumor was shown on a screen for the audience to see. Then the doctors began to rapidly chant a sound that means “Already gone” or “Already accomplished.” As the audience watched in astonishment, the tumor began to shrink right before their eyes. Amazingly, it disappeared completely in 2 minutes and 42 seconds. The story is recounted in Gregg Braden’s excellent book The Isaiah Effect.
Researcher Fabien Maman has also studied the effect of sound on cancer. In the early 1980s, he discovered that a series of acoustic notes would destroy cancer cells, leaving healthy ones intact. He also found that a chromatic scale of notes would alter the energy emitted from healthy human cells.
Although some of this work hasn’t been fully embraced by mainstream science, it may be just a matter of time before it is. It is often the case that discoveries that are outside our mind-sets take time before they become part of the furniture, so to speak.
Maybe there’s more truth in the wizardry teachings of Hogwarts than any of us imagine! There might be ancient words, mostly forgotten, that have been used in past times to achieve the most remarkable of things. Who knows? There is much we have to learn, and I believe that we are only scratching the surface in understanding how sound affects biology. In fact, our understanding of sounds and how they affect matter — biological and nonbiological — is still primitive but deserves a great deal of research.
In his book Power vs. Force, Dr. David R. Hawkins uses a technique known as applied kinesiology to determine “levels of consciousness.” He calibrated a scale between 1 and 1,000, where 1 would represent the consciousness of a bacterium and 1,000 would represent the consciousness of historical figures such as Christ, Krishna, and Buddha. He found the average level of consciousness of humanity to be a little above 200, but found that much classical music scored around 500.
It may be that we have an unconscious awareness of the effects of certain pieces of music and other sounds, and just as our beliefs affect our physical bodies, as shown in the placebo effect, so some pieces of music and other sounds may have powerful effects on our bodies. And of course the vibrations of the sound will affect us, too.
During 2003, I personally conducted some simple experiments that measured the biological effects of some words. I wrote the words “love,” “fear,” “happy,” and “sad” on labels and stuck them onto plastic cups. I then put a small amount of water in each of them. By unconsciously triggering tiny levels of emotion in myself, I believed that my awareness of each word would imprint energy associated with its meaning onto the water in each cup.
I then took a set of 30 pots and put approximately 50 seeds of watercress in each of them. I then used the “love”-labeled cup to water six pots of seeds every day and I did the same with “fear”-labeled cups and the “happy”- and “sad”-labeled cups. I also watered a set of six pots with unlabeled water to serve as a control. Each day I put a small amount of water in each cup and used an exact amount of it to water the seeds.
I used six pots for each word so that I could obtain a statistically accurate result — the effect of each word would be measured against 300 “control” seeds. Each set of six pots received water from the same cup every day so that there was no overlap of words on any seeds.
After watering them for seven days I measured the length of every sprout of watercress, something I can assure you was no five-minute task.
The results surprised even me. I discovered that the seeds that had been watered from the “love”-labeled cups grew much taller than the seeds watered from the “fear”-labeled cups, and the seeds watered with “happy” water were much taller than the seeds grown with “sad” water. There was a 7 percent difference in the height of sprouts between the “love” and “fear” cups and a 15 percent difference between the “happy” and “sad” ones (see References). “Happy” water made the seeds grow tallest of all. And this was after only seven days!
It may be that my awareness of each word, even on an unconscious level, altered the energy output of my body. We know that the electrical output from the heart, for instance, can be measured several inches from the body, and also if you are, say, embarrassed, people can feel an increase in heat emanating from your face. Some aspects of this energy output may imprint water in such a way that it affects the growth of seeds.
In addition, as outlined later in the book, everything is connected at the quantum level, so my awareness of the water immediately changed it — the word that I was aware of, as I thought of the water, changed it.
Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto proved that such changes can take place in water by photographing changes in the crystal structure of water brought about by words. A year or two before my experiments, he had written down words, stuck them onto bottles of water, and used a technique called “dark-field microscopy” to take photographs of the water after it had been frozen into ice. This clearly showed that different words produced different crystals of ice.
For example, Emoto discovered that the words “love,” “thank you,” and even “Mother Teresa” produced highly crystalline sparkly ice crystals, but negative words caused crystals to be dull and undefined. He also recorded differences in the structure of water when people had prayed or when different pieces of music had been played in its vicinity. Tibetan or Buddhist chants or pieces of classical music produced sparkly crystals. Emoto has now produced thousands of crystal pictures of water from all over the world. Many of these can be found in his books Messages from Water, The Hidden Messages of Water, The True Power of Water, and Love Thyself.
This research can be useful to us all every day. I often write inspiring, compassionate, uplifting, peaceful, or healing words on labels and stick them onto the bottles of water that I drink from, because I believe that they will nourish my body in some way.
Before eating anything, I also quietly say a few words to acknowledge the fact that I appreciate the food that I am about to eat.
Food for the Soul
Most food contains water, so any emotions experienced while preparing it or prior to eating it may color it. Even if it had no water in it, however, it would still absorb feelings and intentions, given that rocks, which are dry, absorb mental and emotional energy. Scientists use the fact that quartz crystal holds, amplifies, and transmits sound and electromagnetic frequencies, which are also vibrations.
In fact, it seems as though almost everything can do this. Most psychically sensitive people will tell you that buildings and other places still hold the vibrations, or memories, of past times.
Some interpretations of quantum physics have suggested that thoughts are simply faster vibrations of sound than ultrasound, music, or words. We know that to a small degree music will affect the internal structure of any rocks in the vicinity (just as it affects wineglasses), as would ultrasound. So it is logical to assume that thoughts will also be picked up by the internal (quantum) structure of rocks — and other objects — at some level.
So, to go back to food, any thoughts, feelings, or words expressed around it will color it to some extent. Imagine the consequences of eating three meals a day, 365 days a year, after saying a few words of gratitude as you sat down to eat, or even just thinking them. These might be addressed to the creator, however you envisage this, or to the people who provided the food for you. In one year alone, that would be 1,095 times where you would have taken positive energy into your body as you ate. It would be an interesting scientific study to compare the health of people who did this with people who didn’t, say over the course of a year.
In some cultures, food is carefully prepared with love and gratitude in this way. I find a difference in taste, as well as how I feel afterward, when I eat food that has been prepared like this.
I attended a talk on food during a meditation retreat in India during 2002, at the invitation of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, and learned how much importance they paid to where it comes from and the way that it is prepared. At the retreat center, all food is prepared by people who are mindful of love, and is served with a genuine smile and in a spirit of service. I can tell you that the food tasted divine.
There’s a lot to be said about taking pride in your cooking. A love of food preparation, cooking, and presentation may add more to the quality of the meal than you might imagine.
At one of the lectures in India, the speaker touched on the subject of vegetarian food. He mentioned that meat might be colored by the way the animal was treated. An inhumane environment and painful death, for instance, would imprint the animal’s fear onto the meat. The vibrations of fear would then enter your body as you ate it. If you are going to eat meat, therefore, it might be better to choose meat that comes from animals that have been treated with love and care, or who have roamed free.
This reminded me of something I once heard about some Native American tribes. They would ask the creator to give them food and then, quite frequently, a docile buffalo would wander into their path almost as if it was offering itself up. It was believed that the animal had naturally come to the end of its life and had made an agreement with the creator so it felt no fear or pain when it died. The Native Americans would thank the creator for the gift of food and thank the buffalo for providing nourishment for the people, thereby genuinely honoring its spirit. Such gratitude and compassion would have undoubtedly colored the meat with love vibrations, nourishing the bodies of all who ate of it.
I am quite certain that if any scientists wish to analyze food before and after such feelings are expressed about it, or before and after grace has been said, then they will discover that there is a significant difference in it.
Saying grace, of course, will also affect any water in the vicinity, and the analysis will also show differences in the way its atoms vibrate.
Holy Water
If, say, an apparition appeared near a stream of water, then it would color the water and the surrounding rocks with the energy emitted from it. (It would have to emit energy, which impacts the nerves in the eyes, otherwise it could not be seen.)
Some people may believe that apparitions are merely figments of the imagination, but I will make the assumption that they are real and that some people just can’t see them. As quantum physicists have proven, many forms of energy can occupy the same space as we can, it is just that their vibrations are outside the normal range of perception of the human visual cortex. Every person is unique, however, so there may besome with a slightly larger range than others, and these people may be able to see apparitions.
As we have learned, rocks absorb energy, and just as hot rocks slowly give off heat, so they would also radiate the energy of an apparition. And if water were to trickle over the rocks, it would be colored by the energy of the apparition. This might be a reason why “holy” areas where apparitions have been seen produce healing waters for many years. The healing qualities might last a very long time, because if millions of people knew about it, their faith, beliefs, emotions, and intentions would continually infuse it with healing intentions.
The people wouldn’t even need to be in the vicinity, given that everything in existence is connected. A number of scientists have studied our ability to send and receive intentions over great distances. It is called “distant intentional influence,” or more commonly “distant healing.”
