Looking on the bright side

The thrust of our New Year’s issue this month is that the way to health is not a superhighway on which all of us can motor in the same direction, but a dirt road that we have to navigate to and tread along single-file. The incalculable contribution of William Wolcott, like William Kelley and Weston Price before him, was to determine that each of us is metabolically individual. Discovering our own biochemical fingerprint is one of the keys to good health.

But not, to my mind, the only – or even the major – one.

Besides this biochemical fingerprint, born of our unique genetic heritage, we also possess an energetic fingerprint. At the deepest undercoat of our being, we are not a chemistry set, but a packet of pulsating charges engaged in a constant energy tango with a vast quantum-energy field. My work on The Field and the continuing research for the Living The Field course convinces me that the most important nutrient of all are the thoughts we are thinking all the time.

Every month, I am confronted with yet more evidence – proven through theoretical quantum physics and a vast body of experimental research – that living intention is a powerful energy, an actual physical ‘something’ that shapes and influences the world around us.

The most astonishing implication of the new physics concerns the role of human intention – its ability to shape our world, and its central role in the nature of reality. Quantum theory suggests that reality is not fixed, but is fluid, or mutable – and, hence, open to influence – and that we are central to the entire process as influencers. Every thought we have is a tangible energy – an energy that can actually be measured as a surge of electrical voltage – that changes the molecular structure of the object of our intentions. Our thoughts – our hopes, desires and wishes – have an independent energy that transforms the nature of our world.

A growing body of data from research centres around the world shows that we, by our directed thoughts alone, can change the output of machines and influence living systems (J Sci Explor, 1997; 11: 345-67), heal others from a distance (Benor D. Healing Research: Holistic Energy Medicine and Spirituality, vols 1 and 2. Helix, 1992), transform our own bodies (Presentation at the Annual Society for Neuroscience Meeting, San Diego, 2001), affect the growth of plants (J Soc Psychical Res, 2002; 66: 129-43) and even change the physiology of our brain.

While these ideas may at first seem heretical, they simply reflect the radical new direction that science and medicine has begun to take. Psychiatrist Dr James S. Gordon, chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, recently commented, “We’re just beginning to think about how to apply some of the ways of looking at things that come out of the new physics, such as understanding the influence of the observer on the observed.”

What this says to me is that the most important medicine we have is our own internal ‘tapedeck’. Although we’re all fairly well versed in the power of positive thinking, most of what we think of as looking on the bright side, or sending out positive intentions in our morning prayer or meditation, is nothing more than a Band-Aid on the giant gaping wound of a day, or even a lifetime, of negativity.

It is vital that we examine exactly what is going on in our heads most of the time – the judgements we make on ourselves and on our fellow human beings – and resolve once and for all to change it to something positive and constructive.

The central health challenge we face is not only to uncover our biochemical identity, but also our own unique positive energy.

Lynne McTaggart