A Blue Poppy blog post by Bob Quinn
“The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.”
Albert Einstein
I tried last year to write about fields and acupuncture but was unhappy with the result, so I did not submit it anywhere to be published. In October I taught Sotai with Jeffrey Dann, Ph.D. at the Zen Shiatsu Chicago Conference (Sotai was well received—it was an honor to work with Jeffrey). In that conference Michael DeAgro, a well regarded shiatsu practitioner and psychotherapist, taught two days on his approach to the sinew channels. He brought in an element of “spatial awareness” that he had picked up in his Zen and Quantum Shiatsu studies with Pauline Sasaki. I will not go into what this means right now other than to say it once again ignited my interest in exploring this concept of “fields.”
The quote I lead this article with clearly shows Einstein’s opinion of the foundational role of fields in this universe. Einstein was fond of what he called “thought experiments.” An example of one of his thought experiments was how at age 16 he imagined chasing a beam of light. That is something that a physical body can never do—all we can do is play with such an idea in our minds. With this idea of fields and their role in acupuncture I started with a thought experiment also.
Imagine if you could measure with precision the exact needle placement a true master acupuncturist uses for a given patient, and imagine you could measure the precise vector the needle takes. So we have the right spot, the right angle of insertion, the right depth, and the right amount of force. Suppose we can also duplicate the exact speed of his/her rotations in the needle manipulations. The question of course is: With all these elements precisely duplicated, would we also duplicate the effectiveness of this master’s needle? My own conclusion is that all these factors, while certainly not irrelevant, do not explain the unique effectiveness of a master’s needling. What then would explain her/his success?
I believe this idea of a field being generated, or if not generated, then we could perhaps say contacted, has something to do with it. I believe our senior teachers manage to generate or connect with what we could call a “field of healing” that strongly influences their work and contributes greatly to its unique effectiveness. (I am not saying they do this consciously.)
What more is there to say about fields? A lot as it turns out. Fields do actually occupy space, i.e., this is not some imagined phenomenon I am describing. Remember this was all prompted in my thinking by Michael DeAgro’s teaching about a “spatial element” in treatment at the Zen Shiatsu conference. We have the Einstein quote above that clearly establishes that fields in his opinion are more determinative than the “nouns” that hang out in them, i.e., fields are more important than things.
Rupert Sheldrake has been for decades a controversial scientist, known for promoting his idea of morphic fields. This is the idea that nature, more than having “laws,” actually has habits, i.e., the more often that something happens, the more likely it is to happen again (and more easily as time goes on.) There is actually good evidence to support this idea, even though many scientists still scoff at it and reject it out of hand. He has many lectures on Youtube and they are recommended viewing. He points out that these morphic fields he postulates do occupy space.
If we take Sheldrake’s idea and apply it here, then simply as a function of having treated so many patients, a master is able to access more easily a healing state than perhaps s/he could 20 or 30 years ago. It is in part the repetition that explains a key piece of this healing field being generated. If it is not a field s/he generates but one s/he manages to enter or contact, then that is also explained by Sheldrake’s theory. He postulates for instance that a religious chant or prayer generates a field by virtue of that fact that it has been chanted or prayed so many times in the past. One can feel this when in a room full of people chanting. It is quite a different field (and feeling) from a crowd chanting a sports slogan at a game. Each field is unique.
I hope it goes without saying that I am not downplaying the role of all the hard study and practice of manual techniques that led to the level of expertise our senior teachers have achieved. I know they have worked very hard, and that this is a big part of their success. I am saying though that I think there are perhaps other factors that we have missed—and I think one such factor is captured in this idea of a field.
Without a quiet mind one cannot enter such a field. If we have not practiced enough and have to thus pay close attention to the mechanics of our techniques, then our minds are too occupied with these details to be able to access a healing field. It is a function I believe of the quality of our attention and the automaticity of our techniques that allow us to access such a healing field.
Best wishes all around,
Bob Quinn