Review: The Biology Of Belief By Bruce Lipton
April 12, 2009 by Akemi
As a starter, here is a quiz. Which of the following statements are true?
- Our genes (DNAs) determine who we are, including our health and characters.
- The nucleus of the cell (the part that contains DNAs) is like the brain of the cell, so the cell dies immediately when the nucleus is removed.
- Cells can sense only chemical changes in their environment, so energy healing has no scientific basis.
Answer: They are all false.
Shattering the scientific myths
Dr. Bruce Lipton, who taught cell biology at University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and did research work at Stanford University, shatters the popular myths such as these in his The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles, which is written for laypersons.
The fatalistic view of our genes like #1 is common not only among laypersons but also among doctors. However, Bruce Lipton explains how certain proteins work as an on-off switch to DNAs and how environmental factors, including our own beliefs, can create such switches. Genes are only computer programs — information entered to the program determines the outcome, and we, as operators, have the key to choose which data to be entered. This is called epigenetics.
He then shows us how the cell membrane is the true smart guy that sense the signals and also responds to them. DNA is like the CD disk of the software; once you installed the program, you don’t need it until you need to re-install it. So the cell can survive quite a long while without the DNAs while the day to day, or second to second survival of the cell relies on the membrane’s sensing and responding function.
The cell membrane has receptors not only for chemical signals (from foods, drugs, internally-produced chemicals such as hormones, etc.) but for vibrational signals as well. (page 53) This is a critical fact in considering the effectiveness of the energy healing as well as the effect of our thoughts and feelings on our wellbeing.
Quantum physics and new biology
Then he moves on to physics. This is necessary because he is talking about cell level biology, which is all about chemical reactions, and chemistry is based on physics — physics is the basis of all science. The astonishing fact is — Bruce Lipton introduces us to quantum physics!
Gee, I thought quantum physics was considered to be a quark pseudo science. Quantum physics is accepted in the academics?
Bruce Lipton is firm in maintaining the new cell biology cannot be adequately explained by Newtonian physics — quantum physics understanding is essential. Which means, matter and energy are one and the same, and we are all interconnected. Ah, so spiritual, isn’t it?
After reading this book, I went to my local Borders bookstore and walked through the aisle of science. I so wish I could understand these physics books! There are even books about potential time travel written by serious scientist!! We laypersons are left behind in the dark ages. We need more scientists like Bruce Lipton who can explain new science in our terms.
Biology and belief
The climax of the book is chapter 5, Biology and Belief. I had to put down the book so many times to take my breath. If I weren’t reading it in Starbucks, I would have screamed and run around, too. It is loaded with clinically proven cases in which belief played the critical part in healing (or death):
- Knee arthritis patients who received fake surgery recovered just as well as patients who received real surgery. (Both groups received the same post-operation care, including exercise.) They believed they received real treatment, and that was enough to throw away their canes and play basketball with their grandchildren.
- In depth analysis of FDA data shows antidepressant pills did not outperform the sugar pills. The reason the depression patients got better was because they believed the pill would help. (Don’t ask me why then those pills got approved by FDA.)
- A case of a cancer patient who died some time after the initial treatment, as expected with this type of cancer. However, the autopsy revealed he didn’t die of cancer — meaning he died because he, along with the doctors, believed he would die.
So you can kill someone if you can convince them what they swallowed was a poison. It would be a perfect murder because doctors won’t be able to identify the cause of death. Belief is this powerful.
What I like about Dr Bruce Lipton and The Biology Of Belief
This book is a great resource to gain the scientific understanding of energy and information healing, or what some would call miracles. It’s an eye-opener and I strongly recommend it even if you are not particularly interested in science.
His view of positive belief affecting our reality can be considered the scientific ground for the Law of Attraction, at least when it comes to health and happiness.
I love the author’s attitude that “there cannot be exceptions to a theory; exceptions simply mean that a theory is not fully correct.” (page 96) Whether it’s a placebo effect or never-heard-of type soul shifting, this is the truly scientific approach. Don’t dismiss the exceptions as messy flukes. (Sorry about putting in my own promotion, but this is something I feel strongly about. Defending the theory by dismissing the cases that the theory fail to cover is very UN-scientific.)
How to change your belief in the subconscious mind
Bruce Lipton explains that there are actually two minds in us, the subconscious and the conscious, and the subconscious mind runs the show of our life most of the time. So when the response is not desirable, whether it is ill health conditions or inappropriate behaviors, it is critical to change the subconscious response pattern.
The trouble is, we can’t change the subconscious by reasoning things out. The subconscious mind is like an automated computer program, so we need to reprogram it. It’s like my word-processing software automatically correcting my spelling. Most of the time it’s fine, but there are certain words I use that are not in the software’s dictionary, and when the program corrects it, it irritates me. And I can’t fix this problem by talking to my computer. I need to take action to get it learn the new words.
How can we do the same to our subconscious mind? Bruce Lipton mentions PSYCH-K. But there are other effective methods to reprogram the subconscious mind, including EFT and hypnosis. I guess introducing all kinds of reprograming methodology is outside the scope of this book, so we need to explore this further ourselves.
Bruce Lipton is in the movie What If?, so you might like to check it out too.
What do you think about the new science uncovering the mystery of life in such an unexpected way? Please share your thoughts in the comment.
Related posts:
- Review: The Spontaneous Healing Of Belief By Gregg Braden Book review of The Spontaneous Healing Of Belief by Gregg...
- Detox Your Body And Mind Detox and free your mind by detoxing your body. My...
- Death, Afterlife And Immortality What is death? What happens after death? Is eternal life...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Aah, Akemi – this stuff is so good. I had never heard of Bruce Lipton before seeing What if? The Movie, and I loved what he said there about the biology of belief. I had personally thought of genes as being like radio receivers for the “radio waves” our minds were sending out (an idea I heard somewhere) for many years – so it was great to see there was scientific evidence for this kind of thinking at last (I might mention that I have a background in biochemistry, including DNA etc).
Thanks for this review! It would have been fun being in Starbucks and watching you restraining yourself from screaming and running around! If it affected you like this I might just need to put it on my “to read” list instead of my “knowing of it and agreeing with it” list. There are so many things to check out – I got my copy of ‘The Living Matrix’ DVD in the mail this morning, and I can hardly wait to see it – we are planning to watch it tonight. It has Bruce Lipton in it, too.
Exciting times, Akemi!
Robins last blog post..Calling All Gods And Goddesses!
Hi Robin,
I sort of figured you know a lot about science by reading your blog — part of the reason I was curious to learn what you think about Bruce Lipton. And I saw The Living Matrix this weekend. It was quite good.
Akemi – I have been contemplating reviewing this book as I love it, but you did a great job, so I will just link to yours in my next Blog Share post. I assume you probably also saw and/or read What the Bleep Do We Know a few years back? (If not go to http://www.whatthebleep.com) all the scientists in that movie share similar studies, and many have also written books on related subjects since that came out. I do think science and spirituality (or what has up to now been considered spirituality) are merging, and that a lot of the religious backlash against science (the battle over teaching evolution in schools, etc.) is partly in response to that, a kind of opposition. It’s interesting that the ancients (the Hindu rishis, ancient Greeks and Egyptians) never considered these separate fields, it is really a modern phenomenon – we separated out ‘reason’ and ‘faith’, and now we are starting to see it is all ‘consciousness’.
Lisa (mommymystic)s last blog post..Nature Mysticism
Lisa,
I love What The Bleep movie! I have the DVD. It’s a great way to learn the new science in a fun way, AND it was filmed in my town, Portland Oregon. (I wasn’t in this area when it was made nor when I bought my DVD — come to think about it, so many things were leading me to Oregon)
I think the western separation of spirituality and science is largely due to the way the western religion (Christianity) developed over time. Nothing against the churches and the people there, but historically, there was a clear manipulation when Roman Emp converted — in effect, they converted the original teaching of Jesus so much to the point that the official doctrine is void of really life.
Quantum mechanics is really interesting – it’s a place where experimental evidence shows things happening that are basically impossible unless you accept that consciousness is one of the most basic elements of reality rather than non-existent as some scientists want to believe. Very interesting experiments have been done observing elementary particles which find that the act of observation changes the results. For instance, in the decay of radiactive substances, if you observe every particle which decays, they never decay. (Or do so really slowly, I can’t quite remember). An interesting book on the subject is “Shrodinger’s kittens” – google that if you like.
Unlike the scientific evidence for psychic powers, scientists don’t flat-out deny the findings in Quantum Mechanics – instead, they generally refuse to come to any conclusions at all about it. When I was breaking out of my skeptical/atheist/scientific belief system, QM was something that helped me in seeing that magick, subjective reality and psi might have validity. I shut myself up and made theories about QM thinking I was coming up with some discovery that would shake the world… when really, it turns out that the biggest boundary to what you can know is not whether science has discovered it or not, it’s whether your soul is ready to understand.
Andrew,
I’ve read about Shrodinger’s poor cats, although the material I read was still somewhat unclear about the results and resulting understanding of the experiments. . .
Like you said before, science has become a kind of religion, and I guess many scientists have strong fear in changing their world view.
[...] of light. Light is both the wave and the particle (photon). And if I understand the concept of quantum physics, everything is made of energy and particles that move around. We are all energy, we are made of [...]
WOW Akemi this is phenomenal indeed!
Although I have not read this book (yet), I was at a presentation by Wayne Dyer who explained the concepts in it, etc and I was in heaven!!!! The theories sound like so much what I hold within when it comes to health and well being.
That is why I mean it when I tell people, if you could make yourself believe with all your heart and mind that fast food was good for you and it was going to make you live long then it would. Whatever our mind believes, that is what we get – no and’s or if’s about this as far as I am concerned. That is why too we hear about people who did not drink, smoke and ate healthy and still got some horrible disease and people say “oh what’s the point?”
The point is that we do not know ever what is in that person’s mind. We have no idea how they view or percieve the world and hence why they get, what they get. It is too bad that I am swamped with enough on my plate now in terms of research and reading, but I am putting this book right at the top of “to read” list for this summer – I cannot wait!!!
Thanks Akemi for this awesome review!
Evita,
Glad you like my review. I know you have a sound background in science, so your positive feedback means a lot to me. Please feel free to link to this post if you like.
Akemi – I think you had another post prior to this that talked about light bodies and our possibly not really needing food or something along those lines, and I was looking for that to post this comment on, but couldn’t find it, so this one is close enough. Anyway, I was recently reading up on Yantra Yoga, a Tibetan Buddhist yoga, and came across some of the teachings on light bodies that I think I had mentioned to you in a comment on that post. Here’s an excerpt from Dzogchen on Wikipedia (Dzogchen is one of the TIbetan Buddhist lineages) – the statements in brackets are mine:
“When an advanced practitioner successfully completes practices of Longde or Menngagde [certain meditative and yoga practices], he or she realizes the Body of Light also known as rainbow body. When such an individual dies, from the point of view of an external observer, the following happens: the corpse does not start to decompose, but starts to shrink until it disappears. Usually fingernails, toenails and hair are left behind.
Some exceptional practitioners such as Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra are held to have realized the Great Transferrence (Wylie ‘pho ba chen po, pronounced Phowa Chenpo). This is an advanced Phowa practice. The individual does not die at all, but his or her physical body gradually disappears for an external observer [leaving the light body.]”
Interesting, huh? It’s like some of what you have been seeing for all of us in the ‘new world’ was discovered by forerunners in certain spiritual traditions like this one…
Hi Lisa,
I guess you are talking about this post on developing lightbodies.
Your quotes are so interesting. I am yet to find out exactly how we transition from the physical body to lightbody and what happens to the physical body afterwards. Maybe this answers (at least part of the) question! Thank you.
Lipton’s idea that ultimately ‘belief’ culled from habituated ‘perception’ signals informs the body and its internal mechanisms into behaviour patterns that can be controlled by malignant conscious influences, is indeed a self-empowering cognition…once it is understood correctly. What is required is an understanding of how the perception signals themnselves imbue ‘consciousness’ in the organism?
The answer lies in the correspondence between quanta, because that is where the energy that imbues consciousness in the organism emerges. However, let us understand the term ‘consciousness’. It is not a container or an enveloper of all objects or things of our mental life…consciousness is in fact a ’state of condition’. It is not the spirit or the soul, or the vital force, but is a state into which they become.
Consciousness is a energy resonance that arises as a representation of the sum of the interaction between quanta. It is the informational bridge that spans the spatial distance between the co-ordinate vectors of energy condensations (particles), and by which correspondence between them is shared.
As Lipton as demonstrated in his lectures and books, all signals are informational energy, and when absorbed by a ’sensor’, they excite the sensor into a higher state of energy, raising its wavelength and frequency: this is what consciousness is…a raised state of enegy level. There is not space here for me to go into detail, but I can give some salient points…
There is no actual ‘mind’. It is simply a mental mirage, a quale experience of being conscious. That is to say that we do not have a mind that is conscious, but a conscious-state that is perceived as mind,. The distinction is quite important
Spirit, or life force, or vital force, is the coalescence of memory (of life experiences) into a cohesive community of communication. It too is a emergent property of energy, and is imbued with the consciousness-state by the same mechanism. Without communication (or rather correspondences of energies) there could not be the state of consciousness.
Sentiency, or self-awareness, is derived from looped feed-back mechanisms – even our thoughts and thinking have to be sensed – and from this emerge the constructs of character and personality, which are aspects of the ’self’, what I prefer to call the ’soul-of-self’. Thus, to use an analogy to illustrate my thinking I can use that of an artist’s studio…if the biological form is the easel, and the spirit or life force is the canvas, then the ’soul-of-self’ is the emergent imagery that is painted upon the canvas by life experiences (note: the action of ‘painting’ is equal to that of memory assimilation). In essence, the biological body is the ‘womb’ of spirit, which expresses itself through the emergence of the construct of the soul-of-self.
Hi,
“I thought quantum physics was considered to be a quark pseudo science”
No. Quantum physics is real science and very accepted by the physics community. Quantum physics is very interesting (although most of what Andrew Gubb writes is utter nonsense). Sadly it is widely misinterpreted and misused by people in areas like self-help, psychology or fringe medicine.
“I’ve read about Shrodinger’s poor cats”
These weren’t real experiments done on real cats, you know. It was just a “thought experiment” to show some of the apprently paradoxical aspects of quantum physics.
[...] take in outside stuffs as nutrition of the inside and excrete what is not necessary. (Biologist Dr Bruce Lipton maintains cell membrane is like the brain that plays central role to sustain us.) 2. Life forms [...]
[...] one more thing. Dr Bruce Lipton makes a big point about the placebo effect in his book The Biology of Belief. So, are all the effects of good eating really coming from our mind? For instance, raw food diet is [...]
[...] incurable. (I say “supposed to be” because, even when the conventional medical doctors say so, I doubt if it is true.) So there is still a good reason to be scared. But with the energetic issues, we have [...]
[...] with the power of feelings. The book also serves as a great follow up on Dr Bruce Lipton’s The Biology Of Belief, by discussing what belief can do beyond our individual [...]
I found the article quite enlightning, I think I am going to read the book and some related books and share it with my book club buddies.
Thank you