The Beauty of Coherent Domains

A little light reading with Mae-Wan Ho, and the small piece of water that explains why coherence is the skill that matters most

Life on the farm can feel a bit hectic, and sometimes it means grabbing a quiet moment when you can. This morning, just as I was finishing breakfast, I decided to spend a few minutes with Mae-Wan Ho and her book, Meaning of Life and the Universe: Transforming. My favorite thing is to just open a book to any page and read what shows up. I was not disappointed.

Ho’s book, is a gathering of essays distilled from nearly a thousand works she wrote across her life, ranging through physics and chemistry and biology, through neurobiology and genetics and cosmology, and yes, through the traditional medicine most of her colleagues would not go anywhere near. A little light reading, for sure.

The section that caught me was a quiet one, almost an aside, buried in a discussion about gene mutation. It was about how a cell seems to know which genes to engage and even which to mutate in response to what is happening around it. This is the groundwork for epigenetic ways of knowing. The living cell listens. It senses the field it is sitting inside, and it answers. It is not simply waiting for instruction or influence. It is in active give and take, send and receive, conversation within itself and everything around it.

And then Ho does what she always does. She asks how. What is the physical mechanism by which a cell, made mostly of water, could possibly listen to its environment and answer it intelligently. And the answer she points toward is the part I get really excited about, because it is the whole of what we teach at NESBEM, and what I do in my own work, the answer is written in the language of water and light.

The coherent domain

When light interacts with liquid water in a certain way, the water organizes itself into what physicists call a coherent domain. Inside that domain, the water molecules stop behaving like a loose crowd of separate individuals and begin oscillating together, moving as one between a resting state and an excited state, in step, in phase, in tune. This is not something exotic that happens only in a laboratory under strange conditions. According to the quantum electrodynamics of water developed by Emilio Del Giudice and Giuseppe Preparata, and carried forward by Ho, it happens at ordinary temperatures and pressures, which is to say it is happening in you right now.

Here is the part that made me jump up and down with “yes”. A coherent domain, because it is organized and in tune, can capture electromagnetic energy from its surroundings across a whole range of frequencies, gather those small, scattered excitations together, and produce a single coherent excitation of its own. And that coherent excitation does something remarkable. It calls toward itself the reactants that share its frequency, the molecules that are already resonating on the same note, so that the reaction it needs can take place, and the energy can move outward into the wider field again. The molecules find each other not by bumping around at random until they collide, but by resonance. They are tuned to the same frequency, and so they recognize one another across distance.

If it makes it easier, here is an image or analogy, because the physics can stay abstract if we let it. Think of a bell. A bell that is cracked or dampened makes a dull, scattered thud when you strike it, and the sound dies in the air. But a bell that is whole and clear, when struck, rings on a single pure note, and that note will set another bell of the same pitch ringing across the room without anything ever touching it. The clear bell is not louder than the cracked one in any way that matters. It is not better. It is simply coherent, and because it is coherent it can both receive and transmit. It participates in a field of sound rather than thudding alone.

That is what a coherent domain is. A small, clear bell of water, ringing in tune, gathering the energy around it, and answering on a frequency that calls its partners home.

What we mean by coherence

This is the moment to be precise about a word we use constantly, because it is easy to hear it and quickly translate it into something it is not.

When I say a human being is in coherence, I do not mean they are higher energy than the person beside them. I do not mean they are vibrating at a more impressive frequency, or that they have climbed some ladder the rest of us are still standing at the bottom of. Coherence is not a hierarchy, and it is not an achievement you wear. To be coherent is to have become clear enough, organized enough, in tune enough across all of your systems that you can receive the frequencies present in your environment and within yourself, and you can modulate and regulate them rather than being thrown by them. The coherent person is the clear bell. Not the loud one. The clear one.

This is why I keep saying that the most important skill in the world right now is the building of coherence, and the most powerful person in any room is the one who understands this. I want to be careful with that word, powerful, because it is easy to hear it as a claim about being above other people, and it is the opposite of that. The powerful person is not the loudest one, not the one with the most force or the most certainty. The powerful person is the clear bell. It is the one whose signal is clean enough that the room tunes to it, the one who can stay coherent when everything around them is scattered and, by staying coherent, draws the scattered back into tune. That is real power, and it has nothing to do with dominating a field and everything to do with being the clearest note in it.

This is why we are adamant that learning to be fully coherent is more than self-improvement. Self-improvement is great and highly beneficial for the individual. Training in Coherence is an act of participation. When your physical, mental, emotional, and soul systems are organized and your signal is clear, you become a tuning fork in every room you enter, and your coherence does what coherence does, which is to invite resonance in the systems around you. You are not performing calm. You are not projecting wellness. You are simply ringing true, and the field responds. This is the fifth of our Vital Resonance Systems, the Cosmic Bridge, the place where your own coherence stops being a private matter and becomes something the world around you can tune to.

And here is another reason why I get excited about the coherent domain conversation. We are not borrowing this idea from physics as a poetic flourish. Your body is somewhere between seventy and ninety percent water, and most of that water is not the loose, sloshing kind. It is organized, liquid crystalline water arranged along the surfaces of your membranes and your proteins, stabilized into coherent domains throughout your tissue. The coherent domain is not a metaphor. It is the literal physical condition of your living cells. Ho called the result of all those domains ringing together quantum jazz, every molecular player utterly free and spontaneous and yet perfectly in step with the whole. That is what a healthy organism is. Not a machine running its program, but an improvisation in perfect time.

So when we say that coherence is medicine, this is what we mean at the level of the cell. The restoration of coherence is not something you do to get ready for healing. It is the healing. When your domains are clear and in tune, the body's chemistry proceeds at something close to perfect efficiency, energy and information move freely, and the molecules that need to find each other do. When coherence is disrupted, every intervention works against resistance, against static, against a bell that cannot quite ring.

A threshold you can cross today

And so we don’t just end with a beautiful idea and no door to walk through, let’s engage in a micro-practice.

The fastest, most reliable way a human being can shift toward coherence is through the breath, specifically a slow, even, resonant breath at roughly five to six breaths per minute. At that pace, the rhythms of your heart and your blood pressure and your nervous system fall into phase with one another, the way the water molecules in a domain fall into phase. You become, for those minutes, a more coherent bell.

So this afternoon, or any point in the day, wherever you are, try this: Breathe in slowly for a count of about five, and out for a count of about five, and as you do, let your attention rest in the center of your chest. Do not try to feel calm. Do not try to fix anything. Simply notice what your systems are already doing, and let the rhythm gather them. Notice whether the room around you feels any different after a few minutes. Notice whether you do. You are not adding energy. You are tuning. You are letting the scattered become coherent, the way light and water do it billions of times a second inside you without ever being asked.

Now let the practice reach a little further, because every coherent domain has an edge. In the water, the edge of a domain is where its ordered, in-tune signal meets the wider field and begins to exchange with it. In you, that edge is the Cosmic Bridge, the fifth of your Vital Resonance Systems. It is the boundary where your own coherence stops being private and meets the universe, the place where your signal is broadcast and the field answers back. So as you keep breathing, let your awareness expand past your skin to that edge.

Picture the frequency you are cultivating reaching outward to where it touches everything beyond you and understand that at that edge a conversation is always taking place, frequency speaking to frequency, your signal calling toward itself whatever is already resonating on the same note. Then ask the question, what is being said here? What are you receiving from the field, and what are you sending into it? You do not have to answer in language. Your soul system already knows how to listen at that edge. You are only being asked to notice that the conversation is happening, and that you are part of it.

That is what a coherent domain knows, and it is the oldest knowledge there is. In a world that grows louder and more scattered by the day, this is the skill that matters most, and the person who has built it is the one the room will tune to. Become clear, and the field will answer.

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Further reading, for those who want to follow the question the way Ho did:

• Ho, Mae-Wan. Meaning of Life and the Universe: Transforming. World Scientific Publishing, 2017.

• Ho, Mae-Wan. "Water is the Means, Medium and Message of Life." International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, vol. 9, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–12.

• Ho, Mae-Wan. "Quantum Jazz: Liquid Crystalline Water Music of the Organism." Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 2013.

• Del Giudice, E., Preparata, G., and Vitiello, G. "Water as a Free Electric Dipole Laser." Physical Review Letters, vol. 61, 1988, pp. 1085–1088.