Week 11

Acupuncture as Effective Energy Medicine

Acupuncture is effective energy medicine because it works directly on Qi (roughly translated as energy) to get it properly flowing again. When energy is trapped, it creates blockages in the Qi mechanism and often in the Liver, which is responsible for coursing Qi all over the body. Trapped energy from negative emotions can cause organ damage to any number of organs, especially the liver and heart. The nice thing about acupuncture is that it not only removes Qi blockages, boosts Qi vacuity and Blood- but by needling acupuncture points, the corresponding organ traced to this meridian also discharges the negative emotion held by this organ. Negative emotion is stuck energy, which acupuncture can help clear through the appropriate placing of the needle, no psycho-therapy required.

Human Intent as it Affects Health

I have mixed feelings about how strongly intent effects health, particularly because I’ve experienced strange healing miracles without trying, and then spent years trying to get my health back in order with super strong intentions and very slow results. I think that certain illnesses are there to teach us certain lessons, and until we learn those lessons, we won’t fully get better, no matter how hard we intend to heal our bodies. Healing our bodies sometimes means learning different ways of emotionally relating to ourselves and others. I have found that to be the case in trying to heal Poly-cystic Ovarian Disorder and uterine fibroids. Breaking up is hard to do- especially when you get an ovarian cyst every time you do it.

In the Vajrayana Buddhist center in Tucson, I layed on a crystal healing table with gold-plates spinning behind quartz surrounding me and sugilite on my 3^rd eye (which is supposed to provide insight into the cause of disease) and was told by spirit that the murder of my father caused the pattern with men that gave me P.C.O.S. The gift or lesson of P.C.O.S has been an intense re-wiring of my relationship scripts in which I am friends with lovers first and foremost, and we can get through any difficulty and still be friends because I am not self-destroying in the name of “love.” My body cannot afford any more romantic tragedies, and so I am learning different ways to relate to the opposite sex and getting weekly acupuncture to try and heal my body with physical/energy medicine as well as doing the necessary emotional work to heal. If I did not have a physical illness with which to grapple, I might have never dealt with my romantic tragedy tendencies to give over my power and try to save men.

Life & Living Systems

How do I know I am a living system?

This is a funny question to me, because I was once upon a time married to another Scorpio gothic magician, and one of our favorite things to say was, “Our love is dead already. We’re dead already,” in some pre-homage to the inevitable End. Since the End is Inevitable (in our lives, our love, or both), we celebrated our dead-ness atemporally! We found ourselves in a kind of liberative artistic bardo where “being” became more important than “doing.” The dead don’t have to do anything at all, and yet, in this state non-doing, everything necessary is done.

If physical matter is an illusion like the Buddhists say, and there exists more space between sub-atomic particles than matter, perhaps much more of what we see in this physical world is an illusion and we- unlike Schroedinger’s cat- are both alive and dead in the poetic dimension, biophysical functions aside. But is exactly our biophysical functions that let us know we’re alive!

Living people have so many requirements for what we must do to survive in the world, not to mention the social constrictions manipulated upon us by the expectation of the “Other,” debunkt authority, close-minded and loud-mouthed rednecks, and all the mundane practical activities to sustain a complex bio-physical human body miracle, etc. To be dead already is to have surrendered to ego-death before you die, and then you really realize that you are not your body, and other peoples’ opinions of you matter way less than your ability to own that moment in a small fraction of space and time that you will never see again. You are at peace with the constant change that is the death of every moment and every expectation of a predictable future.

Ego-death spiritual diatribes aside, unless I am naïve to the non-existent eating habits of certain exotic insects that live off air and fucking, I know I am a living being because I require a constant input of food to create energy to function. Corpses have the luxury of not needing 3 meals a day. I sometimes feel eating is such a waste of precious time I could be devoting to less mundane and more existentionally delicious matters.

But I digress, other laymen and scientists might say we know we are living systems because we move, have a carbon-based molecular chemical composition, are capable of reproducing. Sometimes when I menstruate, I feel like I am living and dying all at the same time.

Biophysics and Oriental Medicine

According to Wikipedia, “Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that uses the methods of physical science to study biological systems.” That is exactly what acupuncture is based upon: methods of physical science to study biological systems, with the addition of some mystical wisdom of sages who surmise the biological basis of your dreams. For instance, “When the heart is weak, one dreams of fires. If the dream takes place in summertime, one dreams of volcanic eruptions.” This is one of the mystical/psychological- even Jungian- sides of Oriental medicine that is not based on biophysics.

Most importantly, Chinese medicine looks at the physiological functions and interrelations between organs, meridians, points, etc., to gain a holistic view at how we biologically function. Research has been conducted as to the physical properties of points and channels and the cellular effects of acupuncture in an article called, “The Biophysics of Acupuncture: Emerging Patterns From Selected Studies.”

1. Richard F. Hobbs III. Medical Acupuncture. December 2009, 21(4): 251-256. doi:10.1089/acu.2009.0710.

A New Synthesis

My E-Prime Day

I remember feeling like I woke up from a dream, and then experienced myself biting an apple, first thing in the morning, enjoying what tasted like delicious crunchy sweetness. I then remember calling my best girlfriend on the phone. After communicating with Tracy, I stretched out into various yoga positions and performed what felt to be a powerful self-healing on my ovaries and uterus. I felt myself lie down and vocalize various Buddhist and Hindu mantras. I experienced stuffing myself with cereal and almond milk, putting on clothes, and going shopping for pillows and clothes at Thrift Town. By the time I got home, the sun appeared to be gone. I walked to the Chinese restaurant in seemingly close proximity to my house, then walked home and studied the rest of the night before falling asleep.

Can I synthesize East and West?

There are many findings from Quantum Physics that confirm Eastern mystical wisdom. Quantum physics confirms this ancient Buddhist gem of wisdom: “Everything is empty.” If you look at an atom, you can see that most of the atom is composed of empty space. The portion of space occupied by actual sub-atomic particles is actually very small. If you were able to bunch up all of these sub-atomic into one space- somehow getting rid of all the empty space- you could fit all the sub-atomic matter that composes the human body onto the head of a pin.

After studying years of body-mind and mystical practices such as yoga, chi gong, and meditation, many practitioners developed what are called “siddhis.” Siddhis are a fancy way of saying “metaphysical superpowers.” Some practitioners are able to perform telekinesis- moving things with their minds. Knowing that the observed changes according to the expectation of the observer and knowing that most of all matter is space, it seems natural that matter would accordingly adjust themselves to our thoughts. Since matter is also composed of so little actual physical material, it seems like something like thought could easily influence space that most matter is made of and that the physical matter would be an easy shoe along. If one can merely suspend their belief system of a world of concrete and material reality not directly influenced by thought, then we might see physical matter defying laws of so-called reality.

Classical Physics

Newton’s Three Laws and Me

The 1^st Law states: “Objects at rest remain at rest, and objects in motion remain in motion in a straight line at constant velocity. A force must be applied to change the state of motion of an object.” I can only reminisce on the times I’ve done Sufi spinning only to have a very hard time slowing myself down to a stop once I’ve spun for awhile. I become a high-velocity tranced out time traveller in my imagination, and it would take the force akin to a MAC truck to slow me down, ie, “change the state of motion of an object.”

The 2^nd Law states: “The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to its mass.” Now I reminisce on my daily bike rides and the force my legs exert on the pedals, which is directly proportional to the acceleration of my bike. I had a heavier bike before- and due to acceleration being inversely proportional to its mass- the heavier bike was harder to get started on a hill than my lighter bike.

The 3^rd Law states: “If two objects interact, say in a collision, the force exerted by object 1 on object 2 is matched by a force exerted by object 2 on object 1 of the same size, but in the opposite direction.” If two pool balls hit each other, clearly one goes in one direction and the other goes in the opposite direction.

Our Energy Efficient Culture

Our culture is obviously not energy efficient, or else we would have more sustainable permaculture communities that use energy more wisely. If we were more energy efficient, we would use solar panels; the sun is the most constant source of free energy that is not a wasteful form of energy. As it is, our culture depends on things like combustion and the burning of fossil fuels, all of which take a lot of energy. Because energy can neither be created nor destroyed- the energy of the fuel getting burned changes forms into smoke and pollution, which then go into our atmosphere to wreak even more energetic havoc on all sorts of levels. In the process of burning fossil fuels and changing it to a less concentrated form, there is energy that is lost in the process. The energy that is lost in the process turns into heat. It is no surprise then, that well into the Industrial Age, we have seen the rise of Global Warming.

Descartes has a lot to answer for!

Cartesian dualism has blinded us in so many ways: psychologically, scientifically, spiritually, environmentally, and existentially. It would be a very sad world if indeed “We though therefore we Are,” meaning- the brain was the source of consciousness emanating reality without some Greater Mind or Guiding Spirit not separate from us- helping to co-create reality w/o our conscious knowledge. A world ruled by a Cartesian mechanistic system of looking at reality cut us off from our inner knowing and feelings of interconnectedness with each other. In a world in which we live under the illusion of separation, we hold ourselves less accountable for the negative effects we have on other people. We are not just a product of our physiological underpinnings, but complex multi-dimensional creatures influenced by a Universe that is alive and teeming with consciousness in every part. We are not just the sum of our parts, but a holistic whole with certain non-deterministic, non-mechanistic tendencies towards chaos that clearly show us an unpredictable model of human behavior that does not conceed to a clear-cut cause-and-effect cookie cutter formula. Perhaps the most catastrophic effect of Cartesian dualism is the West’s obsession with controlling nature and the notion that we are separate from nature, which has led to mass ecological disaster. One of the most extreme examples of this from recent history was the British Petroleum oil spill and the government’s attempt to hide the oil by dumping massive amounts of corexit, which is a toxic chemical that I believe had devastating affects on the ocean’s ecology. In the year that followed the oil spill, there were reports from all over the world about mass populations of fish, birds, and octopus dying all over the planet. Clearly- we are not separate from nature, neither is anything is nature separated from any other part of nature. Harm to one part of the ecosystem will spread out like a Doppler Effect of fractaled chaos spun sorely towards entropy, and worse, nihilism and death.

Chaos Theory

Ordered Chaos- does this sound familiar?

Autopoiesis and entropy dynamically balance each other, lending more credence towards the self-regulation of ordered chaos. Entropy spontaneously creates disorder out of ordered contexts, and autopoiesis does the opposite by spontaneously creating order from a disordered context. These two work in harmony, preventing systems from becoming static or too chaotic and relationally incompetent.

Because everything is interconnected, we would expect that chaos in one part of the system would affect another part of the system. There is a kind of complex order and probability to the patterns of chaos that emerge along the arrow of time as variables shift and affect the whole system. However, a chaotic system- is by definition- unpredictable and especially so if one tries to determine probable outcomes too far in the future. Whatever micro changes that happen to the system will most definitely affect the macrosystem, since micro and macro are inseparable.

Fractals as Patterns of Complex Systems

Fractals are very different from the solid Platonic shapes envisioned by the Greeks, ie, triangles, squares, and pyramids. When examining the details of a fractal, any particular detail of the fractal can be magnified to show yet more detail. Some fractals are self-similar in that a particular shape is repeated under greater and greater magnification. Nature has exhibited fractals in a number of natural phenomena. The human lungs, brain, and circulatory system- including the pattern of a heartbeat- all exhibit a fractal nature. Clouds, coastlines, river deltas, weather patterns, cracks in metals, electronic noise in a receiver, insterstellar dust, gusts of wind, tree branches, broccoli, and even the stock market exhibit fractal patterns.

Consciousness out of Chaos

Because consciousness helps shape physical reality down to the way sub-atomic particles behave- such changes will ultimately cause mutations to physical reality on the macro scale since micro and macro are interconnected. By affecting physical reality on a microcosmic level with our consciousness, we therefore affect physical reality of the macrocosm.

Connectionist models of thinking, based on Neural Networks in the brain- often display chaotic modes of behavior. Their Attractors are often Strange Attractors, which has led some theorists to suggest that concentration, decision-making, and commonly recognizable patterns or states of human behavior (such as personality types) may result from brain chaos. There has also been suggestions that Jungian archetypes may be strange attractors.

Online Physics Fun
The first experiment I tried was a bust, and I wound up with saliva all over my computer screen, trying to see the different colors through the drool on the magenta box. I then checked out a version of the American flag where the blue part with white stars was instead yellow with black stars; the red stripes were turquoise, and the white stripes were black. It was quite interesting to stare at the flag for a minute and then look at a white part of the computer screen to see the normal American flag in all its traditional colors, albeit a quick after-image that quickly faded from my mind's eye.