An introduction to the wonderful works of
Dr. Bruce Lipton, Ph.D.
(courtesy of Mr Lipton)
I
Video: The New Biology - From Victim to Master of Your Health
Video: Spontaneous Evolution - Bruce Lipton interview on Coast to Coast
II
Excerpt from the book Biology of Belief -
Chapter 1
The Origins of Life: Smart Cells Get Smarter
It shouldn’t be surprising that cells are so smart. Single-celled organisms were the first life forms on this planet. Fossil evidence reveals they were here within 600 million years after the Earth was first formed. For the next 2.75 billion years of the Earth’s history, only free-living, single-celled organisms bacteria, algae and amoeba-like protozoans, populated the world.
Around 750 million years ago, these smart cells figured out how to get smarter when the first multicellular organisms (plants and animals) appeared. Multicellular life forms were initially loose communities or ‘colonies’, of single-celled organisms. At first, cellular communities consisted of tens and hundreds of cells. But the evolutionary advantage of living in a community soon led to organizations comprised of millions, billions and even trillions of socially interactive single cells. Though each individual cell is of microscopic dimensions, the size of multicellular communities may range from the barely visible to the monolithic. Biologists have classified these organized communities based on their structure as observed by the human eye. While the cellular communities appear as single entities to the naked eye, a mouse, a dog, a human, they are, in fact, highly organized associations of millions and trillions of cells.
The evolutionary push for ever-bigger communities is simply a reflection of the biological imperative to survive. The more awareness an organism has of its environment, the better its chances for survival. When cells band together they increase their awareness exponentially. If each cell were to be arbitrarily assigned an awareness value of X, then each colonial organism would collectively have a potential awareness value of at least X times the number of cells in the colony.
In order to survive at such high densities, the cells created structured environments. These sophisticated communities subdivided the workload with more precision and effectiveness than the ever-changing organizational charts that are a fact of life in big corporations. It proved more efficient for the community to have individual cells assigned to specialized tasks. In the development of animals and plants, cells begin to acquire these specialized functions in the embryo. A process of cytological specialization enables the cells to form the specific tissues and organs of the body. Over time, this pattern of differentiation, i.e. the distribution of the workload among the members of the community, became embedded in the genes of every cell in the community, significantly increasing the organism’s efficiency and its ability to survive.
In larger organisms, for example, only a small percentage of cells are concerned with reading and responding to environmental stimuli. That is the role of groups of specialized cells that form the tissues and organs of the nervous system. The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment and coordinate the behavior of all the other cells in the vast cellular community.
Division of labor among the cells in the community offered an additional survival advantage. The efficiency it offered enabled more cells to live on less. Consider the old adage, ‘Two can live as cheaply as one.’ Or consider the construction costs of building a two-bedroom, single home versus the cost of building a two-bedroom apartment in a hundred-apartment complex. To survive, each cell is required to expend a certain amount of energy. The amount of energy conserved by individuals living in a community contributes to both an increased survival advantage and a better quality of life.
Read the entire first chapter
More about the book “Biology of Belief”
Video: Love and Fear
IV
“Magical Mem-brains“
Excerpt from interview with science writer Jill Neimark
JN: Early in your book, you describe a kind of eureka! insight where you realize that the cell membrane is the equivalent of each cell’s brain. Later in your book, you write that interacting with the cell membrane will enable us to change our lives, health, maybe even the activity of our genes. By changing our deepest beliefs, you say, we can change the signals reaching the cell membrane, and thus our entire bodies from the cellular level on up. But before we get into all that, “brain” is a loaded word. What exactly do you mean by brain when you speak of the “magical mem-brain”?
BL: I mean the cell membrane functions as the active intelligence of the cell. At any given time, every cell membrane contains hundreds of thousands of switches, and the behavior of a cell can only be understood by considering the activities of all the switches. So I asked myself, Where does the cascade of activity for a cell start? And it starts at the membrane. In contrast, genes are remarkable molecules, but they are only blueprints that are activated by signals from the cell membrane. Genes are not our fate. Of course, a very small percentage of people actually arrived on this planet with defective genes, and in those rare cases the blueprint itself is inappropriate.
JN: Scientists have long known that genes are influenced by signals from their environment. There is the famous book The Beak of the Finch, which shows us that evolution is happening right before our eyes in just a few generations of birds on the Galapagos Islands. The length of the finch beak changes according to climate change, which affects the type of seeds that grow on the island and the type of beak a finch needs. So haven’t we known for a while that genes are flexible and responsive?
BL: I fully agree and do say in my book that if you’re a leading-edge scientist, this will not be news. But if you ask the average person on the street what controls life, they will tell you genes control life. It was Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick who suggested that genes are both the blueprint for the body’s proteins and that DNA controls its own replication. The first is true but the second is not. Genes are indeed blueprints. But a gene cannot cause or control its own expression. It is not self-regulatory. If genes don’t control life, then what is in charge of life? I say it’s the cell membrane. This is the “brain” equivalent. The membrane is the physical structure that interfaces internal “self” and external “not-self.” It is an interface that dynamically reads and interprets environmental cues and responds by generating signals that enable the cell to function and survive. And science supports this. One of the remarkable studies I mention in my book shows that a cell whose nucleus - with all its genes - is removed will keep functioning for as long as a month! This was a shock to me at rst, since I was trained as a nucleus-centered biologist as surely as Copernicus was trained as an Earth-centered astronomer. It was truly a jolt when I realized the nucleus does not program the cell. On the other hand, if the cell membrane is damaged, the cell will immediately become dysfunctional and, frequently, die very quickly.
V
Video: Biology of Perception
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Video: Conscious Parenting
DVD: Nature, Nurture & The Power of Love
Excerpt from article on Conscious Parenting:
Human biology is so dependent upon learned perceptions, that it is not surprising evolution has provided us with a mechanism that encourages rapid learning. Brain activity and states of awareness can be measured electronically using electroencephalography (EEG). There are four fundamental states of awareness distinguished by the frequency of electromagnetic activity in the brain. The time that an individual spends in each of these EEG states is related to a patterned sequential expressed during child development (Laibow, 1999).
DELTA waves (0.5-4 Hz), the lowest level of activity, are primarily expressed between birth and two years of age. When a person is in DELTA, they are in an unconscious (sleep-like) state. Between two years and six years of age, the child begins to spend more of its time in a higher level of EEG activity characterized as THETA (4-8 Hz). THETA activity is the state we experience upon just arising, when we are half asleep and half awake. Children are in this very imaginative state when they play, creating delicious pies made out of mud or gallant steeds from old brooms.
The child begins to preferentially express a still higher level of EEG activity called ALPHA waves around the age of six. ALPHA (8-12 HZ) is associated with states of calm consciousness. At around 12 years, the child’s EEG spectrum may express sustained periods of BETA (12-35 HZ) waves, the highest level of brain activity characterized as “active or focused consciousness.”
The significance of this developmental spectrum is that an individual does not generally sustain active consciousness (ALPHA activity) until after five years of age. Before birth and through the first five years of life, the infant is primarily in DELTA and THETA, which represents a hypnogogic state. In order to hypnotize an individual it is necessary to lower their brain function to these levels of activity. Consequently, the child is essentially in a hypnotic “trance” through the first five years of its life. During this time it is down-loading biology-controlling perceptions without even the benefit, or interference, of conscious discrimination. The potential of a child is “programmed” into its subconscious mind during this phase of development.
VII
Video: Dr. Wayne Dyer & Bruce Lipton
VIII
Excerpts from the book Spontaneous Evolution
1. The Finger on the Switch
We have revealed that molecular switches activate protein gears, which, in turn, move, and generate behavior. Now the big question concerning the secret of life is, “Who or what turns on the switch? To turn the switch, we introduce… the signal.
A signal from the cell’s environment puts the gears, motor, switch, and gauge into motion.
The Signal: Signals represent environmental forces that switch on the motor within a cell and cause protein gears to move. Signals represent both physical and energetic information that comprise the world in which we live. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the people we touch, even the news we hear-all represent environmental signals that activate protein movement and generate behavior. Consequently, when we use the term environment in our discussion, we mean everything from the edge of our own skin to the edge of the Universe. This is environment in the truly large sense.
Each protein responds to a specific environmental signal with the intimacy and accuracy of a key fitting into its matching lock. The coupling of a protein molecule with a complementary environmental signal causes the protein molecule to change its shape, which, by its nature, is expressed as movement. The cell harnesses these molecular movements to drive its life-providing protein pathways, such as respiration, digestion, muscle contractions, and others. Protein movement animates the cell, bringing it to life.
New-Edge Biology Conclusion #2: Environmental signals cause proteins to change shape; the resulting movements create the functions of life.
2. Do Ordinary Humans possess Superhuman Powers?
In the face of heroic efforts needed to save our own lives, what chance do we have to save the world? Confronted with current global crises, we understandably shrink back, overwhelmed with a feeling of insignificance and paralysis-unable to influence the affairs of the world. It is far easier to be entertained by reality TV than to actually participate in our own reality.
But consider the following:
Fire walking: For thousands of years, people of many different cultures and religions from all parts of the world have practiced fire walking. A recent Guinness World Record for longest fire walk was set by 23-year-old Canadian Amanda Dennison in June 2005. Amanda walked 220 feet over coals that measured 1,600 to1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Amanda didn’t jump or fly, which means her feet were in direct contact with the glowing coals for the full 30 seconds it took her to complete the walk.
Many people attribute the ability to remain burn-free during such a walk to paranormal phenomena. In contrast, physicists suggest that the presumed danger is an illusion, claiming the embers are not great conductors of heat and that the walker’s feet have limited contact with the coals. Yet, very few scoffers have actually removed their shoes and socks and traversed the glowing coals, and none have matched the feat of Amanda’s feet. Besides, if the coals are really as benign as the physicists suggest, how do they account for severe burns experienced by large numbers of “accidental tourists” on their firewalks?
Our friend, author and psychologist Dr. Lee Pulos, has invested considerable time studying the fire walking phenomenon. One day, he bravely faced the fire himself. With his pants rolled up and his mind clear, Lee walked the gauntlet of burning embers. Upon reaching the other side, he was delighted and empowered to realize that his feet showed no sign of trauma. He was also totally surprised to discover upon unrolling his pants, his cuffs detached along a scorch mark that encircled each leg.
Whether or not the mechanisms that allow fire walking are physical or metaphysical, one outcome is consistent: those who expect the coals to burn them, get burned, and those who don’t, don’t. The belief of the walker is the most important determinant. Those who successfully complete the firewalk experience, firsthand, a key principle of quantum physics: the observer, in this case, the walker, creates the reality.
Meanwhile, on the extreme opposite of the climate spectrum, the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia walk barefoot for days in snow and ice over a 15,000-foot mountain pass. In the 1920s, explorers Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper created the first feature length documentary, a brilliant award-winning movie titled Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life. This historic film captured the annual migration of the Bakhtiari, a race of nomads who had no prior contact with the modern world. Twice a year, as they have done for a millennium, more than 50,000 people and a herd of half a million sheep, cows, and goats cross rivers and glacier-covered mountains to reach green pastures.
To get their traveling city over the mountain pass, these hardy, barefooted people dig a roadway, through the towering ice and snow that blankets the 14,000 foot high peak of Zard-Kuh (Yellow Mountain). Good thing these people didn’t know they could catch a death of cold by being shoeless in the snow for days!
The point is, whether the challenge is cold feet or “coaled feet,” we humans are really not as frail as we think we are.
Heavy Lifting: We are all familiar with weightlifting, in which muscled men and women pump iron. Such efforts require intense bodybuilding and, perhaps, some steroids on the side. In one form of the sport called total weightlifting, burly male world record holders lift in the range of 700 to 800 pounds and female titlists average around 450 to 500 pounds.
While these accomplishments are phenomenal, many other reports exist of untrained, unathletic people showing even more amazing feats of strength. To save her trapped son, Angela Cavallo lifted a 1964 Chevrolet and held it up for five minutes while neighbors arrived, reset a jack, and rescued her unconscious boy.5 Similarly, a construction worker lifted a 3,000-pound helicopter that had crashed into a drainage ditch, trapping his buddy under water. In this feat captured on video, the man held the aircraft aloft while others pulled his friend from beneath the wreckage.
To dismiss these feats as the consequence of an adrenaline rush misses the point. Adrenaline or not, how can an untrained average man or woman lift and hold a half ton or more for an extended duration?
These stories are remarkable because neither Ms. Cavallo nor the construction worker could have performed such acts of superhuman strength under normal circumstances. The idea of lifting a car or helicopter is unimaginable. But with the life of their child or friend hanging in the balance, these people unconsciously suspended their limiting beliefs and focused their intention on the foremost belief at that moment: I must save this life!
Drinking Poison: Every day we bathe our bodies with antibacterial soaps and scrub our homes with potent antibiotic cleansers. Thus, we protect ourselves from ever-present deadly germs in our environment. To remind us how susceptible we are to invasive organisms, television ads exhort that we cleanse our world with Lysol and rinse our mouths with Listerine . . . or is it the other way around? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention along with the media continuously inform us of the impending dangers of the latest flu, HIV, and plagues transported by mosquitoes, birds, and swine.
Why do these prognostications worry us? Because we have been programmed to believe our body’s defenses are weak, ripe for invasion by foreign substances.
If Nature’s threats weren’t bad enough, we must also protect ourselves from byproducts of human civilization. Manufactured poisons and massive amounts of excreted pharmaceuticals are toxifying the environment. Of course poisons, toxins and germs can kill us-we all know that. But then there are those who don’t believe in this reality-and live to tell about it.
In an article integrating genetics and epidemiology in Science magazine, microbiologist V.J. DiRita wrote, “Modern epidemiology is rooted in the work of John Snow, an English physician whose careful study of cholera victims led him to discover the waterborne nature of this disease. Cholera also played a part in the foundation of modern bacteriology-40 years after Snow’s seminal discovery, Robert Koch developed the germ theory of disease following his identification of the comma-shaped bacterium Vibrio cholerae as the agent that causes cholera. Koch’s theory was not without its detractors, one of whom was so convinced that V. cholerae was not the cause of cholera that he drank a glass of it to prove that it was harmless. For unexplained reasons he remained symptom-free, but nevertheless incorrect.”
Here’s a man who, in 1884, so challenged the accepted medical opinion, that to prove his point, he drank a glass of cholera, yet remained symptom-free. Not to be outdone, the professionals claimed he was the one who was wrong!
We love this story because the most telling part is that science dismissed this man’s daring experiment without bothering to investigate the reason for his apparent immunity, which was very likely his unshakable belief that he was right. It was far easier for the scientists to treat him as an irksome exception than to change the rules they created. In science however, an exception simply represents something that is not yet known or understood. In fact, some of the most important advances in the history of science were directly derived from studies on anomalous exceptions.
Now take the insight from the cholera story and integrate it with this amazing report: Rural eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and North Carolina are home to devout fundamentalists known as the Free Pentecostal Holiness Church. In a state of religious ecstasy, congregants demonstrate God’s protection through their ability to safely handle poisonous rattlesnakes and copperheads. Even though many of these individuals get bitten, they do not show expected symptoms of toxic poisoning. The snake routine is only the opening act. Really devout congregants take the notion of Divine protection one giant step further. In testifying that God protects them, they drink toxic doses of strychnine without exhibiting harmful effects. Now, there’s a tough mystery for science to stomach!
Spontaneous remission: Every day, thousands of patients are told, “All the tests are back and the scans concur… I am sorry; there is nothing else we can do. It is time for you to go home and get your affairs in order because the end is near.” For most patients with terminal diseases, such as cancer, this is how their final act plays out. However, there are those with terminal illnesses who express a more unusual and happier option-spontaneous remission. One day they are terminally ill, the next day they are not. Unable to explain this puzzling yet recurrent reality, conventional doctors in such cases prefer to conclude that their diagnoses were simply incorrect-in spite of what the tests and scans revealed.
According to Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, author of Coyote Medicine, spontaneous remission is often accompanied by a “change of story.” Many empower themselves with the intention that they-against all odds-are able to choose a different fate. Others simply let go of their old way of life with its inherent stresses, figuring they may as well relax and enjoy what time they have left. Somewhere in the act of fully living out their lives, their unattended diseases vanish. This is the ultimate example of the power of the placebo effect, where taking a sugar pill is not even needed!
Now here’s an utterly crazy idea. Instead of investing all of our money into the search for elusive cancer-prevention genes and what are perceived to be magic bullets that cure without the downside of harmful side effects, wouldn’t it make sense to also dedicate serious energy to research the phenomenon of spontaneous remission and other dramatic, non-invasive medical reversals associated with the placebo effect? But because pharmaceutical companies haven’t come up with a way to package or affix a price tag to placebo-mediated healing, they have no motivation to study this innate healing mechanism.
More about the book “Spontaneous Evolution”
IX
Video: Fractal Geometry
Video: Fractal Evolution - Alan Steinfeld interviews Bruce Lipton
Video: Fractal Wisdom
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Excerpt from the article
“Cell Psychology and Beyond“
The evolutionary transition from unicellular life forms to multicellular (communal) life forms represented an intellectually and technically profound high point in the creation of the biosphere. In the world of unicellular protozoa, each cell is an innately intelligent, independent being, adjusting its biology to its own perception of the environment. However, when cells join together to form multicellular “communities,” it required that the cells establish a complex social intercourse.
Within a community, individual cells can not behave independently, otherwise the community would cease to exist. By definition, the members of a community must follow a single “collective” voice. The “collective” voice controlling the community’s expression represents the sum of all of the perceptions of every cell in the group. Original cellular communities consisted of from tens to hundreds of cells. The evolutionary advantage to living in community soon led to organizations comprised of millions, billions or even trillions, of socially interactive single cells. In order to survive at such high densities, the amazing technologies evolved by the cells led to highly structured environments that would boggle the minds and imagination of human engineers. Within these environments, cell communities subdivide the workload among themselves, leading to the creation of hundreds of specialized cell types. The structural plans to create these interactive communities and differentiated cells are written into the genome of each cell within the community.
Though each individual cell is of microscopic dimensions, the size of multicellular communities may range from the barely visible to the monolithic in proportion . At our level of perspective, we do not observe individual cells but we do recognize the different structural forms cell communities acquire. We perceive these macroscopic structured communities as plants and animals, which includes ourselves among them. While you might consider yourself as a single entity, in truth your are the sum of a community of approximately 50 trillion single cells.
The effectiveness of such large communities is enhanced by the subdivision of labor among the component cells. Cytological specialization’s enable the cells to form the specific tissues and organs of the body. In larger organisms, only a small percent of the cells function in perceiving the community’s external environment. Groups of specialized “perception cells” form the tissues and organs of the nervous system. The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment and coordinate the cellular community’s biological response to the impinging environmental stimuli.Multicellular organisms, like the cells they are comprised of, are genetically endowed with fundamental protein perception complexes that enable the organism to effectively survive in their environment. Genetically programmed perceptions are referred to as instincts. Similar to cells, organisms are also capable of interacting with the environment and creating new perceptual pathways. This process provides for learned behavior.
Read more:
Bruce Lipton’s official website
Going into the Age of the Fractal - a little story about everything
The Unificationing - a poetic essay about chain reactions and the word “I”
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