Then he told me to look at it properly. The network of neurons, beginning at the central pathways and running out to the smallest thing there is, the nerve endings. A fine energetic sponge spread around the form of every creature, taking in information from the surrounding world without pause, adjusting constantly to every change it meets so that the being holds its shape and its balance.

Every point where a current runs creates an electromagnetic field around it. The sum of those countless small fields is, in a manner of speaking, the aura around the organism. And any malfunction, he said, will show itself first as an imprint in that energetic cage, before it ever arrives as a physical symptom.

The nervous system works as a bridge, he said. It joins matter to its subtler aspects, to feelings and to thoughts. Which is why it has to be looked after with care and trained properly.

I am a physician. His own deep knowledge of medicine was, for me personally, the thing that let me take the teaching seriously at all.