Response to “Sheldrake’s morphic fields” by Dr. Hanzl

Response to the article:

Printed in Reg. Med. 2 (1997), 63–64

Dear colleague Dr Hanzl,

First of all, congratulations on your excellent article. Please allow me, however, to make a few comments.

My introduction to EAV, now 26 years ago (30 in 2001), was marked by an event significant to my understanding of EAV work (a view I have maintained ever since), which represented precisely the problem you discuss:

We—that is, a group of young colleagues and an “old hand” at EAV, a dentist in Freudenstadt—asked an EAV pioneer, to whom the method also owes a measuring point for allergic processes, to check our dental test, in which we had “balanced” a dental focus at Ly 2 using various medications.

Since he had not been present beforehand and did not know what we had done, his measurement at the corresponding point, Ly 2, produced the needle drop “obligatory” for this case and a value between 82 and 86.

As we looked at one another and expressed surprise at his measurement, because we had, after all, balanced the point with medication (correctly, in all our opinions), he said matter-of-factly: “Well, why didn't you say straight away that you already have medications in the honeycomb?” His repeat measurement now also produced the normal value. His next matter-of-fact comment was: “Yes indeed, you tested correctly.”

This event, and later ones, confirmed my view, already suspected then and since become a certainty, that EAV measurement was and is not a purely physical phenomenon, even if it is officially presented differently in order to obtain scientific recognition.

Yet this experience was and is nothing other than confirmation of Sheldrake's morphic fields, which you describe so excellently—only at that time they were not known or named as such—combined with electromagnetic measurements.

However, I would like, from my understanding, to extend your interpretation that the two fields—electromagnetic and morphic—are valid more or less alongside each other (this interpretation is also correct): the four forces of nature and their fields, with their laws, must be contained within the laws of morphic fields, or at least must not contradict them; otherwise they could not act, or one could not measure with them.

In other words, the fact that measurement functions mentally or can be influenced mentally implies that it also functions, or must function, “physically”, and vice versa!! For both obey a higher-order law equally valid for both, as can be derived from Hermetic philosophy.

My interpretation at the time was that, since the dispute was between “mentalists” and “materialists”, precisely the fact that mental measurement physically moved the needle to a particular value (here 50) proved that a physical explanation must also be possible. It was simply that the mental was of a higher order.

Incidentally, the normal value of 50 specified by Voll, adopted and measured in the same way by all his students, is a typical example of the formation of a morphic field. Those concerned therefore always find their crossover point for assessing medication effects at 50, whereas others who later regarded Kramer's specifications of values between 42 and 48 (50) as real and biologically meaningful found and continue to find the crossover point within that range (varying individually, but not automatically at 50). Kramer thus generated and established a different, new morphic field.

The case you describe of balancing with a medication that on checking proved to be a different substance from the one assumed, and for which subsequent repeat testing no longer produced a balance, did not unfold in that way when it happened to Voll. With him, the balance remained, and his comment was: “This remedy is suitable too!!”

Conclusion: there was an additional morphic resonance between the so-called “wrong” test substance, the tester and the person tested, and this was then also measured. Voll therefore had no guilty conscience about it, and in my view he was right: he had no reason to have one.

The well-known fact that Voll often found his remedies by passing his hand over the ampoules also shows that he worked at least as much with morphic fields as with electromagnetic fields, or merely confirmed the former by measurement (electromagnetically); since this second part was more scientific, it became the official teaching.

As a bioenergetic method, EAV is tied to the examiner and therefore remains subjective, even when electromagnetic fields are used for measurement.

If EAV measurement were a purely physical phenomenon and thus a purely electromagnetic field measurement, it—especially medication testing—would also have to be reproducible without a tester. This was already disproved by Bergold in the 1970s, and newer experiments will be no different (see also the article on non-contact medication testing on this website under Articles). Should it nonetheless become possible one day, resonance testing would indeed be reduced to a purely physical effect and thus placed on the same level as today's allopathic medication: soul and spirit would be excluded.

Put differently: precisely the “emotionally significant experiences” you also mention are present in morphic fields and account for much of the success. And it is precisely these that you exclude by reducing resonance testing to “predominantly ... electromagnetic field effects”. It is unfortunate that you wish to reduce this component to something that must reluctantly be conceded as necessary, because EAV thereby curtails its own possibilities.

Both always occur during measurement, i.e. both fields are addressed, and you therefore correctly conclude that this “in no way argues against the usual other transfer of information through electromagnetic signals” (see also my comment on this).

Your aversion, which is not merely implicit, to the formation of a morphic field between patient, examiner and test substance is, in my opinion, based on the same either/or philosophy that you rightly criticise earlier but now employ yourself, by wishing to invoke only the morphic field as evidence of effect in “many instrument-free or pseudo-instrumental testing methods”.

That holistic medicine—which I take to include EAV—is primarily subjective medicine is shown by the fact that treatment success with the same method (here EAV) varies considerably between individual practitioners, depending on the therapist's level of development and empathy. In other words, it depends on the morphic resonance between patient and practitioner, not on the method.

Your fear (and that of many therapists) of engaging with the patient as a homeopath, i.e. as one who suffers with the patient, is projected by you onto the high error rate in information transfer through morphic fields and then blamed on it. This serves, in my view unjustifiably, to accuse other methods—such as kinesiology—of relying solely on this source of error for information transfer. You fail to provide proof that kinesiology in particular is a “purely mental method” in the above sense; you merely assert it. In my opinion, these conclusions correspond only to your conceptions of reality, not to reality itself. Otherwise you would not make your “pointed” remark that muscle force is “at most a force of nature for kinesiologists”. Here too, emotionality and scientific information both play a part—a combination you are reluctant to concede in testing.

1. that as early as the beginning of the 1980s, Thomsen compared the diagnostic and therapeutic results of kinesiology (at that time AK as practised by Eversaul) with those of EAV and found them identical; and

2. that Lechner only recently demonstrated the low error rate (0.1%!) of physioenergetics—a variant of kinesiology—in AR diagnosis (arm-length reflex testing) of chronic jaw osteitis (Medizin-transparent 2/1996), referring in the process to the common foundations of the two methods (physioenergetics and EAV).

Taken together, this means that Sheldrake, with his morphic fields, has not only confirmed Hermetic philosophy, about which I wrote in the fourth edition of my book “Ganzheitliche Zahnheilkunde in physischer, psychischer und meta-physischer Sicht”, but also that the reductionist approach of limiting testing primarily to electromagnetic fields is more likely scientific wishful thinking than reality.

With this in mind, I would like to end with a quotation from Herbert Fritsche:

—similia similibus—the remedy for the human being.