 If there is a heaven, it's right here, right now. We're in it. Today we're delving into another one of those weird but wonderful topics that is taking the world by storm. If you've been around this channel for a while or have attended any of our Spirit Mysteries workshops, you've probably heard us mention the pioneering work of Dr. Bruce Lipton with his books The Biology of Belief and the honeymoon effect. Truth be told, this work has had an absolutely massive effect on all of us here at Spirit Science, and we just had to do a full episode about it. This is, of course, following our recent Live Wisdom Moon workshop, which we presented on the Science of Ascension and went even more in depth on Bruce's discoveries. We've made that available for free in the author comments below, just in case you're curious. In a nutshell, Bruce's research suggests that consciousness and the environment have a guiding effect on our genetics and the quality of our lives. Much like Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenic field theory, we're seeing interesting evidence that consciousness plays a role as the guiding force behind how our genes are expressed at all. When you look in the mirror in the morning and see yourself staring back, who are you really seeing? The real you? Or a projection of your ego? The human body is made up of roughly 40 to 50 trillion cells, each with their own singular immune and reproductive systems. Living together in a community called our body, the cells are individual living entities that make up the whole person. For decades, science viewed our cells as deterministic little robots who got their instructions strictly from the DNA, but Bruce's research is transforming that paradigm rapidly. Bruce explains that one of the main differences between something living and something dead, at least on a physical and biological level, is movement. So what causes a cell to move? Going down this rabbit hole, Bruce discovered that the key source of what causes cells to move and behave actually comes mostly from external signals, and the internal systems reacting to those signals. Usually the quality of the signal will determine the quality of the movement. At a deeper level than the cell, we see that movement takes place at the level of the protein. Cells are made up of proteins, which appear a little bit like squiggly wire wraps. As a signal comes in, if there's a receptor for the signal, they will connect and the new energy received by the protein will be a balanced polarity and facilitate its movement, where the movement is actually just the changing of the shape of the protein at all. To give you a fun example, we all know what digestion is, right? You eat something and your body turns it into energy. Well, digestion itself is a process that works in the same way. The cells in your body, starting with your mouth and stomach, are open to receiving all the time. When you eat food, the food bits are received by the cells of your body, which facilitates their movement in a process we call digestion. I know this is a very simple way of explaining digestion, but the point here is that for so long we've been led to believe that the DNA was the thing that steered and controlled the movements of the cell, but this research is showing us that the movement and control over the cells actually comes from signals. So in that case, what is a signal? Literally everything. Imagine you're walking down a street and someone calls your name. Your ears just received a signal. Even our name is just a collection of vibrations and sounds that we assign relevance to, which causes you to turn around and look. Oh no, it's your arch nemesis, Reginald von Brandebuck III, and he throws a baseball at your head. Your eyes receive the signal, the light bouncing off the ball as it hurls towards your face, causing you to react and move out of the way. Calling back love is the answer, don't be mean. Here's an interesting part about signals. In this example, Reginald is operating at a lower level of consciousness, so he isn't really listening to what you have to say. You could even say that his cells aren't receptive to the intentions that you're sending him, so he carries on with his negative attitude and doesn't really hear or receive what you say about love. See, unless we're receptive to the signals we're receiving, we actively keep ourselves limited to only receive the same thing over and over. Now this is where things get especially interesting, because signals are not just external, they're internal too. Thoughts are signals, feelings are signals. They are signals that we tell ourselves over and over as a result of our beliefs, some of which we program ourselves with, others of which we were programmed by our environment. We explored this briefly as well in our money movie with Think and Grow Rich. One of the steps in Think and Grow Rich was auto-suggestion, continuing to steer your thoughts and focus in the direction of wealth and abundance, because as you look for opportunities to personal success, you open the receptors of your mind to receive those signals, and this brings us to the importance and significance of consciousness. Bruce explains that the mind is similar to a government, which can enact policies to influence the cells. If you have a good mental government, i.e. compassionate and loving thoughts, you get loving commands sent to the cells and thus you have health. But if you have a bad mental government, you have poor health. Do you remember that scene in Doctor Strange when the ancient one asked, when you reattach a severed nerve, is it you who puts it back together or the body? Stephen responds, well it's the cells, to which the ancient one replies, and the cells are only programmed to put themselves back in very specific ways. But what if I told you that your own body could be convinced to put itself back together in all sorts of ways? You see, it's significant for us today because it encourages us to ask just how much of an influence do our minds have on our bodies right down to our cells? And then to go even deeper, the question becomes what programs the mind? In order to understand the answer to this question, we must explore the nature of epigenetics. Bruce's work with epigenetics began nearly 50 years ago when he was first doing research into stem cells and how they would react in different culture mediums. He first took a stem cell and put it in a petri dish and through mitosis the cell divided. Within 150 hours or so, there were around 30,000 cells, all of which were genetically identical because they came from the same parent cell. Then he split the identical cells into three separate petri dishes, but changed the composition of the culture medium, which can stand for the cell's environment and found that in each dish, the cells were expressed differently. In one petri dish, the stem cells became muscle tissue. In another bone cells and lastly fat cells. This caused a very interesting question to come up. If all of the cells were genetically identical and contained the same material, what controls how a cell is expressed? What controls the fate of the cells? He saw that the only thing different in each case was the environment in which the cells were living, which meant that the cells were adjusting to their environment, leading to the critical and important discovery that changing the environment potentially changes how the DNA is expressed. In the world today, we have the conventional idea that genes in our DNA are somehow active or not depending entirely on our heredity. The problem is this mentality actually makes us victims of our genes. If we believe cancer runs in our family, we're going to get it or at least have an increased risk of getting it. Bruce explains that from the point of conception up to about seven years old or so, a child is really a sponge for external programming. It's the reason why, if exposed to it, a child can learn up to three languages independently just by listening to them because their brains are actively in a deep, receptive state, downloading and installing information from the world around them. If a child is told over and over that they're worthless and will amount to nothing, then those mental patterns become solidified by the age of eight and after, and that ultimately dictates how they think and view the world and themselves, influencing the quality of their lives directly every moment, unless they do some serious mental rewiring. But don't worry, there's good news to all of this too. We can actively rewire and shift our state of existence through working to better ourselves. We all know the success rate and impacts of the placebo effect, which heals ailments based on the belief in a fake medicine. But the thing is, the placebo is just the result of positive thinking. So what kind of effects do you think believing negative thoughts would have on us? Both sides are equally powerful. In reality, Bruce's work seems to suggest that genes are more like a blueprint that can be read depending on the chemistry and image you hold in your consciousness, rather than a determining factor from inside the DNA. If you went to an architect's office and asked if their blueprints were on or off, they'd laugh at you. And actually, it's basically the same with genes. All of the genes are always on, but only certain ones or parts of ones are being expressed at any given time. And genetic expression happens when an old protein in the cell dies and the cell requires a new one. In a nutshell, the genes can be read in numerous ways to produce different kinds of proteins or RNAs that are the fundamental building blocks of the cells. And it's the chemical signals that determines how and if those genes are read, which are influenced by our environments, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and consciousness. But again, this doesn't change the gene itself. We all still have the same genes as before, it simply changes how they're expressed. Now briefly on the subject of heredity, it's important to note that hereditary factors are still a thing. A 2014 study on mice found that fear especially can be encoded in genetic memory and passed down from parent to child. In one example, mice were conditioned to fear a strong scent of acetophanone by accompanying the smell with an electric shock. As a result, the mice learned to fear the smell of acetophanone on its own. It was then discovered that this fear could be passed down to the mice's children. Despite the offspring never experiencing the electric shock themselves, the little mice still displayed a fear of the smell, because they inherited the fear epigenetically by site-specific DNA methylation. The study suggested that these epigenetic changes lasted up to two generations without reintroducing the shock. From this perspective, it seems as though there really is something to the idea of carrying with us ancestral trauma. But then merging this with the rest of these discoveries, it also becomes very clear that whatever it is that we're carrying, whether it's childhood traumas or ancestral baggage, we can actively heal these things by our conscious participation with our beliefs and environments. In a nutshell, whatever ideas, feelings or beliefs that we're locked into are sent into the chemistry as a signal for the genes to be read and start producing proteins. For positive or for negative, having a strong foundation of love and gratitude will result in positive and happy chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins all being released into the body. And a big bonus here, according to Bruce, it also helps with the release of somatotropin and telomeres into the body, which aids in cell reproduction, cell regeneration, and longevity of overall life. This also works in the other direction. If we send signals or images of fear, it raises the production of cortisol, the stress hormone, which among other things activates the fight or flight response, diverting energy away from the immune system, and making the cells go into a protection mode, which also can be likened to us emotionally shutting down from connecting with others. Ultimately, a cell can either be in growth or retreat, health or disease, but not in both at the same time. So if Bruce's work has any weight to it, why hasn't this been talked about more? Well, the problem with medicine, or more specifically, big pharma, is that it's still using older models of thinking, which has allowed for privatization and monetization to corrupt the field and steer the direction of research. See, working in academia is actually quite tricky, even more so in medicine. Research must always be funded, usually through research grants. Sometimes you can get government grants, which come from public money, but much of what is considered mainstream research is funded by private organizations with the backing of the pharmaceutical industry. Unfortunately, this means there's a mentality of, if I give you the grant, you can only study what I give you that grant for. And if people start getting results that contradict established ideas and cost people money, then the funding is cut off. In fact, during the 80s when Bruce was discovering this, it was before the Genome Project, so the idea that it was just the genes that controlled everything was basically the mainstream dogma. And so Bruce was laughed off as a kook, and his work was largely marginalized because it didn't conform to the conventional beliefs at the time. However, since the dawn of epigenetics in the 90s, the idea that changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself is now coming back into focus. It seems that while the bottom line is that we have the ability to heal ourselves and control how our genes are expressed, we must also approach this with some caution, because without a proper understanding, it can compel some people into a behavior of toxic positivity. It's easy to try and mask deeper emotional wounds with a superficial mask of happiness to try and rewrite your past. However, the real solution is facing the depth of emotion within you and bringing forgiveness, understanding, and compassion to how you feel. Further, this research may also give rise to people blaming themselves for chronic conditions, and even in this, we must remember the environmental factors in genetic expression, how what you see, think, and feel has largely been influenced by others, family, friends, the media, the news, and so on. So as always, you may not be able to heal chronic conditions instantly by yourself, and it would be wise to implement this kind of healing in complementary fashion instead of replacing Western medicine outright. Ideally, Western medicine should evolve with this new understanding. While conscious thinking is what comprises most of our day-to-day function, the majority of genuine epigenetic healing has to be done from the subconscious by overriding the self-sabotaging programs and beliefs we got as children. While the conscious mind can learn through reading and watching, the subconscious tends to learn more through repetition, hypnosis, and subliminal messaging. As an example, in the movie The Secret, one woman describes how she healed her cancer by taking a long leave from work where she relaxed every day and prayed, Thank you for my healing over and over and over. That kind of repetition is necessary for lasting value to be experienced, and it's the same thing with meditation. In Kriya Yoga, there is a daily practice of breathing meditation where you repeat to yourself, I am not the body and I am not the mind either. And as you do this every day, over weeks, months, and years, your body of consciousness disconnects from the identification as the body or the ego and aligns to a more spiritual-centered awareness. And this is just one of many paths to becoming an enlightened being. Not only does this research bring profound new awareness for all of us in how we can create healing and transcend our limitations, but it brings the realm of science to dance on the edge of spirituality. It also reminds us of the significance of educating children just how beautiful and powerful they really are. Because when they're so young and impressionable, we can easily create a new generation of super aware enlightened children or rather destructive negative nellies entirely based on what kind of environment they grow up in. Bruce's work offers all of us a chance to take our health back into our own hands, which is definitely something worth exploring. Personally, my highest recommendation if you want to go deeper into this is listen to the biology of belief audiobook on Audible or watch his interview with London Real. They're amazing. Toodles!