by Phillip Day
The sea of energy "
We are rising to the conviction that we are part of nature, and so a part of God.... That the whole creation is travelling together toward some great end; and that now, after ages of development, we have at length become conscious portions of the great scheme and can co-operate in it with knowledge and with joy." - British physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge "
How is it that we know what we know?" - Lynne McTaggart Studies with plants Cleve Backster's career had been exemplary. The former CIA scientist had pioneered the polygraph ‘lie-detector' machine and worked as a guest instructor at the Department of Defense Polygraph School and FBI Academy. That all changed one night in 1966 when Dr Backster discovered that a plant could be measured reacting to his thoughts when connected to a polygraph.
If he held the image of burning the plant in his mind, the plant reacted galvanometrically. Yet when the plant was repeatedly threatened with fire but the threat not realised, the plant soon lost interest and failed to react. The plant seemed to know when Backster was faking it. Dr Robert B Stone writes:
"Accidentally cut your finger and the plants receive signals from the dying cells in the drying blood and there is their reaction in black and white. Do it purposely and the results are not the same." 1 The moment reality changed It was a seminal moment which Backster knew would change everything, and it did. In the ensuing decades he became both pariah and prophet. His conclusions were:
- A continuum had to exist by which the plant could detect his thoughts. (If so, what was the nature of this field?)
- The plant was interpreting whether his intentions were honest or not. Where was the seat of this discriminatory intelligence?
- Our thoughts are known!
- What an observer thinks becomes part of the experiment!
Backster's findings were not enthusiastically received by his peers, notes Stone.
"Confront classic scientists with the fact that the thing needed to make an experiment scientific, namely protocol, is the very thing that makes it unrepeatable, and they throw their hands up in the air."2 Further experiments revealed that plants responded with extreme agitation when Backster dumped live brine shrimp into boiling water. After a while, however, the plants got used to the death of the shrimp and tuned into his thoughts instead. Backster also found that the plants adapted to death and only reacted initially to the brine shrimp's demise if healthy brine shrimp were used. Sick brine shrimp did not gain any reaction.
Backster thought of placebo, where a doctor gives a patient a fake pill and, through the extent of belief, the patient can recover. But if the patient knows the pill is a fake, the effect is not observed. Does belief create chemicals which somehow activate the body's healing processes? Science only considers the mind through evolutionary processes. If faith healing did work, it was viewed merely as an evolutionary mechanism to ensure the host's survival, nothing more.
Beyond what we ever imagined But Backster went on to find a lot more. Distance was no object to ‘Primary Perception', as he termed the phenomenon. He could cut off a leaf and wire it up and still get the plant's reaction. He could grind up a leaf and place the electrodes in the powder in another room and get the same reading.
"Equipment was set up and the leaves were to be tested with electrodes. A dish of water and a dish of acetone were placed alongside. If the card turned up was black, the leaf being tested was put in water as a reward. If the card turned up was red, the leaf being tested would be put in acetone - a quick life-terminator. After the second leaf was put into the acetone, all the leaves went into a state of shock or fainting. That is, there would be no reaction on the equipment, neither up nor down, only a straight line." 3 The plants seemed to possess a reactive defence against trauma from threats remotely derived. Further studies confirmed this. Two plants were placed in a room and six students selected lots from a hat. One of the slips instructed the student to murder a plant. The other students and Backster left the room while the student tore the plant out of its pot and ripped it to sheds. Backster then returned and wired up the remaining plant, the ‘witness' to the murder. As each student came in, the plant's reaction was monitored until the murderer entered and the plant's reading went wild.
Why? Because the plant knows the murderer doesn't fake it. Backster's problem was determining what was being measured here. He later came to the same conclusion Sir Oliver Lodge had decades before, and Deepak Chopra would do in the future. That there exists a universal continuum interpenetrating all living things, which is reactive, and here was the proof. The ‘field' was discerning, which meant it had intelligence. Deepak Chopra called it ‘Thinking No-Stuff'. Oliver Lodge said it was God. All Backster knew was that if he mentioned God to anyone, his scientific career would take on the glide angle of a grand piano. "Naturalistic conclusions are required for everything!"
Mind boggling The very concept of what Backster was facing boggled the mind. Dr Stone writes:
"Privacy seemed now to be non-existent. It appears to be an illusion. How can there be privacy if everything is connected through a oneness, a continuum of intelligence, a morphogenetic field, a collective unconscious or anything else you want to call it? Your secret thoughts are communicated to every cell in your body and probably to a larger continuum in space."4 Backster found that plants attune themselves to their owner, even over distance. One night, he took an associate home to a surprise party held in the latter's honour. Both men entered to cries of "Surprise!" from the neighbours. When Backster analysed the reactions of the plants in his lab the following day, his journey was laid out, bare for all to see. He had made notes the night before with a chronometer during points in their trip. The precise time they were running for a bus in the Port Authority. Holding the bus door open for someone. Descending into the Lincoln Tunnel. At the exact moment of "Surprise!" the needles careened off the chart miles away, presumably because of Backster's own reaction to the occasion. Backster realised he had established some sort of quantum connection with his plants.
Stone records another Backster experiment, wherein a veteran of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was asked to watch a video, during which his reactions would be monitored. Painstaking preparations were made to ensure there was no interference in the experiment. The veteran was shown part of a program entitled The World at War on his own television at home. The film was about the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. During the clip, there was a close-up of a naval gunner blazing away at enemy aircraft passing overhead. Stone writes:
"The TV program, also being recorded in the laboratory, then showed the downing of an aircraft. Instantly, the readout recorded a reaction by the veteran's mouth cells. An enemy plane crashing into the sea caused the tracing to make a violent dip down and then up." Later, the veteran admitted he had been emotionally stimulated at that point, hence the reaction. The old man's cells had been collected, centrifuged and connected to the monitoring equipment in a lab seven miles from his home.5 The Zero Point Field The Descartian/Newton model of a matter-only universe was falling apart. Matter was not separate from mind, it was mind. Yet science still had the body divided into parts, with each assigned a medical specialty. Always ignored were the whole person and their unfathomable mind.
Placebo/nocebo: what is the mechanism? Bad news kills yet dogs do not react to bad news and neither do sharks. Apparently only humans have ‘evolved' a higher consciousness with which to process and react to ‘information'. Which begs the question, how did man evolve inordinately further than any other creature, with a mind capable of self-harm with negative conditioning thereby (nocebo)? Come to think of it, why do we question? Anything? At all? You cannot stop a three-year-old asking questions as she tries to learn of the world around her.
Lynne McTaggart, an American researcher and author, has been following an exotic line of enquiry into the very building blocks of matter itself. In her book, The Field, she comments:
"The most important quality common to all these researchers was a simple willingness to suspend disbelief and remain open to true discovery, even if it meant challenging the existing order of things, alienating colleagues or opening themselves up to censure and professional ruin. To be revolutionary in science is to flirt with professional suicide. The system tends to encourage professionals to carry out experimentation whose purpose is primarily to confirm the existing view of things, or to further develop technology for industry, rather than to serve up true innovation."6 Auras and energy fields were being measured around people using Kirlian photography. Was this evidence of Backster's Primary Perception? Did this life-force or ch'i find its origins in some Quantum of Solace? A concept known as the ‘Zero Point Field', writes McTaggart, was soon being openly discussed:
"Several thought again about a few equations that had always been subtracted out in quantum physics. These equations stood for the Zero Point Field - an ocean of microscopic vibrations in the space between things. If the Zero Point Field were included in our conception of the most fundamental nature of matter, they realized, the very underpinning of our universe was a heaving sea of energy - one vast quantum field. If this were true, everything would be connected to everything else like some invisible web. They also discovered that we were made of the same basic material. On our most fundamental level, living beings, including human beings, were packets of quantum energy constantly exchanging information with this inexhaustible energy sea.... We literally resonate with our world."7 'Thinking no-stuff' Peter Hudson writes:
"Energy and matter are the same universal substance, simply vibrating at different frequencies. Recent advancements in quantum physics suggest that the universe is made up of 98% energy and only 2% matter, so it is a great puzzle that we seem to focus far too much, and place too much emphasis on the physical and material aspects of our being instead of the energy that created it."8 Scientists tell us our body is made up of atoms. Dr Stuart Crane reminds that an atom has protons, neutrons and electrons. If the nucleus were the size of a pinhead, scientists have calculated that the first electron in the atom would be 50 yards (150 feet) distant. Everything else in the atom to the Descartian biochemist is... nothing. That's all there is to an atom. If we take all the neutrons, electrons and protons of the atoms in your body and bundle them together, you would be about the same size as a tiny speck of pepper, says Dr Crane. You would weigh the same as you do now because all your atomic weight is in the protons, neutrons and electrons. That's all of you that exists - a speck of pepper. The rest of you... isn't.
If you then take that speck of pepper, do you think you could pass it by another speck of pepper within itself, i.e. 150 feet, without encountering any obstruction? A wall is made the same way we are. A wall, according to atomic physics, is basically nothing. There is absolutely no reason why you cannot walk through a wall, according to all the laws of science except one, says Crane. You bump your nose.
Dr Crane makes the point that much science is dishonest because it does not deal with things as they are, it deals with things that work (events that are demonstrable and repeatable).
"The scientist says: "We had 11,000 people all try and walk through a wall and they all ended up bumping their noses. Therefore we conclude that walking through walls can't be done because noses don't go through and that's what has to go through first."9 Now quantum physics tells us the Zero Point Field is measurable both in the material and throughout ‘the nothing' - Dr Deepak Chopra's ‘Thinking No-Stuff'. Scientists in various fields have been working hard on the enigma despite being shunned by their peers. How does the Field work? Is it a medium through which all atoms are interconnected, distance no object? All sense something mind-boggling just out of reach. For years, quantum mechanics had been loosening up adherents to ‘impossible concepts', such as sub-atomic particles being in two places at the same time, indeed not even existing unless someone observes them! Neuroscientist Karl Pribram was working on the very nature of perception - how we see and think. The nature of reality. Are objects there whether we perceive them or not? Is there a quantum link between all ‘matter'?
Like the internet? The future of the internet, some say, is in ‘cloud computing', whereby all storage and major processing tasks are carried out remotely in huge computer centres, leaving the individual's PC unencumbered by data and processing chores. Scientists are wondering whether the Zero Point Field acts in similar fashion as some sort of quantum repository, into which all our cells, including our brains, are plugged for retrieval of memory.
Peter Hudson writes:
"If we could take a look through high magnification at our solid bodies, we would find the so-called solid reality lost to a rapidly vibrating matrix of energy fields. In other words, there is a vast... emptiness within our bodies but within the void, the emptiness, is a considerable, very subtle form of energy which radiates within and around all molecular or cellular matter."10 Lynne McTaggart writes:
"The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world.... If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world begin? Where was consciousness? Encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field?"11 Boundless affinity Backster found that the field responded to love, which meant that the field was discerning and therefore had intelligence. Marcel Vogel also found this at the IBM Laboratories at Los Gatos, California. He would place three leaves by his bed and upon waking, direct feelings of affection towards the outer leaves while ignoring the middle one. In a few days, the centre leaf had withered while the outer two remained green and pliant.
This is reminiscent of the story of Jesus and his disciples on their way to the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus sees a fig tree nearby has no fruit upon its branches and he curses the tree: "Let no-one eat fruit from you ever again!" The following day, when they pass by the same spot, the tree has withered up from the roots. Peter cries, "Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away."
Jesus replies:
"Have faith in God [the field?]. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them." (Mark 11:20-24) A secret? Rhonda Byrne's bestselling book,
The Secret, sold millions on the idea of a compliant ‘Universe' and how one might milk it. Predictably, the book provoked criticism from Christian groups for portraying God's principles as some sort of celestial Argos catalogue. Christians believe God's Holy Spirit interpenetrates all things and is the giver and taker of life, so Backster's research was warmly received by many religious groups who saw in Primary Perception a convocation with their own beliefs. Backster's work was also acclaimed by New Age groups who related the ‘quantum living phenomenon' to GAIA, Mother Earth. McTaggart concludes:
"The existence of the Zero Point Field implied that all matter in the universe was interconnected by waves, which are spread out through time and space and can carry on to infinity, tying one part of the universe to every other part. The idea of the Field might just offer a scientific explanation for many metaphysical notions, such as the Chinese belief in the life-force, or ch'i, described in ancient texts as something akin to an energy field. It even echoed the Old Testament's account of God's first dictum: ‘Let there be light', out of which matter was created."12 "...If all sub-atomic matter in the world is interacting constantly with this ambient ground-state energy field, the sub-atomic waves of the field are constantly imprinting a record of the shape of everything. As the harbinger and imprinter of all wavelengths and all frequencies, the Zero Pint Field is a kind of shadow of the universe for all time, a mirror image and record of everything that ever was."13 British biologist Rupert Sheldrake coined the term ‘Morphogenetic Field' ‘as the subset of morphic fields which influence, and are influenced by living things':
"The term [morphic fields] is more general in its meaning than morphogenetic fields, and includes other kinds of organizing fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory."14 Altered states In
The Biology of Belief, Dr Bruce Lipton considers the different states of consciousness and what they might mean in the debate. For this, he states, we need an appreciation of the three brains at work in the human condition. The conscious mind (pre-frontal cortex), the subconscious mind (hind brain) and the ‘superconscious mind' in the environment - Dr Lipton's term for Backster's Primary Perception, Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Field, Rhine's ESP, GAIA, The Holy Spirit, God, call it what you will.
Interestingly, meditation and prayer are often carried out in the relaxed alpha state of consciousness, in which the brain cycles at around 10Hz. New Age mystics talk of GAIA interconnected in this plane. Shamans and monks chant themselves into a trance for contact with something beyond. Ray Manzarek, of the pop group The Doors, relates how Jim Morrison had his band pound him into an altered state with the sound of their instruments:
"He [Morrison] was not a performer, he was not an entertainer, he was not a showman, he was a shaman. He was possessed, man."15 In two minds The two centres of action in the brain are the conscious and subconscious minds. The conscious mind evaluates information and forms conclusions. The subconscious mind, located hind brain, is the stimulus-response master computer that runs everything. It can be programmed through repetition, according to Pavlov, and is enhanced using pleasure or pain (aversion therapy).
By comparison, the conscious mind is slow and deliberate. The subconscious mind reacts blindingly fast in flight-or-flight situations and deals with behavioural patterning and the running of life-systems in the body. Depressed people get sick. Dr Lipton contends that the subconscious mind forms our end of a quantum link into the unknown. We not only transmit but receive. This communication is greatly enhanced in the lower states of consciousness experienced in prayer, meditation, trance-states, drug-states and hypnosis. The obvious questions are: What is the nature of what we transmit? What/who is doing the receiving? What is our relationship with what's doing the receiving? How can we know?
Mind control The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was keen to know more, but for other reasons. The Agency's infamous MK-ULTRA and MONARCH programs in the fifties and sixties were spawned out of Josef Mengele's ‘research' on his prisoners in Auschwitz using trauma-based mind control techniques. Infliction of torture on a subject was found to produce a breakaway persona or 'alter' which could be programmed and given access codes like a computer file. The idea was to find a way to develop the perfect assassin using buried alters, creating a subject who would assimilate into society and be triggered to kill or maim years later via radio frequency implant or spoken codeword.16
Dr Ewen Cameron, erstwhile head of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, received millions of dollars from Allen Dulles (CIA) through front organisations such as the Investigation of Human Ecology, over which Cameron presided. Experiments in mind control and euphemistically named ‘basic programming' were conducted in Montreal, mostly at McGill University, St Mary's Hospital and Allan Memorial Institute. Cameron pioneered 'psychic driving' (constant auditory repetition), drug-induced coma and the application of electroshock trauma for alter programming. Many victims were drugged and kidnapped under guise of an ‘alien abduction' or recruited through medical ‘guinea-pig' programs. Cameron has been conveniently left out of most psychiatric journals probably due to MK-ULTRA being publicly exposed in the 1970's through lawsuits filed by Canadian survivors and their families. The CIA and Canadian government settled out of court to avoid being compelled officially to admit any wrongdoing.17
Such events seem far-fetched and hard to believe for the man in the street, yet documentation on ULTRA, if not MONARCH and associated operations is extensive and persistent. Over the years, the press has mentioned some aspect of these programs:
- A London Sunday Times, Feb 1978, article revealed that in a NATO conference on Stress Reduction, a Navy Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Narut, stationed in Naples, admitted to a training program for killers and assassins
- New Federalist journalist Anton Chaitkin asked former CIA Director William Colby directly, "What about MONARCH?" Colby replied angrily, "We stopped that between the late 1960s and the early 1970s."
- Washington Times, December 27th 1988 page A-2, author Bill Gertz
- Defense News, January 11-17, 1993 page 29, author Barbara Opall
- Tactical Technology, February 3rd 1993 pages 1-5 - Russian Technology Used For Mind Control
- Aviation Week and Space Technology, May 24th 1993 - Army Prepares For Non-Lethal Combat
- Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 7th 1993 - Washington Outlook Still Under Wraps (discusses the use of non-lethal means on David Koresh and his followers)
- Defense Electronics, July 1993, page 17, author Mark Tapscott - DoD Intel Agencies Look at Russian Mind Control Technology, Claims FBI Considered testing on Koresh
- Wall Street Journal, January 4th 1993, pages A-1/4, author Thomas E. Ricks hosts a lengthy article exploring the future battlefield use of non-lethal weapon systems
Conclusion Quantum physics declares that the fundamental particles of matter are not matter. That sub-atomic particles can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Einstein believed that the speed of light set limits on how fast a material entity could travel. Now we learn that space-time is an illusion. Is everything the Field and a projection of the Field? Are we as much a part of the Field in death as in life? Yes, say some scientists. When you die, nothing of your spirit/energy in the Field dies. As the Alanis Morrisette song goes: "How about not equating death with stopping?"
Further reading Origins by Phillip Day (Take the Origins Tour....)
The Secret Life of Your Cells by Robert B Stone
References
1 Stone, Robert B, The Secret Life of Your Cells, op. cit. p.19
2 Ibid. p.18
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid. p.38
5 Ibid. pp.68-69
6 McTaggart, Lynne The Field, Element, 2003, p.16
7 Ibid. p.XXI - XXII
8 Hudson, Peter J Where Do We Go From Here? Mayfair Publishing, 1999, p.8
9 Crane, Dr Stuart The Montreal Conferences, 1976
10 Hudson, Peter J, Where Do We Go From Here? op. cit. p.18
11 Ibid. pp.125-126
12 McTaggart, Lynne, The Field, op. cit. p.29
13 Ibid. p.32
14 Sheldrake, Rupert The Presence of the Past, Inner Traditions Bear and Company, 2000, p.112
15 Schimmel, Joe, Rock and Roll Sorcerers, www.goodfight.org
16 Chapter 3, part 4: "Supreme Court Dissents Invoke the Nuremberg Code: CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals." Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report. Retrieved on 24th August 2005. "The CIA program, known principally by the codename MKULTRA, began in 1950"
17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron
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