Guy Spiro: Bruce, you’re doing fascinating work. I usually like to start by asking people just to give a brief overview of significant turns in life that led them to be where they are now.                           

Bruce Lipton: When I was young, some of the so-called spiritual people would give me their wisdom, but when I looked at their lives, it never matched. I was looking for something more truthful. Science really got me as a young kid and an Albert Einstein poster was on my wall. So I got into the sciences and loved it. I was more or less avoiding spirit, but trying to get an understanding of universe. After my training, I ended up teaching in medical school. I was teaching the conventional approach that our lives are the equivalent of biochemical machines controlled by genes. If there was something not working right, you would go in and take it apart, look at the chemistry and try to fix it.

     The biggest shock of my life was in the 1970s, when I started to realize from my research in cloning stem cells that genes clearly did not control life at all. In fact, it was just a complete misunderstanding that I was teaching. The experiments I was doing with cloned stem cells showed that the cells were responding to their environment. I put genetically identical cells into different environments and they would express different functions. It turned out that their behavior and genetic activity was controlled by the environment in which they found themselves. All of a sudden I realized that this whole belief that I was teaching in medical school, that we’re victims of our genetics, which is called “genetic determinism,” meaning that genes control life, was completely wrong. I felt so out of integrity teaching doctors that patients were just biochemical automatons.

     The body is a vehicle, but science looked at the body as a self-programmed vehicle. The problem is that it isn’t. There is actually a driver and the driver influences the vehicle. The genes are controlling the structure of the vehicle, but the driver who uses the vehicle determines which genes are going to be expressed based on how they’re going to drive it. I saw that I was teaching victimization. The new science was teaching me the creative aspect of life. By changing your environment or how you respond to your environment, you change your genes, your biology and behavior. When you recognize the difference, you realize that it is a heck of a lot easier to change your environment than it is to change your genes. So I left.

     Next I found myself doing a laser light rock-and-roll show. I found a musician, who became famous, named Yanni. I did the show until I lost all my money and then came back to research when I joined the Stanford University School of Medicine. There I continued my work cloning stem cells and the studies of environmental influences. I expanded on the topic, published it, but also realized, just as before, my colleagues really weren’t interested in this science. They had their hopes, hearts, and visions set on genes and the genome project and my research indicated that’s probably not the direction to go in. They weren’t that interested so I left Stanford about 1992.

     I then started to recognize that the information that I found back in the 1970s was becoming leading edge science. I decided that it was more important that people know about this science instead of just those in just the halls of science where the discussion never really got out to the public. It’s just coming out to the public now and it’s the concept of how our environment or our perception of the environment controls our genes.

     This is a field of study called epigenetics. What I was teaching in medical school was called genetic control, which means controlled by genes. The new science is epigenetic control and “epi” means “above.” So literally, epigenetic control is control above the genes. It’s as striking a difference between the old view and the new view as occurred in physics when we transited from a Newtonian philosophy of the universe into quantum mechanics. And there it was again, of course; the old Newtonian physicists were not anxious to give up this domain they had controlled over the years and accept the new one. It took time, but it came. The same kind of thing is happening in biomedicine today. The belief that genes control life, the old vision of genetic determinism, is waning and the new understanding of epigenetics is coming in. The difference is profound.

     The new biology takes us from a mechanical concept of a body into a body that is controlled by the field, the invisible forces of quantum mechanics and how they interact with proteins. There is a quote by Albert Einstein that is so important and it applies directly to this: “the field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” What Einstein meant by that is that the invisible field where all this energy is fluctuating is what governs the particle, which means matter. So I wondered how that applies to biology. That takes it right back to the primary concept of the mind-body duality. The mind is the field and the body is the particle. As Einstein said, it’s simply that the field is what governs that particle. That’s what the new biology is all about; how the mind perceives the world and how that perception is translated into the mechanism of controlling cell function and gene activity.

GS: I used to laugh at the old argument over brain chemistry or consciousness. I always thought that the answer is “yes.”

BL: [Laughing.] Well, it is. It’s funny because you can look at brain chemistry in the sense of conventional biomedicine and think that a person has an imbalance in serotonin or an imbalance in some other chemical. Then everybody focuses on the chemical that they think is out of order in an attempt to influence the chemical for restored health. But the unfortunate situation is the chemical is not out of order, the process of thinking, that causes the chemical to be produced is what is out of order. The chemical is just responding to the thoughts. It really comes back to understanding how the mind is the primary cause and the chemistry is a secondary phenomenon, but they are linked. That’s always been the confusing part.

GS: I’m encouraged by the fact that people are finally starting to realize that the mechanistic view of the universe is a dead end. If you live in a strictly physical universe, where is there to go?

BL: The problem we’re dealing with is that awareness-knowledge is power, and we manipulate knowledge. It’s being manipulated, unfortunately, through the pharmaceutical industry.

GS: It always has been.

BL: Yes. When I ask an audience, “how many of you are aware that there are more efficient ways of producing energy, less damaging to the planet than using fossil fuels?” Almost everyone in the audience is aware of alternative fuel sources. But when I ask, “so where are they?” everyone is quiet. It’s not in the interest of the fossil fuel industry to develop new sources because they sell fossil fuel. Consider the concept of physical medicine with chemicals and drugs and then consider energy medicine where you manipulate the field. I ask the audience if anybody is familiar with the fact that energy medicine works. Of course, everybody from chiropractors on up, are. Then I ask why everybody is not promoting this. The answer is that it’s not in the chemical industry’s interest, in any sense of the word, to have energy healing.

GS: It’s like when J.P. Morgan burned Tesla’s lab and destroyed him personally and later was heard to have said, how much money can I make selling antennas?

BL: That’s exactly why the medical industry has blinders on, because it follows the money trail, which is so obvious. Medicine, religion, the government, any of these big agencies, start out having service as a principal function, but when the agency gets larger, there is point where it is about the maintenance of the industry and not the function that is more important. Then everyone is looking at the bottom line of the dollar. Today we’re not doing medicine for humanitarian purposes; we’re doing it because people invest money.

GS: At the physical level, corporatism is the problem.

BL: Yes.

GS: But the real problem is too few people have ever thought about thinking.

BL: It’s unfortunate. The people who think about thinking are the ones who know. If you really understand the nature of how the biological system works, you find out that everyone is equally powerful in their creative ability. If everyone is equally powerful in their creativity, then why do we live in a world with more or less powerful people? There are only two possible answers to that question. One is that some people have found a way to get more power themselves, and that is unlikely. The only way you can get more power is to take away power from the other people. The other is that there is a group of people on the planet who are fully aware of the things that I’m talking about. They’ve known it for thousands of years and encourage it in their own small family communities, but don’t really offer it to the public. When things are offered to the public from this magic area, in a sense, there is a tendency for the media to suppress it as being quackery; for instance, the idea of astrology. Of course, many leaders have astrologers. Of course they do. But the people are told not to believe astrology.

GS: This manipulation of people is perhaps best illustrated by the successful misuse of the concepts of heaven and hell.

BL: I think so. You own their lives when you put people in fear. It’s the same fear game the government is playing with us right now. For hundreds of years, the church was based on the fear of darkness and if you paid enough you could get coverage. Medicine sells the fear of your genetic determinism and that your life is out of your control and you can’t do anything about it, but they can. So they become the modern religion in that sense. Take this tablet and you’ll be well. Take this wafer, it’ll all be okay.

GS: Give us your money and you’ll be well and go to heaven instead of hell.

[Laughter]

BL: This is what it’s about. Having been in the field and seen it from the inside, I recognize that the manipulation is so prevalent. When I first became a professor, if you went through the parking lot and looked at the faculty cars by the biology department you’d find old, inexpensive cars. If you were to walk though the faculty parking lot at Stanford today you’d see Mercedes, Lexuses and BMWs all over the place. Here’s what happened. When I got into biology, we got into science because science was like Star Trek: you were going to go places that no one has gone before. It was the draw and excitement of the unknown. Today it’s all about how much money they can make if they join the drug companies. You have a different type of people now because the dollar became more important. When I got my first job, I didn’t even know what faculty got paid. It wasn’t even an interest. I was just excited to get a chance to do research. I was amazed that people would actually pay me to do electron microscopy. Today the people in this field are there for the money and that has a whole different meaning behind it. They don’t care so much about the science, but only the end result. That’s why the drug companies are killing so many people. It’s the money that they are really looking at.

     I just talked with a colleague who was a big executive at a very large pharmaceutical company. She told me very clearly two interesting facts about that. First, when they make a drug and they know that the side effects are lethal, they do a calculation to find out how many people will die, because if they can sell enough drugs to cover the lawsuits and make more money, then that’s an acceptable drug. She also said that they also have drugs that are actually extremely effective, but they keep them on the shelf because they won’t make as much money if they put them out. Because they’d rather give the less effective drugs which will hook people into a continuous pay thing.

GS: They’ve got to have drugs with bad side effects so they can sell more drugs to counteract those side effects.

BL: It also ensures more employment because if your liver goes bad, then you have to have hepatologists, and that causes your kidney to go bad and you have to get a renal specialist, and then that affects your heart and then you get a cardiac surgeon and everybody joins on the chain.

GS: Well the answer obviously is consciousness. As you state in one of the articles on your website, “the powers that be have no interest in us becoming more conscious.”

BL: Because if people are empowered, you can’t control them. A friend of mine who was a head in the National Institute of Health did research in the causes of violence. He got to an understanding and published it, and got fired as well as having his grants taken away. He had revealed in his research that we are knowingly creating a violent population. The reason for that is that in a patriarchal, authoritative world, if people get very happy, you can’t control them. He saw that the nature of the violence being expressed in the world is being perpetuated by church and the government. Basically, there is scientific evidence which reveals that by interfering with pleasure you create more violence. When he published this information, which said that our taboos and all those strict laws from the church onward, preventing people from getting pleasure, you change the receptors in the brain that regulate the adrenal system, and the significance is that you adjust the level of how much adrenaline the system can take before the system shuts it off. When people don’t get pleasure, the level is set so that the adrenaline level almost comes to a threshold before they shut off, and if the adrenaline goes beyond the threshold, the person will become spontaneously violent. It reveals that by denying pleasure, you get people who can be worked up fast. When people are in pleasure they are less likely to go to war, for instance. That’s what the Bonobo chimps have revealed. Every time they start to get worked up, they have sex. Then there is no violence because after that, everybody has calmed down. It’s a prototype of “make love, not war.”

GS: What do we have to be optimistic about?

BL: We’re going thorough a wonderful evolutionary stage right now. This consciousness is the evolution of going from one phase of human civilization’s development to another. My sense as a biologist is that human civilization is a multi-cellular organism. We are the cells, and there is a fractal character to our geometry which I expand on in some of my lectures. The relevance of fractal geometry is about how organisms fit into the environment. The character of fractal geometry is that the images are so similar in higher or lower levels of the organization of what you’re looking at. It is the science behind the old statement, “as above, so below.” It reveals that the patterns are similar at whatever level you look.

     As a biologist I study cells and how cells form communities called people. If you understand the nature of that community, then you can understand how 50 trillion cells can live in harmony under the skin, and yet we have trouble getting 6 billion people to live in harmony on the entire planet. There are something like 50 trillion sentient citizens inside every body. They live in a community and the cells have jobs; they have wages in the form of energy that they receive. They get services and health care and all these kinds of things. The interesting thing here is that old mystical statement about how the answers are within. It’s interesting because, if you look at the rules of community that make up the community of cells in the human body, and the cells are indeed sentient living entities, understanding the rules of fundamental biology, when applied to humanity, will be the resolution.

     Even more interesting is that the fractal story says there will be a similar pattern between the evolution of an animal and the evolution of human civilization, which is the evolution of an animal, in a sense. If you look at vertebrate evolution, it goes from fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds, to mammals. The human evolution then, according to fractals, would go through similar periods where it would be fish-like, amphibian-like, bird-like, etc.

     So where are we in this evolution lineage? The first cultures who dwelt on the planet were mariculture. They had to live by the water. Water was required for them just like it is for fish, so mariculture and fish cultures were very parallel. Amphibians were different because when they evolved, they took the water from the pond and carried it in their bodies onto the land. That would be tantamount to the period of human civilization when agriculture evolved, because that was the point when we could bring water wherever we wanted. We were no longer restricted to the edges of water sources.

     Then came the reptiles. If you look at them, they are almost like little digital machines the way they click their heads and their eyes. They are actually very machine-like. So much so that a five inch lizard and a fifty foot dinosaur are essentially the same creature. Evolution for them was a blueprint just blown up to massive size. And yet while the machine-like reptiles evolved by making their bodies bigger, they didn’t need to make their brains any bigger. The bodies of dinosaurs got bigger, but their brains stayed small. This allowed the dinosaurs to stay alive as long as the environment was extremely stable because the brain wasn’t powerful enough to adapt the body in times of great change.

     The dinosaurs gave life to the birds and then to the mammals. The dinosaur period is fractally similar to the mechanization of the industrial age. So we went from agriculture to the industrial age. Then the birds, Wilber and Orville Wright, flew. The significance of this is that they took it off the ground, changed the dimensions of the planet with perspective and connectivity which would change civilizations through this aviation phase. The aviation phase reached its maximum in 1969 when the astronauts landed on the moon and took a picture of the Earth. This picture, the one icon that we all know, was very important because it was the first time we saw a perspective derived from the birds, and the people looked at the planet as this very tiny thing on the horizon of the Moon. This provided perspective. People realized that that’s all there is and that we’d better take care of it. We have to take care of the water, air, and people. The word for taking care of people is “nurturing.” What is the character of the mammals? They are nurturers. That’s the fundamental character. So in 1969, civilization was seeded with a new vision called “nurturing,” taking care of each other and the planet.

GS: Just to keep up with popular culture, people are being forced to process so much information that they are being dragged, kicking and screaming into a state of semi-enlightenment. It’s just happening.

BL: I agree with that 100%. I’ve been lecturing on this since 1985 and for fifteen years I had to drag people into opening themselves to these ideas, but in the last five years there has been an almost algorithmic increase of people coming out on their own. So as an historian of my own presentations, I see that we are now accelerating into this other place. I see it because I see the people showing up who weren’t there for fifteen years before.

GS: I noticed talk on your website regarding a crash. Do you think that a serious economic disruption, a complete dissolution of the current system has to happen, or can human civilization be successfully morphed?

BL: I think that it’s going to be hard to successfully morph it if people holding on to the old belief systems don’t let go. There is not a real easy middle ground because it requires a different thinking mindset. That means it’s not patching up what’s here, but creating an alternative that is far better.

GS: How do you see this crash happening, if it indeed does?

BL: I’m not really sure. It could be economic. That’s primed and ready to go all the time because there is no real money behind the money.

GS: They also use that whenever they want to consolidate power.

BL: Yes. Money is power. So it could be something in that field, or it could be as extreme as a polar shift. That would certainly shake up everything. Whatever it is, I think it’s going to be a global, not a local effect. It will put everybody on the same level, all of a sudden and then we may make something far better of it. It’s interesting because everybody thinks that when chaos like that happens, then everybody will be crazy. It turns out that during the greatest times of crisis, people come together and behave the most peacefully. When everybody is on equal ground, then the status of strife we have now goes away and we become more humane. Hurricane Katrina is a good example of this. In the beginning there were people helping people, but when the government let it down, then it was everybody out for themselves. That’s the failure of the government since it is the central voice that holds all the people together.

GS: Yes. What should we cover that we haven’t?

BL: This new science is very exciting in that when people start to apply it, based on the nature of quantum mechanics and the observer and the creation of the world around us, this is extending the physics of quantum mechanics into the real world. It reveals that the world we live in is mental and spiritual. The new biology, especially the role of epigenetics, of the outside information influencing the inside, supports that physics. Both of them agree that the observer influences the world.

     Now that this new biology is coming into place, it tells us that how we interact with the world creates our health and what happens in the world around you. I love the physics because the physics has come full circle. They ran away from spirit, like I did as a scientist, and came right back to fully experience what we already knew, but didn’t have the scientific data for. Now the science is there and it tells us to go right back to the beginning. Everything is based on belief. Belief is what this whole new biology is about. If you want to be a victim, that is a belief. If you want to be empowered, that’s a belief.

---

Dolores Cannon will be appearing at the Lightworkers Midwest Conference, October 27-29, held at the Wyndham Lisle Hotel Ballroom, Lisle, Illinois. For more information, please see www.Angelic-Art.com, call Joanne Macko at 630-579-8184 or email joanne@angelic-art.com.

---

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to the Home Page