The History of Light, Colour and Psychosomatic

Normally, the body works to cure itself, as when lesions close in itself a minor miracle, surely. Normally, too, the body works to maintain body temperature. When the body is ill, however, its recuperative powers are out of balance. Curing a disease is thus a matter of regaining this balance through drugs or surgery or through more traditional methods.

 

            Consider Chinese medicine, particularly, but not solely, the art of acupuncture. The Chinese, especially Taoists, see the body as reflecting the cosmos in that it is also maintained in a state of dynamic balance between negative and positive tendencies– yin and yang.

 

            Energy flows, through channels in the body (as yet undiscovered to the senses) and good health is the maintenance of a balance of this energy. Acupuncture is a means by which the positive and negative forces flowing in those channels may be controlled in ways that help the body to regain its lost balance. It is interesting that Chinese self-massage advises visualisation of those channels and of the energy flow within them. Similarly, in physical exercises (such as the slow motion dances of T’ai Chi Ch’uan so often seen being performed en masse in Chinese cities and towns) the advice is the same – visualise the flow of ch’i.

 

 

Psychosomatic Effect of Visualisation

Allopathic medicine, with which Westerners are more familiar, has as its basis the same aim of redressing imbalance. Unfortunately, however, few patients are yet encouraged to take part in their own cure by means of visualisation.

 

Sage, for example, was half-asleep in a state of deep relaxation. This may be achieved by having the subject imagine a peaceful, perhaps nostalgically favourite scene or floating peacefully in a balloon above the tranquil Earth.

 

Autogenic Training is a form of self-hypnosis that consists of practicing, two or three times a day, a short set of mental exercises that turn off the stressful ‘fight or flight’ mechanism in the body and turn on its capacity for deep relaxation (Page, M., 1990).

Lying down with eyes closed the patient affirms and visualises:

• I’m calm, I’m at peace
• my right arm is heavy
• my right arm is warm
• my pulse is calm and strong
• my breath is peaceful and regular, it breathes me
• my solar plexus is warm
• my forehead is pleasantly cool

 

such a relaxation method is being used in the treatment of AIDS and is followed by an ‘intentional formula’ designed to counteract symptoms. Autogenic Training is seen as part of a holistic programme that might also include advice on nutrition, exercise and the use of mineral supplements and vitamins. In addition, suggestions may be made about psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, biofeedback, homoeopathy, acupuncture, art, music and dance.

The rationale is familiar. If a sufferer is told that death is likely within 12 months, then death will follow within that time. Tell him that he will survive, that he has inner resources to fight the illness, and the chances are that he will survive. In other words, the concept of the sufferer as a dying man or woman is replaced by an image of a living, energetic, positively-motivated person.

 

Direct visualisation by the sufferer of himself as a survivor of terror can help. The efforts of the medics and, more importantly, of the sufferer him or herself has this effect of revising the self-image. An experimental session in 1985 with five patients at St Stephen’s Hospital in The Guardian, 1 March 1988;

‘…they were actually believing they could live, that they could go on living and that they didn’t just have to lie back and wait for the 13 months to be up.’

 

The therapist, Dr Kai Kermani, a GP from Essex, England, believes;

‘…that the most valuable contribution we can make as careers is to give our patients hope and confidence in their fight, not only for survival, but for a fuller, richer, life. If you destroy hope, you destroy their chance of survival.’

 

The article goes on to describe how a patient died within a few days of his doctor greeting him with the words ‘I see your 20 months is almost up’ 20 months being the average survival period for his particular illness. In this case, the patient’s will was undermined, his self-concept as a survivor reversed and he died.

 

I shall turn now to the work of a lone pioneer in the field of self-cure, an original thinker whose work demands more notice than it in fact receives. As might be expected, the method is quirky, but well within the parameters we see being set in other approaches.

 

EH Shattock comes from an Admiral in the Royal Navy, a hard-headed enough position. Untypically for a man in that situation he became interested in Buddhism, entered a Burmese monastery and there practiced the mindfulness exercises in which Theravada Buddhism excels. He wrote a book, which he called An experiment in Mindfulness (1958). It is interesting that during his stay in the monastery he found that a method of dealing with the pain and discomfort he experienced in the early stages of his mindfulness meditations was to direct mental energy towards it. Stemming further from his mindfulness experiments, he developed a method of self-healing that, while idiosyncratic and quite amusingly revealing about his naval training, illustrates the practical value of visualisation and affirmation techniques in looking after one’s own health. As a result, he wrote a further book – A manual of Self-Healing (1982).

 

In it he starts from the premise that the entire body is a ‘totality of consciousness’, made up from the individual consciousness of the atoms and cells that make up the body. He calls them ‘little minds’ and considers that each of them is amenable to orders from the autonomic mind, a ‘subsidiary of the conscious mind’ (that part of the subconscious that controls basic life actions). It does not seem far-fetched to attribute some form of rudimentary awareness to individual cells: after all, some life force animates the lowliest of independent life forms (if any life form can be said to be truly independent).

 Andrew Stanway, for example, in Alternative Medicine (1979) describes Lakhowski’s theory that every living cell possesses a fundamental energy; that when the cell malfunctions, its energy field changes and that this change can be detected. Shattock, however, was apparently not aware of this kind of research. He acknowledges instead a debt to Coue, but uses his method, as he says, ‘…with a more precise expression’. Apart from this, it seems that Shattock was something of an original thinker, ploughing a lonely furrow.

 

He uses both visualisation and affirmation in A Manual of Self-Healing. Visualisation he calls ‘Mind-Picturing’ or ‘Think-see’ and tries to make his mind-pictures conform to reality as accurately as possible. For instance, when he concentrates on his prostate gland, he has an accurate picture of the gland to work on. Having prepared the ground in this way, he then proceeds to affirm and give the agents precise instructions, for example;

‘Think-speak “Attention phagocyte cells…clear away harmful calcified tissue”, ‘ while picturing the process as clearly as he is able: ‘Think-see: see the white cells engulfing bits of the calcified tissue, i.e. little bits of bone-like substance, and carrying them away.’

 

Most healing visualisers believe that precise representation of the affected parts and curative agents is not necessary for healing. Of course, there is every reason to enlist the aid of your doctor in getting a picture of the disease and its physical manifestations, but precise picturing is not vital. What is important, however, is that the mind is directed to achieving the desired result in ways in which vivid visualisation is possible. Indeed, Shattock himself admits that he encountered. For instance, he says that the contracting of all the arteries supplying blood to the affected part ‘…resulted in a severe infection of that organ, which I had, so to speak, to go to “action stations” to put right.’ Nevertheless, by using these methods, in which it must be admitted he tends to issue instructions to his body cells as though addressing the quarterdeck, he cured himself of a prostate condition and an arthritic hip.

 

His writings give a very clear illustration of a disciplined mind using visualisation in curing disease and in the treatment of wounds. It is worth emphasising at this point that his Buddhist mind-training exercises led him to hold the firm belief that the mind has unrecognised powers and the confidence to work on this belief. No doubt his naval training gave him the necessary to continue his experiment in faith, for, as we shall see, it is necessary to exercise discipline if success is to be achieved in visualisation, as in any other pursuit.

 

Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki (1987), however, uses a less-discipline form of visualisation in healing, as in so much else. An interesting exercise that she recommends is taking a stroll around the body in your mind’s eye, visiting each limb and each organ and taking stock of them, seeing if there are any complaints. She says in Highways of the Mind (1987):

“There are many ways in which we can use the power of inner journeys to help our bodies as well as our minds. They can help us to start out each morning feeling ready to cope with the day. They can heal cuts and bruises very quickly…”

 

By this she means that you are much more than merely your body – you are in mind, you have emotions and you have a will. All of these, she is saying, can be enlisted in curing yourself of many, if not all, your ailments.

 

With a deep cut or wound of any kind, she recommends a practice remarkably similar, even in its terminology, to that evolved quite separately by Admiral Shattock (1982):

 ‘Imagine yourself in the brain control room and send out the Red Alert signal requiring antibodies and rebuilding cells to report to the scene of the accident.’.  

 

Penny Brohn (1987) stated that even broken limbs may be led to heal more rapidly  by visualising a healing and therapeutic effect at work.

 

Mind and Immune System

The effect of the brain on the immune system was studied in the 1970s when psychologist Robert Ader (1990) and immunologist Nicholas Cohen (1990) performed a breakthrough experiment. Their study involved giving rats an immunosuppressant drug in conjunction with saccharine-flavoured water. The immune system of the rats became conditioned to respond to the taste of the saccharine. Eventually giving the harmless saccharine water alone led to immunity suppression, sickness and death. By showing that the immune system could ‘learn’ such associations, Ader and Cohen provided persuasive evidence that the brain could directly influence immunity.

 

            In one study conducted by Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues (1992), geriatric nursing-home residents who were taught relaxation and guided imagery (similar to visualisation) showed both increased activity of certain immune system cells and improved physiological control over latent herpes virus infections.

 

            Other studies have shown that humour, positive emotions and hypnotic suggestions also affect the immune response. Under hypnosis some individuals are able to increase the number of lymphocytes in their bloodstream. Although these studies are still not definitive, they suggest it may be possible to control and perhaps optimise the activity of the immune system via the mind. Group psychotherapy also has a good impact on immune response and physical health.

 

            In another innovative study researchers at the University of  Arkansas College of Medicine worked with a 39-year-old woman who was an experienced meditator. After her normal immunological responses were measured the woman was able voluntarily to reduce her immunological reaction to a skin test for a period of three weeks. At the request of the researchers she was then able to bring it back up to her normal level voluntarily, although other similar volunteers failed to produce this effect.

 

            This innovative study shows that it is possible in principle for a practised individual to voluntarily regulate a specific immune response through meditation and visualisation. Experienced meditators have been shown to be able to control pain, bleeding, electrical activity in the brain, muscle tension and infection. Researchers are now planning further studies to see whether other adept meditators and individuals that rate high on hypnotic susceptibility can change their immune responses at will under controlled conditions. If such direct mental control over immunity can be demonstrated, it seems logical to teach mind-body strategies to patients with immune or auto-immune diseases to see if they can consciously improve their medical condition. Psychological factors may alter the susceptibility to or the progression of auto-immune diseases, infectious diseases and even cancer. Evidence of these connections comes from many researchers.

 

            Immunologic reactivity can also be influenced by hypnosis. In a typical study of this type a subject’s arms are exposed to a chemical that normally causes an allergic reaction, but the subject is told under hypnosis that only one arm will show the response. Often the allergic reaction occurs in only one arm.

 

 

Visualisation and Self Healing

As shown above, all visualisation, if it is to be effective, requires that a period of deep relaxation to be undergone as a preliminary stage. The following are some examples of visualisation in the cure of disease

 

Wilson, D., (1976) instructed that in order to lower the blood pressure, patients should visualise the heart as a pump and then visualise the blood vessels. At first, see the blood vessel as very narrow and the pump as working very hard – a pressure gauge registering a high reading. Then direct the mind to relax the blood vessels and visualise them as opening up. See the pump as slowing, and the pressure gauge as going down. As much detail as possible should be visualised:

‘whether or not the concepts are medically correct is not relevant. The important thing is that your mind is directed towards accomplishing the end result you want. If you are under medical treatment for the condition, get as much information about your condition as possible from your doctor and add it to the (visualization), so your mind and his treatment can work together.’ (Donald Wilson, Total Mind Power)

 

Jose Silva (1978) in his book The Silva Mind Control Method gives an example of the sort of visualising that can be done by someone suffering from arthritis. He recommends that a fine sieve be visualised, filtering impurities from the blood, followed by the visualisation of a delicate brush that sweeps away the white powder (calcium) ‘…that can be seen psychically…’

 

In the case of controlling a cancerous tumour, visualise the tumour with a nerve supplying it with what it needs that can be switched off, so that when this is done the tumour shrivels. Alternatively, visualise an antibody machine in your body. Activate this, and direct the antibodies to fight the tumour cells. A method made famous by the Simontons is to see the white cells as sharks eating up a cauliflower – the tumour. Penny Brohn (1987) gives a number of examples in her book. The Bristol Programme of the sort of visualisations she has recommended or that patients devised for themselves for example, “…one patient used to tell me she used to picture the chemotherapy as a champagne of white light that smothered out all traces of unwanted cells.’ Other examples include picturing the cancer cells as ice on a plate that is put in the full glare of sunshine in a beautiful garden, visualising …beautiful, clean white goats…gentle and benign creatures…quick on their feet, agile and fast moving…moving throughout the body, eating up all the rubbish’ and a golden vacuum cleaner buzzing all round the body, sucking up all the dirt and rubbish and unwanted debris from every possible nook and cranny, the person using this last image saying, ‘Oh, I don’t keep it anywhere, I leave it running all the time, so I actually have to go and find it before I begin.’

 

            When visualising cancer-cures, Penny Brohn advises, ‘Don’t leave the job half-finished. Each time you embark on a session of visualisation, always end it with the cancer completely overcome and swept away…finish up with a mental picture of being clear and free of disease…(it is) important for the body for us to conceptualise the possibility of perfection.’ This concept crops up continually. If the internal model is to be effective, it must be consistent, that is, no negative input should be allowed if at all possible. Difficult though this may be in the face of painful fact, it is an ideal to be aimed at. The end results must always be visualised in positive and glowing pictures, ones in which the emotions are also involved.

 

Maxwell Maltz (1960) wrote in Psycho-cybernetics, ‘We do know this much: mental attitudes can influence the body’s healing mechanism.’ The AIDS victim imagines himself dying, sees this uninterruptedly and has a heavy emotional investment of energy in it. In healing, however, the opposite must become the case. The sufferer must be led to see himself as able to live, to concentrate on this throughout the time given to the healing programme and thus become increasingly emotionally positive towards the programme.

           

Silva (1978) suggests that there is a three-pronged curative process in emotional re-programming methods. The three prongs are:

• imagination: the sufferer imagines that he or she is in the desired state of health.
• concentration: the sufferer wants this state uninterruptedly
• emotion: the sufferer feels in imagination how it is to be in the desired state.

 

A great deal of our waking life is spent in a trance-like state. This means that we are open to an immense amount of influences from outside. A typical instance of this may be seen in any supermarkets in the way in which we shop. Much of the time we are quite clearly in a trance, responding not to our own considered judgments in making purchases, but to shop layout, colours and TV advertisement, which we also view in a state of trance. It is almost mass hypnosis and it is well known that the layout of supermarkets is designed to profit from this lack of mindfulness.

 

            We have a similar ‘unawareness’ of the state of our bodies. Only very noticeable symptoms drag us from the usual trance – hideous headaches, grumbling appendices, sore tendons, angina. This unawareness leads us to wear ourselves out day by day in unwanted stress and other results of the repression of the signals our bodies give us until the day comes when we meet a crisis of pain or illness or emotional problem.

           

A necessary habit to acquire if a person wishes to take more control of his or her own life, including that person’s health, is that of mindfulness. In the case of health, mindfulness means to become much more aware of the signals that the body is sending out, as well as being aware of the vision we have of ourselves, that is, what it is we are visualising in relation to the ever-changing states of our body. On the other hand, knowledge of the effects of trance can be helpful in self-healing. Since this trance state affects behaviour and the self-concept in important ways, it can be consciously used, and used in ways that need not be negative in its effects. It can be used positively through visualisation and deep relaxation places the subject in a state approaching that of trance (Page, M., 1990).

An example of this approach is provided by KAS Sage in Live to be 100, where he describes a method of using a form of auto-suggestion – mainly affirmatory – in the small hours when it could be employed on a drowsy mind. He claims to have cured himself of chronic furunculosis (a disease that causes boils to appear) by these means and describes a form of visualisation. However, most of his method relies upon the constant repetition of healing phrases.

 

            This latter aspect of Sage’s approach seems to be directly descended from the work of the pharmacist Emile Coue, best immortalized, as we saw earlier, in his own recommended words: ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’ The disadvantage of such methods of repetition is that the imagination gets in the way – bare repetition tending to get the imagination busy in perversely picturing the opposite of what is being willed. As Coue himself said, ‘When the will and the imagination are in conflict, the imagination invariable wins the day’, and it is this that Maltz (1960) emphasised when he wrote in Psycho-cybernetics, ‘We act, or fail to act, not because of ‘will’, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.’ One of the ways in which visualisation is found to be successful is in its employment of the imagination in harness with the will, for example in the notoriously difficult business of giving up smoking.

 

Visualisation and To Heal Others

Healers who use hypnosis evoke mental images in their patient. The effective evocation of images, or visualisation, depends upon relaxation. The aim of a hypnotist’s relaxation procedure is for the subject to descend (or should we say ascend?) to a dream-like state of suggestibility, so hat the hypnotist can focus the drowsy mind in such a way as to effect the reorganization of mental images.

 

            What else happens when the patient relaxes? It may be that relaxation leads to the left hemisphere of the brain– the dominant, rational, coolly logical, scientific half– being reduced in influence as against the intuitive, dreamy, creative right hemisphere. If this is what happens in hypnotism, then the waking, watchful consciousness is set aside and the patient is thus made more open to suggestion.

 

David Foot (1979), a faith healer, writes in The Healing Word:

     “ I therefore anointed my wife with a little olive oil, and putting my hands on her asked the Lord to heal her sinus trouble.  This was during a weekend at Broadstairs in 1960. Since 1940 she had suffered from chronic septic sinus and infections, which recurred constantly in summer and winter: and with children often bringing colds back from school, life was a nightmare trying to avoid infection. She spent many days in her room, kept at a temperature of 60°, and was only able to avoid operation through a specialist who frequently had to pierce through the bone and flush out the septic sinus. In the 19 years from the day my wife was anointed she has had no more sinus trouble and was immediately able to breathe freely as she had seldom done before.”

 

Such descriptions are not rare. That the body itself possesses powers of recuperation and healing is undeniable. That it is possible for the individual to mobilise these powers for himself or herself and make them more efficient. It is also possible for similar methods to be utilised by healers curing others of a wide variety of ailments by psychic healing.

 

            Books such as Foot’s are rich in examples like the one just quoted. Foot firmly bases such cures within the realm of Christian faith and practice. Such faith healing can often be a case of ‘Your faith as made you whole’ and there seems often to be no need for intervention by another person, although there may be a ‘laying on of hands’ or an anointing perhaps. An important factor in this is that faith encourages strong visualisation of oneself as being, for example, in the arms of a loving, healing god. We know, however, that it is also possible for people without strong faith to be healed, but, for such people, it is the reputation of the healer as a healer that is a most important part of the healing process and replaces faith in a supernatural being.

 

            In all psychic healing, there is a visualisation of the end-product: it may be that with the Christian, cured by faith, here will have been some sort of visualised image of being ‘free from sin’. Equally a non-religious person will be cured by a visualisation of being free from disease or injury.

 

            How do psychic healers mobilise their power? Alexis Carrel, involved with cancer patients, is quoted by Maltz (1960) as believing that the body’s own natural healing powers were ‘speeded up’ by the influence of intense faith, but he begs the question, which Maltz attempts to answer by referring, almost unwillingly, to a growing (mystico-religious) belief he had of a Life Force with many channels of expression and many manifestations. (as an aside, one can only admire the way in which a hard-headed medical doctor, a product of the twentieth century, was led through openness of mind and experiential evidence to a belief in a religious, supernatural power). This power, whatever it may be, manifests itself in some form of mobilisation of energy fields and may just be explicable in terms of psycho-cybernetics. The healer induces in the patient a reconstruction of mental models.

 

            Whether such explanations are tenable in all cases, however, is doubtful, particularly in cases of the sort of healing that is reputedly carried out, for instance, by psychic surgeons in the Philippines. Observers have said that such healers visibly draw clots and tumours hands. The surgeons, if such they may be called, believe that they have the ability to manipulate some sort of energy field and in this belief they are joined by native doctors in Africa, lamas in Tibet, witch-doctors in Africa, aborigines in Australia, as well as our own faith healers. More importantly, their belief is shared by their patients.

 

The preparing for all healing involves inducing in both the patient and the healer a state of deep relaxation as a preliminary, leading to deep mental quietude and suggestibility. To achieved that, there is often then a visualisation by the healer of being a channel (chakra) through which the energy field can flow, whether it is called healing cosmic energy, Life Energy, ch’i, prana or whatever is culturally or psychologically appropriate in the circumstances. Such healing energy is then directed to the patient.

 

            In Shattock’s (1982) terminology in A Manual of Self-Healing, for instance, the procedure is seen thus:

      Think-see energy (from the sun) that is all around (is) being drawn in at a spot between the shoulder blades and concentrated in the area of the spleen: see the energy as a golden stream proceeding from the spleen to the spine and hence to the area that requires it, along pathways that run parallel to the nervous system.

 

When such a visualisation is established in the healer, it is said to be possible to detect abnormalities by mentally ‘asking’ the patient if there are any special requests. Alternatively, the healer can see if he or she can detect within themselves any impulse to work on any part of the patient’s body or mind. The flow of energy should be directed to that part until the person is seen as deeply immersed in the energy in the form of a golden light, looking radiantly healthy. The subject should be spoken to in the healer’s mind and should be told (or reminded) that he is actually a perfect being and a part of the perfection of the cosmos or Godhead or Tao – whatever is culturally appropriate and acceptable to the healer and the patient.

 

            After the session, meditation or service, the subject should be thought of as being perfectly healthy. As pointed out previously, each visualisation session must always finish with the subject being seen to be whole, complete and perfectly cured. The same should be the aim of all future psychic healing sessions also: no more energy should be allowed to empower the negative aspects of illness as the mental image formed in the mind by the visualisation should contain only positive aspects. There seems little possibility of explaining such healing in psycho-cybernetic terms and even less of healing that takes place at a distance.

 

Manipulation of healing energy is possible without physical contact between healer and sufferer. In other words, healing can be carried out at a distance, as in intercessionary prayer.

 

            An example of a procedure suitable for distant healing is provided by Jose Silva (1978) in The Silva Mind Control Method. He recommends using a visualised screen upon which the picture of the sick person is projected. He recommends placing alongside the visualised sick person a further visualisation of whatever needs to be done to cure him and, next to that, a picture of the person as radiantly fit. As he says;

‘Just as we detect abnormalities by visualising them, we visualise conditions as we want them to be – without the abnormalities. This is psychic healing. It’s as simple as that.’

 

‘Simple’ is hardly the word – it is skilled work – and a necessary note of caution is expressed by Admiral Shattock (1982), who writes the following about his own experience in distant healing in A Manual of Self-Healing:

     “ I felt a very definite lack in that I was working in the dark; I had no ability (psychic sense?) that would enable me to diagnose the trouble or to receive feedback on the progress or lack of it, that the treatment was resulting in. this lack could  be dangerous because one might be trying to do something that could harm the body and one must know this at once. In  the case of self-healing, one is very quickly aware of harmful results and can take the necessary action before real harm is done. In distant healing this is not the case and one cannot always rely on the person one is working on having the same degree of perception into physical reaction that one has oneself. This is a very important defect of this method, unless the  healer has the necessary psychic perception to be able to ‘see’ for himself.

 

Whether the sufferer is told that such distant healing is being carried out or not, depends to a great extent on how far they are prepared to accept (on faith) that this is happening and how far they accept that it is possible to be helped. The wonder (and the worry) is that healing can take place at all in the face of ignorance on the part of the patient.

If what appear to be miracles can be effected through the power of thought by individuals, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that the combined thoughts of a group of people will exercise at least as much power. Shakti Gawain (1978) says in Creative Visualisation that;

 ‘Creative visualisation is particularly good when used by a group, because the group energy automatically gives it a lot of power. Each person’s energy tends to support the others and in this case the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.’

           

The power of a mob is well known and stems from the advantage the mob has of a relatively clearly defined emotional target – the immense power generated by a house painter of renown at Nuremburg rallies, for example. Similarly the battle cries and chants of football hooligans and traditional armies of all kinds, best exemplified by television pictures of such as traditional Zulu warriors have tremendous force. This is the other side of the coin: the energy engendered by a group is neutral, but the motives of the group are not.

 

            Two purposes may be met by group healing. One is the cure of a problem shared by a number of individuals, while the other is for a group healing of a single individual. Slimming groups are an example of the former that might use the power of group visualisation for their mutual benefit. Other examples include groups formed to overcome additions, such as smoking and alcoholism.

 

            As for the cure of a single individual, the group proceeds as if it were a single therapist, focusing its combined effort upon the sufferer. There is much power here and members of a group meeting for healing are able to use certain techniques, and need to take certain precautions. Chanting, music, singing (for example hymns) at meetings are long-recognized means of raising the emotional temperature. They may be used at any type of meeting, from gatherings for battle to love-feasts.

 

            In addition to creating mood, a means of focusing is necessary. In healing groups, if the sufferer is not present, a photograph of the person may be used instead. In this way, all members of the group are not reminded of the object of the meeting, but are helped to visualise its subject. Methods such as that advocated by Silva, describes above, can be used or the more common one of visualising healing light enveloping the diseased part or whole person of the sufferer. Each member undertakes a silent visualisation of that kind and this may be followed by a period of affirmation of the good health of the subject, either singly, in pairs, or as a whole group.

 

We live in a scientific age, but as Louis Kronenberger (1962) has written in Company Manners:

 ‘Nominally a great age of scientific enquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science, of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods …’

 

We might add, an age that still exhibits closed minds to many other recognised means of understanding the chaotic diversity around us. Science demands replication, strict measurement, control groups and the like, regardless of the fact that some of the softer sciences themselves are not amenable to such rigorous proof.

 

            The fact is that, at the moment, there is no scientific way of proving that visualisation does cure and no way of proving that it can even aid conventional methods, though, as this literature reviews have shown, science, after all, may be providing the beginnings of an answer. The fact that a good many people acquire a greater sense of control over their lives and bodies does not take us one step nearer to proof. Such people, those who have actually experienced it, would say that they need no proof, that proof would add nothing to their experience or sense of satisfaction.

 

The power visualisation is seen as affecting our all-important self-concepts and in this literature reviews, we have seen how this can affect our bodily circumstances, even our life-span. Similarly, day-to-day health problems can be affected, not only by our long-standing self-concepts, but by the way in which we see ourselves reacting to circumstances as they arise. No one will readily deny that a physical illness will have mental effects, such as depression. That being accepted, it is equally valid to say that mental causes result in bodily effects. Our mental pictures of ourselves are all-important and affect our daily behaviour.

 

            Do we rush for the paracetamol when a headache strikes or do we explore the pain, let it flow and thus help our self-diagnosis? Do we recover quickly from indisposition, or not? Whichever it is, our own self-image is basic to the answer we give. Similarly, if we are struck down with a life-threatening illness, such as cancer or AIDS, it is becoming quite clear that our chances of survival are very much influenced by how we, quite literally, see or are led to see ourselves in the situation.

           

Basic to the power of visualisation is the belief that all phenomena are a form of energy and that all energy is one. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the maintenance of health. Thought, mental energy, is only a more subtle energy than that which manifests itself in grosser form such as our bodies and it does seem that we are able to influence the forms of gross energy by utilising the subtle, just as it is obvious that the gross can affect the subtle – it must be so, for they are, in fact, one.

 

            Even so serious a wound as a broken leg can be hastened in its cure by taking appropriate thought – by the sufferer or by others. As for St Peter’s ear, perhaps there is an explanation to hand of that particular miracle. Visualisation methods are varied and range from the highly disciplined of such as EH Shattock to the relatively low key, dreamy methods of such as Donald Wilson or Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki. While visualisation techniques will never be a substitute for traditional methods, they can do no harm when used in conjunction with them. It is highly unlikely that an individual will come to harm when carrying them out, and in this connection Penny Brohn  (1987) quoted, that;

 ‘…the most famous and widely used way of using the mind to enhance tolerance of, and recovery from, heavy medical procedure is to visualize the process as having a healing and therapeutic effect.’

 

At this point, it does seem that Shakti Gawain is over-optimistic when she repeatedly says that the power of creative visualisation works only for good, to quote one of her chapter headings. It may be true that misused visualisation, that is for a destructive or harmful end, is storing up karmic retribution, as she says, but on the face of it, it seems completely within the realms of possibility for the technique to be misused.

 

 

 

Light and Consciousness

Jacob Liberman (1991) observes that the chemical make-up of chlorophyll in plants and haemoglobin in human beings differs very little – we react to sunlight as plants do. We understand for ourselves something of symbiosis-living as part of an organism greater than ourselves. This consciousness, particularly in relationship to light, can be illustrated by the following group and individual reactions to the sun as the source of light, creativity and healing.

 

In the Colombian Amazon a small ethnic community of 150 Ufaini Indians live out their belief in the vital force they call Fufaka, which they believe is present in all living things and comes from the sun, which bathes them also in ‘creative thought’. That in itself has an interesting parallel with the Greek god Apollo, whose sphere of influence included both the physical sun and the creative arts, especially music.

 

For the Ufaihi Indians, Fufaka reaches the Earth and is recycled constantly between plants, animals and humans. Each group needs a minimum to live and is seen as borrowing this energy from the total stock. What is important to them is the recycling of the Fufaka from species to species with not too much accumulating in any one of them and thereby depriving others and upsetting the natural balance. The energy from the sun is viewed and valued holistically for the benefit and balance of all.

 

The supervision of this proper distribution is undertaken by the shamans of the tribe, who contact the guardians of the animals and other living groups. The guardians may be a boa, a frog, a lizard or a jaguar. The shaman will negotiate fishing and hunting rights and the ecological balance of resources.

 

The shaman, or Jaguar Man, who mediates these forces and heals imbalances, undergoes a rigorous training of abstinence and meditation. It will be for him to say if the tribe must move on because the carrying capacity of the area has been exhausted. His training enables him to see energies in the flora, fauna and human auric field. These days, such ‘exquisite sensitivities’ are decreasing, and with the coming of ‘white medicine’ and exploitation, the jungle’s cultural identity is being eroded and there are new sicknesses that follow colonisation which sadly the shaman cannot cure.

 

Shamans have been figures of such symbiotic wisdom, knowing how to live in balance with the source of all life and all creation, both outwardly and inwardly that their skills remind us of what human beings have both lost and need profoundly(Cooper, P., 2000).

 

The second example is set in modern Japan. A businessman, Shin, a friend of Dr Andrew Weil, who tells his story in Spontaneous Healing (1995), was diagnosed as having cancer. He ignored the advice of the lay practitioner of Oriental medicine -to follow a regime of acupuncture and a macrobiotic diet-and was soon in hospital receiving strong chemotherapy, though the doctors refused to tell him that anything was seriously wrong to avoid depressing him. Apparently this is common practice.

 

Nevertheless, Shin had a powerful dream about attending his own funeral which made him realise that he was very sick and might die. He had developed an acute sense of smell and found the ward intolerable, with its combination of body odours and food being prepared, and he knew he must escape. After dark he slipped out to where the air was clean and safe, on the roof of the hospital. Eventually, of course, he was found by the doctors and nurses and brought down. They read him the riot act. He must obey the rules or go home. Shin was delighted, signed himself off and returned home to follow the macrobiotic diet.

 

The next day Shin woke, amazed to be alive and with a great desire to watch the sunrise. He went up to the eighth-floor rooftop of his apartment house and looked out over the skyline of Tokyo. He recited Buddhist mantras and poems, put his hands together to pray and waited for the sun. When it rose he felt a ray enter his chest, sending energy through his body:

‘I felt something wonderful was going to happen and I started to cry. I am just so happy to be alive. I saw the sun as God. When I came back down to my apartment I saw auras round all my family members. I thought everyone was God.’ (Weil, A., 1995).

 

Both these examples bear out the holistic view that all nature is one resonating and intercommunicating whole. The patterns of connectedness in respect of the sun and light are inspiring and in tune biologically as well as ecologically. Connectedness and co-operation have also been observed in primitive communities.

 

This connectedness of light and consciousness is demonstrated also by the work of two distinguished research scientists today. Mae Wan Ho (1992) a scientists leading the campaign against genetically modified foods and Dr Fritz-Albert Popp (1989) researcher in human light emission, show the fundamental unity of physics and biology. They show that sunlight is absorbed by chlorophyll (the colour pigment in green plants) in individual packets, or quanta, called photons. This energy goes into an excited electron which in the course of falling back into the ground state travels round the body, meting out its energy to support growth, differentiation, sensations and movements. When animals feed on plants or on other animals they are taking in that plant/ sun energy. Both the energy and the chemical cycles demonstrate that life is a dynamic unity, ‘the consequence of sunlight streaming through an open system’.

 

Ho and Popp conclude that far from Darwin’s pronouncement, evolution is, in fact, not the result of rivalry and might but of the capacity for communication. It is not so much individual species as such that are developing but living systems interlinked with a coherent whole.

 

While examining electrodynamic fields within living systems Dr Popp observed that these systems are both emitters and receivers of electromagnetic signals which come in a wide range of frequencies. He and his co-workers have shown that practically all organisms emit light at very weak intensities. F. A. Popp says, ‘The function of our entire metabolism is dependent on light……normal living cells emit a regular stream of photons through the language of light.’ He gives evidence that living cells pass on biological information through photons, quoting Dr Jacob Liberman: ‘(We are) healing ourselves with that which is our essence.’

 

Jack Allanach (1997), the author of an exciting account of the life and work of Peter Mandel, founder of colourpuncture, in his book Colour Me Healing, reports that as long ago as 1922 the Russian biologist Alexander Gurwitsch observed that just as the flame of a lighted candle can jump to ignite the wick of an unlit one so the cells of an onion stalk began the process of mitosis or division into new cells as soon as they were approached by the roots of another onion. The popular theory of the time was that cell growth was regulated by chemical messenger molecules, but Gurwitsch was convinced that the messenger was light in the form of low-level luminescence. To demonstrate this he ensured the onion stalks were riot touching physically by separating them with glass. With ordinary window glass nothing happened but with quartz glass, which allows ultraviolet light to pass through it, the growth in the second onion was stimulated and the message of growth transmitted.

 

Jack Allanach (1997) points out that light is composed of the rainbow range of colours, each colour bearing a specific relationship to our health. When the harmonising information in each colour is beamed at the afflicted cells ‘the healing news is shouted from cell to cell’. This is the basis of all colour therapy and specifically here of colourpuncture.

 

F. A Popp (1986) reports that over 50 years and 5,000 experiments conducted by three other Soviet scientists besides Gurwitsch light is indeed the carrier of biological information. He reports a further experiment. Living cells in a nutrient solution were placed in two hermetically sealed jars of quartz glass. The cells in one container were infected with a virus. Almost immediately the cells in the second jar became sick as well. The virus itself was not transmitted. The infected cells simply broadcast the information that they were ill. The cells in the second jar received the information and became ‘sympathetically’ sick. In a documentary shown in 1995 on Swiss/Italian television Popp showed cells talking to each other in long and short bursts of light, like Morse code.

 

F. A. Popp and his researchers also demonstrated that organically grown tomatoes showed five times the biophoton emission of conventionally grown tomatoes treated with fertilisers. Free range eggs showed twice the amount of biophoton emission as eggs laid by battery hens. Sunflower oil drastically reduces biophoton emission when the oil is refined and preservatives used.

 

The healing power of bioinformation in healthy organically grown plants was the focus of the work of the late Werner Kropp, a German-born scientist. He believed that he could transfer this information to help biological systems which were out of balance, by using water or oil as a transmitter. The cell system would pick up the information it needed to function properly -a real mark of cell intelligence.

 

‘Biological systems function on the basis of energetic information transmitted via ultra faint electric currents’, Kropp told Jack Allanach when he visited his laboratory in Lucarno, Switzerland, in 1995. ‘Disturbances in the electric climate of a cell lead to disease or degeneration of the cells. To restore healing the natural milieu must be established; that means the energetic information has to be corrected.’

 

So we see that there is a language of light by which cells communicate information selectively and purposefully. In 1989 the Russian researcher Professor Kaznacheev proved that there existed in the body channels of light corresponding to the meridians of Chinese medicine. These energy lines! like rivers of information, traverse the body inside and out, creating an etheric grid on which light quanta move (Cooper, P., 2000).

 

In the 1920s and 1930s ,  Dr Auguste Rollier (AD 1874-1954) pioneered the building of special sanatoria high in the Swiss Alps and introduced ‘sun baths’ at his own TB clinic at Leysin. He became the most celebrated practitioner of ‘heliotherapy’ (helios  is Greek for ‘sun’). It was only with the coming of penicillin in 1938 and the growth of the drug industry that doctors prescribed pills rather than free healing sunlight. Now, with the emergence again of tuberculosis in the Western world, the benefits of sunlight are being rediscovered (Babbitt, E., 1967).

 

Another practitioner who recognised  the healing properties of sunlight was  Bates, an oculist working in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century to improve natural vision. He developed a set of exercises to enable his patients to take in as much sunlight as possible. These included periods of  ‘sunning’, looking at the sun through closed lids, ‘palming’, placing the palms of the hands over the eyes to rest them in an enveloping blackness, blinking, swaying and shifting. He trained his patients to focus with and through the centre of sight in the eyes, the fovea centralis. He believed that with this and the supporting exercises it should be possible to do without glasses altogether. Jacob Liberman’s contemporary book Take Off Your Glasses and See echoes Bates’ conviction (Chaney, E., 1987).

              

               Before we more specifics of various light and colour treatments it is worth recalling the words of Brain Breiling, co-creator of the Light Years Ahead conference in 1992. He speaks of standing on the brink of a new medicine, a mind body medicine, neither mind nor body exclusively but both linked essentially as one unit. This is emerging from the very foundation of quantum physics, which, as we have seen, is that at the deepest subatomic reality light is the very fabric of which we are made. Light is the bottom line of all our inner and outer technology, whether it is powered from the sun in the sky and its electromagnetic derivatives or from the Divine sun of consciousness and thought in our heart. At both levels we are involved in vibrational medicine, the essential movement of healing, harmonizing energy.

 

Light and Colour Healing

Doctors have long known that sunlight is a nutrient and a healer particularly useful for tuberculosis and deep skin wounds. It is also helpful for those with osteoporosis, depleted immune systems and the winter depression that can set in autumn and run until the levels of daylight increase again the following spring.

 

The history of medicine studies the history man’s health and diseases since the beginning of recorded time. It shows that the goals of medicine have always been to promote good health, to prevent disease, to restore health, and to rehabilitate the patient. Healing with light and colour as one of medicine’s modalities reaches all of these goals.

 

            Colour has been administered as a therapeutic modality since prehistoric times. In this study, I will reveal the many methods of healing with light and colour, its roots in folk medicine, and the high-tech applications currently being tested in research programs.

 

            Colour has been adopted as a remedy for illness by shamanists, occultists, natural healers, homeopaths, psychic healers, nurses, naturopaths, chiropractors, optometrists, health educators, modern physicians, traditionally trained clinicians, diagnostician, hospital personnel, medical centre administrators, holistic therapist, and even dentists and podiatrists. Colour therapy, in fact is finally becoming and accepted and established and part of clinical and medical settings. Most health professionals around the world who practice on the cutting edge of advanced medical techniques – especially those utilizing methods of nontraditional and complimentary medicine, such as biofeedback, and electromagnetics – area aware of the power of colour for healing.

 

Disease is a dynamic process that develops in all people. The disease process dates back before man and was coincident with the first form of life on this planet. While not as old as disease, healing approaches began with Neolithic man, who started civilization when he cut and polished the first stone. Colours were a main part of man’s nostrums from about 12000 to 4000 B.C., when the archaic cultures of Sumer (an ancient non-Semitic society of Babylonian origin), Egypt, India and later China made their appearances. Sources for research are carved stones, folklore, myths and legends, psychoanalytic studies of the “magic thought” of primitive man, and primitive tribes still in existing today.

 

There were no treatments back then for major diseases and disabilities. Compound fractures, psychoes, and smallpox, for instance, were resolved by killing the patient to prevent his becoming a burden on the tribe. Minor diseases were treated with herbs, massage poultices, dieting and spectral colours. All these methods had already become an established part of folk medicine when written records were finally begun in biblical time.

 

Empiric healers – such as medicine men, witch doctors, and shaman conjurers – were enlisted because they were inspirational and combined the functions of the scientist, magician, priest, statesman, and bard. They possessed and distributed various items they believed would prevent disease, including objects that protected against black magic; talismans; good luck objects. Each of these objects was painted or stained a colour that held great significance. The colour brought its own psychic factor to the patient.

 

            Magic medicine, which lasted several thousand years and was based on the principle of doing no injury to the patient, took into account the psychic motivations for each disease and endeavoured to understand them. Often the therapy involved expulsion of the problem through bleeding, purging (vomiting), diuresis (increased urination through the use of a diuretic). Not infrequently, the treatment was administered in a room or area of some special colour, and the patient wore clothing of the same colour.

 

Today, colour therapy as an adjunctive healing modality matches a colour with three required courses or processes: 1. the various symptoms and signs of illness known to be affected by the colour; 2. the specific physiological effects desired and known to be caused by the colour; 3. the individual body parts and organs known to be influenced by the colour.

 

            The modern science of applying colour as a remedy, antidote, neutralizer, prophylactic, and or nostrum sprang from the research done by German poet, novelist, playwright, scientist, and critic of life and living Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It advanced further with the creative help of Austrian social philosopher anthroposophy founder, educator, editor, scientist, and colour therapist Rudolph Steiner (1996). A significant statement in Steiner’s philosophy affirms that life radiates colour, and out of illness comes a new consciousness that re-establishes its balance in health and healing.

 

A scientific basis for colour therapy was laid in 1979 by Douglas Pratt, of the University of Minnesota. A member of the university’s biology department, Pratt had been researching the effect of coloured lights on plants. He discovered that very deep red colour and very deep blue colours speed up and slow down, respectively, the metabolism and overall growth of plants. These colours might similarly affect human beings, he suggests. Such medical research has yet to be carried out, however, and Pratt anticipates that investigative work on associated topics will be conducted first on animals and then on humans.

 

            In 1978, William Tiller, chairman of the Department of Material Science at Stanford University, investigated the work of George de la Warr, a radionics researcher in Oxford, England. In his own published works, Tiller confirms that radionic research using colour therapy has merit for human healing and deserves further investigation.

 

            The theory of radionics is that every part of the human body (and of animal bodies, too) radiates a specific level of energy. If all these energies are at their proper levels, the individual’s etheric body is in balance. The etheric body is the spiritual essence of the physical body, but it exists in the abstract and is thus nontangible. It carries the spark of life and can be viewed externally as the colours of the aura. If an individual’s energy levels are either too high or too low, the etheric body is out of balance or in disharmony. Disharmony in the etheric body can result in disease in the physical body. According to the radionics theory, nothing occurs in the physical body unless it first happens in the etheric body (Cooper, P., 2000)

 

            Radionics was originally developed in the early 1900s by Albert Abrams, a Dan Francisco physician whose hypothesis was that disease can be diagnosed by evaluating the radiation coming from the body. Abrams devised a machine, the oscilloclast, to measure this radiation. His work in radionics was never considered successful, but his theories have been refined and expanded by other researchers.

 

            “My experience is that it (the oscilloclast) is very effective in the hands of the right person,” said Tiller. Abrams has applied the oscilloclast to diagnose variabilities in his patients’ auras, which are the rays or layers of coloured ethereal vapours emitting outwardly from the living body.

 

            Administered to an individual’s multicoloured aura, which is said to be electromagnetic field extending out about three feet around the entire body, colour therapy restructures a harmony for the person. People with psychic healing abilities (occultists) can be trained to see the multicoloured aura. A few say they can even diagnose disease by interpreting the intensity of each colour and the distance each colour extends out from the body.

 

            Using radionic principles, a chiropractor, Charles F. Whitehouse of Virginia Beach, Virginia, has developed his own diagnostic machine, the etheronic analyzer. With it, Doctor Whitehouse says, he can measure changes in the concentrations of energy in an aura and the strength of the energy coming from any specific part of the body. By bringing the etheric body’s aura back into balance, Whitehouse says, he is able to treat a physical disease. And he says he brings the aura back into balance by shining a specific combination of coloured lights on it. He uses different colour combination – white light blocked by coloured filters or coloured lights themselves – to correct different health problems.

 

Each colour of light vibrates at different frequency. The colour vibrations reach the patient’s etheric body and “energize if to start vibrating and do what it should be doing,” says Doctor Whitehouse. Before treating a person with radionics for any particular illness, the colour therapist must first clean out the person’s aura in general. This is necessary, he says, because the aura may contain ruptures or leaks. Ruptures can occur in anyone from such experiences as having anaesthesia administered, having an accident, suffering an emotional shock, having a high fever, smoking marijuana, taking hallucinogenic drugs, becoming intoxicated from imbibing alcohol, and undergoing any similar form of pollution. In our over-polluted, industrialized world, about seven of every ten people have leaks in their aura, believes Whitehouse. The leaks give to disease.

 

            The Virginia Medical Board and the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are investigating Doctor Whitehouse. The FDA become involved as a result of his etheronic analyzer. The agency regulates the use of medical equipment in the United States. Yet, at least three of the chiropractor’s many patients have stepped forward to praise his healing techniques (Walker, 1986).

 

            Janet Whittenberg, a homemaker from Norfolk, Virginia, says she obtained good results for her mentally-impaired three-year-old son, Shannon. “I had gone to so many doctors and hospitals,” says Mrs. Whittenberg. “Shannon was a vegetable. He did not do anything. They said his brain was deteriorating, and there was nothing they could do. They considered him a terminal case.”

 

            On the advice of a neighbour, she took Shannon to Doctor Whitehouse, who administered colour therapy to him. “I saw results within a month,” Mrs. Whittenberg says. “He had only two teeth in his mouth and in one month every tooth came in. He had stopped growing, and he started growing again. He was all yellow but that faded away. Now he is very alert, knows everyone in the family, and watches TV. I am very pleased.”

 

            Betty Drury, of Newport News, Virginia, says she has seen “tremendous improvement” in her fifteen-year-old mongoloid son, James, since she began taking him to Doctor Whitehouse for colour therapy. “He remembers better, keeps up school work better, writes better, recognizes more words, and his features are changing,” Mrs. Drury says. “Before we took him to Doctor Whitehouse, he was very hyperactive, he tore up everything and he couldn’t even tie his shoes. After a month of treatment, he suddenly sat down and tied his shoes. And he hasn’t torn up anything since. Everyone in the family notices the difference.

 

            Mrs. Drury says doctors told her that James was uneducable and untrainable. But, she says, he is learning more now after having been exposed to the vibrations of the coloured lights. “His speech therapist at school is amazed at the difference,” she said. “James has started making 100s on every one of his tests.”

 

            A third mother from Virginia Beach says she has been taking her brain-damaged six-year-old son to Doctor Whitehouse. “There’s been a lot of progress,” she says. “I am encouraged by what I see and very pleased, but I don’t know that I’m ready yet to have my name be used.” Still, she has continued to take her son to Whitehouse for colour therapy because the boy has slowly but steadily been improving. And medical doctors, she says, had told her there was nothing could be done.

 

            This third mother explained that her son has been suffering from brain damage since birth and could do little more than roll over before receiving the colour treatment. Now, she says “He has become aware of his surroundings; he scoots all over the place; he is starting to relate to people and developing a temper. He still can’t walk or talk but he can do a lot of vocalizing with sounds.”

 

After a twenty-year career as a successful banker in Chicago, John Nash Ott (1976)  turned his hobby and lifelong interest in time-lapse photography into a full-time investigation of the ecology of light and colour. His research has brought him citations and awards from horticultural, scientific, and medical societies, along with an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Loyola University of Chicago. For a time, Ott worked with Walt Disney himself, doing time-lapse photography. He eventually began his own motion picture company.

           

Even what many refer to as two breakthrough books, Light, Radiation & You: How to Stay Healthy and Light, Ott presents his findings on everyday health hazards and what to do about them. Although they have a lot of repetition, the books do warn of the dangers from overuse and under-regulation of modern electromagnetic technology. The author prescribes colour as a healing mechanism. The books, which have easy-to-duplicate demonstrations, point out:

s         The relationship of colour television to cancer.

s         Why pink fluorescence can bring on headaches, high blood pressure, and insomnia.

s         How such common objects as ionizing smoke detectors, fluorescent lights, television sets, digital watches, and video display terminals can weaken the muscles and diminish the sex drive.

s         How coloured lights have cured skin cancers, near-blindness, and goiter.

s         Why dark-coloured sunglasses may provoke illness and eye disease.

s         Why hyperactivity and irritability in some children are related to the kind of fluorescent lighting used in the classroom.

s         Why full-spectrum sunlight does possess the healthful and healing properties historically ascribed to it.

s         How controlled exposure to certain colours can produce, or reduce, aggressive behaviour in both human beings and laboratory animals.

 

John Ott (1976) has performed practical experiments and laboratory tests on plants, microbes, and animals, and clinical studies with people that all tend to prove that the kinds of intensities of light to which living organisms are exposed have a great deal to do with their illness and wellness. His linking light, colour, and health answers a number of questions that have puzzled scientists for decades. For example, ordinary eyeglasses, sunglasses, windows in homes, and automobile windshields all screen from the eyes most of the ultraviolet that reaches people in natural sunlight. But sunlight deprivation can become a strong obstacle to the healing of sickness in an individual or to the improving of health in someone who unknowingly is suffering the beginning symptoms of subclinical illness.

 

Ott points out in his dozens of writings and hundreds of lectures that a very definite relationship exists between the colours making up white or natural sunlight and human physical and mental health. He explains that for scientific purposes, the different colours are defined in the terms of a measuring system using the wavelength as a standard unit. Each colour has its own wavelength, which determines the colour’s proper place in the man eyes since the waves are either longer or shorter than those that are recognized as colours.

 

Wavelengths shorter that ultraviolet and longer that infrared, each of which the human eye cannot see at the extreme end of the light spectrum, are called radiant energy. These radiant energy waves – radiation – at each end of the spectrum are capable of penetrating through ordinary types of building materials even in total darkness. Thus, all of us are exposed to radiation, and this has now become a special study interest of John Ott.

 

Ott has investigated the electrical dimension of the human body and has demonstrated its electrical field in as simple way by showing that holding a lighting rod or other straight length of metal cause a loss of muscle strength. His working hypothesis is that negative ions give the body energy while positive ions bring on fatigue and even depression. In his presentations, he discusses the negative effects of digital watches, certain manmade fibers such as polyester and vinyl, ionizing-type smoke detectors, certain kinds of fluorescent lighting, video display terminals (VDTs), electronic fatal monitoring equipment in hospitals, and other high-technology items.

 

The negative effects and destruction to the body’s cells from exposure to ionizing and non-ionizing radiation is vast. Radiation is frightening and one of the major causes for the increase in cancer among people residing in industrialized countries. It is also affecting future generations. For pregnant women, for instance, the negative effects from sitting in front of a video display terminal or being exposed to other forms of non-ionizing radiation include miscarriage. Researchers have also found that heavy users of VDTs are more likely to bear children with birth defects than are light users. This electromagnetic force coming from computers is related to the vibratory rays of colours, especially to those in the rainbow and given off by sunspots.

 

            The electromagnetic force derived from computers is the same from of radiation, although less toxic, as that manifested by gamma rays and X-rays in the stratosphere (biosphere). On the scale of electromagnetic-spectrum frequencies, all of the computer’s electromagnetic forces lie close to the level of microwaves (as from microwave oven). Ultraviolet and the rest of the visible spectrum are part of that same biospheric environment as gamma radiation. The electromagnetic spectrum and its vibratory frequencies are given in Table 5.

 

Table 5 The Electromagnetic Spectrum

 

Vibratory Frequency	Electromagnetic Force*
10-15	Gamma rays
10-10	X-rays
10-7	Ultraviolet
10-3	Infrared
10-2	Microwaves
10-1	FM
10`	Short waves
103	AM
105	Radio waves

                            * visible spectrum not included.

 

On the basis of numerous observations, Ott established that light influences the size, number, and rate of growth of tumours in laboratory animals. The results of similar investigations varied under different types of lighting, so Ott now stresses the importance of laboratories including light as a reported variable in their experiments. Ott additionally observed the stunted growth in plants placed near the ends of some fluorescent tubes. He noted that old fluorescent tubes emit more radiation than the new ones.

 

            One of the studies Ott helped to conduct at the Environmental Health and Light Research Institute of Chicago showed that rats placed in front of a television set shielded with black paper first became increasingly hyperactive and aggressive, constantly fighting with one another, then become extremely lethargic, and finally all died. However, rats shielded with lead from the television tube’s radiation all remained perfectly normal.

 

            When Ott added the microscope to his photography equipment, his time-lapse microphotography uncovered a new tiny world of change that no scientist had until then suspected. Ott observed the movements of cells in elodea grass and learned that the cells behave quite differently under different coloured lights. Generally, these cells perform in an established pattern when exposed to any natural sunlight condition, but they break the established pattern and display many variations when different filters are used in the microscope light. The cells can be made to move in different directions according to the colours employed; some are encouraged to standstill and neither flow within nor without the intercellular fluids, white others are encouraged to take up new metabolic patterns.       

           

Animal cells will undergo radical changes when the light colours are changed in the microscope. Ott can increase their metabolic activity or kill the cells merely with the application of coloured light. Working with laboratory mice and using various kinds of lighting conditions, Ott learned how to affect the animals physically. Not only does altering light colours cause external physical changes, but it also has a definite effect on a mouse’s sex life and life expectancy.

 

In recognition of his expertise with colour, light, radiation, and health, the Bureau of Radiological Health of the United State Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked Ott in 1983 to be its consultant. In this capacity, Ott came in touch with a number of colour/light-related project that called for investigation.

            Ott’s study involving elodea grass uncovered that different colours (different wavelengths of light) affect individual chloroplasts, in the streaming process of the chloroplasts within the cells of the elodea grass, photosynthesis takes place. Chloroplasts are granules that act as the seat of photosynthesis in the elodea cells, but only in those cells exposed to light with its full spectrum of colours.

 

            Ott also showed the importance of the ultraviolet wavelengths on the pigment granules in the pigment epithelial cells of the retina of a rabbit’s eye. Ott published a four-part series, “Colour and Light: Their Effects on Plants, Animals and People,” in four Special Subject Issues of The International Journal of Biosocial Research in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988. He summarizes his life’s work and challenges certain sacred assumptions on science and medicine

 

Ott has conducted a study in Gocio School for five months in 1973 among Sarasota, Florida, children to evaluate light and health. The Gocio School in Sarasota installed full-spectrum, radiation-shielded fluorescent light fixtures in two windowless classrooms that each contained forty-nine students for a total of ninety-eight children. Two identical windowless classrooms containing the same number of children but with standard cool-white fluorescent fixtures were used as controls. The results showed that several extremely hyperactive children with previously confirmed learning disabilities calmed down completely, rapidly overcoming their learning and reading problems, in the full-spectrum-lighted environments. Furthermore, the overall average academic-achievement level of these entire two classrooms of children showed significant improvement. The children responded exceedingly well in many ways – mentally, emotionally, and academically – to the simulated natural outdoor daylight furnished by Ott’s lighting fixtures.

 

Simultaneously, the Sarasota County Dental Society did a study on the teeth of these same children in the two rooms with the radiation-shielded light bulbs. The dentists determined that these children developed only one-third the number of cavities as did the school’s other children (the controls), who pursued their classroom activities under the standard cool-white fluorescent lighting.

 

Another study by Ott is one he performed with a group of colleagues from the Environmental Health and Light Research Institute of Chicago. These researchers investigated students at the Adjustive Educational Centre of the Sarasota County School System, a special school for children with learning disabilities and related problems. This study showed that all the television sets in the homes of these disabled children were giving off measurable amounts of X-ray radiation. When the sets were repaired or discarded, all the children except one were able to return to their regular classes within a few months.

 

The researchers learned that the one child who showed no response – even when her viewing hours were greatly restricted and she was made to sit way back from the TV set – was sleeping directly on the other side of the wall from the television tube, which was in her living room. Her pillow was actually only a few inches – the thickness of the wall – from the back of the set. The ordinary building partition here afforded no protection from the radiation. When the situation was corrected, this little girl, too, was able to follow her classmates back to the regular school.

 

Ott also participated in a research project with personnel at the Wills Eye Hospital and Research Institute of Philadelphia. In patients at the eye hospital, certain tranquilizer drugs were causing various side effects in a layer of cells located right behind the rods and cones of the retina. These pigment epithelial cells were thought to have little to do with vision, but what they did contribute toward sight was unknown.

 

Ott was asked to do a time-lapse microscopic study of the effects of adding different tranquilizers to the growth media for the pigment epithelial cells while the time-lapse pictures were being taken. He used a phase-contrast microscope that showed the details of the cell structure without having to stain the cells with dye. The dye usually employed for staining would also have killed the cells. The greatest contrast and sharpest image through the phase-contrast microscope is achieved by using a monochromatic light (light of a singe colour). To obtain this, different coloured filters are tried until the filter creating the greatest contrasting light is found. The pictures Ott took very clearly showed that the filter colour used in the microscope’s light source increased the tranquilizer side effects in the pigment epithelial cells. These side effects happened more so under coloured light than when the drugs were administered alone, without colour.

 

Without colour, there is blackness followed by death. With colour, there is white light with correct physiological functioning by the human organism. For this reason, original thinkers in medicine now exist who have become unhappy with the standard “Establishment” methods of treatment because, they feel, patients do not recover fully enough from the disease and pestilence besetting them in this modern era. These thinkers include the members of progressive medical academies and the health professionals on the cutting edge of New Age medicine. Many believe that cancer and other diseases may possibly be reversed by using the proper colour vibrations. Two groups that believe this are the Great Lakes Association of Clinical Medicine, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and the America College of Advancement in Medicine, in Laguna Hills, California

 

William Campbell Douglass of Clayton, Georgia, is one of these progressive thinkers. While no longer in practice, Douglass is utilizing ultraviolet irradiation therapy in Ultra-V (also known as the Photolume). Douglass’ method uses the technique of photopheresis to irradiate the blood of an ill person with ultraviolet to conquer infection, cancer, erysipelas (a streptococcus infection of the skin), rheumatoid arthritis, some cases of autoimmune deficiency disease, including AIDS and ARC (AIDS-Related Complex), thrombophlebitis, and bronchial asthma. It can also be used to improve peripheral blood circulation in the treatment of toxemia, or blood poisoning (Walker, 1986).

 

As we have seen, we live by sunlight. This reaches our brain through the eyes and is monitored by a very important gland – the pineal gland, which is really a light metre. The gland controls puberty and influences our sleep patterns. It secretes a hormone called melatonin (mela means ‘dark’ or ‘black’), which induces hibernation and sleep. With limited sunlight levels of melatonin are high by day as well as by night. Sunlight, however, suppresses melatonin. We are, after all, programmed to be active in the daylight and to sleep at night. Our ancestors lived by the sun and the great rhythms of light and darkness, as do many people currently across the globe. In fact that was the pattern for us all until in 1879 Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and showed that night could be turned into day. That in itself has created a huge revolution in society. In the cities particularly, a new indoor lifestyle has developed with a fair degree of stress and dubious commercial advantage, as it is possible to exchange the sunlight for working all hours.

 

But the light bulb has given us another means of  tackling  SAD.  Sunlight suppresses melatonin, but so does light from a light box. ‘Bright light therapy’, as it is called, can lift moods and also has been found helpful to those suffering from eating disorders and those undergoing detoxification from drugs and alcohol. These light boxes are increasingly available. There is even a dawn simulator – a clock that lights up slowly before the alarm goes so you wake to your own sunrise.

 

Research has showed that light travels to the hypothalamus, an area in the brain rich in serotonin, which influences melatonin secretion. Serotonin levels are lowest in the winter and are stimulated by light to control the melatonin.

 

Beyond the Artic Circle, around the time of the winter solstice at December 21-22, the sun does not rise at all for at least one full day. Moreover, at Point Barrow, the northernmost community in the United States, the Sun fails to show for sixty-seven days. It’s dark there nearly the entire winter season. During this time, many Alaskans are struck by a syndrome called seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which dramatically alters their attitudes. SAD is a persistent mental illness marked with anxiety, neurosis, and depression every fall and winter, followed every spring and summer with joyfulness, mental peace, tranquillity, and psychomotor activity accompanied by much excitement.

 

            The depressive symptoms of SAD often are debilitating and include excessive sleeping (as much as twenty hours daily), fatigue, lack of energy, carbohydrate craving, and weight gain. Furthermore, some women manifest SAD in the form of seasonal premenstrual syndrome (known medically as late luteal phase dysphoric disorder), but only in the fall and winter. These women remain virtually asymptomatic during the spring and summer. Four SAD researchers – Barbara L. Parry; Norman E. Rosenthal; Lawrence Tamarin; and Thomas A. Wehr, all at the clinical Psychobiology Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland – reported on this seasonal premenstrual syndrome occurrence in the June 1987 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry (Walker, 1986).

 

            SAD, in fact, focuses on this one sex; it occurs predominantly in women and usually begins in early adulthood. In winter two or three days when exposed to bright colours and artificial light every day for two to six hours. However, they will relapse into the syndrome within two or three days if the colours and light are withdrawn.

 

            The idea of using bright spectral colours and light to treat human seasonal affective disorder came from studies with animals showing that changes in the length of the days (the photoperiod) trigger changes in mood, behaviour, and physiology in many species. Light waves enter the body through the eyes and travel along the neural pathways first to the hypothalamus (a higher brain centre) and then to the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a pea-sized mass of tissue attached by a stalk to the posterior wall of the third ventricle of the brain, deep between the cerebral hemispheres at the back of the skull. The pineal gland secretes melatonin, an important chemical signaling agent causing target sites in the animals to respond in a seasonally appropriate manner. Colour and light tend to modify the pattern of pineal melatonin secretion.

 

            Chronobiologists (scientists who study cycles as they relate to biology) have discovered that the pineal gland is a master controller of physiological processes. Its neurohormone melatonin helps it regulate circadian rhythms. Chronobiology studies suggest that the stimulation of pineal glandular excretion provides safe and effective readjustment and helps accelerate the return to normal the symptoms of SAD. Such readjustment support can come coloured lights or from pure melatonin taken as a food supplement (Hobday, R., 1999).

 

            Studies in the northwestern United Stated have shown that people can be cured of SAD by using special full-spectrum lights placed in their homes and automobiles. As long as they use these lights, their symptoms of seasonal affective disorder will disappear.

 

            The further discovery that bright artificial lights with colours can suppress human nocturnal melatonin secretion suggests that the retina of the eye, the hypothalamus, and the pineal gland all work together as one mechanism or axis that helps the brain make judgments about the seasons. A person will react with changes in mood, behaviour patterns, and personality according to the amount of pineal melatonin his body has secreted.

 

            Some researchers additionally asked, “Does the eye solely enter into bringing about the correction or is the skin somehow involved as well?” Four other psychiatrists, led by Thomas A. Wehr, (one of the SAD researchers), all from the Psychobiology Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, attempted to unravel this puzzle. Their medical journal article “Eye Versus Skin Phototherapy of Seasonal Affective Disorder,” in the June 1987 American Journal of Psychiatry, revealed that the antidepressant effects of phototherapy were much greater for ten out of twenty patients when light was applied to the eyes than when it was applied to the skin. The visual response to colour from and light is therefore more important for a person to benefit a ray’s healing effect. In their article, Wher and his associates wrote:

      Light and colour administered during daylight hours is an effective treatment for seasonal  affective disorder even though it does not extend the apparent length of the day and does not alter the pattern of nocturnal melatonin secretion…. IN this study exposure of the eyes to light was associated with an antidepressant effect that was superior to that of exposure of the skin to light.

       On the basis of this and previous experiments we now know some of the properties of phototherapy that are essential for its therapeutic effect and some that are not. Intensity and duration appear to be important factors. As we have seen, light applied to the eyes is much more effective than light applied to the skin. This finding strongly suggests that exposure of the eyes is a necessary condition for the response in most patients, but it does not rule out the possibilities that light with spectral characteristics different from the ones used in this study might have antidepressant effects when applied to the skin or that a subgroup of patients might respond when their skin is exposed to the light used in this study. Time of day of treatment is not a critical factor, although it may influence the magnitude of patients’ responses. With regard to this variable the present study corroborates the finding that phototherapy administered only in the evening is effective. Interruption of sleep is not a necessary condition. The wavelengths of light that are necessary for the antidepressant effect of phototherapy are as yet unknown.

 

            This national institute of Mental Health study, along with other studies, shows that our mental health, even-tempered personality, socially acceptable behaviour, and general efficiency in life depend to a great extent on normal colour balance and full-spectrum light being maintained in our daily environment. Our everyday world completes twenty-four hours under the spectrum of colours rays from light. As our technological society brings us closer to an artificial, controlled environment and we use more manmade light sources, we are throwing our psyches more and more out of harmony. In fact, if we are not careful, we can get ourselves trouble without even recognizing it.

 

            As part of his research for colour studies, Robert Gerard, of the University of California at Los Angeles, recorded test subjects’ personal experience with, judgment of, and feelings about different colours. He found red was generally considered disturbing by the more anxious subjects; those having chronic high tension showed a greater physiological response to red. In contrast, blue calmed the tense subjects; blue is an assured psychological tranquilizer in cases of tension and anxiety. In short, Doctor Gerard’s psychological research proves that blue produces an increased sense of well-being, calmness, and pleasant thoughts for people, while red causes excitement, arousal, and tension.

 

            Faber Birren, an education researcher from the University of Chicago turned colour researcher, wrote many articles and books about the psychology of colour. In one of his clinical journal articles, “The Effects of Colour on the Human Organism,” published in 1959 in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy, he discusses a doctoral thesis in psychological written by Gerard for the University of California at Los Angeles. Gerard had painstakingly reviewed the whole area of influence by light and colour, especially red and blue, on human psychophysiology. He had answered the questions:

s         Do such hues as red and blue arouse different feelings and emotional in people?

s         Do the hues induce correlated changes in the autonomic nervous system, brain activity, and subjective feelings?

s         Do the patterns of response correspond to the relative energy of the coloured stimuli?

 

Using red, blue, and white lights transmitted on a diffusing screen with balanced brightness and spectral purity, Gerard had measured his subjects’ blood pressure, palmar conductance (palm sweat), respiration rate, hearth rate, muscular activation, frequency of eyeblinks, and brain waves. To take these measurements, he used an electroencephalogram, and he recorded the result.

 

            Based on Gerard’s studies, Birren concludes that active people in schools and hospitals, including outwardly integrated people, nervous people, and small children, will find relaxation in an actively coloured environment. According to Birren, the visual and emotional excitement in the environment will match the spirits of these persons and therefore set them at ease. Attempts to pacify the active through chromotherapy or something similar would only bottle up their spirits to a bursting point.

 

            Birren also suggests that integrated people prefer a more sedate environment. He writes:

A quiet soul told to wear a red dress or a red tie may by no means respond according to the usual patterns. On the contrary, such boldness may make him increasingly shy and embarrassed. In the case of mental disturbance, however, reverse policies may be necessary. A person with an inordinate craving for bloody red – which might lead to trouble – probably should be exposed to blue in order to counteract his temper. The melancholy person, who is tolerant only of drabness, probably should be exposed to red to animate him, physiologically as well as psychically.

 

Hayden Frye, the coach of the University of lowa Hawkeyes football team, hasn’t lost a home game in many years of coaching at that college. Part of his success he attributes to the colours of the home team and visiting team locker rooms. The Hawkeyes’ locker room is painted blue. The visiting team’s locker room is decorated in pin. The colour blue gives the lowa players a feeling of strength and aggression. Pin, on the other hand, has a weakening effect on physical strength and causes the release of norepinephrine in the body and brain. Norepinephrine is a chemical that inhibits the specific hormones that contribute a aggressive behaviour. Frye’s paint job therefore diminishes the aggression and strength of the opposing team members.

           

In 1979, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley concluded a study done within the California prison system. Prison guards selected for their strength and endurance were instructed to exercise with heavy dumbbells. They performed as many curls with the weights as possible. Some of the guards were exceedingly muscular and strong.

            One guard was able to repeat the curling exercise with heavy weights an astounding twenty-eight times. When the finished, a tall, wide blue poster board was placed in front of him, blocking his view of everything but the blue colour. Even though he felt some fatigue and used the same weights, he was still able to repeat the exercise and even increase his number of curls by one – to twenty-nine curls. However, when the researchers replaced the blue poster board with a pink board, the muscular guard, even after resting, was able to curl the weights only five times. Other strong and musclebound guards repeated the exercise with the same results.

 

            The California prison system has now installed pink-painted “sedation cells” for tough an unruly prisoners. When a prisoner breaks the rules, becomes overly aggressive, or requires disciplining for some other reason, he is moved to one of these pink sells for at least thirty minutes. Hostility, aggressive behaviour, and general violence seem to begin decreasing within about ten minutes.

 

            Alexander G. Shauss, the director of the American Institute for Biosocial Research in Tacoma, Washington, was the first to report this suppression of angry, antagonistic, and anxiety-ridden behaviour among prisoners. Says Doctor Schauss, who is also the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Biosocial Research, “Even if a person tries to be aggressive or angry in the presence of pink, he can’t. the heart muscles cannot race that fast. It’s a tranquilizing colour that seems to sap your energy. Even the colour blind are tranquilized by pink rooms.”

            The sedating and muscle-relaxing effects of pink are now being tried by behavioural psychologists on geriatric patients, adolescents, and those in family therapy.

 

            Other colours have been used in prison settings to induce very different results. U.S. News and World Report journalist Nicholas Daniloff reported his experiences. While interrogated by the Russians in the mid-1980s. for two weeks, overseas reporter Daniloff underwent psychological torture by the GB, the Russian secret police. Interred at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, he endured psychological torture involving lockup in a cell painted black to induce depression. Many people find black very depressing. The unconscious associations with black include death, dying, bad investment, terrorism, and treachery. Daniloff admits that the colour of death and dying made him more malleable to his GB interrogators, but he actually had very little to reveal.

 

            The bad effects of black, however are reversible. London’s Blacfriar Bridge was frequently used for suicide. When the black bridge was painted green, suicides there decreased by almost 34 percent.

 

Sunlight includes a broad spectrum of rays. The ones that tan are the ultraviolet rays (UVs), and they pass directly through the outer layers of the skin to affect the more sensitive lower layers. In addition, there is scientific confirmation that they travel beyond the skin into other parts of the body to produce either a healing or destructive effect depending on which form of UV is predominant.

 

Two basic types of ultraviolet radiation reach the earth. Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays are shorter and are the primary cause of sunburn. Ninety percent of their effect is on the skin surface; 10 percent is underneath. The tan a person gets on his skin surface from UVB rays helps to protect against sunburn underneath his skin surface. Ultraviolet A (UVA) rays are longer. They do 90 percent of their damage on the supporting inner layers of skin and have at least ten times the wrinkling effect as UVBs. The tan obtained from UVA rays does not protect against sunburn (as is often erroneously claimed by tanning salons). However, both UVA and UVB rays have both negative and positive photochemotherapeutic effects on human physiology and pathology.

 

The head of the Department of Dermatology at Yale Medical School, Richard Edelson, and his colleagues at the General Clinical Research Centre of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre, New York City, recently employed a technique of advanced colour therapy called photochemotherapy. They used ultraviolet irradiation of a drug to make the drug more effective in the treatment of cancer.

 

Doctor Edelson’s article, “Treatment of Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma by Extraorporeal Photochemotherapy,” in 1987, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, reports on significant improvements in patients with lymphoma cancer after they received ultraviolet A (UVA) light and 8-methoxypsoralen(8-MOP).

 

The –MOP was made from natural substances found in lemons, limes, and several fresh vegetables, including celery, parsnips, and parsley, and was given orally to the patients. A half hour later, a quantity of blood was withdrawn from a vein in the left arm of each patient. An irradiating device was used to treat the blood with UVA, and the blood was then returned to the patients but through a vein in their right arm. By itself, 8-MOP did nothing against the lymphoma. It was the UVA-irradiated blood containing 8-MOP molecules that was the actual chemotherapeutic agent. Edelson and his colleagues report that when 8-MOP/UVA blood was injected, there was a loss of viability in the target lymphocytes. That is, the lymphocytes involved with the cancer cells reduced their activity by 88 percent.

 

Edelson had previously reported obtaining similar results when he and his colleagues used essentially the same treatment protocol on cutaneous T-cell leukemia in 1983. Edelson’s experience with 8-MOP may explain why amygdalin (laetrile), which is made from natural substances found in apricot pits, works better in sunny Mexico and Southern California than the Mayo Clinic in overcast Rochester, Minnesota, during mid-winter. Because there was no irradiation of the laetrile, the Mayo Clinic’s trials failed and may have errorneously discredited the therapeutic effects of amygdalin.

 

In part IV of his series of articles published in the International Journal of Biosocial Research, John Ott describes the works of George R. Prout, Jr., and his colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital. Prout and his group used a drug for photodynamic therapy by activating it in the patient’s body using the colours in spectral light. They wanted to destroy cancer cells in the bladder without harming the normal tissue. Their experiments were conducted in the Peoples Republic of China. Ott writes:

Similar applications of this approach, called photodynamic therapy, have been used to treat tumours of the lungs and oesophagus as well as recurring breast cancer.

Doctors first inject patients with a drug called haematoporphyrin. After waiting two days, the physicians shine light on the cancerous cells in the lining of the bladder. The light excites the haematophophyrin that remains in these cells. This kills the cancer cells but spares normal cells, which don’t contain haematophophyrin.

The doctors use a slender fiber tube to get laser light to the cancer. It is pushed through the urethra into the bladder. The laser gives off light but not heat.

 

“Tumour cells are unable to rid themselves of this compound,” say Doctor Prout, who directed the study. “Other cells seem to pass it on very simply.” Thus, once again, photochemotherapy ot photodynamic therapy uses light with its attendant colours as a healing agent. Personal, societal, and other behaviours are also affected by colours.

 

The director of the Serammune Physicians Laboratory of Vienna, Virginia, Russell Jaffe, a Fellow of the Health Studies Collegium, in his clinical journal article, “Immune Defense & Repair System: Clinical Approaches to Immune Function Testing & Enhancement – Part 3,” published in the Townsend Letter for Doctors in May 1990, discusses the importance of one’s skin covering in immunology. Jaffe writes, “The use of sunlight is known to enhance activation of 1,25 DiOH-cholicalciferol (active vitamin D₃), an important immune modulator and calcium regulator, to enhance maturation of the B-lymphocytes (producers of antibodies) and to stimulate connective tissue synthesis.”

 

Speaking in print with fellow holistic physicians and other health professionals who apply innovative biologics rather than pharmaceutical products for enhancing their patients’ health, Jaffe advises that thirty to sixty minutes of full body exposure to the Sun taken daily gives optimum clinical effects. For example, there is a direct beneficial interaction between antioxidants such as beta-carotene (the precursor to vitamin A) and sunlight exposure. He reveals that holistic physicians at the Princeton Brain Biocenter in Skilman, New Jersey, find dichromatic lights, particularly green, helpful when sunlight is unavailable.

 

Among the beneficial effects observed are substantial reduction in galvanic skin response (GSR), a general index of autonomic, adrenergic arousal, after 15-20 minutes use. The effect of light on free radical formation in skin has been studied. The beneficial effects of increased illumination on calcium absorption is reported. Others find enhanced illumination helpful in seasonal affective disorders. More is not necessarily better and classic wisdom teaches the importance of balance of sunlight and nutrient availability. Light, as radiant energy of particular frequencies does entrain the brain through nonvisual pathways and influences endocrine biological rhythms.

 

During the day, certain brain rhythms are maintained by fluctuations in light intensity and spectrum. Recent research has linked mood changes to seasonal and circadian fluxes. Other studies suggest that seasonal depression may be reduced by exposure to appropriate lighting sources. The Sun produces a spectrum of colours generated by refraction. Most mechanical sources produce colour by pigment subtraction. In contrast, dichromatic sources, which are the most suitable for photobiologic effects, use materials of differing refractive indices to generate colour.

 

Both visual and nonvisual pathways in the body are employed by physicians on the cutting edge of new advances in medicine for achieving photobiological homeostasis of immunoregulation. These biologic innovators are probably thirty years ahead of the usual traditionally practicing, Establishment-type allopaths stuck in the medical mainstream, as represented by American organized medicine. Russell Jaffe is one of those biologic innovators. His interest in the mechanisms of health and the evoking of the human healing responses led him to apprentice in the systems of various cultures, including such healing arts as acupuncture, meditation, and a variety of related therapeutic approaches. In addition, Jaffe did innovative studies of platelet and other blood cell biochemistry and metabolism. Among the test he developed are the early colon cancer screening test using occult blood detection not interfered with by vitamin C consumption and a variety of tests related to the blood clotting and immune defence systems. He developed the first method of measuring cell-meditated immunity, which provides an “immunologic fingerprint”.

 

In an explanation of how to apply photobiological coloured lighting to produce immunoregulation and advantageously trigger brain rhythms, Jaffe offers the following description:

The person sits four to six feet from the face of a green light for 20 minutes twice daily. This is typically done in the morning and early evening. A socket-clamp light holder can facilitate positioning of the colour source. During this time other activities (such as deep breathing, relaxation, reflex, guided imagery, range of motion exercise, certain reading) can be performed simultaneously. The person need not look directly at the light. Deep brain structures and chemical pathways can be health-adapted by this action.

If indicated, yellow, amber, or blue dichromatics can be arranged to shine on the back, chest, abdomen, or any other specific area of the body. The same position and time conditions apply. Several lights can be used simultaneously. It is best if these are the sole source of illumination. The PAR 38 DICHROMATIC 150 WATT Spot or Flood lights would be the light source. In the United States both Sylvania and General Electric produce these items. Quality lighting suppliers, particularly those specializing in outdoor or theatrical lighting (where true colour rendering is important), should carry or be able to obtain these lights for you.

 

               In Ocular Light Therapy – Light Wave Stimulation, light can be delivered to the body, an area or a point. In this therapy it is delivered to the eye. The treatment was developed by Dr John Downing in the course of 20 years in the neurosensory field. It increases the ability to absorb light energy so that the brain and body can function more efficiently. This lead to improved mental, emotional and physical well-being and performance. The treatment is particularly valuable for those with learning difficulties, dyslexia, hyperactivity, cerebral palsy and autism. Anorexia, bulimia and ME or chronic fatigue syndrome, SAD and depression may also be helped.

 

Research demonstrated that light travels to the brain and stimulates and improves its performance. An increasing amount of photocurrent (light-generated nerve current) may be delivered by the Lumatron. Light travels to three areas :

1.     the brain stem affecting balance

2.     from the visual cortex to the cerebral cortex, to enable both seeing and interpretation of what is seen

3.     from the visual cortex to the limbic system (the primary emotional centre of the brain ), linking with smell, memory and  sexual behaviour.

 

Light travelling to the hypothalamus from the retina to the suprachiasmatic nucleus – the SCN – affects the body’s rhythms, for the SCN is considered the body clock. The hypothalamus is the brain of the brain. The pituitary is attached to it. The hypothalamus controls 75 per cent of the body’s processes. Dr John Downing quotes a case in which he treated a woman of 30 suffering from severe depression, chronic pain and no sense of smell. After nine sessions of violet light her depression cleared completely and although she still had pain, her sense of smell – lost for years – returned. The procedure followed was that outlined below under treatment given by Pauline Allen at The Sound Learning Centre. It is effective for fatigue, stress, hormonal imbalance, PMS, insomnia, poor concentration, memory, learning dysfunction and selected vision problems (Cooper, P., 2000).  

 

The Sound Learning Centre in North London’s principal Pauline Allen is the only centre in the UK offering light wave stimulated based on the Downing technique. The interview start with a visual fields are awareness test to establish whether light wave stimulated is appropriate. During the sessions you sit in a darkened room listening to music and looking at wavebands of light in colours indicated by the assessment as likely to be beneficial. You do this for 20 sessions lasting 20 minutes each, one or two sessions a day. Further visual tests are taken, which generally shown that the visual fields have been extended, which means you are now able to absorb more light from the natural environment. Physical and psychological improvement in wellbeing are often immediate, while for some, further courses may be indicated.

Light wave stimulation can be used on its own or combined with auditory integration training (AIT) with excellent results. In one case an adult male had severe reading and writing difficulties, very poor vision, difficulty functioning by day and general lack of confidence. He could only read pink papers, for example the Financial Times, and claimed he had very twisted visual fields, which after treatment expanded from 10 degrees to 25 degrees. He re-established a normal sleep pattern, became more confident and alert, was able to perform better and passed his HND exams with flying colours, coming top of his class.

 

The lamp used, the Lumatron and the Photron, have also been used by Dr Steven Vasquez and others in their psychotherapeutic work. The lamp is a good tool for psychiatrists and counsellors. The work is not as well known in the UK as it should be, but courses are run in Ireland and in England by Monica O’Malley, who has been doing this work for a number of years and is known internationally for her training programme. She can be contacted in Carlow, Ireland.

 

The medical profession has researched light for decades. In the USA in 1972 Dr Thomas Dougherty used light and photofrin, a light sensitive chemical, in cancer treatment at Rosswell Park Institute. He discovered that the photofrin gathered in the area of malignancy, where it luminesced in response to violet or ultraviolet light. If Dougherty then focused a red laser beam on the tumour within 10 minutes it would begin to self-destruct.

 

This work is being researched in Britain by Professor Stanley Brown at the Centre for Photobiology and Photo Dynamic Therapy, Leeds University. The eventual aim of researcher at the Centre is to have drug-light treatment available in GPs’ surgeries to treat skin cancer within the next two years. This will be in the form of a cream which is rubber into areas of the skin around a tumour and according to Professor Brown, within two to four hours the tumour will have soaked up the drug in the cream and become photosensitive. Red light from a laser or red lamp will then be applied and in a period of about four weeks the tumour will be destroyed with no need for surgery.

 

               Dr Duncan Anderson at Hammersmith Hospital, London, has researched a form of goggles promoted by David Noton and widely available in the UK for sufferers from migraine and PMS. This ‘Light mask’ may be used as a take-home adjunct to such in-clinic treatment as the Lumatron.

 

               Dr Kira Samoilova, a world authority on lasers, spoke at LIGHT ’98 of her work in St Petersburg cleaning blood by irradiating it with ultraviolet light. It has proved a highly successful procedure which has cleaned blood of viruses, cancer and other chronic conditions. One to two percent of a patients blood is taken, irradiated and reintroduced into the patient’s system

 

               In Buqapest Dr Marta Fenyo uses polarized light (in straight parallel lines rather than at all angles from a given point) to heal leg ulcers and acne. She found that polarised light boosts the immune response in blood factors and the result is systemic – treat one or two sores and the rest elsewhere on the body will clean up also. Many conditions benefit from treatment with polarised light from sports injuries to sore throats.

The Swiss company Bioptron has developed two lamps, for use in this treatment, the larger for use in clinic, the smaller for individuals use. This smaller one is no bigger than a hairdryer and comes with instructions for extending its use into a personal colour therapy treatment unit.

 

               Lasers have been developed over the last 30 years. The word is an acronym, standing for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. There are hot and cold lasers. Hot lasers cut, cauterize and destroy. Cold or soft lasers work at a lower power and stimulated cell function in a non-thermal and non-destructive manner. Full-spectrum sunlight gives 700 frequencies, but cold lasers can deliver just one frequency – monochromatic light.

There are, in fact, two ways of delivering monochromatic :

 a) with a cold laser;

 b) with a LED – light- emitting diode.

 

It has been observed that human cell tissue responds more powerfully to a single wavelength – monochrome – than to more than one wavelength at a time. Monochromatic light increases oxygen and blood flow stimulated nerve functioning, reduces pain and relaxes the most potent frequencies for pain relief.

 

Cell tissues respond best to certain frequencies in the red and infrared spectrum: 630nm, 660 nm, 880nm, 940nm, 950nm. Water and haemoglobin within the body tissue restrict the full absorption of light outside the 600 – 980nm range. One frequency may be primary resonant, for example 660nm, and the others harmonics. The frequency 660nm is most resonant to human tissue because it stimulates the production of cell tissue and rapidly promotes regeneration of the skin and blood tissue in areas exposed to it. A wound the size of a 10p piece treated with 660nm LED or cold laser for several minutes every two hours can produce new skin within one to two days no scarring or scabbing.

 

While 660nm red light lasers penetrate 8 – 30 nm, deep enough to affect muscular tissue and very useful for scars, wounds, ulcers and skin conditions, 830 – 950nm infrared lasers penetrate 30 –40nm and reach joints, tendons and muscles and can touch osteo – and rheumatoid arthritis.

 

Work with red light is not new. In the 1890s Dr Neils Finsen treated smallpox lesions and variola with red and infra-red light. Increasingly LEDS are replacing cold lasers. They give a larger light dispersion beam and allow a greater margin of error in locating and activating acupuncture points. There are 12 meridians on each side of the body ; each meridian has 25 –150 acupoints. LEDs sedate with continuous light and stimulate with pulsed light. Treatment deliver 1 – 12 joules of energy (a joule = a unit of energy to 1 watt for 1 second ).LED is applied with gentle pressure on an acupoint for 30 – 90 seconds.

 

The Monocrom Light Dome is the creation of the Swedish psychologist and architect Karl Ryberg. Karl studies lasers with Dr Karu in Moscow and Spiritual development under Ronald Beesley at White Lodge, Speldhurst, England. In this words :

‘In Sweden we have now constructed extremely powerful light projectors that can isolate any range of the visible spectrum with a high resolution…professor Mester, in Budapest, found in the 1970s that low-level lasers could heal a variety of tissue wounds and cellular damage…in the 1990s Professor Karu in Moscow proved that the full coherence and polarization of a laser was biologically unnecessary. The only crucial factor for cell repair was that the light stayed monochromatic within a bandwidth of less than 20nm…

The greatest benefits from monochromatic photo-therapy occur within the brain. These fatty tissues are particularly transparent and are very rich in mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles within every cell. The light stimulates regeneration of nerve tissue and the interneural connection. An abundance of the multiple connection between brain cells is the very basis of efficient thinking.’

 

The power of the light in the Monocrom light dome is such that you may have no more than 15 minutes a month. Entering the dome is like walking into a giant pumpkin with a huge slice taken out to make a door. Inside it is lined with white. You may lie down full length or sit and you have the control switch in your hand. The door is closed and you are in darkness. Gradually, the colours begin their slow sequence, deepening and changing almost imperceptibly into one another. The jewel – like colours fill the dome and your eyes with the most delicious, nourishing and achingly lovely sensation. At any point you can control the sequence, holding on to a colour if you want more of it or allowing the flow to continue. It is food for the brain and sheer joy.

 

With regard to the effect of light on the brain, it is known that light stimulates cell response in the brain has traditionally been associated with consciousness. In her book Molecules of Emotion Dr Candace Pert raise the question of where indeed consciousness really is. Her research demonstrates that informational substance – neuropeptides – are not only secreted by the brain but also simultaneously by the immune cells throughout the body in response to feeling, interaction, thought belief and emotion. This raises the question, where is the mind?

 

Interestingly, in the 1980s a new set of informational substances discovered previously in the plant and animal kingdom raised the same question. Informational essences, pheromones, where found to be secreted from the body (detectable by smell) into the environment in response to a state of mind or being. We ourselves speak of ‘the smell of fear’.

 

So, where is mind? Is it in the brain and can it be separate from the body as a complete unit or do we have a ‘body-mind’. It is obvious from the above studies that consciousness and light are connected.

 

INTERGRATION OF LIGHT AND CONSCIOUSNESS

 

Perhaps the first thing we should be aware of is the energy of thought, it is, in fact, faster than the speed of light and a fourth dimensional tool not bound by our third dimensional limitations of time and space. At this level, prayer and radionics (the projecting of the energy of number and form for healing) and the sending of healing thoughts in whatever form – colour, sound pattern, number are effective. It is simply in accordance with the laws that operate at that level and are as not fully understood by contemporary science.

 

It is well known, however, that energy follows thought. The idea in the mind, the desire of the heart have their energy which follows on to bring about a manifestation at the physical level of the desire. Intention is of major importance at this level. So, even if a method of or performance in healing is less than, brilliant, the good intention will always be honoured and, where necessary, corrections made and inadequacies for. There is a divine economy in which we are part of a far greater scenario than we can imagine and where angels, guides, friends and saints support our healing work.

 

At this level our perceptions also change. Good and evil may impact on our systems as warmth or cold or light and darkness. Sometimes a spirit or an entity may get into a place or a person’s auric field. The spirit may be lost, not able to go to the divine Light and may be living parasitically off the energies of the person to whom it has attached itself, unwilling to go anywhere else. It is important that such a spirit be helped to find the Light of God and its fulfilment there.

 

                     There are those who have had an experience of light as they leave their body in a near-death experience (NDE) and move along what they describe as a tunnel into the next world. In the book by Dr Peter Fenwick and his wife called In Truth To The Light: 300 cases of near-death experiences, a challenge to those who say that when the brain is dead the mind is no more.

 

                     We come finally to the point where what we see – the eye of consciousness and vision – and who we are – the ‘I’ of identity – become merged and cannot be described separately from one another.

 

‘To own and accept one’s humanity’, says contemporary mystic Rosemary Anne Addison, ‘is to take on board a collective consciousness existing in and emerging from the earth between in all its shapes and diversity. It takes us deeper and further into the central “I” for all comes from the “I” and returns to its central core again. Should something go wrong on the levels of consciousness-outer or inner level-it can be dealt with from the central “I” which sends out shafts of light three dimensionally in the shape of a triangle and disperses the disturbance into clouds of dust and all returns to normal and of a purer form.’

 

There are those like Usui, the Japanese founder of Reiki, who have experienced reality in terms of white light. For Usui, after an extended 21-day meditation and fast there was an awareness of a white light striking him at the brow chakra, the Third Eye, with many rainbow bubble particles of light in front of him and, on what felt like a white screen, the symbols from the Sanskrit scriptures blazed in gold. He felt charged with energy to start new healing and teaching work. The light is inside him and working within him.

 

In conclusion, many quantum physicists and field theorists points to the realization that matter is not fundamentally distinguishable from energy. David Bohm, has indicated that whatever meanings we have in our minds are inseparable from the totality of our bodies. This, then, link with the sort of thought I had in relation to some words of R. L. Gregory, in which he referred to the way in which self-observation – self-visualization – creates a cybernetic mental model that feeds back into the body-mind totality.

 

                     Having moved through other considerations of the nature of light – spiritual, creative, other dimensional – we have now reached the point where we can consider healing with light without any such aids, simply using the person of the healer as the means of healing. This inner technology has everything to do with the light of consciousness and with the use of the energy of mind and heart. Of course this inner focus is also present in those using outer technology and it is important that it is. Of what are we conscious? What is it that we see and aware of from this and other dimensions or levels of being? We may also ask who is conscious ?  Who is seeing ?

 

In the West, visualisation is less deliberately used than in the East. In the East, there is no difficulty in believing that thoughts can become externalised objective facts and, conversely, that there is little difficulty in internalising objects, such as images of deities.

 

            For Hinduism and Buddhism in particular and, to a lesser extent, Taoism are the Eastern religions that set out to foster the use of visualisation in their practices. Buddhists in general, more than the practitioners of any other religion, have spent much time in a study of the mind and its workings and have realised that the mind can be tamed, its stormy surface stilled, its calm depths plumbed. Those of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) and Vajrayana (Diamond Vehicle) have realised the spiritual value of its natural propensity for visualising as a way to stillness and Supreme Bliss. They, too, use visualisation in the clearing of the chakras. In addition, they use it in the worship of deities, and in the effort to identify with such deities.

 

             The following example is of the method by which identification with the Buddha may be managed. The meditation begins with as clear as possible a visualisation of the Buddha seated on a throne seven feet or so in front of the meditator. Kathleen McDonald describes the next stages thus(Page, 1990):

      At the level of your forehead …is a large golden throne adorned with jewels and supported at each of its four corners by a pair of snow lions …On the flat surface of the throne is a seat representing the sun and the moon …Seated upon this is the Buddha …His body is of golden light and he wears the saffron robes of a monk. His robes do not actually touch his body but are separated from it by about an inch. He is seated in the vajra, or full lotus, posture. The palm of his right hand rests on his right knee, the fingers touching the moon cushion.

 

Once this visualisation has been stabilised, a request is made to the Buddha for his blessings to free the meditator of negativities and then a stream of purifying white light is visualised as flowing from the heart of the Buddha to the crown of the head of the meditator.

           

While reciting the deity’s mantra – tayata om muni muni maha munaye soha – the throne is visualised as dissolving into the Buddha, who now comes to the space above the meditator’s head, melts into light and dissolves into the meditator’s body, so that he or she becomes one with the Buddha. Such methods attain their full heights in Vajrayana. I rely on Kathleen McDonald again:

      At your heart are a lotus and a moon. Standing upright around the circumference of the moon, reading clockwise, are the syllables of the mantra, tayata om muni muni maha munaye soha. The seed-syllable mum stands at the moon’s center. Visualize that rays of light – actually your wisdom and compassion – emanate from each letter and spread in all directions. They reach the countless sentient beings surrounding you and completely purify them of their obscurations and delusions and fill them with inspiration and strength.

 

Similarly, there are visualisations leading to worship of other deities, for instance, the worship of the powerful Buddhist deity, the Lady Tara. One of her many aspects is as Goddess of the Underworld, in which she rules the demons of the hells. In modern parlance, she may be said to rule those demons of the psyche such as greed and avarice. Yet another of her aspects is as the Goddess of the Earth, ruling all plants, animals and human beings. Her domination of wild animals again symbolizes the possibility of her restraining the instinctual drives of the human psyche and of her worship giving the devotee some possibility of first meeting the devils in the unconscious depths and then of restraining, repressing or sublimating them. She should be visualized and evoked by means of her mantra, which is om tare tuttare ture soha.

 

The Tibetan Buddhists in particular believe that the mind’s power of imagination is part of a continuum of energy – thought being a less dense and concentrated form of energy that can just as easily manifest itself in material form. They believe that thought can be so concentrated as to emerge in material form, as we say, as tulkus.

 

Geoffrey Ashe, (1978) comments on tulkus in Miracles:

      …a special focusing of thought and will – by a superior being, or by several people together – a human tulpa can result which is an actual person, able to live a complete life from conception to death. Such a person is born in the usual way and is called a tulku or ‘phantom body.’ A tulku child need not be visibly different from other children, but embodies a god or a demon or someone who has never lived before or perhaps simply a hope or an ideal – whatever it was that the creator or creators may have been thinking about. This is the clue to such puzzling notions as the mystic succession of Dalai Lamas.

 

Such succession is not confined to the Dalai Lama. There are living now several reincarnated lamas and a full account may be found in Vickie McKenzie’s (1989) book Reincarnation – the Boy Lama. Geoffrey Ashe goes on to say that the resurrected Christ’s body also behaves like a tulpa. ‘It could be composed of what (a lama) called the radiant form of matter, mind-substance.’

 

The creation of mental pictures in minds untrained in their use is most often involuntary, such pictures rising like flotsam in the sea to the surface of the mind and then sinking, sometimes without trace, never to be seen again.

 

            Whatever their immediate cause, many of these wandering mental pictures rise from the deepest depths of the collective unconscious. They may thus be those mental creations that Carl Jung recognized as archetypes such as are most often acknowledged in analytical therapy and present more nakedly in our memories of dreams. Most often they lie unacknowledged and unrecognized behind everyday waking thoughts and actions – dim, shadowy and potent. In contrast to the East, such potency is less immediately interpreted as the presence of gods who can be praised and appeased. Instead it may feed into our everyday unease, our ‘existential angst’, for the archetypes are culturally loaded. Carl Jung wrote in Collected Works, Vol XIV, for instance, of the ‘redeemer-figure’ universally present in human psyches, ‘Whether the redeemer-figure be a fish, a hare, a lamb, a snake or a human being; it is the same redeemer-figure in a variety of disguises.’ So, where we moderns now have lurking in the depths of our psyches the threat of nuclear or ecological destruction, the Greeks had Nemesis to punish their hubris, the Hindu has Shiva and the Tibetan Buddhist has an aspect of  Tara.

 

            It is in the East that the archetypes surface more readily. Where Westerners repress theirs angst, the followers of Eastern religions acknowledge theirs and acknowledge and sublimate their fears. From this point of view, so called ‘reality’ is merely the result of our need to measure and categorize those things that our limited powers of perception and cultures persuade us are there, often having been passed through the filter of the collective unconscious.

 

            There appear to be two layers of unconscious. There is a layer – in Carl Jung’s terminology, the collective unconscious – in which are found the mythic archetypes and there is another layer – Sigmund Freud’s ‘id’ – in which our animal history lives on. Among other characteristics, an aspect of human beings is that we are highly developed animals and our animality, our brutishness, is driven underground.

 

            Both layers are found within our minds, affecting our daily conscious lives. Too many people ‘live lives of quiet desperation’, at the mercy of the id and the collective unconscious. Psychotherapists and mystics aim, each in their own way, to control them and to grow towards fulfilment or enlightenment. It is a path that, if undertaken without a guide and/or deep understanding, may be fraught with danger.

 

            All appearances are maya, illusory concepts, and it is in Hinduism, of all the Eastern religions, that we find ourselves in territory that is the most far removed from the Western Judaeo/Christian/Islamic tradition.

 

            The ‘dark night of the soul’, or even Bunyan’s ‘Slough of Despond’, which figures so prominently in the biographies of Christian saints, may be brought on by the mystic’s near approach to the devils that lie within and a consequent repression of their appearance, for there is little, it seems, in the Christian and Islamic traditions that leads an individual to being able to face, acknowledge and control these demons. Acceptance of the devils within is as much a part of Eastern religion a sit is a part of Western psychotherapy.

 

            It is Carl Jung who points up the distinction most aptly. He draws our attention to the fact that in the Western, theocentric religions, they exalt God and worship Him on high, whereas in Buddhism and in lesser extent, in all Far Eastern religion, we withdraw inwards. Westerners exteriorize while Easterners interiorize. Where the West has the High Altar and steeples and pinnacles reaching to heaven, all typifying the ‘way of ascent’, the East (in Hinduism, as an example) has the lingam, the phallus, placed in a pit, under ground level, all typifying the ‘way of descent’. Where we hear ‘thou shalt not’, in the East we are more likely to hear ‘it would be better if…’

 

            Carl Jung claims that these differences reflect another fact of Western  cultures. He says in Psychology and the East that the West’s working principles is that ‘…nothing is in the mind that was not previously in the senses’. Jung goes to develop his principle with the statement that, ‘Indian thought and Indian art merely appear in the sense world, but do not derive from it.’ (What a world of sensual spectacle, tough, what an abundantly writhing mythology is revealed in Hindu temple carvings.)

 

            The implication of this is that any visualisation done by a Hindu swims up, as it were, from the depths of his or her psyche, whereas a Westerner’s visualization, where it is used, is designed to swim down to those depths. The former emerges as a statement about the existing inner being of the devotee, while the latter is designed to modify the inner being.

 

            A study of Indian (that is Hindu and certain Buddhist) practices leads this study to the conclusion that for them reality is not based primarily on sense perception, but on a sinking, a withdrawal into that ground we share, the ground of the collective unconscious and ancient mythic symbols. From these arise visions that are consciously adopted and invoked by means of mudras (gestures), mantras and the like.

            The images that spring to mind in the imagination during, for instance, a meditation on a mandala may be either beneficent or terrifying and are the products both of our interior consciousness and of our need to bring order to our experience.

 

            The underlying fact Eastern religions seek to persuade Westerner the truth of is that the cosmos is organic, growing, fluid and ever-changing. Fulfilment, then, or enlightenment, may be achieved by deliberately colluding in the creation of another aspect of maya than the everyday, thereby discovering more of its nature. As Thubten Pende(1989) says in The Mandala,

      Likewise, nothing exists as it appears to my senses and, instead of sheepishly following the illusory display of ignorance – something I have yet to profit by – I let it go and create instead a theatre of wisdom and compassion: still illusory, but having a much better effect on myself and others.

 

On the other hand, the everyday may be taken to extremes and transformed, as in Tantra, some schools of which encourage excesses in mundane appetites of all kinds as a path to the light.

            All the related literature reviews as shown above had proven to us that the light and consciousness are inter-connected. This connection also can be seen in the Eastern religion practices as discussed.  Therefore, I will present the healing methods and techniques in the following chapter  based on the data collected on the integration of light and consciousness using the modalities of visualisation and meditation.