Bruce Lipton: The Secret of Life is Belief
This is a very important issue Dirk, because when I buy into the genetics story, then by definition I own irresponsibility: “I am not responsible, the genes did it!” But we are totally responsible. However, how can we be responsible if we don’t have any knowledge? We have been deprived of knowledge, but knowledge is power, and a lack of knowledge is a lack of power. So we perceive powerlessness only because of a lack of knowledge. When you have the knowledge, you are profoundly powerful because now you’re controlling this whole experience.
OMTimes: Can you explain me in more detail, the relationship between the mind and the body?
Dr. Bruce Lipton: For me the understanding is this – we have been misled (lack of knowledge) about how the mechanism works. And we’ve been misled on the nature of how our mind or consciousness is directly influential in regard to the genetic activity. As a result of that then, we don’t perceive that our thoughts have anything to do with our biology. In fact, for the longest time, medicine wouldn’t even use the word ‘mind’.
When I was at Stanford and doing my research and writing a paper and used the word ‘mind‘ in my research, you should have seen my colleagues‘ reaction: “You can’t use the word mind! That’s not scientific!” So we have mainly left the mind out of the equation and have based our belief of the Newtonian physics model. This model explains that there’s an invisible energy world and there’s a mechanical-physical world, but they don’t talk to each other. So you’re a physical body then and your mind is an energy, but in this model, this energy cannot influence the physical body and its easier than to leave out the mind.
But as much as they wanted to leave out the mind, they were always stuck with an important finding, and that’s the Placebo Effect. This effect has been recognized for over a hundred years. It’s this belief that a pill or a medical procedure is going to heal us and we believe it and it will make us well. Even if we find out later that it was a sugar pill or the procedure was just a sham operation. But my healing was derived from what then? Not from the pill, not from the surgery. It was only derived from the belief.
