The Physiology of Change

Day One of SDi Level II, Personal Emergence, focused on the physiology of change.

Dr. Bruce Lipton presented his views on how perception, or more precisely belief (the environment), shapes the function of our cells. His central premise is that thought patterns generate our health status. If we think we are going to get sick, we create the environment necessary to become sick. He was very clear on how cells respond to various signals, but he allowed thought and beliefs to remain abstract forms of energy, as though our thoughts don't create specific chemical environments in the body.

Lipton made some good points, but he left out the whole field of psychoneuroimmunology, a field pioneered by Candace Pert (Molecules of Emotion). Essentially, PNI states that our thoughts and emotions create specific chemical reactions in the body, some of which are healthy and some of which are toxic. The connection between perception and health isn't as abstract as Lipton intimated.

In arguing that the human body operates in much the same way as its individual cells, he made the point that the skin is the major organ influencing our health status because it is the organ that receives info from the environment. This idea is based on the fact that cells can exist for days or weeks without their nucleus, the supposed brain of the cell. Obviously, humans can't survive without brains, but Lipton argues that they are simply processors, and that the skin is the true center of our environmental intelligence.

Howard Bloom (The Lucifer Principle, Global Brain) wrapped up the day with a short presentation. He did, however, talk about the primary chemicals in the brain/body that generate change (serotonin, testosterone, and dopamine). This fills in part of what Lipton didn't cover.

Okay, here is my take on all this.

Several years ago I stumbled across something called biophotons while researching DNA as an intelligence locus. Essentially, biophotons are light particles (photons) emitted from living DNA (bio). What makes this fact interesting is that biophotons are coherent, meaning that they carry information. Every DNA molecule on the planet is emitting biophotons into the environment. Although it has not yet been proven (as far as I know -- info in this country is lacking), it stands to reason that DNA must also be able to receive and process biophotonic information.

The Germans are already using biophotons to assess cell health. An unhealthy cell emits incoherent patterns, while healthy cells emit coherent patterns. The frequency and coherence of biophotons reveal a great deal about the health of the given cells. The Germans have successfully used this technology to diagnose cancer. ("While normal tissue follows this optimization principle, tumor tissue has lost this capacity by a critical loss of coherence," according to Fritz-Albert Popp.)

So, how does this relate to change?

The human body is sending out and receiving billions of biophoton signals every moment. It is a constant means of communication with our environment. As the environment changes, thereby changing our life conditions (the primary factor in changing a system within the Spiral Dynamic framework), our bodies pick up this information and respond accordingly with neurochemical responses that can, as Lipton points out, alter our genetic code. This may be the single most important contributing factor in biological evolution.

Once we understand how this works, it gives a whole new significance to the idea that how we treat our environment is how we treat ourselves. As we destroy our environment, we change our life conditions for the worse. Over time, maybe over decades or centuries, this will change us, our health, and perhaps even our evolutionary arc.

It is likely to be proven crucial to our continued evolution that we STOP DESTROYING OUR ENVIRONMENT. Every detrimental change to our environment will eventually produce a unique biological response in our bodies and in our genetic code.

Okay, off my soapbox.

On a more practical level: Introducing a person into nature has been shown to have a calming effect on the body, improve the status of depressed persons, and help realign biological patterns that have been corrupted by a lack of exposure to nature (E.O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis and here -- or here for Howard Bloom's take on how environment influences evolution).

To fully understand and engage the change process, we must understand how our exposure to other living things changes us at the microbiological level. While this focus of research only engages one quadrant of the change process, it is one that has been mostly neglected until recently. We need to change that.