What is the Body, Where Does it Come From, and How Does it Talk?
Jim Oschman has been fascinated by John Veltheim’s scientific descriptions of Quantum BodyTalk. Explaining this approach to life and health to others can be challenging because of the ways our thinking has been influenced by the dominant materialistic paradigm. This paradigm has been shaken to its foundations in a series of breakthrough moments that forever change our perception of ourselves and the world we inhabit.
While the basic ideas can be traced to antiquity, their modern expression began at a specific moment at the turn of the century. On December 14, 1900, Max Planck reluctantly presented to the German Physical Society meeting in Berlin his discoveries about an obscure physical phenomenon known as black body radiation. His hesitation came from an awareness that his findings were totally contrary to the accepted notions of the nature of matter. Moreover, these notions were very dearly held, for they were widely viewed as a triumph of logic and reason – a means to understand all of nature. At the time of Planck’s lecture, all matter was viewed as composed of “billiard ball” atoms moving about predictably according to the laws of motion developed by Sir Isaac Newton. Lord Rutherford summarized the physicist’s self-confidence by stating that all of science was divided into two branches: physics and stamp collecting. Newton’s mechanics had led to an industrial revolution that offered much hope and enthusiasm for the future of technology (Figure 1). Max Planck’s upsetting presentation led to the birth of quantum physics, and the end of an era of comfort in which physicists knew with great confidence they had the means to fathom all of the mysteries of nature. The universe had come to be predictable as a “clockworks” and the human body could be viewed an intricate machine made of parts that could be understood and fixed if necessary.
Quantum physics led to an entirely different worldview, in which the atom, its parts, and all things made of atoms including living things were better viewed as relationships rather than as isolated things. Electrons are no longer viewed as particles orbiting the atomic nucleus like the planets orbit the sun, but more as energetic essences with sizes and boundaries that can only be approximated.
There arose from Planck’s discoveries, and those that have followed, a sometimes uncomfortable awareness that our basic concepts, our language, our whole way of thinking, are inadequate to describe the world we live in. This is not just an intellectual problem, but an emotional issue. For it goes to the heart of the way we view the nature of reality and what we are taught about how the world works from the first days of our lives. Frijtof Capra’s Turning Point (1982) documented how this change in awareness of relationships has altered every aspect of our reality. There have been attempts to establish a Quantum Medicine, but it was not until Quantum BodyTalk that the discoveries in Quantum physics became part of the daily reality of many healthcare practitioners and their patients.