PREFACE
Why We Wrote this Book
Hello, I’m Bruce Lipton.
And I’m Steve Bhaerman.
Bruce: We welcome you to our new book, Spontaneous Evolution.
In my earlier book, The Biology of Belief, the emphasis was on how our attitudes and emotions control our physiology, our biology, and our gene expression. The book focused on how personal beliefs affect our personal reality. But there is something more profound to be learned, which is that collective beliefs of a culture or society also affect our personal biology and behavior.
Society is beginning to recognize that our current collective beliefs are detrimental and that our world is in a very precarious position. So, I thought it was time to bring out a message about how the new biology and other insights in the world of science can be applied to our societal beliefs and help us address the threatening situations we currently face.
In this work, I emphasize biology, beliefs, and behavior. However, to fully understand this message, my friend Steve Bhaerman offers information regarding how social structure, politics, and economics also tie into our biology.
Steve: For the past 22 years, I’ve been doing comedy, disguised as Swami Beyondananda, the cosmic comic. Comedy is a wonderful way to tell the truth and a way to break through the mind’s defenses to get new information and perspective in under the radar.
Prior to the Swami, however, my first professional “incarnation” was in political science and social activism during the 1960s. I helped start an alternative high school in Washington, D.C., for students who had grown past traditional schooling. These were exciting times when new ideas were emerging and being tested. As I sadly observed, the most important of those tests—whether we could actually live the lofty principles we espoused—was being flunked left and right. For example, I recall meeting one individual who was a world-renowned expert on communal living. Unfortunately no one could stand to live with him.
Realizing how little I knew about how to turn the ideal into the real deal, I embarked on a 25-year journey into psychology, personal growth, meditation, and spirituality. Over the past seven years, I’ve had the itch to integrate those ideas in a book I wanted to call Healing the Body Politic. After I met Bruce, I thought we could work on the project together, and he agreed.
Bruce: In the medical world, we sometimes have a patient who is declared terminal and everyone counts her out. Then something happens, and this individual has a fundamental change in personal belief through which she expresses a spontaneous remission. One moment, she is terminal and, the next, totally free of disease. This shocks many medical practitioners, but it happens frequently, and most people are aware that the phenomenon exists.
Earth and the biosphere—and that includes us—are an integrated living system. While the system appears to be faltering, the planet itself is capable of expressing a spontaneous remission. What is needed to facilitate that remission is a fundamental change in awareness and beliefs as to who we really are. We used the spontaneous remission concept in the title of this book because we believe that science’s new insights will profoundly change civilization’s collective beliefs on the nature of life.
We have woven this new science into a hopeful story of humanity’s potential future to help promote planetary healing. Spontaneous Evolution merges current scientific insights with ancient wisdom to reveal how truly powerful we are and that we can influence our own evolution.
According to conventional Darwinian theory, evolution is a very slow and gradual process, requiring millions and millions of years to manifest the evolutionary transformations of species. New scientific insights reveal that evolution actually consists of long periods of stasis, interrupted by sudden, dramatic upheavals. The upheavals are punctuations that change the course of evolution and lead to whole new forms of life.
Our civilization is presently in a state of disorganization and disintegration. We are currently in dire need of evolutionary advancement and don’t have time for a slow, gradual evolution. Interestingly, in light of the crises we face, it appears that civilization is already in the throes of a punctuation.
Steve: Perhaps the most burning question now is: Is this punctuation a question mark? An exclamation point? Or, sadly, a period?
People are aware that something is happening. They have been exposed to news of diminishing natural resources, climate change, and population explosion. The doomsday clock is rapidly approaching the midnight hour, when it’s going to be more than love that comes tumbling down. Religious people are talking about the end times.
At the same time, we are also coming to realize humanity is connected. The most obvious physical demonstration is the Internet, through which we can send and receive messages around the world at the speed of light. This instantaneous communication ties together the entire global village. Everything is entangled. Everything is related.
As evidence of that, we see science climbing the proverbial mountain of knowledge only to find Buddha sitting on top. In combining Bruce’s scientific knowledge of the body with my knowledge of the body politic, we see that science’s modern discoveries and the ancient teachings of great spiritual leaders lead to the same conclusion: This is a world of relationship. Nobody gets off the bus. We’re all in this together.
Of course, along with this awesome understanding, we realize that the old ways of seeing, believing, and reasoning will not help us alleviate the current situation and step into the new. Our survival is at stake. We need a new paradigm. We need a spontaneous evolution. That is why we have written this book.