Can spirit and science be reconciled? Are the workings of the heart too immaterial to be defined? Can medicine reach beyond anatomy and learn to treat the soul? Those are just some of the questions tackled by the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM) at their annual meeting in Boulder earlier this summer. Big questions, echoing out over the crowd of doctors, academics and hands-on practitioners of various stripes (from grey flannel to tie-dyed, in fact), questions that yearned to bridge the gaps, though they were seldom answered—like the subtle energy they were searching to identify—an unseen force that seems to link and heal us.

Most of us who work with patients recovering from one noxious disease or another must acknowledge that there is a lot more going on than we can understand. Recoveries come out of the blue when physicians least expect them, or when their patients are doing things that don't seem to make any scientific sense at all. For the skeptics among us, random chance is the explanation of both first and last resort. But for this meeting's self-described group of "mystically-inclined scientists and scientifically-inclined mystics," the reality of those healing phenomena was never in question. From chakras to prayer to gigahertz radiation, almost every attendee could readily bear witness to at least one inexplicably powerful modality at work, and each appeared prepared to believe all the other techniques worked as well.

And that tolerant credulity may pose a problem. Any gathering of like-minded individuals naturally turns into a support group, and this crowd, whose toes have probably been thoroughly stomped on by the rest of the world, seemed markedly disinclined to step on each other's. During those sessions I attended, no one stood up and challenged anyone's finding with their own (as is usually the case in the heated moments of scientific meetings), or asked a presenter to do more than amplify on what had already been said. One speaker quoted William James about how deterministic scientists were tough-minded but metaphysicians were tender-minded—and it was clear, to this observer, which camp most of the room was comfortable in. A great, forgiving atmosphere for gathering information, perhaps, but not the slicing and dicing that putting it together demands.

Not that they didn't try—yet even the core concept of subtle energy proved particularly resistant to a specific definition. On one panel, speaker after speaker backed away from that hard question, each joking that they agreed with what the one before them had said it was. The only real agreement was that whatever was going on is largely immeasurable, and often seems to inexplicably work at a distance.

But just as I was prepared to throw in the towel, figuring these true believers were nowhere close to telling me something I could use, they up and got me. Some sort of critical mass of sincerity and warmth must have occurred and suddenly it was enough to share in their enthusiasm for the mysteries of healing without regard for how those mysteries occurred. Well, it was enough for me, right then. But enough for anyone who wasn't there? Probably not. So let’s look at some of the ideas presented at the conference and see what we can figure out about how healing works from them.

Dr. Candace Pert, the neurobiologist, in describing her work with the amazing variety of receptors on the surface of our cells, persuasively argued that emotions are truly altered states of being, affecting the function of the body in both health and disease. James Gordon, of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine at Georgetown, talked about connections in medical care, and the importance of family and community in the healing process. This dovetailed nicely with what Jeff Levin, who has certainly done more to show the importance of religion in daily life than any other scientist, had to say. He outlined the data on healing by intercessory prayer (church groups praying for an unknown individual), and went as far as to propose that we may all be nothing more than polyps, physical extensions of a single larger spiritual organism. Hmm... still joined, by unseen bonds, at any distance: It fits. Not exactly a documentable hypothesis, but I like it.

OK, let’s review: We’ve got a way to tie mind and emotion to disease through cell receptors, and examples of how healers and patients might hook up to affect each other through community and prayer. What’s missing for me is an understanding of the specific spiritual energy that leaps the gaps between.

Enter the medical biophysicists, who really flailed about with that one, with different proponents staking out both the lowest and the highest frequencies of the invisible electromagnetic spectrum (and unfortunately claiming that each extreme did approximately the same thing). Some of the discussion related to the dark side of subtle energy: the electromagnetic fields surrounding power lines and their putative role in causing cancer. Quantum effects and chaos theory got tossed around quite a bit, but Tom Brophy, an astrophysicist by training (and so, like all in that field, a dreamer by inclination), made the case that those ideas were really only elaborations of classical science, and that we needed something entirely new to talk about the workings of the spirit. But he was not able to provide it.

And that is pretty much where it ended up: a strong case for the existence of subtle, connective energies, if nothing solid yet about what the heck they are. That's not too bad, actually—after all, sailors used lodestones to navigate for centuries before anyone got a handle on how magnetism worked. Sadly, though, times have changed, and nowadays you need a mechanistic explanation of whatever's going on to get your foot in the scientific (and medical educational) door.

In summary, then, yes —science and spirit, head and heart, physics and metaphysics, all of them seem to be on a most interesting collision course. And ISSSEEM is bravely stepping out from the curb as a traffic cop. It's said that knowing what you don't know is the first step of wisdom, and if that's true, these folks are hard at it, acknowledging the limits of their understanding and speculating about the unknown in the most open-hearted way. The next step, though, will be to take the gloves off and risk bruising a few of their own members' egos in order to unify what they've seen—to find a single language to tie their experiences into a bright, new paradigm, that bridges the known with the currently inexplicable, and that is strong enough to take on the fusty, blinding tenets of the old one