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Bruce Lipton: Right away, as soon as you said cooperation, you were in violation of Darwinian theory, which is competition and struggle. It’s a misinterpretation, in fact. There’s current science that says that whole belief is wrong. That belief you just talked about, the nature of cooperation and community, is actually the underlying principle of evolution.
Lamarck wrote in 1809 that the problems that will beset humanity will come from separating themselves from nature, and that will lead to the destruction of society. He was right because his emphasis on evolution was that an organism and the environment create a cooperative interaction. If you want to understand the fate of an organism, you have to understand its relationship to its environment. Then he said, separating from our environment is taking our biology and cutting us off from our source. He was right. And when you understand the nature of epigenetics, his theory is substantiated now. With no mechanism to make sense of it before, and especially since we bought the concept of neo-Darwinian biologists who said it was all genetic control, Lamarck looked stupid. But guess what? He was pretty right.
Science of Mind: Your demonstration in the book that the “brain” of the cell is not its DNA but its membrane is fascinating. What does this discovery mean for what we think about ourselves and our lives, since we’re just a community of cells?
Bruce Lipton: If two cells come together and they’re communicating, they’re going to use their own “brains” to make that communication, right? And if ten cells come together, they’re going to use their brains to make their communications make sense to each other. When you get a trillion cells together, like in a human brain, they’re still going to operate off the principle of the cellular brain. Well, when we have been buying the idea that the genes and the nucleus make the brain of the cell, which is totally misdirected, and you apply that as a principle of neurology or neuroscience, you’ve already started in the wrong direction. You can’t get there because that’s not the brain of the cell. Our principles about how intelligence works have been totally misguided. That’s why, after all the neuroscience, you ask somebody, how does the brain really work? And the answer is, we really don’t know.
The Human Genome Project says that model is wrong. We used to think it took more than 100,000 genes to make a human work. The fact that there are less than 25,000 human genes threw a monkey wrench into the entire process. How can you take such a small number of genes and make such a complex thing as a human? The answer is that it requires a lot more than genes to make it work—which is the input from the environment, which can alter the reading of the genes.
There are 140,000 proteins in a human body, and it used to be thought that each one required a separate gene to produce it. All of a sudden, you find that there are 25,000 genes and 140,000 proteins, and the math doesn’t add up. Epigenetics reveals something so astonishing that even science has trouble understanding the power of this new meaning, and it goes like this: With epigenetic control, which means environmentally-mediated control, a single gene can be used to create 2000 or more different proteins from the same blueprint. Epigenetic control is like a reader that can read the blueprint and restructure it to make something different out of it. And that’s how a single gene can be used to make so many different protein products. It wasn’t the gene that made each protein, it was the epigenetic control that did that, and that is the direct feedback from the environment. It moves us away from this mechanism that says we’re just machines.
Science of Mind: And says we’re not victims. We are co-creators.
Bruce Lipton: Absolutely.
Science of Mind: For many people, the idea that our thoughts create our reality, which is what Religious Science and some other metaphysical and spiritual traditions are based on, is a wholly spiritual idea. But quantum physics added scientific fact to the idea. And now, your work and others’ is bringing that concept down to the level of the cells. That makes it more real, somehow, more tangible.
Bruce Lipton: If you define spirit, somewhere along the line you could get a definition of something like “an invisible moving force.” If I define the nature of quantum mechanics, it’s an invisible moving force. So it really says, yes, there are invisible forces giving shape to our existence. Since our biology is traditionally based on a Newtonian, materialistic concept, the nature of that system is not to consider invisible forces as relevant. And yet, what quantum mechanics has put into place is that invisible moving forces are everything. So, if our science is not accommodating the new physics, it is hindering our advancement in evolution. When you bring the new forces in, you’re going to have to give new credit to these forces, and when you do, the spiritual people jump up and say, I knew that! and the quantum physics people jump up and say, I knew that! You’re still talking about the same thing. If we could own that, the opportunity of unity becomes so palpable it’s almost physical. Yeah, we can feel it! We can all agree now. You can call it what you want, I’ll call it what I want. But we’re all being run by these invisible forces.
Science of Mind: I read an interview with you where you said, “Rather than being the victim of our genes, we have been the victims of our perceptions.” Would you talk a little more about what it means to be a victim of our perceptions?
Lamarck wrote in 1809 that the problems that will beset humanity will come from separating themselves from nature, and that will lead to the destruction of society. He was right because his emphasis on evolution was that an organism and the environment create a cooperative interaction. If you want to understand the fate of an organism, you have to understand its relationship to its environment. Then he said, separating from our environment is taking our biology and cutting us off from our source. He was right. And when you understand the nature of epigenetics, his theory is substantiated now. With no mechanism to make sense of it before, and especially since we bought the concept of neo-Darwinian biologists who said it was all genetic control, Lamarck looked stupid. But guess what? He was pretty right.
Science of Mind: Your demonstration in the book that the “brain” of the cell is not its DNA but its membrane is fascinating. What does this discovery mean for what we think about ourselves and our lives, since we’re just a community of cells?
Bruce Lipton: If two cells come together and they’re communicating, they’re going to use their own “brains” to make that communication, right? And if ten cells come together, they’re going to use their brains to make their communications make sense to each other. When you get a trillion cells together, like in a human brain, they’re still going to operate off the principle of the cellular brain. Well, when we have been buying the idea that the genes and the nucleus make the brain of the cell, which is totally misdirected, and you apply that as a principle of neurology or neuroscience, you’ve already started in the wrong direction. You can’t get there because that’s not the brain of the cell. Our principles about how intelligence works have been totally misguided. That’s why, after all the neuroscience, you ask somebody, how does the brain really work? And the answer is, we really don’t know.
The Human Genome Project says that model is wrong. We used to think it took more than 100,000 genes to make a human work. The fact that there are less than 25,000 human genes threw a monkey wrench into the entire process. How can you take such a small number of genes and make such a complex thing as a human? The answer is that it requires a lot more than genes to make it work—which is the input from the environment, which can alter the reading of the genes.
There are 140,000 proteins in a human body, and it used to be thought that each one required a separate gene to produce it. All of a sudden, you find that there are 25,000 genes and 140,000 proteins, and the math doesn’t add up. Epigenetics reveals something so astonishing that even science has trouble understanding the power of this new meaning, and it goes like this: With epigenetic control, which means environmentally-mediated control, a single gene can be used to create 2000 or more different proteins from the same blueprint. Epigenetic control is like a reader that can read the blueprint and restructure it to make something different out of it. And that’s how a single gene can be used to make so many different protein products. It wasn’t the gene that made each protein, it was the epigenetic control that did that, and that is the direct feedback from the environment. It moves us away from this mechanism that says we’re just machines.
Science of Mind: And says we’re not victims. We are co-creators.
Bruce Lipton: Absolutely.
Science of Mind: For many people, the idea that our thoughts create our reality, which is what Religious Science and some other metaphysical and spiritual traditions are based on, is a wholly spiritual idea. But quantum physics added scientific fact to the idea. And now, your work and others’ is bringing that concept down to the level of the cells. That makes it more real, somehow, more tangible.
Bruce Lipton: If you define spirit, somewhere along the line you could get a definition of something like “an invisible moving force.” If I define the nature of quantum mechanics, it’s an invisible moving force. So it really says, yes, there are invisible forces giving shape to our existence. Since our biology is traditionally based on a Newtonian, materialistic concept, the nature of that system is not to consider invisible forces as relevant. And yet, what quantum mechanics has put into place is that invisible moving forces are everything. So, if our science is not accommodating the new physics, it is hindering our advancement in evolution. When you bring the new forces in, you’re going to have to give new credit to these forces, and when you do, the spiritual people jump up and say, I knew that! and the quantum physics people jump up and say, I knew that! You’re still talking about the same thing. If we could own that, the opportunity of unity becomes so palpable it’s almost physical. Yeah, we can feel it! We can all agree now. You can call it what you want, I’ll call it what I want. But we’re all being run by these invisible forces.
Science of Mind: I read an interview with you where you said, “Rather than being the victim of our genes, we have been the victims of our perceptions.” Would you talk a little more about what it means to be a victim of our perceptions?
