The Reason why
Honking could Kill You
We spend a great deal of time talking about sickness and
disease and little on healing and wellness.
And, there is good reason for it.
Healthcare is one of our largest costs and conversely, one of the most
profitable industries.
Inside you, there is a key to wellness. And, something that every good medical
doctor will acknowledge and report with an almost complacent, “Yep. It’s true.
Strange, but true” is the reality that biological organisms -
specifically humans - do not respond in predictable ways to treatment; we
assume someone will respond according to the math of medicine – the linear A +
B should equal C treatment plan.
We aren’t machines.
We are more complicated. Our
thoughts interfere. Doctors don’t really
talk about the placebo effect – it’s not profitable to acknowledge that the
power of your thoughts can have the exact same medicinal impact as that of the
drug if told what will happen to you after taking the sugar pill.
Most things work in synchrony. The wind affects the weather. The sun impacts your mood (there is a reason
people retire in the South). Two
patients with the same illness receiving the same medicine can have two
different outcomes. Why? Because of you. That thinking part of you. That “someone” inside you that thinks and
believes and chatters to you all the time.
Thoughts are things and have outcomes.
The work of Candace Pert on Molecules of Emotion { http://candacepert.com/ } has shown that
what you believe causes your brain to release neurochemicals, which ultimately
determines how you feel. The stark
reality being that this transaction with your environment is completely
perceptual. If I tell you that “I love you,” and we are in the middle of a
fight and your perception is that I am being snarky, then this will cause a
flood of cortisol (the stress hormone), adrenaline, or acetylcholine – among
other chemicals. If you perceive my “I
love you” as a reconciliatory action with genuine positive intentionality, then
your brain will give you a “feel good” cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, or GABA. The
person honking his horn when the light
turns green because you didn’t go will be much more likely to die of heart
disease. That’s the sad, but real
truth.
My graduate research was in stress and stress
management. And, I don’t know why we
don’t see headlines about it. Stress is the number one predictor of
dis-Ease, is responsible for 90% of our healthcare claims in the U.S., AND is
completely transactional and preventable – meaning it is based on our
perceptions of what is going on in the world – i.e., “that person ‘cut me off’
in traffic on purpose” vs. “an honest mistake.” That means we can do something about
it.
What you think impacts EVERYTHING. Your thinking rules are determined by your
beliefs. And, these rules categorize
and encode this information as you experience the world – putting away into
those buckets those experiences that validate your beliefs.
And, for many of us, we believe we aren’t good enough - that
we aren’t lovable as our most authentic self.
That means we see the world through this lens and filter experiences
through it. All around us, we see
threats and validations of our own hypothesis of our worth. And, for many of us, our self-worth is low
to moderate, at best. Are your thoughts
kind to you? How often do you beat
yourself up? How often to you criticize
the mirror’s reflection or the impromptu comment you made in the meeting?
This is why the believability in our lovability as a nation
is … unbelievably important. I dare
say we should be investing national resources to re-educate all of us. Thank God for Oprah. There’s not a whole lot of money in helping
people understand their true nature as whole, but there is a whole lot of
saving for all of us. Healthcare is one
of our nation’s greatest spends, after all.
Right now, “someone” inside of you is having a conversation
with herself – do you agree with me, whether you like what I am writing, do you
feel guilty because you sometimes honk your horn at people, etc., etc. This conversation never shuts up. And, every thought has emotional reverberation
- every mental action has a biological
correlate. A thought is a chemical
messenger, echoing through the body like the aftermath of a rock guitar solo…
or jazz… or funk. It’s happening right
now.
This conversation impacts your health. It would be in your best interest to know
who this “someone” is that never shuts up.
It’s time for a paradigm shift. I am not the first ‘scientist’ to write
about the now ‘proof’ we have for your consciousness and its impact on - - -
well, everything.
Consider the BIG picture.
-
In the last exhale of Brahma (the big Bang), our universe was born. And, we’re about 13.8 billion years old. Slightly more alarming is that after all this work, we now have the capacity to destroy our precious Mother Earth - Gaia, Bumi, Pachamama...
- Human beings are brilliant. Look at what we have accomplished! But, we must move from the information age, to the wisdom age, and the difference between the two is application and execution. We still have cave brain culture in an age of nuclear weaponry. This is a scary notion.
- And, as much as we know, we know so little. Consider that all we know in all of our Sciences is based only on the .01% of the Universe that we actually know about.
- 75% of the whole of our universe is “dark energy” - meaning we don’t know what it is. Dark energy is expanding galaxies faster than the speed of light at this point. Einstein called this the cosmological constant, which was close, but not quite.
- 20% of our universe is dark matter. We have no idea what it is, but we do know how important it is. It holds EVERYTHING in place. And, it’s really strange. It emits no light, reflects no light, has some ‘stuff’ or substance so it causes gravity – and a lot of it – and if particles of dark matter collide with one another, they pass right through each other. Without dark matter, we wouldn’t exist. It quite literally holds our bodies together through its gravitational influence. And, we have no idea what ‘it’ is…
- About 4% of the Universe is a hodgepodge of invisible atoms. So, that’s 99%.
- The last 1% of the Universe is mostly hydrogen and helium. And, of that 1%, only .01% is really visible to us as “stuff”.
- So .01% of our Universe is what we visibly see, study in Science, argue over, fight over… All the galaxies that you see in the vast expanse of space are accounted for in this .01%. When you are on the beach, and you look up, and you see the billions of stars that are in the sky - that’s the .01% we’re talking about.
Humans really do squawk a lot about how much we know, and we
marvel in the wonder of our science, which has categorized .01% of the universe
we are able to see.
We could spend our time categorizing and framing or
performing advanced mathematics to figure it all out. But, at the end of the day, nothing is more
important than the reality that you are here, now… that you exist and KNOW that
you exist. The real depth of the story
lies in the reality that you are awake – that this random cosmological error
fusing stardust and carbon - is now aware of ‘itself.’ Cosmic evolution took 14 billion years to
create you and me. We are an activity
of the universe - an activity of the universe in which the universe is becoming
aware of itself. Without you, the “universe”
is a vast, ambiguous quantum soup. The
universe has color, texture, and form, because YOU are the witness of it. Without YOU, quantum possibilities do not
materialize into these colors, textures, or forms. The world – EVERYTHING - is a projection of
consciousness.
So, it is really, really, really, really important to
understand WHO is doing this projection – 1: because your consciousness is a
gift of 14 billion years of evolution and 2: because it impacts everything you
feel and do; it affects your outcomes, and your health; it impacts me and my
health; and quite literally, our collective future depends on it.
So, here we are at this beautiful confrontation, much like a
Wild West shoot out scene. The sun is
rising. The Earth quiet. The wind blowing. And, we have guns on our hips. And, life is asking across from us in the best
possible Clint Eastwood voice, “what ya gonna do, kid? what ya gonna do?” Really consider the absurdity that we spend
billions of dollars every year inventing new warfare technology so that we can
blow one another up. Stop. Really consider that fact.
We have the capacity to heal our world, feed our poor, and to
thrive. We could invent a world, if we
could gather as one tribe, where there is goodness, truth, beauty, and virtue –
where none are starving or economically deficient, one where we are not burning
and chopping the Earth, but honoring her.
But, first we must overcome our hardest opponent: our mind.
Let’s explore this thing called “the mind.” Maybe we can get to the bottom of it.
- Your body has about 100 trillion cells, more than all the stars in the Milky Way. Each cell is doing 100,000 activities every SECOND. Every cell synchronizes with every other cell in your body. It does this instantly. That, in and of itself, is new science. We now know that your cells respond instantly non-locally. Local communication would be similar to me calling you on the phone. That’s our old model of neural firing. You touch a hot plate and bang, nerve cells fire – going up to your brain, brain interprets ‘hot’ and send signal back to hand to remove itself from the pan. Welcome to the digital age. It doesn’t work that way. Your cells actually respond at the same time – without a local signal.
- You might be asking how your foot cells and brain cells can respond at the same time.
- Simple: your mind does not exist in your brain.
- This is why your body can fight an illness, digest your food, maintain your heartbeat, monitor your temperature, play a piano, kill germs, remove toxins, grow a baby, and think thoughts – AT the SAME time. Never before have we been able to explain how this works and thanks to advances in quantum biology, we now can.
- What we now know is that your body is a verb, not a noun. It is an activity. It is a process, not a thing. Back of you is consciousness and that consciousness sits outside of ‘stuff’. It sits in the womb of creation - the infinite void, the Buddhists “nothingness” or the Quantum Vacuum of Science.
- We come from nothingness, spinning stars as we dance. All the atoms of your body come from the stars – quite literally. Under a quantum microscope, you look more like a galaxy spinning than a suit of skin. You are recycling stardust, spinning, and recycling in and out of you all while maintaining the illusion of your solidarity. Atoms are coming into your body and leaving your body at every second and in this moment.
- Your body is not a structure, it is a process. At the level of sub-atomic particles, everything that you see is changing. Particles are coming and going. Nothing in the universe is ‘standing still’… all around us – EVERYTHING is moving, vibrating. Some are just vibrating more than others. A rock vibrates very, very, very slowly. You vibrate much faster.
- When you look at the body, you see stuff. Heart, lungs, skin
- Get a bigger microscope and you see molecules.
- Get a bigger microscope and you see atoms.
- Get a bigger microscope and you see subatomic particles.
- And, that’s the building blocks of you, me, and everything. And, also where it gets pretty fun.
- Radioactive studies have proven that at this moment, you have a million atoms in your body that once belonged to Gandhi, Jesus, and Alexander the Great.
- In just the last 3 weeks, a quadrillion atoms have gone through your body that have gone through every living creature on this planet – a tiger in Africa, a lemur in South America, a yellow Labrador in Wisconsin, a Redwood in California, and that lunch lady in Knoxville, Tennessee.
- You have ‘stuff’ in your body that was not there less than 3 weeks ago. In less than 1 year, you recycle 98% of ALL the matter in your body.
- At the atomic/molecular level, you have a new liver every 6 weeks, a new stomach lining every 5 days, new skin once per month, a new skeleton – that thing that seems so hard - in less than half a year.
- The chair at your dining room table is more ‘the chair’ – more the same – than you are. You are now in your 2013 model of a body.
- Last year, you had the same clothes, but a different body. Your clothes, your dining room table, your computer --- these things have a longer shelf life than your physical body.
This raises a big question for us – and for science. Who are you then?
- If you think you are your physical body, then which one are you talking about? The 2012 model. Or the 2013 model? Or the 1999 model? Who are you?
- My psychologist friends will gladly tell you that “you” reside in your “brain,” but your “brain” is made of completely different ‘stuff’ – different atoms – every single year.
- We are just recycling stardust, particles spinning in and out of a continuous field of magnetic energy and vibration.
- YOU are not your brain, because your brain is not a solid thing. It is changing every single second. Where do “you” exist then? Where do “you” sit?
- Your 2012 body is dead. It’s gone. It left you. Your 2013 model is made of completely new material.
- There’s your first scientific proof that there is life after death. You die every second and your energy reincarnates materiality – ‘stuff’ – as you. Every second. Right now.
- You are in process with your environment, taking a bit of the atoms of the tree, the grass, the bricks of your home... with you – spinning it into the building blocks of you –making new hairs on your legs, new skin cells for your bio suit, and saliva in your mouth.
- Your consciousness is outliving the molecules through which it expresses itself – all the time. It’s doing it right now. You don’t need proof of reincarnation. It’s happening now.
- The cells of your hand were not there a month ago – but they remember the difference between hot and cold, pain and pleasure… they remember how to hold a baseball or to write with a pencil. The MEMORY is reincarnated.
- So, where does memory sit? This is why experiences matter. This is how karma exists.
- Experiences, memory, actions… these things are lasting. They carry vibration and information. And, this information organizes everything. This information takes ‘dead’ stuff from the stars and organizes it into – everything you see around you.
- Your cells remember what they did yesterday, last week, and 15 years ago. They pass on to their great grandchildren memory (this is why you can still ride a bike after 15 years, when the cells of your body today have NEVER ridden a bike before). In the yoga sciences, we call this imprint sanskara.
The hard problem of science is your subjective experience.
- Where is the mind? It is everywhere and perfectly entangled with yours. If we were having a conversation, I would be talking, and you would be listening. Your mind would interpret what I said, and produce chemicals based on your perceptions of what I said. You would then dialogue with me. My mind would interpret what you said. This would be a dynamic dance of consciousness.
- There is no mental event that doesn’t have a neural consequence and correlate.
- Every thought has action that follows in the body.
- The brain functions as an integrated whole.
- The brain follows the direction of the mind.
- Everything is integrated. Your thoughts are connected to your feelings. Your feelings are connected to your body. Your body produces chemicals that impact you and the environment. The environment impacts your body. Your body impacts your feelings. Your feelings impact your thoughts.
- You are in a dynamic interchange with everything all the time. YOU exist ONLY as a process, not a thing. I know that’s really, really strange and hard to get. But, it’s true. Just as it’s hard to look at the Earth and know it’s round. What I am telling you right now is that the world is NOT flat. Your ‘skin’ suit that you think is SOLID and separate from everything else is an ILLUSION.
- If I told you that I learned that you were getting fired tomorrow, you would have a serious reaction. You would produce cortisol. Your blood pressure would increase. You would start to sweat. Your pupils would dilate. That’s a lot of ‘stuff’ because of what I said to you. Had I said the same thing in Mandarin, you would have had NO reaction.
- Some part of you interpreted MEANING and from that perception, you had a reaction.
- Science has YET to find the meaning-maker. It doesn’t exist IN THE BRAIN, because it CONTROLS the brain. The meaning maker tells the brain to produce cortisol, to raise the blood pressure, to sweat. Or not.
- The brain is the tool of the meaning-maker.
You are not your brain. By the way, NO physical matter can make meaning. Or imagine. Or remember. Or be inspired. Or love. These things EXIST as separate from our ever-changing, ever impermanent physical matter. This is how we KNOW that consciousness does not exist in the BRAIN, but rather the BRAIN exists in consciousness.
- The scary truth, mathematically, is that if you get to a small enough level, ‘stuff’ disappears and all that is left is the possibility of things with some laws in play.
Why does this matter? There is no way of understanding human
biology without understanding the whole system, because systemically,
everything is connected. Your thoughts
affect your neurotransmitters, your neurotransmitters regulate your immune
function, and your immune system regulates your health. We CANNOT look at the parts as we do in the
reductionist West. Parts are fictions
of imagination. You cannot isolate a
molecule. A molecule is a fiction of
imagination. Your body is not a noun;
your body is a verb.
Mind and matter are inseparable. If the environment sick, we are sick. If the rivers are poisoned, so are we. Everything is connected. You are in activity with “the environment”
all the time. It is one system. The trees are your lungs. The earth is recycling; so is your
body. The rivers move like your
blood. Your emotions and mood affect
me; I perceive them subconsciously and actually produce neurochemicals to match
yours.
As is the atom, so is the universe. As is the microcosm, so is the
macrocosm. As above, so below. As is the human mind, so is the cosmic
mind. We are biological fractals and
holographic expressions of the total universe.
Identity CANNOT be contained by the boundaries of your skin, because the
WHOLE universe is involved in the shaping of your body… right now. The entire web of life is responsible for
the activity you call your body.
Wellbeing is a state of being created from your
thoughts. Your thoughts create brain
changes that syncs your biological functioning according to those
thoughts. In short, you think yourself
sick or healthy. Other moderators
matter, of course. Exercise, Diet, Social
Support… these things matter.
The mechanisms of illness are not the root causes of
illness. Modern Science examines
illness from a reductionist lens – treat the bacteria with an antibiotic or
treat cancer with chemotherapy. The
problem with this approach is that mechanisms of illness are not the origins of
illness. This is why when are treating
illness, we aren’t really changing anything.
Health comes from the word ‘holy’ – stemming from ‘whole’ –
the return of your whole self. When you
come in contact with that within you that is timeless – soul – you find that
which cannot be tainted, hurt, fragmented, or lost, and therefore free from
death.
It is no surprise that more people die at 9:00am on a Monday
morning, at work, than any other time of day (cardiac arrest). This is an entirely human
accomplishment. Animals aren’t dying on
Mondays more than Tuesdays. In fact, they
don’t know when it’s Monday or when it’s Tuesday.
I am in the leadership coaching business. My partner Sheila and I help couples
transform their relationships. We also teach
yoga and meditation.
Often, I am asked why I choose to work with companies rather
than to just move on to some type of Tony Robbins initiative. Why help companies change corporate culture?
Because only 20% of us will answer “Yes” to the question – “Do you like
your job?”
Because if your boss criticizes you (gives you
negative feedback), your wellbeing will drop by 40% and you’ll get sick. But, if your boss notices even a single
strength of yours, you will start to thrive.
Because we lose about $300 billion dollars each year due to disengaged
workers. Because disengaged workers are
not only unhappy, they actually seek to come to work to make others
unhappy.
Because your thoughts matter. And, if you hate your work, then you hate
yourself. If you hate yourself, then
you cannot see love in the world; your perception will be filtered through the
lens of a victim.
And, if you filter
the world through this reality, then you are likely to honk at me when the
light turns green and I don’t move soon enough.
Namaste,
Ryan
Dr. Ryan Pride is the
owner of the Moksha Institute, a firm dedicated to improving the wellbeing of
individuals, teams, and organizations through culture transformation and
leadership development. A
profit-for-purpose company, the Moksha Institute applies Ancient Teachings for
the Modern Time in order to transform striving into thriving.
For more information,
please go to: www.mokshainstitute.com
