Lorne Brown:

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Today we have on our Conscious Fertility podcast Neil Theise. He is a medical doctor. He is a pathologist as well as a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. And through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Doctor thesis studies in the complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaboration and fields such as integrative medicine. One of the things that I got really interested in wanting to talk to you, consciousness studies even more so, and then the science, religion dialogue or maybe debate. And it’s worth noting that his book notes on complexity, a scientific theory of connection, consciousness and being was published in 2023. And I got confess, I have a copy of your book, but I didn’t get it until about two weeks ago. The reason being, and I want to share this with our listeners, I want you to get this book. When I went to your website, Neil Theisei official.com, I saw a picture of the book and to me it looked like a big hard cover textbook. And I was like, oh, I just don’t think I want to do that right now. And I thought of it, you being a liver pathologist, stem cell research, I thought it was that book, right? For medical students have to read this book. This is on what it says, scientific Theory of connection, consciousness and being, this is a book it, it’s small, it’s under 200 pages, I think

Neil Theise:

172 with pictures

Lorne Brown:

172 with pictures. So it’s a thin book everybody. It’s a thin book. If you’re watching this on YouTube, if you’re listening, just get a copy of this book. I am loving your book and will refer to this book because I’ve always wanted a manual on how to live life, right? Why not have it? And it’s nice when you bring in theories that come from the western perspective, the materialistic perspective. I get a sense though, I don’t know if this was your intention, you’re grounded in materialism. That’s where you were trained.

Neil Theise:

Oh well. And you are Buddhist right there. That could take us an hour. Well,

Lorne Brown:

Let’s go. Go for it.

Neil Theise:

On the one hand, yes, scientifically and going to medical school, sure, I’m grounded in materialism. However, in seventh grade and eighth grade, I discovered quantum physics. And so I don’t really understand how you can be a materialist if you have any understanding of quantum physics. But parallel with that, religion and science were separate in my mind. But I didn’t favor one or the other. I grew up suburban New England, west Hartford, Connecticut. My parents were from Europe. My dad’s a Holocaust survivor. I grew up in a community of German Holocaust survivors that was our synagogue and Jewish you could assume, and my mother’s family history of Judaism. It’s a long line of rabbinic scholars. And it turns out I learned eventually mystics going back about a thousand years that we can trace. And my dad’s family, the ones who survived my brother and I and the other children in our community were raised. We were seen as precious because they didn’t think there would be a next generation. And the religion wasn’t imposed on us as much as there was a lot of joy in it because we are still here. So with my mom, both of them from different perspectives, I was raised with a very strong Jewish identity and a very strong Jewish spiritual practice.

Lorne Brown:

The point you’re making, I wanted to know how you go from pathologist stem cell researcher to writing this book

Neil Theise:

To writing

Lorne Brown:

This book, but having gone through your book and on my second read, you actually are debunking materialism. And this is why I wanted you on the podcast is because I want us to go out there. I want us to, which we’ll talk about complexity theory, the random ads that you have, the divergent hands

That discover new things. I want us to not stay in the lane. I believe there’s more to this world that meets the eyes than the five senses I think the world needs. There’s an evolution in humanitarian spiritually happening. And I like on the podcast people like you, people that are trained and grounded in the materialism world. So you get it, you understand it. And you’re also in the quantum. So you can be in both worlds versus only knowing one. So you’re dismissing the other, you’re whole versus being separate. So this is why I wanted you on here for the credibility factor and how do you go from liver pathologist stem cell researcher to I’ve heard on another podcast having your own shaman, so this is quite unique. So I’d love for you to continue

Neil Theise:

This or he has me. Yeah,

Lorne Brown:

Continue this because you come from a family Holocaust survivors and you had the mysticism running down through your lineage as well. Lineage as well. So I’m really curious.

Neil Theise:

So that’s step one. When I think back to where my scientific impulses come from in my life, in my own mind and my spiritual impulses, I think they actually have the same source. When I was growing up, we’re talking 3, 4, 5 years old, I had a very strong sense of connection and intimacy with the world around us. And the emotional content of that I think went towards the spiritual side and gave that a reason to be a way to express the feelings. And on the other hand, anything that could bring me closer was fascinating to me. I was probably the only thing I had a native gift for was mathematics. Alas, I didn’t become a mathematician, but the sciences telling me more and more about the details of this world that I felt connected to that was a passion. The moment I learned to read, I was reading books to some extent on science.

That’s how I wound up reading things on relativity in quantum physics in seventh and eighth grade, but I never had any. So I think they had a common source. And while I was aware vaguely that our culture says these are two different things, I just didn’t really care. These were just native instincts for me. I had an orthodox cousin, Hasidic living in Brooklyn who was trying to sort of bring me into the Hasidic fold, meaning the far right, Jewish, spiritual lame. And fortunately being gay, I was sort of getting an idea that I said no. But I was tempted because their mystical practice seemed compelling to me and attractive. But she wrote to me once sending me an essay by their rabbinic leader about how you could bring together the idea of scientific understandings of evolution and biblical seven days of creation stuff. And I just thought it was kind of bullshit.

But I wrote back to her, remember snail mail? We wrote letters. I wrote back to her and said, this isn’t a question that’s important to me. I just have the religion in one part of my brain. I literally said almost exactly this. The religion is in one part of my brain, the science is another part of my brain and they don’t really connect. Now looking back, I see that that’s incredibly disconnected and a little bit of whatever neurotic stuff that I would one day have to deal with, there it is. But even as I got older, twenties, thirties, forties, almost fifties, I just didn’t see where I needed to find a way to mesh them. They were both maybe because a Gemini, I could do this, I could do that. It was doing the complexity theory that to my surprise, this a story I took out of the book where suddenly they collapsed into one thing.

I wasn’t on a mission to deconstruct materialism far from it. And the consciousness side of the book, which is the second half of the book, I was fine saying, oh, complexity theory explains the mind as something emerging from properties of the brain, et cetera. I was fine with that, but the more I spent time contemplating and by that time I had a zen practice, Zen Buddhist practice. I’ve been meditating for 35, 36 years and suddenly the boundaries between them dissolved one morning and it was a sudden moment, which I can tell you about if we get there. But so I didn’t have a drive to bring them together. I didn’t have a mission. All my science, I sort of just go where my nose takes me, I get interested in a question like stem cells and then eventually I’m not interested in that question and I become interested in some other bit of anatomy. So I just sort of follow my nose.

Lorne Brown:

Well, we’re going to follow our nose on this path then you have the right background for this. I want us to talk a little bit about complexity theory and also because I want to get into the integrative medicine side that got your interest there and the interstitium. So I thought maybe for our listeners, and so like you said, we’re going to follow our nose and go a couple of places. I have a feeling that this talk may seem a little disconnected here and there, but it will all come together. The whole will become greater than the song.

Neil Theise:

It’ll come to my brain

Lorne Brown:

At some point. My brain does that as well. So neither of us have taken our ritalin today, so good luck.

Neil Theise:

Well said. Set.

Lorne Brown:

So when I look at why should somebody care about complexity theory in your book and the reason I wanted you on, so I’m going to tell you why I care and then I’m hoping you have some answers or some insight at least it’s becoming more and more obvious that people are struggling, right? The world seems scary and we’re struggling the external world and it seems going to work on the external world doesn’t really work so well. Evidence of where we are today and then so many traditions talk about its inner work. You got to go inside and when you heal in the inside, the external world will rearrange itself as well on some level regardless, even if it isn’t, you’re not. What’s the expression? Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. So

A terrible, you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. That’s that Buddhist part of your life. So that’s my intro to say. Can you share a bit what you’ve learned from complexity theory or how did you get into it from observing the world and then doing the research and then resurging the world? How has it changed you? Do you feel that they would call? Are you awake? Do you have more equanimity in your life? And if people understand complexity theory, can this somehow have them find more peace in their life because they have this understanding?

Neil Theise:

Yes. First off, on the meditating equanimity side, my mother said to me once, with all the meditating you do, I think you’d be less anxious. And I said, imagine what I’d be like if I didn’t meditate. So those are really good questions. So number one, how did I bump into complexity and how did it change me? That’s related to the science religion story I was going to tell you. So I’ll talk about that. The question of how does this help other people? What astonishes me about this material? Because I’ve been speaking about the material in the book for 20 years. It started in my zen group. That’s the first time I gave them a talk because they’re a good laboratory, they’re really smart people and they’re critical thinkers. And then started to talk about it academically. But the more I talked about it, the more people wanted to hear it. I wound up giving it to a class of fifth graders. My nephew wanted me to come to his school and the students were so enthralled. I was in the last period that the parents were called to tell them they were holding the school buses because the kids had so many questions and were so excited.

Lorne Brown:

I’m missing a piece. How is it that your nephew in grade five wants his liver pathologist uncle to come talk? Why did you talk about,

Neil Theise:

Because I’m cool. Why did you talk about pathology? His uncles cool. So he wanted to show me off. And the the reason the book can be simple, all my talks on this are simple. The same talk I gave to cell biologists, I gave to the fifth graders. I just had to explain a handful of words more. I had to make it simple enough for myself to understand and the response I’m getting from the book, I see it when I speak in front of an audience. Sometimes people cry. I get notes from people afterwards and it’s a science talk, but the book is now well beyond any place. It’s out there moving around, sending me postcards. And some people have told me they keep it by their bedside and they read random pages before they go to sleep. At night, I gave sustainability world climate change.

World has discovered me and I’m giving some high profile talks in those worlds. And the way I speak about it, I can see it in their faces, I can hear it in their voices. It brings solace, which is a surprise. So I’ll get to why that happens. But the first question, how did I find out about complexity theory? Random chance. A friend of mine in England is an academic and he had a friend who’s an artist and he really wanted me to meet her and we were never in town at the same time. And so we got a grant to bring us together so we would have to meet, and it was a grant from the Welcome Trust in order to see how an artist and a scientist would talk to each other. And all we had to do was meet several times in each other’s cities and he would record the conversations and they would be transcribed so other people could study how we spoke to each other.

Her name’s Jane Profit and P-R-O-P-H-E-T. And I strongly recommend people, I tell the story in the author’s note at the beginning, Google her name and Technosphere. It’s really kind of amazing what she came up with 20 years ago. So we were talking, she’s an artist and I’m a stem cell guy and I’m telling her about our findings, how I was one of the crowd that was saying adult stem cells can do anything embryonic stem cells can do for those old enough. And in America it was my group’s work that led to George Bush’s address to the nation banning or limiting embryonic stem cell research, which was not our intention, but that happened. So I’m telling her about how cells are moving around the body in our view. And she said, oh, that’s like complexity theorists, how they talk about how ant colonies, self-organized just by interacting with each other.

They create all the complex structures of an ant colony. And I said, what’s complexity theory? And she told me. So it was her insight that, oh, cells in the body behave like ants in a colony or flocks like birds in a flock or humans in a city or an economy or a culture. And these are all things that are described by complexity theory. Another way to think about complexity is you have quantum physics describing the infinitesimal aspects of the universe and it’s completely anti-intuitive, right? It’s hard to get a grasp on relativity considers the greatest scales and it’s also fairly non-intuitive complexity theory is what describes what lies between them, including particularly living things, how life arises in the universe, how life adapts and evolves and how things die too. So it’s really the third great theory I think of the 20th century, but it hasn’t been entered into the popular imagination.

That’s partly what I hoped to do with the book. It seems to be working slowly. And so an implication of complexity in those weeks after I met Jane and she told me about this. I’m walking around town and I’m sort of puzzling over the fact that well ants form this colony, but it’s ants. But if you’re walking along the desert floor and you see this dark shape in the distance, you’re going to think it’s a thing. Even if it’s moving, you’re going to say, what’s that thing over there? And then you go in more closely and you realize it’s not a thing. It’s an amp colony made up of a bunch of interacting ants. There’s no thing there. It’s a phenomenon arising from the ants. Jane’s insight was, well, if you go in close enough to the ants, they’re just cells, the amp disappears or we disappear.

I hold my finger up if you go close enough, those who are watching me, I’m pointing at my microscope because I’m a pathologist. I sit and look at human tissues all day long to make diagnoses. So I live at a cellular scale and at the cellular scale the body disappears. It’s just a community of cells. So I hadn’t really ever thought about it. Whether something appears to be a thing versus a phenomenon is a puzzling question. And my instinct was telling me that one of them has to be the better way of thinking about this. And it just sort of got its hooks into me as a question which sometimes happens. And the question I was walking around with, is this body my body or am I just a flock of cells? And I sort of couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was a little obsessive.

No, it was very obsessive. And a few weeks later, I’m thinking about this as I’m walking down the street in New York City and I came to a corner and there was a don’t walk sign. And I’m thinking, am I a body or are my cells, am I a body or are my cells? And the light changed and everyone next to me stepped off the curb and I couldn’t move because my leg had turned into a flock of cells and then I pulled it together and could start walking again. But it had become an experience rather than just a concept. And then sometime later a month, a few weeks, I don’t know the dates, I was a zen student at that point for 20 years. And it was my job on Thursday mornings to be the person who opened our zen center, the Zendo. So other people who wanted to meditate in the morning before work could come in and back in those days there weren’t so many people as there are now.

And so I was often alone in this endo on Thursday mornings, and I’m sitting there on my cushion and I have a zen practice and it is not to think about whether my body is a body or cells, but that’s all I could do. While I was thinking about it, at one point I looked up and I saw the stick of incense on the altar and it was turning into smoke. I always get choked up when I talk about this. I’m waiting for the time. I don’t get choked up. I’m wondering when it’s going to, but it’s been a long time in that moment I had not a conceptual understanding, but an experience of you are both a body and cells, you are the stick of incense and the smoke. They are not separate, they are not different. They’re just two different views of the same thing. And I realized in that moment that this is what the Buddhists refer to as emptiness of inherent existence.

Lorne Brown:

And what was the second part of that? Things are not things.

Neil Theise:

Things are not, whether something appears to be a thing or not depends on how you view it. And from a Buddhist perspective, nothing in the world is actually a thing from every point of view. Everything will become a phenomenon.

Lorne Brown:

Does that tie into the quantum physics, the observer idea? Nothing collapses into anything until you view

Neil Theise:

It. It does, but a few steps down. And that’s where the solace comes in to some extent when we get to that point. So I took this experience and understanding to my zen teacher and said, is this what they always mean by emptiness? And she said, yeah. And I said, that’s it. She said, yeah, it’s simple. It’s just not easy to get. But once you get it, you can’t unsee it. So I’m thinking, well, what about cells? If the Buddhists are right, then it’s got to be, even the cells have no inherent existence, even they are not things. And western medicine, this is part of the integrative medicine point of contact. What we mean by western medicine and western biology is precisely the understanding that all living things are made of cells and all cells derived from other cells. And that’s called cell doctrine. And when we talk about western medicine and western biology, that’s what we mean.

And acupuncture for example, which we know you can’t explain, at least not easily, at least not as far as we know on the basis of pure anatomy with cells as the building blocks. Western medicine can’t explain acupuncture too well because it’s a different model. It requires a different model, not cell doctrine. And so western medicine can’t explain everything. It explains this stuff really well, but by not explaining, but there are other things it’s going to miss. So are cells a thing? No, they’re just molecules floating in water and they self-organize to give what looks like a cell the way ants organize to make a colony or the way humans organize to make a neighborhood. And this is complexity theory. So are those molecules things? No, they’re just self-organizing atoms and atoms are just self-organizing subatomic particles. And those are just other quantum level stuff. Physicists don’t agree on what the tiniest entities are, but what they do agree on is that it’s not an infinite regress to smaller and smaller things.

There is a smallest unit of length and a smallest unit of time. And the implications of that, both in terms of relativity and quantum physics, is that space, the vacuum is not empty. It’s an energy rich field. And because equals mc squared energy will occasionally give rise to mass and they’ll pop up as little matter anti-matter pairings like the Star Trek engines. And when they pop up, they usually hit each other and then turn back to energy, but sometimes they don’t. And when those tiniest things, some people say they’re strings, that’s what string theory is. Some people say particles, some people say fields, some people say loops. Everyone agrees that this is referred to nicely as the quantum foam, that there’s this foam of material rising out of space time. And if they survive and don’t self annihilate, they combine to make subatomic particles which become atoms, which become molecules which become the entire universe. So there is no thing anywhere, like the Buddhist said, any place you look, if I look at a cell under my microscope, I’m looking at cells as though they are important things. Everything I diagnose is based on cells, but the cell itself, if I go down to a smaller scale, it disappears.

Lorne Brown:

That’s right. You’ll see eventually electrons, protons, and then if you keep looking, it’s just empty space,

Neil Theise:

Right? Well except space isn’t empty, it’s filled with energy.

Lorne Brown:

It’s filled. Yeah. Okay.

Neil Theise:

And then you get the quantum foam. So you run the film backwards and you get all of existence.

Lorne Brown:

You know how our brains go somewhere. We’ll go on track story, audience, but I could see that’s the new market at Starbucks. Get your quantum foam on your latte

Neil Theise:

Full of energy. Someone has to do this full of energy. Absolutely. Yeah. So implications of this at this level of scale, you and I are separate things,

Lorne Brown:

Right?

Neil Theise:

You’re a person and I’m a person at the cellular level. Where’s the boundary of our bodies? Well, we now know that our body is covered by mostly bacteria, but also a few other living things called the microbiome. And that extends through all the body’s crevices too. And it’s about 50% of the cells of your body. And without them, you can’t be a living human.

Lorne Brown:

It’s important to emphasize here, these bacteria that are 50%, they’re not human, right? They’re right, they’re not human,

Neil Theise:

But you can’t be a human without them. And what we now know about the microbiome is whatever we touch, I touch my mouse, I touch my microscope, a doorknob I kiss you on the cheek. Microbiome is exchanged left behind and picked up by other people. So people who share a household and their pets within a short time merge their microbiomes into one single larger microbiome. And so the microbiome is the limits of your body and it actually fills the spaces you inhabit. So at the cellular level, where are your boundaries for your audience? Because of the fertility issue. There’s another way to look at this, and I think I talk, I bring this up in the book. Your body came from your body yesterday, which came from your body a decade ago, which came from your body as a teenager. God help us. Which came from a child, which came from you as a baby, which came from you as a neonate, which came from you as a third semester fetus all the way back to when it was an egg and a sperm. And that egg came from your mother. And in fact, women are born with the eggs they’re going to have. So those eggs derived from your mother’s mother.

Lorne Brown:

Cool part. I just want for our audience, some have heard this, but just it’s so nice to pause for a second. So on the female line, all three are together. At one point the grandmother is carrying her daughter and the daughter has the granddaughter. So all those eggshells, they’re all there at one time,

Neil Theise:

Right? Right. So where’s the boundary of your body at the cellular level, if you bring time into the equation, there’s no gap between your mother and you or between your grandmother and you precisely or between her mother and her mother and her mother, back to pre humans like homo homoerectus and homo habilis, back to small mammals, back to the smallest single cell organisms that were life started on the planet in time. Where are your boundaries? We are the entire biomass of the planet. And that is true, just as it’s true that you and I are separate beings and trying to answer that question of which is the best answer, there is no best answer. It’s 50 50. And this is where we get to the quantum physics thing. You asked me, but I’ll let you speak.

Lorne Brown:

Well, you’re just reminding me, so I want to just bring it up for the audience as well. I don’t know what they’re called. But those images, is it a vase or two people looking at each other or is it, I

Neil Theise:

Think it’s page 49 in the

Lorne Brown:

Book. What page? It’s somewhere in there. Page 47. You’re simultaneously trying to hold two things at once, but you can’t, your mind either sees one or the other, but you’re aware they both exist and you’re either playing the separate game for a moment or you’re playing the raw connected game for a moment. There we go. Oh yeah, perfect. There you go guys. What do you see

Neil Theise:

Here? Is it two faces or a vase?

Lorne Brown:

Yeah.

Neil Theise:

And the thing is you can’t prefer one over the other. You can choose to see only one or the other. But the fact is they’re both precisely equally true. We call this a complementarity, and Neil’s bore one of the founders of quantum physics. This back to the observers subject observer thing. What they discovered in quantum physics is if you look at a beam of light, if you do an experiment one way it looks like and behaves like waves, if you look at it a different way, it behaves like a bunch of particles shooting by, which is it? It depends on how you look at it. So at the quantum level, the actual nature of reality depends on whether you look at the light with this technique or with that technique. Moore said that’s a complementarity, that’s what he coined the word for. But what he also said is that’s a fundamental principle organizing principle of the universe that complementarity extends and involves the entire universe. And what I’m saying about the complexity stuff, this hierarchy, that’s a version of boar’s universal complementarity

Lorne Brown:

On this theory, just to have some fun here. The idea, and I don’t know where it comes from, it’s a Buddhist thing, but if a tree falls in the wood and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make it sound? Does this connect to that theory and how would you

Neil Theise:

Answer that? Because the reason it’s so hard to deal with, it’s like, well, if you say there is a sound, you’re kind of stuck. How can there be one if there’s no one to hear it? But if you say there isn’t a sound, you’re kind of stuck because we know a tree is going to create vibrations in the air that if there were there and here it would hear it. Both are true from the everyday scale. No, there’s no sound because there’s no ear to hear it. At the cellular level, you and the tree are not separate beings at the atomic level. Your boundaries go out even further. So on the one hand, we think of ourselves as lonely, nervous, anxious, often depressed people these days on the surface of this rock, we call earth equally true. We are the atomic substance of the planet. Let me back up, but no Adam in your body, every atom in your body you ate, drank or breathed from the planet.

So equally true, we are each the atomic substance of the planet that in three and a half billion years, like a bunch of ants making a colony in three and a half billion years, these atoms self organized into beings that think they’re lonely and anxious and walking around on top of this rock. Both of those things are true. That means where’s your boundary at the atomic scale, the entire earth. Not just the biomass, not just the living things, but the earth itself. The core of the earth, that tree falls, the atoms in that atmosphere are you. They’re me. There’s no separation. And then when you go down to the quantum level, that’s where things like non-locality and entanglement take place. And we know these things to be true, and we know that because they won Nobel prizes, we should. So they must be true at the quantum level.

Where’s the boundary of an electron? Where’s the boundary of a proton or an atom? It’s the entire universe. At the quantum level, the entire universe is a single boundless body, which is the title of the middle section of the book. And that is equally true to you and I are separate. Can we hold those views? Can we become so comfortable with the two faces and the vase that you can easily flip back and forth between them? If you can do that, then whatever you’re lacking in your life or whatever fears you have from things outside you, that’s only one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is that we are in fact the universe giving rise to itself in every moment and everything is just as it should be. One way to think about this is from one perspective, we’re insignificant specs in this vast universe. I mean, we’re tiny things on this planet and this solar system at the edge of one galaxy. And there’s how many trillions of galaxies now in the observable universe. But equally true is that each of us is a pure expression of the universe in every moment.

Lorne Brown:

I’m curious if you know this parable because it’s a Judaic one. So from your background practice, I am going to butcher it, but I’m hoping you’re going to remember it. There’s this idea of you’re both the center of the universe and insignificant. And it’s like the rabbi says you carry two things in your pocket. One is like a piece of lint or dust or a thread, and the other thing is like a gold or something to remind you that you are nothing, you’re insignificant, you’re just a, and then the other one is you are the universe. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Neil Theise:

Oh yeah. Well, you’ve actually expressed it. On the one hand, you’re nothing on the other hand, you’re everything. And what complexity teaches us is that both are true. The question is which do you focus on? Now, the vast majority of us in our western culture, Western are trained to see it from the point of view that you and I are separate objects. The universe is merely material that connects up with other material, and there’s nothing more to it than that. What complexity reveals when you put it together with quantum physics and relativity is sure materialism is correct from one perspective, from the other perspective, there’s no such thing as material. It’s all just stuff coming out of the quantum foam. There’s no material anywhere.

Lorne Brown:

Neil, just because of your cellular, your analogy or metaphor in your background, I often meditate and think about I have all these cells, they are dying and new ones are being developed all the time,

And I’m the whole, but I’m not mourning the death of all my cells and I’m not celebrating the birth. I’m not even aware of it as I’m whole. And I also think of conscious sometimes. Is it aware I could be like a cell in the consciousness of the universe? So if I die or born, does the universe care? Does it even know because I’m part of the hole? But if all the cells didn’t exist, then the conscious doesn’t exist, the hole doesn’t exist. So the hole is greater than some of its parts. But if you don’t have the parts, you can’t have the hole.

Neil Theise:

And what quantum theory tells us and what complexity theory tells us is that while that number one, the hole is always grander than the sum of the parts and every part is the

Lorne Brown:

Hole. And on a cellular level, we know this, it contains all the DNA of the body. You can take a cell and it could grow an ear or you can take a liver cell and it can grow a nose if you have the right medium. I assume this. Is that true? I heard

Neil Theise:

That. Yeah. I mean pretty much our stem cell research that any cell can become any other cell type that was so it contains the hole that was actually my field back then. But more than that I, but that still comes back to a mechanistic. Well, we have this string of molecules that’s called DNA and it unwinds and other molecules come in and it builds these things. But even in a more fundamental way, what if you’re down at the atomic level? There’s no D-N-A-D-N-A is not a thing in the way. Our bodies are not things in the way. A flock of starlings looks like a thing in the sky. In fact, if you’re not prepared to see it, you might go, what’s that balloon up there? And then you hear the sound and you realize, oh, it’s a flock of starlings. And the starling itself disappears.

If you go in close enough, the ant disappears, my finger disappears. And we can come up with, I had to do a lot of editing to make the book short. There are so many possible, there’s infinite possible examples of this because it’s everywhere. And this is one of the things about complexity is that unlike relativity in quantum physics, it’s utterly intuitive. Walk out of your home in the morning and look around in the world. And in New York, whether you’re in New York city or you’re in a farm somewhere, or you’re living in a tent, in a forest or a jungle, you open your eyes and all around you, trees are spinning earth, air and water into leaves. Birds are flying as though they’re a single being. People walking, if you’re a city, people walking down the street in New York City, everyone’s either on their phone, they’ve got their earbuds in. Why does no one bump into each other? Somehow there’s this seamless arising of this easy flow down the streets. This is what the world is like. And when you start to see it, this is why it gets a little obsessive because everywhere you look, small things are turning themselves into bigger things and it’s magic. And this

Lorne Brown:

Is where, because we’re going to go to the interstitium after this, but before that,

Neil Theise:

You’ve

Lorne Brown:

Talked about some of the, I dunno if you call them rules of complexity theory and rule number three, negative feedback loops. As I was reading your book, this idea where you can see it everywhere, I like you said, people are loving the book. I think there’s certain things that are what I would call universal truths. And so it seems so intuitive, but when I was reading your book, if you don’t have the proper feedback loop and there’s just growth, we have cancer, you can look at the economy. So I’m looking at the market, how it’s growing and the numbers, how high it’s today as we’re recording this, by complexity theory, it’s probably going to pop. They will collapse so you can really understand the climate and your health. That’s why I said, can this book help? How can it benefit you? If you understand this theory, you can start to understand how this can impact you in the material world,

Neil Theise:

Right? So a really precise example of that to me. And since I started thinking about this way, I deal with politics, for example, in a completely different way than most of my friends.

Lorne Brown:

Can we go there? You have an election coming up. Can you take complexity theory? This may not be where you’re going to go, but you have two parties. The world is polarized and the parties are polarized. It looks like a mass extinction happening on a political level.

Neil Theise:

Well, we’ve got lots of mass extinction events happening on many levels. So

Lorne Brown:

I’m curious from your complexity theory though, what are you observing and noticing because of that?

Neil Theise:

So let’s pull back and talk about rule number four for how complex systems. It’s these four simple rules that mean ants interacting. No one tells them here, here are the rules of interaction. They just do it the way you’re interacting with other people when you’re walking down the street in the same way ants are interacting with each other to build colonies. You’re not thinking about it. You’re in your own little world. Rule number four is that if there’s got to be some level of unpredictability of randomness amongst the elements, cells, birds, people that make up the larger scale structure, if there’s too much randomness, too much randomness in the ant colony, the answer just wandering all over the place, just disorder. If there’s too little randomness. So if you look at a food line of ants from a distance, it always looks like a straight line going from food to colony, sugar cube to colony, and they’re going back and forth taking that sugar cube bit by bit.

But if you stoop down and look carefully, there’s always three to 4% of the ants are not following the line. Those ants are the ones that are likely to find a new food source even before that old food source runs out. We know people have studied this, if you put your foot down into the middle of a food line and interrupt it, it’s not the ants in the line that find the short, quickest path around your foot. It’s those ants that aren’t part of the line. So if you have no randomness in the system, if you have no divergent ants as I like to call them, then if the environment changes, you run out of food or a foot comes down out of the sky, you can’t adapt. So you need this low level of randomness in order to be able to organize. It can’t be too much, but it’s got to be enough so that if the environment changes, you can try out new possibilities.

Lorne Brown:

So this ability of adaptability.

Neil Theise:

Yeah, and so this is the source of creativity, human creativity, biological creativity around in every present moment. It’s not an infinite ray of possibilities for the next moment because it’s not infinite. It’s a limited randomness. There’s a constrained number of possibilities that we can’t be precisely sure how many and what they are because it’s randomness. There’s a limited number of possibilities for the next moment. And when the next moment arise, and we call those the adjacent possibles, the adjacent possibles for the next moment, what are the possibilities of how our world will organize itself, how our body will organize itself in the next moment and the next moment arrives. One of those things happen unpredictable. It’s not a machine and then a new cloud of possibilities for the next moment arises. So living things are not predictable. We’re not machines. So when we’re in the middle of cultural social events like let’s say an election, without talking about which side of things I’m on 2016, Donald Trump got elected.

Well, anyone paying attention would see there was a 3% chance according to the polls that he would win. 3% is not 0%. Him being president was a whole bunch of those adjacent possibles. It’s not always the likeliest thing that happens because it’s unpredictable. Similarly, we thought we knew where we were a month or two ago, and then one day President Biden wakes up and decides I’m pulling out of the race. And within an hour the electoral world of the United States completely changed and we had no idea what was going to come by evening. We had no idea what was going to come by the end of the week because the adjacent possibles are unpredictable and anything can happen. So one practical implication for me, even in the face of climate change, we just don’t know. We can’t know. But what I do know is that as surely as I’m worried about these outcomes, there are paths to these outcomes and I can’t predict what they are.

I can’t see what, if I knew what they were going to be, I would invent them. So whichever side of things you’re on, this allows me to go into things like a time of elections and I just do not get anxious and upset. Well, I get a little upset, but I don’t get anxious because we can’t know lots of my friends and family on both sides, particularly when you include my family, invest in one side or the other and think that that investment means something. But it doesn’t because anything can happen. No, not everything can happen. It’s limited, but there’s a whole array of possibilities and we don’t know what they are. And things can change on a dime, and you only can know what was going to happen in retrospect. And then as humans, what did we do? We tell stories. We look back and go, oh, this is why that happened. But looking forward,

Lorne Brown:

That’s not how the universe works. And we’re going to go to the interst on the political side of how you’re sharing this. The world’s changed. So there was an adapt, something adapted where we got the internet and social media where now we don’t get so much objective information where we’ll get algorithms and we’re fed. So even that is affecting.

Neil Theise:

So this is a key point. This is a very key point. And if I were writing legislation, so there are two things here. One, rule number two, you mentioned the homeostatic feedback loops. If there’s negative feedback, that’s what needs to predominate in a living system like an air conditioner, keeping a room within a good temperature rate, a positive feedback loop is like if the hotter a room gets, the more the heater turns on and it just climbs and climbs and climbs. That can happen in a living system. What happens when you get a fever? You’ve got positive feedback loops, but when you fought off the infection, the negative feedback loops predominate and bring it under control.

Lorne Brown:

So that fever was, we don’t always, because we sometimes try and shut it down with medications, but the body’s actually fighting the infection. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. And once the infection has fought, the body’s genetic feedback loop brings the fever back down in

Neil Theise:

That balance. If everything’s working well, yes, that’s what should happen. And part of how the fever helps is it increases the metabolic activity of the immune system. So the immune system is more active, but if you have a bug like tuberculosis and your body can’t actually fight off that bug, then the positive feedback loops predominate. You get a fever and you don’t, like you said, that’s cancer. It’s economic bubbles. When you look at all the economic bubbles of the 20th century, they’ve all been, when governments of both sides have started to pull away regulatory stuff, letting positive feedback loops erupt. That doesn’t mean, oh, you should regulate everything because you don’t want no randomness. It’s finding the right balance.

Lorne Brown:

So again, there’s a balance there. Overregulation, I think of your country, the state of California can impact innovation and growth. And then no regulation. You get bubbles where a few people make a lot of money and the rest of the people lose all their

Neil Theise:

Money.

Neil Theise:

Right? Exactly. So back to the internet, the algorithms that run the internet, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, those algorithms are built as positive feedback loops. So it pulls in and builds this huge thing, but there’s constant collapse events, the American political system, Yanmar, and then it starts up again. If I were to be in Congress and worrying about this, which we all worry about it, the answer would be the algorithms have to be regulated so that they have to have an abundance of negative feedback loops rather than only positive feedback. Facebook wants to just pull in and pull in and pull in and pull in. No, but if you make it too rigid, the only people I can meet are people I already know. There’s no creativity. There’s going to be no surprise. We don’t want that internet either. It’s somewhere in the middle. But right now, the few people who run these companies and decide what these algorithms are going to be, they’ve created runaway positive feedback. And then it’s not a political question, it’s a mathematical question. Economics isn’t a political question from this point of view. It’s a mathematical question. What’s the right balance? How do you find that right balance? And when you find the right balance, you have a robust economy that’s flourishing. When you find the right balance on the internet, you’ll have the internet of 20 years ago when it was creative, but it wasn’t distorting human interactions in such a vicious way.

Lorne Brown:

I like that. I like you for sharing that. And so that’s why, again, Neil’s book on notes on complexity, just check out the rules, the stories. I think you’ll gain something from it because it’s an observation of one of the universal laws in the world, complexity theory. And so you’ll start to see it around you and start to use it in decision making and maybe bring you more peace. I’d love for you to share the story on the interstitium. I remember hearing under nowhere here, or if I heard it or read it when I was getting ready for our conversation, but you had a body worker, I think it was Dr. Green, talking about you had fluids in your fascia or whatever, and you were like nonsense.

Neil Theise:

Yeah. So she’d loved the fact that you called her Dr. Green, just Debbie. She was my yoga teacher, and she was a Rolfer and a healer. I mean, you meet people, lots of people can be trained to do body work, but then every once in a while you meet someone, there’s just something extra and it’s intuitive. They can’t explain it and they might even deny it. She was that kind of person. And I have a genetic disease called ER’s, downlow syndrome, which body workers in the audience will know because they bump into it. And I can do stupid things like this. My collagen is messed up. So people who are just listening, I’m pushing my middle finger, keeping my hand flat. I could push my finger up to point at the ceiling, 90 degrees. Most people can’t do that. So I tear easily and I have lots of scar tissue through my body.

So her working on me was vital. And she would say, well, there’s fluid in your fascia, the connective tissue, the collagen of your body. And I’d say, no, there’s not. I can show it to you under the microscope. There’s no fluid there. And she said, but I can feel it. We’ll just have to agree to disagree. But then I was minding my own business. I used to be a Beth Israel Hospital, and I wasn’t in the pathology department. I was in the medicine department in the division of gastroenterology GI disease and liver disease because they wanted their own liver pathologist in the room next door. And the head of the division and his senior disciple had been given this new fancy endoscope, which you can use an endoscope to look down into the esophagus or the stomach or a colonoscope, same thing. But you’re coming up to look at your colon.

And what this allowed you to do was look at tissues from the inside of the GI tract at the microscopic level in the living tissue. So not a biopsy that the moment you take it out of the body, it’s dead. And we make a slide out of it and I can look at it and tell you, cancer, not cancer, or You’ve got inflammation or whatever. You’ve got gastritis. They could tell theoretically, this was basically an attempt to build something that would take my business away from it. They wanted to make diagnoses themselves. With the endoscope, you could only see a certain depth with the scope. And what they would do is they would inject a fluorescent dye into a vein, and within seconds you could see with the scope that the dye goes through every fluid space in the body. And when they looked at a structure that was thin enough that the scope could look into the connective tissue layer in the middle.

In this case it was the bile duct, but the stomach, the esophagus, the colon, the small intestine, they all have the same connective tissue layer in the middle, but in the bile duct, the scope could see into it. And what it showed was open fluid filled spaces. The reason I don’t see them under the microscope is when we take the tissue out, the fluid drains out, it dehydrates and the spaces collapse. So we’ve always thought that when you look at collagen in the body, it’s a dense wall of collagen, just a wall, very few cells, no spaces. It turns out in living tissue, it’s this open net that supports this huge fluid filled network. So they showed me a picture of this. They didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know what it was. It was a little frustrating. I’m supposed to know what things look like microscopically.

And eventually we figured it out and I thought, well, why would the bile duct have this spongy wall? But then I was doing my clinical work and looking at colon specimens and stomach specimens, people who had cancers, and you look at the normal tissue adjacent to the cancer, and that middle layer has those spaces. I can see the artifacts of the spaces. They look like cracks. So I thought, it’s not the bile duct, it’s the GI tract. And then I got a mastectomy specimen for a woman who had breast cancer, and there’s a piece of skin on it. And I had that normal piece of skin under the microscope, and there’s the dermis, the second layer in from the surface, it’s all just dense collagen. No, it’s not. It’s also this fluid filled space. So I went to them and I said, what happens on if you put your endoscope on the skin, do you actually see the same thing you saw on the bile duct?

And they said, well, you don’t put it on the skin. It’s an endoscope. It’s meant to go inside. And I said, well, here’s my veins. Fill me up with the fluorescent dye and let’s put the scope on my skin. And sure enough, the dermis is all fluid filled spaces. Long story short is that every connective tissue layer in the body, including fascia like Debbie Green told me, like all the osteopaths say, like everyone in fascia world says, anyone who’s got an intimate association, dancers often know this. It’s fluid. How much fluid? It’s four times the size of the cardiovascular system. And what I’ve been busy with since that discovery is to figure out, are these separate pockets of fluid within connective tissue or are they connected? It turns out the connective tissue of the body is a single network. It’s everything between the cells. It’s the extracellular matrix.

If you take away all the cells, buy buy cell doctrine, it’s just molecules organizing themselves into these structures. And the spaces when you investigate it, all turn out to be connected to. So it’s a vast information highway through the entire body. And we know that it can produce its own electricity. So it’s electrical signaling. We know that small molecules and large molecules go through it. Anyone who has diabetes and has a glucose monitor, what’s it checking? Interstitial fluid of the dermis. They’ve had these devices sucking out fluid testing for glucose, but no one ever knew where the needle was. Why there’s interstitial fluid where the needle goes in those spaces, cells move through it. Normally cells move through it as part of your inflammatory system, but cancer spreads this way. And I can show you pictures of cancer going through these spaces and marching up into a lymph. No,

Lorne Brown:

I got to unpack this a bit. I want to ask you, I think it was the media. I remember when this came out and in some of my private Chinese medicine acupuncture groups, when they announced the interstitium, and they were calling it a new organ was discovered

Neil Theise:

Called an organ

Lorne Brown:

In Chinese. I know you had shared the story that the osteopaths were so upset, like we’ve been saying this for 50 years. You can’t. And then US practitioners and Chinese medicine are saying, they’ve been saying it for 5,000 years. It’s triple burn this channel. Right? Right.

Neil Theise:

Bingo. And this happened to me because, well, first off, why didn’t I know that? Because I was trained in allopathic western medicine osteopathy. Osteopathy is a different form of western medicine, but it sort of lost the race against allopathic medicine, which is what we generally think of as western medicine. So what I was trained is the only fashion in the body is the connective tissue between muscles and bones. Whereas the osteopaths knew that it’s a continuous network and that it’s fluid filled. So we didn’t know that when I was interviewed about the thing, they said, well, what kind of thing is this? And the question of whether it could be an organ. And I said, well, it’s big enough to be an organ and any organ, wherever you look, it sort of has the same structure, so maybe it’s an organ. So that became the news.

The only reason it went viral is there was no other science news that week. Stephen Hawking died two weeks before. And if we had published that week, no one would know this paper existed. So then the osteopathy fascia world called me on it and I was like, thank you for teaching me as you realized you were all out here. And then, because I’m a liver pathologist, I was doing consulting work in China where liver disease is very important, is very problematic. And so at the same time, I was over there talking about liver and they asked me to give a talk on this. And that’s exactly what happened. There was someone who was a liver doctor, I didn’t realize that he was also the director of sort of the traditional Chinese medicine, NIH in China. And because he was so high level, he got the first question. And his first question to me was, how did people respond when you said this? And I said, well, people were upset because the osteopaths have been talking about it for 70 years. And he said exactly what you said. He laughed and he said Yes. And we’ve been speaking about it for 5,000 from this

Lorne Brown:

Research. Can you, because I got to let our listeners know that today I came across two papers through a colleague, one called the Applications of Dynamical complexity theory in traditional Chinese medicine, and the other one’s called traditional Chinese medicine, potential approaches for modern dynamic complexity theories. So I thought of Neil because they’re talking about complexity theory, but in the paper, one of them I read is it’s very hard to study Chinese medicine because they’re trying to study it from a reductionist paradigm and it’s a different system. And when you’re talking about your slides, allopathic medicine often studies dead tissue. And so they’re really good at death. Death, Chinese medicine studies, living organisms. So that’s why when you say, why did we miss it? Because you’ve been studying dead tissue, there’s no qi in dead tissue right now. I’m curious, do you have an understanding or a way to explain why acupuncture could work then based on the fascia? I know at Harvard they’re starting to talk about the fascia as part of the how acupuncture you needle somebody’s

Neil Theise:

Ankle. I’m part of the people at Harvard who are talking about that, doing that. So

Lorne Brown:

Perfect. So there’s a point. Bladder six will has nothing to do with your bladder from a Western perspective, the needle pointing near your ankle and that on the right and that’ll affect your neck up. So put up on the left because of how the channel works, but they’re trying to understand it from a fascia perspective. I have two things I want to bring up with you. One is I’m just curious, since your map, you talked about Star Trek. You watch Star Trek, I watched, I think of Allopathy as the Borg, but not in a bad way. As in if it finds something that works and they have evidence, they bring it in, right? It’s not like a closed system so much. It can feel like that it takes a long time for them to

Neil Theise:

Integrate. Once you’re absorbed,

Lorne Brown:

Once you’re absorbed, you’re absorbed. So now that you’ve incorporated that, there’s the interstitium, does that give you another way then to explain acupuncture? Could that be brought into allopathic medicine with the understanding of this new organ?

Neil Theise:

Yeah, so my experience is that anybody who sees that anatomy, and one of the nice things about it is unlike let’s say doing stem cells, if I make a discovery in a stem cell experiment and publish it and say adult cells can do anything, someone else, and this happened a lot, we’ll design an experiment to show that they can’t do it. And so it’s like, well, who’s right? Which experiment? And you go back and forth, it’s agony. And eventually I left the field because it’s really boring. Well,

Lorne Brown:

You should have told them whatever the bias of the lead investigator, you’re going to contaminate the study because you just talked about

Neil Theise:

Quantum. I did tell them and they didn’t want to listen. So, but this isn’t an experiment. It’s anatomy and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And my colleague for most of this, Becky Wells who’s a biologist and a physician and a bioengineer at Penn, we’re doing all the subsequent work together. Wherever we go, people are not pushing back now. And what’s been interesting from the beginning, like you said, when people who practice Chinese medicine saw our paper, they were like, this is what we’ve been talking about, people with shamanic practices of healing. This is what talking about people who do energy healing, this is what I’ve been talking about. So what I’ve discovered is the interstitium, the anatomy is sort of like a cultural interstitium between cultures of health and healing. And part of the reason they don’t understand each other is because they don’t have common languages.

They’re all using different metaphors, they’re perceiving things using different techniques. They’re intervening with different techniques. And so there’s no way to compare things. But when you bring in this elaborate structure, they all have a relationship to it. My dream, and we may pull this off, is getting 12 to 15, which is just the right size for an interdisciplinary group, enough diversity that you can get creative stuff going on, but not so many that it’s people lecturing to an audience, just a conversation and pull in representatives from different cultures of health and healing from every continent, from all sorts of backgrounds. And it’s going to be a three day conference. The first day, no talking, we’re going to set up treatment rooms and everyone gets to experience two or three other people’s methods, just direct experience. Second day, Becky and I and a few other people will get up and explain the interstitium. And then the rest of the conference is people getting up and saying, oh, this is how the framework of the interstitium can help you understand what we’re doing. I almost had it set up, but then covid happened. And so international meetings and it has to be in person. It has to be feeling each other’s energy, feeling each other’s spirits and part of, and having dinner together, not just having a lecture together. You

Lorne Brown:

Got to share your microbiomes. I got to share something and before I share that, I got to tell with our audience, this is how Neil and I met with this idea he had, but not quite his idea. Ours was online and it was called the Healthy Horizon

Neil Theise:

Symposium.

Lorne Brown:

And the theme was bridging classical Chinese medicine with biofield sciences and consciousness. And Neil was one of our speakers. So this is how we met. And when Neil was lecturing, I’m listening to his lecture, I was the chair and moderator and I had to go back to his bio. I was like, I thought this guy’s the leather pathologist, the steps and all you’re talking with stuff. And I was like, he sounds like he could be my yoga teacher where you were going with it. And so I had to go back and look at your bio and then I go, oh my God, this is awesome because you brought the two worlds together. Here’s what I want to tell you what I did, I hope you’re not offended. I have fun with AI chat, GPT, some people very scared of it. I’m not scared of it. I like,

Neil Theise:

I’m terrified, but okay,

Lorne Brown:

I’m like everything. I mean there’s reason you could be terrified. For me, everything is a tool. And then how you use it, you can

Neil Theise:

Use, for me, anything new means change. And I hate change. I’m not a very good Buddhist.

Lorne Brown:

So I’m sure somebody can do terrible things with it. I just hope I’m not that guy. So here’s what I did. The Oregon and Chinese medicine is known as the triple burner or warmer or San Jiao. And I asked it to just give me a brief idea of the interstitium and the San Jiao, which I want to reach you. And then I said, would you compare the San Jiao with neo thesis’s understanding of the Intersystem? Boom. So you want to hear it? Yeah, of course. Alright, so the triple burner, the San Jiao is a yang organ in Chinese medicine often described as having no specific anatomical form, yet being crucial to the regulation of Qi and fluids within the body. So Chinese medicine already, it’s one of the extraordinary organs in the sense that I’m saying that incorrectly. We’ve always known that the San, we have the kidney system, so there’s a kidney organ, we have the liver system, there’s a liver organ. The San gel is one of those things that had no physical organ, but

Neil Theise:

Right

Lorne Brown:

It’s divided into three parts. The upper burner, it governs respiration, the flow of tree through the lungs and heart akin to the function of distributing energy and fluids in the upper body, the middle burner, it controls digestion and transformation associated with the stomach, spleen, liver managing the process of converting food and drink into usable energy and fluids. And the lower burner manages elimination and reproductive functions associated with the kidneys, bladders and intestines, focusing on the movement of elimination of fluids and waste, why they call the triple burner as in this organ system, transverses all three burners, upper, middle, lower in Chinese medicine. Then I asked for the comparison. So it says, well, both the interstem and the sangio are systems without a specific singular form that govern the movement of fluids throughout the body while the intersystem physically regulates fluid transport between tissues. The triple burner does so on an energetic and functional level, managing the movement of body fluids through different organ systems.

Two, it has five points. Holistic integration, the Interst system being a continuous fluid field network throughout the body highlights the interconnectedness of various organs and tissues. Similarly, the triple burner known as the Sanje concept, connects different organ systems ensuring the smooth flow of qi and fluids between the upper, middle, low, and burner. Both systems are integrative, non localized and essential for maintaining balance. Third, dynamic and visible, it’s hidden. I’m just because I don’t want to keep reading this because people can put this in. Here’s one that’s interesting, homeostasis, a balance. The intersystem supports homeostasis by regulating fluid pressure and absorption protecting tissue from damage. The sangio performs a similar role. Balancing the distribution of gene fluids to main overall health, both emphasized the importance of balance for optimal body function. And the last one is recent research suggests that the intersystem may play a role in immune responses by facilitating the movement of immune cells.

The sanjo Chinese medicine also plays a role in defense we call the waiti, overseeing the protective energy that guards the body from external pathogens. In conclusion, while the intersystem and the triple burner come from entirely different paradigms, Western anatomy and Chinese medicine, they share a conceptual similarity in the roles as systems that regulate and distribute fluids and energy in the body. Both are essential for maintaining balance and homeostasis abate through different mechanisms. Discovery of the intersystem offers a scientific bridge to understanding the ancient Chinese concept of the Sanja as both point to body’s need for integrated fluid and energy movement to support overall health and vitality. Accurate. Was chat BT accurate?

Neil Theise:

Yeah, so I have three responses. Number one, they’re just quoting things I wrote, they went into my stuff and they found it so far

Lorne Brown:

We should let everybody know. And it’s always two years away because I’ve asked questions and I’ve asked questions and it’s literally given 90% from my website an answer sometimes. But yes, it is not sentient as it, it’s it’s not creative. But what do you think of the comparison? And it’s an important point because when I look at the Chinese medicine side, I see some error. So it’s not always accurate. I don’t know the intersystem like you. So I’m curious, did it have a good understanding

Neil Theise:

Of this? So let me get to that number one. The way it was chat g bt, I guess the way your AI stated it, it’s like my thing can explain that thing to people like us,

But also Chinese medicine can explain things to us. The directionality of flow and movement through the interstitium is so complicated. We haven’t got a clue how things move. Are there fluid flows, are there patterns? Does it, no one has any idea, but the triple burner says there are these three regions that circulate within themselves. Well, that gives me a hypothesis to look at in our system to say, oh, is there circulation? That’s sort of the thoracic organs, the digestive organs, the lower organs. So it’s shutting light on what we do. It’s not one directional, it’s not us explaining them. That’s number one. That’s important.

Lorne Brown:

HHS, it was a bridge and our whole intention for audience was that we support each other. So western medicine influencing Chinese medicine, Chinese medicine, that was what we did there. We came together.

Neil Theise:

But also what I find is that people in Chinese medicine can be as

Lorne Brown:

Dogmatic.

Neil Theise:

Dogmatic can’t, there’s a word I’m looking for, but let’s just say arrogant, that’s the word, can be as arrogant about their system as we can. And the fact is that if I go talk to an energy healer from Japan, or if I talk to an Ayurvedic physician from India and we start talking about energy points in the body, then I think I can use the interstitium to explain for example what the chakras are. And chakras aren’t in that particular Chinese system. They’re in some other systems in China, but they’re not in that particular system. And when you think that, as I said, the collagen is actually able to generate electricity every time you move, anytime a collagen fiber bends or moves, it generates an electrical current. So there’s this vast electrical current, subtle, subtle energy, maybe subtle throughout the body. And that’s going to create an electromagnetic field that’s three dimensional and in fact four dimensional because it’s evolving in time.

Is that what the chakras are? Is that what an energy healer is feeling? Is this what she is? It’s not enough to explain she, because after having studied and discovered these things, I went and became a tai chi student and it can’t explain how my teacher would throw me 30 feet across the room without moving. That’s not how this electrical current works. But there’s something there. We now at least have something in our system that we can study scientifically from our system. I haven’t met anyone from any other culture of healing. Tibetan, south American shamans, you name it, anyone I encounter goes, yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. And the confluence of all those things, exactly what you’re trying to do with healthy horizons, the confluence of all those things is how we get to a global medicine.

Lorne Brown:

And I’ll quote a teacher of mine that really ingrained this in me is don’t confuse the terrain with the map. And so what you’re sharing is the people in allopathic medicine, the people in Chinese medicine, they start, they have a map, there’s the paradigm. So they think that is the train, but the train is the train. We’re all looking at the same train. That’s all we have in common.

Neil Theise:

And this comes back to the complexity language I was trying to introduce because the map looks like a thing, but from a different perspective, there’s no thing there. There’s some other thing looking like a thing and come back that will disappear and you’ll be back to the first. So it’s all about, in all these things we’ve talked about, the key thing for us is can we develop the habit of changing our perspective to see what we see out of our normal habits of viewing things.

Lorne Brown:

Often people say this world is an illusion, and my understanding at this stage is this reality’s real. I can bleed and it hurts. There’s a reality to it. When I focus on it, you focus on becomes your reality. And when you have a shift in perception, so how you see things, you’re tapping into another dimension. So you’re seeing a different version of that reality or you’re seeing a different perspective of that reality. So I don’t think this world is not real, it’s just with the eyes. I’m using the lens, this is what I can see. I’m sure my cats, the way they look at things are seeing things that I can’t see. But if I could change my lens, I would see more to the reality. Just like we see our finger, but without your microscope, you wouldn’t have gotten to, there’s nothing there. Right? As you can go deeper and

Neil Theise:

Deeper, right? The consciousness thing, and I don’t think we have time to really do a deep dive. That’s the second half of the book. But kind of in a nutshell,

Our culture, the materialist culture we live in says everything is material. So the mind must arise from material. And the material is the stuff in your brain, the cells, the molecules, the electrical, the electricity, and the way an ant colony ants organize into an ant colony. The activities of our individual elements of our brain organize into conscious awareness where you can have an experience of, I see you in my screen, there’s a red bar going across. I made my window thing red. But that doesn’t explain how we have the experience, how we have any experience. This is the classic example. I see the color red. And people want to say, well, that’s just the way my retina is signaling through my optic nerve to my brain. And so I experience the color red. However, I can have exactly the same experience of the color red.

If I close my eyes and that circuit doesn’t exist, that’s a very tiny, insufficient example. But this is called the hard problem of consciousness with all the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe at this point, hundreds of thousands of cognitive neuroscience experiments and papers to find how the brain makes experience. No one has succeeded. And that’s called the hard problem of consciousness. So in the absence of that working in the last 10 years, people have started to say, well, it’s not the brain. It’s like maybe cells have consciousness and the self-organizing larger structure is little consciousness into bigger consciousness. But that doesn’t explain the hard problem either. So you keep going down and down and down in scale and there’s no way to get around the hard problem. And there are other problems that arise. The third possibility, and this is we think of it as Eastern, we think of it as wooo in our culture.

But the fact is the great philosophers from Plato on down and western society, Plato, Hegel, k Spinoza, Leni, blah, blah, blah, all thought what you said, there’s an ideal existence that is non-material. And this world is simply a reflection of that. Every spiritual culture in the world, every religion has some people that when they examine the mind by going into their minds, what they find is a larger mind. And quantum physics now shows mind comes first. Max Plunk, who’s really the ultimate father of quantum physics, said, you can’t get behind consciousness because of that wave light part. You’re always making a choice. The choice to view things comes before the viewing. And so what I describe in the book is this idea, it’s called idealism in terms of philosophy. Western philosophy is that consciousness is what comes first. There’s pure awareness and people who are adepts or have just maybe adepts, but they’ve worked for five decades meditating. Other people can intuit it through other means that the world is just awareness. The awareness, what’s it like? What is it that experiences the color red that is just awareness and that gives rise to existence. And in the book we describe step-by-step how that kind of pure awareness of awareness in which there can be no subject and object, there can be no facing off against the other. That’s where that stops. How does that give rise to

Lorne Brown:

The world? That’s chapter I want to introduce you to. Yap. Oh, I know. Yap. Okay. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve hung up. We have him on his episode has been recorded but hasn’t been released at the time of our recording.

Neil Theise:

Oh, he’s fabulous.

Lorne Brown:

But he reminded me, I saw some parallels with the two of you, as in the perception I had of you was by studying materialism and going deep and looking at the cell and then the atoms, and then there’s nothing there. You went from the yin yang symbol. You went from extreme yang into yin, right, because extreme yang turns into yin. So you went so reductionist that he went into the hole.

Neil Theise:

You got him out the other end

Lorne Brown:

And yap, same idea. By studying the embryology, he became spiritual and he realized one plus one doesn’t equal two. You have one egg cell, you have a sperm cell. When they come together, it’s not two cells, it’s it’s a whole new, something new. It says, I go

Neil Theise:

And the embryo, you can take an embryo and take it to pieces. And this is one way that twins happen and each of them becomes an embryo. But it was one embryo. Now you’ve got halfs of an embryo, but each of those is an embryo, a whole embryo, which is it? Is it a whole or a part?

Lorne Brown:

But each part is the whole. And he talked about there’s this organizing energy happening in the embryo and there’s a movement. And it made me think of Q gong. So for Q gong, the Qigong teachers, I have to have the most benefit is there’s a breath involved. And tension and movement. Movement. Some movement was essential, not just sitting still, but there was some movement in the Qigong with breath and intention to connect. And when he was talking about the embryo, there was this movement and there’s an organizing energy, which he calls the God energy. He tried to give it a name, but right. And Yop is

Neil Theise:

European and Dutch, and so that’s an available word for him. It would’ve been an available word for me except that it became a Buddhist. And I had other words. It didn’t push people’s buttons so much, but because I mean, I met Yap because of the interstitial in fascia world, he’s a god in fascia world. There’s no space between what he says and what I say. We’re just using different languages and our focal points, our starting points are different. Like you said, he was looking at embryology, I’m not sure what I was looking at, I guess stem cells when we’ve been together, he just nods through my talk and I just nods through his talk and then we smile a lot and have a hug.

Lorne Brown:

But when you talk about the, we borrow from Daoism or they say that the Dao that can be named is not the Dao. So this is why so hard because they’re trying to study and find

Neil Theise:

Language. Right? That fundamental awareness I was talking about that underlies that is the ground of being out of which space time arises. And then the quantum foam and everything about that. My chapter 11, it’s indescribable. You can’t even say it’s infinite because infinite is a description. It’s beyond because there’s no subject object split. It’s referred to as non-duality and non-duality. The state of non-duality cannot be described. It can’t be described mathematically, poetically in images. You just can’t describe it. It is indescribable. It’s beyond time. It’s beyond space. It’s before time and before space. But anyone who has a direct experience of it, we’re, like I said before, we’re humans. What we do is we make stories. So these great mystics, great spiritual practitioners through devotional practices or paths of service or sometimes science, right? Like yap, you see it, you glimpse it, you have an experience of it, and then you have to try and put it into words because that’s what humans do. You can’t do it. It’s always insufficient. But that’s okay. They’re all pointers at things. That’s the thing. I actually say it in the books. This book won’t change anything. But if you work with these concepts to experience the truth of them, it changes everything. The book is just a pointer. It’s not the thing itself. These ideas are not the thing itself.

Lorne Brown:

Right. And I appreciate and thank you for writing this book. And when we set out to have this interview, my intention was of course, I’d like to give people the answers to the world. Here’s how the universe was created. It really was, again, to give them a pointer you, your book, and to just let people know that some people have some intuition and some people are aware there’s more to this world than meets the eyes. And I wanted to bring somebody credible that has been trained in the allopathic world that can liver cells, stem cells, and is also has a zen practice and has come to a spiritual side. And they can both live simultaneously. They don’t have to be one or the other. And so you have your spiritual practice, you can have equanimity and peace, and then you can turn on your brain and go to your job and do things. What did he say in Buddhism? Chop wood carry water, right? Can show up in this world. Yeah. Neil, I want to thank you very much for joining us today. And again, check out his website. It’s in the show notes, Neil Theise official.com pick up.

Neil Theise:

It’s because I had Neil Theise.com and then lost control of it because I’m that kind of idiot

Lorne Brown:

I had that happen to.

Neil Theise:

That’s why I’m afraid of ai.

Lorne Brown:

I had that happen to one of my websites too. Somebody else took your name. So it’s Neil Theise official.com. His book is Notes on Complexity, A Scientific Theory of Connections Conscious and Being for my colleagues in Acupuncture or in the Healing Arts. The Healthy Horizon Symposium does have Neil’s talk that we did on bridging classical Chinese medicine, consciousness and biofield sciences. Neil, thank you very much for

Neil Theise:

Today. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 4:

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low-level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown:

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lorne brown.com and acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.