The super genome has liberated our thinking about the body, so can it do the same for the mind? Absolutely. No longer is the brain a castle in the air where the mind lives alone. Everything you think and feel is shared by the rest of your body. The brain doesn’t say something in English like “I’m bored” or “I’m depressed.” Everything is chemical and genetic. The same language is understood by every cell. Whatever happens in the brain is reflected in the exquisitely integrated activities of every cell.
We are in the habit of believing that only the brain has awareness of you and your surroundings. This belief has to change, because it can’t be denied that the whole body is intimately interconnected. Not just brain cells, but every cell’s knowledge has been honed for hundreds of millions of years. Of course, as soon as you say that a kidney cell is conscious, traditional biologists, who are wedded to the belief that biological interactions can only be random, will cry “foul!” If you go on to say that a gene or a microbe is as conscious as you are, many other scientists will be up in arms.
But to be outraged by such notions isn’t good science. One of the most brilliant pioneers in quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger, said, “Consciousness is a singular that has no plural…To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless.” We are so used to separating mind and body that merging them into one field of consciousness isn’t acceptable, but physics has known for over a century that everything in the physical universe emerges from fields, whether it is the electromagnetic field from which light emerges, the gravitational field that keeps your feet on the ground, or the quantum field, the ultimate source of matter and energy.
Imagine right this minute that every cell is as conscious as a person. This would demote the brain from its privileged position. We would have to abandon our belief that thinking is strictly mental, involving a stream of thoughts, images, and sensations inside the brain. But clearly there is a different kind of thinking—nonverbal, without visual images, possessing no voice—that silently upholds every cell. This cellular intelligence has been called the wisdom of the body. To make a leap in your state of well-being, it is necessary to do only three things:
Cooperate with your body’s wisdom.
Don’t oppose your body’s wisdom.
Increase your body’s wisdom.
Even a few years ago this kind of language sounded like poetic license. Wisdom is a high-flown word we reserve for venerable sages and teachers. In modern life, it’s not even a word we tend to use very often. But we aren’t dealing in metaphors here. Wisdom is knowledge that comes only with experience, and your cells have plenty of it. Every lifestyle choice we’ve recommended comes down to one thing: obeying and restoring the wisdom of the body. We’ve used the vocabulary of genetics so far. Let’s see if that vocabulary can be expanded to embrace the body’s wisdom as one thing—a field of consciousness—rather than bits and pieces. This will set the stage for the most exciting possibility of all: influencing your own evolution and that of your children, perhaps even your grandchildren.
Cells are faced with many challenges. If you erase all of science’s sophisticated knowledge, a cell is like a water balloon that happens to be alive. But it can be endangered exactly like a water balloon. A puncture would let out all the water inside; getting too hot would cause it to burst; too cold and it would develop ice crystals poking through the skin. A water balloon and a cell both have to worry about staying intact in the face of a cruel, ever-changing environment. Over the eons, cells set out to solve this extremely tough challenge.
Their solution is known as homeostasis, the ability to preserve a steady state “in here” no matter what’s happening “out there.” At first homeostasis was primitive. One-celled organisms evolved to have ion pumps (for chemicals like sodium, calcium, and potassium) on their outer membrane that could keep the right chemical and fluid balance inside them. The next step was to become mobile, so that they could swim after food, escape predators, and head toward a temperature and light level that was best for their survival. The fact that cells aren’t simply water balloons but incredibly complex life-forms is the result of solving the whole problem of remaining balanced “in here.”
Now jump ahead to the present moment. Your cells still “remember” how the solution works, thanks to DNA. Genetic memory, working over vast periods of time, ensures that no cell, however primitive, turns back into a water balloon. Having learned the trick of cell division, during which each strand of DNA makes a perfect duplicate of itself, life-forms marched forward. Memory was evolution’s greatest invention—a totally invisible one—and once it appeared, it had no reason to stop. Cells started remembering more and more things, developing more and more skills, as we do via our brain.
At this moment, with the help of your genes, your cells remember how to keep you alive, an achievement science barely comprehends, because it takes so many dynamic, interlocked, perfectly synchronized events just to keep the chemical balance inside a heart, liver, and brain cell. Although programmed by the same DNA, heart, liver, and brain cells perform dozens of tasks unique to themselves. In the new genetics, we have to think of the body as a community with 100 trillion inhabitants (adding all of our body’s cells to the vast, teeming genes in the microbiome), each of whom has its own self-interest. A heart cell has too much to do on its own to step in for a liver cell, yet this game of “Me first” manages to be about sharing and cooperating as well, because if the heart cell gets tired of messages from the liver or brain and hangs up on the conversation, it dies.
Homeostasis, which started out turning a water balloon into a cell, had to become a billion times more complicated as more cells were invited into the community. Yet in essence, DNA kept repeating the same lesson: stay in balance, preserve a steady state “in here.” To show you how essential that is, consider prisoners who go on a hunger strike, as happened during “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland when members of the IRA used such strikes as political protest. The body can remain in healthy balance for only three days drawing upon its reserves of blood sugar (glucose) in the bloodstream and liver. Then it begins to take sugar from your fat cells, and after three weeks or so, it turns to the muscles, which begin to waste away. Starvation mode sets in when the muscles are emaciated, and death becomes inevitable starting somewhere around 30 days, assuming that nothing but water is taken during that period. Mahatma Gandhi, who fasted to publicize the campaign for Indian independence, performed his longest fast for 21 days. The ten Irish Republican prisoners who attracted worldwide publicity by hunger striking in 1981 survived between 46 and 73 days. (We aren’t taking into account a person who is grossly obese and decides to stop eating; there are hospital records of survival for over a year without food when someone has three hundred to four hundred pounds of fat and protein to draw upon.)
Total fasting brings the progressive breakdown of homeostasis, which very soon disrupts normal functioning everywhere in the body and is eventually fatal. And yet the survival period can be greatly extended simply by adding a small amount of sugar and salt to the water that is being drunk during the fast. Fasters who add a bit of honey to their water have gone up to five months before they stopped. It’s not just the calories that prolong life but maintaining the cells’ ion (electrolyte) balance, the most basic factor that makes even the most primitive cell a living thing instead of a water balloon. (Note: We are not endorsing juice, honey, or sugar water fasting of any duration. The pros and cons of these regimens must be reserved for another time.)
Notice how systematically the body reacts to total fasting, progressing from one strategy to the next to remain in balance for as long as possible. The point we’re making is that the mechanism for the most basic survival has been preserved in your genetic makeup for over a billion years, while simultaneously your super genome keeps up with everything you want to do today. Homeostasis is as complex as you are. This implies a much wider view of the mind-body connection. As you think, feel, dream, imagine, remember, and learn from the past while anticipating and planning for the future, your body must accommodate it all in the present while never sacrificing its self-interest, which is to survive, if not thrive, and remain healthy.
A typical cell stores only enough oxygen and fuel to survive for a few seconds, so the fail-safe protections must come from elsewhere—in a word, cooperation. A cell “knows,” chemically speaking, that it will get oxygen and fuel from the bloodstream, so it doesn’t have to “think” about those things, devoting its “intelligence” to other processes. (We are using quotation marks here to differentiate a cell’s naturally occurring intelligence from common usage, which involves the volitional implementation of knowledge by the brain.)
Unless homeostasis is disrupted and you begin to feel something out of the ordinary (e.g., pain, dullness, fatigue, depression), the fail-safe mechanisms of the body remain out of sight. But we can relate them to our personal experiences, and as we do, the mind-body connection transcends chemicals and biological processes. Your cells are living the same experiences that you are, sharing the same purpose and meaning. As shown in the chart below, the inherent properties of a single cell are astonishing.
Awareness: Cells are acutely aware of their environment, meaning they are constantly receiving and responding to biochemical cues. A single molecule is enough to make them change course. They adapt from moment to moment according to changing circumstances. Not paying attention isn’t an option.
Communication: A cell keeps in touch with other nearby cells and even some far away. Biochemical and electrical messages are exchanged among cells to notify the farthest outposts of any need or intention, however slight. Withdrawing or refusing to communicate is not an option.
Efficiency: Cells function with the least possible expenditure of energy. They must live in the present moment, but they are totally comfortable with that. Excessive consumption of food, air, or water is not an option. As they attempt to do the most with the least energy, they are constantly evolving to become more efficient.
Bonding: Cells making up a tissue or organ are inseparable companions. They share a common identity through their DNA, and even though heart, liver, kidney, and brain cells lead their own lives, they remain tied to their source no matter what they experience. Being an outcast is not an option. However, renegade cells can create a cancerous tumor.
Giving: The chemical exchange in the body is a constant give-and-take. The heart’s gift is to pump blood to the other cells; the kidney’s gift is to purify the blood for everyone else; the brain’s gift is to keep watch over the whole community, and so on. A cell’s total commitment to giving makes receiving automatic—it’s the other half of a natural cycle. Taking without giving back is not an option.
Creativity: As cells become more complex and efficient, they combine with each other in creative ways. A person can digest food never eaten before, think thoughts never thought before, dance steps never seen before. These innovations depend on the cells being adapted to the new. Clinging to old behavior for no viable reason is not an option.
Acceptance: Cells recognize one another as equally important. Every function in the body is interdependent with every other. Nobody gets to be a control freak. Overstepping needs is not an option; otherwise an abnormality like cancer can result.
Being: Cells know how to be. They have found their place in the cosmos, obeying the universal cycle of rest and activity. This cycle expresses itself in many ways, such as fluctuating hormone levels, blood pressures, digestive rhythms, and the need for sleep. The off switch is just as important as the on. In the silence of inactivity, the future of the body is incubating. Being obsessively active and overbearing is not an option.
Immortality: While cells will eventually die, they are immortal in the sense that they use genes as well as epigenetics to pass on their knowledge, experience, and talents in stem cells long after they die. They withhold nothing from their offspring. This is a continuity of existence that is also a kind of practical immortality, submitting to death on the physical plane but defeating it through the propagation of DNA. The generation gap is not an option.
When any one of these nine essentials is disrupted, life itself is threatened. There’s no more glaring—or frightening—example than cancer. A cancer cell has abandoned the essentials. Its actions make it virtually immortal on its own by endlessly dividing. It crowds out and kills neighboring cells. It has dismissed the regulatory chemical signals from surrounding cells. Nothing matters but its own self-interest; the natural balance of the cellular community has gone tragically awry.
Oncology is actively deciphering the genetic triggers that are involved in cancer. These are incredibly complex and interwoven. The diabolical truth is that a malignant cell can draw upon the same “intelligence” as every other cell, but genetic mutation directs its activity into madness. Like a consummate criminal, it wildly changes disguises to keep out of the clutches of the police, or in this case, the immune system. If cancer wasn’t such a dire threat, such ingenuity proves on yet another front that every possibility the human mind can devise has been anticipated by our cells.
In the face of the incredible complexity posed by the super genome, something simple and useful emerges: the nine essentials that cells preserve at all costs are the same essentials that make each of us human. The mind-body connection is so flexible that it can adapt, not just to adversity but also to perversity—the perversity of turning your back on what Nature has designed you to do, which is to remain in balance. When we submit our bodies to toxins, push them to the point of exhaustion, and ignore their signals of distress, we are flouting the wisdom inside every cell.
On the other hand, we can align ourselves with the same wisdom, and when this happens, the mind-body connection reaches its real potential.
1. Have a higher purpose that goes beyond yourself.
2. Value intimacy and communion—with Nature, other people, the whole of life.
3. Keep yourself open to change. From moment to moment sense everything in your environment.
4. Nurture acceptance for all others as your equals, without judgment or prejudice.
5. Relish your creativity. Seize on the renewed freshness of today, not clinging to the old and outworn.
6. Feel how your being is cradled in the natural rhythms and patterns of the universe. Embrace the reality that you are safe and nurtured.
7. Let the flow of life bring you what you need. The ideal of efficiency is allowing Nature to take care of you. Force, control, and struggle are not your way.
8. Feel a sense of bonding with your source, the immortality of life itself.
9. Be generous. Commit yourself to giving as the reason for all abundance.
These nine things fulfill the necessity of cooperating with your body’s wisdom, not opposing it, and doing what you can to improve it. We’ve crossed over from lifestyle choices into making your life more meaningful, which is the whole point of well-being. You don’t simply want to feel better but to lay the foundation for a fulfilled life.
We strive to support our arguments with solid science, and seeing the body as a field of intelligence is no exception. When someone asks, “Where is the mind located?” most people will automatically point to their heads. Why? It may simply be because so many sense organs are located there: eyes, ears, nose, and tongue. With so much information flowing into one part of the body, it could merely be habit that places the mind in our head. Mind and brain have taken up residence together in a box called the skull. Is the brain actually so closed up in its box that it makes sense to speak of it as though it were a machine for making mind, the way a laser printer makes documents? The new genetics makes us ask some culturally radical questions, including the most radical of all: Is a brain even necessary for all forms of “awareness”?
Evolutionarily, nervous systems are not always centralized. Some creatures, like jellyfish, have neuronal nets distributed throughout the body. While humans do possess a central nervous system, we also have other, more distributed nervous systems as well. We have a peripheral nervous system, which includes nerves that gather information for the brain (e.g., the nerves in our sense organs) and nerves that send signals from the brain (e.g., telling our muscles what to do). After it was observed that the gastrointestinal tract can function quite well when severed from the peripheral nervous system, it was concluded that this constitutes a weblike enteric (intestinal) nervous system.
The deciding factor in calling the enteric nervous system a separate nervous system was the specialized ganglion cells that are located between muscle layers in the intestinal wall; these act like a local brain. If you sever the nerves that contact them from the brain, these ganglion cells continue to instruct the intestine to move and absorb and secrete, working quite well and quite autonomously as a self-contained functional unit.
It turns out that the intestinal tract not only takes advice from the rest of the body. It harbors its own reactions. When bad news gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, you are experiencing an emotion as surely as you experience it in your head, and it usually precedes any thoughts you might have. Did the enteric nervous system create such a sensation on its own? That’s unclear, but it’s tempting to think so. Certainly many people trust their gut reactions over the confused and compromised responses that the brain is often saddled with when overthinking sets in.
Findings about brain-like processes outside the skull have become common. The muscles of your face are directly linked to your brain. While we assume that the brain is telling the mouth and lips to smile when we’re feeling happy, the reverse is also true. Seeing a smile on someone else’s face can make you happy, and children are taught to smile as a way to break out of a sad mood. Whether this works or not varies from person to person, but it could be argued that the face is controlling the brain in those instances.
It may be that other parts of the body override or rebel against the brain. Rudy, who plays basketball twice a week, has experienced a phenomenon known as “alligator arms.” When stressed, distracted, or anxious, the muscle memory of the arm and wrist freezes up, and the ball, shot with the brain’s best intentions, can miss the basket by five feet.
The conduction system of the heart, which organizes your heartbeat, can be thought of as the heart’s brain in the same way the ganglion cells in the gut are the brain of the intestines. The independence of the heart’s conduction system is shown when a transplanted heart keeps beating even though the nerves that connected it to the donor’s central and peripheral nervous systems have been severed. The interaction between the heart’s independent processing and the brain is complex and not fully understood.
The immune system has been labeled a “floating brain.” In a very tangible way, thanks to what is called immune surveillance, your immune cells can “decide” whether an invading substance is friend or foe. If they decide wrong, you develop an allergy to harmless things—house dust, pollen, cat dander—that pose no danger and never needed to be repelled. Ask any allergy sufferer whether their allergy affects their thinking. The dullness, lack of energy, and depleted enthusiasm that many allergy sufferers experience leave little doubt about how the immune system is part of a larger bodily intelligence.
These findings are enough to establish that cultural assumptions about mind and brain are full of gaps. The location of the mind is an open question, and any attempt to isolate it physically in the skull runs into valid objections. More and more it looks as if every organ is the locale of its own version of mind. (You might imagine it like the United States, with a centralized federal government, many state governments, and a myriad of local governments working together and influencing one another.)
Thinking is happening, in some guise or other, everywhere in your body all the time. This emerging view has the potential to rock our accepted understanding of mind itself. The brain looks more and more like an outcropping in a landscape that is permeated with varied forms of intelligence. Let’s explore the implications of this new model.
In the old model, nerves were like the wiring that brings electricity to every part of a house. But it’s not just the “wiring” of nerves that links brain to body. Hormones and neurochemicals produced by all sorts of organs affect the way the brain works and how you experience your mind. Consider the mood changes experienced by many women around their menstrual period and menopause, or by men during a midlife crisis. Other mental events are triggered in similar biological ways. Ever feel sleepy after you’ve had too much to eat? Ever feel an adrenaline rush after public speaking or feel addled after you’re thrown accidentally from your bike? Hormones travel to the brain via the bloodstream, producing profound effects on the nature of “your mind.” A panicky thought created by adrenaline, secreted far away from the brain in the adrenal cortex, feels like “your thought”—biology has mysteriously converted itself into mind.
Looking at the brain itself reveals even greater complexity to the mind-brain relationship. While people generally think of neurons as the particular brain cells that produce the mind (acting together in almost infinitely complex networks), there are other cells in the brain without which the neurons could not do their jobs—the glial cells, for example, which outnumber neurons and perform many essential tasks: conveying nutrients and oxygen to neurons, creating the myelin sheaths around their long trunks (axons) to facilitate speedy signal transmission, stabilizing connections between neurons, and serving as the immune system to protect cells against harmful microbes. In connection with Alzheimer’s disease, glial cells clean up debris from aging or injured nerve cells but can also turn against nerve cells and kill them. This “friendly fire” can occur while trying to protect the brain from invaders like bacteria, viruses, and fungi.
The cells that process mental events aren’t necessarily only “of the brain.” Neurons can also derive from other resident cells in the body, and some neurons and many glial cells arrive in the brain via the circulatory system—they are like nomads who eventually find a place to live permanently. Questions abound about how much this happens and in which different regions of the brain it is taking place. (The production of some brain cells might occur by circulating stem cells that directly become neurons and glial cells, or by fusing with preexisting cells.) All these issues are still being worked out by developmental biologists. It’s clear, however, that cells are trafficking between the body and the brain all the time.
So the boundaries between brain and nonbrain in the body are not clear cut. The brain is permeable to the rest of the body. To say the brain creates the mind is at best incomplete. It may be more accurate to say the brain provides access to the mind. In a simple analogy, every automobile needs an engine in order to run. But an engine by itself goes nowhere. The functions that make a car a car require every part acting in concert. Likewise, the functions that our dynamic minds carry out are created by the body-brain complex, not by the brain alone. The brain has always been out of the box; it’s just been waiting for science to catch up. Mainstream science is reluctant, if not dismissive, when faced with the notion of mind outside the brain. Actually, getting your mind to move outside your head is relatively easy. If you burn your hand on the stove, your attention immediately rushes there. The heartache of unrequited love takes one’s attention to the center of the chest. In various spiritual traditions, this kind of “moving mind” becomes a conscious skill. Here’s a common introductory example of “mind outside the box” from Zen Buddhist practice. Students who have taken on a disciplined daily Zen meditation—usually counting or following the breath—are then advised to move their minds into the hara. The hara is the second chakra, or subtle energy center, located below the navel, just in front of the sacrum. One way to describe this “moving mind” exercise is to imagine that the mind is located in a drop of honey in the center of the skull (where we usually experience our mind anyway) and then to let the drop of honey slowly descend down along the front of the spine until it finally reaches the hara.
Succeeding in this exercise takes time and a great deal of practice. Initially it can feel as if there’s only a little movement, because your focus of attention snaps back into your head like a rubber band. And so you begin again, letting the drop of honey slowly descend, bringing your mind with it. Why do this? One reason is that when your mind moves from inside your skull into a position in front of the sacrum, it can bring a jolt of energy, not unlike the way coffee suddenly energizes your mind a few minutes after downing your morning cup. What might otherwise have been sleepy Zen suddenly becomes awake Zen.
More important, practitioners report that there is an exquisite sense of stability in their mind when it’s brought to that location: thoughts still come and go, but they take on a sense of waves rising and falling, or of clouds passing overhead, rather than being like a restless monkey bouncing all over the room. A mind running around in the space of uncontrolled thoughts makes us tired, but it also disguises the potential for having a silent, strong, still mind.
Neuroscience is leery of subjective experiences, but the fact is that practitioners of Zen and other Eastern traditions routinely move their mind out of their head. The experience has been replicated for centuries; it isn’t accidental, haphazard, or hallucinatory. With enough practice, someone can move their mind into their little toe, shoulder, elbow, perhaps even across the room. The immediate answer of most neuroscientists is that such a subjective sense of “moving mind” either isn’t real or can be explained away as a kind of neurological illusion, like the “phantom limbs” reported by patients after a leg or arm has been amputated. The phantom limb seems to occupy the same space as the real limb that was lost and even experiences pain.
The best rejoinder to this claim is that a whole host of subjective experiences in medicine are self-reported and cannot be measured without asking the patient what’s going on. Statements like “I feel a pain here,” “I’m depressed,” “I’m confused,” and “I’ve lost my balance” can sometimes be traced to distorted brain activity on an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scan, but only the patient can relate what is actually happening. The brain scan can’t tell someone he’s in pain when he says he isn’t. (When a bacterium avoids a toxin in a petri dish or is attracted to food, can we claim to know that it isn’t feeling some primitive form of repulsion or attraction?)
There comes a time in all contemplative traditions when one’s sense of mind and of the ordinary self changes fundamentally, lasting for a moment or a lifetime. In Vedic and Buddhist traditions, these experiences are called Samadhi, in which a connection is made with pure awareness at the deepest level. In Hebrew mystical practice this might be understood as D’vekut, in Christian practice “cleaving to God.” The ordinary thinking mind is left behind, and one arrives at consciousness without content.
Samadhi enters the shadow zone in which “my mind” dissolves into mind itself. Here, reality shifts dramatically. Instead of sitting inside the space of a room, the person sits inside mental space (Chit Akasha in Sanskrit). The events that take place are not strictly mental, however. On the inner voyage, time, space, matter, and energy emerge from silence much the way physics describes creation bubbling up from “quantum foam.” In our view, the inner experience of meditation, yoga, Zen Buddhism, and the like are not inferior to the data collected on subjective states like pain, feeling happy, or falling in love. Brain scans offer a correlate with these experiences, but it takes a person to have them.
It makes people woozy, sometimes even apprehensive, to discover that there is no boundary between “me” and the whole world. What about the skin? It is portrayed in high school biology class as an impermeable barrier protecting you from invaders assaulting the body from “out there.” But the metaphor of the skin as living armor isn’t viable. Your skin is a community of your human cells and bacterial inhabitants. Pause and move your hand, observing how the wrist and finger joints move under the skin. Why doesn’t the skin break down with all this motion, the push and pull of your fingers closing and extending, your arm bending and stretching? Because the bacteria lining the creases in your skin digest the cell membranes of dying skin cells and produce lanolin, which lubricates the skin (as does the collagen connecting skin cells). How long would “you” and your genome last if your skin were cracking, open to infection just from typing on a laptop or waving good-bye to someone? Fortunately, we are living communities thriving in harmonious interaction driven by the super genome.
The only reason we separate “in here” from “out there” may be biological rather than based on reality. Research is starting to account for the swing between the inner and outer world, a swing we all experience every day. Sometimes we direct our attention to objects “out there,” sometimes to mental events “in here.” One hypothesis now suggests specific neural activity within two complementary signaling networks in the brain—one is active when you are dealing with the world outside the body (called the task-positive network), while the other, the “default network” (or task-negative network), revs up when your focus is inward, as commonly happens in wakeful rest, introspection, or from lack of significant sensory input. Our brains are thought to alternate rapidly between these two networks, but when deep meditation is performed, they both activate together. In meditation, “inside” and “outside” are no longer opposite and contrary but are experienced as a seamless whole. And gene activity is changing throughout this magnificent process.
One last boundary keeps mind and body apart, a rigid belief in physicality. The entire setup of the brain is physical. Every action a neuron takes is physical, and so are the coded sequences in DNA that create nerve cells. Thanks to the new genetics, this coding has become far more transparent; with stunning advances in technology, we can view the tiniest alterations in gene activity. Nowhere along the line, however, can you see DNA obey the mind. Thoughts are invisible, and science is leery of anything that cannot be visibly detected and measured. The validity of science is all about measurement, even if it takes an instrument as powerful as an electron microscope to extend human sight.
Yet we know that our minds are at work. The new genetics has helped the cause of invisibility, so to speak, by showing that subjective experiences in life can lead to epigenetic modifications that alter gene activity. In a way, the fact that our bodies change according to how we think and feel is so obvious it doesn’t need science to prove it. The whole body responds when someone loses a spouse, a best friend, or a job, and in the wake of grief there can be depression, greater susceptibility to disease, and even a risk of premature death. Your super genome directly reacts to these life changes.
All these changes are regulated by genes, and yet the lure of the physical remains strong in mainstream science. A geneticist will first look at the chain of molecular alterations in DNA, finding more and more complex links, before anything as intangible as the emotion of grief is considered. This limitation is the final frontier that must be crossed. How can that be accomplished?
One angle is the concept of the field, which is basic in modern physics. Everything that happens physically at the level of atoms and molecules (which are observable “things”) goes back to fluctuations in the field (which is invisible and “no-thing”). You can see a compass needle point north, but you can’t see the Earth’s electromagnetic field, which is causing the effect. You can see a leaf fall from a tree, but you can’t see gravity pulling it to the earth. Is something like this happening when genes become active?
An intriguing experiment by British molecular biologists in 2009 might illuminate this point. For decades we have known that DNA has the property of repairing itself, which it does by recognizing which parts of the double helix are incorrectly coded, broken, or mutated. When a cell divides and a strand of DNA duplicates itself, recognition is also involved in reassembling the new strand as each base pair finds its proper place. In their experiment, the British team placed separate strands of DNA in water and watched them begin to form round clumps (sphericals) of genetic material. A long sequence of 249 chemical bases (called nucleotides) was marked with fluorescent dye to follow how it attached itself to other bits of DNA inside the clump.
The results were astonishing and inexplicable. Exact matching sections of DNA were about twice as likely to join together, recognizing each other even when they were separated in the water by distances that allowed no physical contact. To a cell biologist, this makes no sense, since it takes physical contact or chemical connections for anything to happen inside a cell. But in terms of the field, the mystery has an explanation. Like a compass obeying the lines of magnetic force encompassing the planet, these strands of DNA could be obeying a “biofield” that keeps life intact.
The research team dubbed the behavior of the DNA strands “telepathic” in the absence of any physical connection that drew them together. The biofield, operating through infinitesimally tiny electric charges, might offer an explanation less supernatural. But recognition is a trait we ascribe to the mind. When you wait at the airport for a friend’s plane to land, you recognize who she is out of a crowd of strangers, not by going one person at a time, but simply by knowing who you’re looking for. In the same vein, but far more mysterious, an Antarctic penguin returning from the sea with food in its crop can recognize which chick belongs to it, heading directly to the chick among thousands of other penguin chicks.
Something about recognition is basic and defies random choice. This is a property of the mind field that all of us depend on—at this moment you recognize words on a page, not collections of alphabet letters that you sort through to obtain what they mean. Apparently DNA can do the same, because the 249 nucleotides didn’t match up one by one; the entire sequence found its mirror image, defying randomness.
This telling experiment helps cross the final frontier, but it doesn’t get us entirely past physicality. To do that, we must accept that other, as yet indescribable and unmeasurable, factors are acting behind the scenes, organizing bits of matter into living creatures. In mystical traditions around the world, adepts have experienced this invisible agent.
All that’s needed is to contact into your natural field of intelligence, present from your brain down to every cell in your body. Fields are infinite, but you don’t have to be. A small horseshoe magnet is an outcropping of the Earth’s immense magnetic field, and in turn, the Earth’s magnetic field is the tiniest speck in the electromagnetic field of the universe. Yet every trait of this infinite field is present in a magnet. In the same way, you are an outcropping of your mind as part of a larger mind field. This gives you an automatic connection to it. When an experience of the mind field is clear, as in deep meditation, perception changes. Some people who have entered this state of consciousness have reported the following experiences:
They sensed infinity in all directions.
Time and space stopped being absolutes—they were seen as purely mental creations.
All separation ceased. Only wholeness was real.
Every event was connected to every other, like waves rising and falling on an unbounded ocean.
Life and death no longer represented a beginning or end. They were merged into the continuum of existence.
These realizations are available to everyone; you don’t have to attend a mystics school. There is nowhere to go, in fact, in pursuit of the mind field, because we are surrounded by it, down to our genes. It takes a special angle of vision to make the field show itself. In the Vedic tradition, a text called the Shiva Sutras gives 108 ways to see beyond the mask of matter and discover what lies beyond. One such technique is to see what lies beyond the sky. You can’t perform such an act, not physically, but that’s not the point. In the attempt to see beyond the sky, something else happens: the mind stops. Baffled by the impossibility of the exercise, the normal stream of thought ceases. At that instant, the mind perceives only itself. No object obstructs pure awareness, and, aha! That’s what lies beyond the sky.
A fish surrounded all of its life by water cannot know what water is actually like. But if it jumps out of the sea, there’s a contrast, and then wetness can be experienced as the opposite of dryness. You can’t leap out of the mind field, but you can slow down your mind, and then there’s a similar contrast: you can experience what stillness, silence, and the cessation of activity feel like.
Even if you don’t practice meditation, which is where the great sages, saints, and mystics found their deep contact with the field, you can still get a glimpse. Sit quietly with your eyes closed, doing nothing. Notice the stream of thoughts going through your mind. Each mental event is temporary. It comes, stays for an instant, and then departs. In between each mental event, notice that there’s a brief gap. By diving into this gap, you can reach the mind field in its infinite extent. But you don’t have to try it this minute.
Having glimpsed the gap between two thoughts, open your eyes. Consider what you’ve just experienced. Mental events rise—but from where? Mental events fade away—but where to? The mind field. We pay so much attention to our thoughts that we miss this simple point. Each thought is a transient event, while the mind is permanent and unchanging. Did you feel how easy it is to notice this? For a brief moment you’ve become a Gyan Yogi, someone who is united with the mind field. Or to be more precise, someone who knows they’re united with the mind field, because there’s no such thing as losing contact with the field. We just forget about the field, being obsessed over the mind’s constant round of thinking, feeling, sensing, and imagining.
We aren’t criticizing the activity of the mind. Experiencing the mind field only deepens your appreciation of life. It engenders the wonder that caused the Persian poet Rumi to exclaim, “We come spinning out of nothingness scattering stars like dust,” and on another occasion, “Look at these worlds spinning out of nothingness /This is within your power.”
Life evolves according to patterns everyone finds beautiful to behold. Evolution gave rise to the human genome and the brain, the most complex structure in the known universe. Can this mystery be solved by looking beyond the mask of matter? The body exhibits almost infinite “intelligence” in every cell. What we refer to as cellular “intelligence” is the cell’s natural ability to adapt, respond, and make the right choices at every moment not only for itself, but in service to every other cell, tissue, and organ in the body. Something caused this to happen. In pursuit of that something, we need to address evolution itself, the force that makes it possible for all of us to be here in the first place.