Changing Your Genes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYnmqhm7BIU

(Update: some of the ideas in this entry are continued in another entry published one month later, Changing Your Genes Part 2)

In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we talked about how it is surprisingly easy to modify your potential future paths by making adjustments in physical stance or mental attitude. In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we talked about the groundbreaking experiments being conducted by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, that are now proving that the only thing that is truly real is our observed "now": amazingly, everything else in the future and the past extending out from our constantly moving "now" is a probabilistic cloud. In entries like The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, and Being More Fifth Dimensional, we've talked about what a powerful idea this is: if everything before and after "now" is only a probabilistic wave function, then we as observers have much more control over the information that becomes reality than the traditional viewpoint has led us to believe.

Genes, memes, and spimes: these are three powerful ways of visualizing the information that becomes our reality from a more timeless vantage point. As we discussed in entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Boredom and Consciousness, and The Omniverse, physicist John Wheeler introduced us to the idea that not just the future but the past can be changed by observation, an idea that makes much more sense if we can accept the evidence of the Zeilinger experiments.

So, while we're not talking about magic here (my role as an observer can't change the force of gravity or the speed of light, or allow me to walk through walls or bring back the dead, and so on), there really are things about the past that we as quantum observers can change: and this is an idea which contradicts most of what we are taught. Most of us believe, for instance, that our genes are locked in by heredity, and as a randomized mixing of our parent's genetic material that occurred at conception, this is not something we have control over now.

Now click here to read about a new study indicating that we can turn genes on and off simply by altering our lifestyle and our mental attitude. Or read below for a few paragraphs from the article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life) - Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy.

The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation.

As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes.

After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes — including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off.

The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As I've said before, ideas that imply this level of control over our own reality have, up to now, often been ridiculed as quackery, so publication of the above report by the National Academy of Sciences is remarkable. My song "Positive Vibes" talks about similar ideas that the mainstream often ridicule: how much control do we really have over reality? Are we really able to affect changes in ourselves and others purely by sending out positive thoughts into the "ether"? Are we really able to affect our immune systems through positive visualization, or simply through the determined viewpoint of saying "I'm too busy to get sick"? Next blog, we'll talk about the daily parrying that, historically speaking, has indoctrinated us into thinking that such ideas are nonsense.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMWDdOkWkQU

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Daily Parrying