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The Doctor Is In

Dr Strange

Scott Derrickson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Marvel Studios, 2016.

Finally, a movie about Reiki Masters!

We're just like everybody else. We want to go to the movies and identify with the antihero as much as the next Wounded Healer does. See ourselves in the accessibly-more-glamorous shoes of someone who does what we do and lives in the world we live in. Pay riveted attention while Benedict Cumberbatch takes his shirt off in the process of becoming a monastic disciple, just like any other woman (or man, or vegetable) does. And we really want our ordinary day's work-world to be seen, at least marginally understood, and glorified.

Welcome to my world of healing toys.

As a Reiki Master, I've always wanted to have business cards that say “electrical engineer.” That's Reiki. You ground, hook up, combine, channel, listen, and allow the possibility of reorganization. Period. It's as simple as carpentry, and anybody can do it—and as with carpentry, practice helps. All people are born with an innate capacity for Reiki and it is only habit and acculturation that blocks us against it. But still, when people ask me how to do it and I explain the mechanics, I know I sound like a sprout-eating kombucha-smoking freak. Unfortunately there's only so many ways you can say, “and then you send beams of energy through your hands and your palms get hot from the fire.” There's only so many ways you can say, “expand the luminescent energy field until it encompasses the whole room and beyond, then compress it into a tiny brilliant white-hot ball between your hands.” There's only so many ways you can say, “so, if you're working with a group of spirits, you can all work on different parts of the body at once, and you should probably leave the most critical areas to the spirits.”

I know it sounds like a bunch of California hooey. But it's just physics. If I explained how airplanes go up in the sky to you, that would sound like a bunch of California hooey too, yet that too is just physics. To me Reiki is as ordinarily visible, audible, and palpable as anything in this world, and I assume everyone can see, hear, and feel it as much as I can if not more. I am always surprised when this turns out not to be true.

I thought I'd go to the movies to escape myself (and stare at Benedict Cumberbatch) but, as ever, I found myself there. Let's hear it for Dr Strange! Finally, a logical, believable movie about the completely normal behaviour of the universe!

Ok not quite, but for me this was a sensible warping of reality that was based on something concrete. Kind of like how the Star Wars costumes feel real because they're based on traditional martial arts clothes. I live in an everyday world full of mandalas that swallow you up and spit you out, I live in an everyday world where learning to make electricity come out of your hands takes some practice but eventually becomes habit, and I live in an everyday world with mirror dimensions. So this silly comic-book movie didn't feel far-fetched for me at all!

I live in The Holographic Universe. We all do, although some prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Reality is a hologram. If you unpack that, everything in the universe makes sense, including things that don't make sense in Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, like string theory and ESP. (Although I'd prefer if we called ESP just “perception,” because it's not extra, it's the most essential sense there is. If you want to talk about “extra,” let's talk about people who have a knack for making PowerPoint presentations.) Get quantum, accept that we are perceiving a holographic version of information, and suddenly physics explains all the ancient religious texts you ever read. It also explains leaving your body, remembering what hasn't happened yet, Aboriginal Dreamtime, and the power of placebo medicines.

I'll let you read about it on your own, through the wonderful guidance of Michael Talbot, who died too young. He would be happy to know that the holographic principle is being more and more extensively researched and accepted as The Way Things Really Are. And I am happy because finally physics agrees with reality instead of reality having to jerry-rig itself and hide a lot of itself in the closet in order to agree with what physicists said physics was.

You can also read about the hologram as the fact that we are interactive parts of a giant dynamic energy field and what that means (I know, so obvious you can't believe anyone had to write a book about it, but apparently someone did) in The Field by Lynne Taggart. And if that reminds you suspiciously of that class on Shinto you took in college where you read about the entire universe being a jewelled net in which all beings are jewels, connected through the net and reflecting in every other jewel...then you're right there with me!

We don't all have a sacred responsibility to be smart rubber-faced English actors who can pull off an American accent and a goatee at the same time and have us totally buy both. But we do all have a sacred responsibility to devote our lives to developing our understanding of the power of the mind and the nature of reality. In a way I was thrilled that what's “normal” for me is finally infiltrating the mainstream mindset. But I was also sad that concepts that have been extensively researched and written up in umpteen thrillion medical journals (and counting) are being presented as comic-book impossibilities. The truth is that the body really does have a mind of its own that knows better how to heal itself than we do, and we really are energy force fields that interact with other force fields, and affecting the force fields affects the body. Get used to it.

Then get out there and save the universe.