Unseen Forces
Written by Lee Schneider
Bruce Lipton was telling me about Newtonian and quantum worldviews. Yeah, you can stop reading now. You have better things to do than know why self-help books won’t always help you or the real reason you think you need glasses. You can keep thinking of yourself as a victim of your hereditary fate and go get coffee. Really. See you here next week, but then you won’t know what the behavior of iron filings in a magnetic field has to do with anybody getting cancer.
Dr. Lipton is a biologist who got into quantum mechanics. That kind of thing is sometimes seen as a sign of instability, but I assure you that Dr. Lipton is quite lucid. Start with his take on Isaac Newton, who described gravity and the rules we use to understand the physical world. Newtonian thought holds that the material world is essentially everything there is. Nothing else matters. Now think about Charles Darwin and “survival of the fittest.” In Dr. Lipton’s view, put those two dominant thinkers together and we get a world where only physical stuff matters, and survival of the fittest means becoming the person who controls most of the physical world. But wait – life is also about the unseen, energy like electromagnetism and mental energy. “While you see and respond to the physical world, it’s the invisible world that is actually the shaper,” Dr. Lipton says. This is the quantum world.
Look at what happens when people read self-help books but never change. The reason, says Dr. Lipton, is because of the function of the conscious vs. the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is associated with the authentic self and the spirit. The subconscious mind is about habituation. “You learn something and then it’s a habit so you don’t need to relearn it,” Dr. Lipton says. The conscious mind can read the book, take a test on the contents, and pass. But unless you change the habits of the subconscious mind, knowing the contents of the book won’t create change.
Scientists believe the habit-mind is running our everyday life, and according to Dr. Lipton, it is also determining our genetics. At Stanford University School of Medicine his research revealed how environment controlled the behavior and physiology of a cell, changing its genetic structure. That’s the reverse of the established view, which holds that our genetics are “locked” and unchanging. Put it another way, your dad wore glasses, your mom wore glasses, you will wear glasses. Genetics, right? Well, Dr. Lipton says genetics aren’t “fate” – they occur because your cells got the information that that’s the way life is: Everybody in our family wears glasses. If your cells received different information there’d be a different result.
This is getting kind of deep, so here’s a picture of how you can use a cat to prop up your iPad. 
Dr. Lipton wants us to know that we are not victims of our “hereditary fate” but can actually make lasting changes to cellular structure. That’s how our health is shaped by invisible forces.
Remember the high school experiment when you sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper and put a magnet under the paper? Is the pattern you saw in the filings themselves or in the invisible magnetic field? What’s happening is a physical structure is reflecting an invisible force.
In pharmaceutical medicine, if cells get cancer we try to change their chemistry. But in Dr. Lipton’s view, optimum health means changing your belief system, not just adding chemicals to the body. Your cells, like iron filings, make physical changes when acted upon by unseen forces. Those forces can include environmental toxins, heredity, and consciousness. It means that the science of the physical world doesn’t tell the whole story. You have to consider the quantum world, where the universe starts looking less like a great machine and more like a great thought.
Dr. Lipton will be speaking at the Hay House “I Can Do it” Conference, which begins in San Diego on May 14th and goes on to other cities.
iPad photo courtesy Veronica Belmont via Creative Commons license.
Hey Lee,
Dr. Lipton speaking at Hay House? Louise Hay, who claimed the reason people get cancer is they don’t have enough forgiveness in their hearts (cancer rates have risen from one quarter of the U.S. population 20 years ago to one-third today–with a continuous rise projected)? A growing lack of forgiveness? Doesn’t seem right.
This bothers me a lot, based on my experience. No doubt people can change their genetic proclivities with healthy lifestyle changes–and perhaps avoid hereditary breast or colon cancer. Perhaps. Perhaps in a less-stressed-filled modern world the incredible pressure of chemical and radiation exposure–chemicals in our air, water and processed food, radiation from microwaves, televisions, computer screens and perhaps even the wiring in our homes–would not have such disastrous effects. Meditation for everyone?
I’m very leery of New Age thinking, superficially influenced by ancient philosophy and medicine.
Off on a rant again!
Bob
It’s certainly true that the subconscious mind has to do with “habituation,” but I’m sure you’ll agree that it does much more than that, and is in fact the playground of the “authentic self”. I think Dr. Lipton has it wrong in suggesting that “the conscious mind is closer to the authentic self and spirit.” Clearly, the authentic self and spirit are far removed from the ordinary “conscious” mind which, much like the ordinary subconscious mind, is really another automaton. It seems to me that “spirit” and “authentic self” really only make occasional visits — if we’re lucky.
Love this one, Lee! When you act as a bridge-builder between these worlds, bringing your astute intelligence and intellectual observations to a topic either some dismiss as woo-woo, or others eat up without discernment, you make a real difference. Thank you!
I approached Dr. Lipton’s ideas with some skepticism, but he impressed me as one of the most reasonable of the mind-body-you-can-think-your-way-to health guys. Unlike docs like Bernie Siegal, who really seem to be suggesting that a benign kind of voodoo can make everything ok again, Lipton seems to be working with some real scientific results, certainly on the cellular level. He also allows that illness can arise from toxic crap in the environment (including toxic chemicals and toxic people), as well as genetic predisposition, as well as the “mind.” His was a more balanced approach, and he also has a great take on the quantum world as one that works to understand invisible forces. He’s almost certain to be wrong in some particulars, but like any pioneer, he’s going to be right on some things also, I think. Moving energy around, whether in qigong or in a physics lecture, works for me. Thanks for commenting. Rants always appreciated.
Thanks, Lotta – I’m glad I was able to strike a balance!
There are a lot of names given to this landscape because a lot of explorers have visited it. But whatever our definition of the higher self, creative self, spirit, authentic self – it’s clear that we’re dealing on an everyday basis with a earthly mind that thrives on pattern recognition, scenario building and dopamine hunting. In fact, there’s some research suggesting that the “free” part of free will might not exist – that most of our actions are pre-determined by programming – we don’t “decide” to do things at all but are responding to little pre-built loops of brain code. Still, I wonder about this: why in yoga do we repeat postures over and over, and in prayer and chanting do we repeat sounds, and in the Sufi tradition there’s a lot of spinning? Somebody, a long time ago, must have figured out that if you want to get to the habituated mind and change it, repetition is the way. By the way, in a yoga class in NY this week, the teacher read a passage from Gurdjieff. Thought of you. Thanks for commenting.
Thanks for posting Lee – great read and post…working on habits next…
I know I’m late, but I just got around to reading this one. Very interesting! What occurrs to me about this is that so often we think we understand something and it turns out to be way more complex in reality. There’s layer’s of understanding with more and more complex underlying models to explain the behavior. I’m guessing that our understanding of genetic information and DNA is another case of this. We kind of get it, but there’s really a lot more to know about how it really works.
Oh, and by the way… it seems that Cat’s love iPad’s too:
http://mashable.com/2010/04/14/its-official-cats-love-ipads-video/
Thanks for commenting. Did you know that an early adopter cat was present at the original iPad presentation by Steve Jobs?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8EWjOy8jdw
Hey Lee — here’s a May 3 story from the LA Times, but you beat them to the punch.
Can you master your own epigenetics?
Some authors say so. Epigenetics researchers say it’s probably too early to be certain.
Thanks for posting this!