What is Crystal Thearpy?
Excerpt from Really Useful Crystal Layouts by Brian Parsons, published by Samarpan Alchemy Publishing.
ISBN: 978-1-907167-10-2
What is crystal therapy and how does it work?
To answer this question we must first explore the different contexts within which crystal therapy sits.
We need to explore both the therapy context and the historical context underlying crystal therapy.
Crystal Therapy is one area within the much broader field of vibrational medicine.
Vibrational medicine includes crystal therapy, colour therapy, homeopathy, flower essences, tree essences, gem essences, and sound therapy (to name but a few).
Within the last 100 years, relativity theory and quantum physics has conclusively shown that there is no such thing as solid matter, that everything is composed of energy vibrating at different rates. If this was not true, you could not be reading these words on a computer screen, via the internet.
Practitioners of vibrational medicine believe crystals and other vibrational agents vibrate at a rate which is both life-enhancing and which promotes health and wellbeing.
They believe that placing a healing agent – such as a crystal – on or around the client’s body creates a vibrational effect, which interacts with the client’s own energy field, so that the client’s energy field starts to resonate at the same rate as the crystal, and no longer at the rate which is associated with a particular illness or issue.
This is in contrast to traditional allopathic medicine, where healing can only occur through a chemical / physical interaction with the patient’s body – through their taking a prescribed drug, or surgical intervention, or some other manipulation of the physical body.
Allopathic medicine has been the dominant force within Western medicine for the past 300 years, and its paradigm – a set of practices and beliefs which define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time – can be mainly traced back to 2 historical events:
- Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) did a deal with the Pope to allow him and other scientists to dissect human bodies. At that time, medicine needed to dissect human bodies in order to extend the knowledge of anatomy, however, this was outlawed by the Catholic Church, on the grounds that a soul could not be resurrected on the Day of Judgement if its body was incomplete. In return for the Pope allowing human dissection to go ahead, Rene Descartes promised that from that point on doctors and scientists would only focus on the physical human body, and that any enquiry into the human emotions, mind and soul would remain the domain of the Church. From this point onwards medicine started to focus on the physical body at the expense of emotional, mental or spiritual elements, which were often ignored or discounted as unimportant.
- Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) discovered calculus, which enabled him and others to create mathematical equations which could be used to predict the fundamental laws of nature, such as light, force and gravity. Now Newton was as much an alchemist as he was a scientist, and so he can’t be entirely held responsible for the Newtonian revolution which occurred later. But from this point onwards, there was a growing belief that the universe was a vast machine, and through observation and reason it was possible to deduce how this machine worked, and so control it. Building on this, if the universe was a machine then so was the human body, and if medicine knew how it worked, medicine could also repair it.
These 2 events helped to shape the medical paradigm which has dominated the Western medical tradition for the past 300 years. Cornerstones of this paradigm are:
- The body is a machine
- Each body is separate and distinct, and does not interact with its surroundings except for the fuel it needs to continue to exist (food / air / water)
- A machine cannot fix itself, and requires outside intervention for healing / repair to occur
- Healing can only occur through the intervention of trained experts
- Medical science is not concerned with the emotions, mind or soul, and there is no link between these and the physical body (or if there is they arise from the physical body and have no independent existence)
- Intellect and reason are superior to intuition and feeling
It must be recognised that this dominant / traditional medical paradigm has been very successful, there have been many significant breakthroughs in medical science because of it, and that many people owe their health and continued existence to its discoveries and techniques.
However, as with other past paradigms, there are limitations, and when you choose to accept one version of reality as the truth, anything which does not fit your picture of reality has to be ignored or excluded.
But for the past 200 years these “inconvenient truths” have been making a comeback, and the cornerstones of the traditional medical paradigm have been steadily eroded by developments within science itself and the alternative therapies. These developments include:
- Samuel Hahnemann (1755 – 1843) discovered Homeopathy, where a healing agent is diluted in water, or potentized, and then taken by the patient. The healing agent then interacts with the subtle energies of the patient to kick start their own healing process. Now the traditional medical paradigm hates homeopathy, because it challenges many of its sacred cornerstones, and there have been many attempts to discredit it. But if homeopathy does work, and many people claim to have been helped by it, then it proves that there is more to a human being then the physical body, that there is also an energy body which is important for health and wellbeing, and also that the human body can heal itself.
- Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) was the founder of Psychoanalysis, which postulated that the human mind has a conscious and unconscious element. This helped to undermine the belief that the human body was a machine, because how can a machine have both a visible and hidden side, which are often working against each other. From Freud onwards, there was the realisation that the human mind is far more complex then any machine, and that the causes of many illnesses and issues reside in the unconscious part of the self.
- Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) discovered Relativity and the famous equation E = MC2. This proved that solid matter was an illusion, and that in reality, all matter was really energy vibrating at different rates.
- Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962) was one of the founding fathers of Quantum Physics, which put an end to the Newtonian cause and effect view of the universe, especially when it was discovered that the observer of an experiment can also influence the outcome of the experiment, which totally undermines the mechanical universe theory.
- In the 1970s, Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen founded the medical science of psychoneuroimmunology, and established the important role which emotions play in health and illness. This helped to undermine the belief that emotions play no part in the continued wellbeing of the human body, and this work has been continued and built on by Candace Pert and others.
- In the 1980s and 1990s, Martin E.P. Seligman founded Positive Psychology, and established that an individual’s beliefs and mental attitudes in life have an important influence on their health and continued wellbeing. If a person can change their mental outlook on life, there is strong chance they can improve their health.
- From the 1970s onwards, the integration into Western culture of the healing traditions of other cultures, such as Ayurvdea from India, Shiatsu from Japan, and Acupuncture from China, began and has continued. There have been various scientific studies which show their effectiveness for certain medical conditions. All of these traditions work from the premise that there is a subtle energy body connected to the physical body which influences its health and wellbeing.
In addition, over the past 100 years there have been many discoveries which show that the human body uses vibration and resonance in its functioning, and that it is not just an intricate clockwork mechanism. These discoveries include:
- Blood is magnetic and oxygen is also magnetic. Oxygen is able to bond with blood cells and be transported through the human body through the power of magnetism.
- Bones are semi-conductors, and generate electricity when pressure is put on them. They also generate electricity when exposed to light, and they create light when they are generating electricity.
- Scientists now believe that enzymes are so effective because they create a resonance phenomenon which allows them to lock in place when they reach their destination, and that this is one of their key properties.
- Your brain actually generates light within and between its cells.
- Your heart generates an electromagnetic field which is 5000 times more powerful than your brain’s electromagnetic field, and which can be measured at least 12 feet from your physical body.
- Your nerves generate an AC electromagnetic field, and your brain generates a DC electromagnetic field – so you are really AC / DC on the inside.
- Sunlight influences the activity of your pituitary gland, which in turn influences many of the body’s internal systems.
- Many of the body’s most essential biochemical reactions occur at extremely low levels of electrical potential, but which are frequency specific. This means weak electromagnetic fields can influence you more powerfully than strong ones if they are at the exact frequency that can influence your physiological systems.
- You create Vitamin D when sunlight touches your electrically active skin.
- One of the ways your bio-field accesses your physical body is through the process of semi-conduction. Semi-conduction happens in materials with highly ordered molecular structures, like crystals. The regular electron structure of crystals allows electrons to move through them very easily. Electron microscopy has revealed many crystalline structures in the human body. Semi-conducting currents are thousands of times more sensitive to electromagnetic interaction than the kinds which travel down a copper wire. Semiconductors carry only small currents, but they carry them over very long distances. Your proteins are semi-conductors, and you regulate the semi-conductors in your connective tissues by the process of hydration and oxygenation, or by changing the levels of water and oxygen in your body.
- There’s a positive and negative charge on the surfaces of large bio-molecules in your body, and these charges separate like two poles of a magnet. Molecules of this type are called electrical dipoles, and they’re like microphones because they convert acoustic sound into electrical signals, and at the same time, they are like stereo speakers, because they convert electrical signals into vibrations. Electricity and vibrations convert into each other at the level of the cells. They create a single electrovibratory field, which is known as the Josephson effect. This is how the surface of your skin works.
Now, for a long time, the traditional medical paradigm argued that it accepted that the human body does indeed generate an electromagnetic field, but that this field is a by product of physical / mechanical processes, and that the human body did not use this electromagnetic field for communication or within any of its internal processes.
However, as can be seen above, continued discoveries show that this is not the case, and that the human body does indeed use vibration, resonance and electromagnetic fields for internal communication and process, and if this is so, then it is only a small step towards acceptance that these processes can be influenced by an external vibration, such as a crystal, which are frequency specific.
Unfortunately, as the history of science shows, the transition from one paradigm to the next is not about reason and evidence, but has more to do with belief and dogma. In the majority of cases, the proponents of the old paradigm have to retire and die out before the new paradigm can take hold and be accepted, and this seems to be the case with the current clash between the traditional medical paradigm and the new paradigm of vibrational healing.
There is a sad story told by Stanislav Grof about Carl Sagan towards the end of his life, where Sagan preferred to accuse a fellow scientist of lying, rather then engage with the evidence which that scientist was attempting to present. Why did Sagan do this? Probably because the evidence challenged his view of reality and how it worked, and it was easier for him to deny it then re-assess his personal ideas and opinions.
Unfortunately, this is something which we are all prone to from time to time, and it is the reason why you can amass all the scientific evidence in the world about how and why crystals work, but in the end for many people it will come down to their own personal experiences and opinions, and whether they choose to believe it or not.
