Breathing with the Earth
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present hum of electromagnetic information from other creatures may
have become an intolerable burden. Think how confused you would feel
if you could simultaneously hear what everyone else in the world was
thinking. After all, mediums, sorcerers, and psi experimenters all agree
that some sort of trance or mental quietude—a reduction of nerve im-
pulse activity—is needed for best results. According to Elmer Green,
yogis of some Tibetan traditions teach clairvoyance to novices by having
them meditate seated on a glass plate, facing north toward a sheet of
polished copper in a dark, windowless room, with a bar magnet sus-
pended over their heads, its north pole pointing up to the zenith.
The biofield also lends itself to theories of psychokinesis and object
imprinting. All matter, living and nonliving, is ultimately an elec-
tromagnetic phenomenon. The material world, at least as far as physics
has penetrated, is an atomic structure held together by electromagnetic
forces. If some people can detect fields from other organisms, why
shouldn't some people be able to affect other beings by means of their
linked fields? Since the cellular functions of our bodies are controlled by
our own DC fields, there's reason to believe that gifted healers generate
supportive electromagnetic effects, which they convey to their patients
or manipulate to change the sufferer's internal currents directly, without
limiting themselves to the placebo effect of trust and hope.
Once we admit the idea of this kind of influence, then the same
kind of willed action of biofields on the electromagnetic structure of
inanimate matter becomes a possibility. This encompasses all forms of
psychokinesis, from metal-bending experiments in which trickery has
been excluded to more rigidly controlled tests with interferometers,
strain gauges, and random number generators. At present, it's the only
hypothesis that offers much hope of testability. On a less spectacular
level, we must ask whether the biofield can project the individual sig-
nature of a person's thoughts onto his or her surroundings, changing the
electromagnetic characteristics of these objects so that the person can be
sensed by others even though absent. This may well be the commonest
of all paranormal experiences, and the number of crimes solved by psy-
chics reacting to the mere scene of the crime should entitle scientists to
investigate the idea without fear of ridicule from their colleagues.
Over and over again biology has found that the whole is more than
the sum of its parts. We should expect that the same is true of bio-
electromagnetic fields. All life on earth can be considered a unit, a glaze
of sentience spread thinly over the crust. In toto, its field would be a
hollow, invisible sphere inscribed with a tracery of all the thoughts and
emotions
of
all creatures. The Jesuit priest and
paleontologist-phi-