The Holographic Universe (28 page)

However, she does not
see the precise stratified layers described by other clairvoyants, and she
often doesn't even see the outline of the physical body. “A person's physical
body can come into it, but rarely because that's seeing the etheric body rather
than seeing the aura or the energy field around them. If I'm seeing the
etheric, it's usually because it contains leaks or rips that are keeping the
aura from being whole. Thus I cannot see it completely. There are only patches
of it. It's kind of like a ripped blanket or a torn curtain. Holes in the
etheric field are usually the result of trauma, injury, illness, or some other
kind of devastating experience.”

But beyond seeing the
etheric, Dryer says that instead of seeing the layers of the aura like tiers of
cake piled one on top of the other, she
experiences
them as changing
textures and intensities of visual sensation. She compares this to being
immersed in the ocean and feeling water of different temperatures wash by.
“Rather than getting into rigid concepts like layers, I tend to see the energy
field in terms of movements and waves of energy,” she says. “It's as if my
vision is telescoping through various levels and dimensions of the energy
field, but I don't actually see it neatly arranged in various layers.”

This does not mean that
Dryer's perception of the human energy field is in any way less detailed than
Brennan's. She perceives a dazzling amount of pattern and
structure—kaleidoscopic clouds of color shot through with light, complex
images, glistening shapes, and gossamer mists. However, not all energy fields
are created equal. According to Dryer, shallow people have shallow and humdrum
auras. Conversely, the more complex the person, the more complex and
interesting their energy field. “A person's energy field is as individual as
their fingerprint I've never really seen any two that look alike,” she says.

Like Brennan, Dryer can
diagnose illnesses by looking at a person's aura, and when she chooses she can
adjust her vision and see the chakras. But Dryer's special skill is the ability
to peer deep into a person's psyche and give them an eerily accurate status
report of the weaknesses, strengths, needs, and general health of their
emotional, psychological, and spiritual being. So profound are her talents in
this area that some have likened a session with Dryer to six months of psychotherapy.
Numerous clients have credited her with completely transforming their lives,
and her files are filled with glowing letters of thanks.

I, too, can attest to
Dryer's abilities. In my first reading with her, and although we were virtual
strangers, she proceeded to describe things about me that not even my closest
friends know. These were not just vague platitudes, but specific and detailed
assessments of my talents, vulnerabilities, and personality dynamics. By the
end of the two-hour session I was convinced that Dryer had not been looking at
my physical presence, but at the energy construct of my psyche itself. I have
also had the privilege of talking with and/or listening to the session
recordings of over two dozen of Dryer's clients, and have discovered that,
almost without exception, others have found her as accurate and insightful as
did I.

Doctors Who See
the Human Energy Field

Although the existence
of the human energy field is not recognized by the medical orthodox community,
it has not been completely ignored by medical practitioners. One medical
professional who takes the energy field seriously is neurologist and
psychiatrist Shafica Karagulla. Karagulla received her degree of doctor of
medicine and surgery from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and
obtained her training in psychiatry under the well-known psychiatrist Professor
Sir David K. Henderson, at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous
Disorders. She also spent three and a half years as a research associate to Wilder
Penfield, the Canadian neurosurgeon whose landmark studies of memory launched
both Lashley and Pribram on their quest.

Karagulla began as a
skeptic, but after encountering several individuals who could see auras, and
confirming their ability to make accurate medical diagnoses as a result of what
they saw, she became a believer. Karagulla calls the faculty to see the human
energy field
higher sense perception
, or HSP, and in the 1960s she set
out to determine if any members of the medical profession also possessed the
ability. She put out various feelers among her friends and colleagues, but at
first the going was slow. Even doctors who were said to have the ability were
reluctant to meet with her. After being put off repeatedly by one such doctor,
she finally made an appointment to see him as a patient.

She entered his office,
but instead of allowing him to perform a physical examination to diagnose her
condition, she challenged him to use his higher sense perception. Realizing he
was cornered, he gave in. “All right, stay where you are,” he told her. “Don't
tell me anything.” Then he scanned her body and gave her a quick run-down of
her health, including a description of an internal condition she had that would
eventually require surgery, a condition she had secretly already diagnosed. He
was “correct in every detail,” says Karagulla.

As Karagulla's network
of contacts expanded, she met doctor after doctor with similar gifts and
describes these encounters in her book
Breakthrough to Creativity.
Most
of these physicians were unaware that other individuals existed who possessed
similar talents, and felt they were alone and peculiar in this regard.
Nonetheless, they invariably described what they were seeing as an “energy
field” or a “moving web of frequency” around the body and interpenetrating the
body. Some saw chakras, but because they were ignorant of the term, they
described them as “vortices of energy at certain points along the spine,
connected with or influencing the endocrine system.” And almost without
exception they kept their abilities a secret out of fear of damaging their
professional reputations.

Out of respect for their
privacy, Karagulla identifies them in her book by first name only but says they
include famous surgeons, Cornell University professors of medicine, heads of
departments in large hospitals, and Mayo Clinic physicians. “I was continually
surprised to find how many members of the medical profession had HSP
abilities,” she writes. “Most of them felt a little uneasy about their gifts, but
finding them useful in diagnosis, they used them. They came from many parts of
the country, and although they were unknown to each other, they all reported
similar types of experiences.” At the end of her report, she concludes, “When
many reliable individuals independently report the same kind of phenomena, it
is time science takes cognizance of it.”

Not all health
professionals are so opposed to going public with their abilities. One such
individual is Dr. Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York
University. Krieger became interested in the human energy field after
participating in a study of the abilities of Oscar Bstebany, a well-known
Hungarian healer. After discovering that Estebany could raise the hemoglobin
levels in ill patients simply by manipulating their fields, Krieger set out to
learn more about the mysterious energies involved. She immersed herself in a
study of
prana
, the chakras, and the aura, and eventually became a
student of Dora Kunz, another well-known clairvoyant. Under Kunz's guidance,
she learned how to feel blockages in the human energy field and to heal by
manipulating the field with her hands.

Realizing the enormous
medical potential of Kunz's techniques, Krieger decided to teach what she had
learned to others. Because she knew terms such as
aura
and
chakra
would have negative connotations for many health-care professionals, she
decided to call her healing method “therapeutic touch.” The first class she
taught on therapeutic touch was a master's level course for nurses at New York
University entitled “Frontiers in Nursing: The Actualization of Potential for
Therapeutic Field Interaction.” Both the course and the technique proved so
successful that Krieger has since taught therapeutic touch to literally
thousands of nurses, and it is now used in hospitals around the world.

The effectiveness of
therapeutic touch has also been demonstrated in several studies. For example,
Dr. Janet Quinn, an associate professor and assistant director of nursing
research at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, decided to see if
therapeutic touch could lower the anxiety levels of heart patients. To
accomplish this she devised a double-blind study in which one group of nurses
trained in the technique would pass their hands over a group of heart patients’
bodies. A second group with no training would pass their hands over the bodies
of another group of heart patients, but without actually performing the
technique. Quinn found that the anxiety levels in the authentically treated
patients dropped 17 percent after only five minutes of therapy, but there was
no change in anxiety levels among the patients who received the “fake”
treatment Quinn's study was the lead story in the
Science Times
section
of the March 26, 1985, issue of the
New York Times.

Another health
professional who lectures widely about the human energy field is University of
Southern California heart and lung specialist W. Brugh Joy. Joy, who is a
graduate of both Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, discovered his gift .in
1972 while examining a patient in his office. Instead of seeing the aura, Joy
initially was only able to feel its presence with his hands. “I was examining a
healthy male in his early twenties,” he says. “As my hand passed over the solar
plexus area, the pit of the stomach, I sensed something that felt like a warm
cloud. It seemed to radiate out three to four feet from the body, perpendicular
to the surface and to be shaped like a cylinder about four inches in diameter.”

Joy went on to discover
that all his patients had palpable cylinderlike radiations emanating not only
from their stomachs, but from various other points on their bodies. It wasn't
until he read an ancient Hindu book about the human energy system that he found
he had discovered, or rather rediscovered, the chakras. Like Brennan, Joy
thinks the holographic model offers the best explanation for understanding the
human energy field. He also feels that the ability to see auras is latent in
all of us. “1 believe that reaching expanded states of consciousness is merely
the attuning of our central nervous system to perceptive states that have
always existed in us but have been blocked by our outer mental conditioning,”
says Joy.

To prove his point, Joy
now spends most of his time teaching others how to sense the human energy
field. One of Joy's students is Michael Crichton, the author of such
bestsellers as
The Andromeda Strain
and
Sphere
, and the director
of the motion pictures
Coma
and
The First Great Train Robbery.
In
his recent bestselling autobiography
Travels
, Crichton, who obtained his
medical degree from the Harvard University Medical School, describes how he
learned to feel and eventually see the human energy field by studying under
both Joy and other gifted teachers. The experience astonished and transformed
Crichton. “There isn't any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body
energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind,” he states.

Chaos
Holographic Patterns

The increasing
willingness of doctors to go public with such abilities is not the only change
that has taken place since Karagulla did her investigations. Over the past
twenty years Valerie Hunt, a physical therapist and professor of kinesiology at
UCLA, has developed a way to confirm experimentally the existence of the human
energy field. Medical science has long known that humans are electromagnetic
beings. Doctors routinely use electrocardiographs to make electrocardiograms
(EKGs) or records, of the electrical activity of the heart, and
electroencephalographs to make electroencephalograms (EEGs) of the brain's
electrical activity. Hunt has discovered that an electromyography a device used
to measure the electrical activity in the muscles, can also pick up the
electrical presence of the human energy field.

Although Hurt's original
research involved the study of human muscular movement, she became interested
in the energy field after encountering a dancer who said she used her own
energy field to help her dance. This inspired Hunt to make electromyograms
(EMGs) of the electrical activity in the woman's muscles while she danced, and
also to study the effect healers had on the electrical activity in the muscles
of people being healed. Her research eventually expanded to include individuals
who could see the human energy field, and it was here that she made some of her
most significant discoveries.

The normal frequency
range of the electrical activity in the brain is between 0 and 100 cycles per
second (cps), with most of the activity occurring between 0 and 30 cps. Muscle
frequency goes up to about 225 cps, and the heart goes up to about 250 cps, but
this is where electrical activity associated with biological function drops
off. In addition to these, Hunt discovered that the electrodes of the
electromyograph could pick up another field of energy radiating from the body,
much subtler and smaller in amplitude than the traditionally recognized body
electricities but with frequencies that averaged between 100 and 1600 cps, and
which sometimes went even higher. Moreover, instead of emanating from the brain,
heart, or muscles, the field was strongest in the areas of the body associated
with the chakras. “The results were so exciting that I simply was not able to
sleep that night,” says Hunt. “The scientific model I had subscribed to
throughout my life just couldn't explain these findings.”