This map stretches from yoga psychology to anthroposophy and integral psychology, but there is a particularly detailed philosophical explication and scientific proof of it in Arthur Young's "The Reflexive Universe" and William Tiller's "Conscious Acts of Creation."
[Evolution-Purusha]
^
| Spiritual (?)
| -----------
| Mental-Egoic (+below=Humans)
| Emotional-Astral (+below=Animals)
| Vital-Etheric (+below=Plants)
| Physical-Dense (+below=Matter)
v
[Involution-Prakriti]
The question of what energy is comes up a lot in my lectures - does it belong at a certain stage on the integral yoga continuum - or does it encapsulate everything. It depends on what you mean.
I like to think of Prana, Qi or Vital Energy as corresponding to the Etheric or Vital body - the layer between Dense-Physical and Astral-Emotional, Mental-Egoic, and higher Spiritual layers. Of course we could call them all Energy but this is just a matter of semantics. Clinically, scientifically, and experientially, I'll say why this makes a difference.
The more superordinate levels of mind and emotion affect the vital energy and its physical constituents. Of course a knife can cut your skin or toxic food eat away your insides but the more subtle yet superordinate level of vitality should heal this through the "immune system," with a little physical help if necessary (emergency medicine). Unfortunately modern allopathic medicine is nihilistic-materialist and intrudes on the healing process and deprives the mind of its power to heal and to be, making it more dependent.
The biochemistry of cells has to be organized by the kind of vital etheric field memories discovered by Burr and Sheldrake. However, the mental and emotional layers of humans affect these for both health and disease - this is the placebo effect, the power of prayer and meditation, and psychosomatic illness and healing demonstrated in hypnosis and analysis in Freud. Much of our illness today depends on the depletion of vital energy and intrusion on the functioning of its fields. We have now seen clinical and scientific proof of how the mind dis-eases and heals matter - we just don't really believe it enough yet - and that is what "matters". A positive affirmation or prayer or someone else's hypnotic suggestion (in therapy) usually is not enough to really change the underlying BELIEF.
Prana "underlies" physical and mental events but as a backdrop or transitional substance for the insubstantial power of mind to translate or manifest in the theatre of physical force. This is important, for while acupuncture, qi gong, hatha yoga, and pranayamic breathing will heal the L-fields of our bodily organs (and this is already a huge step over materialist medicine) we really have to get to the level of mind to make larger longer changes. At present mind is usually controlled from below by materialist belief systems programmed by family, society, media and institutions, but when mind recognizes itself for what it is it turns the tables on the physical. Some psychoanalytic, philosophical and artistic movements of the past century pushed this as far as it would go. Now it's a matter of crossing the abyss to the other side - actually experiencing the superpositioned wave of the transpersonal infinite and sitting in the sovereign transformer of mind which collapses this beyond into what it chooses.
This is a powerful kind of involution or actually evolution towards involution - transcendence in the service of regression. Playing.
It was partially my own experience with a family member who transfered childhood trauma and depression with no outlet into a myelin sheath degeneration which led me to the study and practice of psychoanalytic and psychosomatic medicine. In my practice I see the continual transfer of psychosocial experiences into physical disease and back again.
With specific reference to neuroscience, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff describe the quantum coherence effects of the microtubules of cell cytoskeletons which operate at a more subtle yet more superordinate level of will and consciousness to the more linear discrete operations of neuronal firing. In their research they were able to disrupt simple external tasks with mild electrical current through the brain too subtle to effect the actual neurochemical transmission.
In my own doctoral research I argued that the quantum coherence of the cytoskeleton was able to translate nonlinear transpersonal events of consciousness and will before the further linear specification of neural mapping which requires the later (ontogenetically and phylogenetically) developed sheathed neurons for many of the logical symbolic behaviors which our particular external culture prizes.
Indeed I saw how the demyelinization accompanied decreasing ability to perform specific motor and memory tasks and increasing free associative behavior which was radically honest to the discomfort and/or amusement of others. With very little judgement this person entered childlike or mystical states which appeared to be pleasant. The negativity or guilt was in those who were observing.
Your comments neurologically parallel Aulagnier's findings on the creation of schizophrenia from violent interpretation and intrusion which robs the ability of the psyche or self to evolve. The brain simultaneously is intruded upon and develops autoimmune defenses. Lack of the culturally normal specificity of tasks, pain from self-destruction, and fear of external judgement are often accompanied by heightened creative and paranormal abilities which have not been lost the way they are through normal development in this culture. This has led to an unfortunate dualism among those struggling for an enlightened approach to schizophrenia in many ways. There are BOTH biological causes and effects AND psychosocial causes and effects AND they are structurally coupled. One can have BOTH sympathy for the pain of "schizophrenic" subjectivity AND struggle for an understanding about how cultural judgement and medical labelling of "schizophrenia" as a disease caused by some bad gene or microbe perpetuates an inability to see how it develops and heal it.
For more general background reading I recommend.
Roger Penrose "Shadows of the Mind"
Wilhelm Reich "The Cancer Biopathy"
Klaus Dumke "AIDS: The Deadly Seed"
Ernest Rossi "The Psychobiology of Gene Expression"
Mark Seem "Bodymind Energetics"
Piera Aulagnier "The Violence of Interpretation"
Like a lot of similar "conspiracy" material it is sometimes hard to see any clarity in sides. Rather a game among the privileged while the population remains pawns in the game. It is interesting that while people like Leary, Lilly, and Grof began amongst class and government hierarchies, their experiences with psychedelics could not help but lead them into a life and transmission of radical freedom - or did it. Self-interest and trickster-guruism are always just around the corner. Fun and games is certainly a superior vibration to war games. But I am not sure how much really changed spiritually. There is a certain narcissistic nihilism involved in the "culture of freedom" which has spawned the hippy, slacker, hipster art and indie rock cultures of today.
I recently read what I felt was a good description of the effect of drugs by a spiritual practitioner, mystic, and scientist. Drugs don't add anything - they cancel out the lower vibrations on the scale temporarily so that one only experiences the higher ones. My own addition to this is that drugs and practices can alter the semiotic-somatic filters which screen out the infinite multiple real (or "God"). The problem is that when they wear off that taste of elevated joy and consciousness is gone followed by an often deeper depression, disappointment or entrenchment in linear cause-effect, matter-energy space-time existence. Those moments cannot produce lasting change if one returns to the same filters held in place by the cultural symbolic order.
Which is why I see the political-economic institutions and cultural-linguistic media as the prime block to further development and healing. I am a communist of old old fashioned sort. The young Marx's experience of alienation in the industrial exchange of work and consumption was nothing but the natural development of the spiritual principles of christianity and buddhism. This could never be mandated through enforced state socialism but must develop from the individual experiences like those of the post-sixties generation toward new forms of groups - the communities of radical sovereignty based on nonjudgmental unconditional love, individual desires, and the impossibility of the gift.
A Brief History of Medicine
In Harris Coulter's 3000 page 3000 year history of medicine in the West "Divided Legacy" he describes the common priniciple running through it of a dialectic between "empiricist" and "rationalist" medicine. Empiricist could also be called vitalist or spiritualist in that in every case the physician with humility believes there is something larger going on in illness that he cannot master - whether this is the mathematical infinite, the cosmos, or god. Empiricist medicine includes those approaches that intuitively develop hypotheses and test them out clinically, learn from the results, and remain open to the truth. Rationalism attempts to formulate complete answers, to master the truth with human knowledge and fit the anomalous experiences of individual patients into those fundamentalist beliefs.
From the time of the pre-Socratic and Hippocratic physicians to the early Roman Galenic period (app. 500 bc - 500 ad) empiricism diminished while rationalism grew. The next 1000 years of the dark ages was of course dominated by extreme rationalist fundamentalism until Paracelcus restored vitalist empiricism to serious practice and study - although there were always empiricist naturopaths underground attacked as witches. This tradition has been growing ever since - reaching a high point through the 1800s with Hahnemann's development of homeopathic medicine, and the development of structural-energetic methods of osteopathic medicine and chiropractic medicine - based on traditional Oriental medicine. Simultaneously, the scientific technology has reinforced the fundamentalist rationalism of the biochemical mechanical paradigm.
The 20th century saw the application of political-economic control structures made up of the guild controlling AMA and high-profit pharmaceutical and HMO corporations to maintain a monopoly on a profit-producing, rationalist-mind assuaging medical industrial complex expelling empiricism to the margins. Simultaneously what is left of the "free" market has allowed some truth and freedom to emerge so that patients now spend more out of pocket on holistic "alternative" empirical medicine then on orthodox medicine, but this schism remains to the detriment of all.
Osteopathic medicine was absorbed into the allopathic model in America, losing its essence - accept for the rebirth of craniosacral therapy through Upledger. Chiropractic medicine survived only by becoming a minor specialty and shedding its holistic empiricism. Naturopathic medicine is becoming a recognized approach only by becoming increasingly allopathic and rationalist. Even Oriental medicine which has remained a holistic vitalist empiricism throughout half the world for millenia is at this moment threatened. While Oriental and Western allopathic medical schools and hospitals coexist side by side in the East, the seduction of Western rationalism and profit is strong.
Homeopathic medicine which had its own hospitals and medical schools, had more proven success treating epidemic diseases than allopathic medicine throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and developed most of the medicinals which allopathy has adulterated in the laboratory for its coercive formulas was nearly completely erased - still now transmitted only through apprenticeship, autodidacticism, and small seminars.
My Practice:
As a result of my previous and ongoing philosophical, poetic, psychoanalytic, and spiritual practice, coming from the point of view of the infinite unknown as it unfolds through the spirit, psyche, mind, and body integrally and continuously, I have studied and empirically practiced the best of what exists of holistic vitalist medicine from traditional Taoist Chinese, Ayurvedic Indian, and Buddhist Tibetan forms of Oriental medicine up to the modern forms of homeopathic, naturopathic, energetic, and psychosomatic medicine, and I have come to the conclusion that the greatest difficulty in helping patients heal is the structural institutions and media which maintain the belief systems and practices of a medicine that continues to hurt people more than it helps. Allopathic medicine has been proven to kill more people yearly than any other disease (garynull.com). Is this ignorance or destructive sadism? Sometimes it is hard to tell one from the other. The unconscious death drive relieves us of the burden of cocreative survival and existence in the plurality of worlds within worlds of the multiverse. The simultaneous fear and relief that we are only this material body and its accidental epiphenomenon of neural consciousness and that we will thus cease to exist when it dies supports a cynical, defensive, nihilistic, abusive approach to life that permeates our healthcare system with as much or more grave consequences than our ecology or government, yet few recognize it. Activists cry out for more heath care coverage without being aware that the treatment they are receiving contributes to their ignorance, illness, debilitation, and control. Paradoxically those without health coverage are better off as they do not have the money to have unnecessary toxic procedures and pharmaceuticals applied to them for the sake of fear and profit.
Reckeweg and some European homeopathic physcians demonstrated the homeotherapeutic healing modality and the dangers of allopathic suppression biochemically in the laboratory as well as clinically. Bacteria is often part of the healing process. Bacteria colonize various areas of the body - especially the digestive tract - with important health purposes. When there is a disturbance of a certain terrain of the body there is also a change in bacteria. Often bacteria help to digest toxins along with the facilitation of the excretion and inflammation phases of the immune system healing process. They showed how antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, aspirin, and other common allopathic drugs interrupt the natural healing process, kill beneficial bacteria, block enzymes, suppress excretion which expels toxins, suppress inflammation which burns up viruses and other toxins. In this case the original toxins - including natural and chemical allergens from food and environment and the body's own waste products - remain in the body and have to be walled off in the deposition phase. For example suppressing diarrhea and colitis with antibiotics and other allopathic pharmaceuticals can actually produce an abscess. Furthermore, the toxins remaining in the body as a result of suppressing rather than supporting the natural homeotherapeutic process of healing, and the new toxins from the pharmaceuticals create mutant proteins, wild peptides and other antigens which circulate the tissues and enter the cells altering the genetic expression, causing progressive auto-immune reactions. They can even enter the cells and alter genes. Perhaps this is the basis of Hahnemann's discover of the basic miasms or disease tendencies which he saw passed on from generation to generation in the human species.