Voices of natural law

Itzhak Bentov (1923–1979)

Inventor · scientist · mystic

Itzhak “Ben” Bentov was born in Humenné, Czechoslovakia, in 1923. His parents, brother and sister were killed in the Nazi camps; he escaped to British Palestine and, with no university degree, joined Israel’s Science Corps, where he designed the young country’s first rocket. In 1954 he came to the United States and settled in Massachusetts.

Working from a basement workshop in Belmont, he built the steerable cardiac catheter in 1967, one of the inventions that helped create the field of biomedical engineering. The company he co-founded with John Abele, Medi-Tech, became part of what is now Boston Scientific. He held patents on everything from EKG electrodes and pacemaker leads to automobile brake shoes.

He was also a meditator, and he studied consciousness the way he studied everything else: with instruments. He built a device to record the reverberations of the heart and aorta, and reported that in deep meditation the body’s rhythm settles into resonance at roughly seven cycles per second, near the brain’s alpha rhythm and the low-frequency pulsations of the Earth. In Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977) he wrote that “consciousness permeates everything.”

Bentov died on May 25, 1979, aboard American Airlines Flight 191 in Chicago. He was on his way to California to present his ideas on science and mysticism.

Why his work speaks to us

• The Union of Science and Faith: a working engineer who measured what he meditated on, and saw no wall between the laboratory and the sacred.
• Frequency Is Law: his picture of body, mind and planet as rhythms that can come into resonance.
• Universal Oneness: consciousness not as something we have, but as something everything shares.

Bentov’s resonance findings are his own reported measurements and interpretations, presented here as part of his thought rather than as settled science.