Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
This is dangerous ground to tread in if you’re with traditional biologists because they will immediately accuse you of creationism and teleology and all the old terms that are used to attack the most traditional model of evolution. Evolution right now needs revision.
I’ve just written this book with Dr. Rudy Tanzi, Super Brain, where we have an entire chapter devoted to evolution, mind, and consciousness; but we’re doing studies at our own center here where we take people through various practices of meditation and then we look at the gene expression, and it changes! It changes because of epigenetic modulation. Epigenes are factors outside the gene and the epigenetic information is all there in the sheet of proteins outside the genome.
This is influenced by everything. It’s influenced by thought, by stress, by relaxation, by meditation, by diet, by sleep, by emotions. So, for the first time, we now have a very clear handle on mind, brain genome, and even microbiomes. 90 percent of the genetic information in your body is bacteria.
This includes your gut and your skin. 90 percent of your DNA is bacteria. Only 10 percent is human. Even in the human cells – the 10 percent human cells that you have – the mitochondria, which are the energy producing organelles in your cells, they’re all derived from bacteria. I would say you are, as a human being, the awakening in consciousness of bacterial colonies. They got together to produce human beings and they said, “Okay, who am I now? Let’s start talking about consciousness itself.”
We can now show that your thoughts, your emotions, your mental activity, which obviously comes from your consciousness, is influencing the behavior of your genes, not only your human genes, but your microbial genes. We are getting all this data together.
We have a study right now that we’ve completed on meditation and what happens to gene activity, and we have scientific partnerships with cell biologists from Harvard, from UCSF, from UCSD, from Scripps, and from Duke University, collaborating on the paper on how meditation influences gene activity.
