We Are What We Think

The fascinating thing about the field of human motivation is that the more you study it the more you appreciate how science and spirituality are ultimately converging on the same amazing conclusions regarding our ability to create our own reality.

That’s not to say that scientists and spiritual seekers share the same belief systems. Many are still poles apart in their thinking when it comes to the secrets of life.

Slowly, however, it would appear that more and more scientific studies are bearing out some of the more esoteric wisdom that has been popularised by books and movies like ‘The Secret’.

I’d like to follow up on the general theme of destiny but I’d like to come at it from a different, more scientific angle.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
― Albert Einstein

Scientific Fact and the Rest:

Most of us have grown up to appreciate that there are things about our universe and our existence that can be substantiated by scientific fact and those that cannot.

Depending on your upbringing, environment and education you may believe that:

Science is still evolving and eventually everything will be capable of explanation through science.

Or that certain things were never mean to be explained by science and will forever remain in the domain of the unknown, the magical or the divine.

Or that science and the divine, or unknown realms are just different perspectives on the same thing.

Masters of our Destiny:

Whatever you believe is, of course, your choice. Nevertheless, you may be heartened to find that, increasingly, scientific research is bearing out that we are far greater masters of our own destiny than we may realise.

Some scientists are starting to uncover something that spiritual wisdom has long proposed – that we create our own realities through what we choose to think and believe.

One of the most interesting books on the subject is The Biology of Belief by Bruce H Lipton, PhD. What I have written below derives from my understanding of what is presented in Lipton’s best seller.

DNA in charge?

In the 1940s scientists discovered that it is our DNA that contains hereditary information or programming.

Later observations of the process by which DNA molecules replicated themselves led scientists to believe that DNA itself was in firm control of that process and therefore directly responsible for determining a person’s characteristics, strengths and weaknesses.

The conviction that your DNA controls your life led to a generalised belief that ‘you are what you inherit’, or, put in rather sobering language, if you had the misfortune to inherit cancer causing genes you were destined to be a cancer sufferer.

This rapidly spawned massive research into linking diseases with faulty genes on the premise that we could come up with a treatment for serious illnesses simply by identifying the genes that caused them and by seeking to remove or alter them. The human genome project followed, in the 1980s as an ambitious effort to categorise all of the genes that go to make up humans.

The Fatalists were right:

All of this seemed to prove that the fatalists were right. The prognosis for our lives was, to a very large extent, out of our hands. All the positive thinking in the world would not help if there was a bad roll of the dice when it came to your inherited gene pool…

Or Were They?

…except that the scientists had overlooked something important.

The assumption that DNA was in control of the process of its own replication and thus the creation of the protein building blocks for cellular life, was merely a strong assumption … not a proven fact!

Epigenetics is a new and exciting field of biology which has completely changed the way many scientists think about how life is controlled.

In essence, research in this field has shown that the genes you inherited do not, in and of themselves, control your destiny.

Rather your genes are controlled or activated by environmental ‘signals’. In simple terms, this means that the cells that go to make up your body are not controlled by your DNA but by the environment in which they live.

You may have certain genes that render you more vulnerable to certain diseases but signals in the environment have to trigger or activate such genes before you will suffer from the disease. The mere presence of the genes alone cannot cause this.

We Are What We Think:

Other research has shown that the environment within which the cells that make up our bodies live, is heavily influenced by our nervous systems. Our nervous systems in turn react to our thoughts which are shaped by our beliefs.

The upshot of this fascinating discovery is that, to a very great extent, we are what we think!

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