Conventional medicine practitioners are not very friendly to nonmaterial causes of disease because of their belief in a philosophy called scientific materialism. According to this philosophy, all phenomena are due to the movement of matter in space and time, and all that seems nonphysical must in truth be epiphenomena of matter alone. This philosophy holds that all cause is material and local, mediated by signals. All events are objective and determined. In particular, medicine is based on a biology that holds strongly to the belief called genetic determinism: genes determine everything relating to the physical body.
In this way, scientific materialism leaves no room for theorizing about nonphysical sources of human disease. But is this belief system correct? In fact, it is based on an archaic Newtonian physics that has been replaced by a new paradigm called quantum physics quite some time ago. Quantum objects are transcendent waves of possibility residing in a domain of potentiality; when subjected to measurement, however, they behave as particles in the physical space and time. This is contrary to scientific materialism: not one domain of reality, but two. Quantum physics also allows nonlocality, signalless communication, opening wide the question of nonphysical source of causality. Moreover, in quantum physics, there is a fundamental uncertainty in the movement of objects that we cannot get rid of; hence, strict determinism does not hold and quantum science is probabilistic—only probabilities of events can be calculated.
In this way, quantum physics has brought doubt in the universality of genetic determinism. If the root cause of many diseases is not genetic, is not even local and physical, if we can trace nonlocal and nonphysical causes of disease, if we can theorize about these nonphysical causes effectively, base such theories firmly on experimental data, what then?
In my book, The Quantum Doctor, I have laid out the rudiments of such a theory and shown that experimental data already exists in support of it. Credibility of the new theory will take a quantum leap in your mind when you realize that the new approach is integrative of both conventional and alternative medicine.
Quantum Psycho-physical Parallelism
Quantum physics gives us an unsolvable paradox if we hold on to scientific materialism—the paradox of quantum measurement. How does a wave of possibility become a particle of actuality upon measurement in view of a mathematical theorem that no material interaction can ever convert a wave of possibility into an event of actuality? To resolve the paradox, we must invoke the philosophy of monistic idealism and posit that consciousness is the ground of all being and material objects are possibilities of consciousness itself. Consciousness chooses out of the many facets of a possibility wave the one facet that becomes actuality. The choice by consciousness is responsible for the collapse of the wave into a particle.
This way of resolving the quantum measurement problem that quantum physics forces upon us in the form of the von Neumann theorem, opens the door for an equitable treatment of all our experiences and does not put material experiences in a privileged position. As the psychologist Carl Jung codified, we have four kinds of equally valid experiences: we sense material objects: sensing; we feel vital energies: feeling; we think mental meaning: thinking; we intuit archetypal values like truth and love: intuiting. These four ways of experiencing the world give us four personality types, said Jung.
Jung’s empirical data forces us to think beyond scientific materialism and according to quantum psycho-physical parallelism:
Consciousness is the ground of being in which there are four worlds of quantum possibilities: material, vital, mental, and archetypal (which I call supramental). Choice from material possibilities gives us material objects of sensing. When consciousness chooses from the possibility-movements of the vital world, we experience vital energy movements of feeling. Choice from the mental world, mind, gives us meaningful objects of thought. And choice from the supramental gives us the archetypal objects of intuition.
The individual manifest worlds of our experience do not interact directly but only though the intermediary of consciousness with nonlocal, signnalless communication.
This scientific validation of our subtle experiences of feeling, thinking, and intuition, opens the door for the validation of alternative practices of medicine that postulate an important disease-causing role to imbalances of the subtle movements of our experience. For example, vital body medicine practices (Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Indian Ayurveda, homeopathy) hold that many diseases are caused by imbalances or blocks of vital energy movements associated with our organs and their interactions. Mind-body medicine practices hold that imbalances and blocks in our processing of mental meaning cause some of our diseases. And so forth.
We have four bodies of experiences within the four worlds of consciousness that are the whole. All together five bodies, five different sources of imbalances and blocks of disease, and so five different healing systems are called for as has been the tradition. However, now that quantum physics has enabled us a unified way of incorporating all our experiences within one integral metaphysics, we can also integrate all the medicine practices within one unified practice of quantum integral medicine.
