Human physiology in an electric universe

[SMM]

Thank you for sharing this, Keyhole :)

 

[Chad]

There a few threads where this post could go but i figure this one is probably the most relevant.

I just came across this article by Mercola about fascia, and he links to two documentaries, one is by Dr JC Guimberteau (30 minutes - this one looks particularly intersting) and another by Deutsch Welle (45 minutes). I haven't watched them yet but i plan to.

I've been looking into fascia over the last few years because i think it's at least partly related to some of my own issues, and I think this article goes some way to (simply ) explaining the role it plays, as well as some of it's lesser known qualities.

What You Need to Know About Your Fascia

• September 01, 2018
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  Story at-a-glance
  
  • Your fascia, the fibrous connective tissue found throughout your body, accounts for about 20 percent of your body mass
  • Your fascia stores and moves water, and carries voltage, acting like an electrical wiring system
  • Fascia may play a significant role in pain, especially back pain. The reason for this is because the fascia is one interconnected system, and when it loses its suppleness, pain can transfer from one region to another
  • Fascia is made up of fibroblasts — cells that produce collagen and other fibers — held together by a surrounding matrix. Physical inactivity causes the fascia to tighten and become less supple
  • The fascia’s ability to slide plays a major role in back pain. Fascia in people without back pain can slide about 75 percent of its length; in people with back pain, this movement is reduced to about 50 percent
  
  

By Dr. Mercola

The 2018 DW Documentary, “The Mysterious World Beneath the Skin,” delves into the workings and functions of your fascia, the fibrous connective tissue found throughout your body. Remarkably, this thin layer of tissue accounts for about 20 percent of your body mass.
As explained by Dr. Jerry Tennant in his book, “Healing Is Voltage: The Handbook,” your muscles are stacked one on top of the other in a specific order (much like batteries in a flashlight) to form a power pack. Each organ has its own battery pack, which is a stack of muscle batteries.

These muscle batteries are in turn surrounded by fascia, which acts as a semiconductor — an arranged metabolic molecule designed to move electrons at the speed of light, but only in one direction.

Together, the muscle stack and the surrounding fascia serve as the wiring system for your body, carrying the voltage from the muscle battery inside, out, through the fascia and to the appropriate organ. In addition to moving electricity, fascia also acts as a hydraulic pump, and is responsible for moving fluid around your body.

As noted by Dr. Dana Cohen, a doctor of internal medicine and author of “Quench: Beat Fatigue, Drop Weight, and Heal Your Body Through the New Science of Optimum Hydration,” a book about optimizing hydration, your fascia is actually a movement system for water in your body. To activate this system — and optimize cellular hydration — you have to engage in physical movement.

[There's a review of the book Quench here on the forum written by member Prodigal Son]

Pain Transfers Through Fascia
Fascia has long been overlooked, but its functions are now starting to be investigated at greater depth. According to the featured film, fascia may actually play a significant role in pain, especially back pain. The reason for this is because the fascia is one interconnected system, and when it loses its suppleness, pain can transfer from one region to another.

In other words, when you experience pain in an area, the actual cause and origin of that pain often stems from a completely different area. For example, Thomas Myers,1 an expert on fascia and coauthor of “Fascial Release for Structural Balance,” says he gets the best, long-term results in patients presenting with plantar fasciitis when treating the fascia in the lower leg, hamstrings or even the base of the neck.

According to Myers, the low back is a weak spot for most people, but the fact that it hurts there doesn’t mean a back problem is causing the pain. The pain may be sourced in the arches of your feet, knees, hips or shoulders, for example. Jan Wilke, Ph.D., is conducting sports medicine experiments in an effort to verify the anatomical chains proposed by Meyers and others.

His findings confirm that, for example, when moving the foot, the fascia in the lower thigh does glide back and forth, and by stretching the leg, mobility in the upper cervical spine of the neck increases. These findings suggest there is in fact a “force transmission across the fascia connections.” Wilke also suspects force is transmitted not only vertically throughout the body, but also horizontally, which is what Myers contends.



Living Fascia

The film also features Dr. Jean-Claude Guimberteau, a French hand surgeon, who singlehandedly has changed how medical professionals view fascia. While fascia has previously only been investigated using cadavers, Guimberteau wanted to understand its workings better in order to improve his own surgical techniques.

[This reminds me of the recent discovery of the 'Interstitium'. According to the article, it's primarily fluid and conventional investigation involved slicing the skin resulting in the loss of the interstitium fluid:

"What was once thought to be dense, connective tissues running all throughout the body has now been found to be a network of fluid-filled compartments that may act as 'shock absorbers.'

It's long remained undetected due to the field's dependence on the examination of fixed tissue on microscopic slides, according to the researchers.]

He came up with the ingenious idea to insert an electron microscope camera under the skin of a live patient. Footage is included in the film, but you can also see the water movement in action in the short video above. “It seems totally chaotic, but it isn’t,” Guimberteau says, adding the fascia is “a perfectly efficient system,” and one that makes life possible.

As noted in the film, “fascia exists everywhere in the body, in many shapes and consistencies.” Surface fascia is located directly beneath your skin, whereas deep fascia surrounds your muscles and organs, including your brain. Dr. Carla Stecco, who is also featured in the film, has made great contributions to our understanding of fascia by producing the first atlas of the human fascial system.2

This is the first time in human medical history that the entire fascial system of the human body has been systematically documented. Research by Robert Schleip, Ph.D., reveals fascia is made up of fibroblasts — cells that produce collagen and other fibers — held together by a surrounding matrix. Essentially, the fascia is primarily built out of collagen.

Physical Movement Is Essential for Healthy Fascia

Collagen is what allows your body to close a wound and is an important part of your body’s healing system. However, too much collagen can cause problems, and excessive collagen growth is a result of inactivity. One test showed that after keeping a broken arm in a sling for three weeks, the connective tissue had already begun to overgrow.

What Schleip’s research shows is that exercise is extremely important to maintain healthy fascia function — a finding that prompted Schleip himself to start doing daily jump rope exercises. Without adequate physical movement and exercise, the connective tissue structures start to overgrow, losing flexibility and suppleness. As mentioned earlier, cellular hydration is also impeded.

Overly tight fascia can even compress nerves and muscles, resulting in pain, either at the site or elsewhere in your body, via force transmission. The fascia is arranged in two layers, and when you move, those layers slide back and forth across each other. Healthy fascia has the ability to shift or slide about 75 percent of its total length.

This sliding ability, it turns out, plays an enormous role in back pain specifically. When comparing the fascia in people with and without back pain, fascia researcher Dr. Helene Langevin3 discovered that the main difference between the two is the ability of the fascia in their back to slide across each other with ease. Whereas healthy fascia can move about 75 percent of its length, in people with back pain, this movement is reduced to about 50 percent.

Like Schleip, Langevin believes excess collagen production is responsible for this reduction in the fascia layers’ ability to slide. Animal experiments demonstrate that exercise can counteract this overproduction, further confirming Schleip’s findings.

Healthy Fascia Is Important for Inflammation Control, Wound Healing and Pain Relief

Langevin also found that inflammation is decreased and wound healing is sped up through movement, such as gentle stretching. Why is that? Langevin found that when you stretch, the fibroblasts expand by up to 200 percent. The expansion of the cell causes it to transmit chemical signals ordering the muscle to relax. Langevin explains:

“What we found is that the stiffness of the connective tissue is actively regulated, minute by minute, by the fibroblasts. So, this is a dynamic, active cellular regulation of connective tissue tension. That could be important, because what we’re finding is that when you do acupuncture for example on the tissue, fibroblasts actually respond and expand and that helps the tissue relax. The same thing [occurs] with stretching.”

Another fascinating fact about fascia: It responds and contracts — completely independently of the muscles, nerves and organs it surrounds — to chemical messengers. Even more interesting, Schleip has discovered fascia responds not only to chemical messengers of inflammation but also to chemicals associated with emotional stress.

“It was a breakthrough for us to learn that the fascia also reacts to that, very, very slowly and sustainably,” Schleip says. This is more scientific proof supporting the idea that emotional stress can cause physical tension and pain. Last year, I wrote about the late Dr. John Sarno, who exclusively used mind-body techniques to treat patients with severe back pain.

He believed you unconsciously cause your own pain, and that pain is your brain’s response to unaddressed stress, anger or fear. The fact that fascia responds to your emotional state (via the chemicals produced by these states), helps explain why Sarno had such a remarkable success rate.

The culprit in question is a signaling molecule known as TGF, the release of which is triggered by stress. “If I’m tensed up for weeks, even in my sleep, it’s mainly the red muscle fibers that are tense. [But] they relax fairly quickly. It’s the white fascia tissue, the sheath around the muscle … that [gets] hard,” Schleip says.

Fascia Tensegrity
The fascial system is now thought of as a tensegrity system. Tensegrity is a combination of the words “tension” and “integrity,” and tensegrity modeling helps us understand how the fascia works as a complete system to hold your body together.

The conventional view of the skeleton as a more or less rigid structure of connected bones is extremely misleading. As explained by Myer, your skeletal bones actually float freely, completely separated from each other. What holds the bones together is the connective tissue system. Were you to magically remove all the connective tissue in your body, your bone structure would collapse in a heap on the floor.

Similarly, the conventional view of the spine is that it’s a rigid “pole” of stacked vertebrae with cushioning discs in between. The tensegrity counter model, demonstrated by Schleip, reveals a very different picture of the spine. The vertebrae do not actually rest on or press down on each other.

Rather they too are free floating, held together by the tension of the connective tissue. As long as the fascia maintains the proper amount of tension on each vertebra, your spine will remain erect and pain free — even if you have disc degeneration.

The Importance of Water
As mentioned in the beginning, fascia also plays a crucial role in the movement of water. In fact, the connective tissue is made up of about 70 percent water, and physical movement helps keep this water moving. Hyaluronic acid acts as a lubricant for your connective tissue. As explained in the film, the hyaluronic acid forms a “sponge-like network that binds large quantities of water.”

As a result, the less hyaluronic acid you have, the less mobile you are, as your fascia will be drier, less supple and less able to slide properly. Here again, movement has been shown to be a crucial component. Low water content in the fascia makes it brittle and less elastic. Experiments reveal manual fascia manipulation techniques such as Rolfing help increase water reserves and suppleness of the fascia.

[I've recently been receiving Rolfing and i can say that, for myself, it has been more effective than any massage, chiropracter, physio, as well as well movement or exercise]

The force of the pressure appears to be key. When sufficient pressure was exerted on the fascia, it would actually fill up with more water once the pressure was released than it had before the pressure was applied. In other words, Rolfing helps press the old water out of the connective tissue, encouraging it to refill with fresh reserves.

If done hard enough, several times, the connective tissue ends up moister than it was before. The reason for this appears to be that hyaluronic acid flushes in along with the water, thereby improving the tissue’s ability to hold water. Massage, if done deeply and slowly enough, will also help. However, the most effective strategy is active movement.

The Importance of Exercise Recovery

With regular exercise, the fibroblasts increase their ability to produce fresh collagen. You can actually improve the quality of your fascia in as little as three days of active movement. However, severely agglutinated fascia — connective tissue that is firmly stuck together due to excess collagen production, caused by inactivity — can take up to one year to completely regenerate.

As you exercise, small tears in the fascia will occur, just as micro tears in your muscle occur during strength training. To allow the fascia to regenerate and heal, you’ll want to recuperate for two to three days after vigorous exercise. Schleip recommends “alternating high doses of tensile stress with a two- to three-day break.”

Is Fascia Pain Sensitive?

Dr. Siegfried Mense,4 professor of anatomy at the University of Heidelberg, is studying whether fascia itself is sensitive to pain, which would necessitate it to contain some sort of nerve fibers or nerve endings. Indeed, Mense discovered back fascia contains rather dense clusters of nerve fibers.

In other words, the fascia does have pain receptors, and this too may help explain otherwise inexplicable back pain. The question is, how can you determine whether the pain originates in the fascia or in the muscle? This can be quite difficult. That said, tests reveal that the pain response of the fascia is greater than that of the muscle itself.

As noted in the film, the fascia is really a “key organ of sensory perception,” and since stress has a direct impact on this connective tissue, that means your central nervous system is also a key component. Your sympathetic nervous system connects your brain to virtually every organ in your body. When triggered, your sympathetic nervous system responds with “fight or flight.”

A hypothesis brought forth by Mense is that the sympathetic nervous system may influence fascia via sympathetic nerve fibers embedded in the connective tissue. When those fibers are irritated through stress, chemicals are released that cause blood vessels to contract, thereby causing reduced blood flow and pain. He believes this may explain why many experience worsening back pain when they’re stressed.

Take Care of Your Fascia for Optimal Health
As you can see, your fascia is a vastly underestimated component of your body. The good news is it’s fairly simple to optimize the function and health of your connective tissue. All you need to do is to move your body more. Walk more. Exercise more. Stretch. There are many reasons to get more movement into your day, and now you can add caring for your fascia to that list. Doing so may help address any number of different aches and pains, especially back pain.

Here are the documentaries he mentions:

Also, the following site provides a lot of up to date research on fascia: Schierling Chiropractic / Destroy Chronic Pain

Here's three posts i thought were interesting:

1. https://www.doctorschierling.com/blog/the-fascia-fibrosis-inflammation-connection-the-cause-of-all-disease-including-cancer
2. Fascial Adhesions Commonly Entrap Nerves, Leading to Chronic Pain
3. Whiplash, Chronic Neck Pain, and the Relationship to the Sternocleidomastoid Muscle

 

[Jenn]

Thanks for the excellent information Itellsya, the fascial network is just fascia-nating

Here is Buckminster Fuller talking about the tensegrity model:

And a couple more podcasts from osteopath Josh Lamaro discussing the collagen network, bioenergetics and infrared light, I will post a summary later for those interested :

This site has a wealth of scientific research that is annually presented at the Fascia Congress: 2018 Accepted Abstracts – Fifth International Fascia Research Congress, Berlin, November 14-15, 2018

 

[SMM]

The Body Electric Summit by Dietrich Klinghardt and Christina Schaffner is accessible and available this October from here.

Scroll down for a full list of speakers towards the bottom of the page, including James Oschman and Gerald Pollack.

 

[Jones]

The following are some highlights from Mae Wan Ho's book "The Rainbow and the Worm:

Chapter 3. Can The Second Law Cope With Organised Complexity?
The Second Law Restated
Cell biologists are beginning to take seriously the view that the cell is more like a solid state, or more accurately, a liquid crystalline matrix, where nothing is freely diffusible, and even the cell water is organised.

Chapter 9. Coherent Excitations of the Body Electric
Coherent Excitations of the Body Electric
Songs and dances may have their origin primarily in the pleasurable sensations arising from the entrainment of one’s own internal rhythms to those of the collective, they also serve to mobilise the energies of the collective in an efficient and coherent way.

Chapter 12. How Coherent is The Organism? The Heartbeat of Health
Complex Music of the Healthy Heart
The apparent regularity of the heartbeat conceals abundant variability, and contrary to common intuition, the more healthy the heart, the more variable the beat. The heart has four chambers: two upper small ones called left and right atrium and two lower big ones called left and right ventricle. A ‘pacemaker’ site, the sinoatrial (SA) node located in the back wall of the right atrium, initiates the heartbeat. Special cells in the SA node spontaneously generate spikes of electrical discharge (action potentials) at a rate of about 100 per minute. This intrinsic rhythm is strongly influenced by the autonomic (involuntary) nerves. The vagus (parasympathetic) nerve brings the resting heart rate down to 60 – 80 beats/min, the sympathetic nerves speeds up the heart rate. The action potential generated by the SA node spreads throughout the upper heart chambers (atria), depolarising them and causing them to contract .

Chapter 13. How Coherent is The Organism? Sensitivity to Weak Electromagnetic Fields
How Magnetic Field Can Affect Organisms
Membrane lipids (as well as proteins) belong to a large class of molecules called liquid crystals, which can exist in a number of mesophases, i.e., phases that are neither solid nor liquid, but in between (see Chapter 13). These mesophases are characterised by long - range order in which all the molecules are aligned in quasicrystalline arrays. Liquid crystals are relatively easily aligned with electric and magnetic fields, which is the basis of the liquid crystal display screens that come with watches, calculators, computers and computer games. The cell membrane is also known to play a major role in pattern determination. One way in which an external static magnetic field can affect body pattern is if a global alignment of membrane components — as a kind of phase transition brought on normally by an endogenous electric field — is involved in pattern determination. In that case, a weak external magnetic field could easily interact with the endogenous electric field to alter the alignment on a global scale.


Chapter 14. Life is All The Colours of The Rainbow in a Worm
The Light That Through the Green Fuse
Long - Range Communication Between Cells and Organisms In considering the possibility that cells and organisms may communicate at long range by means of electromagnetic signals, Presman pointed to some of the perennial mysteries of the living world: how do a flight of birds, or a shoal of fish, move so effortlessly, spontaneously and freely in unison without following marching orders from a leader? How do the individual organisms communicate their intentions so flawlessly and instantaneously to coordinate their movements? Similarly, during an emergency, organisms can mobilise prodigious amounts of energy almost instantaneously. The motor nerve to the muscle conducts at 100 times the speed of the vegetative nerves that are thought to be responsible for activating processes leading to the enhancement of the contractile activity of the muscles required in a crisis: adrenalin release, dilatation of muscular vessels and increase in the heart rate. Yet, it appears that the muscle actually receives the signals for enhanced coordinated action long before the motor signals arrive at the organs responsible for the enhancement of muscle activity! This suggests that there is a system of communication that sends emergency messages simultaneously to all organs, including those perhaps not directly connected with the nerve network. The speed with which this system operates seems to rule out all conventional mechanisms. (This is also true for normal visual perception and muscle contraction described in Chapter 1.) Presman proposed that electrodynamical signals are involved, which is consistent with the sensitivity of animals to electromagnetic fields. Electrodynamical signals of various frequencies have been recorded in the vicinity of isolated organs and cells, as well as close to entire organisms.

[.....]
We had accomplished the first ever, high resolution and high contrast imaging of an entire, living, moving organism. And the very idea of using polarising light microscopy to look at dynamic order within the organism was also new. We were puzzled for a long time as to how a living squirming worm could appear in brilliant interference colours which had hitherto depended on rock crystals or liquid crystals having an orderly arrangement of atoms or alignment of molecules that is purely static. The reason living organisms could appear like a dynamic liquid crystal display is because all of the molecules in the tissues and cells including especially the water molecules, are not only globally aligned as liquid crystals, but also moving coherently together as a whole. Because light vibrates much faster than the coherent motions, the light passing through will experience perfect order at every instant, which is the basis for generating the brilliant colours. These beautiful images are hence direct evidence of the remarkable coherence of the living organisms. What is so suggestive of dynamic order is that the colours wax and wane at different stages of development. The early stages associated with pattern determination are some of the most colourful images. We have also been able to discern traces of the pre-pattern of the body plan, though not quite in the way expected. I am far from disappointed. It confirms my belief that the best experiments always tell one something unexpected, as they are acts of communicating with nature. ( More about that in Chapter 19.) The most dramatic change is in the final stages when the colours intensify in the embryos that have started to move several hours before they are due to hatch. It is as though energy, say in the form of an endogenous electric or electrodynamical field, is required to order the molecules, so that even though the structures are formed, the molecules are not yet coherently arranged, and require something like a phase transition to do the job. The closest analogy one could think of is the phase ordering of liquid crystals in electric and magnetic fields, for biological membranes and muscle fibres in particular, have properties not unlike those of liquid crystals (see next chapter). As consistent with the above interpretation, the colours fade when the organism dies or becomes inactive due to dehydration or to the cold. In the latter cases, the colours return dramatically within 15 minutes when the organism is revived.

[....]
The technique works on all live biological tissues. Tissues that have been fixed and stained often fail to show any colours, unless they are very freshly fixed and well preserved. Thus, we seem to have a technique for imaging dynamic order that is correlated with the energetic status of the organism. This could be evidence for the non- equilibrium phase transition to dynamic order that Fröhlich and others have predicted. All our investigations on the optical properties of living organisms described in this chapter have been done using relatively non-invasive techniques that enable us to study living organisation in the living, organised state. That is, in itself, a major
motivation towards the development of non-invasive technologies . Ultimately, they lead to a different attitude, not only to scientific research or knowledge acquisition (see Chapter 19), but also to all living beings . For as these technologies reveal the immense subtlety and exquisite sensitivity of biological organisation, they engender an increasingly sensitive and humane regard for all nature. The most remarkable implication of our findings is that organisms are completely liquid crystalline. We shall explore the implications of the liquid crystalline organism in the next three chapters .

Chapter 15. The Liquid Crystalline Organism
Rainbow Colours and Liquid Crystals
Since our discovery of the technique, we found that several microscopists had discovered the same setting before us, but none of them had been looking at living organisms nor did they realise the full potential of the technique for studying liquid crystalline regimes in living organisms. Even well into the 1990s, most biologists still regarded the idea of the liquid crystalline organism as ‘mysticism’. But then, very few biologists knew physics, and some had never even heard of liquid crystals.

Liquid Crystals and Pattern Determination
As mentioned in Chapter 3, ‘memory’ is always a projection to the future. Memory is not only relevant to embryonic development; it is also an important feature of conscious experience. We shall see how liquid crystals may be much more concretely involved in consciousness than anyone has suspected.

Chapter 16. Crystal Consciousness
The Liquid Crystalline Continuum and Body Consciousness
You may think I have been using the word ‘consciousness’ rather loosely in referring to the embryo, which after all, does not have a brain. Whenever people speak of ‘consciousness’, they usually locate it to the brain, where ideas and intentions are supposed to emanate, and which, through the nervous system, is supposed to control the entire body. I have always found that odd, for like all Chinese, I was brought up on the idea that thoughts, like feelings, originate from the heart. I have come to the conclusion that a more accurate account is that our consciousness is delocalised throughout the liquid crystalline continuum of the body (including the brain), rather than being just localised to our brain, or to our heart. By consciousness, I include, at the minimum, the faculties of sentience (responsiveness), intercommunication, as well as memory. Though in the emerging ‘science of consciousness’, it seems to be restricted to conscious awareness (see later). You have seen how the entire cell is mechanically and electrically interconnected in a ‘solid state’ or ‘tensegrity system’ (Chapter 10). Actually all the cells in the body are interconnected to one another via the connective tissues, as has been pointed out by biophysicist James Oschman more than 20 years ago, when he began to develop into a world authority on energy medicine that he is today. The connective tissues include the extracellular matrix surrounding all cells, the skin, bones, cartilage, tendons, filaments, the wall of arteries, veins, alimentary canal, air - passages, and various membranous layers covering the internal organs and tissues. The connective tissues are also liquid crystalline, and fresh-frozen or well-fixed sections of the skin, cartilage, and tendons all exhibit the same brilliant interference colours typical of living organisms. Most people regard the connective tissues in purely mechanical terms; their functions are to keep the body in shape, to act as packing between the major organs and tissues, to strengthen the wall of arteries, veins, intestines and air passages, and to provide the rigid elements (bony skeleton) for the attachment of muscles. At best, connective tissues or the extracellular matrix is seen as part of the tensegrity system of the body that transduce mechanical information to cells to determine their structure and function (see Chapter 10). The proteins of the connective tissues have always been seen as poor cousins to the many ‘sexy’ (!) growth factors, hormones, transmitters, signalling proteins, receptors, regulators and enzyme cascades that plague our biochemical and medical texts . We really have not done sufficient justice to the connective tissues. For they may be largely responsible for the rapid intercommunication that enables our body to function as a coherent whole, and are therefore central to our health and well - being.

Quantum Coherence and Conscious Experience
Russell Hebert and colleagues at the Maharishi University of Management Fairfield in the United States found a significant increase in alpha-wave (7 – 13 Hz) phase-synchrony between the anterior and posterior regions of the brain as well as over the entire brain during transcendental meditation. Transcendental meditation is widely interpreted to be a state of ‘pure wakefulness without activity of thoughts and feelings’, ‘restful alertness’ or ‘thoughtless awareness’ , a kind of ‘activated ground state’. Alpha frequencies appear to be particularly involved in integrating experience. Researchers have found increased synchrony and coherence in alpha frequencies during cognitive and creative tasks. Even more tellingly, there appears to be a re-setting of phase in the alpha frequencies at the onset of a stimulus. This ground state may be a state of the highest degree of quantum coherence that a person can achieve. In this light, all other states of consciousness are different degrees of de-coherence which generates time and entropy

Chapter 17. Liquid Crystalline Water
Collagen Organising Proton Cables
No one in the cell biology community using the technique has commented on the significance of the observation, i.e., the collagen is liquid crystalline, and water is integral to this liquid crystalline structure, making it behave like a quartz crystal, as Zhou Yu-Ming has demonstrated in our laboratory. The water enters intrinsically into the liquid crystalline structure, and is also integral to its function.

Chapter 18. Quantum Entanglement and Coherence
Quantum Coherence Survives Weak Measurements
Universal Quantum Entanglement One clear message has emerged from recent advances in quantum physics within the past decade: quantum coherence is much more pervasive, robust, and fundamental than people thought; and in my opinion, it is quite unlikely for organisms not to be quantum coherent, at least to some degree. This has some profound implications. The individual organism, defined as a domain of coherent activities, opens the way to envisaging aggregates of individuals as organisms, as, for example, populations, communities, or societies engaging in coherent activities. As coherence maximises both local freedom and global cohesion, it defines a relationship between the individual and the collective that has previously been deemed contradictory or impossible. The ‘inevitable’ conflict between the individual and the collective, between private and public interests, has been the starting point for all social as well as biological theories of Western society. But quantum coherence tells us it is not so ‘inevitable’ after all. Eminent sociologists have been deploring the lack of progress in sociology for years, saying that it is time to frame new questions. Perhaps sociology needs a new set of premises altogether. In a coherent society, such conflicts do not exist. The problem is how to arrive at such an ideal state of organisation that in a real sense, nurtures diversity (and individuality) with universal love.

Universal Quantum Entanglement
Consciousness — the faculties of sentience, responsiveness and memory — may be understood as a macroscopic quantum wave function inhering in the liquid crystalline continuum of the organism. Organisms are quantum superpositions of coherent activities. This has profound implications on the nature of knowledge and knowledge acquisition, as well as issues of determinism and freewill, which we shall explore in the final chapters . I make no claims to having solved the problem of life. I have sketched with a broad brush where some of the clues may lie, pointing to a number of new and promising areas of investigations on bioelectrodynamics, nonlinear optical properties, and the liquid crystalline nature of living organisms. In the process, I have also raised many more subsidiary questions that I hope will keep the ‘big’ question alive.

.Chapter 19. Ignorance of The External Observer
Ignorance of the External Observer
Ideally, we should be one with the system so that the observer and observed become mutually transparent or coherent. In such a pure, coherent state, the entropy is zero; and hence uncertainty and ignorance are both at a minimum. Perhaps such a state of enlightenment is just what Plato envisaged as being one with the Divine Mind; or, as the Taoists of ancient China would say, being one with the Tao, the creative principle that is responsible for all the multiplicity of things. It involves a consciousness delocalised and entangled with all of nature, when the awareness of self is heightened precisely because self and other are simultaneously accessed. I believe that is the essence of aesthetic or mystical experience. This manner of knowing — with one’s entire being, rather than just the isolated intellect — is foreign to the scientific tradition of the west. But I have just demonstrated that it is the only authentic way of knowing, if we were to follow to logical conclusion the implications of the development of Western scientific ideas since the beginning of the present century. We have come full circle to validating the participatory perspective that is universal to traditional indigenous knowledge systems the world over. I find this very agreeable and quite exciting.

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