Wonder what psychoenergetics will bring?
I remember William Tiller's name, but I haven't yet read any of his books.
I have been fascinated by the question of the interface between the psychic and material worlds ever since my mother described her near-death experiences to me in the 1980s, and wondering why the worlds she was describing didn't seem to have any counterpart in the physics I was reading in Scientific American. Particularly the dogma about the speed of light being a fundamental limitation just didn't seem to apply. In "the next world over", as she described it, it seemed that thought was a form of light, people communicated by telepathy, and time and space didn't exist as such, they could all just be blinked away by focused mental intention. In the face of this, Relativity and all of the theoretical towers of cosmology built on top of it seemed about as useful as trying to build skyscrapers out of damp tissue paper. The universe must be fundamentally more connected than the "speed of light limit" claims it to be.
Then there are the cases of physical healing, where organic matter seems to grow suddenly (within seconds, in the dramatic cases). The matter/energy interface must be capable of doing something unusual, and "conservation of energy" can't be the hard limit we think it is either.
Whatever is happening in particle accelerators, it doesn't seem to have much to do with what happens in biological systems. Biological systems at room temperature and pressure seem to be capable of carrying energies which can transcend space and time. Our Standard Model of physics gives no clues to what's happening here (maybe "quantum entanglement' might explain some of it, but it can't be all of it).
We have huge gaps in our basic physical knowledge, and also in the will to believe that there *are* gaps. In the 1970s there was a brief period of openness to exploring some of these mental/physical energy systems, but it seems like two generations have passed since then and the hard wall of disbelief in science is stronger than ever. On the other hand, The "New Age" community often hasn't conducted itself with the coherence and grace needed to win over the skeptics, and has often fallen into angry, dissociated, conspiracy thinking.
Mental intention does seem to be a large part of the flow of nonphysical biological "energy" (qi, or similar concepts of it). How this works at a physical level is very hard to understand, but it seems to be understandable (and can be experienced) at an intuitive level.
The concepts of thankfulness, release, forgiveness seem to resonate as keys for helping direct mental intention in a healing way. But practicing this still requires rigor and focus and a slow, long-term attitude. A miracle might happen in an instant, yet it is still not a quick fix.
It seems that we need a physics that's more intuitively accessible, but I don't know how to begin to get there. Some forms of mathematics are more intuitive than others. For me personally, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are not intuitive at all, yet they predict results. The material world seems to be quite well described by mathematics, but the "next world" (or the world "inside") maybe isn't so much. Yet these worlds can't be completely separate. There must be an interface, presumably at the level of our cells, or we couldn't exist as both biological and sentient beings.
I suspect water, and particularly the odd state of water between liquid and solid, when it's trapped between cell membranes, might be an important part of this interface. Particle physics probably isn't going to help us there.
The other thing that's been whispering at my mind for the last eight years or so, has been the whole structure of thought coming down from the Taoists, Gnostics and Kabbalah. There's something there in that ancient thought system - about the interface between dark/light, matter/spirit, chaos/order, multiplicity/unity - and the idea of "emanations from the One", that feels like it resonates with modern complexity and systems thinking. It also feels like it was maybe *communicated to us* as a primer about the structure of subtle worlds and how they interface with us. The details are probably incorrect and much less important than the core of it. It reminds me of the "quantum particle zoo" but in reverse: instead of small particles building up larger structures, this system of thought seems about a single unified (but intelligent) system/entity giving birth to more and more diverse, yet still integrated, substructures.
I don't know. It's hard to explain. But I can sense its outlines there, this thought-system, in many of the big ancient philosophies. It also feels like the sort of conceptual structure that humans would not naturally come up with on their own and that, wherever its outlines are seen, some kind of "contact event" may have occurred, from the subtle worlds to ours. Like it's a sort of familiar "hello pattern", trying to communicate the essentials needed for further contact. Or perhaps it's the default human way of thinking and it's just *modern* humans, trained in the analytical mode, who have taught ourselves (slowly and painfully) how not to think like this. But it seems to be appearing in the future. Ecology, for example, seems to be converging on similar concepts. Christopher Alexander's approach to architecture, also. I think David Bohm is a bit overplayed, but his "implicate order" was probably also playing with a similar structure of thought. And in computing Alan Kay I think has been touching something similar, and facing similar gulfs of misunderstanding when trying to communicate it.
I have hope that, if this set of thought-constructs is there "in the ether", that we will eventually figure out how to integrate it into our current physics, sociology and technology. But it's going to be rough until we do.
Regards, Nate