The Biology of Belief ~ Spirit Science 51

“If there is a heaven, it’s right here, right now. We’re in it” -Bruce Lipton.

Today we’re delving into another one of those weird but beautiful topics that are taking the world by storm! If you’ve been around the channel for a while - or attended any of our Spirit Mysteries workshops! You’ve probably heard us mention Dr. Bruce Lipton's pioneering work, with his books The Biology of Belief and The Honeymoon Effect. This work has had a massive effect on all of us at Spirit Science, and we just had to do a full episode all 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 links below, just if 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 morphogenetic field theory, we see compelling evidence that consciousness plays a role as the guiding force behind how our genes are expressed at all! 

When we look in the mirror in the morning and see ourselves staring back, who are we seeing? The real us, or a projection of our ego? The human body comprises roughly 40-50 trillion cells, each with its 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 DNA, but Bruce’s research is transforming that paradigm. 

Bruce explains that one of the main differences between something living and something dead is movement, at least on a physical and biological level. 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 at all comes mostly from external signals -and maybe a little bit of the internal systems reacting to those signals. Usually, the signal's quality will determine the quality of the movement. At a deeper level than the cell, we see that activity occurs at the protein level. Cells are made up of proteins, which appear slightly like squiggly wire wraps. As a signal comes in, if there is a receptor for the signal, they will connect. The new energy received by the protein will be a balanced polarity and facilitate its movement, which essentially changes its shape, which is the movement itself. 

To give you a fun example, we all know what digestion is, right? You eat something; your body turns it into energy? Well, digestion itself is a process that works similarly. 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 your body's cells, which facilitates their movement in a process called digestion. I know this is an effortless way of explaining digestion. Still, 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 come from signals. 

So, in that case,….what is a signal? Everything! Imagine you’re walking down the street and someone calls your name - your ears just received a sign (even our name is just a collection of vibrations and sounds that we assign relevance to), causing you to turn around and look. It’s your arch-nemesis, Reginald von Brandybuck the third, and he throws a baseball at your head! Your eyes receive this signal, the light bouncing off the ball as it hurls towards your face, causing you to move out of the way, calling back, “Love is the answer! Don’t be mean!” - Here’s the exciting part about signals. In this example, Reginald is operating at a low level of consciousness, so he isn’t listening to what you have to say! You could even say his cells aren’t receptive to the intentions you’re sending him...so he carries on with his negative attitude. Unless we’re receptive to the signals we are receiving, we actively keep ourselves limited only to repeatedly accept the same thing. 

This is where things get especially interesting because signals are not just external; they’re internal too. Thoughts are signals, and 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 which we're programmed with by our environment when we were younger. We explored this briefly in our Money Movie, with Think and Grow Rich. One of the steps in think and grow rich was autosuggestion, 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 that can enact policies to influence the cells… If you have a good government (i.e., human and loving thoughts), you get loving commands sent to the cells, and you have health… But if you have a bad government, you have poor health. 

Do you remember the scene in Dr. Strange when the ancient one asked, “When you reattach a severed nerve, is it you who puts it back together or the body?”, Steven responded ”It’s the cells,” to which the Ancient One replied,” and the cells are only programmed to put themselves back together in particular 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? To understand the answer to this question, we must explore Epigenetics's nature.

Bruce’s work with Epigenetics began nearly 50 years ago, when he researched stem cells and how they would react in different culture mediums. He first took a single 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… They were genetically identical because they came from the same “parent” cell. 

He then 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 within our body-and found that the cells were expressed differently in each dish. In one petri dish, the stem cells became muscle tissue cells; in another, bone cells, and lastly, fat cells… This caused an exciting question to come up: If all 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 significant 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 makes us victims of our genes… We think if cancer runs in our family, we’re going to get it… or at least have an increased risk. Bruce explains that up to 7 years old, a child is a sponge for external programming from the point of conception. It’s the reason why, if exposed to it, a child can learn up to 3 languages independently just by listening to them, because their brains are actively in a receptive state, downloading and installing information from the world around them. Suppose a child is told repeatedly that they’re worthless and will amount to nothing. In that case, those mental patterns become solidified by the age of 8 and after, which 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 re-wiring. But there’s good news to all of this; we can actively re-wire 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 a 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 suggests 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 blueprint was on or off, they’d laugh at you, and actually, it’s the same with genes. All of the Genes are always on, but only certain ones or parts 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 our cells… And it is the chemical signals that determine how and if those genes are read, which are influenced by our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and consciousness. 

But again, this doesn’t change the gene itself. We all still have the same genes as before. It merely changes how they are 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 can be encoded in genetic memory and passed down from parent to child. In one example, mice were conditioned to fear acetophenone's strong scent by accompanying the smell with an electric shock. As a result, the mice learned to fear the smell of acetophenone on their 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 fear 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 is something to the idea of carrying with us ancestral trauma. But then merging this with the rest of these discoveries, it becomes evident that whatever it is we’re having, whether it’s childhood traumas or ancestral baggage, some of it can be healed by our conscious participation with our beliefs and environment. 

In a nutshell, whatever ideas, feelings, or beliefs that we are locked into are sent into the chemistry as a signal for the gene to be read and start producing proteins, for positive or 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. According to Bruce, a big bonus also helps with Somatotropin and Telomerase's release 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 cortisol production. This stress hormone activates the flight or fight response, diverting energy away from the immune system, making the cells go into protection mode, which can also be likened to us emotionally shutting down from connecting with others. Ultimately, a cell can either be in growth or retreat, health or dis-ease, but never in both. 

So, if Bruce’s work has any weight to it, why hasn’t it been talked about more? Well… The problem with medicine -or more specifically, Big Pharma, today is that it’s still using older models of thinking, allowing for privatization and monetization to corrupt the field and steer research direction. See, working in academia is 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. Still, much of what is considered mainstream research is funded by private organizations with the Pharmaceutical industry's backing. Unfortunately, this means there is 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 all genes that controlled everything was the mainstream dogma, so he was laughed off as a kook, and his work was primarily marginalized because it didn’t conform to conventional beliefs at the time… However, since the dawn of epigenetics in the 90s, the idea that changes in organisms caused by gene expression modification rather than alteration of the genetic code itself is slowly coming back into focus.

Now, wrapping up this conversation in a neat little bow, it seems that while the bottom line is that we can 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 the behavior of toxic positivity. It’s easy to mask deeper emotional wounds with a superficial mask of happiness to 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 their chronic conditions, and even in this - we must remember the environmental factors in genetic expression, how what you see, think, and feel has primarily 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 on your own, and this kind of healing should be used to complement rather than replace Western Medicine.

While conscious thinking comprises most of our day-to-day function, most genuine “epigenetic healing” has to be done from the subconscious by overriding the self-sabotaging programs and beliefs we got children. While the conscious mind can learn through reading and watching, the subconscious mind learns through repetition, hypnosis, and subliminal messaging. As an example, in the movie “The Secret,” one woman describes how she healed her cancer by taking an extended leave from work where she relaxed every day and prayed “thank you for my healing” over and over. That level 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 realigns to more spiritual centered awareness, and this is just one of many paths to becoming an enlightened being. 

In closing, 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 gets the realm of science to dance on the edge of spirituality. It also reminds all of us of the significance of educating children just how beautiful and powerful they are, because when they’re so young and impressionable, we could easily create a new generation of super-aware enlightened kids, 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 something worth exploring. 

Personally, my highest recommendation if you want to go deeper into this is to listen to the Biology of Belief audiobook on Audible or watch his interview with London Reel! Please be sure to support Bruce and his work; he is doing such amazing things! Toodles!