Living with mobile phones, part 1

It is eleven at night. The light is off, and the only thing still glowing in the room is the screen of the mobile on the bedside table. One more message, one more look at tomorrow's weather, the alarm set for six. Then you put it down next to the pillow, and in the morning it is the phone again that wakes you up. Our mobiles are with us from early morning until late in the evening, and many of us keep them by the bed while we sleep. How often do we stop and think about what that rhythm does to us?

In these two articles I look at how science sees phones and the fields around them, at how people actually live with their mobiles day to day, and at a way of thinking about balance that comes from the physician Gabriel Cousens. The text draws on an English paper that dealt with the subject and on materials published by the maker of tachyonized products. This first part sets the scene. The second part turns to Cousens' own experiment and to the small habits that make evenings and nights calmer.

An argument as old as the mobile

People have argued about how mobiles affect our health since the very first handsets. For every study that suggests phone signals are bad for us, there seems to be another, often paid for by someone else, that says the exact opposite. For an ordinary person it is like listening to two radios at once, each tuned to a different station.

So where does science stand today? IARC, the international agency that belongs to the World Health Organization and assesses what may seriously harm us, placed radiofrequency electromagnetic fields in the group "possibly carcinogenic" in 2011. It is the category for cases where the evidence is limited, so nothing can be ruled in or ruled out with confidence. ICNIRP, the international commission that sets the exposure guidelines, updated its limits in 2020 so that they also cover the newer networks. And in 2024 a large review came out, prepared for the WHO by Ken Karipidis and his colleagues. After weighing a great many studies, it found no link between using a mobile and diseases of the brain. For people like Cousens, the more interesting question sits somewhere else: how we feel day to day, and how much energy is left at the end of a long day spent half inside a screen. I write more about electrosmog and the research in the article Electrosmog and 5G: what the science says.

We may never agree on a single answer. One thing is certain, though. Mobile phones are part of a whole web of wireless devices around us. Wireless communication has become as ordinary as MP3 players and DVDs once were. We have quickly forgotten the days when we dialled numbers on old telephones by turning a rotary dial with one finger. Everything points to landlines slowly disappearing, with nearly all our talking done wirelessly. Along with that comes an ever larger amount of invisible electromagnetic fields, radio waves and microwave frequencies, in our kitchens and bedrooms.

Why a single view is hard to reach

If you live in a town almost anywhere in the world, it is close to certain that you, or someone close to you, uses a mobile phone. And economics plays a very large part in the debate about whether phones are bad for our health.

Imagine for a moment what would happen if it turned out that mobiles had a strongly negative effect on health. The telecoms world as we know it would be shaken to its foundations, and the phone companies would feel it badly. When the original paper was written, almost two billion people used a mobile. Today there are far more. Anyone among them with a serious health problem could sue the maker of their phone, and an avalanche of court cases would follow. For that reason alone it is hard to imagine a single view ever winning out on whether mobiles are a serious health risk. The question stays open, and each of us ends up deciding for ourselves how the phone fits into our day.

Another way of looking at it: energy and entropy

Perhaps it helps to set the names of diagnoses aside for a moment and look at the whole question from a different angle. In the language of quantum physics, everything is made of energy. Everything either takes energy in or gives it away. From a holistic point of view, we can compare losing energy to ageing and taking it in to growing younger. Think of a phone battery: it does not stay full by itself, it has to be charged, and the way we use it decides how long it lasts.

This is where a word comes in that the physician Gabriel Cousens works with, and that runs through this whole piece: entropy. In physics it is a measure of how disordered a system is. Cousens carries it over to people and uses entropy for the gradual wearing down and loss of balance in the body. Picture a room that nobody tidies. Things do not line themselves up on their own; the mess only grows. Rejuvenation, in the sense of slowing down ageing, is for Cousens another word for negative entropy. That means a system moving towards balance, evenness and order. When a system moves towards balance, he sees it as rejuvenation. Entropy is the opposite direction, a system drifting towards chaos, imbalance and disorder, in other words the process of ageing.

In this holistic view, nearly every bodily complaint has its roots in an imbalance of energy. Bigger problems, the view goes, grow out of energy depletion that builds up over a long time. That is the process of entropy: the wearing out, or ageing, of a gland or an organ, which in the end affects the whole system.

Seen in terms of energy, then, every more serious imbalance is a cumulative, entropic process. Any system that goes through it for long enough ends up depleted, and its natural outcome is weakening, breakdown and finally an end. Cousens builds his whole philosophy of balance on this picture, and it is why he asks whether the devices we carry with us all day add to that slow drift. He also looks at the other side: what helps a person come back to order, rest and evenness. How he tried to explore the first question, and which simple habits help with the second, is described in the second part of this article.

Why Cousens and David Wagner see tachyon energy as a source of order, and why the manufacturer describes its products as aids for calm and balance at home, is explained in the article Tachyon energy.

Sources

• Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D. (H), Tree of Life, www.treeoflife.nu/gabrielshanti.html.
• Buryl Payne, PhD: The Body Magnetic, Psychophysics, ISBN 0962856991.
• Advanced Tachyon Technologies International, 480 Tesconi Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95401.
• Elektrosmog Ostrava: Zkoumání EMP a zdraví (Exploring electromagnetic fields and health, in Czech), elektrosmog-ostrava.webnode.cz/news/zkoumani-emp-a-zdravi-/.
• IARC Monographs, vol. 102: Non-Ionizing Radiation, Part 2: Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields, 2011 (Group 2B classification).
• ICNIRP: Guidelines for Limiting Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields (100 kHz to 300 GHz), Health Physics 118 (2020).
• K. Karipidis et al.: systematic review of the effect of exposure to radiofrequency fields, prepared for the WHO, Environment International 191 (2024).