Your Mind Matters
Isaac Newton
If you’re healthy and those close to you are healthy, you probably don’t think very much about our medical system. Maybe you go for a check-up once a year, maybe you pay a visit to your doctor when you get a really bad cold. But if you’ve been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, or any chronic illness, our health care system is suddenly an intimate partner in your life, a partner that could guide you back to health or keep you sick.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to my intimate partners, I like to know about their past, what motivates them, what their core values are, and how they got to be the way they are today. I like to know – when they give me advice, feedback, suggestions – what is informing those thoughts, so I know what makes sense for me to listen to, and what should be ignored.
I think many – if not most – people have no idea how our medical system got to be the way it is today. But if you’re challenged by a chronic illness, and you’re counting on your medical care to heal you, you need to know. So today I will offer you a brief history of some of the relevant events that led us here. This history was offered by Bruce Lipton, PhD in his new book Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here)
A Science Tale
Once upon a time, scientist and philosopher Rene Descartes said there was a body and a mind, and that these two unique entities interacted and effected each other. He said this duality was important – that the mind mattered when it came to the body. But then Isaac Newton came along.
Newton showed that he could predict the nature of the universe through physical mechanics alone. He could explain how apples fell and planets moved. According to Newton, everything in the universe was a machine, from a wristwatch to the human body, and you could learn everything there was to learn about it by simply taking it apart and studying the pieces.
Science adapted this notion of Newtonian mechanics and we ditched the concept of the mind altogether. And once we bought into this idea of a material universe and a limited mind, we decided that to understand life, all we needed to do was study the physical elements that comprise it, just like we would a wristwatch. It’s this Newtonian concept, known as reductionism, that led to the focus on anatomy, and then, breaking down the human body even more to cells and tissues, biology, and then, studying the fundamental particles that make up the body in biochemistry.
From these studies we learned that our biology is predicated on proteins. Proteins are responsible for our physical makeup and our behavioral characteristics. Proteins, we discovered, are made of amino acids, which are like breaded strings whose sequence is unique for each protein. But how do our bodies know which sequence of amino acids to use to create each protein? Where is the memory in the protein? That’s where DNA comes in.
The Central Dogma
Our DNA is the memory molecule responsible for carrying our hereditary traits. DNA is the physical blueprint, the template that carries the info for building the proteins that comprise us. Francis Crick, who was one of the two scientists who discovered the DNA molecule, described the flow of information in this process and coined it the Central Dogma. He said the information in the DNA (your genes) is transferred to the RNA (which is like a photocopy of your genes) and that RNA is used to code the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. In other words, information flows only one way – from our genes unfolding into our body.
Why should this matter to you?
Here’s why: The Central Dogma says that information doesn’t go from the protein back to the RNA and then back to the DNA. But proteins make up the body and the body interacts with the environment. So the Central Dogma says information can’t go from the environment through to the protein and then back to our DNA. In other words, our experiences in the world in no way can change our heredity.
Victims of our heredity!
Well if our DNA controls our traits and our lives and we didn’t pick our DNA and there’s nothing we can do to change it, then we’re victims of our heredity!
And it’s here that the prevailing mythology of our current medical system was born. Our traits were programmed at the moment of our conception and the Central Dogma said we can’t change it because information doesn’t flow that way. So we’re victims. And once we bought into the idea that we were victims, we needed to find someone to rescue us. And science was happy to do that. And so they began to create a seemingly endless supply of chemistry and molecules – of drugs – to compensate for our defects. And with this, we suddenly let go of the idea that we had control over our lives and offered ourselves to the medical community to fix what we ourselves couldn’t handle.
Sound familiar?
We thought if we could throw enough money at this, if we could make enough drugs, we could heal ourselves. So we developed a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry and we built a medical system with this victim position at its foundation. But there were a few tragic flaws here. One, we never actually proved the Central Dogma. It was a theory that we were so sure was right we never bothered to test it. And, this is all based on a Newtonian paradigm, a human body that is mechanical and material in nature. What we left out was the mind.
Epigenetics
The new field of epigenetics, which Bruce Lipton is at the forefront of, shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Lipton believes that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking, which he talks about in his groundbreaking book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles
Modern medicine, however, is still locked in a Newtonian belief system. And Big Pharma is certainly not about to hop on board with the notion that energy healing could have some merit when they sell chemicals to survive. But understanding this makes it so that you can use our health care system in the ways that it benefits you while also being aware of how it’s limited, and potentially limiting you and your healing.
When I learned the story of how the current medical system developed I was thrilled, because it supported what I already understood intuitively. The mind matters. Healing does not begin and end with a prescription for a drug. All of us were born into this system – a system that may feel like Truth because it’s the way things have “always” been. But in fact it is just a narrow paradigm of thinking that developed because of a few ideas that pivoted what we collectively believed to be true. And there is good news here. This is a story with a happy ending, because new science and new discoveries are integrating the mind and the body and creating a new awareness that revises the victim position and puts the power and control back in our hands (and our minds).
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