A TOUCHSTONE REVIEW:

Human Energy Systems: A Way of Good Health Using Our Electromagnetic Fields *

by Jack Schwarz

Arkana (1980)

* For this review, I have mined information on the history and influence of this book from Kurt Leland’s Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (2016).

The Author: Jack Schwarz (1924-2000)

Jack Schwarz 1992

Jack Schwarz was a Dutch-American pioneer in the education health field who had the ability to see auras. He wrote books on energy healing and the human energy system from 1977-1997.

Though not a yogi, he also possessed what are called in clinical studies “voluntary controls”; that is, he had the ability to regulate his own brain waves in measurable ways and to control what are called involuntary physiological processes such as heart rate, blood pressure, circulation to limbs, perception of pain, neutralization of injected toxins, and rapid healing of wounds. (Watch the video “Mind over Matter by Jack Schwarz” on the Jack Schwarz YouTube channel.)

In 1958 in Grants Pass, Oregon, Schwarz founded the Aletheia Foundation (whose name is derived from the Greek word for “revealing what is hidden”) to propagate his teachings and publish his books. The Aletheia Psycho-Physical Foundation became the international headquarters for the teachings of Jack Schwarz and was continued after his passing by Lois A. Scheller Schwarz, the co-director and his partner of 44 years. (The latest entries on this website date from 2017, so it is not clear whether the foundation is still functional.)

From the self-description on his YouTube channel, Schwarz considered himself to be a humanitarian, educator, philosopher, and naturopath known as a “legendary point rider and master.” A point rider is the one at the front of the herd, setting its pace and direction, especially in difficult conditions. The difficult conditions in Schwarz’s case no doubt refer to his role as a clairvoyant healer and “the first holistic health educator for integrating the whole person” in the United States in the 1950s and facing the rising materialism in conventional medicine and the in conventional understanding of the human energy system and in the body-centered therapeutic theory and practice going on at Esalen in the 1970s.

Beginning in 1972, he was involved in experiments at the Pscho-physiology Laboratory of the Menninger Foundation in Kansas similar to those undergone by Swami Rama. The observers there noted that Schwarz was more talented than most of the Hindu yogic teachers coming to California from India at the time. They wrote about Schwarz’s demonstrations of pain and bleeding control, his reading of auras, and his visualization techniques in Beyond Biofeedback (Delacorte Press, 1977).

A full biography of Jack Schwarz’s fascinating life with bibliography and links to videos is available online at  “All About Heaven,” a website founded by Rosemary Rock-Evans in conjunction with the World Awake Movement.

The Book

Human Energy Systems opens with a brief discussion of the possibility of measuring the electromagnetic life force around the body directly using extremely sensitive instruments, citing the fact that cells radiate both photons and very high frequency sound when they split and reproduce during mitosis. This discussion leads into a discourse on living without eating much food, using light as a nutrient, and operating the chakras, or subtle energy centers, at full capacity.

The first three chapters of the book provide Schwarz’s chakra theory, his concepts and his  experiences of the human energy field. The first provides a general discussion of human energy fields. The second discusses in detail the input of the subtle body or energy body – the ray. The third looks at the output of the human energy cell, the aura.

The next two chapters share his understanding of the process of assimilation and his naturopathic health system. They also provide a series of exercises to train your eyes to observe auras by using the model charts provided in the book. In these chapters, he tells how to read auras – or at least how he reads auras. The final chapter presents the tarot system of natural healing which he developed. The book has two appendices. One is a guide to medicinal herbs. The other is a review of his chakra system.

The authors of the Foreword to this book, both experimenters at the Menninger Foundation, discuss the difficulties in reading this little book:

Those who tend to perceive directly with their mental apparatus, perceiving in beyond-space-time dimensions, are unable by the nature of perception and language to develop a correct verbal structure. Verbal structure, having been created for space-time, is by definition inadequate and misleading…. Therefore, … it is necessary to read the book once to find out what the words mean, and then read it a second time to find out what the text means…. This process is remarkable useful for reading in the existential domain, where words are inadequate, where a new awareness often must be developed before communication can be satisfactory. This approach is also necessary because Jack, not trained as a scientist, uses words in the popular rather than the scientific mode.

Schwarz advocated decentralizing spiritual authority in passing on eclectic systems, whether it was his or someone else’s:

From each of the many books I have read, I have extracted the material relevant to my own needs and perspectives and dismissed the rest. Every one of them has confirmed me, sometimes with only one sentence. This is the important thing. All my gurus have enabled me to realize that I am not the only one who is envisioning the world in a certain way. But they have also helped me to understand that the model created by all my perspectives is unique to me. That model is important to others only when it encourages them to make their own models.

            What will people do with the experiences they have if they take this book seriously and practice the exercises? Will they say, “This is Jack Schwarz’s method?” No. If they have followed the instructions carefully, they will be developing their own methods.

– Schwarz, Voluntary Controls: Exercises for Creative Meditation and for Activating the Potential of the Chakras, 1978, p. 19

With these words, he invites people to have their own experience rather than depend on the authority of a guru or spiritual teacher. But his words also invite people to appropriate the ideas and words of others without citing them, a practice many New Age authors continue to follow, making it difficult for readers to evaluate the truth of their statements or to know the source of their terminology.

Schwarz’s book  gives us a clear example of how theosophical ideas and other influences make their way unnoticed into later 20th-century books on the chakra system: They are appropriated without citing their source. Luckily, Kurt Leland, in his history of the Western chakra system Rainbow Body, has taken notice and clarified the influences on Schwarz.

According to Leland, Schwarz’s program of meditative exercises, which involve breathing and visualization of colors and images to activate the chakras, is derived from Rama Prasad “via the early developers of the Golden Dawn magical tradition.” Schwarz built his program around Leadbeater’s teachings on the chakras, Leland points out, including the spleen chakra and Leadbeater’s color system. The visual symbols Schwarz assigns to each chakra are derived from the yantras of the five elements (tattvas) of the Eastern chakra system.

Schwarz’s practice is to activate each chakra, one at a time, through regulated breathing, while focusing on the color and symbol of the chakra. The visualization of colors in connection with the chakras while ascending from the base of the spine to the top of the head, Leland says, “goes back to Blavatsky’s kundalini practice, as presented in her Esoteric Instructions.” And the functions Schwarz assigns to the chakras “appear to be derived from those attributed to the chakras by Alice Bailey in her book Esoteric Healing.”

The primary importance of Schwarz’s book today lies in the fact that the clairvoyant healer Barbara Brennan, who developed one of the most comprehensive and complex esoteric Western chakra systems, adopted Jack Schwarz’s energetic philosophy and adapted it to her own chakra system.

In her first book, Hands of Light, Brennan says that the chakra system Schwarz describes in Human Energy Systems is one of two contemporary systems most similar to hers. Brennan also notes that Schwarz speaks about past life bands within the eggshell of what she calls the ketheric template level of the aura and interprets their meaning by their color, just as she does. Brennan also recommends the exercises in Voluntary Controls, another of Schwarz’s books, for “getting into that quiet self-accepting state and to increase your sensitivity” in order to become more receptive to receive spiritual guidance.

Schwarz’s Chakra System

Kurt Leland includes Schwarz’s system as one of the evolutionary lines of the current chakra system of the West that went extinct. He describes the situation in his book Rainbow Body in the chapter titled “Way of the Dodo – Extinct Systems”:

The situation in the latter half of the 1970s was not unlike that of earlier phases of human evolution…. In the 1980s, Dychtwald’s version of the chakra system was gaining evolutionary ground, whereas the systems described in the present chapter gradually disappeared from most New Age presentations of the chakras and became extinct.

But his statement is not entirely true. Just as many Denisovan and Neanderthal characteristics are part of the inheritance of modern Man, many of Schwarz’s concepts have made their way into Barbara Brennan’s highly evolved chakra system. The concepts that the human energy body receives universal energy through a cone-shaped vortex at the crown chakra, that the energy body has seven layers of increasingly subtle fields, that these layers operate according to specific dynamic principles, and that clairvoyants may perceive the aura differently because they are seeing the chakras on various layers (without being aware of it) are all propositions made by Schwarz that Barbara Brennan has adopted and incorporated into her own chakra system.

The table below presents the characteristics Schwarz associates with the chakras:

  • The Ray and the Aura

Schwarz: “In the human energy cell, the input is called the ray, and the output is known as the aura…. The ray shows a person’s potentials and purposes, and the aura displays his or her present and past experiences.” The ray is “a current of electromagnetic energy” that “looks like a vortex or cone” and “enters us through the pineal gland and is then distributed throughout the body.”

It is essentially pure white light, “but it starts to change color as soon as it hits the human atmosphere in the region of the causal aura,” which is “an emanation from the human organism.”

The density or vibration of the causal aura “functions as a prism and refracts the light. Different frequencies are separated out, and different colors result…. “Everything that your particular energy field has experienced through the ages has produced patterns in your emanation, or aura; these patterns exist as particle waves of light of varying frequencies and amplitudes.” This pattern absorbs from the white light of the current all the frequencies that correspond to it, “on the principle that like attracts like…. “The color seen in the ray after it hits the human atmosphere is determined by the screening effect of the aura.”

  • The Seven Auric Fields

The human energy field “is made up of vortices that move in different directions and together make up an elliptical, or egglike, shape…. There are horizontal as well as vertical energy fields, made up of vortices within vortices within vortices…. The total aura may extend as far as fifteen or twenty feet, but on the average, a normal, active person will have an aura five to eight feet in diameter.”

The human aura, he says, is made up of different levels of density. “As we move away from the human body, the energy fields become progressively subtler and more difficult to see. Because of this, we know considerably more about the auras closer to the body than we do about some of the subtlest ones.”

The first corona of the emanation, “which looks like a shadow form of your physical structure,” Schwarz calls the “physical aura.” This is the aura most closely related to the physiology of the body and is the one that Schwarz used to diagnose physical disturbances.

The next emanation some esoterics have called the astral aura. Schwarz calls it the emotional aura. Schwarz considers the emotional aura to be “one of the most difficult of the energy fields around the body.” This is because there is a lot of activity going on in the emotions all the time.

“The other auras are not so complicated as the emotional aura.”

The next is the mental aura: “The mental aura reflects only the activity of the conscious and the subconscious minds, the conscious being the intellect and the subconscious being the coordinator of physiological activity, the maker of dreams, the archives and library.” Blockages in the mental aura, Schwarz says, “prevent our intuitive knowledge from flowing out of the paraconscious mind into the subconscious and the conscious minds.” Personal traumas act like a surface pressure that suppresses the flow of information from the universal mind. Even though we are in constant communication with the universe at large through our paraconscious mind, he says, we will not be aware of it unless we unblock the energies and avoid putting pressure on the subconscious mind.

The next aura reflects the activity of what some people have called the superconscious mind and   what Schwarz calls the paraconscious mind, “the individualized part of the universal mind, the pure, creative intuition.” The paraconscious aura contains the same seven main colors of the chakras that appear in the emotional aura, but the colors are “always lighter, more pastel than the emotional aura.”

The next emanation Schwarz calls the causal aura, which, he says, “we know very little about … because it is so subtle.” This aura “deals with the soul essence, the individualized capacity of energy that we call the soul.” It is this aura in which “the ray first becomes visible because it is in this aura that all the experiences you have gone through as a soul, or capacity of energy, lead to the absorption of various frequencies and amplitudes. Out of the pure white light that is your input, what is left after it hits the prism of the causal aura is the ray you operate on. The ray shows “all the potentials of what you have not yet experienced.”

The cosmic and spiritual auras, Schwarz says, “are very difficult to see.” The sixth emanation is connected to the functioning of the pituitary gland, the gland which Schwarz calls “the prism that breaks down the light (energy), refracts it, and distributes it to the body through the different chakras” and also “the synthesizer, taking the different energy components and integrating them once again.”

The seventh emanation, at the crown chakra, “is connected with the mysterious pineal body, which … cannot be used until all the other energy centers are balanced and fully functioning.”

Schwarz comments that during the late 1970s he had observed a new phenomenon in the cosmic and spiritual fields of young people, “the so-called flower children of the coming Age of Aquarius.” In them he witnessed “a very bright cosmic field” in which were “very fine gold sparkles, like gold dust” that “twinkle like little golden speckles.”

  • Energy Transformation

Clairvoyants in general describe their perceptions of chakras as vortices of shifting colors, sounds, and densities. Schwarz in particular uses the same images as Charles Leadbeater to describe his perception of them, saying they are “rather like liquid convolvulus flowers or the surface shape of water spiraling in a whirlpool.”

He notes that each of the chakras vibrates at a characteristic frequency as it transmits vital energy: “The energy pattern around each chakra is viewed as a vortex predominantly of a certain color, which corresponds to the frequency at which that chakra is vibrating. Similarly, each chakra is associated with a musical tone that also corresponds to the frequency of its basic vibration.”

Schwarz observes that when a chakra is operating in a balanced manner, “the color surrounding it will be very pale and will be the pure color of that chakra,” indicating that the energy transmitted by the chakra is “fine and subtle.” If a chakra is not properly transmitting the energy that comes into it, the color will have “a dense, dark overflow that will be apparent in the aura surrounding the chakra.”

Like most Westerners, Schwarz promotes a seven chakra system in which each of the seven main chakras has as its external counterpart one of the seven major endocrine glands of the body, whose functions, he says, “interact with one another in a manner still mysterious to science.” (See the table above).

Schwarz summarizes the overall functioning of the human energy field in this way:

Each of the seven chakras has a particular way of transforming energy. Starting from the top, the crown chakra (pineal body) receives and transmits energy; the brow chakra (pituitary gland) synthesizes and desynthesizes energy; the throat chakra (thyroid gland) is the expressive node for energy; the heart chakra is the area of transmutation of energy; the solar plexus chakra deals with emotional and physical energy, pain, and pleasure; the spleen chakra is the reserve center; the sacral chakra (gonads) is the reservoir. The reserve tank of energy (spleen) comes into operation only when the reservoir is empty.

Schwarz thinks of the chakras as dynamos, “dynamic centers through which the energy is distributed … as it comes into the body as well as when it goes out from the body; there is a capacity for transmission as well as for reception.” And when these power centers are in harmonious equilibrium with one another, “they produce a wave of resonance that at one level manifests itself as an individual being and at other levels blends with the entire energy fabric of our universal environment.”

Schwarz describes in some detail his personal observation of the dynamic interaction of the chakras in the human energy field as light energy activates the physical body.

The light or current that Schwarz calls the ray, enters the body through the crown chakra, which is associated with the pineal gland. “At this point, the energy is pure light.” This ray “is the main current of energy entering from the universe” into the individual human being. “We might say that the ray is the main power line from the central power station, the universe, and that the chakras are auxiliary distribution centers on the main power line.”

As the light moves down to the brow chakra, which is associated with the pituitary gland, “it is broken down into seven different qualities.” The pituitary, the master gland, “functioning like a prism,” bends or refracts the light into “seven main colors” and “distributes it through the body by way of the various chakras.”

At the throat chakra, which is associated with the thyroid gland, “the light starts to become denser so that it can interact with the body chemistry.” This is the aura in which “the ray first becomes visible because it is in this aura that all the experiences you have gone through as a soul, or capacity of energy, lead to the absorption of various frequencies and amplitudes.”

The heart chakra, associated with the thymus gland, “is the cauldron in which energy is transmuted.” As the energy moves down to the heart chakra,“the light undergoes a transformation into fire, a somewhat denser energy form”:

The energy moves down and activates the adrenal glands at the solar plexus chakra, then on to the spleen, pancreas, and liver at the spleen chakra. These three organs begin the filtering operation, removing the waste material created in the burning process. Finally, the energy, in its densest form, reaches the gonadal system at the root chakra, which I like to compare to a butane tank with a pilot light on it because the density of the energy here is concentrated like liquid oxygen and the energy is released very slowly unless it is activated.

Once the energy has provided nourishment to the physical body, “it is released out of its physical and chemical state, and it becomes subtler and subtler, until finally it once again gets to the heart chakra, the cauldron, which now acts as a refinery, transmuting fire into light.” When the energy returns back up through the chakras after it has been distributed to and utilized by the various organs and systems of the body, “the brow, or pituitary, chakra functions as the synthesizer, integrating the component energies once again into pure light…. The energy becomes subtle substance once again, and finally, it comes out of the pineal.”

Schwarz means his description of energy conversions and changes in energy states to be taken literally, not in a metaphysical sense. Of course, he recognizes that this transformation has not yet been proven with scientific evidence. “Nevertheless,” he says, “this is what I have observed in human energies, and I feel fortunate to be able to see these energies moving and thereby, after years of observation, to get some idea of what is going on. This is the process I have observed: the transmutation of light to fire to substance and the transmutation of substance to fire to light.”

  • Dating Events from the Aura

Through Schwarz’s many years of observation, he has discovered what he calls the growth pattern in the aura:

From below the sacral area, down into the ground where you cannot see the aura anymore, the emotional aura is a brownish green color…. It is in this part of the emotional aura that we can observe the growth pattern. We can see vortices, which are also slightly visible in the physical aura…. Through experience, I have learned that these vortices of energy surrounding a person are like growth rings in trees and that each ring represents a year in time. Let us say that suddenly, four years ago, our subject had a spiritual rebirth, a tremendous transition in his/her life. In the growth area, the aura would begin, from that point on, to look a lighter green. It might be kelly green to start, and where the rebirth occurred, it would suddenly get subtler, more of a chartreuse color, and you can start to count lines in it because every line becomes a subtler color. It is therefore possible to determine the approximate date at which important events took place or when a disease started by counting back on these growth rings. If the change took place four and a half years ago, the color change will be seen four and a half lines in from the outer part of the emotional aura.

  • Disease

The condition of physical and mental health, Schwarz says,

is a regulated, balanced flow of energy through the body, which, as we have said, receives its impetus from the chakras. Moreover, there is radiant energy emitted by the body, and this radiant electromagnetic energy bears a specific relation to the location and intensity of the activity within the body. When we realize that in the final analysis our bodies are in fact made up of nothing but energy in constant transformation, it is easier to understand how subtle, nonphysical, energetic influences such as emotions and thoughts can have a direct influence on our physical functioning, just as our physical functioning can have an effect on our emotional and mental experiences. Similarly, once we understand what produces the radiant emanation from our bodies, it is clearer why this emanation should reveal something about the state of our functioning.

  • Light

Schwarz clearly states that light is a form of nourishment for the human organism, and he has described its transformation as it moves down through the chakras and is broken down into different qualities that nourish the different systems of the body. There is also intuitive and experimental evidence that the human being radiates photons. “The brightness of this light, or photon radiation, is determined by the amplitude of the radiation. The higher the degree of excitement, the higher the amplitude and the brighter the emanation. Our consciousness is not aware of our relationship to all these particles we attract from our environment, but once we understand the principles involved, it is not so strange that we could feed ourselves in that manner.”

  • Enlightenment

“Not surprisingly, total enlightenment means no color, no sounds, and no influences,” Schwarz says. “A person in a state of total enlightenment, or Christ consciousness, functions surrounded by white light, not by the hues determined by the various states of our seven energy centers, or chakras.” As Schwarz’s book Voluntary Controls tries to make clear, “spiritual growth is marked by the increasing brightening of our auras, the increasing nonattachment from external influences.”

Going Further

Barbara Brennan states in her book Hands of Light that the universal life-energy field feeds the human energy field. To her the universal field “appears to be charged by sunlight” and “is visible as tiny globules of orgone” that “seem to be tiny white balls … conspicuous above all others which may be seen floating in the atmosphere.” She adds: “While the force that vivifies these globules is quite different from light, it nevertheless seems to depend upon light for its power of manifestation.”

Brennan’s description bears a clear resemblance to what Charles Leadbeater described fifty years earlier as vital energy or prana. This life energy, which is absorbed as food by the human energy field, also appeared to him in the form of “vitality globules … pouring forth from the sun continually.”

Although Barbara Brennan recognized Jack Schwarz’s energetic philosophy to be similar to her own and Schwarz adopted many of Leadbeater’s concepts into his chakra system, the concept of vital energy globules doesn’t play into Schwarz’s chakra system at all. However, Schwarz returns again and again to the concept that “we can nourish ourselves on pure energy, on light.” Yet Schwarz never refers to this energy using the term prana. (This may be because in Leadbeater’s chakra system the spleen processes prana and Schwarz understands the spleen to have a different function.) And Schwarz uses the term vital energy only when he refers to the energy of the root chakra or red center. When Schwarz talks about the pure energy of light being a nutrient capable of feeding the physical body and the energy body, he is referring specifically to the ray that he sees entering the human energy field through the crown chakra.

It is nonetheless significant that Schwarz states in his book a basic dynamic principle that is directly related to the idea of the human energy field living on the pure energy of light:

How can it be possible for us to live on light? In energy fields, when we go beyond the atomic level, we get to the electromagnetic level. Beyond that is the paramagnetic, which is different from earth magnetism, where we see that positive attracts negative, that is, that opposites attract. Rather, in paramagnetic fields, like attracts like, so that if we radiate out a certain frequency of energy with a certain amplitude, this will attract energy of the same frequency and amplitude. If we are radiating energy from our bodies, we thereby attract from the environment an equal particle of the same frequency and the same amplitude.

That the principle “like attracts like” operates on the higher levels of the human energy field is recognized by both Schwarz and Brennan. And this principle can explain how it is possible for a Fifth-Dimensional Light Body to take on Form while we live in our Third-Dimensional world. This process is a primary concern of Cosolargy.

According to the teachings of Cosolargy, men and women are composed of three bodies. There is the physical body that corresponds to the physical sun. There is the Dark spirit, the individual organizing field or archetypal person, that corresponds to the psychic world of the Fourth Dimension. And there is a Light spirit that has the potential to become a Fifth-Dimensional soul once it is linked to the Intelligible Sun of God’s Divine Word or Presence.

Chrixons (Cosolargy’s term for the vitality globules described by Brennan and Leadbeater), the emanations of the Spiritual Sun, act upon the organizing field to bring into being a more active field that is capable of utilizing otherwise inaccessible spiritual energy and information. Adepts of Light learn to capture Chrixons in their field and benefit accordingly. The Light body lives off these Chrixons, which stream forth from the cosmic Consciousness of God.

The spiritual Consciousness of a Community of adepts counters the adverse effects of negated human consciousness through the application of a System of spiritual techniques that has been guarded over for thousands of years and was created for this purpose. In this way, Cosolargy  prepares for the future. Schwarz and Brennan present us with an understanding of the inner self. The new organizing field of the collective Community holds the potential to create a new way of life on the planet as a result of the sun’s rays and the Spiritual Factors they carry.

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