Spirituality Guide

As part of his virtual tour to promote his book, I decided to question Mr. Church on some subjects relevant to his work and curious to me. Today is the last day of this style questioning.

Stop in tomorrow for my more formal interview with Mr. Church.

S: Bruce Lipton talks about cell stimuli, as in what triggers them to do things. The signals seem to provoke reactions in the cell membrane which then cause the internal processes to produce proteins. What i wonder is where the epigenetic structures receive their ‘instructions’ to operate. Is it possible they show the presence of a life field as Lipton says is the originator of our DNA functions?

DC: I believe there’s Consciousness with a big C, of which our little local human consciousness is a part. Experienced meditators have experiences that are not explainable in terms of our local awareness. They produce a “felt sense” in the body as well, as these transcendent experiences echo down to the level of our cells.

The amazing observation I make here is that we’re unified organisms, and our trillions of individual cells are as involved with transformative states of consciousness as our transcendent spirits. There’s no such thing as a spiritual change that is not a biological change, and when our spirits soar, our bodies are filled with vibrancy and health.

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Dawson Church has edited or authored many books in the fields of health, psychology, and spirituality. He has collaborated on articles with many of the leading voices of our time, including Larry Dossey, Bernie Siegel, Caroline Myss, Barry Sears, and John Gray. He earned his doctorate in Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the mentorship of distinguished neurosurgeon Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., founder of the American Holistic Medical Association. He went on to receive a postgraduate Ph.D. in Natural Medicine.

As part of his virtual tour to promote his book, I decided to question Mr. Church on some subjects relevant to his work and curious to me.

S: For a long time it was thought that individuals are the result of their genes. Before the Human Genome study it was presumed that the DNA of humans would be complex, vastly more so than say, a mouse. Did this finding kick off the epigenetics theory or was it more a matter of bringing back into attention something from earlier times?

DC: It was eye-opening when the Human Genome Project showed that humans share about 99% of the genes of mice. We have only about twice the number of genes found in a simple insect such as a fruit fly. Scientific papers from the early 1990s spoke of over 100,000 genes. A decade later scientists were talking 65,000 genes, then 40,000, down to the current consensus of 23,688 genes. These findings told us that epigenetics, control of the DNA from outside the genome, was very important in differentiating human bodies.

S: Some time back there was a study that looked at the environments of grandmothers and how this affected their children and the children of their children. Was this the beginning of a real look at the effects of environment on DNA expression?

DC: A number of provocative studies have shown that love and nurturing is epigenetic. When we’re loved, gene switches in the stress-response parts of our brain are tripped, and these changes affect our lives. They can also be passed on to the next generation. So the offspring of nurturing parents tend to nurture their young better, several generations on. All this without any change in the DNA sequence!

This week, author Dawson Church will be joining us not only to talk about his newest book The Genie in Your Genes but also the implications of epigenetic research.

Dawson Church has edited or authored many books in the fields of health, psychology, and spirituality. He has collaborated on articles with many of the leading voices of our time, including Larry Dossey, Bernie Siegel, Caroline Myss, Barry Sears, and John Gray. He earned his doctorate in Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the mentorship of distinguished neurosurgeon Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., founder of the American Holistic Medical Association. He went on to receive a postgraduate Ph.D. in Natural Medicine.

Church and Shealy coauthored a compendious survey of spiritual healing throughout history called Soul Medicine. Church founded Soul Medicine Institute (SMI), a nonprofit dedicated to education and research into science-based medical interventions which use consciousness and energy as primary modalities. He is the author of several studies published in peer-reviewed journals, and lectures at many medical and psychology conferences each year.

He presents workshops on peak performance for athletes and organizations through EFT Power Training. He performed the first randomized blind trial of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) for athletes, the first study of EFTs effects on healthcare workers, and a large nationwide study of PTSD in war veterans as part of the Iraq Vets Stress Project.

His research summarizes the biomedical evidence for consciousness-based treatments. The Genie in Your Genes outlines the latest studies on the effects of psychospiritual experiences on gene expression, and predicts that consciousness will reach the front line of medicine in the coming decade. It has been hailed as a brilliant contribution to the literature by many reviewers.

You can visit his website at The Genie in Your Genes.

The Genie in Your Genes

The Genie in Your Genes is a breakthrough book linking consciousness to genetic change. For the first time, a single book summarizes a chain of remarkable scientific discoveries that are revolutionizing the ways we think about health.

Author Dawson Church applies the insights of the new field of Epigenetics (epi=above, i.e. control above the level of the gene) to healing. Citing hundreds of scientific studies, he shows how beliefs and emotions can trigger the expression of DNA strands.

He focuses on a class of genes called Immediate Early Genes or IEGs. These genes turn on within a few seconds of a stimulus. They can be triggered by thoughts or emotions (”I loved that unexpected gift of roses Bill gave me” or “I’m so mad about what Uncle John said at the Christmas party”). Many IEGs are regulatory genes turn on other genes that affect specific aspects of our immune system, such as the production of white blood cells that destroy attacking bacteria and viruses. Epigenetics thus influences our health every day.

He coins the new term “Epigenetic Medicine” to describe healing techniques with epigenetic effects. He also summarizes the science behind the infant fields of Energy Psychology and Energy Medicine, both of which offer promising epigenetic medical therapies, and describes a few of the thousands of powerful personal breakthroughs that are being achieved by therapists, doctors and lay people practicing these techniques.

The Genie in Your Genes shows that there is a sound theoretical framework, based on credible experiments, for understanding these astonishing results, and predicts that the insights of Epigenetic Medicine will dramatically advance the fields of both medicine and psychology in the coming decade.

Best of all, The Genie in Your Genes demonstrates that, by taking control of our consciousness and using it to influence our genetic expression, we can sometimes bypass years of therapy, as well as harmful drugs and invasive surgeries, to, in effect, do continuous genetic engineering on our own bodies. This can produce both immediate relief from long-standing anxieties and neuroses, as well as “miraculous” healing of persistent physical conditions, especially autoimmune diseases.

Among a new crop of books that chart the way to a positive health future, The Genie in Your Genes stands out as a solidly grounded and exciting pointer to the future possibilities of a medicine that links soul to body and mind.

by Seeker

Some of the new knowledge we have come to from science tells us that the Earth is in flux. The surface of the planet is still recovering from the Ice Age, both in climate and in physical effects. The mass of ice, particularly in the Northern hemisphere, was enormous; when that much water is concentrated in one area, the excess weight can change landscapes, alter the albedo of the planet so that more sunlight is reflected away from the surface, and even press the continental plates down into the magma underneath.

The Antarctic is made up of two islands, something not many people realize, with a channel between them. One island is pressed down below what would be sea level by the ice on it. Were the ice on that island to slip and slide into the ocean, not only would the mass of water alter the sea level rather rapidly, there would be a surge back from the island as the magma below ‘popped’ the dimple back out to the normal surface.

As well as the weight stress on the continental plates, there is the effect of huge masses of ice entering the sea in a very short space of time. For example, recent findings show an increase in liquid water under the ice on the Antarctic islands – it isn’t hard to see this water as a lubricant, allowing the sudden slip of a large mass into the ocean.

Not only would this raise the sea level, a sudden mass slippage would cause a tsunami, the size of which would depend on how much ice moved. There would also be climate change as the fresh water altered currents in the ocean and even changed precipitation rates and distribution.

There’s another effect as well; huge amounts of water can be trapped behind ice masses and when the ice lets go, the water releases all at once. Canada was once almost covered by a large lake held back by an ice dam. When it released, possibly due to an atmospheric air burst of a comet, (of which they are finding traces in excavations across North America) it scoured across the US, entering the Gulf of Mexico in such an amount it altered the salinity enough that the life forms changed from marine to freshwater for a time.

Ice dames are dangerous even today – in India there are often unexpected floods as valleys in the Himalayas, flooded for centuries, suddenly empty as the ice holding them back is swept away.

So, it is certainly feasible that the end of the Ice Age brought about massive cataclysms that altered the world. Even today, most of our civilization lives in the lowlands, close to the sea. Were the sea to rise within a day or so, by (say) twenty metres, how much of our world would change forever?

by Seeker

It may seem I am straying far from the path of Spirituality, but be patient with me, it does come together. There is more evidence of things lost in the mists of time. You may have heard of the ‘road’ they found off Bimini near Miami in the US. There’s more of this type of discovery.

Off the west coast of India they’ve found a number of submerged structures that are very hard to dismiss as anything natural. At least one site shows as a town several kilometres long. Down around Sri Lankha they’ve found more underwater structures that appear to confirm Tamil myths of cities that once existed on the land bridge to India. It would also confirm Marco Polo’s assertion about the modern island being much larger in the past.

Off Cuba, an engineer named Paulina Zelitski found structures at 800 metres depth that show pyramids, walls and buildings that, by orthodox history, cannot exist.

Near Taiwan, at the Japanese islands of Yonaguni, a number of underwater structures have been found and are being investigated. And there are others…

The problem with all of these is that we know, with as much certainty as science can give us, that the waters covering these structures have been there for thousands of years. This means the structures were covered by the sea before conventional history says anyone was around to build them.

Tiahuanaco has wharves carved in stone to take advantage of the opportunities trade and development offered by Lake Titicaca. The problem here is, the lake moved away something around 10,000 years ago.

There aren’t meant to have been any civilized humans at that time.

by Seeker

SO just what is it that started us on the spiritual path as a race? Graham Hancock started as an investigative journalist and has a string of books behind him that have a common thread – that we have, as a race, a history that has been forgotten.

He has travelled the world looking for clues to what we have lost, and he seems to have found them all over. Geologist Dr. Robert Schock has cast a skeptical eye over the Sphinx and provides convincing expert testimony that the erosion on both it and the cutting in which it stands (or crouches) has been caused by long term heavy rainfall. This erosion also interestingly calls into question the face and head of the sphinx – it shows much less weathering than the rest of the monument.

This immediately moves the sculpting of the sphinx back prior to the last time Egypt had such weather – prior to about 6,000BC – and given the heavy weathering along with the evidence it has been restored a couple of times, probably a long time before 6,000BC. You can see the erosion and some of the old restoration work in the photo above.

Hancock, Ralph Ellis and Robert Bauval, among others like Charles Hapgood and Christopher Dunn have caused controversy and name-calling among the orthodox historians and Egyptologists by pointing out, with what must be agrannoying insistence, the inconsistencies in the ‘normal’ historical view of the history of Man.

There are mysteries about the Giza plateau pyramids, about Stonehenge and the knowledge they encode, with Tiahuanaco on the shores of Lake Titicaca and the pyramids at Teotihuacan in Mexico; some of these are known about by most people, even if not in detail. But there are many other places and mysteries that seem to point as well to a forgotten history, as well as reasons why we may have forgotten. And consistently we find these mysteries and histories tied up with a interwoven thread of spirituality and the quest for immortality.

by Seeker

When we reach down into the tiniest things of the universe, into realms that even the math says are the tiniest things possible, it is natural to be uncertain as to the reality of what we imagine. Strings are so tiny, there is not only no experiment to verify them, we haven’t yet thought of a possible experiment that could work.

One of the finest ‘microscopes’ we have is the electron microscope; it streams electrons at things and we ‘read’ the results on a screen. Streaming electrons at a string is like trying to identify a piece of wool by throwing Jupiter size planets at it. Only worse.

But the theory says if strings are there, they vibrate. In their vibration they create the particles of which we have evidence. The ancients and mystics have talked for millennia of the Song of the Universe and it appears they may have known more than we give credit for. The orchestra is all of the cosmos, the players every piece of mass and energy, the score is mathematics and the music is the combination and interaction across time and space that produces Consciousness.

It may be that our task, as Conscious beings, is to simply appreciate the symphony of creation, to be the audience to an orchestra beyond the wildest imaginations of Beethoven and Bach. Or it may also be that we are here to bring harmony into the Sounds of Chaos, to so order our lives and our paths that we impose scale and beauty on what might otherwise be chaotic dissonance.

Another facet that the Theory of Strings http://www.superstringtheory.com/ brings up is it still doesn’t have a built-in description of awareness. In fact, in Quantum theory, awareness seems to be a required part of the schema; a necessary part of collapsing the probability matrix that is the quantum potential into a settled ‘state’ that then makes up our universe.

The Birth of Religion - Part 4
by Seeker

Invisible universes? How could that be? How could there be entire realms which remain invisible even for those who look? It seems strange to think of but it is easily demonstrated.

The above is a series of images of just one thing. It’s something we can see every night when the sky is clear. The Milky Way looks markedly different depending on which frequency we choose to view it in. remarkable isn’t it? To think that each of those views is there, all the time, yet they remain invisible until we choose the right wavelength of light to record.

In a similar fashion, it has been suggested that there may be vibration differences that can reveal new vistas for us when we achieve them. Science has only brought credence to this view with the discoveries they bring forth. What we see as solid simply isn’t; in fact it may not be there at all.

When we track our way down through orders of magnitude of size, we come to atoms, once thought to be the ultimate in smallness. Now the investigations have gone way smaller than that, talking of quarks and muons, of photons, neutrinos and other particle exotica that are much smaller than atoms.

No longer can we even pretend that there is such a things as solidity as even within atomic size, most of the ‘matter’ is empty. If the nucleus of a hydrogen atom was swelled to the size of a basketball, the electron would be orbiting it more than ten miles out.

And down from that again, they talk of strings, basic fabric of the cosmos that are smaller compared to an atom than a grain of sand is to the sun. And strings vibrate!

And now for the third part in Seeker’s series on The Birth of Religion.

The Birth of Religion - Part 3
by Seeker

What is it to be human? A part of it is our ability to think and reason, but another part of it is our wonder and sense of awe at the scale and content of the world around us.

Reason tells us that it is at least a possibility that the universe exist only in our minds. Those considered wise among civilizations throughout history tell us over and again that consciousness, spirit, beingness, or whatever name you give to the essence that is us, is all there is. That we create the cosmos around us and that without awareness there is nothing.

Whether or not this is so, Einstein’s Relativity tells us of the importance of the Observer, that it matters from where you look as to what you see. Quantum Theory seems to tell us that Consciousness is an integral part of the universe rather than just a facet of it. In science there are theories that the Observer affects the results of the experiment, including some quite strange results that seem to say the results change in strange ways.

Mystics talk of this world being just one place among many while science talks of the possibility of many dimensions. So why is it we see only this realm?

Our senses are not really enablers for our minds. Rather than opening us to the cosmos around us, when looked at realistically, they instead limit our view. Out of the huge range of the spectrum of light available, we ‘see’ only a tiny slice. Our ears pass very little of the possible spread of sounds that occur around us. Our noses have nothing like the sensitivity of the animals we keep as pets and we can feel only things which directly contact our skin.

All that it takes for a world to exist that we can’t perceive is for it to not react to the wavelengths we can see.

For part of this week, a wonderful person I know is providing a series of guest posts about humanity and religion. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I do.

The Birth of Religion - Part One
by Seeker

Of all the life forms on Earth, as far as we know, only humans have religion. It may be that dolphins worship whales or that dogs worship their masters, but the wonderment at the possibility of higher realms and or a Creator seems to be a particularly human trait.

Mind you I am not talking here about any of the established or orthodox religions but rather the personal sense of awe and numinous feeling that there is more to life, more to the universe, than just atoms and other particles.

It seems strange but there is little in the normal world to indicate that people are thinking about just why we have the religious sense – or maybe we should call it the spiritual sense so we don’t keep getting tangled up with Religion.

Why do we have this feeling? When you ask those of science about such things, they talk about how Man would feel so alone, or our need for a father figure, or trying to find answers to the mysteries we see around us. Yet that begs the question of just why we would have those feelings at all.

It seems to me that if intelligence brings along with it such fear of facing the real world that we go looking for phantasms to brace us against the vicissitudes of life, then maybe it doesn’t have so much going for it after all. That if we need to invent a supernatural and omnipotent being to protect us and provide us with meaning to our lives then perhaps we don’t really meet the definitions for sanity and wisdom.

Unless of course, there is actually something beyond our merely physical world – as mystics and sages have been telling us all through history. Unless the sense of spirituality is really based in a recognition of something beyond the mundane and an awareness of lives and self that allows us to reach past the boundaries of the mere mortal world and catch a glimpse of forever.