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As beliefs control our lives, then how to change our self-limiting beliefs to achieve the desired result. What are the control means available with each of us, then this critical piece of knowledge is for you. It covers the biology of our body cells, environmental effect on them, how mind is different from brain, the synergy between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind with a lot of real-life examples. Earlier also, I had given reference to Bruce Lipton from his life-changing book titled The Biology of Belief.
Bruce Lipton, Ph.D.: The Jump From Cell Culture to Consciousness
Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., cell biologist, and lecturer, is an internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit. Bruce was on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and later performed groundbreaking stem cell research at Stanford Medical School. His pioneering research on cloned human stem cells presaged today’s revolutionary new field of epigenetics. He is the bestselling author of The Biology of Belief and The Honeymoon Effect, and he is the co-author, with Steve Bhaerman, of Spontaneous Evolution. Bruce received the prestigious Goi Peace Award (Japan) in honor of his scientific contribution to world harmony.
IMCJ: Is there a time when this happens naturally?
Dr. Lipton: Yes. When we fall head over heels in love with somebody, a profound change occurs in our lives. Your life could suck all the way up to the day you meet person X. The next day is like, “Oh my God, I’m so in love!” It is heaven on Earth. Things become more beautiful and life is so much easier. You are healthier. You are happier. You are creating a world of joy and love, and that’s called the honeymoon. When we fall in love, we stop focusing our conscious mind on thought and start keeping it present. It is called being mindful. Meaning, if you’ve been looking for this person your whole life, why would you redirect your mind to go interior into thought when what you have been looking for is right in front of your face?
Science has recognized that immediately after falling in love, we enter a period of mindfulness where we keep our conscious mind present. It means when you fall in love for the first time, you stop playing subconscious programs that have been controlling 95% of your life. You start running programs that are based on your conscious wishes and desires. All of a sudden, without the programs—without the subconscious programs—we begin to experience a heavenly life.
The programs eventually kick back in, because inevitably we start thinking again. Guess what? They sabotage the entire honeymoon experience, which ultimately disappears; then life returns to the way it was beforehand. The vast majority of those programs are disempowering and self-sabotaging. We are quite powerful if we can get out of the program.
This is where the future will take us: Knowledge that we are powerful is quite different than the program we receive that we are victims. We are moving into a new future where we start to recognize, “Oh my God, my mind is creating the problems.”
Getting back to health, it comes down to a simple fact: Less than 1% of disease is associated with genetics. Over 90% of disease is a total reflection of the environment and especially our programming: the disempowering, self-sabotaging behaviors that we acquired in the first 7 years. Since those disempowering programs are based on our environment and our perception, and since we can change the environment and our perception, we have the power to free ourselves from disease and to start living that happily-ever-after honeymoon of life experiences that we all believe that we can have. The way to do that is by eliminating the self-sabotaging subconscious programs acquired during the first 7 years of our lives.
IMCJ: What have you observed on the cellular level that leads you to believe that the cells demonstrate this awareness?
Dr. Lipton: As I said, I grew cells in tissue culture dishes and used a culture medium to approximate blood. In addition to nutrition and oxygen carried in the blood, the blood is also sending information: signals, hormones, growth factors, and neuroregulatory agents. Information is in the environment of the cell. This information, by interfacing with the cell membrane—which is the brain of the cell—then enables the cell to engage in behaviors that are elicited by this information. The cell becomes aware of the environment by reading the information in the culture medium, the natural culture medium called blood.
Signal transduction, a new science, reveals the pathways by which an environmental signal engages a biological behavior. The interface of the cell membrane reads the environment of the cell and, in response to the information, adjusts the behavior and genetics of the cell to survive in that environment. The awareness process becomes biological awareness of the interface of the cell membrane, which then translates the environmental information into biological behaviors—signal transduction.
Part of signal transduction is the new science we mentioned, epigenetics. Signal transduction is the whole process: Environmental signals controlling cell behavior and cell behavior include genetics. The environmental signal via signal transduction can go into the nucleus and selectively change the reading of our gene blueprints.
IMCJ: That can elicit a differentiated response?
Dr. Lipton: Absolutely. This is why a change in perception of an individual can change their biology, virtually immediately. How fast can you change genetics? There are studies that showed the genetic readout of some inflammatory genes in a group of people who then went through a meditation process. After 8 hours of meditation, the activity of the genes changed. How long did it take? Well, less than 8 hours.
You can change your genetic activity by how you change your response to the environment. The commonly held perception is that your genes are a blueprint of your life—this is totally false. The blueprint of your life is based on your perception because your genes will change according to your perceptions via epigenetics. Rather than putting emphasis on genes controlling life, the emphasis is fully turned around to recognize your perceptions, via signal transduction, are translated into biological behavior. These factors control not only your behavior but also control your genetic activity.
IMCJ: You mentioned that you see the cell membrane as the brain of the cell. Doesn’t that conflict with conventional wisdom at this point that the nucleus is the brain of the cell?
Dr Lipton: Well yes, because we have held that the genes are self-actualizing. This means that if genes are capable of turning themselves on and off, like we thought, then that would make the nucleus of the cell the brain. Because that is where the genes are located—essentially, 98% of them. Since genes were then given the opportunity of self-actualization, then all the decisions are being made by the genes in the nucleus. Well, that turns out to be totally false. Genes are not self-actualizing. They do not make any decisions at all. The control of genes is not due to any inherent activity in the DNA itself. The change of genetic activity is due to the interaction of the cell with environmental signals.
When I put my cells in the tissue culture, the fate of the cells was not determined by the genes. They all had the same genes. The fate of the cell was determined by the information in the environment.
So, what is reading that information? The answer is, “Not the genes directly.” It is the cell membrane through receptors picking up the signals and translating them into biology, which then sends signals into the nucleus, which then controls the genetic activity. This is the essence of what the new science epigenetics is all about. Genes do not make decisions, so then the question is this: “If they are not making decisions, where are our decisions being made?” That takes us back to the cell membrane, which is the first organelle to evolve in the evolution of cells.
If there was no membrane, of course, there is no cell. As the interface between what is outside the cell and inside the cell, the membrane reads both environments. In this position, the membrane reads the external environment and then adjusts the functions of the internal environment to keep the cell alive. The idea of genes controlling biology is totally false. I understood this in 1964 when I did my first enucleation experiments. If you remove the brain from any living organism, the necessary consequence is death. So, if the nucleus is the brain of the cell, then the process called enucleation, which is removing the nucleus using a micropipette, should lead to the death of the cell.
Guess what? You can enucleate a cell. The cell will survive for months without any genes in it. It is not just sitting there; it’s doing every function it had before. It is moving around. It is ingesting food. It is breathing. It is defecating. It is communicating with other cells. All of this is happening without genes. Well then, obviously something must be coordinating the behavior of the cell and there are no genes in it. Where the heck is the control coming from? The answer is what led me to the cell membrane. The cell membrane is the interface of control. Genes are just responsive elements farther down the line.
The relevance is that the whole DNA story perpetrated and propagated by Watson and Crick as “DNA controls life and it’s self-replicating, therefore it controls itself,” led to something called a central dogma, which is a reflection of how information flows in biology’s conventional thought. This convention stipulates that information flows from DNA to RNA to protein in a unidirectional manner; this flow of information led to the belief that genes control our lives. Unfortunately, Watson and Crick left some very important stuff out of that explanation. They left out the membrane proteins and the chromosomal proteins that control the DNA, called regulatory proteins. But even those proteins are controlled by environmental signals. It is not DNA to RNA to protein.
The new understanding is environmental signals to regulatory protein to DNA to RNA and then to protein. Why is it relevant? DNA is not at the top of that information scheme; the environment is. Leaving out the chromosomal regulatory proteins, which are responsible for regulating DNA, we had a complete misperception of the nature and role of DNA in controlling our lives.
Articles from Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal are provided here courtesy of InnoVision Media
