Mushroom soup

Coaches and therapists of multiple descriptions are popping up all over the place like mushrooms in the dark! Life coaches, executive life coaches, coaching neuroscientists, energizers, shamans – the list is exhaustive. And all are making claims of enhancing your wellness, banishing all traces of your unfortunate nature-nurture beginnings and bringing you to a place of gratification and bliss for evermore. And to really add spice to this crazy mixed up soup is the fact that many are using terminology conveniently borrowed from the sciences. And so for example there are claims that your pituitary gland can be massaged (somewhere near your big toe, by the reflexologists) and that you have a brain in your heart and in your guts which you can fall back on if the one between your ears is damaged beyond repair. And then there are the vitamins and supplements which have been shown to have no beneficial effect if you are consuming an average Western diet. In fact, big studies have revealed a slightly higher incidence of lung cancer among those using mega-vitamin supplements. And those joint-enhancing supplements .... they’ve been shown to include shark cartilage which is toxic due to high levels of mercury salts!

Aggravating this mob rule is the fact that very few of the modalities have been validated. The basic requirement for any claimed modality of intervention is to be able to describe the modality in some rational way and then provide evidence of success in an experimental group compared to a control group over a period of five years. The best that we’re getting from this space is individual anecdotal descriptions. And so the soup darkens with misinformation, disinformation and sadly, some real fake news. Not that the medical fraternity are angels. We’re sitting with big pharma pushing drugs with doubtful significance and applications. In addition we have an increasing retraction rate of articles published in peer-reviewed journals because of questionable data. And finally, only 40% of articles published in reputable psychology journals were reproducible.

Which all raises the question of what is authentic? The conventional bio-medical model is too narrow and conveniently discredits anything lying outside of the ‘acceptable’ zone while the alternative/complementary coaches/therapist domain fluffs out into some undefined and undefinable ether zone. And so to contribute some clarity to this state of affairs, I offer a model which perhaps could lend itself to creating a working context, one that can be built on by others of all denominations, provided that contributors respect the requirements for validation of their methods - by providing case studies over time and applying a process of logical reasoning to explain the rationale of the modality and its effectiveness.

The best way to develop a comprehensive model is from the bottom, up. In this way it has firm legs to hold up the universe! At the bottom are the basic sciences and the bio-medical model – physics, chemistry, cells, tissues and organs together with systems that co-ordinate the structure and function of the whole organism. At the next level up, we introduce the concept of psychoneuro-immunology (PNI) – the study of the influences of mind states on immunity and indeed on organ function and metabolism. These influences feedback to the brain, which serves to further modulate the mind states.

Once this level is locked in place we can ascend and introduce the third tier of influence – the nonlocality energy space. All physical entities have an energy equivalent (E=MC²) which seem to exist in a dimension which is independent of time and space (Implicate order, singularity, nonlocality). Everything in this space is interconnected through the process of energy resonance (see analogy of 2 tuning forks, where one vibrating may cause the other to vibrate in sympathy if they generate similar frequencies). It has been documented further that human consciousness is able to convert the energy form, existing as energy potential (superposition), into physicality (base state) by merely engaging with it – co-creatorship, in other words.

And there you have it. If you wish to remain at the basic physical level with its biomedical model, that’s fine. What you see is what you get as per the five senses. At this level the concept of cause and effect prevails. At the next level up, causality includes brain-mind-consciousness which influences body wellness and performance but which feeds back to the brain-mind-consciousness. At the apex energetic level, we depart from cause and effect causality because in the energy dimension all physicality has representation – including our physical bodies. Here, interaction is based on resonance – the simultaneous occurrence and activation of entangled entities. This plays out in physicality for example, as a toxic mind state, resonating with a toxic body chemical configuration, resonating with a growing malignant tumor. There is no cause and effect but rather, resonating linked processes. And I hazard to extend this resonation beyond the body – the toxic mind state materializes a toxic external event which negatively affects you ... because all entities are unified in the energy space and their co-ordinated interaction in physicality reflects the energy resonance. Ultimately each level is incorporated into the higher one, with the energetic apex incorporating all lower tiers of function - degrees of influence thus increase with successively higher levels. The central core of this model is conscious awareness, functioning at each level.

So there it is. Something upon which to cogitate. Perhaps something even to build upon to create context and value and turn that soup into something more appetizing and appealing. 

                                                    Copyright reserved - Ian Weinberg 2017