BELIEFS & OPINIONS
Dr. Bruce Lipton began his scientific career as a cell biologist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville before joining the Department of Anatomy at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine in 1973, where his research on muscular dystrophy focused on the molecular mechanisms controlling cell behavior. In 1982, Dr. Lipton began examining the principles of quantum physics and how they might be integrated into his understanding of the cell’s information processing systems. In the process he discovered that the brain of a cell is not in the nucleus, which is what I was taught in school, but in the membrane – the outer surface, or “skin” of the cell.
“His research at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, between 1987 and 1992, revealed that the environment, operating through the membrane, controlled the behavior and physiology of the cell. His discoveries, which ran counter to the established scientific view that life is controlled by the genes, gave rise to one of today’s most important fields of study, the science of epigenetics. Many subsequent papers by other researchers have since validated his concepts and ideas.”1
Epigenetics is to biology what quantum physics was to physics; it has turned our age-old understanding of biology upside down; or, as I’ve put it many times already, the opposite of what we have always believed is true. From epigenetics, we now know our perception of the environment controls our DNA, not the other way around.
Bruce is a brilliant man and a good friend. Unfortunately, he still believes what’s “out there” – the human body in particular – is real; but despite that, through his best-selling book, The Biology of Belief, and his live seminars called The Biology of Perception, he offers some very important insights into the effects of beliefs on our lives.
“How we see life determines our behavior, and since perceptions can be wrong, it is more accurate to say that beliefs control biology – what you believe creates your life.”2
The first example he offers is what is called the “placebo effect.”3
It is normally used as a medical term, meaning a patient is given something neutral – like a sugar pill – and yet it makes them feel better. There is no chemical reason in the placebo for it to have any effect at all on the body, but it does somehow. That “somehow” is because the patient believes it will, and nothing else. It is the patient’s belief that changes their biology and their behavior.
“Statistics reveal that one-third of all medical healings are the result of the placebo effect.”4
But this “placebo effect” does not have to be limited to medicine or pills. In fact, it is in operation a lot of the time as we, the Players, believe something – anything – is good for us that is actually neutral, and yet it makes us feel better.
This, of course, is true for all homeopathic remedies as well. Homeopathy is still based on a belief that taking something from “out there” – “natural” though it might be – will have an effect “in here.”
The other side of the coin, and not nearly as well known, is the “nocebo effect5.” This is when a patient – or a Player – believes something, anything, that is actually neutral is harmful to them; and it makes them feel bad or worse, when in fact there’s nothing in the nocebo that can hurt them at all.
“If a doctor tells you that you have a disease, or the doctor tells you that you’re going to die, and you believe the doctor because he’s a ‘professional,’ the belief will give you a disease or will cause you to die.”6
The most famous “nocebo” currently may be HIV. According to Dr. Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, and over two-thousand other medical and scientific researchers, health care professionals, and journalists7, there is not one scientific paper that proves HIV causes AIDS8. Dr. Peter Duesberg, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the world’s leading retrovirologists in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, who received acclaim early in his career for research on oncogenes and cancer. Dr. Duesberg says there’s nothing about HIV that can do damage to a human body, that HIV is a “harmless passenger virus.”9 According to the staff report of a U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee, and the Office of Scientific Integrity of the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services, the man who first claimed that he discovered HIV and that HIV was the cause of AIDS was guilty of “scientific misconduct”,10 and his research was called “of dubious merit”11 and “really crazy.”12
In fact, HIV fails every traditional and accepted scientific test to be called the “cause” of AIDS13, and even the AIDS experts admit that more than half of those dying from AIDS are dying from organ failure - mostly liver failure - as a side effect of the antiretroviral drugs they are encouraged to take, and not HIV14.
But if someone believes what we’re being told by the mass media, that HIV causes AIDS and will result in death, then the stress caused by that belief is enough to destroy their immune system and give them AIDS, and they will die, according to Dr. Bruce Lipton.
In both cases – the placebo and the nocebo – it is the Player’s belief and not the actual experience that controls their perceptions and determines their behavior.
“If you believe that something will be good for you, it will be good; and if you believe that something is harmful, it will be bad.”15
Dr. Lipton stresses the fact that a lot of our beliefs are “learned” from other people, and those learned beliefs can actually override our natural perceptions and instincts. For example, all babies know how to swim when they are born. But as they grow up and watch the reaction on their parents’ faces whenever they get near water, the baby learns to be afraid of water; and then it needs to be taught how not to fear water and to swim again at the proper age – when their parents are no longer afraid.16
Bruce likens our perception to a camera, taking snapshots of the “physical world” our brain has projected “out there.” But, he says, our beliefs act like filters on that camera, filtering out certain frequencies and changing the picture that comes in; and he offers a very good example of this during his workshops when he puts one slide on the screen that makes no real sense…
