As Above, So Below – Our Beliefs About Health Challenged

For all but a few of us, humanity’s way of life these days is characterized by our striving to separate and insulate ourselves from any rough and tumble wilderness remaining on Earth. This is a natural condition for us and will permanently influence our behavior. From that we have a learned tendency to separate most things into elements instead of working with them as an organic whole. Depending on our individual personality, mysteries can make us uncomfortable, curious, or both.

Because of this cars, for example, are designed in subsystems. When something goes amiss with our car, our first tendency is to dissemble the problem into subsystems and sections – diagnose the car and again make it run right. It’s what we do and we’re used to it. Our specie often takes this reductionistic approach with most problems and challenges. But, training ourselves to think this way also tends to make us lazy when we encounter something ineffable, such as a blue planet with mysteries we’ve forgotten.

Peter Fraser from The Living Matrix movie

Often it’s hard for us to see how things on Earth are holistically connected to each other. Does the phosphate detergent with which you clean your dishes or clothes poison the Earth’s lifeblood, water? Is the computer monitor you threw in last year’s dumpster going to affect you after it’s stacked into an electronics boneyard in Mumbai, gradually leaching toxics? Is the palm oil in your supermarket snack food, from a slash and burn Indonesian monoculture plantation, really having an effect on global warming? Do the ingredients of most sunscreens cause life-altering endocrine disruptions in both people and fish? Absolutely proven, all of them, but most of us prefer not to think about them.

And there are exactly many bazillions of these little connections. But although we’ve grown far away from our ancestral roots, like a 12,000 year old creosote bush in a Sonoran desert, it doesn’t mean we don’t share the same physiological needs and DNA of our forbears. The inescapable fact is that we need practice thinking outside the boxes we’re used to.

You can take this to your bank: we’ll be successful as a species and sustain our ways of life only to the extent we’re able to appreciate seemingly unrelated connections between ourselves and our planet.

But our knowledge about the environment doesn’t always need an immediate environmental context. As humans we  just need to remember that our “left arm affects our right arm,” that “our mind affects our heart” and “as above, so below.” Hundreds of useful metaphors and similes about health permeate our language. If you’re healthy, you care about how you’re connected to the Earth. If you’re somehow in dis-ease, you’ll misunderstand that you’re part of the Earth.

Harry Massey, executive producer of the Living Matrix

For example, it’s natural for us to mention things like, “The Earth is ailing,” or “The planet’s not healthy,” and these draw us to an intuitive and mindful appreciation of our situation and place. These observations are a tremendous help because we’ve grown far from our 12,000 year-old roots when we didn’t threaten the planet. Now, we often need touchstones to relate what we see to our current experience.

So in that spirit, I’d like to offer an enthralling touchstone which you’ll like, a movie, to step outside your box and help make you and your planet more healthy. Just as there are things we don’t understand about our one and only planet, in this moment I’d like to ask that you move past the predominant Western paradigm of allopathy. Consider that there are things about bodies which Western medicine doesn’t yet understand. But there are thousands of credible researchers who are facile with making better connections about how the human body transmutes its energy.

That’s why I was honored to attend the Hollywood premiere of The Living Matrix on September 30, so I could talk with a few of them. Featuring fascinating discussions about the nature of health, healing  and human energy from popular, leading-edge luminaries, The Living Matrix can de-ice your frozen circuits of thought, and put you in a frame of mind to re-connect to your earth through your health. Take a look at its Website to loosen up.

Rupert Sheldrake’s fascinating morphic field which postulates subtle energetic connections between living things is discussed by him. Or another example, Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol, is said to mention significant concepts from the work of real-life ‘The Living Matrix’ researchers at Edgar Mitchell’s, Institute of Noetic Sciences (IoNS). There are opinions afoot that Brown’s character, Katherine Solomon, was inspired by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, IoNS chief executive. But it’s certain that an IoNS scientist and author, Lynne McTaggart, is mentioned by name in Brown’s book. The experience and thought of these researchers and more, as well as other professionals, are shown in The Living Matrix.

Eric Pearl from the Living Matrix movie

Since I met some of the film’s participants and talked with them at their premier, listening to the panel discussion after the film, I can vouch that Peter Fraser, Eric Pearl and Harry Massey all have the best interests of our planet’s people at heart.

Fraser is well-spoken and adept at stepping beyond the boundaries of ‘known’ science to help people create new health for themselves. He commented from the stage that when he first started presenting his findings many years ago he would usually address an audience of 10. At this premiere of a sold-out house at the legendary Egyptian theater, there were around 600 of us present.

Executive producer Massey retains a youthful air of astonishment and graciousness in having well-deserved attention for a well-produced documentary. Filmmaker Greg Becker is honest, mindful and polite. And in this second time I’ve had the pleasure to chat with Dr. Eric Pearl, he remains  especially funny but particularly sincere about his unusual research and experiences in alternative methods of healing. These three men are, as are all the participants in The Living Matrix, excellent examples of people who can step outside the imaginary box which bounds the true progress of our species toward a holistic understanding of the more mysterious mechanics of the human organism.

So, consider the possibility that the allopathic box you’ve drawn for yourself might need reassessment. Take a look at this movie, as I did, and perhaps your mind and intuition will be sparked to take some action on behalf of yourself or a loved one.