Devra: I’m really excited about our interview because I've always been interested in how you’re tying science and spirit together. Your work is just awesome.

Dr. Lipton: Thank you. It’s been such fun stuff and a big shock to my system. I had always been very conventional and mainstream before that. In fact, I was the heretic in the group.

Devra: Well, you're not anymore! But in your book The Biology of Belief, you talk about having a scientific epiphany.

Dr. Lipton: Yes. The epiphany occurred in a moment when I was reverse engineering my work. You know, I was taking it apart to see how it all came about. I hit a point where I saw that the cell membrane is a brain that responds to its environment. It actually generates its behavior to compliment the environment. But then I also recognized that each one of us is a different entity and our cells express that differently such as when the immune system goes into “not self vs. self” mode - they see a difference there. What's most interesting is that it identities on the surface of the cells, through antennas, but these antennas are not the identities. They're just like television antennas. They capture the signal, yet the signal is outside the cell. The identity was the equivalent of a broadcast being received and then playing into the physical structure. It then manifests itself in the physical. So, in reality, the cell is the recipient of the identity and since it's not the identity, whether the cell is here or not here, the identity is still here. That’s when I realized we're immortal because we're not in it. And that discovery took me from being unspiritual to full spirituality. Wow! Now, immediately upon this awareness, the question came up in my head, “Well, if I don't exist, it's a spiritual thing. Then why do I have this body? I’m already out here.” Well, the answer was phrased in a question format, so I guess they were Jewish cells. The cells responded to me by saying, “Well, if you're just a spirit, what does chocolate taste like? If you're just a spirit, what does a sunset look like? If you're just a spirit, what does being in love feel like?” It was in that instant I knew the spirit comes in, but the spirit gets to have the sensations and all the awareness, the expressions and the feelings and love and joy which come from the cells of the body converting our experiences into sensation. Then take away the sensation, and that's what's broadcast back to the cells. So it's like you have this body, you have these experiences because that was the purpose of it.

Devra: I’d like you to talk about that a little more. You have an interesting concept of cells. I find
it mind-blowing.

Dr. Lipton: Well, being a cellular biologist, few people in the world have had the opportunities that I ended up getting. I was involved with the scientist who actually founded the cloning of cells. This was back in 1960. I was cloning stem cells back then. I was also doing electron-microscopy, which was like going into space. But it was inner space travel. Every day, when I turned on that microscope, I was seeing what no person in the world had ever seen before. After doing that long enough, I became quite familiar with the world and biology of the cells. It was like being a note-taking tourist in their world. Later, what I attempted to teach medical students was when you look at the human body, you can see all the wonderful parts, all the systems are there – the reproductive, muscular, skeletal, cardiovascular. These amazing systems give us all these characters and life, and then, you have to recognize that every one of those characters and systems is already present in every single cell. Every cell has every system that we have. These cells are miniature people! They’re living an experience in communities with each other that is an exact parallel to what we share. We have such a limited vision that we tend to look at ourselves as individual entities. Yet, we fail to perceive that the real living entity on this planet is an organism called Humanity. We are the cells in the body of that humanity as much as the single cells in my body are living in their community, creating this thing called me.

Devra: So all of these different cells are experiencing different things, therefore acting out in different ways.

Dr. Lipton: Each cell has its own life. You can put it in a Petri dish, you put some food on one side of the dish and put some trash on the other side of the dish, and they’re smart enough to be over at the food in a few minutes. They know what's going on. They know how to communicate. And ultimately, the significance is, at least to those with a scientific awareness of fractals and fractal geometry, the relevance of this mathematics implies that the structure of cells, in their community, is a pattern that is redundant to the structure of cells of people in our community. This explains why self-destructive ailments, like auto-immune diseases, are such a big issue on the planet. The reason is what's going on in our global community, the vibration of that is manifesting to the same parallels as our internal community. It’s all predicating one on top of the other. What's happening in one is happening in the other. The more we become destructive in our outer world, the more we end up becoming self-destructive internally. That's what we are seeing reflected in this current health crisis.

Devra: So do you think that the solution or at least the most constructive direction for changing the physical health on the planet lies in changing our consciousness?

Dr. Lipton: Oh, absolutely. It lies in changing the awareness of who we really are because we've been mislead by assumptions that are totally incorrect and as a result we've predicated a culture, an entire civilization, on beliefs that are not accurate. The beautiful part of it is there's two ways to look at what’s happening. The predominant way has been to look at the world situation as crazy. Survival and extinction are big issues. But I encourage everyone to pull back and see it from a different sight and that is this: Civilizations have come and gone. For example, we could go back and say first the Indians and Aboriginals were here. They worshiped God as spirit and nature; everything was spiritual. Then we went into polytheism with the Greeks and the Romans. Then, we journeyed into monotheism in the Judeo-Christian phase. We jumped into scientific imperialism with Darwin. And what remains important is the fact these changes, in our culture, are following a distinct pattern that we are experiencing another major change, right now. We are breaking the structure of the existing pattern to make way for the new one. I get excited to look at where we're going. But if we are caught up in the socio-political economic trials, we can’t see it. If you stand back and look at it, humanity as a collective organism, represented by us as people, is going through an evolutionary leap at this moment. And the undoing of the structure is a requirement, an absolutely imperative, to get to the next level.

Devra: So what would you call the next level we're moving into?

Dr. Lipton: The mammalian phase of evolution. And I will explain…remember I said there were fractal patterns and fractals are repetitive self-similar patterns? Well then, humanity is an organism (like an animal) and we're cells in this organism. The significance of this is that, as an animal, it will evolve to self-similar stages as animals as the evolution of animals has done already. Fractal patterns would imply that. So, let's say there would be a fish phase, in the vertebrate level. You see, the world has gone through the phases of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals and humanity is going through those stages as well. The fish phase was mariculture – when the first civilizations lived off the water. They lived by the water and they couldn't go away from the water because they would die. So, they were like fish. Then the next phase would be the amphibian phase when civilization learned to take the water onto the land. Well, that was the beginning of our agricultural period when we were no longer restricted to the edge of the water. People could find and transport water and then they became capable of growing things everywhere. Later, we went from the amphibian to the reptile phase. Reptiles are mechanical devices. I mean they are like machines. Dinosaurs have even been referred to as killing machines. And they were. They represent the mechanistic age, whereas amphibians were in between water and land. They were a more sluggish kind of thing. By the time you got to reptiles, they were like machines. They could even fly. And that machine phase is when humanity went from agriculture to the industrial age. The industrial age gained life from the reptiles, the dinosaurs. And a branch from the dinosaurs became the birds. A branch from the smaller reptiles later became the mammals. So, I say reptiles and ducks are your middle-aged dinosaurs, the age of the corporations where they took the knowledge of Mom and Pop businesses and made giant machines out of them; the giant corporations we have now. The birds were actually Wilbur and Orville Wright who gave life to aviation. The world changed with the birds because all of a sudden from that perspective sprang all the height and the communications. At that point, everybody could communicate in minutes versus years. This then changed life to the bird phase which precipitated what we are experiencing now.

In 1969, when the bird’s fullest evolution took us to the moon, we captured a picture of the Earth on the moon's horizon. This has become an icon to represent the fragility of our planet suspended in dark space. All of a sudden people started to realize that we have to take care of the Earth. Taking care is what? Nurturing. Nurturing is the character of mammals. So, the nurturers were seeded in 1969. Over time most people thought that disappeared. Today it’s been coalescing into the greens and the environmentalists and all the people who perceive the next evolution. They are the mammals. So we are in the age of the dinosaurs controlling the little meek, the mammals – the corporate interest over the mammal interest. And yet, if you look back - the dinosaurs crashed. We're experiencing that again, right now! The markets are shaking. Credit is falling apart. The body is going. Why? Because it doesn't sustain the system. The dinosaurs cannot sustain the system and that's why there's an evolution. The evolution is mammals. That means it’s time for community, harmony and taking care of each other. If you're part of the dinosaurs, this is a very dark time for you. But, if you're part of the mammals, this is a very light time for you. So, we're moving into that next phase right now, and for me, that is the exciting part!

Devra: You see a lot of that happening in the political race right now in the United States.

Dr. Lipton: Well, I'd love to see more of it because this is what it represents. It represents this detached voice, from the distance, saying this structure is killing us! And that's where the change will come from. So again, we can look at the global crisis as the shedding of this old, reptilian skin that allows this conscious, mammalian nurturer to surface. Otherwise, the alternative may be extinction.

Devra: This is really interesting. When we go into this fully, when we finally transcend the dinosaur into this full mammalian thing, what will happen? What will the shift look like?

Dr. Lipton: This is where the meek inherit the earth. The mammals were not actually derived from the dinosaurs; they were derived from the smaller reptiles. Mammals were small, furry and soft. Dinosaurs were these big, giant, scary things. Mammals were meek and they ultimately took over the world. This is what will happen again. This phase into harmony and higher awareness will spread and eventually eliminate most of the health problems we have. Our present health problems are related to disharmony in the system. The more disharmony you have, the more the system starts to die. The more system starts to die, the more the parasites come, making the thing look really scary. But once harmony is brought back into the system, health will return as well. Today the biggest issues of death are not really organic issues. Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer and 90% of that is lifestyle. 60% or more of cancer is also considered lifestyle. However, in fact, the biggest leading cause of death is the medical profession.

Devra: Well, I'm not anti-medical profession. I think there's a place for it, but it seems like their answer for everything is to take a pill. Take a pill. Put a chemical in your body and this will solve everything.

Dr. Lipton: But that's not the medical profession. What you’re talking about is the bleed through of the reptiles. The dinosaurs created the pharmaceutical industry, and in turn, it shapes the medical profession. So the medical profession is actually being cultivated and cultured through the pharmaceutical industry’s pursuit of its own drug. Everything has to have a drug. The reality is this – we require no drugs for healing; true healing only calls for a change of consciousness. As a demonstrated fact, one third of all feelings are due to the placebo effect. Science acknowledges that. One third of our health cost could be totally eliminated if we realize it's a placebo effect. And the other consequence is this: Although you're familiar with the placebo effect, most people are not familiar with the no-cebo effect. Basically, the placebo effect demonstrates that a positive thought can heal you. The no-cebo effect is a scientific term for the fact that a negative thought can kill you. It's the same power at work and it's the power of thought. Not the power of positive thought, it's the power of thought - just as powerful negative as it is positive. So if you recognize one third of all feelings are generated by a positive thought, then we must recognize the profound amount of all illnesses that are due to the negative thoughts. These are the things that drive heart attacks and cancer. Changing your belief system will eliminate the contribution from thought which is the primary contribution. I’ve got to tell you, though, I wouldn't want to live without the medical profession. Why? Because if I’m in an accident, I don't want a chiropractor sewing me up. If I need a heart transplant, then homeopathy is not the direction I want to go. Traditional medicine works miracles in anything it can call trauma. But when you get outside the range of trauma, the effectiveness declines significantly.

Devra: You know, I'm so thrilled to finally know somebody who's not anti-medicine.

Dr. Lipton: No, it would be a horror to be out of the realm of their miracles of medicine.

Devra: And I think that doctors get lost in all of that. It took me a long time to find a doctor that was open to using the right thing for me at the right time. You know if you needed surgery, fine, do surgery. If you had homeopathic remedies or herbs or whatever, use that. Or change your lifestyle for potential heart problems. It was the first time a doctor had ever said, yes your cholesterol is high, why don't you try resting, meditating to reduce your stress. Instead of here, let me put you on this drug that's going to make your muscles die in a matter of weeks.

Dr. Lipton: That's exactly right. If the AMA was running the business they might possibly be open to other things, which they are beginning to open to because it's the public is forcing them to do that. The pressure is on because the public is finding the benefit. When more than 50% of the population seeks alternative or complimentary healers, then as a business model, you have to take a look at what’s going on. Again, it's the pharmaceutical industry that has pushed every one of these drugs because simple it's a corporation and the bottom line of any corporation is, do we make money? In a corporation that makes drugs the more drugs you can sell the more money you can make. You can see why television advertising has people wanting every damn drug they can get because the pictures on the TV are better than they're own lives. We've always connected the drug with the healing. This is one of the perceptions that is about to be changed in this world. We are about to re-empower ourselves through our own participation in our health and healing.

Devra: Yeah, I can't tell you how many times doctors have said to me, “You'll be dead in a week!” And I’d say, “No, I don't think you're right. Sorry, that doesn't feel right to me.”

Dr. Lipton: Exactly. For several thousands of years, we’ve continuously given up our own power to beliefs that actually are not true. Now we have an opportunity to regain power over our lives. When you have power over your life, then all of a sudden, you are participating in this life and not just responding to it.

Devra: Absolutely. Because we should be at cause for our own lives and not at effect of it.

Dr. Lipton: We are, but we don't know it.

Devra: Before we end our interview, I want to let our readers know your website is www.brucelipton.com

Dr. Lipton: Thank you. There's lots of information that people can download – articles and resources and stuff like that, free stuff so it's not a sales gimmick.

Devra: And The Biology of Belief is also available in all major bookstores and it's so interesting to open up something that can finally kind of tie together all of those readers. I mean, I do a lot with science in Mystic Pop, and one of the reasons I do it is because people who may not be that into the “spiritual,” “Now Age” kind of thing can find their path through science back to the same place.

Dr. Lipton: Absolutely. And that was a surprise to me. To me it's the image of the snake on its tail. I was avoiding spirituality by going into science. I thought spiritual people were the most freaky, scary people in my life So, I really avoided spirituality and went on this total scientific path, only to find out when I got to the end my search had lead me to the opening of my spirituality. So it was a circular search in the end.

Devra: And we're so glad to have you.