The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles

by Bruce H. Lipton

Suddenly I realized that a cell’s life is fundamentally controlled by the physical and energetic environment with only a small contribution by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a “contractor” who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell’s life. It is a single cell’s “awareness” of the environment that primarily sets into motion the mechanisms of life.

Suddenly I realized that a cell’s life is fundamentally controlled by the physical and energetic environment with only a small contribution by its genes.

Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life.

There is no doubt that human beings have a great capacity for sticking to false beliefs with great passion and tenacity, and hyper-rational scientists are not immune. Our well-developed nervous system, headed by our big brain, is testament that our awareness is far more complicated than that of a single cell. When our uniquely human minds get involved, we can choose to perceive the environment in different ways, unlike a single cell whose awareness is more reflexive.

I was exhilarated by the new realization that I could change the character of my life by changing my beliefs. I was instantly energized because I realized that there was a science-based path that would take me from my job as a perennial “victim” to my new job as “co-creator” of my destiny.

Caribbean. We are living in exciting times, for science is in the process of shattering old myths and rewriting a fundamental belief of human civilization. The belief that we are frail, biochemical machines controlled by genes is giving way to an understanding that we are powerful creators of our lives and the world in which we live.

“[This] research . . . has contributed to a greater understanding of life and the true nature of humanity, empowering wide layers of the public to take control of their own lives and become responsible co-creators of a harmonious planetary future.” It is also my sincerest hope that everyone who reads The Biology of Belief recognizes that many of the beliefs that propel their lives are false and self-limiting. You can take control of your life and set out on the road to health and happiness, and you can band together with others you meet on that road so that humanity can evolve to a new level of understanding and peace.

The mechanism by which DNA controls biological life became the Central Dogma of molecular biology, painstakingly spelled out in textbooks. In the long-running debate over nature vs. nurture, the pendulum swung decidedly to nature. At first DNA was thought to be responsible only for our physical characteristics, but then we started believing that our genes control our emotions and behaviors as well. So if you are born with a defective happiness gene, you can expect to have an unhappy life.

Using these cell communities as role models, I came to the conclusion that we are not victims of our genes, but masters of our fates, able to create lives overflowing with peace, happiness, and love.

We are made in the image of God, and we need to put Spirit back into the equation when we want to improve our physical and our mental health.

Every time a drug is introduced into the body to correct function A, it inevitably throws off function B, C, or D. It is not gene-directed hormones and neurotransmitters that control our bodies and our minds; our beliefs control our bodies and our minds, and thus our lives . . . Oh ye of little belief!

In this book I will draw the proverbial line in the sand. On one side of the line is a world defined by neo-Darwinism, which casts life as an unending war among battling, biochemical robots. On the other side of the line is the “New Biology,” which casts life as a cooperative journey among powerful individuals who can program themselves to create joy-filled lives. When we cross that line and truly understand the New Biology, we will no longer fractiously debate the role of nurture and nature because we will realize that the fully conscious mind trumps both nature and nurture. And I believe we will also experience as profound a paradigmatic change to humanity as when a round-world reality was introduced to a flat-world civilization.

I had been fascinated by the idea that considering cells as “miniature humans” would make it easier to understand their physiology and behavior.

Actually, I believe that the unwritten ban on anthropomorphism is an outmoded remnant of the Dark Ages, when religious authorities denied any direct relationship existed between humans and any of God’s other creations.

I also made it clear to my students that each cell is an intelligent being that can survive on its own, as scientists demonstrate when they remove individual cells from the body and grow them in a culture. As I knew intuitively when I was a child, these smart cells are imbued with intent and purpose; they actively seek environments that support their survival while simultaneously avoiding toxic or hostile ones. Like humans, single cells analyze thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. Through the analysis of this data, cells select appropriate behavioral responses to ensure their survival. Single cells are also capable of learning through these environmental experiences and are able to create cellular memories, which they pass on to their offspring.

For example, when a measles virus infects a child, an immature immune cell is called in to create a protective protein antibody against that virus.

Así como cuando tienes una experiencia negativa y creas una creencia sobre la experiencia, los anticuerpos crean una proteína para defenderse

Activated cells employ an amazing mechanism called affinity maturation that enables the cell to perfectly “adjust” the final shape of its antibody protein, so that it will become a perfect complement to the invading measles virus. (Li, et al, 2003; Adams, et al, 2003) Using a process called somatic hypermutation, activated immune cells make hundreds of copies of their original antibody gene. However, each new version of the gene is slightly mutated so that it will encode a slightly different shaped antibody protein. The cell selects the variant gene that makes the best-fitting antibody. This selected version of the gene also goes through repeated rounds of somatic hypermutation to further sculpt the shape of the antibody to become a “perfect” physical complement of the measles virus. (Wu, et al, 2003; Blanden and Steele 1998; Diaz and Casali 2002; Gearhart 2002)

así como vamos desarrollando creencias, con el tiempo las vamos comprobando y mejorando. Ya sea para el bien de nuestra vida o el mal

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.

Mientras mas grande la comunidad que vaya por el mismo objetivo, más grande el poder y fuerza que tendrán. De allí la importancia de una comunidad con creencias empoderantes y no limitantes

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.

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.

Unfortunately, we conveniently “forgot” about the cooperation necessary for evolution when Charles Darwin emphasized a radically different theory about the emergence of life. He concluded 150 years ago that living organisms are perpetually embroiled in a “struggle for existence.” For Darwin, struggle and violence are not only a part of animal (human) nature but the principal “forces” behind evolutionary advancement. In the final chapter of The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin wrote of an inevitable “struggle for life” and that evolution was driven by “the war of nature, from famine and death.” Couple that with Darwin’s notion that evolution is random and you have a world, as poetically described by Tennyson, that can be characterized as “red in tooth and claw,” a series of meaningless, bloody battles for survival.

La educación que recibimos es la de pelear para sobrevivir cuando nuestras células no lo hacen

It had been thought that genes are passed on only to the progeny of an individual organism through reproduction. Now scientists realize that genes are shared not only among the individual members of a species but also among members of different species.

Given this sharing of genes, organisms can no longer be seen as disconnected entities; there is no wall between species.

This sharing of information is not an accident. It is nature’s method of enhancing the survival of the biosphere.

Already there is a study that shows that when humans digest genetically modified foods, the artificially created genes transfer into and alter the character of the beneficial bacteria in the intestine. (Heritage 2004; Netherwood, et al, 2004)

Genetic evolutionists warn that if we fail to apply the lessons of our shared genetic destiny, which should be teaching us the importance of cooperation among all species, we threaten human existence. We need to move beyond Darwinian Theory, which stresses the importance of individuals, to one that stresses the importance of the community.

The single-minded pursuit of stellar medical school grades, without regard for the students surrounding you, no doubt follows a Darwinian model, but it always seemed to me an ironic pursuit for those who are striving to become compassionate healers.

the genes we inherit from our mothers and our fathers are not our fate!

Neo-Darwinism attributes mutations to accidental copying mistakes in replicating the genes; if the genetic error enhances the organism’s survivability, the mutation is selected to propagate. This suggests that the direction of evolutionary advancement is accidental and unpredictable . . . how’s that for a tautology! In response to the perennial questions “How did we get here?” and “Why are we here?” neoDarwinian theory would lead us to believe we evolved through a few billion years of “lucky” genetic accidents. In contrast, Lamarckian theory implies that evolution-producing mutations arise from an organism’s “need” to adapt to life-threatening environmental stresses, so they are not random and to a large degree are environmentally predictable.

Using mathematical and computer simulations, Nowak divided populations into “cooperators,” those who support others, and “defectors,” those who do not support others even after accepting help from others. Nowak found that in the several thousand papers scientists have published on how cooperators, ranging from bacteria to human beings, prevail in evolution, all the scenarios fall into five categories. (Nowak 2012) One category, for example, is “spatial selection,” in which cooperators and defectors are not uniformly distributed in a population. In these populations with “patches of cooperators,” helpful individuals band together and prevail against defectors. Another category is what Nowak calls the “I’ll scratch your back, and someone will scratch mine,” in which an individual decides to be a cooperator because of the person in need’s reputation.

According to this “scientific” principle, the less fit genetically deserve only what’s left over . . . if anything. That mentality has brought us continuous wars over material possessions, overconsumption that has led to unsustainable resource exploitation, and increasingly unequal wealth distribution as well as an obviously ailing planet. The Darwinian focus on the fitness of the individual de-emphasizes the significance of communal cooperation in evolution.

In his alarming new book, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, Dr. Martin J. Blaser, Director of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University, warns not only about antibiotic resistance but also about the declining diversity of the human microbiome that is increasing our susceptibility to chronic conditions from allergies and asthma to diabetes and obesity.

My professor, mentor, and consummate scientist Irv Konigsberg was one of the first cell biologists to master the art of cloning stem cells. He told me that when the cultured cells you are studying are ailing, you look first to the cell’s environment, not to the cell itself, for the cause.

“It’s the environment, stupid,”

El problema no son los Adictos sino el ambiente

Though it wasn’t apparent at the time, I eventually realized that this advice was a key insight into understanding the nature of life. Over and over I learned the wisdom of Irv’s advice. When I provided a healthy environment for my cells, they thrived; when the environment was less than optimal, the cells faltered. When I adjusted the environment, these “sick” cells revitalized.

Since the dawning of the Age of Genetics, we have been programmed to accept that we are subservient to the power of our genes. The world is filled with people who live in constant fear that, on some unsuspecting day, their genes are going to turn on them. Consider the masses of people who think they are ticking time bombs; they wait for cancer to explode in their lives as it exploded in the life of their mother or brother or sister or aunt or uncle. Millions of others attribute their failing health not to a combination of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual causes but simply to the inadequacies of their body’s biochemical mechanics. Are your kids unruly? Increasingly the first choice is to medicate these children to correct their “chemical imbalances” rather than fully grappling with what is going on in their bodies, minds, and spirits.

Of course there is no doubt that some diseases, like Huntington’s chorea, beta thalassemia, and cystic fibrosis, can be blamed entirely on one faulty gene. But single-gene disorders affect less than 2 percent of the population; the vast majority of people come into this world with genes that should enable them to live a happy and healthy life. The diseases that are today’s scourges—diabetes, heart disease, and cancer—short circuit a happy and healthy life. These diseases, however, are not the result of a single gene, but of complex interactions among multiple genes and environmental factors. What about all those headlines trumpeting the discovery of a gene for everything from depression to schizophrenia? Read those articles closely and you’ll see that behind the breathless headline is a more sober truth. Scientists have linked lots of genes to lots of different diseases and traits, but scientists have rarely found that one gene causes a trait or a disease. In the realm of human diseases, defective genes acting alone only account for about 2 percent of our total disease load. (Strohman 2003) The confusion occurs when the media repeatedly distort the meaning of two words: correlation and causation. It’s one thing to be linked to a disease; it’s quite another to cause a disease, which implies a directing, controlling action.

Nijhout summarizes the truth: “When a gene product is needed, a signal from its environment, not an emergent property of the gene itself, activates expression of that gene.” In other words, when it comes to genetic control, “It’s the environment, stupid.”

Organic chemists discovered that cells are made up of four types of very large molecules: polysaccharides (complex sugars), lipids (fats), nucleic acids (DNA/RNA), and proteins. Though the cell requires each of the four molecular types, proteins are the most important single component for living organisms. Our cells are, in the main, an assembly of protein building blocks.

Living organisms are distinguished from nonliving entities by the fact that they move; they are animated. Cells harness the energy of protein movements to do the “work” that characterizes living systems, such as respiration, digestion, and muscle contraction.

You’ll notice that, in the above section, I didn’t discuss DNA at all. That’s because it is the changing of the proteins’ electromagnetic charges that is responsible for their behavior-generating movement, not DNA.

According to the Dogma, DNA controls your life and you cannot influence your DNA!

No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease.

David Baltimore, one of the world’s preeminent geneticists and a Nobel Prize winner, addressed the issue of human complexity (Baltimore 2001): “But unless the human genome contains a lot of genes that are opaque to our computers, it is clear that we do not gain our undoubted complexity over worms and plants by using more genes. “Understanding what does give us our complexity—our enormous behavioral repertoire, ability to produce conscious action, remarkable physical coordination, precisely tuned alterations in response to external variations of the environments, learning, memory, need I go on?—remains a challenge for the future.”

In addition, the results of the Human Genome Project are forcing us to reconsider our genetic relationship with other organisms in the biosphere. We can no longer use genes to explain why humans are at the top of the evolutionary ladder.

Enucleated cells die, not because they have lost their brain but because they have lost their reproductive capabilities. Without the ability to reproduce their parts, enucleated cells cannot replace failed protein building blocks, nor replicate themselves. So the nucleus is not the brain of the cell—the nucleus is the cell’s gonad! Confusing the gonad with the brain is an understandable error because science has always been and still is a patriarchal endeavor. Males have often been accused of thinking with their gonads, so it’s not entirely surprising that science has inadvertently confused the nucleus with the cell’s brain!

Muy buen chiste

In the last decade, epigenetic research has established that DNA blueprints passed down through genes are not set in concrete at birth. Genes are not destiny! Environmental influences, including nutrition, stress, and emotions, can modify those genes without changing their basic blueprint. And those modifications, epigeneticists have discovered, can be passed on to future generations as surely as DNA blueprints are passed on via the double helix. (Reik and Walter 2001; Surani 2001; Watters 2006; Cloud 2010)

Think of the pattern of the test screen as the pattern encoded by a given gene, say the one for brown eyes. The dials and switches of the TV fine-tune the test screen by allowing you to turn it on and off and modulate a number of characteristics, including volume, color, hue, contrast, brightness, and vertical and horizontal holds. By adjusting the dials, you can alter the appearance of the pattern on the screen, while not actually changing the original broadcast pattern. This is precisely the role of regulatory proteins. Studies of protein synthesis reveal that epigenetic “dials” can create 2,000 or more variations of proteins from the same gene blueprint. (Bray 2003; Schmuker, et al, 2000)