The insights of quantum physics remain a total mystery to most people. When you get to the level of atoms, there are no particles or solid objects moving around following predictable steps. Subatomic particles are separated by huge gaps, making every atom more than 99.999999999999 percent empty space. But that space is not empty, it is filled with energy. This holds true for everything solid, including our bodies.
According to Dr Deepak Chopra, intelligence is present everywhere in our bodies. Our inner intelligence is far superior to anything we can see from the outside. This intelligence is more important than the matter of the body. Every cell in the body is programmed by its DNA, but like everything else regulated by our inner intelligence, this process in not purely mechanical. A cell divides in response to its own internal need combined with signals from surrounding cells, the brain, the other faraway organs that talk to it via chemical messages. Except for the case of cancer, a cell produces itself without check, ungoverned by self -expansion.
If you could see your body as it really is, it is never the same way. 98 percent of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skeleton that seems so solid was not there 3 months ago as atoms of all kinds pass freely back and forth through the cell walls. The skin is new every month, a new stomach lining every 4 days, and a new liver every 6 weeks. The brain neurons are not replaced once they die but the content of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and so on is totally different in a year. The brain is like a computer that operates continuously, handles hundreds of programs at a time, deals in multiple billions of “bytes” of information every second and most miraculously, knows how to run itself. The brain does not just send impulses down the axons of neurons, but it also sends neurotransmitters and neuropeptides by the monocytes of the immune system, whose primary role is to protect us from disease. Now we know that the mind and body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave consequences in the physical ones. Researchers discover the same neuropeptides and receptors in other organs such as the gut, kidneys, stomach, and heart.
The cell must find a thousand ways to create new chemicals from a handful of elements- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Previously, science declared that our bodies are physical machines that somehow learned to think. Now, a new view arises that we are thoughts that have learned to create a physical machine.
How does the brain produce the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of the three-dimensional world? The brain is completely dark inside, there is no light in the visual cortex. Light is transmitted by photons which are colourless and invisible and there is no brightness. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, proposes that the only reality we know is the reality created by our consciousness. Every animal species experiences a reality that conforms to its nervous system. A dog’s hearing can reach a much higher frequency that the human ear can perceive.
It is fascinating that a study of four hundred spontaneous remissions of cancer interpreted by Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Clinic found that all patients had only one thing in common- every person had changed the attitudes before the remission occurred, become hopeful, courageous, and positive. For quantum healing to be completely viable, the power of intention must be harnessed calling to the inner intelligence. We assume that a person can cure himself of a fatal disease operates with the same mental machinery as anyone else, but it is not true. Mental processes can go deep to contact the hidden blueprint of intelligence and change it, then the visualisation of fighting cancer be strong enough to defeat the disease. But most people cannot do that, their thought power is too weak to trigger the appropriate mechanisms. This may explain why mind-body medicine has proved so inconsistent.
Robert Keith Wallace, in 1967, discovered that within a few minutes of meditation, his subjects entered a state of deep relaxation with slow breathing and heartbeat and alpha waves in EEGs and decreased oxygen consumption. Normally, it takes 4 to 6 hours after falling asleep to reach the period where oxygen consumption falls to its lowest levels. Moreover, in sleep the drop is usually less than 16 %, where meditators achieved momentarily reduction almost twice as low. That showed subjective feelings during meditation, inner silence, peacefulness, and relaxation had a real physical basis. Wallace concluded that meditation was a state of “hypometabolic wakefulness” that he named this entirely new state of consciousness, the fourth state, that is different than the 3 states of consciousness in waking, dreaming, or sleeping. He also studied meditation and aging and found that long-term meditators decrease their biological age by 5 to 12 years. This research suggests that aging is controlled by consciousness.
Meditation creates beneficial changes in brain functions, that is the brain must follow where the mind goes. Tibetan Buddhist monks showed unprecedented activity in the prefrontal lobes, especially in the regions with higher emotions like compassion.
To say that you exist inside your body is not entirely true. The truth is your body exists in you, inside your consciousness. Now you no longer have to travel under the assumed identity of “I”, the limited ego trapped inside a package of skin and bone. Your actual identity takes you to the level of the quantum mechanical human body and every quality you experience come from the field. From there no one can predict the kind of power, creativity and control that is available.
Dr Joe Dispenza had an accident that fractured 6 vertebrae of his spine. He did not want to have surgery as he believes our bodies possess an innate intelligence and miraculous healing power. By the process of visualizing his spinal column rebuilding itself, he achieved spontaneous healing and could walk after nine and a half weeks after the accident. As our bodies renew themselves, we can harness these physiological processes intentionally, directing the hormones, the proteins, the neurotransmitters production. By changing your internal state, you can change your external reality. In his book You are the Placebo, he shows that your own thoughts, emotions, and beliefs are generating chains of physiological events in your body. Some researchers have coined this practice as self-directed neuroplasticity (SDN) that is we can direct the formation of new neuronal pathways and the destructions of old ones through the quality of the experiences we cultivate. He learned that one of the main principles of quantum physics is that mind and matter are not separate elements, that our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings are the blueprints that control our destiny. The persistence, conviction, and focus to manifest any potential future lies within the human mind and within the mind of the infinite potentials in the quantum field. Both minds must work together to bring about any future reality that potentially already exists.
We live a huge part of our lives on autopilot, thinking the same thoughts leading to make the same choices, and then the same behaviours creating the same experience, the same emotions and then the same thoughts all over again. As a result of this conscious and unconscious process, your brain, your body and your biology stay the same. As a result, you’re feeling the same every day, your yesterday becomes your tomorrow and in truth your past is your future. The most basic principles in neuroscience states, “Nerve cells that fire together wire together”. So, if you reinforced those circuits so often, they have become hardwired, and that fixed pattern is called your identity. If the neurons are firing the same way, they are triggering the release of the same chemical neurotransmitters and neuropeptides in the brain and body. Now the body is being trained by the mind and when the body becomes the mind, it is called a habit. The conscious mind is only 5% and the subconscious and unconscious mind is 95%. No wonder why it is very hard to change.
People often believe that we are the victims of our genetic make-up that determines our health, our wellbeing, our personalities. Genes can be activated (turned on) or deactivated (turned off) by the environment inside the body (the emotional, biological, neurological, mental, energetic, and even spiritual states of being) and at other times the environment outside the body (trauma, temperature, altitude, toxins, bacteria, viruses, food…). Epigenetics show that we are not doomed by our genes and that a change in human consciousness can produce physical changes in the body. We can modify our genetic destiny by turning on the genes we want and turning off the ones we don’t want by working through various factors such as feelings and thoughts.
Chronic stress causes stress hormones to be released and they cause the cells of the body to become selfish to ensure that we survive, endorse our ego to become more selfish too. That me-first personality pervades all our thinking, leading us to become self-indulgent, self- serving and self-important. We indeed have some degree of control over our own genetic engineering by way of thoughts, choices, behaviours, and emotions...
The Placebo effect:
When you’re truly focused on an intention for some future outcome, if you can make inner thought more real than the environment, the brain won’t know the difference between the two. Then your body, as the unconscious mind, will begin to experience the new future event in the present moment. You will signal new genes, in new ways, to prepare for this imagined future event. You will be producing epigenetic variations that lead to real structural and functional changes in the body by thought alone. This is possible through mental rehearsal. Due to the neuroplasticity, the circuits in your brain begin to reorganize themselves to reflect what you’re mentally rehearsing with a strong positive emotion. Your brain and body are no longer a record of the past, they are the map to the future- a future that you’ve created in your mind.
We should concentrate not merely on avoiding negative emotions like fear and anger, but also consciously cultivating heartfelt positive emotions such as gratitude, joy, excitement, compassion, kindness, appreciation, and empowerment, to give us every advantage in maximizing our health. Studies show that positive emotions like kindness and compassion tend to release a neuropeptide Oxytocin which naturally shuts off the receptors in the amygdala that generates fear and anxiety. With fear out of the way, we can feel infinitely more trust, forgiveness, and love. We move from being selfish to selfless. With this new state of being, our neurocircuitry opens the door to endless possibilities that we never could have imagined before.
Stem cells are undifferentiated biological cells that become specialised into muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells, immune cells and even nerve cells in the brain. When you have a physical trauma, the body needs to repair and send signals to the gene outside the cell, to turn on and make the appropriate proteins which then instruct the stem cells to turn into healthy functioning cells. Healing attributable to this type of gene expression has been documented in the liver, skin, intestines, bone marrow and even in the brain and heart. In wound- healing studies if the subject is emotional and angry, the stem cells don’t get the message clearly. So, when the placebo effect is working, the mind has a clear intention with a nurturing, elevated emotion, the right type of signal can reach the cell DNA. In fact, stem cells help to explain the miraculous healing.
Placebo does not work for everyone. If familiar feelings have become familiar thinking and the person can not transcend that habituation so everything still stay the same. The person needs to reach a new level of acceptance and belief, and then surrender to that end without constantly fretting, worrying with doubts. That is what suggestibility is: making a thought into a virtual experience and having our bodies consequentially respond in a new manner, then greater reward can be attained. Suggestibility combines 3 elements: acceptance, belief, and surrender. The more we accept, believe, and surrender to whatever we’re doing to change our internal state, the better the results we can create. Suggestibility is not just an intellectual process. We need to be able to emotionally embrace the results with intense elevated emotions to be able to enter the autonomic nervous system that is vital to access the subconscious programming.
The survival emotions such as fear, futility, anger, hostility, impatience, pessimism, competition, worry, and depression knock the brain and body out of balance and so down regulate the genes needed for optimal health.
People who don’t analyse or intellectualize too much are more prone to accept a thought and embrace it emotionally and are more open to suggestion like in hypnosis to enter their subconscious.
Gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions for increasing your level of suggestibility. It teaches your body emotionally that the event you are grateful for has already happened, because we usually give thanks after a desirable event has occurred.
Our beliefs aren’t always conscious. We may accept an idea on the surface, but if deep down, we do not really believe it’s possible, then our acceptance is just an intellectual process. Beliefs are programmed in the subconscious or unconscious from the past. To change our beliefs, we must create a new belief with the amplitude and energy high enough to be greater than the hardwired programs and emotional conditioning in the body. When that happens, the body is living fully in the present, it is no longer a prisoner of the past.
The receptor sites on the outside cells of our body are a hundred times more sensitive to energy and frequency than they are to the physical chemical signals like neuropeptides. Research reveals that invisible forces of the electromagnetic fields can influence every aspect of cellular biology and genetic regulation. Cell receptors are frequency specific to incoming energy signals. If you could change your own energy and consciousness to create the right kind of signal outside of the cells, it enables you to tap into that vast field, and to help you to access your true ability to authentically heal your body. The rewiring of the brain and the new chemical emotions in the body trigger epigenetic changes, and the result is that you become literally a new person.
Meditation:
The whole purpose of meditation is to move your awareness beyond your analytical mind, to take your attention off your outer world and pay attention to your inner world of thoughts and feelings. We move from conscious mind to subconscious mind, but also from selfish to selfless, from somebody to no body (no self), from believing the outer world is reality and defining our reality with our senses to the inner world that is reality, the world of thoughts beyond the senses.
When neurons fire together, they exchange charged elements that produce electromagnetic fields, and we can measure brain wave frequencies. Beta is our everyday waking state, the thinking brain or neocortex is processing all the incoming sensory data and creating meaning between our outer and inner worlds. Alpha is our relaxation state. Most days, we move back and forth between beta and alpha states. Theta is a kind of twilight state, half awake and half asleep, or mind awake, body asleep. In meditation, we want to be in theta where we can access the subconscious, because the analytical mind is not operating, and we are mostly in our inner world.
The Quantum Mind
On the subatomic quantum level, matter is a momentary phenomenon, it’s here one moment and then it disappears. It exists only as a tendency, a probability, or a possibility. When observed, the electron is a particle, look away, it disappears back into energy. And so, because the human mind as the observer is intimately connected to the behaviour and appearance of matter, you could say that mind over matter is a quantum reality. When particles vibrate at a slower frequency, they appear in physical reality for longer periods of time and thus appear as solid matter. So, the physical world may look as it is made up of only material matter, but in truth, it shares a field of information (the quantum field) that unifies matter and energy intimately. That’s because all particles are connected in an immaterial invisible field of information beyond space and time and that field is made of consciousness (thought) and energy (frequency, the speed at which things vibrate). We are always broadcasting information as electromagnetic energy based on our states of being. So, when you change your energy to alter your belief about yourself, you’re increasing the frequency of the atoms and molecules in you body and amplifying your energy field. You’re now more wave and less particle and your body responds to a new mind. From a quantum perspective, a higher, more coherent frequency is called health, and a slower more incoherent frequency is called disease.
Since all things material are made of atoms, which are connected beyond space and time, then humans, along with all things in the universe, are connected by this field of intelligence, both within us and all around us, that gives life, information, energy, and consciousness to all things. This is the universal intelligence that gives us life. The self-organizing autonomic nervous system is your connection to that innate intelligence. This intelligence is what you merge with in meditation when you lay down the ego, and go from selfish to selfless, when you become pure consciousness, no longer a body in the environment but instead no body, no one, no thing, in no place and no time. That’s when you simply become an awareness in an infinite field of possibility.
In the book “You are the Placebo”, there are many stories of success in healing chronic diseases through changing the state of the mind.
References:
- Quantum Healing- Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine by Deepak Chopra M.D
- You are the Placebo- Making your Mind Matter by Dr Joe Dispenza
- Breaking the Habit of Becoming Yourself- How to lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Dr Joe Dispenza
Becoming Supernatural by Dr Joe Dispenza