Subtle Energy: It’s Not "Just" Your Imagination

Anyone who has entered a room where a meeting is in progress, or has received a "cold shoulder" from a spouse, knows what it means to experience "vibes." It’s a common experience that most people can appreciate. We use the term vibration to describe an experience that falls somewhere between a sensation of a physical reality and a subjective, emotional reaction. Are these "vibrations" real, or are they, as many spouses have replied, "just your imagination"?

As early as Anton Mesmer’s work with "animal magnetism," claims of the existence of "subtle energy" have been rebuked as products of the imagination. Because subtle energy so often becomes implicated in the healing interaction between patient and therapist, many people have tried to use physical measures to give it a firm place in the material universe. Edgar Cayce, however, often referred to the "imaginative forces" in ways to suggest that there exists a level of creative, potentially healing and transformative energy that might correspond to the domain of the subconscious mind rather than the material plane. The consciousness of the subconscious mind, the soul mind, is that of the imagination. So it is possible that just as visualization may act through subtle energy to create physical effects within the body, so might the imagination be capable of perceiving subtle energy events or interpret them with imagery. This possibility has recently been verified by Atlantic University researcher Henry Reed at workshops held at the Edgar Cayce School of Intuitive Studies and other locations.

Asking pairs of people with eyes closed to focus their imagination on the experience of being in "contact" with each other, Reed collected reports of thousands of such "imaginal encounters." Receiving both oral and written descriptions, together with drawings, he observed that accounts of subtle energy interactions between partners reported by each individual in the pairing often bore striking similarities with each other. Depending upon the "chemistry" of the partnership, the contact was either low-key and uneventful, or full of vitality, movement and excitement. These same observations occurred when partners were in close proximity or at great distances.