Exploring the Human Energy System

Barbara Brennan is a former NASA scientist whose ground-breaking exploration of the human energy field is discussed in her books “Hands of Light” and “Light Emerging.”

DiCarlo: In your work you have explored the human energy field and I am wondering if you could tell me exactly what the energy field is?

Brennan: From a scientific perspective, nobody has really proven what it is so I can only talk from the perspective of a healer who works with it. I have a scientific background, but in fact there aren’t any adequate experiments to tell you what the field really is. So I am going to have to speak solely from my experience as a healer who is able to perceive the field. From this perspective, the human energy field is the matrix structure upon which the cells of the physical body grow. It is the template of the physical body.

It is also the vehicle for psychosomatic reactions, or the “mind-body” connection. The human energy field can be perceived by anyone with practice. It’s of vital importance since it is a foundation for the physical body. It is directly connected with health and illness. Based upon my experience as a healer conducting private sessions with clients spanning a fifteen year period, and as a teacher for as many, I can tell you that anything that happens in the physical body will happen in the pattern of the energy fields first.

So the energy field precedes the physical body. It sets the foundation for the physical body, and anything that goes wrong in the energy field will eventually make its way into the physical body.

DiCarlo: Is the field fairly stable or does it tend to shift?

Brennan: Actually, your field changes with each thought. Once you open your high sense perception as I call it, and can see the field (the major two senses I use are seeing and feeling but any of the inner coorespondences to the outer five senses can be used) you will be amazed at how it changes from moment-to-moment. It moves very, very fast.

The field has several different components and can be broken up into at least seven different layers. These seven layers are commonly reported in the esoteric literature and by people from different cultures around the world who have the ability to directly perceive it.

From my perspective, every other level of the energy field is structured- organized lines of scintillating light with a specific pattern. The structured layers can be perceived as a frequency band, with each layer having its own frequency. Little sparks of light can be observed moving along these lines.

In between the structured layers of the field is a bioplasma-like energy that simply flows along the lines of the structured field pattern. It’s the energy that flows along the lines of the structured field pattern that changes very fast with thoughts and emotions, not the structured pattern itself.

For example, if you stop yourself from feeling something, it will stop the flow of energy in the field. And if you experience the feeling, the energy will be released. There is a direct correlation. There are even correlations between the energy field and the part of the brain you are thinking with. As you change your thought patterns, the patterning of the field changes.

DiCarlo: So if you switched from being very analytical and left brained, to being very intuitive and right brained, there would a change?

Brennan: Yes, there would be definite flow patterns that change. For example, we mostly are trained from very early in our childhood to be rational. And traditionally, we go to school and we learn to think logically and we memorize information. And that shows in a particular field pattern or a generalized flow. And intuitive thinking is very different than that. Different parts of the brain are used and the flow and pattern of the field is different.

What’s really interesting is that it corresponds more or less to what a PET scan shows.

DiCarlo: Let’s try to make this rather abstract concept of an energy field permeating the physical body a bit more concrete. What are some of the common experiences people have that directly relate to activities which take place in the field?

Brennan: Knowing something before it happens, because it’s happening in the energy field first. Feeling that someone is looking or staring at you when your back is turned to them. You turn around, look and yes, someone is looking at you. You may not even know that’s why you turned to look. There are streams of energy that come out of the eye and you can feel it on your body.

Another example: the phone rings and before you answer it you already know who the person is and that they have good news. Also, feeling good when you wear specific cloths, even specific colors because they are related to the colors that your energy field needs that day. Interactions with animals- people can communicate with their pets and know what the animals are feeling. These are all energy field interactions.

DiCarlo: Now let’s say I have an affinity to someone I have never met before, or on the other hand there is someone I immediately dislike, is that phenomena related to activities taking place at the level of the human energy field?

Brennan: That’s directly related to the interactions of the field. Everybody’s field pulsates within a range of frequencies. If the range is about the same for two people, then they will usually have a lot of affinity with each other. If it’s not, it will make them nervous. If you have a higher general frequency tone to your field than someone else, you might feel drugged out. On the other hand, if somebody has a higher frequency than yours and that frequency is chaotic, it will make you nervous. There are many of those examples.

DiCarlo: I like the example you give of the man and woman who attend the same social function. Even though they might ignore and pretend to not notice each other, this is not the case since at the level of their fields there is a great deal of activity, cascades of energy moving back and forth which indicates a genuine interest and a testing of each others fields for compatibility.

Brennan: Right. That happens a lot. All of the beginning stages of courtship can be seen quite clearly in the field.

DiCarlo: If you read all the self-help literature that is available, it would seem that we could all benefit from learning to forgive ourselves and others. That certainly seems like the right thing to do in life but I’m wondering, from a more concrete perspective, what happens in our energy field when we do this?

Brennan: When you forgive yourself, there are some wonderful things that happen. There is a certain tension and stagnated energy that is held in the field whenever there is anything that you won’t accept within yourself. It’s kind of like a mucous that you get when you have a cold. So you actually create distortions in your own energy pattern that have to do with unforgivingness towards your self. These distortions will eventually lead to illness. When you forgive yourself, you are actually unblocking the flow of energy in your field so that it can flush itself out. It allows for the resumption of the normal life flow.

Life is associated with constant movement in the personal energy field, so any attitude of non-forgiveness within the self will create blockage. When you have an non-forgiving attitude towards an individual, there will be a definite pattern in your field. The outer edge of your field will become rigid and brittle when interacting with that person. There will be additional ways that you will not let your life energy flow out towards that person.

There are great bands of energy or bio-plasmic streamers that normally flow between people when they interact. If you have an unforgiving attitude towards another person, that won’t happen. So there’s not an exchange of life energy that normally goes on between all living things and it’s not just human beings. There’s a flow between humans and animals. Humans and plants.

But if there is a sense of unforgiveness, all that will be stopped. There will be the same type of stoppage in the other individual also. It’s usually a two way street.

DiCarlo: Would that be the same phenomena you would observe if someone was judging another person?

Brennan: That would be a little bit different. All of these different attitudes and mental states would result in a little bit different flow. Usually judgement has to do with an energy flow running up the back of the body and sometimes hooking over and a rigid withdrawing back. Also, energy running up the front of the body and kind of “hooking over” towards the other person.

If you look at the energy field, there are three major aspects: reason, will and emotion that are associated with psychological phenomena. When you judge another, you stop the flow of your emotions towards that person which would be on the front of the body, and you would be pushing your energy to the back of the body, into the will, and then running it up into the mind. So you “will not” accept this person, and then the energy moves up your body to the head region and you rationalize it in the mental sensors.

DiCarlo: What if someone is experiencing love?

Brennan: With love, especially when both people are feeling love towards each other, there is a tremendous flow of energy between the two. But you don’t even have to have two people. When a person allows love into their field, the field becomes very soft, very flowing, resilient. The whole field blows up sort of like a balloon. It becomes very energized and the energy flows out of the field in a very healthy way.

All fields have different kinds of boundaries, so the boundary of someone who has a lot of love or is feeling love toward a particular person, will be soft and more resilient. As a result they can interact with another human being in a much easier way.

DiCarlo: Well, how would that compare with a person who was experiencing gratitude in their life?

Brennan: To feel grateful is one of the most important experiences we need as humans. When we feel it, there is an acceptance of everything in our life and a surrender to basic values in life. We can see the positive in everything and also feel thankful for it. That’s essential, because it allows a connection to take place between the personality self and the deeper regions of the human being, the core essence or the divinity within.

The intense energy from the core essence then radiates out. It’s as if a corridor opens from the core essence of an individual, an the energy is able to flow out and into the entire world. Also, the connection from the personality to the spiritual or divinity within is open and made more solid. The feeling of gratitude is an essential experience we all need.

Gratitude also puts the individual in synchronicity with the universal energy field that connects all of life, the flow of the life force, or the morphonogenic fields of the whole planet and the solar system. That is also very important because it puts you in sync with your life. When you can flow in that way and find that place in life then the entire universe becomes very supportive. Gratitude is essential.

DiCarlo: So when you have the experience of being in sync, in the universal flow, do more positive events, circumstances and people come into your life experience?

Brennan: Yes, because you will allow them. You won’t be stopping them. This is the opposite of judgement, which stops the flow of energy. You don’t let anything in and you don’t let anything out- or what you do let out isn’t so nice.

DiCarlo: Do you find the environment effects the human energy field, take for example fluorescent lighting?

Brennan: Yes. The environment effects the field very much and there are several chapters in Light Emerging about that. I can’t work under fluorescent lights.

I have spoken with Dr. Brainard, a professor at Thomas Jefferson Medical Center in Philadelphia who’s been studying the effectiveness of fluorescent lights in reducing “Seasonal Affective Disorder” (SAD). He has helped develop a very high frequency (40 kilowatt) pulsing flourescent light with x-ray shield. It as well as halogen work well for SAD without disturbing the field as much as normal flourescent lighting. Full spectrum flourescent lights also need to be converted to a higher frequency and have x-ray shields.

There are several things that happen with fluorescent lights. The pulse of the fluorescent beats against the human energy field. It’s like two fields beating against each other, which I realize sounds terrible.

Flourescent lights also emit x-rays. So it really disrupts the human energy field, and in my book there is a case study about a female client who came in for a healing session. The woman had been working on a computer under fluorescent lighting for about six months for 12 hours a day. She got very, very ill. She was in her twenties, and she was able to take the skin under her arm and stretch it out four inches. The first layer of her energy field was breaking down. After she quit her job she got well right away.

DiCarlo: Are there any common misconceptions about the human energy field that you commonly encounter?

Brennan: Yes. People think it’s layered like an onion and it’s not. It has levels that extend all the way through, or frequency bands-that’s the best analogy I can use.

Anybody looking at it with High Sense Perception will see the same thing if they are looking at the same structure. Many people seem to think they will see different things in the field, that what is perceived is determined by who does the perceiving. I don’t think that is true.

The field changes very fast and some people don’t understand that. Also, it’s much more complicated than what people think. A lot of people will come up to me and say, “What color is my aura?” Well, the human energy field is comprised of all the colors there are, so some people might think they have, let’s say, a “blue aura” and that means something. A person might have a lot of blue in the aura and that could mean a lot of different things. So it’s not really simple.

The study of the human energy field is as complicated as the study of the anatomy and physiology of the physical body. There is a subtle anatomy and physiology in the human energy field.

DiCarlo: I have gotten into discussions with scientific researchers and doctors about the very term “energy” and as you know, that is the subject of a big debate. If these are fields are comprised of energy, this energy doesn’t seem to behave in the way physicists have come to understand energy behaving-it seems to violate some of the rules of physics.

Brennan: Yes. I am using it rather sloppily here….I think that as we learn more about basic physics, all of these issues will be resolved. I am using the word “energy field” because it is more meaningful to most people than talking about holograms or something more difficult. From my perspective, there are energy fields. An energy field is the matrix or mold for the physical body. But it’s that and much more than that. Take the phenomena of prayer for example. I can relate prayer to what happens in an individual’s energy field and it’s clearly something beyond that. Certainly life goes beyond the limited definitions of an energy field.

I know this from my own work with the deeper levels of the human energy field, where the healing methods are totally different. It is not like running energy or projecting energy into the field of another individual. It is more like healing with intentionality and there are very specific steps to that.

So in one sense we do in fact heal with bioplasmic streamers and certainly bioplasma has been measured. There are fields and there are field structures. And the deeper nature of the human being is much more than that. It goes much beyond that. I find the idea of a structured energy field to be very, very useful. When people learn to see it and we teach people how to do that all the time, it becomes extremely useful. And yet there are many things that happen that are beyond that concept.

I don’t tend to argue with people. I tend to find the bridges between somebody else’s interpretation of reality and my own. They are all limited ideas actually.

DiCarlo: You have said that the major cause of illness stems from how we habitually imbalance our fields, thereby making it weak and ourselves susceptible to physical illness. Why do we do this?

Brennan: Our fields become imbalanced because we all have certain belief systems that we grew up with and a whole string of childhood traumas. When you put both the traumas and belief systems-which most of the time are unconscious and actually based on traumas inflicted during childhood-together you create a picture of the world -a world view- which is not in keeping with what the world really is.

In childhood, you try not to feel any traumas experienced in order to survive and the way that you succeed in not feeling these traumas is to block the flow of energy. They then become stuck in your field. So we create a way to hold these”blobs” shall we say, of consciousness and energy so that we might never have to experience them.

This is strictly an automatic system that happens in everybody and in order to do that we have to distort the healthy field pattern. Once we’ve done that several times, once we’ve found an effective way not to feel terror let’s say, as a child, we will continue to do that and eventually that will become a habitual pattern in the human energy field. The field will become imbalanced in order not to feel terror, fear or anger.

Then we act as if the world is terrorizing and a belief is formed. We approach the world from the perspective of terror. Because we see it that way, we eventually draw to us more experiences that make us believe in terror even more. But fortunately what happens is at some point things get so bad the individual cannot tolerate living that way anymore and sets out upon a path of personal change and healing.

That’s actually what’s happening to many, many people in this country now. Especially people in mid-life crises. The school that I have is filled with people in their late 30s and 40s. These people are saying in effect, “This isn’t what I wanted in my life.”

DiCarlo: So they are searching for the deeper causes of their unfulfilled life experience?

Brennan: Right. And it’s about finding out what they really want. Usually it’s the situation where you want something in your life and you just can’t get it. No matter what you do you can’t seem to create it and you know something is wrong. Actually, that is the negative carrot that turns us around. It’s really a “fail-safe” system. If you are not getting what you really wanted to create, then what you are going to do is to create pain. That pain then will motivate you to change.

DiCarlo: In speaking about creation, it seems that the battle cry of the New Age is that “you create your own reality”. Would you agree or disagree? Could you tell me how the creative process works?

Brennan: The statement is a limited one and I have said it many times. From the broader spiritual perspective we are all connected. We are connected in concentric spheres, so that those who are closer around us are more involved in the creation of our personal reality with us than those who are outside of that sphere. You can just expand that out concentrically. Our creations come from our individuals selves, and also the inner sphere of people around us, and then the next sphere, so we not only create as individuals, we create as groups, as communities, as nations, and as the whole of humanity.

I think it’s really important to understand how this works in illness. Let’s say someone creates AIDS or cancer. It isn’t an individual doing that. It is the whole of humanity. As a group we are creating the three major health problems of heart disease, cancer and AIDS. From that perspective, yes we create our own reality. But it’s not because we are bad, and we are not the only one’s involved in this creation because we are all connected.

From that perspective, you can then go to an individual level and see how each individual is distorting their energy field, which again, is the basic matrix structure for the physical body. This would thus make the physical body weak, allowing a microorganism to invade and cause illness. Any of those major illness, like heart disease will have certain and specific configurations or patterns of energy in the human energy field that are not healthy.

DiCarlo: If somebody holds a creative intention, what would be happening on an energetic level? How would that move down through the various dimensional levels of the human energy field and and eventually result in a physical manifestation?

Brennan: That’s a really good question because the intentionality emerges from a deeper level of the human energy field. By aligning with a positive intention, you can shift your auric field immediately-the whole field can shift. The more you work to clarify that intentionality, for whatever it may be, for health, etc.., and hold that, the stronger your field will become. It is a more advanced healing technique.

The beginning techniques of centering, grounding and opening the energy centers are usually necessary for the person to go through so they can actually learn to hold intent. One can be an expert at holding intent, or one can sort of fantasize and think they are holding a particular intent.

So intentionality is actually a learned process that directly affects the human energy field and therefore effects health very strongly. I have seen people turn around in one healing session.

For example, there was a woman who was going blind in both eyes from detached retinas. An operation was advised, which may have worked, but which might also have blinded her so instead, we began working on her. I did one healing in which I did a lot of restructuring of the field and then worked with her intentionality. In the one eye she immediately went back to 20/20 vision. The other eye was much worse. She had 20/70 vision and was almost blind but after a series of healings over a one year period that eye improved to 20/30. But the one eye became normal in one healing and that kind of result is amazing.

In another case, a young girl had curvature of the spine and her spine was corrected by 15 degrees in one three minute healing. So things can happen quite rapidly although those are unusual examples. I am telling you the best cases.

DiCarlo: Can the type of energetic healing you do result in “miracle cures?” for those considered terminally ill?

Brennan: It can, though it’s actually quite unusual. A miracle cure isn’t really a miracle-it’s simply speeding up what the body can naturally do. The body is a self-healing organism, so it’s really about clearing things out of the way so the body can heal itself.

I have never seen a healer do anything the body can’t do. But the body needs a lot of support. For an individual to heal a terminally ill condition, a lot of work is involved-work on the energy field itself, psychological work, better diet, etc..etc…

When I was working and had a practice, I would always work in conjunction with physicians, therapists and nutritionists. All of this is very important. So I don’t see any separation between conventional medicine and healing. Everything is a miracle.

Excerpted from the book Towards A New World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge with Russell E. DiCarlo. The 377-page book features new and inspiring interviews with 27 paradigm pioneers in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, business, religion, science, education and human potential. Featuring: Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, Joan Boysenko, George Leonard, Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe, Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Senge, Jacquelyn Small, Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof, Rich Tarnas, Marilyn Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar, Dr. Raymond Moody, Stephen Covey and Peter Russell.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who’s focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled “The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine” (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.