Halos

Well, when I began this blog I didn't think I'd be writing about halos, auras, or any other such phenomenon. My intent was to share the perspective I acquired from performing so much massage and bodywork, as I often don't have the opportunity for this when in session. If I do have a chance to talk with someone for a bit after a massage I certainly don't have the luxury of time to figure out the best way to express my ideas. Hence the blog. Now I spend too much time thinking about anything bodywork related which leads me to delve into more esoteric areas of thought.

Halos, those glowing orbs of light radiating out from the skulls of holy people, have been depicted in the art of multiple cultures. In ancient Greek culture, Homer describes more than natural light surrounding heroes in battle. Egyptians presented their sun god Ra with what looks like an orb of light above his head. Since at least the 4th-century Christians have imbued their anointed figures with halos. Buddhist have been using halos in their art even longer. There are Persian, Mughal, and Ottoman art that displays halos in Islamic art. There are numerous ways in which artist have envisioned halos. Sometimes halos are shown as luminescent rings over someone’s head. Sometimes they are a solid sphere of light behind someone's head or whole body. They can be spears of light shooting out from someone's central nervous system or portrayed as fiery circles. So the question I pose, is there some subtle but tangible phenomenon that artists of all these cultures were sensing in some ethereal way? In other word are halos real?

To set up a case that halos are a part of the observable world, that can be perceived by the sensitive, I will explore what happens on a biochemical level when we engage in movement. To engage a muscle requires a precise biochemical formula. Efferent (motor) nerves travel from our brain to whatever muscles we wish to engage. A nerve impulse will travel down a nerve until it reaches the neuromuscular junction, where consciousness becomes action. At the neuromuscular junction, the efferent nerve will release acetylcholine into the synaptic cleft (or space between muscle fiber and nerve fiber ). The just-released acetylcholine will be absorbed by the acetylcholine receptors in the muscle cell. This causes ion channels in the muscle to open which allows positive sodium to enter the muscle cell. This causes the muscle cell to depolarize or go from being negatively charged to positive. This depolarization causes an excitatory postsynaptic potential. In other words, our muscle cell is engaged. *

So how does this relate to prescientific art portraying halos? If we zoom out from the biochemical perspective and instead focus on the basic shapes we contort our body into during any conscious movement practice such as yoga, qi gong, or many martial arts we often find ourselves creating loops of this neuromuscular energy. The easiest example for me to describe is doing a sun salutation. When we rag-doll ourselves up extending our back vertebrae by vertebrae we abduct our arms over our head. Doing this we create a cascade of depolarized muscle cells, that shrouds our body in a field of neuromuscular energy as we reach overhead. Would this energy not radiate out as all energy does?

While I'm sure many halos were depicted for stylists or metaphorical reason I have to wonder how many artists of different cultures and epochs were trying to illustrate something they were observing on some level. I’m not a big fan of the idea of saints or holy people, as I think we are all only as righteous or as dastardly as the choice we make. That said there are some people whom I am always happy to see. I don't see auras, but I would expect these people to have healthy ones. Other people require a bit more effort to get along with. I would not be surprised to learn these people have aura infected with bad neuromuscular vibes. Could some of the source of their apparent imbalance be a caddywhompus movement pattern? Could the way we move over our lifetime influence the energetic fields around us?

I have my suspicions but don’t know any real answers to these questions. What I do know is the wold external to our bodies is filled with its own energic agendas. We are now more than ever bombarded with an energy field that comes from inorganic sources. Energy is energy whether it stems from an organism or from inorganic organized molecules. But organic energy is in a constant state of communication with the energy around it. This is not to say it is always harmonious. There can be conflicts of interest, but even the most brutal war is ultimately a form of communication. Energy that's derived from machines and electronics drone on and on indifferent to whatever is outside their basic programming. Whatever energy is being emitted around a machine is of absolutely no concern to the machine. So, I think there can be a case made for cultivating more conscious movement in order to strengthen whatever electric field we have around us and to radiate some good organic energy into the world.

Anthony Bruni

*On a side note, it's worth mentioning that muscle cell and nerve cells are binary. They are either all on or all off. We can employ more or less individual muscle fibers to temper our force, but we don't control the force of the muscle cells we engage.