Fear is the opposite of everything you are, and so has an effect of opposition to your mental and physical health. Fear is worry magnified. Worry, hate, fear — together with their offshoots: anxiety, bitterness, impatience, avarice, unkindness, judgmentalness, and condemnation — all attack the body at the cellular level. It is impossible to have a healthy body under these conditions.
Similarly — although to a somewhat lesser degree — conceit, selfindulgence, and greed lead to physical illness, or lack of well-being. All illness is created first in the mind.
How can that be? What of conditions contracted from another? Colds — or, for that matter, AIDS?
Nothing occurs in your life — nothing — which is not first a thought. Thoughts are like magnets, drawing effects to you. The thought may not always be obvious, and thus clearly causative, as in, “I’m going to contract a terrible disease.” The thought may be (and usually is) far more subtle than that (“I am not worthy to live.”) (“My life is always a mess.”) (“I am a loser.”) (“God is going to punish me.”) (“I am sick and tired of my life!”)
Thoughts are a very subtle, yet extremely powerful, form of energy. Words are less subtle, more dense. Actions are the most dense of all. Action is energy in heavy physical form, in heavy motion. When you think, say, and act out a negative concept such as “I am a loser,” you place tremendous creative energy into motion. Small wonder you come down with a cold. That would be the least of it. [...]
Yet you are all mental lepers. Your mind is eaten away with negative thoughts. Some of these are thrust upon you. Many of these you actually make up — conjure up — yourselves, and then harbor and entertain for hours, days, weeks, months — even years.
… and you wonder why you are sick.
Achterberg’s recommendation that we rid ourselves of negative images is well taken, for there is evidence that imagery can cause illness as well as cure it. In Love, Medicine and Miracles, Bernie Siegel says he often encounters instances where the mental pictures patients use to describe themselves or their lives seem to play a role in the creation of their conditions. Examples include a mastectomy patient who told him she “needed to get something off her chest”; a patient with multiple myeloma in his backbone who said he “was always considered spineless”; and a man with carcinoma of the larynx whose father punished him as a child by constantly squeezing his throat and telling him to “shut up!”
Sometimes the relationship between the image and the illness is so striking it is difficult to understand why it is not apparent to the individual involved, as in the case of a psychotherapist who had emergency surgery to remove several feet of dead intestine and then told Siegel, “I’m glad you’re my surgeon. I’ve been undergoing teaching analysis. I couldn’t handle all the shit that was coming up, or digest the crap in my life.” Incidents such as these have convinced Siegel that nearly all diseases originate at least to some degree in the mind, but he does not think this makes them psychosomatic or unreal. He prefers to say they are soma-significant, a term coined by Bohm to sum up better the relationship, and derived from the Greek word “soma” meaning “body.” That all diseases might have their origin in the mind does not disturb Siegel. He sees it rather as a sign of tremendous hope, an indicator that if one has the power to create sickness, one also has the power to create wellness.
The connection between image and illness is so potent, imagery can even be used to predict a patient’s prospects for survival. In another landmark experiment, Simonton, his wife, psychologist Stephanie Matthew-Simonton, Achterberg, and psychologist G. Frank Lawlis performed a battery of blood tests on 126 patients with advanced cancer. Then they subjected the patients to an equally extensive array of psychological tests, including exercises in which the patients were asked to draw images of themselves, their cancers, their treatment, and their immune systems. The blood tests offered some information about the patient’s condition, but provided no major revelations. However, the results from the psychological tests, particularly drawings, were encyclopedias of information about the status of the patient’s health. Indeed, simply by analyzing patients’ drawings, Achterberg later achieved a 95 percent rate of accuracy in predicting who would die within a few months and who would beat their illness and go into remission.
1. The cell is like a human body and it functions without DNA
The cell is like a human body. It is capable of respiration, digestion, reproduction, and other life functions. The nucleus, which contains the genes, has traditionally been viewed as the control center — the brain of the cell.
Yet, when the nucleus is removed, the cell continues with all of its life functions and it can still recognize toxins and nutrients. It appears the nucleus — and the DNA it contains — does not control the cell.
Scientists assumed some 50 years ago that genes control biology. It just seemed so correct, we bought the story. We don’t have the right assumptions.
2. DNA is controlled by the environment
Proteins carry out the functions in cells and they are building blocks of life. It has long been thought that DNA controls or determines the actions of proteins.
Here I propose a different model. Environmental stimuli that come into contact with the cell membrane are perceived by receptor proteins in the membrane. This sets off a chain reaction of proteins passing on what could be described as messages to other proteins, motivating action in the cell.
DNA is coated in a protective sleeve of protein. The environmental signals act on that protein, causing it to open up and to select certain genes for use — genes specifically needed to react to the current environment.
Basically, DNA is not the beginning of the chain reaction. Instead, the cell membrane’s perception of the environment is the first step.
If there are no perceptions, the DNA is inactive.
Genes can’t turn themselves on or off… they can’t control themselves. If a cell is cut off from any environmental stimuli, it doesn’t do anything. Life is due to how the cell responds to the environment.
Of course, Lipton is a well-known crank, whose central idea seems to be a variant of The Secret, in which wanting something badly enough makes it so and that “modern science has bankrupted our souls.” Basically, he questions the “Newtonian vision of the primacy of a physical, mechanical Universe”; that “genes control biology” [...]
Yet despots cannot be allowed to flourish, but must be stopped in their despotism. Love of Self, and love of the despot, demands it. This is the answer to your question, “If love is all there is, how can man ever justify war?”
Sometimes man must go to war to make the grandest statement about who man truly is: he who abhors war.
There are times when you may have to give up Who You Are in order to be Who You Are.
There are Masters who have taught: you cannot have it all until you are willing to give it all up.
Thus, in order to “have” yourself as a man of peace, you may have to give up the idea of yourself as a man who never goes to war. History has called upon men for such decisions.
The same is true in the most individual and the most personal relationships. Life may more than once call upon you to prove Who You Are by demonstrating an aspect of Who You Are Not. [...]
This should put to rest some pacifist theories that highest love requires no forceful response to what you consider evil.
When I first started back in the '70s and my research was coming out, it was the golden age of genes. My research irritated a lot of people. I always thought of them as lemmings running off the cliff of DNA, and I'm standing there on the side with the results from my stem-cell studies thinking, 'Oh my God, you're all going the wrong way.' At some point I realised that they marginalised my work because it didn’t conform to their conventional beliefs and I thought, well, they’re not even being scientists. And I just left the system. I realised the message is more important for the average person than it is to argue in the halls of science.
Here is Metaphysics 101: A Short Course in Ultimate Reality.
As we've noted a while back in this conversation, all elements of life are imbued with what you would call, in your language, "intelligence" — or Awareness of Its Inherent Function.
This Awareness fills each element to its maximum capacity. That is, every element is imbued with Divine Intelligence utterly, full out, from border to border. Indeed, it would not be incorrect to say that the element itself IS this intelligence, in particle form.
So each element of life, down to the tiniest submolecular particule, is a part of the Mind of God.
With your sense of poetry, that would be how you would put it... and I have no reason to argue with you.
Now the Elements of the Essential Essence are attracted to each other by an aspect or characteristic that you would call, in human terms, "common function".
That is, they are all trying to do something. And it is the same thing. They are all in action, forever moving, continuously vibrating — but not without purpose.
Their purpose is simply to BE. They realize that life is movement. If movement ever stops, that which you call life would not exist. [...]
Now, as to what each element wants to be, that doesn't matter. The individual element does not have a preference in the matter. It simply wants to exist. It desires to "be".
What is called "alignment", then — and the subsequent joint or unified action to which you refer — is created by the vibrational influence of any force larger than the individual element.
It is this way throughout all of nature. The larger the force, the more "pull" it has on every smaller element within its Impact Area. So every element within any Impact Area will fall into alignment with the larger force that is pulling on it. [...]
So if you, as creative beings, wish all the elements of life, down into the tiniest particle, to move in a particular direction, you must create alignment using the force of combined energy focused in a particular way.
And thought is that force.
The key point here is that at every level, the same variational, surprise-reducing dynamics must be in play to supply Markov blankets for the level above.
Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms.
Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.
It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong. It all started when I accidentally stumbled upon a paper by a few American psychologists. They had travelled 8,000 miles all the way to India for a fascinating study. It was an experiment with sugarcane farmers. You should know that these farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means that they're relatively poor one part of the year, and rich the other.
The researchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they subsequently discovered completely blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the test before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. Now, to give you an idea, that's comparable to losing a night's sleep or the effects of alcoholism.
If you think it defies common sense that water does this, you are right. In fact water does not respond to thoughts and feelings — it's just water. How then does one explain Mr. Emoto's experiments? My best guess is that Mr. Emoto grows hundreds of crystals and then selects different shapes to demonstrate whatever point he wishes to make. [...]
Do I know Mr. Emoto does this? No, which is why I called it a guess. Mr. Emoto has never published his work in a reputable scientific forum, where it would be scrutinized. He only presents it in self-published books, where he is free to say whatever he wants. Basic physics says the work cannot be correct, and Mr. Emoto has not convinced the scientific community that his experiments have any merit whatsoever.
Have I tried to reproduce Mr. Emoto's experiments? No, and I don't intend to. While I try to keep an open mind to new ideas, this one is just too outrageous. I only have limited time and resources, so I study ideas that I think are more likely to be fruitful. As we liked to say back on the farm in North Dakota — it's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out!
It is very difficult to reverse the effects of negative thinking once they have taken physical form. Not impossible — but very difficult. It takes an act of extreme faith. It requires an extraordinary belief in the positive force of the universe — whether you call that God, Goddess, the Unmoved Mover, Prime Force, First Cause, or whatever.