From the 27th to the 29th of November 2009, the northeastern Brazilian coastal city of Recife was the forum of a conference on Quantum Medicine. This event was organized and hosted by Wallace Carvalho, professor of quantum physics at the Federal University of Pernambuco. Nearly 900 people attended this fascinating event where the latest ideas in science were discussed by a panel of international specialists.

The principle focus of the conference was to understand the involvement of the mind in the processes of health and healing. Research in the scientific fields of epigenetics, neuroscience and psyconeuroimmunology have demonstrated how thoughts, emotions, and attitudes can effect physiology and health. However, the concepts proposed in this conference went even further, exploring some cutting-edge ideas that revolutionize the way in which we see and think of the world.

Professor Amit Goswami

The star of the conference was Amit Goswami, an Indian professor of quantum physics and author of more than a dozen books on the subject. Prof. Goswami became a familiar face after appearing in What the Bleep Do We Know!?, a documentary film that explains quantum physics to the mass market.

Western Medicine is based on a mechanical model of nature. Human beings are thus biological machines that function in a Newtonian Universe. It is unnecessary to explain here that the Newtonian model of the world is a deterministic philosophy where the laws of physics are mechanical in nature. However, the revolution in physics brought along by such brilliant scientists as Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenbeg has unsettled that. They showed that at the most fundamental level, a subatomic particle also manifests as a wave: it depends on the observer! Professor Goswami says: "When we look, we collapse the electron's wave to localize at one place. But, between our observations, an electron spreads out as a wave of possibility in transcendent potential." When an electron jumps from one atomic orbit to another, it never goes thru the intervening space. Electrons actually appear and disappear in existence forming a fuzzy cloud around the nucleus. The atomic model electrons spinning around the nucleus like planets is totally unrealistic. Matter, at the most fundamental level, is completely elusive.

Since we now know that the true nature of the universe is better expressed and described by this quantum physics, we also realize that we have a completely obsolete medical model because it is based on the materialistic model of Newtonian physiology. Of course, modern medicine will solve emergency problems, for example a bleeding artery can be mended like a leaking hose – which is extremely useful and lifesaving! However, life itself is the product of quantum probability distributions and is not mechanical. Professor Goswami says that the current belief in science is best exemplified by a phrase by Jacques Monod: "the body is a machine, mind is a machine, soul is a machine." This French scientist, winner of the Nobel prize in medicine, was also a proponent of the view that life on earth arose by a freak chemical accident and was unlikely to be duplicated even in the vast universe. He wrote in 1971: "Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance." He used this bleak assessment to argue the absurdity and pointlessness of existence. Monod believed we are merely chemical extras in a majestic but impersonal cosmic drama – an irrelevant, unintended sideshow. And, most certainly, nature does not have any intention or goal.

At the other side of the spectrum are not the creationists, as Richard Dawkins likes to call them, but scientists with a series of ideas that put consciousness as the ground of all being and where there is a downward causation of such principle into the material world. Professor Goswami illustrated his lecture with a series of compelling slides. For example, Darwinian evolution determined by chance variations of the genetic material and natural selection, by itself cannot explain the evolution of such things as the eye. Similarly, there are many gaps and jumps in the evolutionary tree.

The materialistic worldview sees the world bottom-up, an upward causation model where atoms form molecules, molecules form brains, and brains form consciousness. Professor Goswami sees it the other way round. Furthermore, we are not only composed of a gross material body – reflected by external experiences – but also by a subtle body, reflected by internal experiences. This dimension is very difficult to share and communicate so it has been completely neglected by science. But the subtle is as much part of reality as the materialistic.

Professor Goswami says that the materialist worldview has created a straw god; a simplified idea that is then used to disprove its existence. He says we can call it many names, but this universal consciousness is a state of all possibilities beyond duality. Mystics of all ages have taught about this dimension beyond time and space. "Then that undivided consciousness and its quantum possibilities collapse in the observer's brain and lead to self-reference – a split of consciousness into subject and object." Thus the objects in world around us are not determined things but possibilities of consciousness to chose from. Thoughts are waves of possibilities you concentrate upon to become experiences and actual events.

These ideas definitively put things upside down, where the material world is the striving-force of the universal consciousness into the dimension of time and space. Because we humans are ultimately the product of this universal consciousness, we can access it. "This dimension is discontinuous, synchronistic, holistic, non-local, transpersonal, the source of true creativity, and functions through tangled hierarchy". To experience such a state creates bliss, which is a fusion with the whole. These concepts are in direct opposition to the characteristics of what Professor Goswami calls the Ego Self which is: continuous, deterministic, linear, local, personal, acts by reasoning and functions through principles of simple hierarchy. Even hardliner scientist must admit that that these scientifically undefinable experiences, such as when one is in love or has a mystical moment, do manifest characteristics of existence that are definitively not Monodian! In a metaphor where one distinguishes hardware from software, one cannot escape the fact that the mind gives meaning to this cosmic dance of molecular interactions all around us.

The ideas portrayed by Professor Goswami are a springboard to understand and give justice to non-conventional healing modalities such as Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Mind/Body Medicine, etc. These are based on the idea that we are made of subtle energetic dimension and that this interacts with our gross material one. There are many portholes that interconnect the dimensions, for example the Indian chakra system that connects organs with emotions. Professor Goswami gives the example of the heart chakra situated above the thymus gland, the organ which the body uses to discriminate the self from the non-self. When we fall in love, this portal allows the discrimination of the other to melt away so that the two become one. When this porthole opens an incredible energy flows, which is the manifestation of the continuity with the universal consciousness. Therapies like acupuncture work in a similar fashion by operating on the connection between the subtle and the gross bodies.

There are many interviews and video clips with Professor Goswami readily available on the Internet. A new documentary film, The Quantum Activist, stars him in a comprehensible hour-and-a-half. For more information, visit Amit Goswami's website.

Professor Dejan Raković

Another international guest was Professor Dejan Raković, professor from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia. His presentation was on the "phenomenology of meridian psycho-therapies and quantum-holographic psychosomatic-cognitive implications."

Meridian Psycho-therapies is a common term covering a group of new alternative psycho-therapies based on ancient teaching of psychosomatic disorders related to the level of energetic field in and around human being. Such therapies prove that many psychological and emotional problems can be successfully treated in quantum leaps. This they can do without the need to pass through long and laborious stages of discovery such as emotional and cognitive restructuring, which is often considered to be the trademarks of serious psychotherapy.

Traumas, phobias, allergies, post-traumatic stress and other psycho-somatic disorders are quickly removed via simultaneous effects of visualization of the psychosomatic problems and tapping/touching of some acupuncture points.

In the best tradition of scientific rigor reminiscent of his conational Nikola Tesla, Professor Raković proposed that we study these therapies through the framework of a quantum-holographic Hopfield-like model. Thus, acupuncture-based psychosomatic disorders might be interpreted as "smearing" and associative integration of the disorder-related-memory attractors. Thus successful outcomes through successive imposing of new boundary conditions in the energy-state space of acupuncture system/consciousness during visualizations of the psychosomatic problems demonstrates close relationship between consciousness and acupuncture system.

Professor Raković proposes that psychosomatics be considered a quantum hologram, both on the level of individual and collective consciousness. To the initiated, he suggests that the fundamental field-related macroscopic Hopfield-like quantum-informational model is the underlying explanation of the quantum-holographic paradigm.

Professor Raković is author of Integrative Biophysics, Quantum Medicine and Quantum-Holographic Informatics: Psychosomatic-Cognitive Implications (ISBN 978-86-81879-24-5) where these ideas are exposed and the mathematics elaborated.

Dr. Francisco Di Biasi

Dr. Francisco Di Biasi is a Brazilian medical doctor and neuroscientist who is also author of successful science books. Dr. Di Biasi presented the "Quantum-Informational Holographic Model of Consciousness."

This model proposes an interconnection between brain and spirit by means of quantum micro-sites named dendrons (bundles of nerve dendrites) that couple to psychons.

Dr. Di Biasi proposes a dynamic concept of consciousness seen as a holoinformational flux interconnecting holonomic informational Quantum Brain Dynamics (QBD), with the quantum informational holographic nature of the universe. This self-organizing flux is generated by a holographic mode of neuronal information that can be optimized through practices of deep meditation, prayer, and other states of higher consciousness which Dr. Di Biasi calls the quantum potential.

Brain mapping studies performed during the occurrence of these harmonic states have shown a highly synchronized and perfectly ordered spectral array of brain waves that form unique harmonic waves, as if all frequencies of all neurons from all cerebral centers played the same symphony.

This highly coherent brain state generates the nonlocal holographic informational cortical field of consciousness interconnecting the human brain and the holographic cosmos. According to Di Biasi, the comprehension of this holonomic quantum informational nature of brain-consciousness-universe interconnectedness allows to solve the historic mind-matter Cartesian problem, unifying science, philosophy, and spiritual traditions in an expanded transdisciplinary paradigm.

In this new holoinformational cosmovision brain and universe are conceived as quantum holographic-informational systems interconnected by an instantaneous universal nonlocal holoinformational flux.

This instantaneous holoinformational brain-cosmos dynamics is based on three pillars of modern science: 1) The holographic neural network processing of brain systems described by neuroscientist Karl Pribram. 2) The quantum-holographic theory of the universe developed by physicist David Bohm. 3) The quantum principle of non-locality developed by physicist Hiroomi Umezawa.

In a holographic system, information about the whole system is distributed in each part of the system: the whole is in the parts as each part is in the whole. Karl Pribram has demonstrated with his holonomic theory of brain dynamics that the cerebral cortex is the site of a holographic information process he calls a multiplex neural hologram that is dependent on local circuits of neurons without long fibers that do not transmit ordinary nervous impulses. The neural hologram is build by the interaction of the electromagnetic fields of the neurons similarly to the interaction of sound waves in a piano. When a piano is played the keys strike the strings generating a vibration standing wave between the two ends of the string, creating an interference pattern. This interference can be destructive or constructive. Nodes of constructive interference of these sound frequencies create the harmony or harmonics that are the notes making up the music we listen to. Pribram demonstrated that a similar process is continuously occurring in the cerebral cortex by means of the interpenetration of the electromagnetic fields of the adjacent cortical neurons, generating a harmonic field. According to Pribram's model, this harmonic electromagnetic field, distributed in the cerebral cortex, holographically stores and encodes a huge information field responsible for the emergence of memory and consciousness. As the music is not in the piano but in the resonating field that surrounds it, so our memories and consciousness are not in the brain, but in the holographic information field that surrounds it.

This new holographic paradigm allows us to rethink the manner in which information processing occurs in the nervous system. In this context, Pribram's quantum holonomic theory of brain function is one of the most brilliant and revolutionary contribution to neuroscience in the past 100 years.

In Bohm's universe, space and time are mixed, "folded" into a dimension of frequencies without space-time relations. According to Bohm, everything is folded into everything. This means that what each part is based on the enfoldment of all the rest, including the whole universe. Enfoldment is not merely superficial or passive, but each part is fundamentally internally related to the whole and to all the other parts.

Research confirm the existence of a Quantum Brain Dynamics in neural microtubules, in synapses and in the molecular organization of the cerebrospinal fluid. This Quantum Brain Dynamics can generate Bose-Einstein condensates and the Fröhlich Effect.

Bose-Einstein condensates consist of atomic particles, or in the case of the Fröhlich Effect, biological molecules that can assume a high level of coherent alignment, functioning as a highly ordered and unified informational state, as seen in lasers and superconductivity. These quantum dynamics show us that the interaction process between dendrons and psychons are not limited to the synaptic cleft but a much wider embodiment throughout the whole brain.

The interconnectedness between brain and cosmos is an instantaneous non-local connection to the concept of a holoinformational flux, from which both mind and matter are in-formed.

In this new concept, quantum holographic brain dynamic patterns are conceived as an active part of the universal quantum-holographic informational field, and are capable of generating an informational field interconnection that is simultaneously nonlocal (quantum-holistic) and local (Newtonian-mechanistic), i.e. holoinformational.

Taking yet in consideration the basic mathematical property of holographic systems in which the information of the whole system is distributed in each part of the system, Dr. Di Biasi proposes that this universal interconnectedness could permit access all the information codified in the wave interference patterns existing in all the universe since its origin.

The quantum-holo-informational nature of the universe interconnects each part – each brain-consciousness – with all the information stored in the holographic patterns distributed in the whole cosmos in an indivisible and irreducible informational cosmic unity. As a consciousness exercise, analogous to Einstein's thought experiments, one could compare this universal informational interconnectedness with the following metaphoric quotations from various spiritual traditions: "as above so below" (Alchemy); "all that is outside is inside" (Upanishads); "the father is inside us"and "as in the earth so in the heavens" (Christianity).

This universal interconnectedness could be perfectly understood as a Cosmic Holographic Consciousness. Consciousness in this conception is the holoinformational flux that permits the interaction of the holonomic informational Quantum Brain Dynamics – that can be considered as extended dendrons – with the quantum-holographic nature of the universe, that can be viewed as an extended cosmic psychon.

Brain is material, communication is mental. Highly Harmonic Synchronized Brain States through practices of deep meditation, prayer, and others states of higher consciousness that elevate the coherence of cerebral waves, expand this universal interconnectedness by synchronizing the functioning of the cerebral hemispheres and unleashing a highly coherent brain state that optimizes the holographic treatment of neuronal information.

In Dr. Di Biasi's concept, this highly harmonic synchronized state generates a nonlocal holographic informational cortical field, creating a holoinformational flux of consciousness interconnecting the human mind with the Holographic Cosmic Consciousness.

Dr. Vladislav Lugovenko

Other speakers at the conference included Dr. Vladislav Lugovenko, an eminent scientist who has been the director of a laboratory studying anomalous magnetic fields at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere, and Wave Propagation in the scientific community of Troitsk, outside Moscow for the past 25 years.

Dr. Lugovenko has spent many years researching geomagnetism, and has described in detail a fascinating principle which he terms "The Breathing of the Earth". This in turn led him to explore biomagnetism and the bioelectric fields of mammals and fish, the human aura, and finally Indigo Children. His most recent book, The Indigo Children of Russia, is not yet available in English.

Dr. Lugovenko says that the Earth is a living system that breathes and can be witnessed as oscillations in the flow of subtle energies through and between the Earth and the Cosmos. In the course of a lifetime of research, he has devised experiments that detect and measure just such an oscillation in this flow. This breathing is not only strikingly similar to the breathing patterns of human beings, but is dynamically affected by events in the Cosmos also by human thought. "Global" breathing consists of all possible methods of receiving, processing, and obtaining energy from external space through a complex system of grids and chakras of different calibers.

Dr. Lugovenko calls the interaction of this energy with the Earth a "cosmo-terrestrial field", which is defined as the substance by which the biopower interaction between Space and Earth takes place. The cosmo-terrestrial field is a phenomenon on the boundary between the thin (unmanifest) world and the material (manifest) world.

The cosmo-terrestrial field has many interesting properties, including whirlwind movement, resonance, and virtually instantaneous distribution over vast distances.This energy can be perceived by highly sensitive people and by specially created equipment. The maximal activity of breathing of the Earth occurs when there is a minimum of solar activity.

Dr. Elisabeth Rauscher and Dr. Richard Amoroso

Dr. Elisabeth Rauscher and Dr. Richard Amoroso, two eminent and brilliant United States scientists gave presentations on technologies and methodologies using electromagnetic fields to reduce and eliminate pain as well as their non-invasive pacemaker technology that uses pulsed modulated waves.

Míria de Amorim

Míria de Amorim is a Brazilian Homeopath, is the creator of FAO, a company that produces homeopathic products and services, including applications for agriculture. Author of Holism, Homeopathy and Alchemy: a Synchronicity for a Cure (In Portuguese - ISBN 85-898662-14-3) she gave a general overview and the different modalities of Energy Medicine.

Dr. Thornton Streeter

Dr. Thornton Streeter, Founder Director of the Centre for Biofield Sciences in India has spent over fifteen years specializing in human biofield research. He gave a lively presentation on the PIP technology.