By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

The field of genetics is so complex that the story is simplified for popular consumption. The simplified story is that DNA contains the “code of life,” a master blueprint that jumps into action the instant an egg is fertilized in the mother’s womb. From that point on, a human being develops from a single cell to 37 trillion cells as the blueprint unfolds. The traditional view is that we are then the sole products of our genes. Yet, increasingly, evidence shows that “nurture” plays a much bigger role over “nature” than even professional geneticists have ever envisaged. When it comes to genetics, “nurture” exerts its effects on “nature” via epigenetics, as we laid out in our book Super Genes.

 

As powerful as the “code of life” story is, behind the scenes a growing number of geneticists don’t buy into it; in fact, they think we’ve gotten a lot about genes, wrong. At the same time, a new, improved picture of human development, based on the interplay of genes and lifestyle, is emerging. This revolution is outlined beautifully in an online article at Nautilus.com titled “It’s the End of Genes as We Know It.” The author, Ken Richardson, is an expert in human development, and he is worried that wildly exaggerated assumptions about the deterministic effects of DNA could lead to social policy that echoes the racism that fueled the eugenic movement decades ago, most notoriously with the Nazi ideology of a master race. As a case in point, Nobel Laureate, James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, was recently stripped of all his honors at Cold Spring Harbor, Laboratories, where he spent much of scientific career, after he continually expressed his bigoted opinion that black people and women are less intelligent than others based on their genetics.

 

Richardson’s article cuts much deeper, into everyone’s everyday aspirations, in fact. The problem with the traditional “code of life” story is that it has huge holes in it that are growing bigger every day. There’s no substitute for reading Richardson’s argument in detail, but here’s the gist. DNA’s purpose is to produce the proteins that are the basic building blocks of a cell and other products that regulate the genes that produce these proteins. But DNA, alone, does not account for the many ways cells, tissues, and organs use these proteins. Jumping to the conclusion that DNA is the final blueprint for the body, mind, and behavioral traits of a person is dead in the water.

 

Recent research has shown that cells have their own intelligence. They are dynamic systems that change their makeup “on the hoof,” as Richardson puts it, a process of self-regulation that begins almost the moment a sperm fertilizes an ovum. As soon as that one cell forms into a ball of identical cells, “the cells are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo [i.e., from scratch].” It turns out that totally independent of DNA, a cell is controlling all kinds of information contained in amino acids, fats, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and various kinds of nucleic acids (RNA)—a whole factory of ingredients necessary to keep the cell going are not predetermined by our genes at all.

 

In the newly emerging view, the cell controls DNA just as much as DNA controls the cell.  DNA, it seems, emerged at a later stage of evolution. In their earliest stages, billions of years ago, cells had no DNA but were self-enclosed vats of molecular soup that likely used RNA, the blueprint of proteins. This soup somehow began to regulate itself, giving rise gradually over time to permanent structures that were needed on a regular basis. The information for these structures was then coded as DNA, which serves as a kind of passive database.

 

A validation of this new understanding is that cells, in fact, can alter their own DNA via epigenetics. This means that the life of a cell is intelligent, dynamic, responsive to changing conditions, and creative. DNA possesses none of these traits; they operate outside the manufacture of proteins. Richardson notes something else that puts DNA in its rightful place as a necessary part of a cell’s existence but not its whole complex life. “More startling has been the realization that less than 5 percent of the genome is used to make proteins at all. Most produce a vast range of different factors (RNAs) regulating, through the network, how the other genes are used.”

 

If the life of a cell is dynamic, intelligent, self-regulating, and creative, it is no wonder that complex life forms, including Homo sapiens, display the same traits.  But where did they come from? At present, the new story is stuck on two factors: information and complexity. The notion is that primal “molecular soup” found ways for atoms and molecules to form complicated structures through information exchange and the statistical possibilities that arise when zillions of molecules start churning around.

 

But is that feasible? As someone wittily put it, the notion that complexity is enough to explain the behavior of a structure as complex as the human brain is like saying that if you add enough cards to the deck, they start playing poker.

 

In our book Super Genes we tackle these issues head-on in great detail. Our premise is that a cell, tissue, organ, system, or a complete person are all expressions of an underlying field of consciousness. Only consciousness explains what must be accounted for: intelligence, self-regulation, dynamism, and creativity. It’s good news that these traits have been tracked to the level of the cell. It’s also good news that the notion that we are robots controlled by DNA is being dismantled. But just as important is the next step, to stop defending physical matter as the only basis of life, turning to consciousness, as well. It was the ideology of materialism that got us into trouble in the first place.

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Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self, co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World”.

 

There’s an old joke about a man who falls off the Empire State Building. As he passes an office window on the way down, someone shouts, “How are you doing?” and the man answers, “I’m okay so far.” I don’t know anyone who doesn’t laugh at the punchline the first time they hear the joke, but there’s also a wince thinking about the thud that awaits the man at the end.

 

Science has been okay—so far—in explaining how nature works, riding the crest of success for several centuries now. But the thud is near at hand, as outlined in a very readable, perceptive online article titled “The Blind Spot,” jointly written by two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s well worth your time to read it, because the blind spot referred to in the title has been of tremendous but hidden importance in your life.

 

The blind spot refers to science’s rejection of consciousness as a key factor in describing reality. Rigidly adhering to a belief that it holds the key for explaining everything, science hasn’t seen its own blind spot—or taken it seriously, with a few exceptions—and therefore the vast majority of working scientists don’t hear the thud that awaits them. The authors of the article do, and they go right to the heart of the problem. As they view it, science has been wrong on two counts. The first is the belief that science can accurately and objectively describe the real world as it exists. The second is the belief that physical reality is all that must be accounted for.

 

But as the authors cogently argue in plain language, “To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty.” This conclusion can be supported in countless ways, but the most important way, which touches all of us, is that the mind isn’t material, and no attempt to explain thoughts as the byproduct of physical activity in the brain has been remotely successful.  The fact that 99% of neuroscientists assume that the brain produces the mind—which is roughly akin to the assumption that a piano composes the music it transmits—testifies to how blind the blind spot actually is.

 

No matter what branch of science you examine, it works through reductionism, breaking existence down to the smallest unity, the source and cause of whatever is being examined. Like the man who is okay on his way down to the ground, reductionism has proved wildly successful in physic, chemistry, medicine, biology, and so on. We know how atoms, cells, and chemicals work in fine detail. But there’s a fundamental problem, which is that at a certain point—the point where you hear a thud—reductionism fails.

 

If you reduce the mind to atoms and subatomic particles, none of these can actually think, nor is there a viable argument for showing how they learn to think. If you reduce time to the first instant of the Big Bang, this tells you nothing about how time came into being, only when the cosmic clock started, which isn’t the same thing. If you search for the tiniest bit of matter, it vanishes into invisible waves in the quantum field, totally losing its solid “thingness.” In fact, by reducing the universe to ripples in the quantum field interacting with ripples in the electron field, the quark field, the gravity field, and so on, the entire cosmos becomes a mathematical riddle that is impossible to calculate.

 

There are many such difficulties with reductionism, presented in detail in You Are the Universe, which I co-wrote with physicist Menas Kafatos. Our arguments are totally in accord with the blind spot article. Yet in either case the average person will say “So what?” The interactions of the quantum field have zero bearing on finding a job, raising a family, and all the other activities of everyday life. Yet each activity begins with our experience of the world and the mental models we carry around in our heads.

 

If you get in a fender bender, for example, you can explain it by any number of models. The accident could be caused by an act of God, random chance, bad luck, a sleepy brain, distracting thoughts, a malfunction in your car, slippery roads in winter, crowded traffic patterns, or lousy drivers clogging up the road—take your pick. Each explanation leads back to one thing: how you perceive the accident. Every experience involves an interpretation; perceptions are never impersonal.

 

The fact is that since birth you have undergone the process of living in an interpreted world, which is where the theoretical problems in science bump into “so what?” Science is the chief bulwark of modern life and the models we follow to explain how everything works. If science discounts consciousness and cannot explain the mind, then we as ordinary citizens have inherited this blind spot. As a result, any belief that we know how things “really” work is wobbly. Or to recall the blind spot article, our assumptions are either false or empty.

 

Examples of our muddled state greet us everywhere. Why are some people geniuses, criminals, hungry for power, cruel, or saintly? No one can explain it. What is talent? Is Schizophrenia a disease? Why do some people get hooked on drugs after trying them one time while others walk away and never become addicted? What is love? Can animals think?

 

What these questions have in common are two things. First, we’ve all experienced them or know someone who has. In other words, they are inescapable, and it’s natural to want reliable answers. Second, using reductionism to provide the answer doesn’t work. Being human isn’t about physical “stuff” bouncing around, either in the brain or out there in the cosmos. Instead of a first cause, which is what science looks for all the time when exploring space, time, matter, and energy, human experience is embedded in a cloud of causes.

 

Going back to all the explanations that can be applied to a fender bender, it is obvious that no single one is “the” answer. Not so obvious is the fact that being human is about our infinite capacity to interpret experience any way we choose. Thus we are creative users of consciousness. As the answer to science’s dilemmas and failures, I think we must concede that first and foremost Homo sapiens is a species based on consciousness. There’s no other way to get rid of the blind spot. As long as we consider ourselves a bundle of physical “stuff” operating like a complex machine, the most urgent problems of everyday life will not be solved.

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Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self, co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In a news-driven society more attention is paid to events that will soon fade away than to ideas that could alter civilization. Modern secular society needs the impetus of great ideas to add meaning and purpose to our lives, as religion once did when it was the dominant force around the world. In turbulent times the prospect of a single idea that can transform humanity seems remote.

 

But just such an idea has arrived. It travels under various tags, the most common being “the one mind.” It’s the notion that there is only one mind in the universe despite the appearance here on Earth of seven billion minds. On the surface the radical possibilities stemming from “the one mind” aren’t obvious. In fact, the last thing anyone would want to give up is the claim to be a unique individual. That’s not what the one mind is about—it’s about expanding into higher consciousness as a practical reality. If humanity shares one mind, and this mind has a cosmic dimension, the very idea begins to cause one’s consciousness to expand.

 

Radical ideas are rarely new, and in the history of religion there has always been the concept that everything is happening in God’s mind. Without religious overtones, the one mind brings in attributes once considered divine, such as omniscience. An all-knowing god is remote; an all-knowing consciousness that you are part of is intimate. In place of divine omnipresence, the one mind brings timelessness down to Earth as a human attribute.

 

Can you in fact feel the effect of being timeless and all-knowing? There’s a wealth of tradition behind the possibility that the human mind can transcend the physical world, reaching a domain of higher reality. Undertaking the journey to reach that reality is at once an ancient challenge and a contemporary one. The one mind isn’t about inflating our sense of self-importance. You can’t experience what it means to be timeless and all-knowing as if those traits belong to the individual ego personality. “I” is a limiting concept. By transcending the everyday mind you get a glimpse of your source, which is where the timeless and all-knowing originate.

 

The point is to base reality, including your personal reality, on consciousness. That’s a radical departure from the official story that human beings are essentially physical, with the evolutionary add-on of a higher brain. When the one mind becomes the official story, all of life finds the same foundation in cosmic consciousness. There is no longer higher and lower life but one life that must be cherished and seen as a whole. At the very least, adopting this view can make saving the planet more central to everyone’s purpose. Clearly the crisis of climate change only deepens the longer we believe in separation between nations, belief systems, and individuals.

 

It would sell the one mind short, however, to call it a viewpoint or a story. What’s at stake is the hidden reality that humans have continually glimpsed and yearned to reach. It’s the realm of peace where there is no fear of death because death doesn’t exist. It’s the beginning of creation and the end of suffering, because suffering is caused by creation gone awry.

 

Ours would seem to be the last era when such a vision can reach fulfillment, but in the long view it was necessary to bring the one mind down from myth and mysticism. Science needs to confront nature head on and affirm that the one mind is real. Huge steps have been taken in this direction. Almost a century ago a quantum pioneer like Erwin Schrödinger affirmed that consciousness was one and indivisible, and another genius in physics, Werner Heisenberg, asserted that physical reality cannot exist without the interaction of an observer.

 

Despite these radical insights, or perhaps in defiance of them, physics has clung to the idea that nature is what is seems, a given that cannot be challenged. Now the challenge has not only arrived but is making headway. Serious consideration is given to the concept of one observer in the universe, and after decades of failing to show that mind can be created through physical processes, the idea is rising that the cosmos has always been conscious—mind is a feature as innate to creation as gravity or the speed of light.

 

I’m barely touching upon the explosive implications of the one mind. (Anyone curious to read a complete in-depth treatment should consult Larry Dossey’s riveting book, The One Mind” How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness.)  Science is poised to go in an intriguing direction, but where I feel the most hope, and genuine confidence, is in the future of spirituality and personal evolution. Without transcendence, we are stuck in the domain of separation. Body and mind inhabit separate compartments, and within the mind there is a war of opposing impulses, feelings, and thoughts.

 

The prevailing attitude is to live with the divided mind, protect yourself form the worst aspects of human nature, and boost the self-interest of “I, me, and mine” as far as you can. At best this strategy has left us feeling insecure and dissatisfied. At worst it has led to the catastrophes of war, xenophobia, and the specter of an environment damaged beyond repair. The primary attraction of the one mind is that it heals everything created by the state of separation. In itself, that is enough to create a new future. Who would settle for the old one that is looming before us when healing and renewal have arrived to save us from ourselves?

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

Fad diets come and go, but officially the subject of nutrition is guided by science. The public stubbornly thinks in terms of “good” foods and “bad” foods, so when the government’s nutritional experts issue scientifically based advice, any attempt at a nuanced picture generally gets lost. Recently there were headlines when the highest board for dietary protocols, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Council, reversed a government warning about avoiding foods high in cholesterol, which has been in place nearly 40 years.

The public is likely to shrug off this about-face, or else decide that eggs, the most common food high in cholesterol, is no longer a “bad” food but has moved into the “good” column. This ignores the council’s message, which weighed one thing against another. For people in a normal state of health, saturated fats from animal products pose a higher risk than high cholesterol. This finding is more a shift in focus than an about-face. It’s still unhealthy, the majority of nutritionists agree, to eat too much red meat as opposed to eggs, but eggs are high in saturated fat, too, so you shouldn’t overdo them, either.

Nutritional science is a foggy subject, not only to the non-scientist but to the experts.

The picture of the human body as a machine works only so far, and after that all kinds of confusion sets in. Too many processes are happening on too many levels, each interwoven, for the machine model to be simple in the first place. Imagine a car that ran on gasoline, air, water, and a dose of daily vitamins and minerals. If a car that runs on gasoline alone is complicated, adding these other elements would require an engine beyond our present power of engineering.

Now substitute food for gasoline, and no amount of knowledge can reduce the body-as-machine to a level of useful comprehension. Some vitamins, being soluble in water, leach from the body quickly, the oil-soluble vitamins stick around for a long time. Some minerals like potassium also readily leach out in urine, while iron levels remain steady for years at a time. The processes that affect every nutrient are subject to mental factors that seem far removed from food intake, such as stress and depression. A cascade of hormones influences digestion, assimilation, and weight, so going back to the analog of a car, what would it be like to press on the gas pedal and have the car refuse to accelerate because it feels depressed?

Until the body is redefined as a process rather than a machine, nutrition (not to mention all of medical science) will never be a settled matter. Human beings are omnivores, and our capacity to digest a huge range of food has resulted in diets around the world of amazing diversity. Even the fact that the microbiome–the sum total of bacterial populations in the intestinal tract and elsewhere–is different all around the globe stymies any attempt to standardize the human diet. Not only is the body a process, but through the microbiome we merge into the surrounding ecology.

In fact, the most useful model of the body would approach it as an ecology that reflects the planetary ecology. Just as the separation between mind and body is totally arbitrary, so is the division between what our bodies are doing and what Nature as a whole is doing.

So where does that leave you when you next go to the grocery store?

The answer isn’t going to be a shopping list. Almost everyone has gotten the message that a whole foods diet is the best, and in this general category a Mediterranean diet has distinct advantages, largely because its reliance on fish and olive oil is healthier than a reliance on saturated fats and red meat. The high fiber content in any whole foods diet gives the microbiome the nutrition it feeds on. There’s not much more to advise, because almost everything else is mental. Stress is worse for you than a bad diet. Depression, too. Habits are mental, and it is habit that keeps Americans eating processed and junk food, far too much sugar and fat, probably too much salt, and so on. As long as 1 in 10 meals is eaten in McDonald’s, which can stand symbolically for the gamut of fast food, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Council seems a little out of touch.

Because the poor and uneducated have the worst health and consume the worst diet, the ideal of a perfect American diet runs into one more huge snag. But “perfect” has always been the wrong goal. “Balance” is the right word, boring as it sounds, and to really get it right, there must be a holistic mind-body balance. I don’t know when the machine model will ultimately be discarded, but no one has to await the official word. Individuals can take the power for themselves to take wellness seriously, incrementally end bad habits, reduce their stress for real rather than always procrastinating, and stop obsessing over “good” and “bad” foods. When you throw out the wrong model and begin to appreciate the right one, major changes in the right direction are actually achievable.

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Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self, co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com