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>> When I started my research back in 1967 at the University

of Virginia, I was working with the early leaders of stem cell

research.

Biologists thought that genes would turn themselves

on and off.

However, in the stem cell cultures with

Which I was working, I noticed that the cells

altered their gene expression based on their environment.

My colleagues thought I was nuts.

But in 1991, science finally realized that my observations

were accurate.

And they coined the new insights as the science of epigenetics.

I am your host, Bruce Lipton.

And as a pioneer in the research of stem cells in epigenetics,

I hope to share with you a scientific approach as to how

spirit exists in every part of our body, a new awareness that

can create an inner evolution.

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Before we can dive into this research

and its positive effects on our human civilization,

we must first address the current state of global chaos

and how an understanding of how our bodies work

offers a better life for us as individuals and a better future

for humanity.

Let's begin with some facts.

Human behavior has precipitated the planet's sixth mass

extinction event.

And civilization as we know it is

facing an irreversible collapse within the coming decades.

Are the global crises we now face

a portent of the end of civilization,

or are they a sign for the beginning of a better one?

Five times in the history of this planet, life was thriving,

and some natural event caused from 70% to 95% of all life

to go extinct.

The last time this happened was 66 million years ago

when the dinosaurs were here.

A comet hit near Mexico, upended the environment,

and wiped out over 90% of all life,

including all of the dinosaurs.

Well, today, scientists recognize

we are now facing the sixth mass extinction

event on this planet.

Unlike the previous five, which were

due to natural events such as comets hitting the planet

or tectonic plate movements, the current sixth mass extinction

is actually due to human behavior.

For example, in 1970, the World Wildlife Foundation

did a survey of how many animals were on this planet.

Recently, they redid the survey.

And guess what they found.

Over 63% of the animals that were on

this planet have disappeared since 1970.

We only have one third of the animals left.

Another study on insects in Germany

revealed over the last 17 years that there's

been a 75% reduction in insects in their national parks.

When it comes to the sea, the same kind of thing

is happening.

And in fact, science has recognized

that there will be no saltwater fish left in the ocean by 2048.

And we see all these changes occurring and, along with it,

climate change.

And people talk about climate change.

Of course, the weather is kind of strange.

But we always focus on the fact that the melting of the ice

caps is going to cause rising seas,

and it's going to affect the planet.

But people don't really recognize there's

something even more profound.

And that is, when climate change occurs,

we cannot predict agriculture.

We don't know when plants will grow to their fullest

maturity, when we'll be able to harvest them,

when it will rain, when it will be sunny.

And all of a sudden, climate change

is now threatening the food supply of this planet.

NASA, few years ago, had taken a survey

of what was going on in the planet and came to a conclusion

that industrial civilization is facing

an irreversible collapse, that we are now

facing our own extinction.

Interestingly, crises as we experience

them are precipitating an evolution.

And this evolution is changing our civilization.

And if we look over the history of Western civilization,

we find that there were civilizations that

were here and have disappeared.

We go back 10,000 years ago, and there

were animists, the native people of the world,

the Native Americans, the Indians in South America,

the druids in Europe.

All of these people lived in a world

of animism, which meant that spirit and matter were one

and the same, and that living on this planet you

would honor both the material realm and the spiritual realm.

However, animism faded away as polytheism came into presence.

And polytheism, such as the Greeks, the Romans,

the Egyptians-- what did they do?

They actually took the spirit out

of the individuals of the world, as the animists

saw it, and coalesced these spirits

into gods, multiple gods, a god of water, a god of crops,

a god of stars, gods for everything that we saw.

But it took spirituality out of our everyday world

and put them into figurehead gods.

Polytheism also faded out as a new belief, monotheism,

came into being.

Monotheism collected all of the spirit of this planet,

put it into one god, and actually

sent that god off the planet.

So we left a time behind where everything

was spiritual to a current time where nothing is spiritual,

except god in another place.

And after monotheism, a new and current civilization arrived,

and that is called scientific materialism.

And scientific materialism is today's world

where we start to recognize there's a material realm

and that we don't even need to understand a spiritual realm.

We can live here with just understanding

the physical, material nature of the planet.

Well, as you can see, we've been through several civilizations.

And we're actually facing the end of the current civilization

of scientific materialism.

A civilization has a life cycle, like anything in the universe.

A star is born, matures, and dies.

People are born, mature, and die.

And so does a civilization.

And as a civilization is created,

the first phase is like that, where children are experiencing

life, a developmental phase, a developmental phase

where we try all different kinds of things, try them out.

However, as we mature, we begin to have

very rigid beliefs about how the way civilization

and the universe works.

Now, there's an unfortunate part of that,

because once we have a rigid belief,

we're in trouble for a very simple reason.

Nothing in the universe stays the same.

Everything is always moving and transforming itself.

So the reality of a rigid belief actually

leads to crises, challenges that we must face.

Not facing those challenges causes a civilization

to actually go into decline and collapse.

Well, today's civilization is surely facing the challenges.

All you have to do is watch the news on TV, read the newspaper,

go on the internet, or even just look out your window,

and you can see that chaos abounds all over the planet.

The significance about this chaos

is that we are now recognizing we are not

sustainable in the way we are living.

It absolutely means we must change the nature of life

on this planet.

Human behavior is the source of the problem.

An important point to note in the face of the sixth mass

extinction is a very profound fact.

And that is this.

Crisis precipitates evolution.

So as our current civilization is in a state of failure,

a new civilization is being seeded.

And interestingly enough, the viewers of Gaia

are part of this major new influx of information,

because Gaia viewers are cultural creatives looking

for a better way to live on this planet.

So let's understand how we got into the current civilization

and how we're going to move into a better

civilization in the future.

Scientific materialism, the civilization

we're in right now, was actually founded

in the works of Isaac Newton.

He was studying the movements of the universe

and looking at the universe as a machine.

And why that was important is that Isaac Newton

created what we call classical physics, or Newtonian physics.

And what's it based on?

Well, Isaac Newton, in studying the movements

of the planets of the solar system,

interestingly enough had to actually create something

before physics.

He created calculus.

No little, small adventure on the way to understanding

physics, using the calculus equations what Newton did

was put in the physical characteristics of the planets,

how big they are, their mass, how fast they're moving,

and the vectors of their orbits.

And using this data, he solved the equations,

and he was able to accurately predict

the movements of the planets in the solar system.

And you may say, well, what's the significance?

And the answer to that is very important.

Because at the time of Isaac Newton,

we were living in a civilization called monotheism.

Well, this led to a belief in materialism.

Isaac Newton, in providing this new insight,

actually was considered a heretic

because the church was running civilization,

and Isaac Newton's data did not fit the infallible knowledge

offered by the church.

However, to proceed, science had to make a detente

with the church.

And this is how it worked out, very simply this.

Science said, we will only study the material, physical realm

of the universe, leaving behind all the invisible stuff.

And that they left to religion, such as spirit.

This was the separation of physics and metaphysics,

physics saying, we will not deal with the invisible realm

at all.

We'll understand life just through the physical realm

and therefore not step on the feet of the church,

which was actually running civilization.

Well, through this process of studying the material realm,

Isaac Newton again was able to predict

the movement of the planets.

And the significance of that is prediction

is the hallmark of science.

If you can predict something, it generally

means that you understand the mechanism behind it.

So this led Newtonian physics to a new understanding

of how the universe works.

From that time, assumptions were made about the universe.

And there are four assumptions which

I call myth perceptions, myths that we

accepted as scientific truth.

And then we created a culture based on these myths.

And the significance is, today, these four fundamental myths

that shape our world have been actually found to be incorrect

or outright false.

We've built a civilization on incorrect information.

Let's just list these four myth-perceptions.

The first myth-perception is the fact

that biology is based on Newtonian physics.

And the significance of that is that we

believe that our biology and physical, chemical body

conforms to the laws of chemistry

and that if we can understand the chemistry,

we'll understand life.

It leaves out what was called spirit and invisible moving

forces, because in the Newtonian physics,

material science said, ignore those elements,

not necessary to understanding life.

Well, the problem with that is, in 1925, a new physics

came into being.

Quantum physics revealed that the universe is not

a duality of matter and energy, that the entire universe is

made out of one thing, energy, and that humans, while we have

the appearance of being physical,

are actually energy beings along with all the other energy

in the room.

And the significance of that, according to quantum physics,

is there is an energy of who we are, an energy

in the field of humans.

And we've left this out of the equation

because it was an invisible realm and not

subject to Newtonian physics.

An important point--

Newtonian physics is still alive and viable.

Just because quantum physics came in,

we must recognize that Newtonian physics is a small subdivision

of quantum physics.

So Isaac Newton's equations still work,

but they're incomplete.

And we're going to discuss this in the series,

getting into the nature of quantum physics

and its influence on our human biology.

A second myth is that genes control biology.

Well, this is totally wrong, as we now know,

because there's a new science called epigenetics.

So what's the difference?

Well, when we had a belief that genes controlled our life,

then consider this.

As far as we know, we didn't pick the genes we came with.

If we don't like the characteristics we have,

we can't change that genes.

And we're told that genes turn on and off by themselves.

Well, if you look at it that way,

then you have to recognize, then, we

are victims of our heredity.

Oh, there's cancer running in my family,

and I can get the cancer gene, or Alzheimer's

running in my family and I'll get Alzheimer's disease.

And this is the belief that the genes

are going to convey what kind of life

we will have on this planet.

Well, this is totally false.

Genes are not capable of turning on and off,

and we're going to discuss that in this series.

But what we really should understand is this,

the new science called epigenetics.

Well, it sounds like genetics, epigenetics.

I go, it's a revolution.

It's an evolution.

Epigenetics is a brand new science.

And the important part is the prefix "epi."

"Epi" means "above."

Interestingly, skin is called epidermis.

So "epidermis" means "above the dermis."

Well, now we're talking about epigenetics.

Translated, epigenetic control simply

means control above the genes.

And now we recognize that the environment and specifically

our perception of the environment

is what controls our genes.

Since we can control the environment,

since we can control our perceptions,

then we're not victims of our genetics.

We are masters of our genetics.

A third myth about our civilization

based on the Darwinian theory of evolution-- as most of us

have learned, in the Darwinian theory

there's a character called survival

of the fittest in the competition for life.

What all this represents is the belief that animals

reproduce faster than plants.

Over time, there'll be more and more and more

animals and less and less plants.

Well, that will mean there is competition.

Whichever animals get the food can stay alive,

and whichever animals don't get the food will

pass by the wayside.

So given a belief that life is a struggle of competition

to survive on this planet, and the simple reality is, then,

that makes our planet a war zone with people competing

against people all of the time.

So is competition the ground of the world in which we live?

And the answer is absolutely not.

Science has now recognized that it

is cooperation that drives evolution,

the complete opposite.

Rather than fighting with each other,

our evolution is based on working together in harmony

and creating a future as a collective nature

of an entire civilization.

So that's the third myth, the myth that we're here

to struggle in life.

It's false.

The fourth myth, which is also related to Darwinian theory,

is based on this very simple fact.

According to the Darwinian theory of evolution,

the first step in evolution is generated

by what is called a random mutation, an alteration

of the genetics that changes the character of that individual

and can be propagated by reproduction.

So basically, it said, how did we get here?

Well, it was a series of random accidents

that led to our evolution.

Then why are we here?

The shake of genetic dice.

There was no reason for us to be here.

And that's where the crux of the problem

comes from, because we say, is there a purpose

for human civilization?

Well, according to the fact that we evolved

through a whole set of random, accidental mutations, well then

the answer is, not that we know.

There's no purpose at all.

It was all chance.

Well, guess what?

We now know that that idea of random mutations

as the origin of evolution is incorrect,

that animals and organisms on this planet

are well adapted to every environment.

It's not a coincidence that there

are no orchids in Antarctica and there are no polar bears

in South America.

Each of the plants and animals on this planet

are fitting perfectly into the environment in which they live.

Is that a coincidence?

No.

It turns out that organisms adapt their genetics

to conform to the environment.

And all of a sudden, then, it says, and why are we here?

Because we were adapting to an environment.

And to do what?

Bring harmony to that environment.

That's what nature seeks, balance and harmony.

As one organism gets out of control,

another organism will come in and neutralize that.

So as you go up the evolutionary scale,

every new organism brought into the environment

had more power than the lower organism in what?

Creating harmony and balance in the world.

And if we understand that, and we go back,

let's say, to the animists, the Native Americans,

what was their understanding?

That the environment was a garden.

And what was their job?

They were gardeners in that environment.

They were there to help and maintain the environment.

Well, that idea is completely gone from today's civilization.

Today, we upend the environment to seek out all the material

wealth that we've been looking for.

We're destroying the planet underneath our own feet.

We're not living in harmony with the planet.

We're actually destroying the planet and now, as a result,

facing an extinction that we have created.

So an important understanding is this.

We have built a culture on these four beliefs.

And these four beliefs are now patently incorrect.

So to change our civilization, we

have to now change our culture to accommodate the new insights

about why we're here, the nature of our physical or energetic

universe, the nature of genes.

All of these things are up for a new reconsideration,

a new look.

And why is this important?

Because how we adapt to these understandings of nature

is going to allow us to survive into the future.

As Albert Einstein said, you can not

solve the problems using the same thinking that

created the problems.

The four myths we just described are the problems.

And by following these problems and making life based on them,

look where we are.

So the understanding is this.

We're going to have to go back into the world

and understand how we are involved with the garden

that we inherited.

Because there's still time for us to change the way

we are living on this planet, to learn

to live in harmony with nature, and forestall that sixth mass

extinction.

But we're going to have to do it relatively soon.

And in this process, one of the most important things

we're going to learn is this.

There's more to a human than this physical expression.

There's actually a spiritual component.

And it's not a new-age idea.

It's actually founded in the hard science

of quantum physics.

And why we are going to go into this

is to give you your power back, because we

have lost our powers.

Now, we didn't lose them because we don't have power.

We lost our powers because we've been programmed to be weak.

We bought the program, and now we

find ourselves to be powerless.

This is the farthest thing from the truth.

We're extremely powerful individuals.

In looking at the world today, we have to recognize something.

It all looks like it's crazy.

Things are going out of sync everywhere.

We're looking as if we're going through a random process

of change here.

Things are changing here, and things are changing there.

But it's not random.

Let me give you an insight of what we're in.

It's actually called chaos.

And chaos is not random.

I'll give you a very important example.

Let's say we're in Grand Central Station in New York

at rush hour, standing on the balcony,

watching all the people moving in through the station,

going to their trains.

You see people going this way and that way

all over the place.

You say, wow, they're random.

I go, no, they're not random.

Every person has a specific destination, a train

that they're going to find.

It's programmed.

But what is random?

Well, I can tell you what random is.

During that rush hour, you're standing on that balcony,

and you start yelling fire, fire.

And guess what?

Now you'll see random, because people

will start running all different directions to try to get out

of the building at one point.

And all of a sudden, you realize not everybody

knows where they're going.

They're bouncing all over the place.

That's random, no destination in sight, OK?

Chaos is actually a matter of not being random at all.

It's actually controlled.

So the planet is in a state of chaos.

Yes, look on the news.

Everything is falling apart here and there.

And you could say, oh, this is random.

I go, it's not random.

There's a plan underneath that's determined.

There is a plan that shows that we are not

living in harmony with the system

and that we're going to have to break the old system down

and create a new system.

Well, guess what?

The old system has structure.

The new system has structure.

But what's in the middle as one is breaking down

and a new one is forming?

Well, it would look like chaos.

It looks like the cells are randomly

running all over the place and forming a new organism.

And the fact is this.

They're very specifically forming a new structure

as the old one is coming down.

To give you the best example of this, consider this.

A caterpillar, a very voracious organism,

will eat up all of the leaves on the plant that it's growing on.

And once it destroys its own environment,

it goes into what is called a pupa, a chrysalis.

And in that chrysalis, it's the beginning

of the formation of a transformation from caterpillar

to butterfly.

A caterpillar has structure.

A butterfly has structure.

But if you cut open a pupa, what would you see?

A random mass of cells.

At least, it appears random.

But it is not.

Why?

Some cells are breaking down from the old caterpillar

structure, and some cells are building up the new butterfly

structure.

So in the middle, in that pupa, is chaos.

This is very relevant to today's world for a simple reason.

Today's civilization is like the voracious caterpillar.

It's been destroying the environment in which we live.

And in this process, we're pushing it

to the edge, which is causing what?

A time for transformation.

We have to move from the caterpillar

stage of human civilization into the lighter

touch of the butterfly stage of human civilization.

Well, where are we?

We're not in the butterfly phase yet,

and we're still following the collapse of the caterpillar

stage.

It is in a state of chaos, moving

from a non-sustainable civilization into one

that we can thrive into the future with.

The important point about this is, when you look out

the window, and you see the chaos in the world,

and you read the news, and you see

things collapsing all over the place, this is not a bad sign.

This is a very important positive sign.

Simple reason-- we cannot sustain ourselves with the old

way of life, that we have to transform and create a new,

sustainable civilization.

So when you look at the world and it's chaos,

it's actually a very positive sign.

Honor it.

Welcome it.

Why?

It is the process that will allow

us to create that more sustainable civilization that

will allow us to move into the future and thrive on a planet

that we can love.

Now that I've given you the insight on the world situation,

how does this help us move through today's chaos?

Well, coming episodes will emphasize a renaissance

in science that reveals a path toward personal self

empowerment and an opportunity to create a civilization that

will thrive into the future.

Thank you for joining me.

I'm your host, Bruce Lipton, for this series on inner evolution

through biological change.

Join me for the next episode, when we will

discuss the myth of your genes.

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