🍄 The Rainbow, The Worm, H20 and Genius

The microanatomy of the entire body needs to be re-examined.

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"Life is achingly beautiful and creative once you free yourself from the mind-numbing shackles of neo-Darwinian dogma.”
—Mae-Wan Ho, Geneticist

A Scientific American article titled: "Meet Your Interstitium, a Newfound Organ” published in 2018, introduces a paradigm-breaking discovery of fluid-filled spaces in the body’s connective tissue. More than two-thirds of the human body is water, most of that contained inside cells. Much of the rest, about 20 percent of the fluid in the body, is "interstitial," a Latin word combining "inter," or "between," and "sistere," or "to place"—literally, "between the other places.” Understanding the interstitium could be particularly significant in diagnosing and tracking diseases that spread throughout the body. 

According to the research team, the interstitium was right there under their noses (and skin) all along, but it took a new way of examining tissues to figure it out. No one saw the "in-between" spaces before because the way scientists traditionally examine human tissue (by slicing it and treating it with chemicals) drains away its fluids. Interstitial tissues handled that way throw off all of their fluids and, in essence, flatten out. Life exists on a spectrum and is, at its root, organized, quantum coherent energy. 

Well, not so fast, someone did see the “in-between spaces"….

Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. In an interview with Dr. Mae- Wan Ho  in 2007, Dr. Ho told us about her living experiment where she uncovered the body’s water channels, which she called liquid crystalline. This news did not make it to  Scientific American—at the time. Dr. Ho was considered a renegade, or as some claimed, “controversial." In our 28+ years of interviewing geniuses, Alice has come to realize it is not easy being at the frontier. Dr. Ho is just one of a few visionaries interviewed whose ideas—once considered controversial—ultimately manifest in society. 

Alice in Futureland lives at the forefront of changing paradigms. Meaningful foresight lives within a certain tolerance for ambiguity. Theories evolve. Accepting this zone of ambiguity is important to see the probable, and if we are lucky, the provocative future. 

Liquid crystalline and a new physics of life

Mae-Wan’s book, "Living Rainbow H2O",  uncovers the startling properties of water and its relation to life as we know it. We highly recommend going down the rabbit hole on her archive site Institute of Science in Society. For anyone interested in cutting-edge biology or biophysics, or anyone interested in related philosophical issues, Mae-Wan was a brilliant researcher and her ideas will just keep receiving broader acceptance in coming decades. Dr. Ho died in 2016, we are so privileged to have met the quantum-coherent-force called Mae-Wan Ho. 

Below is an edited interview from our archives. It is as fast-paced, and electric as the ideas that drove Mae-Wan’s existence. 

“It was one day in 1992 and I was already very deep into trying to understand living organization. How it is that organisms are so well coordinated? They can play like tennis and play the piano where you have a split second coordination involved. And then you don’t know, there is nothing in conventional textbook biology that would explain that. And I was very intrigued about this idea of coherence. 

Coherence is a special kind of wholeness of the organism, in the sense that every part is actually intercommunicating at every moment with every other part. And the real archetypal way of describing it is actually quantum coherence. 

And so I said if there is any evidence of this coherence we should be able to see it. You see, I am a very literal person in that way. So one day a friend, his name was Michael Lawrence, he worked in the BBC and was at the Open University. He came into my lab and said he was filming crystallization and a polarizing light microscope in the Earth Sciences Department. So, I said, ‘Oh good. Let’s go and have a look at our embryos under this microscope.’ Now I should explain to you polarizing light microscopes in Earth Sciences is always used to look at rock crystals, and if you set it up properly, this is a special polarizing set-up that gives you a dark field. But if you have these rock crystals and you put them between, under this dark field in which you set it up so that only polarized light goes through. But in any case, only crystals, that is material with a very highly ordered arrangement of atoms or molecules, will look bright and colorful. So that was the idea I was going on. I said, ‘If there is something about the living organization, as the living egg, the embryo as it is developing, then we should see some very colorful, fantastic images.’ And so we went. And on that day the technician in charge of the lab was away. So my friend was not an expert but he was actually a very good microscopist. So he played around with all the settings until he thought he got a good picture. And now, very interestingly, my friend is colorblind so he knew he saw a very good contrast picture, very clear. And then he came in and he said, ‘Well come and have a look at this.’ And I looked out and I was just flabbergasted because this, basically, was what I saw. [*Visual of still picture from microscope of worm is shown above] 

The Rainbow Worm

And what we saw was this little lava just emerging from the egg. It was just like nothing you have seen. It had these flashing rainbow colors. It was just going about its business of living and exploring the world. But it was just so beautiful. All the colors, literally, all the colors of the rainbow. And it is very accurate because these are so-called interference colors. These are the brightest, purest colors that you can get. And the artists would die for them because they are the colors of the rainbow. So you get these brilliant reds and oranges and blues and greens, and they keep changing into each other. As the animal’s moving they keep getting brighter, dimmer, darker, brighter. It was just so beautiful. 

So this is where the phrase “rainbow worm” came from, and that gave the title to a book that I wrote. We printed it many times but that was in 1992. And the significance of this is that, at first, we puzzled really about it. Rock crystals we can understand because they have this ordered arrangement of the atoms and even liquid crystals we can understand…they also look bright under this kind of polarizing light microscope because they have a very ordered alignment of the molecules. However, this little worm is nothing static about it. It’s moving about all the time. 

How is it possible for something, for a living, squirming, crawling worm to look like liquid crystals? It just blows your mind. 

We thought surely there must be a very simple explanation and before we reinvent the wheel we better look for a physicist friend to tell us what was going on. So little did we know what would happen. A quantum optics physicist looked at this and he was puzzled, asked ‘Are these colors still there when the organism dies?’ So I was equally puzzled. I said, ‘Why do you want to know? I never even thought to ask.’ So he said, “Then I know these colors are not artifacts.” Then I was shocked because this really tells me we have a kind of scientific paradigm, a very mechanical paradigm, based on dead static things. And therefore when faced with something living, moving, colorful as hell…all they can think about is this must be an artifact. How can you use methods that are appropriate to dead static material to try and understand living things?

There is no holding nature still and looking at it. And really, basically, that is the dilemma. We have a mechanistic science that would not actually enable us to understand living organization, and we have to get out of this paradigm.

The Body Crystalline

So what does this picture tell us? The rainbow worm is telling us that our body is coherent beyond our wildest dreams. Every single part of it is intercommunicating with every other part. And this is why I can talk and move my arms about while my body is digesting my food this morning, and my brainwaves are firing and so on. And this is what a perfectly coordinated, coherent system can do. And that is just what this rainbow worm is telling us.

Of course at that time when I first proposed it, very few people took it seriously. But soon after that neurobiologists who were studying the brainwaves, the discharges of the brain cells and different parts of the brain, they began noticing these highly correlated activities of the brain cells and all brain areas in different parts of the brain that are widely separated. And from that they conclude that the brain must be acting in a very coherent way. So from then on the idea of coherence and quantum coherence has begun to take root. 

The basis of that coherence, a lot of that, is due to the fact that our bodies are actually liquid crystalline.

Which is why you see the rainbow worm. And the importance of the liquid crystalline phase in our body, there are many phases of liquid crystallinity in our body, is due to the water. Water that is associated with all our cells and tissues and organs and everything. And we are 70% water on average. And if we lose our water we would not work at all. So it has been known for a long time among the biochemists that water plays a very important role in the enzyme action. So, first of all, what is the importance of the water? The water enables the proteins and the molecules to be flexible. And you can’t actually have any activity if you are not flexible, right? So that is the first requirement. And we know from our experiments that if you dehydrate the tissues the colors fade. The colors are much more muted. So the colors and the liquid crystallinity is actually very highly correlated with this flexibility. When we look at the movement of the rainbow worm, the most active parts are also the brightest parts. And we’ve done the physics and the optics to know that the brightest parts are the most coherent parts…which means that the more energetic the parts, the more coherent it is. The more active the parts, the more coherent it is. 

So, in a sense, our imaging technique gives you a kind of measure of vitality.
People talk about vitality but nobody knows what it is. Well, it is actually very concretely related to this idea of energy and coherence. So when the colors are washed out that means the tissues and the molecules are no longer so vital and full of energy… they are no longer moving coherently.  

By the way, the answer to whether the colors are still there after the organism dies is “No.” 

And this is remarkable because after the organism dies these coherent motions can’t take place anymore. And, in fact, incoherent motions begin to take over. And therefore you lose the colors. So this is absolutely why the colors and the brightness reflect coherence and vitality. 

Now there is also another importance of the water that, by the way, permeates throughout the entire body. It is in the nervous system as much as it’s in the connective tissues in the cells. They are all interconnected. There is a liquid crystalline continuum that goes through the whole of the body and it is interconnected into the interior of every single cell. So it gives you a very concrete pathway of interconnecting every single cell with every other. It’s just amazing. So now you have a substrate for real intercommunication and coherence. 

I could go on and on about the cell water and the biological water which make up the liquid crystalline continuum, the liquid crystalline matrix that’s the living organism. But the most important one is that it conducts positive electricity. And this, by the way, is a very important reason why our bodies are intercommunicating all the time. 

A colleague and I some years ago had proposed that acupuncture meridians… you know, traditional Chinese medicine is based on a totally different paradigm from this mechanistic paradigm of Western medicine. You have lots of different diseases based on different molecules being absent, and molecules come together like lock and key, like nuts and bolts. So you have many different kinds of diseases based on defects of different molecules. Well the Chinese, actually, have a very organic view of health. 

To the Chinese, you see, the body is coherent, intercommunicating—the rest of your body is communicating with your brain as well as the brain is communicating with the rest of your body. The brain is nothing special. In fact, the Chinese say, “My heart thinks.” And I still think my heart thinks. 

It gives you a totally different feel, doesn’t it, if you think your brain thinks as opposed to your heart thinks. Part of Chinese medicine is to say that this intercommunication goes through energy meridians. And even though Western medicine has picked up on Chinese medicine and acupuncture is now accepted by Western medicine because they say, ‘There are these endorphins, molecules that give you pain relief and so on and so forth that are produced when you have acupuncture.’ That’s nonsense explanation. That’s not an explanation at all because you still have to explain how it is that sticking a needle at the side of your little toe, which is supposed to actually represent your eye, can lead to brainwaves coming out of the visual cortex in your brain. This has been shown. They are still puzzling over that. So one explanation is that it is the water aligned on these connective tissues that are the major meridians…that are the major energy transport. Energy and information now is interchangeable because an electrical signal through these water channels, through these hydrogen bonded daisy chains, would be energy. It would be signal, information signal, because everything is highly organized.

Energy is everywhere. So you only need a very weak signal before you can set off a very significant effect. And that is basically how it is possible for our body, our liquid crystalline body, to get organized.

Radical Wholism

Schrödinger asked this question, ‘What is life?’ And he meant it in ‘What is life, in a physical and chemical sense?’ as well as, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ And my book was basically written as an answer, as an update to Schrödinger’s question. So I don’t shy away from things like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ And I think this is really crucial. Because if you have this organic way of knowing, it gives you a totally different take on life. It does make you feel interconnected with everything. It makes you feel your body is totally interconnected, it makes you feel interconnected with you, and with every other person, every other living other thing on Earth…or even non-living. 

And that is how profound the implications are. And it’s a kind of what you call a ‘radical wholism.’ And it recovers, to a large extent, the wholistic perspective of all indigenous cultures all over the world. We have a crisis of communication, the Western culture, with the rest of the world. And I definitely think that that is the source of all conflicts and strife. This whole notion of competition of one-against-all and all-against-nature is because people don’t feel profound entanglement, interconnectedness, and the paradigm of interconnectedness. 

What I am saying is that quantum physics gives you a very good in-road into thinking about coherence…to thinking and feeling. If you really take that seriously there is no separation between thinking and feeling because this whole Western paradigm, mechanistic paradigm, about objective science is that you should leave your feelings behind and you should think with your disembodied mind or brain or whatever. And that is really nonsensical. What is required of you is a total coherence with what you want to know. This is where I feel, again, our science is static and mechanical. It kills us. And it has no communication with the feeling part which is the aesthetic part…which is art. 

Art and science should be one in this kind of quantum coherent education system. 

And this quantum coherent paradigm is totally different with this dominant paradigm of Darwinism gone mad—that everything is based on competition and competitiveness, dog eat dog society, if you thrive that means I diminish, and so on. It is a world in which everything is interconnected, deeply entangled—and every living being contains a bit of every other. This is an organic way of being—of being and creating. The universe is always being created and re-created from moment to moment. 

What we have to look at is this whole notion of the wisdom of the body.

Life is incredibly magical but we keep constraining it, we keep destroying it, limiting it because we don’t open our hearts and minds to it. So this is the difference between an organic way of being and this kind of mechanistic way of being. I’m a very subversive scientist I’m afraid, and some people will probably shriek with horror at what I am saying [laughs]” Thank you for your radical wisdom, Dr. Ho.

What else we are wondering…

🔍 The Science in Society website is Dr. Mae Wan Ho's archive of scientific reports, journalism, books and audio visual material representing two decades of work by the Institute of Science in Society. There are close to 2000 reports available on this site: some are previously published in print, others only electronically. 

🔍 What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrödinger

🔍 Understanding Biophoton Theory
There are various theories surrounding the health and functioning of the human body. One such theory that has grabbed considerable attention is the biophoton theory. This theory was developed by Fritz-Albert Popp, PhD, who was one of the most distinguished scientists of the 20th century. He dedicated a significant portion of his life to studying biophotons, their generation, and their role in human health. 

🔍 Subtle Energy & Biofield Healing, a CHI consciousness and healing initiative, advocates for the application of science-based approaches that have proven successful in the mindfulness, acupuncture, and, more recently, psychedelics movements. Through these approaches, evidence-based subtle-energy and biofield modalities will become integrated into modern health care systems. The report further defines, for the first time, a road map for systems-based action through research, education, technology development, practitioner empowerment, and integration of validated subtle-energy healing techniques to the modern health world to help alleviate suffering worldwide.

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👁‍🗨 Meridians with Mae-Wan Ho
👁‍🗨 Energy Transport with Mae-Wan Ho

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