Toward Ecosophy

During the years when Dr. Albert Abrams was busy laying the foundations of radionics, other researchers were pursuing their own investigations into the life force. One of them was Leon Eeman, shown on the left. Born in Belgium, he became a British subject and served in the Royal Air Force during the First World War. An airplane crash left him so seriously wounded that he was hospitalized for two years, and the physicians told him he had no hope of making a full recovery. 

Eeman refused to accept this. Recalling passages in the Bible about healing through the laying on of hands, he started experimenting to see if he could direct healing energies through his hands. That was when his recovery began. Once he was out of the hospital he continued his researches, and found -- as Mesmer, Reichenbach, and Abrams found before him -- that whatever the healing influence was, it could be made to flow through copper wires. The result was the Eeman biocircuit. 

Of all the etheric technologies we'll be discussing in this series of entries, the Eeman biocircuit is the simplest. In its most basic form it consists of two copper mesh screens connected by wires to two short dowels covered with copper foil. The user lies down on his or her back, with one screen under the head and one under the base of the spine, takes hold of the handles, and crosses the legs at the ankles. The user then relaxes for thirty minutes or so.  Eeman found that setting up a relaxation circuit once a day led to significant improvements in health and well-being.  My experience, on the occasions when I have had the chance to use a set of Eeman screens, is that he was right:  the effect is gentle but definite, and resembles nothing so much as what happens in healing by laying on of hands. 

Central to Eeman's approach was the idea that the unknown healing force he was using -- he called it, sensibly enough, the X force -- was bipolar, like magnetism.  Where a magnet has two poles, the human body has several, as shown on the left.  Bringing the poles into contact with one another, directly or by way of wires, appeared to bring about energy flow with definite effects on the body.

He found, interestingly, that right-handed and left-handed people have reversed polarities; the diagrams above and to the left are right-handed, and left-handers should have the lower screen linked to the left hand and the upper to the right to produce what Eeman called a relaxation circuit. (Do it the other way around and you get a tension circuit, which is only useful if you're too relaxed.)  Eeman and other investigators noted that these effects seem to be unrelated to the expectations of the user. 

Eeman wrote several books discussing his experiences and the results of his experiments.  The books are readily available online -- the L.E. Eeman Archive site is a good source, with other Eeman resources -- and the biocircuit screens are also readily available, although they tend to be overpriced; You can get all the components for $30 or so, while biocircuits sold to the New Age market tend to be $300 and up. Of the various etheric technologies that will be covered in this series, this is probably the easiest to get into, and it's also one where someone with a little talent for handicrafts might be able to bring in a decent second income stream by producing well-made biocircuits, perhaps with cloth backing for the two mesh panels and a sturdy storage bag. 

And Eeman?  He continued his researches until the end of his life in 1958. Since he lived in Britain, which is by and large sane about alternative health care, he didn't have to deal with the kind of sustained persecution from the medical-industrial complex that American researchers into etheric healing have faced so often. In this country, research into biocircuits has had to be much quieter, though the Borderland Sciences Research Association (which we'll be discussing in more detail later on) did some valuable experimental work with the Eeman biocircuits.