Transcript for:
Lecture by Dr. Bruce Lipton on Consciousness and Epigenetics

consciousness is creating our life experiences you want to change your life you don't change the world you change your own consciousness the world changes after that essentially that genes express based upon how humans consciously perceive the world but if you understand you're the creator then that's the option to stop creating the hell that we're living in and start creating the heaven that we desire welcome to commune we are on a mission to inspire heal and bring the world closer together okay dr bruce lipton great to be with you jeff i am so honored to be with you because uh you're making a difference out there in the world talking to people and trying to uplift them and that's what everything's all about because we need this evolutionary upheaval at this time and so thank you for being that clarion that says there's a better way oh man that's that's very sweet yeah a lot of my uh conversations these days have been hovering around this concept of the sixth grade extinction and maybe we'll talk about that but uh we'll see what we can do to uh to abate that process or be part of the evolution of what comes next so i'd rather be part of the evolution where it comes next than part of the evolution that's going down [Laughter] yes well so i've been uh saving up sort of a mini portfolio of um topics to excavate with you over the years and uh if anything i'm worried that we won't get to as many of them but um well maybe i'll just spend a moment setting this up and we can back into some of these topics that i'm excited to talk about so to say that you've been a pioneer in the field of epigenetics is is basically an understatement um uh and just for clarity for the audience and we'll get into you know some of the definitional work around epigenetics and behavioral epigenetics but basically this notion that gene expression modifies in response to its environment and there are myriad different environmental inputs that can influence the expression of a gene for example i recently introdu interviewed this very fascinating doctor cara fitzgerald who's part of the emerging field of epinutrition essentially studying how different foods influence the the coding of proteins but one primary arbiter of gene expression is belief essentially that genes express based upon how humans consciously perceive the world and and you've obviously written brilliantly about how perception shapes biology and in many cases trumps our under conventional understanding of dna so obviously this work opens up so many interesting doors into the nature of consciousness the placebo effect quantum physics and maybe we can back into some of those topics by first examining a very tangible way that people experience the relationship between perception and biology and that is through the experience of fear which is a omnipresent and prescient topic today uh given everything that's going on in the world so maybe let's we'll back up a couple millennia so for the overwhelming majority of our human history homo sapiens existed as hunter-gatherers and we evolved certain um adaptive phenotypic traits that comported with with foraging on the serrage so 200 000 years ago bruce and i go out and roam the savannah we're searching for food to bring back to our clan and all of a sudden a saber-toothed tiger or some odd toad horned ungulate springs forth out of the underbrush and it's furiously running towards bruce and i so as a place to start can you describe the neurobiological cascade that is triggered by the perception of threat before we even get to the human aspect of this you have to recognize something called the biological imperative what the hell is that and that is it's the drive to survive uh and all organism this is the point where it becomes critical is organisms as the bottom organism bacteria they are endowed with a biological imperative because if you try and kill a bacterium it's not going to go oh okay kill me it's going to do everything it can to stay alive so every living organism has a drive to stay alive well in that case it also then has an awareness of what could you know compromise that alive and then we build up a an awareness of the scary things that could threaten us so that if they show up in our world then we're going to immediately make a response to protect ourselves let me just before because we might get into this later there are two aspects to the biological imperative survival of the individual yourself let's say which is meaning why you you know you seek air water food you know shelter and things like this because this keeps us alive the second one is also very critical because the second part of biological imperative is survival not of the individual but survival of the species which means there's a drive to reproduce to keep the species alive so we can talk about the individual one first okay so it says when threats come into the environment the biological imperative is the first to waken you to the threat okay where is it well that's why you said well in the neural system i go we don't even know where it is and it was there in bacteria before there was much of a neural system so all of a sudden it goes boy we don't know where it is but we know it exists and and the relevance about that is that we all live by this biological imperative which protects us okay and then i say well as you said if a threat is looming then the biology switches its action community organization from growth into protection and they're mutually exclusive i'll just give a reason why if there's a stimulus that offers growth you go to that stimulus and you go with your arms open to take it in assimilate it's growth it has to it could be food it could be love i don't care you open up you go to the stimulus open up and take it that's growth protection you go away from the threat and you close yourself down in protection i say guess what you can't be in growth and protection at the same time they're mutually exclusive behaviors so when we get into protection we shut down our openness and our growth in the world and we start to look at how can i preserve myself in this threat okay i said well how does the body make a response to this i go that the hypothalamus which interprets the signals interprets the fact that there's a threat and when it does that it sends a signal to the pituitary gland the brain hypothalamus says oh this is a threatening situation and it sends a signal the pituitary gland which in high school was called the master gland because its secretions control 20 you know 50 trillion cells that are in your body and then in a state of threat the pituitary sends a signal to the adrenal glands which in school was called fight or flight and all of a sudden it says what happens the adrenal stress hormones go to the body and they redirect the system they take away uh the energies that are involved with like growth the energy is uh involved with the immune system and i go why look if you're being chased by a saber-tooth tiger bacterial infection is not your big deal at that moment okay and the immune system uses tremendous amount of energy because when people get sick sometimes they don't even have energy get out of bed okay so what are we talking about when we're getting stressed we want to allocate all the body's energy to escape and escape uses arms and legs so i go your energy is where in the blood so i go so what happens when stress hormones come in they redirect the flow of the blood and they take the blood and preferentially send it to the arms and legs because that's where the energy is going to activate to get me out of there and i go well preferentially where was it preferentially before the stress i go it was in the gut the viscera all the organs in here i go what were their functions growth maintenance of the body cleaning up the system preparing the energy you know taking care of the machine more or less okay but at the moment stress hormones are released in the body the blood vessels in the gut respond to the stress hormones by squeezing shut and when they squeeze shut that means the blood is not really going into the gut but it's now going preferentially into the arms and legs and that's where we want to get that energy to run so number one stress hormones shut down the growth mechanisms of body number two they shut down the immune system because that's a high energy system that is not relevant to an external threat and then number three which i always call the adding of insult to injury is the blood vessels in the conscious brain are energizing conscious creativity thinking you know an action like that but the conscious brain is very slow processor compared to the rest of the brain back here called the subconscious brain and the subconscious brain is not only extremely fast beyond conscious brain but it's a million times more powerful so what happens is remember i told you the blood vessels in the gut constrict with stress hormones that's where people get that butterflies in the stomach kind of feeling queasy feeling because what's going on and blood vessels are all squeezing shut you can feel them and that's the queasiness but then the stress hormones go into the brain and they do the same thing in the conscious blood part of the brain they squeeze the blood vessels shut i say so i'm not nourishing or energizing my consciousness but when i squeeze it shut the blood is then sent to the back of the brain where the subconscious has reflex behavior reactions high speed very fast we become less intelligent when stress hormones are there because we're not using thinking we're using reflexes and that's a completely different way of life so i say so what happens here i say well growth taking care of the body threat get the energy into the arms and legs as best you can and run like hell and get out of there but at the compromise of what well you're shutting down growth you're shutting down the immune system and you're shutting down intelligence and i go you don't need that to escape from the tiger you just need fast arms legs and reflexes to make them go i go well this is really great back you know two three hundred thousand years ago where uh the only real threat we had was the saber-tooth tiger i go so what i say well if you're running from that saber-toothed tiger and you escape 10 minutes 15 minutes you're gone you're safe then you return back into growth again maintain the body today's world the threats are so so many of them out there that we're not on uh stress hormones for 10 minutes we're on stress hormones all day and i go what's the consequence well i say all day you are inhibiting the mechanism from taking care of itself and i say today we have a health crisis i go yeah a lot of people up until recent times said oh the genes the genes are causing the disease and all this kind of stuff like that fact of science less less than one percent of disease is connected to genetics i was saying well then we have a health crisis where the heck is where is all this coming from and the answer is stress over 90 percent of illness is directly loaded to stress why because it shuts down the immune system it shuts down the growth you're weak and it was only for a short period years and years ago but today that period of stress is extended so it's like 24 7. and i say well that is the major compromise of life on this planet the fears and i go well zero interesting because the media loves to give us all the fears and manipulates us so when you watch the news you're just dripping stress hormones through your body compromising yourself and so it's a point where we have to get out of this continuous chronic connection with fear which is everywhere on this planet just watch the news surf the web you know look out your window and you can see this place is crazy and everybody's trying to do what well you know fear closes you down well you can't survive why because you need to be engaged with the world and respond to everything but if you're closing yourself down you pulled yourself out and that's where uh disease starts to begin and it's at every level you know it's like people are thinking oh well cancer is caused by genes i just love this as a fact of science ready there's not one gene that causes cancer there's no gene that causes cancer they're called oncogenes cancer genes they say well because they used to say well that's the responsive thing that's responsible uh your cancer right there and i go genes do not cause cancer what the result is that consciousness will engage those genes if we're out of harmony if we're in a stress situation so i say well well then the gene didn't turn on and do that it was the consciousness that activated that gene so for example most women are very of course concerned about what's called the breast cancer chain oh that's the gene that causes breast cancer i say it doesn't cause breast cancer it's associated with breast cancer did it cause the cancer no no it was activated by a problem and that problem is repressed anger or you know repressed emotions that weren't allowed to express themselves then you activate the gene we've been blaming the gene i go no the gene didn't even do this it was us and i go that's the difference i say what's the difference i say if you believe the gene did it then you're acknowledging you're a victim my genes there i had nothing to do with it i i didn't pick these damn genes i can't change these genes and these genes are turned on and off by themselves according to the story which means i'm a victim of my biology and i go but james didn't do this it was our response to the world that did this i go wait a minute our response to the world i say yeah your consciousness i go why is that significant change your consciousness and the diseases can disappear or the the consciousness can cause a disease or a change of the consciousness can cause the disease to change the difference is this first story victim of heredity jeans did this i'm powerless victim give me drugs uh the new story is i through my disharmony are causing a cancer which then leads to a very simple understanding is well then what if i return to harmony i go but then the cancer disappears as simple as that and all of a sudden it says first story victim second story the new science epigenetics where consciousness is controlling the genes master so we go from victim to master with a change in the science because now i'm going to give the power back to the people rather than saying you're a victim of your genes you have nothing to do with it now i'm going oh no you're the creator of this and all of a sudden that changes how we look at the world after how many years of being programmed to be victims and then we find out no my god we're the creators well for the creators then where the hell the issue is i go well that's the programming we have to deal with yeah yeah god so interesting okay so many threads to pull on there um what was once an adaptive advantage essentially this hpa axis response to threat has become maladaptive because of these systems and structures that we have reified in our society so for example fast forward to the serengeti of facebook for example um which i often call the largest non-consensual psychological experiment in history it is yes sorry it's true and and we're spending especially i have three daughters particularly teenagers are spending an inordinate amount of time well not on facebook but on all of these platforms and these algorithms are designed for the hind brain basically to leverage negativity bias through fear and outrage in order to maximize views and watch time etc and the result is this chronic secretion of neuromodulators and hormones like cortisol and epinephrine etc we become very uh entrenched in this sympathetic overload which i think what you're saying is having really detrimental impacts on human physiology so i'd love to kind of dig into that mechanism a little bit how do let's say you know we are in this constant state of low-grade fight-or-flight and we're having a hormonal response that is concomitant with with the sympathetic response how do our cells at the cellular level how do we know how why are they acting differently how are genes turning on and off in response to serum hormonal levels well the first thing we have to understand is this the the entire belief that genes turn on and off by themselves is a totally false statement because by acknowledging that then you're saying well i have no control over it the genes did it okay but we don't know genes are blueprints they're there to design what are called the proteins of the body 100 000 different proteins the the proteins are like lego pieces that you can assemble them the 100 000 different proteins and different combinations make a muscle cell with one combination of proteins some nerve cell with a different combination already so i say yeah but these are the proteins that create us and these are the proteins where life comes from i said but what about the dna so what proteins wear out that they're they're called labile not stabile labial meaning that they fall apart you put a piece of meat on a plate and we come back next week that meat is not going to be the same as it was when we put it out there it's going to start to break down fall apart so proteins that naturally keep falling apart but then you have to replace them i say yeah but proteins are complex molecules with a complex structure and i go oh i said well how do i replace these complex structures i say there are blueprints a blueprint to make this protein or that protein 100 000 proteins i say they're blueprints i said what do you call a blueprint i got a gene a gene is a blueprint i go oh a gene is a blueprint and then we told people well they were self-emergent which means oh they turn themselves on they turn themselves off i say you know look let's be honest about a blueprint we go into an architect's office she's working on a blueprint you lean over her shoulder and you ask her hey is your blueprint on or off and she look at you like what the hell are you talking about there's a blueprint there's no on and off i go precisely the difference is you can read a blueprint or not read a blueprint but the blueprint doesn't read itself and all of a sudden i said then for years we were saying the blueprint was turning on and off by itself controlling you and now we know no it's the consciousness that engages the blueprint i say how does it do it i say through chemistry different chemicals cause different responses and genes a matter of fact that's what i did in 1967 which is i know like 40 50. it's a long time ago and uh what did i do i had genetically identical cells cloning cells and i had three plates with genetically identical cells in them but i fed them different culture medium i said what's cultural medium well that's the growth environment i go yeah but what is culture medium i say laboratory version of blood so if i'm going to grow human cells i say well it's human blood made out of and then i go into the lab and with a recipe i make culture medium matthew and blood okay and so i go so what i say well because i'm creating the mixture i can change some of the composition so i created three different combinations of chemistry called culture mediums slightly different and i had three plates genetically identical cells in all the plates and what i did is i fed one plate with culture medium version one another plate with culture of medium version two and a third with culture medium three and i said well what was the result they were all genetically identical i said well in one environment culture one the cells form muscle in environment two the cells form bone in environment three the cells form fat cells and i go wait a minute i'm teaching a genes control life and here we have an experiment that reveals all these cells are genetically identical then what was the cause of why one becomes bone and one becomes muscle and the answer was it wasn't the cells it was the environment the culture medium i go wow that's really neat that's the foundation of what we call epigenetics the genes didn't control this they were controlled by the environment that the cells were in okay so i go so what's the significance for this i go well a human when we see ourselves in a mirror single entity and i go well that's an illusion because we're made out of 50 trillion cells the cells are the living entity bruce by definition is a community of 50 trillion sentient cells so i go oh so the cells in our body our body is like a skin-covered petri dish it's got 50 trillion cells inside i go yeah but it also has the original culture medium i said what was that blood and i go then what i say it doesn't make a difference if it sells in a plastic dish or the skin covered dish it's still controlled by the environment culture medium in the plastic dish that's the one i put in there in your skin covered dish your blood is your culture medium so bottom line is this it's the chemistry of the blood the environment that activates expression of the gene and i go ah now comes the most of well where's that chemistry come from i go the brain is the chemist that puts the chemicals in the blood but then comes the ultimate one that jeff has been waiting for me to say and that is simply this so what chemicals should the brain put in the blood the answer is whatever thought you have the brain will translate that into complementary chemistry there's a chemistry for love which is a different chemistry than fear which is a different chemistry than anger and i go oh and so basically says this if i hold a picture of love in my consciousness my brain translates that into love chemistry dopamine for pleasure oxytocin bonding vasopressin makes you more attractive keep your partner and growth hormone which does what it says so if i have a picture of love in my head i'm a healthy person why those chemicals when in my blood are going to enhance my vitality that's why people fall in love they glow that glow of health is not an accident as a result of the chemistry but i say but if i have a picture of fear in my head i don't release love chemistry as you mentioned uh jeff just a moment ago we start to release things like stress hormones into the blood or factors that affect the immune system to protect us and shut us down and go wait the chemistry of love is totally different than the chemistry of fear but to the cells they respond to the chemistry so there's a behavior that's associated with love vitality health and that's why love is so cool but there's a different behavior associated with fear because it's a shutdown of the mechanism protection wall yourself off save yourself and stuff like that and i'm going so here's bottom line we used to say genes control us we're victims we didn't pick them can't change them they turn on and off by themselves the new science epi genetics and epi means above so epigenetics is above the genes that's where the control comes from consciousness you change your consciousness and you change the chemistry of your blood which and then in turn changes the genetic activity and all of a sudden it says then i'm not a victim of my jeans damn it i'm the master of my genes because it depends on what chemistry i'm going to send to the cells which then is dependent on what is my consciousness and all of a sudden it says oh my goodness we're not victims we're creating this uh but if you didn't know it then that's when it goes to victim it's like i don't know how that happened i go well i'll tell you how it happened now it was what you were thinking that created the chemistry which in turn adjusted the genetics to complement the vision are there so many potent metaphors to to draw there i mean you know we think about the social medium for cells being in a petri dish it's called a culture well of course you know we have a human culture too and if you stick an individual in a caustic or toxic culture you're probably going to end up with the same result if you stick a cell a pluripotent stem cell in a in a toxic uh petri dish right i mean there's a metaphor there that's a 100 right and that's why you know if we really start to go into a lot of discussion about what where's culture coming from and who's controlling the ideas of the culture because they can then control the chemistry of the of the people in that culture and it's interesting because in today's world because there's so much movement of people from one place to another place that let's say the culture in japan which has its own correlation of certain diseases associated with japanese cultures but if the japanese individual comes and lives in the united states with a different culture we have different stressors over here they end up with different diseases so the diseases weren't accidents the diseases were correlated with with the culture from where that person is living yeah and of course we're exporting uh things like the standard american diet to places like japan right and so we're so on a nutrition level we're becoming more uh homogeneous as a homogeneous and down and downhill not not homogeneous going up but homogeneous going down because the vitality of the world is under so much threat that that we're in a global health crisis not a local global health crisis uh and it's not based on the genes it's based on the culture yeah and if you start to pull this thread even further you know this constant fear cycle which as you've eloquently described triggers the secretion of cortisol epinephrine adrenaline etc those have very specific knock-on impacts as it pertains to like metabolism for example so you know uh high levels of cortisol is going to trigger high blood glucose levels um and essentially we know that chronic high blood glucose levels are concomitant or causative for you know diabetes cardiovascular disease cancer you know all these um diseases associated with with chronic inflammation for example and of course then we say well wait a minute i thought cardiovascular disease was hereditary um but but no so i but this is very few people are just this are are disentangling this matrix here which we're looking at all this efflorescent levels of chronic disease and we're scratching our heads and saying like okay more statins you know metformin you know all this stuff when really if you go upstream and you start to unpack some of the things you're talking about this interconnected relationship between belief and biology then it becomes almost glaringly obvious on a chemical level like this is not a woo-woo thing uh that the biochemistry is right there so um i'd love for you to maybe get into put on your cell biologist hat a little and you can obviously take this wherever you want um but i'm interested to know how the cell actually uh perceives how it is is a um how does it what what methods does it have at its disposal for perception so let's say there's high concentration of serum cortisol how does the cell even know okay how do we know what's going on in the world well you have eyes i can see i got nose i can smell i got ears i can hear taste touch pain temperature i got love emotion i got fear emotions i got i got senses out of all this i said how would you get them i said i got receptors an eye is a receptor an ear is a receptor i say at the cellular level cells have receptors not as complex but there are proteins like antennas like tv antennas that are tuned to different frequencies of what's going on so a cell in its skin has receptors just as a human has receptors eyes ears nose built into its skin to read the environment so the cell needs to read the environment so it can adjust its behavior to survive biological imperative what's the behavior i need in this environment i say well what is this environment i said well i have to read it so i have all these receptors okay the brain sends the signals which respond to those receptors and so they determine uh which signals are going to be released into the blood are going to go to the cell and the cell has receptors like we have on its skin reads the environment and then adjusts its behavior and the significance about this is then here comes the critical part an amoeba lives in the outside world in a pond okay i say well as an amoeba is a single cell it's reading the world around it to adjust itself to that world but then i go what about my liver cell i go wait a minute well it's supposed to respond to the world i go yeah but it's inside how does the hell know what's going on outside because i have to adjust my cells on the inside to match what's going on on the outside that's where all of a sudden a new thing is introduced there's environment and the cell which is going to respond to the signals but the cells are not in the environment so they can't see it i say well how do they see it i say the brain reads the environment and then sends the appropriate signals to the cell to control its function to stay alive in that environment everything's cool except for this we can interpret that environment so two people can get the exact same signals but have totally different behavior based on their experiences so the point is my liver cell has no idea what the hell is going on outside except it takes the signal from the brain and if it's a an individual who's afraid then the signals coming from the brain are the stress hormones and say get ready for fight or flight but the same person sitting right next to them in the exact same signals reads it totally differently it says no it's okay i go then the liver cell and that person is not getting the fear and all of a sudden then i say well the behavior of the cells in person one is different than the behavior and yet we're in the same environment i said well how'd that happen interpretation right and culture it's so fascinating because you know if a snake slithered across the the floor here in the studio i might go right into fight or flight in fact i would because my father was incredibly uh scared of snakes and he he he taught me that behavior but in some cultures or for example there was a i can't remember what a snake experts called it herbology herpetologist herpetologist yeah um if that person would clearly be able to identify that that snake was not poisonous that's right yep so both both these guys the herpetologist and the other guy walking down the same sidewalk snake comes across totally different behaviors totally different and then i say but one of them is a stress response and the other one is a knowledge response oh yeah look at that snake i'm very familiar with that snake blah blah blah i can pick it up i can hold it i'm not afraid you on the other hand will run like hell if the snake comes even close to you i go same signal totally different response why learned they were learned as you said your father brought that concept of the fear into your world you bought it and now you're afraid of snakes yeah so let's say uh yeah i recently interviewed a brilliant guy i'm sure you know him uh gabor mate so he talks oh yeah brilliant guy just oh man um and uh you know he talks a lot about trauma-inducing events than uh that are then concomitant with disease so let's say abuse or neglect how is abuse or neglect recognized by ourselves and how does that change the mechanism of protein synthesis for example our does abuse and neglect or a trauma-inducing event cause like dna methylation such that certain genes don't express or do express can you untangle that mechanism for me yeah well basically i said well the nucleus of the cell has genes genes are programs we used to think they were read-only you got this gene you got that program nothing you can do about it we now know epigenetics says no genes are read right i can read the gene but i can also alter the gene i say why because as environments change i have to adjust my self and my behavior to survive in that environment if it's a threatening environment i'm going to have to do some kind of protective mechanism to stay alive uh versus if it's a healthy environment that's a totally different behavior and i say well how do i learn these things as well experiences that you have but also most importantly as you brought up and this is really critical is we download in the beginning experiences from other people and i'll give you a simple reason just simple in the old days not like today you would go to the store and buy a computer and i'm saying the computer because the brain is a computer so i'm going to parallel right here you bought a brand new computer you took it home you plugged it in you push start the screen lights up it's booted it's ready to go i got a brand new computer i say okay now do something write a story do a drawing you know surf the web you say i can't do it i say you got a brand new computer say first i have to put programs into the computer and then i can access the programs with no programs in the computer i got to screen it lit up but nothing no place to go there's nothing no program so the child's brain a computer the screen on that child's brain boots up in the last trimester of pregnancy and i say okay use this brain i go no programs can't use it so i said ah the first seven years of a child's life the machine brain mechanism is designed to download programs i said where'd you get the programs from i said ah the first seven years of your life you're in a state of hypnosis i go so what i say whoever you focus on you will download their behavior just like a video recorder you focus on your mom your dad your siblings you focus on the community see how they do things i go and you didn't just see how they did things you recorded how they did things so the idea is this now that i have some programs i can engage those programs and i'll have behavior okay but now there's only one other other other problem here and that is most of the programs that we have downloaded from conventional understanding psychology are programs that take away our power you know they limit us in our capability they self-sabotage us and these are programs that we download in the first seven years i go significance is clear the conscious mind wasn't working when the downloads were coming in i say so what's relevant i say well the conscious mind can can review and say this is a good program this is a bad program i say no conscious mind all programs were downloaded good programs bad programs turns out about 60 percent of the programs of behavior that we downloaded by observing family and community are behaviors that disempower us i go jesus you know just our programs are sabotaging us we didn't pick those programs we just downloaded them okay and i go but what are these programs because they control our life i go they control your life i go yeah remember i said the first seven years is downloading a program but after age seven and this is an important fact of science 95 of our life behavior is not coming from the creative conscious mind that's the one with wishes and desires i said jeff you tell me what you want from life that's a creative thought you say oh i want health i want a great relationship i want a good job blah blah blah blah blah that's great and then i say is that conscious mind the one that's going to steer you to to manifest things thing i go five percent of the day that's how much because 95 is straight read out from the programs yeah but if 60 of those programs are disempowering then 95 of the day 60 of that you're sabotaging yourself and then you go oh well i would see if i was you know engaging behavior that sabotages me i go no you won't i go what do you mean i said why are you playing these programs when you have a conscious mind that's a creator mind that could manifest what you want and the monkey wrench in the game is this and this it's the most important monkey wrench and that is what the conscious mind which has wishes and desires and can steer you to those destinations can also think i go think i said what's that i said consider your body as a vehicle with a steering wheel when the conscious mind has got its hands on the wheel it's looking out the window and driving us toward wishes driving us toward desires i go great but if the conscious mind is thinking it's not looking out the window anymore why a thought is inside you want to think go inside your head you have to think you can close your eyes you can think easier with your eyes closed well i'm going inside i go well if you're going inside and thinking then you're not looking out i go that's the problem because give you a simple example where it could be the biggest problem i say you're driving your car with your conscious mind i'm going to go here and i'm going to turn at this place i'm going to do all this in your driving and all that but what if you start thinking about well oh geez when i get to the store i'm going to buy this and i'm going to buy that and i say oh you're thinking i said at that moment you're not looking out the windshield i go you're driving the car you're not looking out the windshield i go don't worry the subconscious has a program of driving the car because you it was a habit you acquired so i guess what the moment i'm thinking i let go of looking out the window the subconscious is autopilot it will step in grab the wheel and drive me but not drive me to my wishes and desires conscious mind it will drive me to wherever direction the person i downloaded the behavior from if they have a glitch in their behavior then when i'm not paying attention i'm playing that glitch do i see it no because i'm not even looking at the damn window so whatever behavior i'm playing when i'm thinking i'm the one that can't see it and this is why for 40 years i tell the same story so here's 41 years i go what is it i say you have a friend and you know your friend's behavior very well and you happen to know your friend's parent and one day you see your friend has the exact same behavior as their parents of you you gotta just tell them hey bill you're just like your dad back away from bill i can tell you exactly what bill's going to say the first thing out of bill smith i know it is going to say how can you compare me to my dad i'm nothing like my dad the audience laughs why personal experiences i go do you understand what that story just said the profound point and i was what bill has behavior exactly like his dad i said where did he get it i said the first seven years he downloaded it he was in the state of uh theta which is hypnosis he downloaded his dad's behavior i say but then when he's playing it i said why is he playing his dad's behavior and that all of a sudden says oh because he's not paying attention so i say then whatever behavior is coming out it wasn't from the conscious mind that was busy thinking so whatever behavior he's playing when he's not paying attention is from the program that he got from his dad so he plays his dad's program he doesn't see it reason why he doesn't see it because he's conscious it's not looking at the behaviors looking inside but everybody else sees it and if that behavior isn't a very supportive behavior he then he is actually undermining his life without him even knowing about it it was his invisible behavior that was sabotaging him but he didn't see it and i go what would be the result of that what would be with result i have wishes and desires to go here and it doesn't manifest and and then i have to say oh that person interfered with me i'm a victim because of this thing happening i'm a victim i'm a victim and i'm going oh guess what you have disempowered yourself because you are now claiming that your life is being controlled by outside forces without recognizing no it was your unconscious behavior that was playing 95 percent of the day that you didn't see but everybody else did we are creating this okay now what's important about the story here is the story of bill is we are all bill every one of us 95 of the day is playing programs because that's how much the average person is thinking and if they're thinking then they're playing programs that they're not even aware of because they're it's unconscious behavior that's controlling them not conscious behavior okay and so i say then this is the issue of the world because we've all perceived that we all have great wishes and desires and they're not manifesting those we don't look at ourselves we say oh they these people caused the problem well you disempowered yourself because you say i have no power i'm a victim of those people i go no you created those situations that led to your own self-sabotage all of us do this all of the time and the unfortunate part is without any awareness of what we just said the average person says it's not up to me man i'm a victim of the world around me man i wanted to be successful it's not working all these other people did this and it's like no you have to understand we do this ourselves and we don't see these programs and let me just help with one last thing on this point we got these programs before age seven okay i said guess what you were being programmed that computer of yours was getting downloads when even before you were born last trimester pregnancy you were learning okay you you learned uh from your whole first year of life from zero to one you were in a state of record of behaviors okay tell me the program you got from zero to one it's like i don't know i wasn't there i got okay how about your program a whole year from one to two what programs did you get then you go i don't know i wasn't there because my consciousness didn't even kick it until later so the point is for at least the first three years you have been programmed with programs that control your life and you personally have no idea what the hell those programs are why you were not conscious when they were being downloaded so now we got a problem and said holy crap my life is being run by programs i don't even know what they are now i'm going to just help for one minute on that let's help just resolve this and it goes simply like this and it basically says this the things that you like and they come into your life the things that oh look i'm so happy look these things come in here they came in because you have a program to accept those things acknowledge those things but and this is the capital bud underlined bold print the things that you work hard for you struggle over you sweat over i'm gonna make it i'm gonna do this i'm putting a lot of effort into this baby i'm working real hard to make this happen why are you working so hard and the answer and this beautiful part whatever programs you got do not support that destination and what you're trying to do is override the programs because you're not successful you say i'm going to put a lot of work and i'm going to make this happen i go you're going to have a lot of trouble here because the conscious creative mind that can make those things happen is not relative in mathematics to the subconscious mind and i mean the subconscious mind is one million times more powerful and works 95 percent of the time versus the small conscious mind working five percent i said that's the one that's stressed that's the one that's struggling it says i want something and i'm not getting it and i'm gonna make it and i go you're trying to change the world when your own behavior was the one that was sabotaging it and that's because you didn't see your programs and like bill you engage these programs and you don't even know you have these programs but then as i said well if you want to see your programs your life 95 coming from the program your life is a printout of your programs the things you like as i said they come in they came in because you have a program to acknowledge them but if you understand the things you struggle over or not because the outside is preventing you from getting there it was your own invisible 95 of the day playing programs you didn't even know you had and that's where the sabotage comes from and yet we want to blame and fix everybody on the outside and think that we're just the recipients of all this without recognizing we're the creator of all this and that sounds like oh so new agey and i go listen quantum physics is the most valid science on this planet and principle number one quantum physics consciousness is creating our life experiences you want to change your life you don't change the world you change your own consciousness the world changes after that beautiful so further on that point this notion of sort of bottom-up behavior or subconscious behavior which as you say dominates 95 of our life essentially the equivalent of of hitting the turn signal you know on your car but and that is a relatively banal and prosaic example but you can hit the turn signal on your life um and you might be all of a sudden you know going in the wrong direction and this might be associated with oh i don't know like limiting beliefs or maybe you had a parent who essentially told you that you weren't good enough um and you spend your whole life uh trying to please and be and fit in and uh and well that made you stop for a second you spent your whole life consciously wanting to please and change conscious mind but not recognizing well that's a great thought but that's not what you're manifesting because you're manifesting 95 of the time the problem that you think you want to override yeah so what is the key to recognizing some of the more deleterious bottom-up behaviors and being conscious of them and being able to turn one's conscious attention such that we are not prey to this programming and that we have an opportunity to reprogram our lives in greater alignment with our wishes and desires yeah you know what's interesting most people have seen the movie the matrix and it's listed under science fiction i go no matrix is a documentary why premise everybody's been programmed well that's that's not a premise that's a reality everybody that's here had to have been programmed by the first seven years is the only way you can be here but in the story they said you could take a blue pill and when you take the blue pill you wake up and the program is running just like it's always done so life is exactly the same as it's always been but then they offer take a red pill and you get out of the program i go oh what would be the you know is there an equivalent of a red pill i go yes and most everybody out there is experienced probably even you jeff and i go what is it and i say when we fall in love immediately after that moment of experiencing love your life changes you could have blah blah blah blah every day you meet this person fall in love 24 hours later you're going oh life is so beautiful everything is great the food's great the music is great sex is beyond anything i love this is great i love my life i go you have blah blah blah blah blah and then 24 hours later you had heaven on earth what happened biologists have recognized ready it's the equivalent of the red pill when you fall in love you stop thinking like what do you mean stop thinking i say you stay present the words are stay mindful i say what does that mean you stop thinking you're engaged right now in the present moment i'm actively engaged in the present moment i'm not thinking about past future i'm right here control i go oh so you stop playing a program i go well yeah where'd the program come from subconscious 95 of the time 60 bad okay i said well what happened you stopped playing the programming so you stopped playing the subconscious then i said well who's controlling now i go the conscious mind it used to be five percent but you fall in love it's over 90 is coming from conscious what's that wishes and desires i go what did you manifest wishes and desires the honeymoon the heaven on earth life experience i know that was not an accident it wasn't a coincidence it was you stopped playing the program and started living from the conscious mind which is wishes and desires and manifested heaven on earth it was always there it was always there except if you're only using that mind five percent of the day it's really tough to experience that but if you can use it 90 of the day then your life actually is now heaven on earth which is honeymoon and all of a sudden i say then what's the significance of this and the answer was it's the programs that have taken us away from health and vitality and harmony and peace and love and if you stop playing those programs then for that moment you stop you are actually now creator of your life and what will you create have it on earth because that's what everybody wants that's what you're gonna get yeah so interesting so um you know when i think of um kind of our five senses and in a sense we are pre-programmed to uh perceive ourselves as separate from the world yes and uh you know especially when you create this seven year substrate of programming that you know our eyes and and you know everything that we're taught to uh identify in the foreground and not the background etc and all of the labeling that then occurs from you know the most banal kind of labeling to then you get up to well there's someone of a different sexual orientation or a political affiliation or or whatever and inherent in that uh process is a labeling of self as separate from the world and that is what i generally think of as the ego the symbol that i actually give myself uh to navigate um to navigate the world and when you talk about love i i very much associate love with a state of being um similar to what the buddha said about awakening um which is is an epiphany or really a mystical experience that is a sensation of non-separateness of integrated consciousness and we feel that oftentimes in love or even in this conversation where i'm fully engrossed in every single word that you're saying i'm right here right now and any feeling that i ever had of being a separate self has completely dissipated because i'm literally with you all there and of course i experienced that with my children and i experienced that with my community from time to time and this is codified in a lot of sanskrit words that i know like mudita like this idea of joy simply for someone else's joy or karuna the kind of compassion that identifies someone else's suffering as your own you know these ideas that were these states of being where we don't feel like the ego where we don't feel separate where i guess we're not connected or run by this programming that we're essentially have an awakening yeah well a lot has to do with something called mirror neurons and i go what are mirror neurons they observe other people and and have a sense of their emotion or whatever they're experiencing and all of a sudden it says that's very familiar to me i've experienced the same thing and so when we watch somebody who is sad and we have been sad in the past then watching them our mirror neuron plays back for us what are they feeling the same thing that we would feel when we're sad or when they're angry then we say oh yeah that's the same as i feel that's what connects us to all the other individuals in the group to recognize we're all sharing these kinds of experiences like this uh and it's really so important i mean it's it's so much more primitive i mean dogs hung in a pack how they they got a leader i said how how the dogs do this they don't talk like we do and i say no they follow the leader because they know what the leader is doing because they've done it themselves and then so by following the leader they know how to engage their behavior to conform and coincide with the leader's behavior we're going after this we're going over here i watch that leader okay we do that ourselves as you just said when you see someone who is you know experiencing what you've experienced then you have a sense of that that compassion okay they're hurting you you can oh i know how they feel why i've hurt like that and this allows us to connect with each other because we recognize we're seeing ourselves with different people more or less and we know what they're going through and if it's something you don't want to go through yourself then you're going to be compassionate to say i want to help you get out just because i don't want to be there with you a kind of thing like this and that brings the community together community is to watch the other people but know who or what they are because you have done this yourself and this connects us together i don't have to talk to you i could just watch you and i know what you're experiencing okay and then if it's something that you're sad and and i said you know i feel that sadness i don't want to be sad let's do something different and then you help them do something different you can help them get out of sadness that's how it works okay i can't help somebody get out of sadness if i don't even know they're sad so the first thing is i have to experience what they're experiencing and this is a significant level of how we communicate with each other non-verbal had nothing to do with verbally you didn't have to ask them anything just watch them the vibration the energy you will feel that just like because when you have that energy it created an experience in you when you see them have that energy you say oh i know what you're going through i have had that myself yeah we we often um draw this imaginary line between the internal and the external world saying that this is all the stuff that happens out there and and this is me in here but even this experience that we're having right now uh i mean really i'm just listening to waves with a certain amplitude and frequency in the air that you're creating through um kinetic energy through moving your lips essentially and that's going through all this technology but it's it's and then you know vibrating my my eardrum and these tiny little bones in my ear and then you know pushing down the auditory nerve and into my brain that finally decodes these these electromagnetic signals and then my mind puts some sort of salience and valence on top of that and then i have some kind of emotional reaction to it i'm like oh bruce just said something i'm so excited i can't wait to respond or whatever um but if you really kind of think about that is that out here in the world what you said were simply sound energy it was just waves it was only when it was decoded by my brain that it had any sort of salience or meaning to me and in that sense there is no external world or the external world is completely internal and of course i'm in the external world as weird as weird as that sounds that is what the principle of quantum physics is all of this is a manifestation of consciousness and spirituality according to quantum physics which is interesting because they use the word spirituality which conventional science doesn't use because it's an energy field everything is energy and to get down to the simple level is this everything is energy and when things energies interact they can have various impacts on each other i'll give the two extremes two energies come together and they're in harmony with each other the result is you add up the energy of both and that's a much more powerful energy so two people with lower energies come together in harmony they manifest in energy collectively that is more powerful that's called uh constructive interference uh but i give you the name that people use is called good vibes you find yourself where the energy on the outside is in harmony with the energy on the inside and then when the two come together because they're in resonance and harmony there's a feeling of more empowerment in contrast the other way is an energy that is opposite of each other are called destructive interference and i say what does that mean when they come together they don't add up they actually cancel each other out so two energies can neutralize and there's no energy at all that's called bad vibes and that's what you feel when you're feeling bad vibes you're feeling a threat why your energy is compromised you're feeling weak and vulnerable so everything is an energy interaction and it's so powerful i go you know what's interesting just to give us the meaning of it i i always use i use the example of a snail snail comes out of an egg there's no mother there's no father there's no snail school i said how the hell is the snail just come out of the egg navigate the environment i go there's one gauge on the dashboard energy i go with significance energy is life you have a lot of energy got life you have no energy you got no life so basically the sail is moving around reading the energy if the energy is enhancing constructive good vibes the snail keeps going that way if the plant is reads the energy plant like shamans read the energy of this plant is the energy of this plant make me feel powerful or if i take this energy it's going to cancel me it could kill me okay well it depends on the on the gauge if the gauge says oh this plant has higher energy if i eat it then that's my food but if this plant i read and i feel weaker because my energy just got canceled i said don't eat that one to take away your life uh where do i go if the energy in the moving direction is good i keep going that way but if all of a sudden i feel a cancellation of my energy i'm going to turn around go the other way so i say the entire behavior of that snail is predicated on what read the energy and i go guess what same for us exactly the same for us that we we move according to our receptivity you always move toward those people that give you better energy higher energy and avoid those people that cancel your energy bad vibes i don't want to be here i'm not going no way so one thing that i really love about your work is how you have weaved together spirituality and science and let me just say that let me preface this question with this is that faith has long been the providence of religion in fact over here is the realm of science and you've managed to bridge this chasm between spirituality and empiricism and um and i wonder if you could pull on that a little bit because i recently revisited the dao of physics i'm not sure if you ever read that book but um classified classic and it really does a great job at underscoring kind of how the how modern physics is pointing to many of the tenets and ideas posited by by eastern religion but i wonder if you could just spend a little bit of time describing how you understand this relationship between science and spirituality okay first thing is the hard part and that is understanding the science making sense out of it in your life instead of just oh i memorized that fact and i took it on the exam and i wrote it down i say that didn't impact your life how does it impact your life well that's where i said we brought in quantum physics quantum physics said first of all the idea of a material physical universe is a is a you know an idea uh it's not real there is no physical universe and i go what do you mean it's a physical universe i gotta touch myself here i am i see you i go it's a physical universe i go it's an illusion i know what do you mean i go because what quantum physics found out is the atoms that we perceived as the little bits of matter that come together and create us here is a piece of matter called bruce a lot of matter in here the quantum physicists recognize that if you open up that atom and look deep inside there's nothing physical and it's an energy i go so atoms are energy i go yeah but when we perceive them they look physical i go that's an illusion of light that has to do with that so it took me a while because i kept reading the science and going oh that sounds great it's like at some points like now wait a minute what the hell does this really mean and it means that we are energy beings okay there's no physicality here and our energy is then related to the energy of the world around us are we living in harmony with that energy or we're not living in harmony good vibes bad vibes that's what it comes down to okay and then i started to recognize a very important thing and this is the most important one for me personally was no two people are the same in the sense that i can't take my cells and put it into your body because your body will save not self and your cells in my body not self so there's a self and then i tried to find out so where the hell is this self and i said well there are antennas on the surface of the cell like tv antennas and no two people have the same set of antennas meaning you're getting a broadcast different than i'm getting say broadcast i say yeah the antennas are on the outside of the cell they're reading something from outside i go oh then who are we i say we are the broadcast being picked up by the antennas we're not the antennas we're the broadcast picked up by it and i go well why is that important because the broadcast is an energy field and i say oh then each of us has our own unique energy field i go yeah and that was the part that transformed my whole life because it basically says wait a minute i'm receiving like the bruce show and this is the tv playing the brew show you got the jeff show in your physical body and i go when we were watching a tv and tv breaks we say tv's dead i go yeah tv's dead it's not working anymore my question which i realized at some point was did the broadcast die when the tv died i go no it didn't the broadcast is always here you get another tv plug it in tune it in you're back online again i said oh my god i'm not this body i am the broadcast being picked up by this television set that you see right here and then the thing that hit me was the tv analogy well the tv is dead but i'm still here oh my god we can't die we were never even in here and that was the wake up call they said the fear which is human specific is the fear of mortality there's no other organism that knows it's going to die and i say that fear is what then we gave up our power to have somebody assuage that fear it's like oh it's not so bad or whatever you know we we bought what religion why do we buy religion well i'm going to tell you about what happens after you die the big mystery and i say oh then all of a sudden guess what they made the program for my life i go who the hell are you it's a program for my life well i bought it because i was in fear and fear means i have no power and when i have no power i'm going to seek someone who says they have the power and then i'm going to accommodate what they do and so people join into religion because they have the fear of the afterlife well i'm going to tell you the beautiful part about my research was i didn't believe in spirituality okay i had no to me afterlife was home i'm chemicals and when i die i go back into chemistry you know that's what it is but when i understood this said oh my god i'm an immortal i'm a spiritual field quantum mechanics a field and all of a sudden i started to realize oh my goodness i have no fear why i'm not going to die i'm not even in here so how the hell am i going to die and once that fear was gone my life was radically different i tell you why because we all live with that biological imperative that says i'm afraid to die and i said but what if you're not afraid to die what if you don't see death as an end what if you see it as just a transition into another way and all of a sudden i say what the consequence of that is no fear i say then what does that mean i say then i'm more powerful because it was the fear that took away my power and if i don't have fear then you can't scare me and i don't i'm not scared and i don't care about your rules about afterlife because i have my own understanding now you don't have to try and tell me about afterlife i know what i am i'm a spirit i'm an energy field and and this was profoundly important because uh as a science guy i was like wait there's a spirit a field and a body i say why have both why not just be the spirit that's i always joke i say that's when i found out i had jewish comedian cells i said what do you mean i said i asked a question why have a body and a spirit why not just be a spirit and my 50 trillion comic cells answered with a question i asked why i have both the answer came bruce if you're just a spirit what does chocolate taste like that is the most profound thing if i tell you you're gonna have to think about that maybe for some period here but i'm gonna tell you the most profound thing that ever came into my head at that moment because i said basically oh my god the body provides us with sensations pain love joy happiness anger whatever it comes from this mechanism it's a mechanism the the eyes take in light but they don't they don't see light back here in the brain they see energy vibrations sound comes in my ears i don't hear the sound i hear the vibrations taste that's a vibration it's a chemical vibration all of a sudden oh my god this is a transducer it takes life experiences in a body that gives us vision and smell and taste and touch and pain and love and joy and i say and this is sent back to our source so we came here to have life experiences and i go at that moment of awakening i said oh crap here's a major difference between men and women men are not allowed to have these sensory experiences and like every reason but women are so women are sensitive and that's a way of life for them they're sensitive and then they go back but men are so insensitive i go that was a program we were programmed to be insensitive for a very simple reason you cannot be a soldier if you're sensitive you can't kill somebody if you're sensitive so men have been knowingly programmed to lose sensitivity so they can be used to do those jobs like killing somebody else and i go oh my god then i missed the reason for being on this planet i missed the feeling of what is love all about you know what are these senses of joy and happiness i'm not allowed to experience him as a guy because uh that interferes with a soldier job i go by wasting my life and that was a wake-up call i said well damn it go out and taste it and touch it and feel and smell it and do whatever you want if it's really good do it again and if it didn't work out so good then don't do that one again you came here to have these experiences why would you want to waste your life having all the negative fear anxiety all those problems it was a choice it was consciousness but we didn't know that because we were programmed to be victim and a victim has no power and as long as you believe you're a victim then you manifest victim and this is why i'm so uh honored to be with you jeff because you're experiencing this you know this stuff you're trying to get this message out to the other people why to wake us all up because we came here to manifest heaven on earth like falling in love and i go then what about all this war and pestilence and plague and all these things i go oh that's a manifestation and we're manifesting it you can live in this world without even being involved with all those things you just have to change who you are and what you are and what you want conscious mind versus programs subconscious mind and when you understand this you become empowered and i say empowered to do what i say create heaven on earth and then people think oh you die and go to heaven i go boy is that a big mistake because you're going to get to the pearly gates saint peter's going to be there and he says well how was your experience in heaven he said what do you mean i said you were on earth right that's heaven why that's where you came to create what'd you create i go oh i don't want to wait to the end man my mother remarried when she was relatively older and she married this guy who was i said curmudgeony guy he was not really a happy guy or anything he lived to be like 95 96 or something he had cancer my mother took care of him at home the last week of his life he essentially wasn't there he was just comatose more or less in the bed and then two days before he died he all of a sudden his eyes opened up he was there and he looked at my mother and he said i didn't have any fun and all of a sudden i just said holy crap he's gonna die in two days and he woke up today he didn't have any fun i said that's not me babe because when i finish it's gonna be that was great let's do it again [Laughter] well i will say if there's anything you know how to do it's have fun mr lipton let me tell you jeff i've i had many years without it and once i started to recognize it and how come i didn't have it and how i could get it by changing my consciousness and my program and then ending up with i honestly live heaven on earth does that mean everything i want happens like nope but you know what when it doesn't happen i'm not carrying it anymore i don't care i'll go on to the next thing and as a result i don't stew and the things that aren't working right and all that right yeah i mean i think you know you pointed to this earlier in the conversation this notion of mindfulness of non-judgmental presence right here right now in the everlasting now and we're distracted so much of the time focused on the trauma of the past and then projecting that into the future as some sort of anticipated negative memory um that uh that we spend so much of our lives not here we're off somewhere else well that's why i said the conscious mind is not even present the conscious mind is thinking in the past or thinking about the future but it's not as you just said here now well i know that we're both refugees of the music industry or the music business or and as musicians and you know some of my most epiphanous moments have been kind of lost in um in music in the in the creation of music either by myself or in conjunction with others and it's that cognitive absence and that absolute yoking of action and intention um that you know it's the it's i think a lot of people call that the flow state but it's um this uh you know it's it's mystical jeff it's a honeymoon and i i should emphasize this very clearly because when you say honeymoon immediately oh that's a relationship with another person i go it doesn't have to be with another person you could be a chef and you get so into that cooking that your joy and happiness you're there you're present you're not thinking you're b you're engaged in the present moment consciousness it could be gardening it could be making music so the idea is it's unfortunate because i use the honeymoon because a lot of people have really had that experience where the life profoundly changed just within hours after meeting another person and i go there there's a reason for that but it doesn't have to be with a person as you just mentioned and it's very clear and very important you can play music and you'll be in the divine land somewhere else man it's not here with these issues you're creating another experience and that is a honeymoon yeah i mean i watch my daughters dance for example and when they dance with no audience or no awareness of audience they are just absolutely 100 there and you know alan watts often says you don't dance to finish the routine otherwise the best dancer would be the fastest one right um there are some impressive fast dancers you dance to dance and um and we can live to live and love to love and do the dishes just to do the dishes you know as tiknot han you know it's always fun and you just brought that up because a lot of a long time ago when people say well bruce do you meditate and i go no i i don't have any formal meditation or anything like that but then i came up with a concept you know i love doing the dishes i go why it's mindless it's a procedure a b scrub warm water in your hands feeling the warm water it's really nice and all that and i go it was an opportunity to let go of the world doing a routine thing i didn't have to think about doing and and while i was free to think then i was free to it was a meditation meditation you're free go think of something in chinese there's this notion of mushin so shin being mined but kind of heart mind and then mushin is like without mind and uh it's very associated with um way or not forcing um just functioning spontaneously with intuition not intuition as some sort of like instinct of like my gut told me to do it but a sort of refined skill of knowing how to apply the rudder in the river such that you're harnessing the power of water's course or applying the sail and tacking with the wind just right and i think you know to me that is living with the dao of uh refining this intuition to be right there where you can seamlessly interact under interdependently with this emergent world and that for me is spirituality it's process like god is not material it's not something it's not an old geezer and a top hat and some cosmic panopticon with a sexual manual you know with an abacus judging your transgressions you know that's a that's a form of delusional prophecy it's really for me anyways studying nature deeply uh such that i can understand the patterns of the metaphysical inside the physical and focus my attention is such that i'm in alignment with that flow that's the basic look i did the same thing i was looking at cells i was looking at nature but interpreting what that experience was and then saying i could do that once i started to do that that's when i understood the nature of my power to manifest my reality versus the program reality that was put into me you know this whole idea of programming it's nothing new you know it's like 400 years the jesuits have told their followers give me a child until it's seven and i will show you the man they knew exactly what we just said scientifically seven years download program rest of life 95 coming from program they knew that from the very beginning but then they were the first ones to go wait a minute what if we programmed that child for the first seven years and all of a sudden it's like oh my god the first manipulation and it's gotten much much more invasive and powerful when you can see an infant walking around he can hardly walk and he's carrying an ipad but there's some programming going on here folks and and this is what we have to be aware of yeah this notion of structural structuralism where we feel like we shape the world but when we under closer examination the world so often shapes the self and i think this is part of having the great awakening is to realize where that has been the case and to to find um our ways of essentially being in the here and now such that we're not prey to this this pre-programming right right um you know he there have been a lot of scientific paradigm shifts over the last 500 600 years from i guess geocentrism to the earth orbiting around the sun or miasma theory which was the prevalence theory for disease during the black plague for example and then migrating to this kind of uh contentious thing between pasteur and germ theory and um and the beschamp and and terrain theory which is something that i would i would love to explore with you at some point and of course newtonian physics to einstein and planck and quantum physics and then basically how you've disrupted the scientific paradigm from genetic determinism to epigenetics and where do you think we are on this spectrum right now in terms of how humans understand the world yeah well a very simple fact we're facing what is called the sixth mass extinction of life and i say there are five previous ones of course things that were natural like earthquakes tectonic plate movements the last one the last mass extinction was 66 million years ago when a comet hit near the yucatan peninsula a giant comet and up ended the web of life and 75 percent of life disappeared at that moment including all the dinosaurs who never came back either okay uh and today we're in what is called the sixth mass extinction and why this zone is so different is that it's caused by our own human behavior our behavior is undermining the web of life we're not living in harmony with the planet we're separating ourselves saying the planet is something we have domain over we can control i go who the hell do you think you are you're a piece of this nature you are not the car the boss of nature and and and living with that belief that we can control nature which was a mission statement of science uh how's that control working out well we're going extinct because what we learned is not in harmony with supporting us so basically this is a wake-up call to humans and saying either learn to live in harmony with nature or kiss a goodbye i say oh is that like a thousand years from now and i go no within the next few decades civilization is facing what nasa scientists have identified as listen irreversible collapse that means it's a collapse with no going back because that going back is what caused the problem it's going forward that we're being asked to do at this time nature's giving us a wake-up call says you don't learn to live in harmony a couple of decades from now industrial civilization is going to totally collapse and you won't this whole thing is going to fall apart right away so um it's a wake-up call and the wake-up call is for us to take responsibility for our lives on this planet and uh this is why this wake-up call of i'm not a victim becomes important because when you're a victim then you could let the whole thing fall apart and say i have no responsibility i was a victim of the whole thing i go no you are creator of this whole thing there's no escaping that fact but if you understand you're the creator then that's the option to stop creating the hell that we're living in and start creating the heaven that we desire that's the responsibility we're being faced with right now and nature says well you got a short time i'm going to give you a warning matter of fact science has been telling the public for 15 years we're in this extinction and people are so preoccupied with everything else they're not paying attention to the overriding issue of human civilization is we are going to extinction because we are not in harmony and jeff you know you mentioned being a musician first thing is harmony and you know a band that doesn't have any harmony nobody's going to go play and go see that band yeah and a note sitting in isolation by itself is not going anywhere it's only when it's in relationship to another note or a cluster of notes where you actually get harmony and i think in this era of self-isolation and division and polarization and atomization you know closed systems devolve into entropy we know that so we can recognize ourselves as part of this web of life or you know nature is relatively neutral it will just select for life so maybe really the next on after this extinction maybe it looks like you know just a half a billion humans i mean of course like you know this i don't want to get modeling about it you know um but but maybe there is a higher evolved humanity or life on the other side of this thing i don't know this is what we're moving to right now this is the renaissance and science that says hey you know the beliefs that you built your life on well most of those are wrong and now we have new science we have quantum physics we have epigenetics we have fractal geometry we have these new visions i say wait a minute we were not seeing it correctly and this is a correction factor are you going to see it correctly well you got a few decades a couple of decades and if you do it we're going to thrive into the future and if you don't do it then just kiss it goodbye because it's coming to an end yeah well dr bruce lipton i'll be there holding your hand and this uh well we'll be dancing at that point we will be dancing in effort to try to get humanity to understand itself as an interconnected web or what the buddhists call indra's net that you know we are part of this emergent spontaneous world that that arises dependently that there is no such thing as a completely disjointed individual now you've studied you've studied human cells so if you were to look at my hand and study it on a cellular level with i love your description of your first experience with electron microscope by the way but anyways if you were to study my hand on a cellular level you could look at each cell and all the space around it but you would never recognize this as anything but a hand you know and and this is i think one of the great quandaries of relativity theory that we all do exist as these sensitive individuals and we're distinct but we're not in any way disjointed and i think this is like the transition that we have to go um through from this form of spotlight consciousness to a form of floodlight consciousness like our friend anita morgani describes and and this is a difficult task because you know as you say we're so culturally programmed in a hyper individualistic world and we have these particular sensory organs that make us feel so separate and so this is why your work is so important because it can wake people up it can literally elicit a spiritual u-turn in someone's life and then all of a sudden they're effusive and uh and animated and full of energy and connecting and creating that constructive energy that you talk about and of course man that's just the best kind of virus well for me jeff this is you know well i have a message i also emphasize but you are an important component of this evolutionary change because you have an audience where you can offer them some more powerful insights into who they really are and get out of this victim mode because when you're out of this victim mode and you become the creator i can tell you there's nothing more exciting than to be a human on planet earth who is part of the whole network of life and and experiencing in that positive way and so i just want to thank you for letting me have the soapbox for a little while but i need to say thank you because you've gathered the people necessary that will take this information and collectively we can create that world that we talk about it is heaven on earth i hate to have people you know screw up their life like my my my former stepfather who gets all the way to the end and says oh i missed it it's too late man don't miss it it's here now it is the most beautiful experience that you could ever imagine to be a human but not if you buy the programs and get lost into the control manipulation and then you've lost the power and you've lost the joy and now it's a job and i don't see life as a job i think life is a as a reward you know it's like wow we get to live here are you kidding me this is beautiful yeah it's like america i want to say thank you thank you thank you to our audience again because it's with them when we collectively do this that the world becomes something completely different and it's a wake-up call and you're here to offer some answers and hope in this wake-up call so i i need to thank you for offering this to the public and for our audience who's out there listening because they are the elements of evolution themselves and when they get it the world gets it's going to be heaven on earth which is actually what it's supposed to be so thank you dr bruce lipton thank you so much uh to be continued i hope so many topics it was covered and so many others that i would love to excavate at a future date so the beautiful part is we have future yes we do grateful for you thank you hey thanks for watching if you like this interview from the commune podcast then click subscribe and check out this video right here