Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
You obviously don’t change. You do not change the sequence of the nucleotides on your DNA. It remains the same, but you do definitely regulate the activity of your genes and actually engenerate the factors, including emotions and stress, will influence gene activity in subsequent generations.
If you look at experiments where they take mice and they have them smell something like wintergreen and they give them electrical shocks, then the next generation of mice will be afraid of the wintergreen smell even though they haven’t experienced the electrical shock. Or if you go to a cattle farm and you see cattle that are enclosed with wiring that has an electrical fence around it and so they get mild electrical shock, then the subsequent generations will be afraid and will not go near that wiring. How does memory get transferred?
We all assume that memory is in our brain, and, of course, there are neural correlates for memory that you can look at. If I ask you to remember the face of your mother, or the location of your house, or what you had for dinner yesterday; when you do that there will be activity in your brain that I can look at. But, where is the memory at a cellular level before I asked you that question?
Nobody is able to answer that. Where is the cellular imprint at the basis of chemistry in cells – your synaptic network for merely on/off switches. So, where are memories recorded, and how are they transferred? If you think the examples I gave you with mice and cattle, they’re being transferred.
If they were in the brain alone, how would they be transferred? Epigenetically we don’t know yet. My theory is that all memories are in consciousness and consciousness is not in the brain. Consciousness at the very fundamental level is sentience that pervades the entire universe.
If you read Freeman Dyson’s book Infinite in All Directions, towards the end he addresses some very interesting questions. He says, “Every quantum experiment forces the atom to make a choice, that, in fact, atoms have some degree or sentience.” They’re hanging out with other atoms. Particles are hanging out with other particles, and they’re in a relationship with other particles. Otherwise you couldn’t get two atoms and molecules, etcetera. So, there’s some form of sentience. Obviously bacteria have sentience. They look for good food.
