Dossier, Volume 14 #2: A Spiritual Sampler

Energy Field Around the Human Body

In the recent movie Mesmer, Alan Rickman, as the eighteenth-century psychic, erotically and ecstatically strokes his patients' bodies back to health. The historical Franz Anton Mesmer claimed that the human body was magnetically charged and that an unbalanced charge resulting from illness or madness could be rectified through hands-on healing. Mesmer was also, of course, famous for his hypnotic skills and hence contributed the term mesmerism to our vocabulary. The film is framed by the charismatic healer's appearance before the Académie Royale in Paris, where he was asked to argue the scientific basis of his work and was ultimately dismissed as a charlatan. Viewers are left to decide for themselves.

The aura, the term most commonly used today to describe what Mesmer considered a magnetic substance, is still dismissed by much of our western scientific establishment. And its widespread popularity among New Age devotees has only confirmed the skeptics' suspicions. Observations of the phenomenon, however, are neither new nor entirely restricted to the fringes of established society.

From Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE to Valerie Hunt in the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers, scientists, "psychics" and laypeople have observed, puzzled over and tried to make sense of some kind of emanation from or substance around the body. A number of scientists have tried to measure the emanations they observed. In Britain, Walter J. Kilner used coloured screens and filters to reveal a slightly glowing oval "mist" around his patients' bodies. The psychiatrist George De La Warr diagnosed his patients with a radionics instrument he developed to detect radiation from living tissues.

In the second half of the twentieth century, scientists working in this domain have returned to Mesmer's explanation of the aura as a magnetic or energy field. Since the seventies, Dr. Valerie Hunt at UCLA has electronically measured the frequency and location of what she calls the biofield on human subjects. And in Japan, Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama has measured the aura with light-sensitive devices.

Two American scientists, in particular, have argued not only that they can see and feel auras but that, like Mesmer, they can heal diseases by manipulating these auras. John Pierrakos, a psychiatrist, and Barbara Brennan, a former NASA research scientist, have worked both together and individually and published their findings in a number of books.[FN 1]

They draw on both western science and eastern traditions. In the West, they refer to twentieth-century physics, especially the equivalence of matter and energy in Einstein's theory of relativity. Among eastern traditions, they refer to the Chinese notion of Ch'i or universal energy; the tradition of acupuncture, which sees the body as made up of energy lines; and the Hindu notion of chakras (Sanskrit for wheels), which they describe as concentrated points of energy in the body.

Brennan and Pierrakos argue that the human energy field, as they call the aura, is composed of pulsatory rhythms that vary in speed. These pulsations are faster at the outer rim of the field than they are next to the physical body, which is what enables the human energy field to draw "nourishment" from the universal energy field (the Chinese Ch'i permeating all individual human energy fields) into the body's organism. In their understanding of the aura, it both permeates the solid body and extends beyond it: "The material and the nonmaterial functions differ in vibratory frequency, not in substance."[FN 2]

According to Pierrakos and Brennan, our aura or human energy field is what keeps us alive and healthy. They claim that disease results from blocks created in the flow of energy (whether the result of external factors such as a polluted environment or emotional factors such as the physical impact of fear or anger). Blocks sustained over long periods of time can become pathological and even life-threatening.

For these two scientists, the human energy field explains how we can be so sensitive to other people's positive or negative "vibes," how a mother sometimes knows intuitively when something has happened to her child, or even how healing can take place through human touch. Brennan and Pierrakos also claim we can all learn to see and feel auras, not to mention heal ourselves and others by these means.

Pierrakos quotes the Gospel story in which a woman who had been hemorrhaging internally for twelve years was suddenly cured when she touched the fringe of Jesus' cloak as he was walking through a crowd. "Somebody touched me," Jesus said. "I felt that power had gone out from me" (Lk 8:47). Pierrakos writes, "The orthodox Christian belief is that all such Biblical acts of healing were strictly of supernatural origin. But many contemporary healers maintain that the sacred act summons the natural healing energy in the body and in nature, as Christ did. They claim that Christ and the apostles exercised an art open to all persons who are capable of tapping these energies."[FN 3]

Pierrakos and Brennan express no desire to belittle the divinity of Christ. Although they claim no strict affiliation with any existing religious tradition, they do express respect for these traditions. Indeed, both understand the human body to be as much a spiritual as a physical being, a view that has instantly categorized them in the eyes of many traditional scientists as superstitious "New Age" psychics.

Like others of the New Age movement, they reject a purely rational and material worldview and use religious imagery to describe what they are about. Echoes of the description of Love's source in chapter 4 of the first letter of John reverberate in the epigraph to Brennan's book Hands of Light: "Love is the face and body of the Universe. It is the connective tissue of the universe, the stuff of which we are made. Love is the experience of being whole and connected to Universal Divinity."

Unlike many in the New Age movement, however, Brennan strongly advocates working with the western medical profession, whose diagnostic skills (if not existing treatments) she sees as highly sophisticated. She and Pierrakos also depart from the New Age mainstream in expressing the desire for further scientific research into what they do to substantiate their insights.

They claim their findings will be commonplace in the world of the future. The research they advocate may very well support this claim.