Tao Articles

In April 1999, a dozen Senior Instructors and old time US students from the 1980’s were waiting in Masahiro Ouchi’s New York office to meet with Master Chia, who was delayed by half a day. This was the core group that had launched the Healing Tao and supported it in its uncertain early days. There was some gloom, caused by the divorce of the Chias’ and its surrounding dark aura of rumor and lawsuits. We decided to each share our vision of what we wanted the Healing Tao to be, with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight.

The visions that emerged were spoken from the heart, in a circle of old friends. Many felt the Healing Tao could be more heart centered in its teachings, less manipulation of chi by technique. Some called for more balance between the male and female approaches to teaching, more “yin” practice focused on receiving and nurturing chi and cultivating virtues of love and compassion, instead of “yang” methods of commanding and projecting chi. Others asked for simplicity, greater focus on the ultimate truths of the Tao, less attention to myriad ways to energetically change yourself or the world, more attention to cultivating “shen” and spiritual values.

Since then, I have received many letters and had many conversations with HT instructors from around the world. I sense there is a genuine shift occuring in the Healing Tao, a yearning for core simplicity and truth and silence. The HT has made its fame with the many sophisticated methods for managing the energy body, and this has perhaps been its first necessary step to achieving acceptance in the West. Master Chia has been a superb emissary for accomplishing this mission, and our collective impact worldwide has been tremendous.

One of the reasons I myself supported the HT from the very start was its practicality in everyday life, its immediate benefits, the very tangible opening of personal chi flow. This was my prime motivation in spending years writing & editing its many books filled with techniques, and encouraging others to do so. I was well aware of other paths that focused more direclty on other-worldly, transcendental approaches to meditation. I had close connections to other highly achieved spiritual teachers in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, but chose not to promote them because of what always seemed to me to be excess religious baggage.

But now, 20 years later, on the brink of a new millennium, I find my own teaching style has dramatically changed. I want the Simple and True in my own life, and have seen too many students drop away from the Tao because they could not keep up with the perceived necessity of doing so many techniques. Techniques can become a way for the Ego to hide its fear of losing control behind a mask of accomplisihed skills.

I am concerned for the future growth of the Healing Tao, and ask myself, if we put on a simpler face, would the teachings achieve even more widespead acceptance, more devoted adherents? Do we need to fear Simplicity? The key is to emulate nature, and Nature always seems to favor the simplest way of doing things, even complicated things.

As the current President of the National Qigong/Chi Kung AssociationoUSA, I have had the opportunity to exchange teachings with dozens of other schools of the Tao. When I co-lead an NQA trip to China last year with 30 sophisticated western qigong healers, I was especially impressed by a comment made by Dr. Cai Jun, the head of Qigong Medicine at Shi Yuan, a major Beijing hospital: “It seems you Americans are well trained in qigong techniques. Some of you are on the edge of being really good. Actually, I think Americans in general may be more sensitive to chi than the average Chinese person. But I perceive a general weakness in your dan tiens. If you build the lower dan tien, then all the other channels, the orbit, healing ability, etc. will easily follow. Taoist neidan (alchemy) is very simple this way.”

I have taken his comment to heart. In my Chi Kung Fundamentals course, I spend a long time from the very start doing a very simple chi kung movement I now call Ocean Breathing, a brilliant term coined by Senior Instructor Walter Beckley, who was experimenting with similar simple breathing methods. The secret in these methods is to get “mindless” as quickly and directly as possible, while still focusing on the lower dan tien. The image of water gets you out of the heady concept of breathing air, and into the deeper watery rhythms of your blood and jing. I link in a heart centered Inner Smile with this state of floating in waves inside the dan tien, and being aware of a vast ocean inside the body, an inner ocean of chi, bigger even than the outer ocean.

The dan tien is no longer a tiny, hard to find point inside a dense little physical body — it is immense, and from the very start the source of all pure chi used in the Healing Sounds. I teach students to see their bodies filling with clouds of different colored chi from this inner ocean filling their vital organs and entire body, before they breathe it out using the Healing Sounds. And I give them dynamic movements to help release the chi, by integrating the Six Healing Sounds with the oldest chi kung movement known in China, the Five Animals Play. In between each sound & animal movement, I have them internally breathe between the vital organ and the dan tien.

I never let the students get away from this inner ocean of chi in succeeding practices like Fusion and Healing Love or a new course I teach called Internal Chi Rooting and Breathing, my simplified version of Iron Shirt (different postures learned in China) and neutral force breathing.

To make sure spiritual values are reinforced, I begin training them from the very start to contact not just the chi of each vital organ, but the shen (spirit, or “natural intelligence”), as well. This opens up a different kind of communication internally, in which you have to open your innermost heart in order to talk with the spirit of each organ. I introduce the Five Shen as “my inner family” or “inner children”, each with different needs and abilities.

It also paves the way for a shen (and “te”, or virtue) based practice of the Fusion and Kan and Li formulas. I’ve found this an effective way to simplify the Healng Tao practices. Chi can be manipulated using outer will or ego. Shen, as your inner voices, will only relate to your inner will or spiritual intent. Anytime a practice starts to feel complicated or too pushy or too heady, I tell students to drop all the techniques, go back into the Inner Ocean, and invite one or all of their their Five Shen/ Inner Family to take an internal vacation doing nothing but smiling and riding the pulsing ocean waves. In short, drop back into empty mind, but an emptiness that is grounded in one’s inner oceanic essence and the sensuous, primal orgasmic pulsations of the life force.

I encourage every instructor to find the Way that speaks to you personally and feels most true, as this felt sense of truth is what ultimately gets transmitted to students. If you cannot find the Simple and True inside yourself, how will your students find it? The Simple and True ultimately can only be apprehended in Silence and Stillness, where the monkey mind cannot bring its endless techniques and concepts/images and words. This is constantly stressed in the ancient Tao teachings. In the Tao Canon text of the Zhonghe Ji, it puts it thus: “Silence is the Word. Fundamentally in the place where the Word exists there is Silence. The world is silent; that is the secret formula of alchemy.”

We have the secret formula under our noses already in the Healing Tao, and it is called the Inner Smile. But I rarely see it taught as a high level shen practice, only as a beginner or warm up to a meditation, or tied into an ever more complicated technique of manipulating chi. But once technique has used the polarities of yin and yang to change the balance of chi in any moment, that is the moment when our Original Being has a new opening to come into Presence. Techniques open the gates, then we must leap quickly to ride on the invisible back of yuan (original) chi between the waves of dragon and tiger, of yin and yang.

So really, I think all the Healing Tao techniques should be seen as warmups for a Simple and True Inner Smile. Control of Chi must each time be followed by Surrender to Shen. Practically speaking, appropriate time and emphasis must be given to allowing our inner heart virtues of love/acceptance (fire), kindness/compassion (wood), integrity (gold), wisdom (deep water) and trust (core earth) to merge with this Inner Smile. In my experience, this deeply felt natural virtue is what attracts the Tao Iimmortals. They are not faked out by the concept of virtue, by words imitating virtue or the techniques trying to control or force virtue. But when natural heart virtue and method unite in focused spiritual intent, they must come to assist their human brothers and sisters in cultivating the Elixir of immortality.

As a Healing Tao-ist, are YOU ready to embrace the Simple and True?

Question has been asked: according to Tao alchemy principles, is the physical body immortal? The issue can be simplified. Jing , chi, shen (body substance, energy, and intelligence/spirit) are all one, and all disappear together into and emerge out of the Wuji, the Supreme Unknown. Ther wuji is NOT a true void, more a womb of unknown origin. If either spirit or substance or energy lives, they all live. If one dies, they all die.

Spirit and substance are just two ends of the same pole, connected by energy. The movement of their apparent life and death is not just between body and spirit, but between wuji/ Unknown and creation/Known. So even the infinite field of Original Spirit has to face this Unknown. The Original Spirit (Yuan Shen) is closest to the wuji, the other levels of spirit (in stars, planets, or human bodies) are dimensionally (i.e. vibrationally) more distant. But all claim the wuji as their grandmother.

Jing, chi, and shen all have equal and simultaneous reality, and need each other to know themselves. How does spirit know that it exists except by Body/jing’s presence? That is what ensures Body’s Immortality. Otherwise Original Spirit would just snap it fingers in the causal plane and disappear in a second this entire troubled physical plane. It doesn’t do this, because it NEEDS for body/substance to evolve itself back into its original immortal state of awareness.

But we could speculate that Immortality itself, the Eternal Life of Spirit integrated with Body, ceases to exist and becomes something else in the presence of the Supreme “Black Hole” of Wuji. Perhaps we cauld call it Non-Mortality, or Amortality? I wish I were close enough to even pose the question to the proper Presence or Absence.

Smiling at this Headiiness,

Michael Winn
2001

This poem captures beautifully the Taoist vision of our inner spiritual child birthing itself into a manificently interconnected planet. Enjoy a lovely poem well worth reading every time you celebrate a re-Birthday.
Michael Winn

On the eve of your birth
word of your coming
passed from animal to animal.

The reindeer told the arctic terns,
who told the humpback whales,
who told the Pacific salmon,

who told the monarch butterflies,
who told the green turtles,
who told the european eel,
who told the busy garden warblers,

and the marvelous news migrated worldwide.

While you waited in darkness,
tiny knees curled to chin,
The Earth and her creatures
with the Sun and the Moon
all moved in their places,
each ready to greet you
the very first moment
of the very first day you arrived.

On the day you were born
the round planet Earth
turned toward your morning sky,
whirling past darkness,
spining the night into light.

On the day you were born
gravity’s strong pull
held you to the Earth
with a promise that you
would never float away…

…while deep in space
the burning sun
sent up
towering flames,
lighting your sky
from dawn until dusk.

On the day you were born
the quiet Moon glowed
and offered to bring
a full, bright face
each month,
to your windowsill…

…while high above the North Pole,
Polaris, the glittering North Star,
stood still, shining silver light
into your night sky.

On the day you were born
the Moon pulled on the ocean below,
and, wave by wave,
a rising tide washed the beaches clean
for your footprints…

…while far out at sea
clouds swelled with water drops,
sailed to shore on a wind,
and rained you a welcome
across the Earth’s green lands.

On the day you were born
a forest of tall trees
collected the sun’s light
in their leaves,
where, in silent mystery,
they made oxygen
for you to breathe…

…while closer to your skin
and as high as the sky,
air rushed in and blew about,
invisibly protecting you
and all living things on Earth.

On the day you were born
The Earth turned, the Moon pulled,
the sun flared, and then, with a push,

you slipped out of the dark quiet
where suddenly you could hear…

…a circle of people singing
with voices familiar and clear.

“Welcome to the spinning world,” the people sang,
as they washed your new, tiny hands.

“Welcome to the green Earth,” the people sang,
as they wrapped your wet, slippery body.

And as they held you close
they whispered into your open, curving ear,
“We are so glad you’ve come!”

From the book On the Day You Were Born by Deborah Frasier

There is an old Chinese text written by Wang Fu-chih that neatly summarizes the Shen-Chi-Jing principles of Taoist alchemy, only using the language of the I Ching on Law-Energy-Number: “Between Heaven and Earth there exists nothing but law and energy. The energy carries the law and the law regulates the energy. Law does not manifest itself (has no form); it is only through energy that the image is formed, and the image yields the number. If this law becomes blurred the image is not right and the number is not clear. This reveals itself in great things and expresses itself in small things. Thus only a man of the highest integrity can understand this law; basing himself on its revelation he can grasp the symbols, and observing its small expressions, he can understand the auguries.”

On Quantum Coherence, from conclusion of this article by Mae-Wan Ho:

“An intuitive way to understand quantum coherence is to think of the ‘I’ that each and every one of us experience of our own being. We know that our body is a multiplicity of organs and tissues, composed of many billions of cells and astronomical numbers of molecules of many different kinds, all capable of working autonomously, and yet somehow cohering into the singular being of our private experience. That is just the stuff of quantum coherence. Quantum coherence does not mean that everybody or every element of the system must be doing the same thing all the time, it is more akin to a grand ballet, or better yet, a very large jazz band where everyone is doing his or her own thing while being perfectly in step and in tune with the whole. ”

The article below is cutting edge scientific thinking on wholeness and the quantum field, which share a common foundation with Taoist principles of chi field theory. The article gives the “hard” physics that integrate those cutting edge ideas. Reading it (slowly, if you are not used to scientific absracts) will give Tao practitioners another viewpoint to understanding the energy body they work with in their daily practice.

Bioenergetics and Biocommunication

by Mae-Wan Ho

1 Introduction
Organisms are so enigmatic from the thermodynamic point of view that Lord Kelvin, co-inventor of the Second Law of thermodynamics, specifically excluded them from its dominion (Ehrenberg, 1967), while Schr?dinger (1944) suggested they feed upon “negative entropy” to free themselves from all the entropy they cannot help producing.
Lord Kelvin was impressed with how organisms seem to have energy at will, whenever and wherever required, and in a perfectly coordinated way. That is at once the problem of bioenergetics – how organisms can have energy so readily – and of biocom-munication – how the energy mobilizing activities are organized as a whole. Similarly, Schr?dinger alluded to the ability of organisms to use the energy they feed on to build up and maintain their dynamic organization. The intuition of both physicists is that energy and organization are intimately linked….
In this essay, I show how stored mobilizable energy effectively frees the organism from thermodynamic constraints so that it is poised for rapid and specific intercommunication. In the ideal, the organism is a quantum superposition of coherent activities with instantaneous (nonlocal) noiseless intercommunication throughout the system.

2.1 Energy storage and mobilization in living systems
The key to understanding the thermodynamics of the living system is not energy flow or energy dissipation, but energy storage under energy flow (Fig. 1). Energy flow is of no consequence unless the energy is trapped and stored within the system where it circulates before being dissipated. A reproducing life cycle, i.e., an organism, arises when the loop of circulating energy closes. At that point, we have a life cycle within which the stored energy is mobilized, remaining stored as it is mobilized, and coupled to the energy flow.
…. According to Rothschild et al (1980), linearity in biological processes can arise in enzymes operating near a multidimensional inflection point far away from thermodynamic equilibrium, if some of the rate constants are linked. That is realistic for living systems which are now known to have highly organized flows in the cytoplasmic matrix. ..Sewell shows how Onsager’s reciprocity relationship applies to locally linearized combinations of forces and flows, which nonetheless behave globally in nonlinear fashion. That is particularly relevant to the living system, where nested compartments and microcompartments ensure that many processes may be operating locally at thermodynamic equilibrium even though the system or subsystem as a whole is far away from equilibrium (Ho, 1995a).
Further-more, as each process is ultimately connected to every other in the metabolic net through catenations of space and time, even if truly symmetrical couplings (note: kan & Li?) are localized to a limited number of metabolic/energy transducing junctions, the effects will eventually be shared or delocalized throughout the system, so that symmetry will apply to appropriate combinations of forces and flows over a sufficiently macroscopic space-time scale (Sewell, 1991). That is perhaps the most important consideration. As real processes take time, Onsager’s reciprocity relationship cannot be true for an arbitrarily short instant, but must apply at a sufficiently macroscopic time interval when overall balance holds.
To summarize, nonlinearity does not preclude symmetry on the appropriate scale, and local linearity does not exclude the possibility for self-organization at a more global level….

2.3 Thermodynamics of the steady state vs thermodynamics of organized complexity
Microscopic homogeneity is not crucial for the formulation of any thermodynamic state, as the thermodynamic parameters are macroscopic entities quite independent of the microscopic interpretation (Ho, 1993). Like the principle of microscopic reversibility, it is extraneous to the phenomenological laws of thermodynamics (Denbigh, 1951).
…According to Guggenheim the two processes, diffusion and flow of current across the junction, “take place at rates which vary according to different laws” when the composition gradient across the boundary is altered, and so it seems reasonable to suppose that the two processes are merely superposed, and that the one may be ignored when considering the other. Thus, the steady state is treated as if there were no dissipative processes, and it is this assumption which is later validated by Onsager’s reciprocity relationship.

2.4 The living system is free from immediate thermodynamic constraints
In the same spirit, I propose to treat the living system as a superposition of dissipative irreversible processes and non-dissipative processes… This will include most living processes because of the ubiquity of coupled cycles, for which the net entropy production balances out to zero. The principle applies in the smallest unit cycle in the living system – enzyme catalysis – on which all energy transduction in the living system is absolutely dependent. Over the past 30 years, Lumry and his coworkers (see Lumry, 1991) have shown convincingly how the flexible enzyme molecule balances out entropy with enthalpy to conserve free energy during catalysis. The organism is, in effect, a closed, self-sufficient energetic domain of cyclic non-dissipative processes coupled to the dissipative processes (Ho, 1995b). In the formalism of conventional thermodynamics, the life cycle, or more precisely, the living system in dynamic equilibrium, consists of all cyclic processes for which the net entropy change is zero, coupled to dissipative processes necessary to keep it going, for which the net entropy change is greater than zero (Fig. 3).

Consequently, the organism is free from the immediate constraints of energy conservation – the First Law – and the Second Law of thermodynamics. There is always energy available within the system, which is mobilized at close to maximum efficiency and over all space-time modes. This in turn creates the conditions for rapid, sensitive and specific intercommunication throughout the system.

3.1 Energy self-sufficiency and the exquisite sensitivity of organisms
One distinguishing feature of the living system is its exquisite sensitivity to weak signals. For example, the eye can detect single photons falling on the retina, and the presence of several molecules of pheromones in the air is sufficient to attract male insects to their mates. That exquisite sensitivity applies to all levels of ‘information processing’ in the organism, and is the direct consequence of its energy self-sufficiency. No part of the system has to be pushed or pulled into action, nor be subjected to mechanical regulation and control. Instead, coordinated action of all the parts depends on rapid intercom-munication throughout the system. The organism is a system of “excitable media” (see Goodwin, 1994,1995), or excitable cells and tissues poised to respond specifically and disproportionately to weak signals because the large amount of energy stored can amplify weak signals into macroscopic actions. It is by virtue of its energy self-sufficiency, therefore, that an organism is a sentient being – a system of sensitive parts all set to intercommunicate, to respond and to act appropriately as a whole to any contingency.

3.2 The polychromatic whole
Evidence for constant intercommunication throughout the living system may already exist in the physiological literature. I refer to ‘deterministic chaos’ which has been used to describe many living functions from the complex, locally unpredictable behaviour of ant colonies (Goodwin, 1994) to unrepeatable patterns of brain activities (Freeman, 1995). A different understanding of the complex activity spectrum of the healthy state is that it is polychromatic (Ho, 1995d), approaching ‘white’ in the ideal, in which all the modes of stored energy are equally represented. It corresponds to the so-called f(l) = const. rule that Fritz Popp (1986) has generalized from the spectrum of light or “biophotons” found to be emitted from all living systems. I have proposed that this polychromatic ideal distribution of stored energy is the state towards which all open systems capable of energy storage naturally evolve (Ho, 1994b).
It is a state of both maximum and minimum entropy – maximum because energy is equally distributed over all space-time modes, and minimum because the modes are coupled together to give, in effect, a single degree of freedom (Popp, 1986; Ho, 1993). In a system with no impedance to energy mobilization, all the modes are intercommunicating and hence all frequencies are represented. But when coupling is imperfect, or when the sub-system, say, the heart, or the brain, is not com-municating properly, it falls back on its own modes, leading to impoverishment of its activity spectrum. The living system is necessarily a polychromatic whole, it is full of variegated complexity that nevertheless cohere into a singular being, and that is the ultimate problem of biocommunication that needs to be addressed. (note: Need for organs to communicate with each other)

4 The intercommunicating whole
Recent advances in biochemistry, cell biology and genetics are giving us a concrete picture of the organism as an interconnected, intercommunicating whole. It is becoming increasingly clear that living organization cannot be understood in terms of mechanistic controls, nor of endless processings of genetic information.

4.1 A molecular democracy of distributed control
Henrik Kacser (1987) was among the first to realize that in a network, especially one as complicated as the metabolic network, it is unrealistic to think that there could be special enzymes controlling the flow of metabolites under all circumstances. He and a colleague pioneered metabolic control analysis to discover how the network is actually regulated. After more than 20 years of investigation by many biochemists and cell biologists, it is now generally acknowledged that so-called ‘control’ is invariably distributed over many enzymes (and metabolites) in the network, and moreover, the distribution of control differs under different conditions. The metabolic network turns out to be a “molecular democracy” of distributed control.

4.2 Long-range energy continua in cells and tissue.
Studies over the past 25 years have also revealed that energy mobilization in living systems is achieved by protein or enzyme molecules acting as “flexible molecular energy machines” (Ho, 1995a and references therein) transferring energy directly from the point of release to the point of utilization, without thermalization or dissipation. These direct energy transfers are carried out in collective modes extending from the molecular to the macroscopic domain. The flow of metabolites is channeled coherently at the molecular level, directly from one enzyme to the next in sequence, in multi-enzyme complexes (Welch and Clegg, 1987). At the same time, high voltage electron microscopy and other physical measurement techniques reveal that the cell is more like a ‘solid state’ than the ‘bag of dissolved enzymes’ that generations of biochemists had previously supposed (Clegg, 1984). Not only are almost all enzymes bound to an intricate “microtrabecular lattice”, but a large proportion of metabolites as well as water molecules are also structured on the enormous surfaces available. Aqueous channels may be involved in the active transport of solutes within the cell in the way that the blood stream transports metabolites and chemical messengers within the organism (Wheatley and Clegg, 1991).
As Welch and Berry (1985) propose, the whole cell is linked by “long-range energy continua” of mechanical interactions, electric and eletrochemical fluxes and in particular, proton currents that form a “protoneural network”, whereby metabolism is regulated instantly and down to minute detail. Cells are in turn interconnected by electrical and other cytoplasmic junctions. And there is increasing evidence that cells and tissues are also linked by electromagnetic phonons and photons (see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992; Ho, 1993; Ho, Popp and Warnke, 1994). As I shall show later, the cell (as well as organism) is not so much a “solid state” as liquid crystalline. Living systems, therefore, possess just the conditions favouring the rapid propagation of influences or ‘information’ in all directions, which are naturally gated in cascades (see Ho, 1993) by the relaxation space-times of the processes involved. These are precisely the conditions that can yield linear flow force relationships in a system globally far from thermodynamic equilibrium (Berry et al, 1987). Global phase transitions may often take place, which can be initiated at any point within the system or subsystem. Abrupt, phase-transition like changes in the electrical activities of whole areas of the brain are indeed frequently observed in simultaneous recordings with a large array of electrodes, for which no definite centre(s) of origin can be identified.

4.3 Organism and environment – a mutual partnership

Biology today remains dominated by the genetic paradigm. The genome is seen as the repository of genetic information controlling the development of the organism, but otherwise insulated from the environment, and passed on unchanged to the next generation except for rare random mutations. The much publicized Human Genome Project is being promoted on that basis (Ho, 1995e). The genetic paradigm has already been fatally under-mined at least ten years ago, when a plethora of ‘fluid genome’ processes were first discovered, and many more have come to light since. These processes destabilize and alter genes and genomes in the course of development, some of the genetic changes are so well correlated with the environment that they are referred to as “directed mutations”. Many of the genetic changes are passed on to the next generation. As I pointed out at the time, heredity can no longer be seen to reside solely in the DNA passed on from one generation to the next. Instead, the stability and repeatability of development – which we recognize as heredity – is distributed in the whole gamut of dynamic feedback interrelationships between organism and environment from the socioecological to the genetic. All of these may leave imprints that are passed on to subsequent generations: as cultural traditions or artefacts, maternal or cytoplasmic effects, gene expression states, as well as genetic (DNA sequence) changes (see Ho, 1986;1996).

4.4 The distributed organic whole

Thus, the essence of the organic whole is that it is distributed throughout its constituent parts, with no centre of control, no governors, no hierarchical levels of line-managers or regulators processing information down the line of command. Instead, pervasive, moment to moment intercommunication throughout the system renders part and whole, local and global completely indistinguishable. The existing mechanistic framework is most inadequate in coming to grips with the organic whole. In the next Section, I shall present an alternative frame-work based on coherence, in particular, on quantum coherence.

5 The organism as an autonomous coherent whole

5.1 The coherence of organisms

I mentioned earlier that the living system is necessarily a polychromatic whole – a variegated complexity that nevertheless cohere into a singular being. The wholeness of the organism is the ultimate problem of biocommunication: how to account for the continuity that encompasses the activities of elementary particles and atoms, molecules and cells, tissues and organs all the way to the organism itself (see Joseph Needham, 1935) The problem has never been adequately addressed until Herbert Fr?hlich (1968; 1980) presented the first detailed theory of coherence. He argued that as organisms are made up of strongly dipolar molecules packed rather densely together (c.f. the ‘solid state’ cell), electric and elastic forces will constantly interact. Metabolic pumping will excite macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids as well as cellular membranes (which typically have an enormous electric field of some 107V/m across them). These will start to vibrate and eventually build up into collective modes, or coherent excitations, of both phonons and photons extending over macroscopic distances within, and perhaps also outside, the organism.
The emission of electromagnetic radiation from coherent lattice vibrations in a solid-state semi-conductor has recently been experimentally demonstrated for the first time … The possibility that organisms may use electro-magnetic radiations to communicate between cells was already entertained by Soviet biologist Gurwitsch (1925) early this century.This hypothesis was revived by Popp and his coworkers in the late 1970s, and there is now a large and rapidly growing literature on “biophotons” believed to be emitted from a coherent photon field (or energy storage field) within the living system (see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992).
In collaboration with Fritz Popp, we have found that a single, brief exposure of synchronously developing early fruitfly embryos to white light results in the re-emission of relatively intense and prolonged flashes of light, some tens of minutes and even hours after the light exposure (Ho et al, 1992b). The phenomenon is reminiscent of phase-correlated collective emission, or superradiance, in atomic systems, although the time-scale is orders of magnitude longer, perhaps in keeping with the coherence times of organisms. For phase-correlation to build up over the entire population, one must assume that each embryo has a collective phase of all its activities, in other words, each embryo must be considered a highly (quantum) coherent domain, despite its multiplicity of activities (Ho, Zhou and Haffegee, 1995).
During the same period of early development, exposure of the embryos to weak static magnetic fields also cause characteristic global transformation of the normal segmental body pattern to helical configurations in the larvae emerging 24 hours later (Ho et al, 1992a). As the energies involved are several order of magnitude below the thermal threshold, we conclude that there can be no effect unless the external field is acting on a coherent domain where charges are moving in phase, or where magnetically sensitive liquid crystals are undergoing phase alignment globally (Ho, et al, 1994). Liquid crystals may indeed be the material basis of many, if not all aspects of biological organization (Ho et al, 1995).

5.2 Organisms as polyphasic liquid crystals

Liquid crystals are phases of matter between the solid and the liquid states, hence the term, mesophases (DeGennes, 1974). Liquid crystalline mesophases possess long range orientational order, and often also varying degrees of translational order. In contrast to solid crystals, liquid crystals are mobile and flexible, and above all, highly responsive. They undergo rapid changes in orientation or phase transitions when exposed to electric and magnetic fields (Blinov, 1983) or to changes in temperature, pressure, pH, hydration, and concentrations of inorganic ions (Collings, 1990; Knight, 1993). These properties are ideal for organisms (Gray, 1993; Knight, 1993). Liquid crystals in organisms include all the major constituents of the organism: the amphiphilic lipids of cellular membranes, the DNA in chromosomes, all proteins, especially cytoskeletal proteins, muscle proteins, collagens and proteoglycans of connective tissues. These adopt a multiplicity of meso-phases that may be crucial for biological structure and function at all levels of organization (Ho et al, 1995) from channeling metabolites in the cell to pattern deter-mination and the coordinated locomotion of whole organisms.
The importance of liquid crystals for living organization was recognized by Joseph Needham (1935) among others. He suggested that living systems actually are liquid crystals, and that many liquid crystalline mesophases may exist in the cell although they cannot then be detected. Indeed, there has been no direct evidence that extensive liquid crystalline mesophases exist in living organisms or in the cytoplasm until our recent discovery of a noninvasive optical technique (Ho and Lawrence, 1993; Ho and Saunders, 1994; Newton, Haffegee and Ho, 1995). This enables us to obtain high resolution and high contrast coloured images of live organisms based on visualizing just the kind of coherent liquid crystalline mesophases which Needham and others had predicted.
The technique amplifies small birefringences typical of biological liquid crystals, en-abling us to see the whole living organism down to the phase alignment of the molecules that make up its tissues. Brilliant interference colours are generated, specific for each tissue, dependent on the birefringence of the molecules and their degree of coherent phase alignment. The colours are generated even as the molecules in the tissues are moving about, busily transforming energy. That is possible because visible light vibrates much faster than the molecules can move, so the tissues will appear indistinguishable from static crystals to the light passing through so long as the movements of the constituent molecules are sufficiently coherent. With this imaging technique, one can see that the organism is thick with activities at every level, coordinated in a continuum from the macroscopic to the molecular. And that is what the coherence of the organism entails.
These images also bring out another aspect of the wholeness of the organism: all organisms, from protozoa to vertebrates without exception, are polarized along the anteroposterior axis, so that all the colours in different parts of the body are maximum when the anteroposterior axis is appropriately aligned, and they change in concert as the organism is rotated from that position. The anteroposterior axis is the optical axis of the whole organism, which is, in effect, a single (uniaxial) crystal. This leaves us in little doubt that the organism is a singular whole, despite the diverse multiplicity and polychromatic nature of its constituent parts.
The tissues not only maintain their crystalline order when they are actively trans-forming energy, the degree of order seems to depend on energy transformation, in that the more active and energetic the organism, the more intensely colorful it is, implying that the molecular motions are all the more coherent (Ho and Saunders, 1994). The coherence of the organism is closely tied up with its energetic status, as argued in the beginning of this essay: energy and organization are intimately linked. The coherent whole is full of energy – it is a vibrant coherent whole.

5.3 Quantum coherence in living organisms

The above considerations and observations convince me that the wholeness of organisms is only fully captured by quantum coherence (Ho, 1993

A quantum coherent system maximizes both global cohesion and local freedom (Ho, 1993). This property, technically referred to as factorizability, enables the body to be performing all sorts of different coordinated functions simultaneously (Ho, 1995b). It also enables instantaneous (nonlocal) and noiseless intercommunication to take place through-out the system (Ho 1995f). As I am writing, my digestive system is working independ-ently, my metabolism busily transforming chemical energy in all my cells, putting some away in the longer term stores of fat and glycogen, while converting most of it into readily utilizable forms such as ATP. Similarly, my muscles are keeping in tone and allowing me to work the keyboard, while, hopefully, my neurons are firing in wonder-fully coherent patterns in my brain. Nevertheless, if the telephone should ring in the middle of all this, I would turn to pick it up without hesitation.
The importance of factorizability is evoked by the movie character, Dr. Strangelove, portrayed by Peter Sellers as a megalomaniac scientist who wanted to rule the world. He was a wheelchair-bound paraplegiac, who could not speak without raising his arm in the manner of a Nazi salute. That is just the symptom of the loss of factorizability which is the hallmark of quantum coherence.
The coherent organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of activities – organized according to their characteristic space-times – each itself coherent, so that it can couple coherently to the rest (Ho, 1995b). It is, in effect a vast array of Fr?hlich systems all coupled together. This picture is fully consistent with the earlier proposal that the organism stores energy over all space-time domains each intercommunicating (or coupled) with the rest…Furthermore, quantum superposition enables the system to maximize its potential degrees of freedom so that the single degree of freedom required for coherent action can be instantaneously accessed.
The main implication of quantum coherence for living organization is that, in maxi-mizing both local freedom and global intercommunication, the organism is in a very real sense completely free. Nothing is in control, and yet everything is in control. Thus, it is the failure to transcend the mechanistic framework that makes people persist in enquiring which parts are in control, or issuing instructions or information. These questions are meaningless when one understands what it is to be a coherent, organic whole. An organic whole is an entangled whole, where part and whole, global and local are so thoroughly implicated as to be indistinguishable, and where each part is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive. The challenge for us all is to rethink information processing in the context of the coherent organic whole.

Acknowledgments (60 footnotes on website) http://www.i-sis.org/