Theos-Talk Archives (October 1993 Message tl00103)

Mike L.:

Regarding the subject of biology and prana, I'm not sure that a physical
basis for life energy will be found. It's the same as the mind/brain
distinction, where the brain is an organ of thought, and both responds
to and helps with the experience of it, but is not the thinker and
does not create thought.

A living body responds to and helps with the experience of innate life
energies, but is not the originator of those energies, and gives
expression to rather than originates them. When those energies depart,
death occurrs, regardless of the presence of old age or causative any
physical trama.

And I'd say the same is true of the sense organs, giving expression to
the sense of sight, hearing, touch, etc., but not the cause of those
qualities of consciousness. Minus the physical body, I'd say that those
senses could *still be experienced*, just as thought could still
function apart from the physical brain.

In the body, though, if an organ is damanged, we are blocked from
certain experiences, while *in the body*, because that is where we are,
it is the vehicle for the expression of our consciousness on this plane.
Dead, asleep, or otherwise apart from our body, we'd have our full
senses and capabilities.

Learning the functioning of the brain, what centers of the brain are
assocated with aspects of consciousness, what chemical imbalances are
related to particular psychological disorders, etc., we are studying
the effects of thought, something correlated to it, but not thought
itself.

While it is true that to damage the brain would affect someone's
physical ability to think, or to give some drug like prosac (not sure
about spelling) could help certain kinds of mental illness, I'd still
say that we are solely affecting a person's *physical* ability to
express his consciousness, and not the conscioussness itself.

I don't think that it will ever be possible to directly photograph,
weigh, measure, touch, contain, or otherwise interact with the
nonphysical. Anything we do would be through images or the effects
of astral energies temporarily made physical, and then we would
be interacting with something that was, for the time being, physical.
And I think that the reverse cannot happen, that something physical,
on its own, cannot become nonphysical and create nonphysical effects.

What we might be able to observe, would be the effects of prana life
energies on the healing of sick people. The prana itself is not
measurable, but we can observe what happens when people with healing
abilities try to heal people. An example of this kind of individual
was the first President of the Theosophical Society, H.S. Olcott,
and his ability to heal people was written--if I remember it right--
in his biography "Hammer on the Mountain", published by TPH.

As long as the healing is purely based upon vital energies and there
is no aspect of suggestion involved, I'd consider it a useful avenue
of investigation for use in modern medicine. When hypnotism and
suggestion are involved, though, it's entirely another matter, being
potentially quite dangerous.

                           Eldon Tucker
                           eldon@netcom.com