(Editor’s Note: Dawson Church, PhD, is an award-winning author whose best-selling book The Genie in Your Genes (www.YourGeniusGene.com) has been hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in our understanding of the link between emotions and genetics. His follow-up title Mind to Matter, (www.MindToMatter.club) reviews the science of peak mental states, and is the primary source for this article. He founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare (www.NIIH.org) to study and implement promising evidence-based psychological and medical techniques.
His groundbreaking research has been published in prestigious scientific journals. He is the editor of Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, and Treatment, a peer-reviewed professional journal (www.EnergyPsychologyJournal.org) and a blogger for the Huffington Post. He shares how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and athletic performance through EFT Universe (www.EFTUniverse.com), one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web.)
Your Beliefs Become Your Biology
Your beliefs are powerful determinants of your health and wellbeing. That’s not a metaphysical proposition; it’s a scientific fact.
There are scores of studies linking belief to healing. One of the most provocative of these examined the spiritual states of AIDS patients. The research team was led by Dr Gail Ironson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami. She measured the medical status of AIDS patients in two ways. One was their viral load — the quantity of the HIV virus in a sample of blood.
She also counted the concentration of the white blood cell responsible for killing invading organisms. If the concentration of these drops, our bodies are less able to fend off other diseases like pneumonia. That’s why the I and D in AIDS stand for Immune Deficiency; as AIDS patients lose their immune cells they are more susceptible to the kinds of invading organisms’ “opportunistic infections” that healthy immune systems easily fend off.
To their astonishment, Ironson’s team found that the beliefs patients held about God and the universe affected the progression of the disease. The quantity of AIDS virus in the bloodstreams of those who believed in a punishing God increased three times faster than those who believed in a benevolent God. Beliefs predicted whether patients would live or die more strongly than factors such as depression, risky behavior, and coping skills (Ironson et al., 2011).
Many of Dr. Ironson’s patients reported a spiritual transformation subsequent to their diagnosis. This transformation was characterized by a sense of self that was profoundly changed, and resulted in different behaviors. Many kicked their habits of street drugs like cocaine and heroin, or legal ones like alcohol and smoking. Some went through such a transformation only after hitting rock bottom.
John, a gay African-American man with a college education who was enrolled in Ironson’s study, was one of these. One day, after transcending his preoccupation with his own suffering in order to help a drunk white man in distress, John had an out-of-body experience (OBE). Here’s how he describes it:
“I felt like I was floating over my body, and I’ll never forget this, as I was floating over my body, I looked down, it was like this shriveled up prune, nothing but a prune, like an old dried skin. And my soul, my spirit was over my body. Everything was so separated. I was just feeling like I was in different dimensions, I felt it in my body like a gush of wind blows. I remember saying to god, ‘God! I can’t die now, because I haven’t fulfilled my purpose,’ and, just as I said that, the spirit and the body, became one, it all collided, and I could feel this gush of wind and I was a whole person again.
“That was really a groundbreaking experience. Before becoming HIV-positive my faith was so fear based. I always wanted to feel I belonged somewhere, that I fit in, or that I was loved. What helped me to overcome the fear of God and the fear of change was that I realized that no one had a monopoly on God. I was able to begin to replace a lot of destructive behavior with a sort of spiritual desire. I think also what changed, my desire to get close to God, to love myself, and to really embrace unconditional love.”
By the end of the study, the amount of HIV virus in John’s blood was so low that it could not be detected. Dr. Ironson summarizes by saying, “If you believe God loves you, it’s an enormously protective factor, even more protective than scoring low for depression, or high for optimism. A view of a benevolent God is protective.” (Church, 2013).
As a researcher and science writer, I’ve been awed at the volume of research linking our beliefs to our biology. Beliefs affect not just white blood cells, but stem cells, muscle cells, skin cells, and the hormones that determine how fast we age and how much energy we have. When you fill your mind with an image of a benevolent universe, and your heart with compassion for all living things, you’re doing more than basking in the majesty of creation. You’re sending signals to your cells that make you healthier and happier.
References:
Church, D. (2013). The genie in your genes: Epigenetic medicine and the new biology of intention. Energy Psychology Press.
Ironson, G., Stuetzle, R., Ironson, D., Balbin, E., Kremer, H., George, A., … & Fletcher, M. A. (2011). View of God as benevolent and forgiving or punishing and judgmental predicts HIV disease progression. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 34(6), 414-425.
Intuition and Premonitions
On Oct 9, 2017, my home and office were consumed by the Tubbs Lane wildfire. My wife, Christine, and I got out with moments to spare.
We woke up at 12:45 a.m. and saw the flames racing toward us. Running to the car, we got out just ahead of the inferno. Many of our neighbors weren’t so lucky. Reports from fire fighters later estimated that the fire traveled the length of a football field every three seconds. Forty-two people didn’t escape in time. But thousands did. Why?
In the weeks since the fire, that time of 12:45 a.m. keeps cropping up in conversations with friends and neighbors. Many of them report waking up at that exact time. When asked why they woke up, they can’t explain it. After they awoke, they might have smelled smoke or seen the glow of the fire on the horizon. But what woke them up in the first place?
Many people seem to have premonitions just before disasters. The New York City police department produced the first official estimate of the death toll from the attacks on September 11, 2001 — 6,659 dead. It was based on reasonable estimates of the number of people who should have been at their desks in the Twin Towers on a weekday morning.
But the final death toll was only 2,753. Where were the missing people? Many were evacuated successfully, but many others reported unusual circumstances that kept them away. Some had premonitions of disaster. Others had disturbing dreams that led them to alter their routines. These subtle signals may be a relic of the sixth sense that human beings have had since the dawn of history.
A remote chain of 500 islands called the Andamans and Nicobars lies off the Bay of Bengal. The Andaman Islands are inhabited by an aboriginal tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Jarawa, who reject contact with outsiders (National Geographic, 2005).
On December 26, 2004, a massive tsunami struck the coast, with the Andamans and Nicobars directly in its path. Anthropologists feared that all 250 members of the Jarawa tribe had been washed away. On the neighboring island of Nicobar, 1,458 people died.
However, when government helicopters arrived to render aid, the Jarawa fired arrows at them. Eventually, seven men emerged from the forest wearing loincloths and amulets. They told aid workers that not a single member of the tribe had died (Lagorio, 2005). They had moved deep into the jungle before the tsunami struck.
Research shows that the electromagnetic fields of individual human beings are linked to the geomagnetic fields of the planet as a whole, and that communication is occurring within these fields. Rollin McCraty, director of research at HeartMath, says, “We’re all like little cells in the bigger Earth brain — sharing information at a subtle, unseen level that exists between all living systems, not just humans, but animals, trees, and so on” (McCraty, 2015).
Human beings are part of the web of life. Modern humans are capable of picking up on the subtle signals inherent in nature, just as the Andaman islanders did. I also believe that with practice we can hone our abilities to tune in to global natural cycles. Like any skill, the more it is practiced the stronger it becomes. Meditation, prayer and spiritual practice all can put us back in tune with natural cycles larger than our individual lives. 12:45 am is my personal daily reminder of the presence of these global rhythms.
References
Church, D. (2018). Mind to matter: The astonishing science of how your brain creates material reality. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.
Lagorio, C. (2005, January 4). Ancient tribe survives tsunami. CBS News. Retrieved November 24, 2017, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ancient-tribe-survives-tsunami
McCraty, R. (2015). Could the energy of our hearts change the world? Retrieved November 24, 2017, from https://goop.com/wellness/spirituality/could-the-energy-of-our-hearts-change-the-world
National Geographic. (2005, January 24). Did island tribes use ancient lore to evade tsunami? National Geographic News. Retrieved November 24, 2017, from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_tsunami_island.html
Your DNA is Not Your Destiny
I’ve been studying the new scientific discipline of epigenetics since the turn of the century. Epigenetics measures changes in DNA that are due to outside influences.
Just because you have a gene doesn’t mean it’s active. Genes need to be turned on, or “expressed,” in order to have an effect. It’s like turning on a light: the switch must be tripped in order for the light to shine. Simply having a gene doesn’t mean it’s expressed any more than simply having a bulb means that the light is turned on.
In particular I study the epigenetics of stress. Genes that contain the genetic code for stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are turned on by stress. Stress triggers the expression of these genes, and your body uses that genetic code to build the hormones themselves. Stress > gene expression > hormones.
In my book Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science Behind How Your Brain Creates Material Reality, I tell the story of Janice, a friend of mine who was diagnosed with breast cancer. At first, she panicked. Gene tests showed that cancer genes, called “oncogenes,” were highly expressed in her cells. Like lights, they were turned on.
I urged Janice to do everything in her power to reduce her stress levels, knowing that this would dial down the expression of the genes that code for cortisol and other stress markers that are typically higher in cancer patients (Balkwill & Mantovani, 2012).
Janice quickly got serious about healing. She phoned or emailed friends in the medical and research worlds, as well as experts in energy medicine. She began to use a variety of energy methods to center herself daily. Those included qigong, meditation, and EFT tapping. EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) uses fingertip tapping on acupuncture points, in combination with affirmations. Over 100 studies show that it’s highly effective for anxiety, depression, and stress (Church, 2013). Meditation and qigong also have hundreds of studies supporting their efficacy for both physical and mental illness (Jahnke et al., 2010; Goyal et al., 2014).
Three months later, after changing her energy and her attitude 180 degrees, and consistently practicing these methods, Janice went back to the hospital for another comprehensive battery of tests. Her new diagnosis? “Cancer free.” Her oncogenes were no longer expressed. Janice had shifted her energy and consciousness, and the genes of her body had shifted in response.
Albert Einstein said that, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Energy fields like those that doctors measure using medical devices like MRIs and EEGs shape the particles of which our bodies are composed.
We aren’t used to thinking of our spiritual practices as medical interventions like pills and surgery, yet they can profoundly change our bodies. When we reduce our stress levels through meditation and energy practices, we change our consciousness. That can flip the switches that determine which genes are turned on. In a study of veterans with PTSD who received 10 sessions of EFT, my colleagues and I found that 6 key genes were switched on, including genes that reduce inflammation throughout the body (Church et al., 2018).
Your DNA is not your destiny. Your genes do not determine your future. As you deliberately choose to shift your consciousness, calming your stress, filling your mind with positive thoughts, and regulating your field with energy techniques, you turn on the lights of healing and regeneration throughout your body.
References:
Balkwill, F. R., & Mantovani, A. (2012). Cancer-related inflammation: common themes and therapeutic opportunities. Seminars in Cancer Biology 22(1), 33-40. Academic Press.
Church, D. (2013). Clinical EFT as an evidence-based practice for the treatment of psychological and physiological conditions. Psychology, 4(08), 645.
Church, D., Yount, G., Rachlin, K., Fox, L., & Nelms, J. (2018). Epigenetic Effects of PTSD Remediation in Veterans Using Clinical Emotional Freedom Techniques: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study. American Journal of Health Promotion, 32(1), 112-122.
Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., … & Ranasinghe, P. D. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(3), 357-368.
Jahnke, R., Larkey, L., Rogers, C., Etnier, J., & Lin, F. (2010). A comprehensive review of health benefits of qigong and tai chi. American Journal of Health Promotion, 24(6), e1-e25.
Your Beliefs Create Your Body
Materialists often dismiss faith, energy healing, belief and spirituality as “feel-good” practices that have no bearing on the real world. They believe that material reality can be explained by the action of atoms and molecules, independent of mind and consciousness.
One of the most famous of these was Sir Francis Crick. Along with James Watson (with whom Crick won the Nobel prize) and Rosalind Franklin (who received little credit for her part in the discovery … but that’s another story), Crick co-discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule.
Crick believed in genetic determinism, the theory that “it’s all in your genes.” He espoused the idea that all your characteristics from emotions to aspirations to mystical experiences are due to the action of your genes and nervous system. In his final book, Crick wrote: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (Crick, 1994). In the materialist view, consciousness is no more than the result of a complex brain, an epiphenomenon of matter.
Yet science shows that this view is exactly backward. I summarize over 400 studies in my book Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science Behind How Your Brain Creates Material Reality, and they show clearly that your beliefs, faith and energy have a direct and measurable effect on your cells (Church, 2018). Your mind literally creates the matter of your body, from stem cells (which repair injured tissue) to telomeres (which influence how fast you age).
A large study illuminated the role that our beliefs influence our objective material health. A team led by Dr. Robert Gramling of the University of Rochester surveyed the beliefs and psychological profiles of 2,816 adults aged 35 to 75. It then tracked them over the course of 15 years and measured the incidence of heart disease in the group. They found that people who believed they were at low risk of cardiac problems had a third the incidence of strokes and heart attacks (Gramling & Epstein, 2011).
Just one third! That’s a dramatic difference. The effect persisted after the team controlled for variables such as cholesterol level, smoking, high blood pressure, and a family history of heart disease. The Rochester study showed that rather than your molecules determining your consciousness, as Crick believed, your consciousness determines your molecules.
We live in a material world. Our lives are rarely perfect. People are people and circumstances are circumstances. Yet belief provides a frame through which we perceive this material world. We can choose our beliefs. We can select positive frames and optimistic perspectives. We can elect to see material reality through rose-colored glasses.
As we shift our beliefs, the material world, starting with the bodies in which we live, changes measurably. Research shows that different genes turn on, while healthy hormones and neurotransmitters are synthesized by our cells. Unique groups of neurons fire. We produce all this biological activity with belief, thought, energy and mind.
It’s worth examining every thought you think and every word you say — before you say it. Pick thoughts and words that frame reality in a positive light. Infuse your material reality with your spiritual beliefs. When you do this, you deploy the immense power of your consciousness to change material reality, starting with the molecules of which your body is composed.
References:
Church, D. (2018). Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science Behind How Your Brain Creates Material Reality. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.
Crick, F. (1994). The Astonishing Hypothesis, The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Scribner.
Gramling, R., & Epstein, R. (2011). Optimism amid serious disease: Clinical panacea or ethical conundrum?: Comment on “Recovery expectations and long-term prognosis of patients with coronary heart diseaseâ€. Archives of Internal Medicine, 171(10), 935-936.
Thoughts Versus Facts
“The facts, ma’am, and nothing but the facts” are what makes the world go round. That’s the materialist worldview. Materialists believe that objective material reality —atoms and molecules — are the basis of everything in the universe. Yet science is now showing that faith, mind, belief, thought, and consciousness are creating the facts of material reality.
A study performed by scientists at Stanford University examined mortality statistics for 61,141 adults. Among other things the researchers measured the amount of exercise participants performed. They also measured how much exercise they believed they performed compared with other people the same age.
During the two decades the study went on, a number of the participants died from a variety of causes. The researchers examined the relationship between the beliefs people had about how much they exercised and mortality rates. Participants who thought they weren’t exercising as much as their peers died younger than people who believed they did more.
Crucially, these beliefs bore no objective relationship to the facts. The longevity differences persisted even when the actual amount of exercise people were doing was the same as others. Chief researcher Octavia Zahrt found a 71% greater mortality risk among people who perceive themselves as exercising less than their peers.
Another study called the Whitehall II study examined the beliefs of 7,000 British civil servants. They were asked when they believed that old age begins and middle age ends. Those who believed that old age began at 70 or later were less likely to have serious heart problems than those who believed that it began at 60 or younger (Kuper & Marmot, 2003).
In my book Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality, I examine the research linking consciousness to material reality. The evidence that our thoughts literally create our reality, starting with our bodies, is overwhelming. As we change our minds, huge biological shifts occur in our bodies. Mind becomes matter in the form of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.Â
One study I did found a 37% drop in baseline cortisol in just a single week of consciousness change using EFT tapping and meditation (Bach et al., 2018). A randomized controlled trial of EFT measured a 24% reduction in cortisol from just one hour of EFT (Church, 2013).
I underpin the science in Mind to Matter with dozens of case histories. One of my favorites is the story of Dean:
Dean, one of the participants in the cortisol study, was a 58-year-old male psychiatric nurse who had been randomized to the talk therapy group. Dean’s scores on psychological distress were as high after the therapy session as before, and as he remembered his problems, his cortisol rose by 40 percent.
In the second treatment session, instead of talk therapy, we used EFT tapping. We worked on a memory around which he had a high emotional charge: breaking up with his girlfriend, “the love of his life.” He teared up as he remembered, with stunned regret, their last day at the airport, and the image of her walking down the jetway.
The adult event reminded him of childhood events and we tapped on those too.
When Dean’s cortisol results arrived back from the lab a few days later, they showed that his cortisol levels had dropped by 48 percent.
Our consciousness is a remarkable tool. When we use “new thought” deliberately, to release stress and embrace compassion, we create molecular facts. Our consciousness can produce powerful, immediate, and long-lasting upgrades to our health, happiness, and longevity.
References
Bach, D., Groesbeck, G., Stapleton, P., Banton, S., Blickheuser, K., & Church, D. (2018). Clinical EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) improves multiple physiological markers of health. Open Medicine (in press).
Church, D., Yount, G., and Brooks, A.J. (2012). The effect of emotional freedom techniques on stress biochemistry: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 200, 891-896. doi: 10.1097/NMD.0b013e31826b9fc1.
Kuper, H., & Marmot, M. (2003). Job strain, job demands, decision latitude, and risk of coronary heart disease within the Whitehall II study. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 57(2), 147-153.
Zahrt, O. H., & Crum, A. J. (2017). Perceived physical activity and mortality: Evidence from three nationally representative US samples. Health Psychology, 36(11), 1017.
Science and Spiritual Experience
We think of science and spirituality as two distinct domains, very different from each other. Science is experimental, practical, rigorous, empirical, materialistic, objective, and intellectual. Metaphysics is spiritual, experiential, abstract, mystical, ephemeral, internal, irreplicable, imprecise, subjective, otherworldly, impractical, and impossible to prove.Â
Yet throughout the history of science, science has led great scientists to spiritual epiphanies. As we study the workings of atoms and molecules, cells and organisms, stars and planets, energy and matter, we come face to face with the order and beauty inherent in it all. Scientific discovery inspires awe. Albert Einstein said: “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe — a spirit vastly superior to that of man.”
For the past few years I’ve been on a fascinating quest to understand and describe how energy creates matter, mind creates things, and thoughts create facts. I began my inquiry believing that energy fields were a byproduct of material conditions, the way a bar magnet produces an electromagnetic field around it. I considered the point of view of materialist scientists to be plausible.
They explain consciousness as an “epiphenomenon” of matter, hypothesizing that as brains became more and more complex over the course of evolution, they eventually produced this byproduct we call consciousness. Elaborate human brains produce the consciousness we call mind and the electromagnetic fields we measure with technology like MRIs and EEGs. In the words of researcher Marvin Minsky, “Mind is what brain does.”
On my quest, I read over 400 studies and interviewed over 100 experts, and found that this is exactly the opposite of what the evidence shows. Studies demonstrate that energy fields come first, and they shape matter. I trace each step of the process in my book Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality (Church, 2018).Â
One of the most fascinating demonstrations comes from research on water. When water is held by a healer, the angle of the molecular bond between the oxygen and hydrogen atoms changes (Schwartz, De Mattei, Brame, & Spottiswoode, 2015). When “blessed” water is used to sprout seeds, more germinate. The resulting plants grow bigger and faster than those raised using ordinary water (Rao, Sedlmayr, Roy, & Kanzius, 2010).. Consciousness, acting through an energy field, shapes matter.
Science led many of the founders of the field of quantum physics to an awareness of the great universal field of consciousness. Besides Einstein this group includes Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, and Eugene Wigner. These pioneers did not perceive energy, space, time, consciousness, and matter as separate entities, but as flowing together at the junction of quantum physics.
Planck said: “All matter originates and exists, only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force is the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” The deeper scientists delve into the workings of matter, from the tiniest subatomic particles to enormous galaxies, the more they notice the synchronous coordination characteristic of consciousness.
The essential message of science from Einstein onward is the primacy of consciousness. Change your consciousness, and you exert an influence on the material world. Prayer, belief, faith, compassion, love, kindness, and goodwill are not just insubstantial sentiments. As consciousness acting through energy fields, they influence the material reality of your life.
References:
Church, D. (2018). Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science Behind How Your Brain Creates Material Reality. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.
Rao, M. L., Sedlmayr, S. R., Roy, R., & Kanzius, J. (2010). Polarized microwave and RF radiation effects on the structure and stability of liquid water. Current Science, 98(11), 1500–1504.
Schwartz, S. A., De Mattei, R. J., Brame, E. G., & Spottiswoode, S. J. P. (2015). Infrared spectra alteration in water proximate to the palms of therapeutic practitioners. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 11(2), 143–155.
Defying Gravity
In my book Mind to Matter, I show how human consciousness can affect some of the four fundamental forces of physics. These are:
- The strong nuclear force that binds subatomic particles together
- The weak nuclear force evident in the decay of radioactive elements
- Electromagnetism
- Gravity.
In the book, I review experiments showing human consciousness to affect the first three of these. What about the fourth force, gravity?
Can human consciousness really affect gravity? It seems unlikely. The “Gravitational Constant” is a known scientific value. I don’t weigh 185 lb one day and 132 lb the next day, as gravity waxes and wanes. Gravity is a fixed scientific fact.
Or is it?
Lissa Rankin, MD, best-selling author of Mind Over Medicine, tells the following story: “I was watching a ceremony with a group of Kogi shamans in Peru. I suddenly realized that one of them was floating about 10 inches off the floor. I nudged the participant next to me, pointed, and said, ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’
“‘Yup,’ he said, ‘there’s air between his butt and the ground’” (Rankin, 2018).
Throughout history, there have been many eyewitness accounts of people who defied gravity. Perhaps the most famous is Joseph of Cupertino (Radin, 2018).
Joseph was born in 1603 to a poor Italian family. When he was nine years old, he became sick from a painful and crippling infection. He escaped into his imagination, and at times experienced ecstasy.
When he recovered five years later, he’d missed out on schooling as well as socialization. He was regarded as a misfit, sometimes so entranced by sacred music that his mouth hung open. This earned him the nickname “Boccaperta” or Gaping Mouth.
Ordained at 25, he soon exhibited anomalous abilities such as healing, precognition, and telepathy.
The one that got him into the most trouble was levitation. When saying the mass, he would spontaneously rise off the ground. This was witnessed by thousands of people on hundreds of occasions.
The Medieval Church had no time for miracle workers. Bishops moved Joseph to a different diocese whenever his notoriety became too great. But soon people in the new congregation would realize they had the floating priest in their midst.
Eventually he was summoned to Rome to stand before the Inquisition. They ordered him to say Mass to find out if the stories were true. He levitated before their skeptical eyes.
He was ordered to stop his foolishness but he continued to levitate spontaneously. Eventually the Church arrested him again and hid him for the rest of his life. A century after his death, he was canonized as St. Joseph, based on 35 years of written testimony from kings, cardinals and ambassadors.
Other Christian saints observed to levitate include St. Teresa of Avila, St. Padre Pio, St. Martin de Porres, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Alphonsus Ligouri and the Russian Orthodox St. Seraphim of Sarov.
Chapter 7 of Autobiography of a Yogi is called “The Levitating Saint” (Yogananda, 1946). Yogananda talks about yogis who had the advanced spiritual power (siddhi) of levitation. Yogananda’s friend, Upendra Chowdhury, says: “I saw a yogi remain in the air, several feet above the ground, last night at a group meeting.”
Several YouTube videos show contemporary Buddhist monks levitating. As they go deep into meditation, their bodies simply float off the ground.
We’re accustomed to thinking of prayer, affirmations and meditation as confined to the intangible domain of spirituality. Levitating saints remind us that our consciousness has the power to shift the very fabric of our material world.
References
Radin, D. (2018). Real magic: Ancient wisdom, modern science, and a guide to the secret power of the universe. Harmony.
Rankin, L. (2018). Rewiring the brain, renewing the mind. Presented at the Second European Energy Psychology Conference, May 27.
Yogananda, P. (1946). Autobiography of a yogi. Philosophical Library.
Buddhist Monk Levitation Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnLj8DMqaC8
The Next Great Evolutionary Leap
We’re accustomed to thinking of evolution as a slow process. Occasional genetic mutations throw up useful innovations – think the opposable thumb, neurons, eyes – each of which took millennia for nature to perfect.
But today, evolution is proceeding using a different and much faster mechanism. That mechanism is consciousness. You and I can switch genes on and off with our minds.Â
This is easy to demonstrate. Think back to a stressful event. You’ve just turned on the genes that code for stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol.
Now shift your awareness. Sense the holiness of the universe. Pray, give thanks – and you’ll feel calm. You’ve just used your consciousness to turn those same genes off.
You didn’t need a lab or a PhD in epigenetics to change your gene expression. You accomplished that minor miracle in seconds, purely through consciousness.
When you choose to pray, meditate, stroke a pet, tap EFT acupressure points, act kindly, be grateful, feel optimistic, breathe deeply, walk in nature, or feel compassion for others, you activate the brain regions associated with happiness. Over time, the brain regions we use regularly grow, while those we don’t use shrink.
Human beings are thus able to create molecules, cells, and neurons deliberately – creating matter with mind alone. No other species throughout evolutionary history has been able to accomplish this feat of biological self-engineering.
Evolving our bodies does not take millions of years. We can accomplish it in the space of days, weeks, and months. A real-life example comes from chapter one of my book Mind to Matter (Church, 2018):
Graham Phillips is an Australian TV reporter who’d heard about the benefits of meditation. Though skeptical, he decided to put it to the test by committing to an 8 week practice (Catalyst, 2016).
Before he began, he was evaluated by a team at Monash University, led by biological psychology professor Neil Bailey, PhD, and clinical psychologist Richard Chambers, PhD. They put him through a battery of tests, and used an MRI to measure the volume of each region of his brain, especially those responsible for memory and learning, motor control, and emotional regulation.
After just two weeks of practicing mindfulness, Phillips felt less stressed and more able to handle the challenges of his job and life. He reported that he “notices stress but doesn’t get sucked into it.”
Eight weeks later, he returned to Monash. Bailey and Chambers put Phillips through the same battery of tests again. One of the brain regions the researchers measured was the hippocampus. They looked especially at the dentate gyrus, part of the hippocampus responsible for regulating emotion in other parts of the brain.
They found that the volume of nerve cells in Phillips’s dentate gyrus had increased by 22.8%!
That’s a staggeringly large change. It indicated a dramatically increased volume of the specific type of neural hardware required to regulate the emotional storms that make us unhappy. Phillips’s cognitive abilities had increased by several orders of magnitude as well. There are many studies showing that meditation changes the structure of the brain (Tang, Hölzel & Posner, 2015).
We are thus evolving our bodies and brains over the course not of eons, but of weeks. We can use our minds and emotions as epigenetic tools, deliberately changing gene expression. This feat has been accomplished by no other species in history. In this way our consciousness, individually and collectively, creates the next great evolutionary leap.
References:
Catalyst. (2016). Meditation. Retrieved May 16, 2017, from http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4477405.htm
Church, D. (2018). Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science Behind How Your Brain Creates Material Reality. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.
Tang, Y. Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213–225.
To the Brain, Imagination Is Reality
For thousands of years, sages have assured us that our minds create our reality. In Proverbs 23:7, the poet tells us that, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Two thousand years ago the Buddha said, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” And in Charles Fillmore’s The Revealing Word he wrote that, “all conditions and circumstances in (our) affairs and body are attracted to us in accord with the thoughts we hold steadily in consciousness.”
Modern science now possesses the research tools to trace the links between thoughts and things. An ingenious new study used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure how our brains respond to scenarios that exist only in our imaginations.
The research team, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, took 68 people and gave them a mild electric shock accompanied by a sound. They were then divided into 3 groups.
The first group heard the sound repeatedly, though this time without the shock. The second group imagined the sound in their heads repeatedly. The third group imagined the pleasant natural music of rain and birds.
The group imagining the sound showed the same brain activity as the one actually hearing the sound. Two brain regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens, lit up. The first regulates emotions like fear in the midbrain, while the second processes reward and aversion.
Later, people in the “rain and birds” group were still afraid of the sound even when it was repeated many times without the shock. But those in the group that heard the real sound, as well as those imagining it, unlearned their fear. In neuroscience, this revision of reality is called “extinction learning.”
The study’s lead author, Marianne Reddan, said: “Statistically, real and imagined exposure to the threat were not different at the whole brain level, and imagination worked just as well.” Her colleague Tor Wager observed, “This research confirms that imagination is a neurological reality that can impact our brains and bodies.” Adeline’s story from my book Mind to Matter shows the miracles that imagination can accomplish:
Adeline was only 33 when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. It had spread throughout her body. Adeline’s doctors recommended chemotherapy and radiation following surgery. Her chances of survival were small.
Unwilling to surrender her body to the ravages of treatment, she decided that instead she would make her last months as serene as possible.
Adeline began to take long walks in the redwoods of Northern California where she lived. She also took long baths each day. As she lay in the tub and walked through the forest, she imagined tiny glittering healing stars raining from heaven. They passed through her body, and whenever the point of a star touched a cancer cell, she imagined the cancer cell popping like a burst balloon.
Adeline ate the healthiest diet possible, meditated every day, read inspirational books, and spent most of her time in solitude. She found herself feeling better than ever before.
When she went back to the hospital for a checkup nine months later, Adeline’s doctors could find no trace of cancer in her body. When I interviewed her seven years later, she was still cancer-free.
It need not take a crisis like cancer for us to clean up our thinking. When we recognize that our thoughts are creating our reality, we can become meticulous in what we allow to occupy our minds.
References:
Church, D. (2018). Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science Behind How Your Brain Creates Material Reality. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.
Fillmore, C. (1959). The revealing word: A dictionary of metaphysical terms. Unity Village, MO: Unity.
Science Daily (2018, December 10). Your brain on imagination: It’s a lot like reality, study shows. Retrieved Dec 17 from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181210144943.htm
Reddan, M. C., Wager, T. D., & Schiller, D. (2018). Attenuating Neural Threat Expression with Imagination. Neuron, 100(4), 994-1005.
Jump Time
We are in Jump Time. These are times when evolution takes enormous leaps forward.
A famous jump called the Cambrian Explosion occurred 541 million years ago. In a very brief period of time by evolutionary standards, every major animal group in the fossil record appeared. Before the Cambrian, there were no starfish, mice, jellyfish, or scorpions. Suddenly there were.
Other jumps are historical. In 1890, the number of countries in which women were able to vote was 0. Then in 1893 the first country, New Zealand, gave women the vote. Within 40 years, after thousands of years of political suppression, women could vote in virtually every democracy. We as a human species changed our collective minds, and the political power of 50% of the human race came online.
We’re in the midst of a similar jump now. By virtually every standard, global wellbeing is rapidly improving. Consider just a few of thousands of examples:
- Between 2000 and 2015, one billion people – one-seventh of the world’s population – escaped poverty.
- The life span of the average global citizen has doubled in the past century.
- The world’s wealth has tripled in the past 33 years. It has grown 100-fold since the start of the nineteenth century.
- Despite the interruption of horrific wars, each century has been more peaceful than the one that preceded it.
- Carbon emissions per dollar of GDP have dropped by over 50% in the past 50 years.
- The proportion of the world’s people without access to clean water and air has roughly halved in a decade.
You can’t detect this jump by reading the news. In fact, you’d be misled into missing it altogether. An archive of the frequency of words used by the media in 130 countries finds that between 1979 and today, words with negative connotations (like “horrific” and “terrible”) increased. At the same time, positive words like “nice” and “good” declined, as did the happiness level of US citizens.
The truth is that we are in the midst of an explosion of spiritual, physical and material wellbeing. We’re not simply in Jump Time, we’re actually co-creating Jump Time.
That’s because we affect the world around us with our consciousness. Pray, meditate, and feel compassion, and you turn on beneficial genes. These include the genes that trigger your body’s production of stem cells, longevity hormones, and pleasure neurotransmitters. Your consciousness is creating the molecules and cells of your body in every moment.
In chapter two of my book Mind to Matter, I review the extraordinary phenomenon called “emotional contagion.” Emotions can spread through societies as rapidly as the flu. A single happy person makes the people around them happier by 34%. Those affected in turn make others happier — by 15%. The ripple keeps spreading, with the next layer happier by 9%.
With our spiritual practices, we’re helping not just ourselves, but the world. We’re accelerating the jump to the next level of human flourishing. Just like the Renaissance of the 1300s changed art, law, education, politics, religion, and every other facet of human existence, today’s New Renaissance is changing everything.
This is the most exciting time in all of history to be alive. As we as a species jump to the next level of wellbeing, we are unlocking creative potential like the world has never known before. From changing our minds to changing our genes to changing our societies to solving global problems, we’re ushering in a completely different future for the planet.
How does a reduction of 92% in your chances of being in a traffic accident sound to you? How about a reduction in the possibility of a cancer diagnosis of 15% (if you’re a woman) and 34% (if you’re a man)? That’s the result of a long term study of religious believers in Denmark.
It’s called the Danish Religious Societies Health Study, and it examines the death and disease statistics of religious Danes going back more than 70 years. They belong to either the Seventh Day Adventist or Baptist churches. Denmark has a national register of cancer cases, and a second that lists the causes of death. The researchers carefully compared the names on membership lists of the churches with the statistics in these government databases.
For each type of cancer, they compared the expected number of deaths with the actual number, and tabulated the difference. They found that “lifestyle” cancers linked to smoking and alcohol abuse were much lower in the religious societies, which preach abstinence or moderation. Yet the numbers were better even for cancers not linked to lifestyle, such as bladder cancer and pancreatic cancer.
The effect extended to other diseases. The chances of religious Danes getting heart disease were reduced by 27% for men and 21% for women. When every possible cause of death was tabulated, men had just 76% the average mortality rate and women, 87%.
Both Seventh Day Adventists and Baptists believe that God protects them from harm. Based on the numbers, they’re right. Similar results have been found in studies of church-going Americans and Norwegians.
What fascinated me about the study is the magnitude of the effect, especially the traffic accident statistics. After all, they’re called “accidents,” implying that they happen by chance. But the religious Danes having just 8% of the traffic accidents of the average Dane? More than chance may be at work.
In my book Mind to Matter I present many case histories in which people dramatically changed their lives and their health by changing their beliefs. In one, a patient’s cortisol levels dropped by 48% in a single hour. In another, an MIT student was able to precipitate sodium crystals on his first attempt, a feat that normally takes students many attempts.
Why? Because no one in the lab had yet explained to him how extremely difficult this task was. Without that belief blocking him, mind shaped matter easily.
What we think of as random events like traffic “accidents”as well as ailments like cancer and heart “disease”can be strongly influenced by our beliefs.
Which comes first: The chicken or the egg? Does a belief in a loving God protect you, or does it simply result in better lifestyle choices like moderation? These studies don’t allow us to separate them, and they are likely to be linked. The results might be due both to the belief in God’s loving protection and the lifestyle choices that result from following the tenets of the faith.
Either way, it’s worth reinforcing the strength of your positive beliefs. Claim the protection of a loving and benevolent universe at the start of each day. Align your consciousness with Spirit deliberately. Use prayer as your front line response to life’s challenges. Meditate in the morning to set the tone for the day ahead. Associate with people of elevated emotion and spiritual awareness. Abstain from negative thoughts, actions, and media.
Love yourself enough to believe. Science tells us that these practices can produce a dramatic effect on your health and longevity