A child’ s view of reality , for example, contains
much that is unfamiliar , and until he learns more about the world, his body
expresses itself in untrained and uncoordinated behaviors. At 3 months old,
a baby cannot tell the difference between a staircase and a painting of a
staircase. His brain hasn’ t grasped what an optical illusion is. By 6 months,
his reality has changed; babies can recognize optical illusions by that age,
and using that knowledge, their bodies are better able to negotiate three-
dimensional space (mirrors don’t look like holes in the wall, real stairs are
to be climbed but not paintings of stairs, roundness is different from
flatness, etc.). Making this perceptual shift isn’t just mental; a whole new
way of using eyes and hand s has been achieved, and the physical
dimensions of various brain centers for shape recognition and motor
coordination are af fected. As long as new perceptions continue to enter your brain, your body can
respond in new ways. There is no secret of youth more power ful. As one
80-year -old patient of mine succinctly put it, “People don’t grow old. When
they stop growing, they become old.” New knowledge, new skills, new
ways of looking  at the world keep mind and body growing, and as long as
that happens, the natural tendency to be new at every second is expressed. In the quantum world, change is inevitable, aging isn’t. The
chronological age of our physical bodies is beside the point. The youngest-
looking 50-year -old has molecules that are the same age as those of the
oldest-looking 50-year -old. In both cases the chronological age of the bodycould be stated as 5 billion years (the age of the various atoms), or 1 year
(the time it takes for these atoms to replace themselves in our tissues), or 3
seconds (the time taken for a cell to turn over its enzymes for processing
food, air , and water). In truth,  you are only as old as the information that swirls through you,
and this is very fortunate. You can control the informational content of the
quantum field. Although there is a certain amount of fixed information in
the atoms of food, air, and water that make up each cell, the power to
transform that information is subject to free will. One thing you can own
free and clear in this world is your interpretation of it. There are remarkable
medical cases of young children, for example, who feel so unloved that they
stop growing. This syndrome, called psychosocial dwarfism, occurs among
severely abused children who convert their lack of love and affection into
depleted growth hormone, in defiance of the fact that growth hormone is
supposedly released on a preprogrammed schedule imprinted into every
child’ s DNA. In these cases the power of interpretation overrides the
genetic imprint, causing a change in the body’ s informational fields. Interpretations arise from a person’ s self-interaction. You experience this
as internal dialogue. Thoughts, judgments, and feelings are ceaselessly
swirling through  one’s mind: “I like this, I don’t like that, I’m afraid of A,
I’m not sure of B,” etc. Interna l dialogue is not random menta l noise; it is
generated from a deep level by your beliefs and assumptions. A core belief
is defined as something you assume is true about reality , and as long as you
hold on to it, your belief will hold your body’ s informational fields to
certain parameters—you will perceive something as likable or unlikable,
distressing or enjoyable, according to how it fits your expectations. When someone’ s interpretation changes, a change in his reality also takes
place. In the case of children suffering from psychosocial dwarfism, putting
them into a loving environment proves more effective than administering
growth hormone  (their belief in being unwanted and unworthy can be so
strong that their bodies will not grow even when hormones are injected into
them). However , if loving foster parents can transform the children’ s core
belief about being unlovable, they can respond with bursts of naturally
produced growt h hormone, which sometimes brings them back to normal
height, weight, and development. When they see themselves differently ,their personal reality is altered at a physiological level. This is a powerful
metaphor for how our fear of aging and our deep belief that we are meant to
grow old may get transformed into aging itself, as a self-fulfillin g prophecy
generated by a withering self-image. To escape this prison, we need to overturn the beliefs supported by fear. In place of the belief that your body decays with time, nurture the belief that
your body is new at every moment. In place of the belief that your body is a
mindless machin e, nurture the belief that your body is infused with the deep
intelligence of life, whose sole purpose is to sustain you. These new beliefs
are not just nicer to live with; they are true—we experience the joy of life
through our bodies, so it is only natural to believe that our bodie s are not set
against us but want what we want. 7. Despite the appearance of being separate individuals, we
are all connected to patterns of intelligence governing the
cosmos. You and your environment are one. Looking at yourself, you perceive
that your body stops at a certain point; it is separated from the wall of your
room or a tree outdoors by empty space. In quantum terms, however , the
distinction between “solid” and “empty” is insignificant. Every cubic
centimeter of quantum space is filled with a nearly infinite amount of
energy, and the tiniest vibration  is part of vast fields of vibratio n spanning
whole galaxies. In a very real sense, your environment is your extended
body: With every breath, you inhale hundreds of millions of atoms of air
exhaled yesterday by someone in China. All the oxygen, water , and sunlight
around you are only faintly distinguishable from that which is inside you. If you choose, you can experience yourself in a state of unity with
everything you contact. In ordinary waking consciousness, you touch your
finger to a rose and feel it as solid, but in truth one bundle of energy and
information—your finger—is contacting another bundle of energy and
information—the rose. Your finger and the thing it touches are both just
minute outcroppings of the infinite field we call the universe. This truth
inspired the ancient sages of India to declare:As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. As is the atom, so is the universe. As is the human body , so is the cosmic body . As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. These are not just mystical teachings but actual experiences of those who
could dislodge their awareness from a state of separation and identify
instead with the unity of everyth ing. In unity consciousness, people, things,
and even ts “out there” all become part of your body; in fact, you are only a
mirror of relatio nships centered  on these influences. The famou s naturalist
John Muir decla red, “Wheneve r we try to pick out anything by itself, we
find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” This shouldn’ t be a rare
experience but the first building block of everything we know . The possibility of experiencing unity has tremendous implications for
aging, because when there is harmonious interaction between you and your
extended body , you feel joyful, healthy , and youthful. “Fear is born of
separation,” the ancient Indian sages maintained; in this statement they
probed deep into why we age. Seeing ourselves as separate, we create chaos
and disorder between ourselves  and things “out there.” We war with other
people and destroy the environ ment. Death, the final state of separation,
looms as a fearsome unknown; the very prospect of change, which is part of
life, creates untold dread because it connotes loss. Fear inevitably brings violence  in its wake. Being separate from other
people, things, and events, we want to force them to be what we want. In
harmony there is no violence. Instead of futilely trying to control the
uncontrollable, a person in unity learns acceptance, not because he has to
but because there actually is peace and orderliness in hims elf and his
extended body . The modern sage J. Krishnamurti lived into his nineties with
wonderful alertness, wisdom, and undiminished vitality . I remember seeing
him bound up the stairs to a lecture podium when he was 85, and I was very
moved when a woman who had known him for many years told me, “I have
learned one thing about him—he is completely without violence.”
The quantum worldview is not a spiritual one in its equations and
postulates, but Einstein and his colleagues were united by a mystical
reverence for their discoveries. Niels Bohr compared the wave aspect ofmatter to cosmic mind; Erwin Schrödinger ended his life believ ing that the
universe was itself a living mind (echoing Isaac Newton, who maintained
that gravity and all other force s were thoughts in the mind of God). The
truth is that probing our own spirit always brings humans to the border of
spirit in its larger sense. By putting this encounter into objective terms, the
new paradigm allows us actua lly to cross over the boundary that once
divided mind, body , and spirit. The transformation from separation to unity , from conflict to peace, is the
goal of all spiritual traditions. “Don’ t we live in the same objective world?”
a discip le once queried his guru. “Yes,” his master replied, “but you see
yourself in the world, I see the world in myself. This minor perceptual shift
makes all the dif ference between freedom and bondage.”
All of us are in bondage to the disorder we create by seeing ourselves as
separate and isolated. The perfect example is the Type A personality with
its driven, frustrated behavior , its constant sense of being pressured by
deadlines. Unable to relax into any kind of acceptance or flow, such a
person nurtures his past hurts as anger; this repressed turmoil gets projected
into the environment as hostility , impatience, blame, and unacknowledged
panic. Endlessly  trying to control others, such a person reacts to minor
stresses with harsh criticism of both self and others. In the act of creating so
much chaos, the Type A person, particularly in the business world, is
deluded into thinking that he or she is competing successfully . In actuality ,
the level of efficient work is very low, and as frustrations mount, the
feedback the Type A personality receives from his or her extended body
creates more havoc within the physical body . Cholesterol and blood
pressure rise; the heart is subje cted to needless stressful arousal, seriously
increasing the risk of a fatal heart attack or stroke. Type A is an extreme example  of the harm created by not interacting
harmoniously with one’s extended body . As we will see, perceiv ed stress in
the environment is directly related to most of the age changes that overtake
everyone. What makes us old isn’t the stress so much as it is the perception
of stress. Someone who doesn’ t see the world “out there” as a threat can
coexist with the environment, free of the damage created by the stress
response. In many ways, the most important thing you can do to experience
a world without aging is to nurture the knowledge that the world is you.8. Time is not absolute. The underlying r eality of all things is
eternal, and what we call time is r eally quantified eternity . Although our bodies, and the whole physical world, are a display of
constant change, there is more to reality than process. The universe was
born and is evolving. When it was born, time and space came into
existence. Befor e the instant of the Big Bang, time and space didn’ t exist as
we know them. Yet the rational mind finds it nearly impossible to ask
questions such as “What came before time?” and “What is bigger than
space?” Even Einstein, when he was a young physicist working out
quantum principles for the first time, held on to the old notion, embraced by
Newton, that the universe existed in a steady state—time and space were
eternal constants, never born and never dying. This steady-state version of reality is still the one our five senses report
back to us about. You cannot see or feel time as it speeds up or slows down,
even though Einstein proved that time does this; you cannot sense space as
it expands or contracts, yet this too is part of a rhythmic universe. To go
even further, to imagine those dimensionless regions where time and space
are born, requires a radical shift in perception. This shift is forced upon us
because the universe had to have some kind of timeless source—and the
same holds true for us. You perceive yourself as existing in time because your body is composed
of change; to change, one must have a flow or sequence. In this sequence
there is a before and after—before this breath was the last breath, after this
heartbeat will be the next heartbeat. But theoretically , if you had the time
and the equipme nt, you could make an EKG of all the heartbeats someone
has had in a lifetime, and by holding the printout in your hands, you would
have past, present, and future contained in one place. You could look at it
upside down or backward; you could fold it in half so that the last heartbeat
and the first one were next to each other . This kind of manipulation is what quantum physics reveals about the
most basic space-time events in Nature. As they exchange energy states,
two particles can move backward in time as easily as forward; things that
happened in the past can be altered by energy events in the future. The
whole notion of time as an arrow shooting inexorably forward has beenshattered forever in the complex geometries of quantum space, where
multidimensional strings and loops carry time in all directions and even
bring it to a halt. The only absolute left to us is the timeless, for now we realize that our
entire universe is just one incid ent springing forth out of a larger reality . What we sense as seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years are cut-up bits
of this larger reality . It is up to you, the perceiver , to cut up the timeless any
way you like; your awareness creates the time you experience. Someone
who experience s time as a scarce commodity that is constan tly slipping
away is creating a completely different personal reality from someone who
perceives that he has all the time in the world. Is your day full of time
pressure? Do you suffer the breathless, panicky symptom s of “time
sickness,” whic h the body translates into rapid or irregular heartbeat,
distorted digestive rhythms, insomnia, and high blood pressure? These
individual differences express how we perceive change, for the perception
of change creates our experience of time. When your attention is in the past or the future, you are in the field of
time, creating aging. One Indian  master who seemed remarkably young for
his age explained this by saying, “Most people spend their lives either in the
past or the future, but my life is supremely concentrated in the present.”
When a life is concentrated in the present, it is most real, because the past
and future are not impinging upon it. At this instant, where are the past and
future? Nowhere. Only the present moment exists; past and future are
mental projections. If you can free yourself of these projections, trying
neither to relive the past nor to control the future, a space is opened for a
completely new experience—the experience of ageless body and timeless
mind. Being able to identify with a reality that is not bounded by time is
extremely important; otherwise there is no escape from the decay that time
inevitably bring s. You can catch a glimpse of timelessness with a simple
mind-body exercise: Choose a time of day when you feel relaxed and
unpressured. Sit quietly in a comfortable chair and take off your watch,
placing it nearby so that you can easily refer to it without having to lift it or
move your head very much. Now close your eyes and be aware of your
breathing. Let your attention easily follow the stream of breath going in andout of your body . Imagine your whole body rising and falling with the flow
of each breath. After a minute or two, you will be aware of warmth and
relaxation pervading your muscles. When you feel very settled and quiet inside, slowly open your eyes and
peek at the second hand of your watch. What’ s it doing? Depend ing on how
relaxed you are, the second hand will behave in different ways. For some
people, it will have stopped entirely , and this effect will last anywhere from
one to perhaps three seconds. For other people, the second hand will
hesitate for half a second, then jump into its normal ticking. Still other
people will perceive the second hand moving, but at a slower pace than
usual. Unless you have tried this little experiment, it seems very unlikely ,
but once you have had the experience of seeing a watch stop, you will never
again doubt that time is a product of perception. The only time there is is
the one you are aware of. You can learn to take your awareness into the region of timele ssness at
will—meditation is the classic technique for mastering this experience. In
meditation the active mind is withdrawn to its source; just as this changing
universe had to have a source beyond change, your mind, with all its
restless activity , arises from a state of awareness beyond thought, sensation,
emotion, desire, and memory . This is a profound personal experi ence. In the
state of timeles s or transcendent awareness, you have the sensation of
fullness. In place of change, loss, and decay , there is steadiness and
fulfillment. You sense that the infinite is everywhere. When this experience
becomes a reality , the fears associated with change disappear; the
fragmentation of eternity into seconds, hours, days, and years becomes
secondary , and the perfection of every moment becomes primary . Now that meditation has entered mainstream Western cultural
experience, researchers have applied scientific measureme nts to the
subjective experience of silence, fullness, and eternity . They have
discovered that the physiological state of meditators under goes definite
shifts toward more efficient functioning. Hundreds of individual findings
show lowered respiration, reduced oxygen consumption, and decreased
metabolic rate. In terms of aging, the most significant conclusio n is that the
hormonal imbalance associated with stress—and known to speed up the
aging process—is reversed. This in turn slows or even reverses the agingprocess, as measured by various biological changes associated with
growing old. From my experien ce with studies on people using  meditation,
it has been established that long-term meditators can have a biological age
between 5 and 12 years younger than their chronological age. The most fascinating aspect of this research, which has been ongoing for
over two decade s, is that the biological process of aging itself does not have
to be manipulated; the desired results can be achieved through awareness
alone. In other words, meditation alters the frame of reference that gives the
person his experience of time. At a quantum level, physical events in space-
time such as heartbeat and hormone levels can be affected simply by taking
the mind to a reality where time does not have such a powerful hold. The
new paradigm is showing us that time has many levels and all are available
to us in our own consciousness. 9. Everyone inhabits a r eality of non-change lying beyond all
change. The experience of this r eality brings change under
our contr ol. At the moment , the only phys iology you can maintain is time-based. However , the fact that time is tied to awareness implies that you could
maintain an entirely different style of functioning—the physiology of
immortality—which would correspond to the experience of non-change. Non-change can’t be created as a product of change. It requires a shift out
of time-bound awareness into timeless awareness. There are many
gradations to this shift. For example, if you are under extreme time pressure
at work, your body’s reaction to the pressure is not automatic; some people
thrive under time pressure, using it to fuel their creativity and energy, while
others are defea ted by it, losin g incentive and feeling a burden that will
bring no satisfaction compared with the stress it creates. The person who responds with creativity has learned not to identify with
the time pressure; he has transcended it at least partially , unlike the person
who feels constriction and stress. For him, identification with time has
become overwh elming—he cannot escape the ticking of the internal clock,
and his body cannot help but mirror his state of mind. In various subtleways, our cells constantly adjust to our perception of time; a biologist
would say that we have entrained, or locked in sequence, a series of
processes embracing millions of related mind-body events. It is all-important to realize that you can reach a state where time-bound
processes can be realigned. A simple analogy demonstrates this: Look at
your physical body as a printout of signals being sent back and forth
between your brain and every cell. The nervous system, which  sets up the
kinds of messages being sent, functions as the body’ s software;  the myriad
different hormones, neurotransmitters, and other messenger molecules are
the input being run through the software. All this constitutes the visible
programming of your body . But where is the programmer? He is not visible,
yet he must exist. Thousands of decisions are being made in the mind-body
system every second, countles s choices that enable your physiology to
adapt to the demands of life. If I see a cobra on the path in India and jump back in fear, the visible
apparatus controlling this even t can be seen in the muscle reactions I
display , which are triggered by chemical signals from my nervous system. My increased heartbeat and panting breath are other visible signs that the
hormone adrena line has kicked in, secreted by the adrenal cortex in
response to a specific brain chemical (ACTH) sent from the pituitary . If a
biochemist could track down every single molecule involved  in my fear
reaction, he would still miss the invisible decision-maker that decided to
have the reaction, for even though I reacted in a split second, my body
didn’ t jump back mindlessly . Someone with entirely different programming
would exhibit entirely different reactions. A snake collector might bend
forward with interest; a Hindu devotee, recognizing a form of Shiva, might
kneel in awe. The fact is that any possible reaction might have occurred—panic, rage,
hysteria, paralysis, apathy , curiosity , delight, etc. The invisible programmer
is unlimited in the ways he can program the visible apparatus of the body . At the moment I stumbled across the snake, all the basic processes of my
physiology—breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, perception, and
thinking—depended on the meaning  that a cobra held for me perso nally . One sees the truth in a saying from Aldous Huxley: “Experience  is not what
happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.”Where can you locate a meanin g? The quick and easy answer  is to say
that it is located in the brain, but this organ, like every other , is in constant
flux. Like migrating birds, billions of atoms are flying in and out of my
brain every second. It swirls with electrical waves that never form the same
pattern twice in a lifetime. Its basic chemistry can shift if different kinds of
food are eaten for lunch, or if a sudden mood swing is experien ced. Yet my
memory of the snake doesn’ t dissolve in this sea of change. My memories
are available to the programmer who stands above memory , silently
observing my life, taking account of my experiences, always ready to
entertain the possibility of new choices. For this programmer is nothing but
the awareness of choice. It appreciates change without getting
overwhelmed; therefore it escapes the time-bound limitations that arise in
the normal cause-and-ef fect world. The “me” who is afraid of snakes learned that fear somewhere in the
past. All my reactions are part and parcel of the time-bound self and its
tendencies. In less than a thous andth of a second, its preprogrammed fear
arouses the whole sequence of bodily messages that produce my actions. For most of us no other “me” is apparent, because we haven’ t learned to
identify with the decision-make r, the silent witness, whose awareness isn’t
defined by the past. Yet in a subtle way, we all sense that something inside
us has not changed very much,  if at all, since we were infants . When we
wake up in the morning there is a second of pure awareness before the old
conditioning automatically falls into place; at that moment you are just
yourself, not happy or sad, not important or humble, not old or young. As I wake up in the morning, this “me” dresses itself in the mantle of
experience very quickly; in a matter of seconds I remember that I am, for
example, a 46-year -old doctor who has a wife, two children, a home outside
Boston, and ten minutes to get to the clinic. That identity is the product of
change. The “me” who is beyond change could be waking up anywhere—as
a 5-year -old in Delhi smelling my grandmother ’s cooking, as an 80-year -old
in Florid a listening to the wind  rattling the palms. This changeless “me,”
whom the ancient sages in India simply called the Self, serves  as my real
reference point for experience. All other reference points are bound by
change, decay , and loss; every other sense of “me” is identified with pain or
pleasure, povert y or wealth, happiness or sadness, youth or old age—everytime-bound condition that the relative world imposes. In unity
consciousness, the world can be explained as a flow of Spirit, which is
awareness. Our whole goal is to establish an intimate relations hip with Self
as Spirit. To the extent that we create this intimacy , the experience of
ageless body and timeless mind is realized. 10. W e are not victims of aging, sickness, and death. These ar e
part of the scenery , not the seer , who is immune to any form of
change. Life at its source is creation. When you get in touch with your own inner
intelligence, you get in touch with the creative core of life. In the old
paradigm, contr ol of life was assigned to DNA, an enormous ly complex
molecule that has revealed less than 1 percent of its secrets to geneticists. In
the new paradigm, control of life belongs to awareness. All the examples
cited here—of children who can curtail the secretion of growth hormone,
medical students who alter their output of interleukins when they feel
anxious, yogis who can manipulate their heartbeat at will—indicate that the
most basic bodily processes respond to our state of mind. The billions of changes occurring in our cells are only the passing
scenery of life; behind their mask is the seer, who represents the source of
the flow of awareness. Everything I can possibly experience begins and
ends with awareness; every thought or emotion that captures my attention is
a tiny fragment of awareness; all the goals and expectations I set for myself
are organized in awareness. What the ancient sages termed the Self can be
defined in modern psychologica l terms as a continuum of awareness, and
the state known as unity consciousness is the state where awareness is
complete—the person knows the whole continuum of himself without
masks, illusions, gaps, and broken fragments. Because we don’t maintain the continuity of our awareness, all of us fall
into gaps of one kind or another . Vast areas of our bodily existence go out
of our control, leading to sickness, aging, and death. But this is only to be
expected when awareness has become fragmented. In a famous series of
experiments at the Menninger clinic in the early 1970s, a noted spiritualadept from India, Swami Rama, demonstrated the ability to raise his
heartbeat at will from 70 to 300, a rate far beyond the normal range. Essentially , his heartbeat became a flutter that no longer pumped blood in
the norm al rhythmic fashion. In an ordinary person, cardiac flutter can
cause heart failure and other serious or even fatal problems. Such
occurrences af flict thousands of unsuspecting people every year . However , Swam i Rama was unaffected by this cardiac event because it
was under the direct control of his awareness. What this implies is that a
person who dies in a matter of minutes from a sudden interruption in his
normal heartbea t (this category would cover all kinds of arrhythmias,
fibrillation, and tachycardia) has actually suffered a loss of awareness. In
our mate rialistic worldview , we localize this loss in the heart muscle, saying
that the electroc hemical signals that coordinate a healthy heartbeat have
become disordered. Instead of orchestrating their individual twitches into a
smooth, unified pulsation throug hout the whole heart, billions of heart cells
lapse into chaotic, isolated contractions, making the heart look like a bag of
writhing snakes. Yet this horrifying spectacle, which every cardiologist dreads, is
secondary; loss of awareness among the heart cells is primary . This loss of
awareness isn’t local but general. The person himself  has lost
communication with the deep levels of intelligence that govern and control
all his cells—indeed, every cell is nothing but intelligence organized into
various layers of visible and invisible patterns. An adept like Swami Rama
shows us that our awareness is not meant to be thus fragm ented and
curtailed. If one knew himself as he really was, he would realize that he is
the source, course, and goal of all this flowing intelligence. What the
world’ s religious traditions call Spirit is wholeness, the continuity of
awareness that oversees all the bits and pieces of awareness. We are made victims of sickness, aging, and death by gaps in our self-
knowledge. To lose awareness is to lose intelligence; to lose intelligence is
to lose control over the end product of intelligence, the human body . Therefore, the most valuable lesson the new paradigm can teach us is this:
If you want to change your body , change your awareness first. Everything
that happens to you is a result of how you see yourself, to an extent you
might consider quite uncanny . In the sea battles of World War I, Germansailors were sometimes stranded in lifeboats  for days or weeks after their
ships were sunk . Invariably , the first men to die were the youngest. This
phenomenon remained a mystery until it was realized that the older sailors,
who had survived earlier sinking s, knew that the crisis could be weathered;
lacking such experience, the young sailors perished becaus e they saw
themselves as trapped in a hopeless situation. Taking a clue from these incidents, animal researchers have been able to
induce rapid aging, disease, and early death in laboratory rats and mice by
putting them in situations of high stress, such as by throwing them into
tanks of water with no escape. Animals that have never met such a situation
perceive it as hopeless and quickly give up and die. Animals that have been
gradually conditioned to the tanks persevere and survive, swimming for
long hours without signs of stress-induced deterioration of their tissues. Much of the history of human aging has been characterized by
hopelessness. Our fearful images of growing old, coupled with high rates of
disease and senility among the elderly , resulted in grim, self-fulfilling
expectations. Old age was a time of inevitable decline and loss, of
increasing feebleness in mind and body . Now our whole societ y is waking
up to a new awareness of aging; people in their sixties and seventies
routinely expect  to be as vigorous and healthy as they were in their forties
and fifties. But one underlying assumption— that humans have  to age—has not been
radically challenged. Having to age is a fact we inherited from the old
paradigm, stubb ornly fixed in our worldview until a shift in awareness can
bring new facts to light. A world view is just a way of arranging the infinite
energy of the universe into a system that makes sense. Aging made sense in
a scheme of Nature where all things change, fade away , and die. It makes
much less sense in a world where an endless flow of ever-renewing
intelligence is present all around  us. Which view you adopt is your choice. You can choose to see the rose bloom and die; you can choose to see the
rose as a wave of life that never ends, for next year new roses  will spring
from the seeds of this one. Matter is a captive moment in space and time, and by seeing our world
and ourselves materialistically , we make the captive aspects of the universe
assume too much importance. As this book unfolds, I want you toexperience just how fluid and effortless existence can be when your
worldview shifts. Despite its solid physical appearance, your body is very
much like a river, akin to the sacred river so beautifully described by
Hermann Hesse  in his spiritual novel Siddhartha. In that book there comes
a point when Siddhartha, the seeker of enlightenment, finally finds his
peace. After years of wandering he ends up beside a great river in India,
where an inner voice whispers, “Love this river, stay by it, learn from it.”
To me, this whisper says someth ing about my body , which flows on and on
in its life processes. Like a river, my body changes as the mome nt changes,
and if I could do the same, there  would be no gaps in my life, no memory of
past trauma to trigger new pain, no anticipation of future hurt to make me
contract in fear . Your body is the river of life that sustains you, yet it does so humbly ,
without asking for recognition. If you sit and listen to it, you will find that a
powerful intelli gence dwells in and with you. It isn’t an intelligence of
words, but compared to the millions of years of wisdom woven into one
cell, the knowledge of words doesn’t seem so grand. Siddhartha wanted to
learn from the river and to listen, which is tremendously important. You
have to want to rejoin the flow of the body before you can learn from it, and
that means you must be willing to open yourself to knowledge that was
overlooked in your old way of seeing. Hesse went on, “It seemed to him that whoever understood this river and
its secre ts, would understand much more, many secrets, all secre ts.” All that
has ever happened to you is recorded in your body , but, more important,
new possibilitie s are there, too. Aging seems to be some thing that’s
happening to you, when in fact it is something your body has largely
learned to do. It has learned to carry out the programming fed into it by you,
the programmer . Since so much of this programming was unconscious,
dictated by beliefs and assumptions you hardly knew you held, it’s
important to shatter the whole edifice of thought that gave you the material
world as you know it. Now we need to return to the body, for the intimate experience we have
of our physical selves contains the most personal truth. Being comfortable
with its present-moment feelings allows you to escape the shadow of threat
that hangs over everything when order is losing the battle with entropy .Such a world is the one we were taught to believe in. There is another way
and another world. This was the greatest lesson Siddhartha learn ed from the
river. At the end of the novel he speaks about it with his oldest friend and
companion, V asudeva:
“Have you also learned that secret for the river; that there is no
such thing as time?”
A bright smile spread over Vasudeva’ s face. “Yes, Siddhartha. Is
this what you mean? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at
the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry , at the
current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the
present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow
of the future?”
“That is it,” said Siddhartha, “and when I learned that, I review ed
my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the
mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by
shadows, not through reality .”
He spok e with delight, but Vasudeva just smiled radiantly at him
and nodded his agreement. The delusion fostered by centuries of materialism is that we can conquer
the river and control its flow; if we did, our only achievement would be to
die. The truth about each of us is that our life spreads out in larger and
larger fields of experience. Ther e is no limit to the energy, infor mation, and
intelligence concentrated in one person’ s existence. In physica l form this
infinite creativity has been embodied in your cells; in unmanife st form it is
expressed in the mind’ s silence, the void that is actually a fullness of untold
possible meanings, possible truths, possible creations. The emptiness at the
core of every atom is the wom b of the universe; in the flicker of thought
when two neuro ns interact there is an opportunity for a new world to be
born. This book is about exploring that silence where time’ s breath does not
wither but only renews. Look to the land where no one is old; it is nowhere
but in yourself. OceanofPDF .comIN PRACTICE:
How to Reinterpret Your Body
The first step toward experiencing your body in a different way is to change
your interpretation of it. No two people experience their bodies in exactly
the same way, because each of us interprets experience—including the
experience of inhabiting a body—according to his own personal beliefs,
values, assumptions, and memo ries. An aging body involves one style of
interpretation; an ageless body involves an opposite style. Try to let go of the assumption that your body is aging because things
just are that way. If you feel certain that growing old is natural, inevitable,
and normal, I don’t want you to erase those assumptions instantly . You
couldn’ t do that if you tried, for the old paradigm has taught all of us to
accept these assumptions without question. However , while still honoring
your deep belief  in aging, sickn ess, and death, allow yourself to set aside
the old paradigm for a moment. The quantum worldview , or the new paradigm, teaches us that we are
constantly making and unmaki ng our bodies. Behind the illusion of its
being a solid, stable object, the body is a process, and as long as that
process is directed toward renewal, the cells of the body remain new, no
matter how much time passes or how much entropy we are exposed to. The great enemy of renewal is habit; when frozen interpretations from
the past are applied to the prese nt, there will always be a gap, a mismatch
between the need of the momen t and the solution from the past. To have a
renewed body , you must be willing to have new perceptions that give rise to
new solutions. The exercises below are designed to help you open up new
perceptions. Some are exercises in absorbing the new knowledge of the
quantum worldv iew as it applie s to your body . Others are exercises in newexperience, gaining an inner feeling for that level inside your body that is
ageless. Ideally , as we move on to later exercises, knowledge and
experience will begin to fuse—that is the sign that you are fully
assimilating this new worldview in place of the old. Exercise 1: Seeing Thr ough the Mask of Matter
The most impor tant step in gaining the experience of ageless body is to
unfreeze the perceptions that have locked you into feelings of isolation,
fragmentation, and separatenes s. These frozen perceptions reinforce the
idea that only the reality of the five senses can be believed. So let us see if
we can go beyond the senses to find a level of transcendental experience,
which is in fact more real than the world of the senses. Look at your hand and examine it closely . Trace its familiar lines and
furrows, feel the texture of the skin, the supple flesh cushioning the
submer ged hardness of bone. This is the hand your senses report to you, a
material object composed of flesh and blood. In this first exercise we will
attempt to “thaw out” your hand and give you a different experience of it
beyond the reach of your senses. Holding the image of your hand in your mind’ s eye, imagine that you are
examining it through a high-pow ered microscope whose lens can penetrate
the fines t fabrics  of matter and energy. At the lowest power , you no longer
see smooth flesh but a collection of individual cells loosely  bound by
connective tissue. Each cell is a watery bag of proteins that appear as long
chains of smaller molecules held together by invisible bonds. Moving
closer , you can see separate atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen , and so on,
which have no solidity at all—th ey are vibrating, ghostly shadows revealed
through the microscope as patches of light and dark. You have arrived at the bound ary between matter and energy, for the
subatomic particles making up each atom—whirling electro ns dancing
around a nuclea r core of proton s and neutrons—are not spots and dots of
matter . They are more like traces of light left by a Fourth of July sparklerwaved in the dark. At this level you see that all things you once took to be
solid are just energy trails; the instant you see one trail, the energy has
moved elsewhere, leaving nothing substantial to be touched or seen. Each
trail is a quantum event, fleeting, dying out as soon as it is noticed. Now you start sinking even deeper into quantum space. All light
disappears, repla ced by yawning chasms of black emptiness. Far away on
the horizon of your vision, you see a last flash, like the farthest, faintest star
visible in the night sky. Hold that flash in your mind, for it is the last
remnant of matter or energy detectable by any scientific instrument. The
blackness closes in, and you are in a place where not just matter  and energy
are gone, but space and time as well. You have left behind your hand as a space-time event. Like all space-time
events, your body has to have an origin beyond the fourth dimension. There
is no such thing as “before” or “after” in this region, no concept of “big” or
“small.” Here your hand exists before the Big Bang and after the universe’ s
end in the “heat death” of absolute zero. In reality these terms are
meaningless, for you have arrived at the womb of the universe, the pre-
quantum region that has no dimensions and all dimensions. You are
everywhere and nowhere. Has your hand ceased to exist? No, for in crossing the boundary of the
fourth dimensio n, you didn’ t go anywhere; the whole notion of place and
time simply doesn’t apply anymore. All the grosser levels of perception are
still available to you; your hand still exists at all these levels you have
traversed—quantum, subatomic, atomic, molecular , cellular—connected by
invisible intelligence to the place where you now find yourself . Each level
is a layer of transformation, completely different from the one above or
below it, but only here, where there is nothing but pure inform ation, idea,
creative potential, are all levels reduced to their common origin. Ponder this exercise for a moment to absorb its lessons:
•  The three-dimensional body reported by the five senses is a mirage. •  Every solid particle of matter is composed of more than 99.99 9 percent
empty space. •  The void between two electrons is proportionately as empty as the
space between two galaxies.•  If you go deep  enough into the fabric of matter and energy, you arrive
at the origin of the universe. All events in space-time have a common
source outside the reality we perceive. •  Beyond the quantum, your body exists as pure creative potential, a
multilayered process controlled by intelligence. Now examine your hand with a new understanding—it is the stepping-of f
point for a dizzying descent into the dance of life, where the dancers
disappear if you approach too near and the music fades away into the
silence of eternity . The dance is forever , and the dance is you. Exercise 2: Closing the Gap
Now that we have touched that level of quantum space unde rlying all
physical existen ce, I want you to become more comfortable there. Ordinarily we think of space as cold and empty , but quantum space is full—
it is the continuity that connects everything in the universe. When the
quantum field is active, it gives rise to a space-time event; when it is quiet,
there is just quantum space. But this doesn’ t signify that the field has gaps
in it—im agine the Earth surrounded by lines of magnetic force radiating out
of the north and south magnetic poles. All the separate magnets on the
planet participate in this field. They are small, separate outcroppings of
magnetism, yet even when a magnet is not in your immediate vicinity , the
magnetic field surrounds you. A horseshoe magnet is a local outcropping of
the field (a space-time event), while the lines of the magnetism surrounding
the Earth are a nonlocal, invisib le presence. Both are connected as aspects
of one underlying field of ener gy. Because your body emanates electromagnetic frequencies, you are yet
another expressi on of the same field. The pulsations of nerve signals racing
along your limbs, the electric charge emitted by your heart cells, and the
faint field of current surrounding  your brain all demonstrate that you are not
separate from any form of energy in the universe. Any appearance of
separation is only the product of the limitation of your senses, which are not
attuned to these ener gies.Imagine two candles standing about three feet apart on a table in front of
you. To your eyes they appear separate and independent, yet the light they
cast fills the room with photons; the entire space between them is bridged
by light, and therefore there is no real separation at the quantum  level. Now
carry one of the candles outside at night and hold it up against a background
of stars. The pinpoints of light in the sky may be billions of light-years
away , yet at the quantum level each star is just as connected to your candle
as the second candle in the room; the vast space between them contains
waves of ener gy that bind them. As you look at the candle and the distant stars, photons of light from both
land on your retina. There they trigger flashes of electrochemical dischar ge
that belong to a different vibratory frequency from visible light, yet they are
part of the same  electromagnetic  field. Therefore, you are another candle—
or star—whose local concentrati on of matter and energy is one outcropping
in the infinite field that surrounds and supports you. Think about this organic connection between everything in existence. The lessons of this exercise are
•  No matter how separate anything appears to the senses, nothing is
separate at the quantum level. •  The quantum field exists in, around, and through you. You are not
looking at the field—in every wave and particle, the field is your
extended body . •  Each of your cells is a local concentration of information and energy
inside the wholeness of information and energy of your body . Likewise, you are a local conce ntration of information and energy in
the wholeness that is the body of the universe. When you begin to own this knowledge, nothing in your environment
will feel threatening to you. As a result, the fear of separation will loosen its
hold over you, and the unbroken flow of awareness will counter entropy
and aging. Exercise 3: Br eathing the FieldThe quantum field transcends everyday reality , yet it is extremely
intimate to your experience. To fetch a word from your memor y, to feel an
emotion, to grasp a concept—th ese are events that change the entire field. The eminent British physicist Sir James Jeans once remarked, “When an
electron vibrates , the universe shakes.” There is no flicker of activity in any
of your cells that goes unnoticed across the entire quantum field. At its finest level, every physiological process registers in the fabric of
Nature. In other words, the more  refined a process is, the more connected to
the basic activity of the cosmos. Here is a simple breathing exercise that can
give you a remarkably vivid experience of this phenomenon. Sit comfortably in a chair with your eyes closed. Gently and slowly
inhale through your nostrils, imagining as you do so that you are drawing
the air from a point infinitely far away . See the air gently coming to you
from the edge of the universe. Feel it coolly suf fusing your body . Now slowly and easily exhale , sending every atom of air back to its
source infinitely  far away . It may help if you envision a thread that extends
from you to the far reaches of the cosmos; or you might visualize a star
hovering in front of you that is sending light from infinitely far away—in
either case, imag ine the thread or the star as your source of air. If you aren’ t
a good visualizer , don’t worry; just hold the word infinite  in your mind as
you breathe. Whatever technique you use, the aim is to feel each breath
coming to you from the quantum field, which at a subtle level is actually
happening. Reestablishing the memory of your connection with the
quantum field will awaken the memory of renewal in your body . Exercise 4: Redefining
Having absorbed  the knowledge that your body is not a sculpture isolated
in space and time, redefine yourself by repeating the following statements
silently to yourself:
I can use the power of my awareness to experience a body that is
Flowing instead of solid
Flexible " " rigidQuantum " " material
Dynamic " " static
Composed of information
and ener gy" " random chemical reactions
A network of intelligence " " a mindless machine
Fresh and ever -renewing " " entropic and aging
Timeless " " time-bound
Another good set of redefining statements:
•  I am not my atoms, they come and go. •  I am not my thoughts, they come and go. •  I am not my ego, my self-image changes. •  I am above and beyond these; I am the witness, the interpreter , the Self
beyond the self-image. This Self is ageless and timeless. Repeating these statements serves as more than a mental reminder . As a
process rather than an object, the human body is constantly  filled with
messages of every kind; the verbal messages we hear in our heads are just
one version of the information being exchanged from cell to cell every
second. Because  every person’ s awareness is colored by past experiences,
the flow of information inside us is influenced by unconscious imprints we
are barely aware of. We will examine in detail how these unconscious
imprints break down the smoo th flow of messages, creating the loss of
intelligence that results in aging. For the time being, know that you can change these imprints by giving
the unconscious  new assumptions and beliefs to operate with. Every
thought you have activates a messenger molecule in your brain. This means
that every mental impulse gets transformed automatically into biological
information. By repeating these new statements of belief, affirming to
yourself that your body is not defined by the old paradigm, you are
allowing new biological inform ation to be produced; and, via the mind-
body connection , your redefined sense of yourself is being received by your
cells as new programming. Thus, the gap between your old, isolated self
and the image of yourself as an ageless, timeless being starts to close.OceanofPDF .comPART 
TWO
Aging and Awareness
OceanofPDF .comAWARENESS HAS THE power to chang e aging, but awareness is a two-edged
sword—it can both heal and destroy . What makes the difference is how
your awareness becomes conditioned, or trained, into various attitudes,
assumptions, beliefs, and reactions. When these mental patterns are
destructive, a person finds himself driven by his mind into destructive
behavior; when the mental patte rns are constructive, the person is motivated
toward self-enhancing behavior . Before it gets trained, awaren ess is just a
field of energy and information;  it is the mind’ s faculty for having thought
before thought is actually prese nt. Compared to any single expression of
matter and energy, whether one atom or one galaxy , the quantum field is
incomparably more powerful, because it has the potential to generate
infinite combinations of space-time events that have never occurred before. Likewise, becau se it always remains capable of generating new mental
impulses, which in turn generate new biological information, your
awareness is much more power ful than any single thought you might ever
have. Retaining this creative potential is the mark of non-aging; giving it up
in favor of habit s, rituals, rigid beliefs, and outworn behavior is the mark of
aging. In ancient China, the Tao Te Ching  proclaimed the same truth:
“Whatever is flexible and flowi ng will tend to grow , whatever is rigid and
blocked will wither and die.”
The impressions of past experience lock our minds into predictable
patterns that trigger predictable behavior . Everyone’ s inner life is complex,
swirling with both positive and negative thought patterns, but the fact that
awareness can be trained is simple; it is the most fundamental thing that
happens to us from birth onward. Like melted wax being imprinted with a
signet ring, raw, unformed awareness is able to hold an impression, and
once the impression has taken, awareness sets around it. The Illusion of No ChoiceIn childhood we were at our most impressionable; our awareness was like
soft, fresh wax not yet marred by experience. By old age the same
awareness has been conditioned  thousands of times over, and like old wax
that has been used too many times, the mind becomes brittle and stiff. It is
difficult to find even a small corner that is not conditioned by multiple
layers of experience. Old bodie s reflect this underlying rigidity , which is
felt in every cell. The number of impressions that get laid down inside us is staggering—
behavioral psych ologists have estimated that just the verbal cues fed to us
by our parents in early childhood, which still run inside our heads like
muffled tape loops, amount to over twenty-five thousand hours of pure
conditioning. For each of us, the learning process that teaches us to age is
complex and never -ending. It involves attitudes passed along from family ,
peers, and society since earliest childhood. What did your moth er say when
she spotted her first wrinkles? Did she see them as a dreaded symbol of lost
youth? Did she still feel pretty and desirable? How did your father feel
about retirement? Was it the end of his useful existence or the threshold of a
better time? Were your grandparents benign, wise guides or distant, fear-
inspiring strange rs? Were the signs of old age that they exhibited viewed as
senility or simply as change? The effect of conditioning is always the same: choice becomes restricted. For exam ple, the act of eating is a choice, which most of us freely exercise
several times a day. But to someone suffering from the eating disorder of
anorexia, the choice has become severely limited. Inside the awareness of
anorectics are powerful imprints of low self-esteem, harsh guilt, repressed
anger , and defective body images. These imprints can be extraordinarily
intricate, but the end result is graphically simple. The person can no longer
eat norm ally. The mere sight of food triggers the submer ged conditioning;
feelings of revulsion spontane ously well up, killing all appetite. If the
disorder has progressed to extremes, anorectics are virtually paralyzed,
compelled by their old conditioning to starve, even when abun dant food is
available. A physician confronting anyone  with an eating disorder hears the same
anguished cry: “I have to behave  this way; I must do what I’m doing.” This
conviction is an illusion, for the bonds of conditioning can be broken. Aslong as it is in force, though, this illusion is overwhelmingly convincing to
the mind, and under its influence, the physiological mechanism for hunger
is distorted into abnormal responses. The same mechanics apply to our
subject, aging. Inside everyone lies the hidden conviction “I must age,”
which operates so powerfully on us that our bodies conform to it. Any time choice  seems to be cut off, some form of illusion is operating. Thousands of years ago the greatest of Indian sages, Shankara, declared,
“People grow old and die becau se they see others grow old and die.” It has
taken us centuri es even to begin  to catch up with this extraordinary insight. As a physical process, aging is universal and, to all appearances , inevitable. A steam  locomo tive doesn’ t wear out over time and fall apart because it
sees other locomotives doing the same thing. The only conditioning that
affects any machine is simple wear and tear; certain parts get worn down
faster than others because they absorb the most impact or friction. Our
bodies also absorb impact and friction; various organs and tissues wear out
before others. This physical picture looks so much like mechanical wear
and tear that we are blinded to Shankara’ s deeper point—the aging body is
responding to social conditioning. There are societies in which people share very different styles of
conditioning and therefore very different styles of aging. In recent decades
anthropologists have been surprised to discover how many so-called
primitive people s are immune to signs of aging that the West has long
accepted. S. Boyd Eaton, co-aut hor of a fascinating book about early man’ s
health, The Paleolithic Prescription,  points to at least twenty-five
traditional societies around the world where heart disease and cancer , two
diseases long associated with aging, are almost unknown. These societies are our best testing ground for the hypothesis that
“normal” aging is really a collection of symptoms born from abnormal
conditioning. Eaton cites native cultures in many places—V enezuela, the
Solomon Islands, Tasmania, and the African desert—whose members all
enjoy low blood pressure throughout their lives. This is completely contrary
to the trend in the United States and Western Europe, where almost
everyone’ s blood  pressure rises by a few points every decade and up to half
of the aged population needs to be treated for hypertension.Growing deaf is yet another marker of senescence that modern societies
have long accep ted as “normal” and inevitable. The onset of deafness may
even be getting earlier here; one study of college freshmen in Tennessee
revealed that 60 percent had already suffered significant hearing loss. Approximately 25 million American adults have enough hearing loss to
qualify for disability payments. Y et certain Bushman tribes in Botswana and
the Maabans of southern Sudan exhibit no significant hearing loss as they
grow older . Similarly , although cholesterol levels tend to rise with age in
industrialized countries, such tribes as the Hadzas of Tanzania and the
Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico rarely have cholesterol readings
over 150; this level, which is 60 points below the American average,
strongly protect s these people against premature heart attacks. Again, the
low readings persist throughout  life, while in our culture everyone’ s serum
cholesterol tends to rise, slowly but surely , as we age. A wide variety of
cultures has managed to escape one or more of these “diseases of
civilization,” a misnomer , for highly civilized societies are also marked by
good health. The breast cancer that strikes one in nine America n women is
extremely rare in both China and Japan; colon cancer , a major threat to
American men, is also extreme ly low there, as it is in many  indigenous
African tribes. When Japanese, Taiwanese, or African populations move from their
traditional settings to this country , exposure to civilizati on and its
“improved” lifestyle often proves disastrous. Rates of heart attack, colon
cancer , and hypertension that were a fraction of ours begin to soar;
typically , by the second generation there is no advantage left. But is this
change only one of diet and lifestyle? To support this explanation,
epidemiologists point to the Japanese who live in Hawaii, which is
considered a cultural halfway house between East and West in diet and
lifestyle. Becaus e they eat less fat than is consumed on the U.S. mainland
but more than is customary in Japan, the Japanese immigrant s to Hawaii
have heart-attac k rates that also stand between the two extrem es of Japan
and the mainland U.S. This long-accepted explanation was shaken, however , when some of the
data was examined in more detail. As psychologist Robert Orns tein and hisco-author David Sobel relate in their book The Healing Brain,  if one looks
at the whole spectrum of Japanese immigrants in California, there was one
subgroup who continued to have low rates of heart disease that did not
correlate with diet or cholesterol levels in their blood. These were males
who retained strong ties to Japanese culture despite their havin g moved to
America. The various ways in which their awareness remained Japanese (by
growing up in a Japanese neighborhood, attending school with other
Japanese children, speaking their native language, and observing traditional
customs and social ties) all contributed to producing healthy hearts, no
matter whether their blood cholesterol levels were high or low . What kept these men healthy was a social bond that is invisible but very
powerful. They continued to share in the consciousness of traditional Japan,
which is a form of extended mind that cannot help but have physiological
effects. Along the same lines, studies of auto workers laid off during hard
times in Michigan have reveale d that those men who felt strong support
from family , relatives, and friends were less likely to develop  physical or
mental symptoms. Similarly , when pregnant women were asked whether
they felt supported by their family and friends, it was found that 91 percent
of serious complications during  pregnancy occurred among those who said
that they led stressful lives and had little social support. Social support is a complex phenomenon, covering all the interactions of
language, customs, family structure, and social tradition that bind people
together . The net result is that awareness gets programmed; social binding
takes place at the level of mind. Y ou perceive that another person is like you
and you believe he sees you the same way. What you share is a larger self,
an interconnected psyche that is as sensitive and intricate as an individual
psyche. Hundreds of books have been written about the aging proce ss on the
assumption that growing old is something that happens to people. Now ,
however , we are seeing that it is something that social conditioning taught
our bodies to do. This is an extremely important distinction. If aging is
something that’s happening to you, then basically you’re a victim; but if
aging is somethi ng you learned, you’re in a position to unlearn the behavior
that’s making you age, adop t new beliefs, and be guided into new
opportunities.There’ s an aphorism made famous by the late Norman Cousins: “Belief
creates biology .” No truer statement was ever made about aging. Our
inherited expect ation that the body must wear out over time, coupled with
deep beliefs that we are fated to suffer, grow old, and die, creates the
biological pheno menon we call aging. Life is awareness in action. Despite
the thousands of hours of old tapes that program our responses, we continue
to live because awareness finds new ways to flow. The positive side of
awareness—its ability to heal—is always available. OceanofPDF .comLEARNING NOT TO AGE:
The Link Between Belief and Biology
Although aware ness gets programmed in thousands of ways, the most
convincing are what we call beliefs. A belief is something you hold on to
because you think it is true. But unlike a thought, which actively forms
words or images in your brain, a belief is generally silent. A person
suffering from claustrophobia doesn’ t need to think, “This room is too
small,” or, “There are too many people in this crowd.” Put into a small,
crowded room, his body reacts automatically . Somewhere in his awareness
is a hidden belie f that generates all the physical symptoms of fear without
his havin g to think about it. The flow of adrenaline that causes his pounding
heart, sweaty palms, panting breath, and dizziness is triggered at a level
deeper than the thinking mind. People with phobias struggle desperately to use thoughts to thwart their
fear, but to no avail. The habit of fear has sunk so deep that the body
remembers to carry it out, even when the mind is resisting with all its
might. The thoughts of a claustr ophobic—“There’ s no reason to be afraid”;
“Small rooms aren’ t dangerous”; “Everyone else looks perfectly normal,
why can’t I get over this?”—are rational objections, but the body acts on
commands that override thought. Our beliefs in aging hold just this kind of power over us. Let me give an
example: For the past twenty years, gerontologists have performed
experiments to prove that remain ing active throughout life, even up to one’s
late seventies, would halt the loss of muscle and skeletal tissue. The news
spread among retired people that they should continue to walk, jog, swim,
and keep  up their housework; under the slogan “Use it or lose it,” millionsof people now expect to remain strong in old age. With this new belief in
place, something once considered impossible happened.
_OceanofPDF.com_Ageless_Body_Timeless_Mind_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        A child’ s view of reality, for example, contains
much that is unfamiliar, and until he learns more about the world, his body
expresses itself in untrained and uncoordinated behaviors. At 3 months old,
a baby cannot tell the difference between a staircase and a painting of a
staircase. His brain hasn’ t grasped what an optical illusion is. By 6 months,
his reality has changed; babies can recognize optical illusions by that age,
and using that knowledge, their bodies are better able to negotiate three-
dimensional space (mirrors don’t look like holes in the wall, real stairs are
to be climbed but not paintings of stairs, roundness is different from
flatness, etc. ). Making this perceptual shift isn’t just mental; a whole new
way of using eyes and hand s has been achieved, and the physical
dimensions of various brain centers for shape recognition and motor
coordination are af fected. As long as new perceptions continue to enter your brain, your body can
respond in new ways. There is no secret of youth more power ful. As one
80-year -old patient of mine succinctly put it, “People don’t grow old. When
they stop growing, they become old. ” New knowledge, new skills, new
ways of looking  at the world keep mind and body growing, and as long as
that happens, the natural tendency to be new at every second is expressed. In the quantum world, change is inevitable, aging isn’t. The
chronological age of our physical bodies is beside the point. The youngest-
looking 50-year -old has molecules that are the same age as those of the
oldest-looking 50-year -old. In both cases the chronological age of the bodycould be stated as 5 billion years (the age of the various atoms), or 1 year
(the time it takes for these atoms to replace themselves in our tissues), or 3
seconds (the time taken for a cell to turn over its enzymes for processing
food, air, and water). In truth,  you are only as old as the information that swirls through you,
and this is very fortunate. You can control the informational content of the
quantum field. Although there is a certain amount of fixed information in
the atoms of food, air, and water that make up each cell, the power to
transform that information is subject to free will. One thing you can own
free and clear in this world is your interpretation of it. There are remarkable
medical cases of young children, for example, who feel so unloved that they
stop growing. This syndrome, called psychosocial dwarfism, occurs among
severely abused children who convert their lack of love and affection into
depleted growth hormone, in defiance of the fact that growth hormone is
supposedly released on a preprogrammed schedule imprinted into every
child’ s DNA. In these cases the power of interpretation overrides the
genetic imprint, causing a change in the body’ s informational fields. Interpretations arise from a person’ s self-interaction. You experience this
as internal dialogue. Thoughts, judgments, and feelings are ceaselessly
swirling through  one’s mind: “I like this, I don’t like that, I’m afraid of A,
I’m not sure of B,” etc. Interna l dialogue is not random menta l noise; it is
generated from a deep level by your beliefs and assumptions. A core belief
is defined as something you assume is true about reality, and as long as you
hold on to it, your belief will hold your body’ s informational fields to
certain parameters—you will perceive something as likable or unlikable,
distressing or enjoyable, according to how it fits your expectations. When someone’ s interpretation changes, a change in his reality also takes
place. In the case of children suffering from psychosocial dwarfism, putting
them into a loving environment proves more effective than administering
growth hormone  (their belief in being unwanted and unworthy can be so
strong that their bodies will not grow even when hormones are injected into
them). However, if loving foster parents can transform the children’ s core
belief about being unlovable, they can respond with bursts of naturally
produced growt h hormone, which sometimes brings them back to normal
height, weight, and development. When they see themselves differently,their personal reality is altered at a physiological level. This is a powerful
metaphor for how our fear of aging and our deep belief that we are meant to
grow old may get transformed into aging itself, as a self-fulfillin g prophecy
generated by a withering self-image. To escape this prison, we need to overturn the beliefs supported by fear. In place of the belief that your body decays with time, nurture the belief that
your body is new at every moment. In place of the belief that your body is a
mindless machin e, nurture the belief that your body is infused with the deep
intelligence of life, whose sole purpose is to sustain you. These new beliefs
are not just nicer to live with; they are true—we experience the joy of life
through our bodies, so it is only natural to believe that our bodie s are not set
against us but want what we want. 7. Despite the appearance of being separate individuals, we
are all connected to patterns of intelligence governing the
cosmos. You and your environment are one. Looking at yourself, you perceive
that your body stops at a certain point; it is separated from the wall of your
room or a tree outdoors by empty space. In quantum terms, however, the
distinction between “solid” and “empty” is insignificant. Every cubic
centimeter of quantum space is filled with a nearly infinite amount of
energy, and the tiniest vibration  is part of vast fields of vibratio n spanning
whole galaxies. In a very real sense, your environment is your extended
body: With every breath, you inhale hundreds of millions of atoms of air
exhaled yesterday by someone in China. All the oxygen, water, and sunlight
around you are only faintly distinguishable from that which is inside you. If you choose, you can experience yourself in a state of unity with
everything you contact. In ordinary waking consciousness, you touch your
finger to a rose and feel it as solid, but in truth one bundle of energy and
information—your finger—is contacting another bundle of energy and
information—the rose. Your finger and the thing it touches are both just
minute outcroppings of the infinite field we call the universe. This truth
inspired the ancient sages of India to declare:As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. As is the atom, so is the universe. As is the human body, so is the cosmic body. As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. These are not just mystical teachings but actual experiences of those who
could dislodge their awareness from a state of separation and identify
instead with the unity of everyth ing. In unity consciousness, people, things,
and even ts “out there” all become part of your body; in fact, you are only a
mirror of relatio nships centered  on these influences. The famou s naturalist
John Muir decla red, “Wheneve r we try to pick out anything by itself, we
find it hitched to everything else in the universe. ” This shouldn’ t be a rare
experience but the first building block of everything we know. The possibility of experiencing unity has tremendous implications for
aging, because when there is harmonious interaction between you and your
extended body, you feel joyful, healthy, and youthful. “Fear is born of
separation,” the ancient Indian sages maintained; in this statement they
probed deep into why we age. Seeing ourselves as separate, we create chaos
and disorder between ourselves  and things “out there. ” We war with other
people and destroy the environ ment. Death, the final state of separation,
looms as a fearsome unknown; the very prospect of change, which is part of
life, creates untold dread because it connotes loss. Fear inevitably brings violence  in its wake. Being separate from other
people, things, and events, we want to force them to be what we want. In
harmony there is no violence. Instead of futilely trying to control the
uncontrollable, a person in unity learns acceptance, not because he has to
but because there actually is peace and orderliness in hims elf and his
extended body. The modern sage J. Krishnamurti lived into his nineties with
wonderful alertness, wisdom, and undiminished vitality. I remember seeing
him bound up the stairs to a lecture podium when he was 85, and I was very
moved when a woman who had known him for many years told me, “I have
learned one thing about him—he is completely without violence. ”
The quantum worldview is not a spiritual one in its equations and
postulates, but Einstein and his colleagues were united by a mystical
reverence for their discoveries. Niels Bohr compared the wave aspect ofmatter to cosmic mind; Erwin Schrödinger ended his life believ ing that the
universe was itself a living mind (echoing Isaac Newton, who maintained
that gravity and all other force s were thoughts in the mind of God). The
truth is that probing our own spirit always brings humans to the border of
spirit in its larger sense. By putting this encounter into objective terms, the
new paradigm allows us actua lly to cross over the boundary that once
divided mind, body, and spirit. The transformation from separation to unity, from conflict to peace, is the
goal of all spiritual traditions. “Don’ t we live in the same objective world. ”
a discip le once queried his guru. “Yes,” his master replied, “but you see
yourself in the world, I see the world in myself. This minor perceptual shift
makes all the dif ference between freedom and bondage. ”
All of us are in bondage to the disorder we create by seeing ourselves as
separate and isolated. The perfect example is the Type A personality with
its driven, frustrated behavior, its constant sense of being pressured by
deadlines. Unable to relax into any kind of acceptance or flow, such a
person nurtures his past hurts as anger; this repressed turmoil gets projected
into the environment as hostility, impatience, blame, and unacknowledged
panic. Endlessly  trying to control others, such a person reacts to minor
stresses with harsh criticism of both self and others. In the act of creating so
much chaos, the Type A person, particularly in the business world, is
deluded into thinking that he or she is competing successfully. In actuality,
the level of efficient work is very low, and as frustrations mount, the
feedback the Type A personality receives from his or her extended body
creates more havoc within the physical body. Cholesterol and blood
pressure rise; the heart is subje cted to needless stressful arousal, seriously
increasing the risk of a fatal heart attack or stroke. Type A is an extreme example  of the harm created by not interacting
harmoniously with one’s extended body. As we will see, perceiv ed stress in
the environment is directly related to most of the age changes that overtake
everyone. What makes us old isn’t the stress so much as it is the perception
of stress. Someone who doesn’ t see the world “out there” as a threat can
coexist with the environment, free of the damage created by the stress
response. In many ways, the most important thing you can do to experience
a world without aging is to nurture the knowledge that the world is you. 8. Time is not absolute. The underlying r eality of all things is
eternal, and what we call time is r eally quantified eternity. Although our bodies, and the whole physical world, are a display of
constant change, there is more to reality than process. The universe was
born and is evolving. When it was born, time and space came into
existence. Befor e the instant of the Big Bang, time and space didn’ t exist as
we know them. Yet the rational mind finds it nearly impossible to ask
questions such as “What came before time. ” and “What is bigger than
space. ” Even Einstein, when he was a young physicist working out
quantum principles for the first time, held on to the old notion, embraced by
Newton, that the universe existed in a steady state—time and space were
eternal constants, never born and never dying. This steady-state version of reality is still the one our five senses report
back to us about. You cannot see or feel time as it speeds up or slows down,
even though Einstein proved that time does this; you cannot sense space as
it expands or contracts, yet this too is part of a rhythmic universe. To go
even further, to imagine those dimensionless regions where time and space
are born, requires a radical shift in perception. This shift is forced upon us
because the universe had to have some kind of timeless source—and the
same holds true for us. You perceive yourself as existing in time because your body is composed
of change; to change, one must have a flow or sequence. In this sequence
there is a before and after—before this breath was the last breath, after this
heartbeat will be the next heartbeat. But theoretically, if you had the time
and the equipme nt, you could make an EKG of all the heartbeats someone
has had in a lifetime, and by holding the printout in your hands, you would
have past, present, and future contained in one place. You could look at it
upside down or backward; you could fold it in half so that the last heartbeat
and the first one were next to each other. This kind of manipulation is what quantum physics reveals about the
most basic space-time events in Nature. As they exchange energy states,
two particles can move backward in time as easily as forward; things that
happened in the past can be altered by energy events in the future. The
whole notion of time as an arrow shooting inexorably forward has beenshattered forever in the complex geometries of quantum space, where
multidimensional strings and loops carry time in all directions and even
bring it to a halt. The only absolute left to us is the timeless, for now we realize that our
entire universe is just one incid ent springing forth out of a larger reality. What we sense as seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years are cut-up bits
of this larger reality. It is up to you, the perceiver, to cut up the timeless any
way you like; your awareness creates the time you experience. Someone
who experience s time as a scarce commodity that is constan tly slipping
away is creating a completely different personal reality from someone who
perceives that he has all the time in the world. Is your day full of time
pressure. Do you suffer the breathless, panicky symptom s of “time
sickness,” whic h the body translates into rapid or irregular heartbeat,
distorted digestive rhythms, insomnia, and high blood pressure. These
individual differences express how we perceive change, for the perception
of change creates our experience of time. When your attention is in the past or the future, you are in the field of
time, creating aging. One Indian  master who seemed remarkably young for
his age explained this by saying, “Most people spend their lives either in the
past or the future, but my life is supremely concentrated in the present. ”
When a life is concentrated in the present, it is most real, because the past
and future are not impinging upon it. At this instant, where are the past and
future. Nowhere. Only the present moment exists; past and future are
mental projections. If you can free yourself of these projections, trying
neither to relive the past nor to control the future, a space is opened for a
completely new experience—the experience of ageless body and timeless
mind. Being able to identify with a reality that is not bounded by time is
extremely important; otherwise there is no escape from the decay that time
inevitably bring s. You can catch a glimpse of timelessness with a simple
mind-body exercise: Choose a time of day when you feel relaxed and
unpressured. Sit quietly in a comfortable chair and take off your watch,
placing it nearby so that you can easily refer to it without having to lift it or
move your head very much. Now close your eyes and be aware of your
breathing. Let your attention easily follow the stream of breath going in andout of your body. Imagine your whole body rising and falling with the flow
of each breath. After a minute or two, you will be aware of warmth and
relaxation pervading your muscles. When you feel very settled and quiet inside, slowly open your eyes and
peek at the second hand of your watch. What’ s it doing. Depend ing on how
relaxed you are, the second hand will behave in different ways. For some
people, it will have stopped entirely, and this effect will last anywhere from
one to perhaps three seconds. For other people, the second hand will
hesitate for half a second, then jump into its normal ticking. Still other
people will perceive the second hand moving, but at a slower pace than
usual. Unless you have tried this little experiment, it seems very unlikely,
but once you have had the experience of seeing a watch stop, you will never
again doubt that time is a product of perception. The only time there is is
the one you are aware of. You can learn to take your awareness into the region of timele ssness at
will—meditation is the classic technique for mastering this experience. In
meditation the active mind is withdrawn to its source; just as this changing
universe had to have a source beyond change, your mind, with all its
restless activity, arises from a state of awareness beyond thought, sensation,
emotion, desire, and memory. This is a profound personal experi ence. In the
state of timeles s or transcendent awareness, you have the sensation of
fullness. In place of change, loss, and decay, there is steadiness and
fulfillment. You sense that the infinite is everywhere. When this experience
becomes a reality, the fears associated with change disappear; the
fragmentation of eternity into seconds, hours, days, and years becomes
secondary, and the perfection of every moment becomes primary. Now that meditation has entered mainstream Western cultural
experience, researchers have applied scientific measureme nts to the
subjective experience of silence, fullness, and eternity. They have
discovered that the physiological state of meditators under goes definite
shifts toward more efficient functioning. Hundreds of individual findings
show lowered respiration, reduced oxygen consumption, and decreased
metabolic rate. In terms of aging, the most significant conclusio n is that the
hormonal imbalance associated with stress—and known to speed up the
aging process—is reversed. This in turn slows or even reverses the agingprocess, as measured by various biological changes associated with
growing old. From my experien ce with studies on people using  meditation,
it has been established that long-term meditators can have a biological age
between 5 and 12 years younger than their chronological age. The most fascinating aspect of this research, which has been ongoing for
over two decade s, is that the biological process of aging itself does not have
to be manipulated; the desired results can be achieved through awareness
alone. In other words, meditation alters the frame of reference that gives the
person his experience of time. At a quantum level, physical events in space-
time such as heartbeat and hormone levels can be affected simply by taking
the mind to a reality where time does not have such a powerful hold. The
new paradigm is showing us that time has many levels and all are available
to us in our own consciousness. 9. Everyone inhabits a r eality of non-change lying beyond all
change. The experience of this r eality brings change under
our contr ol. At the moment, the only phys iology you can maintain is time-based. However, the fact that time is tied to awareness implies that you could
maintain an entirely different style of functioning—the physiology of
immortality—which would correspond to the experience of non-change. Non-change can’t be created as a product of change. It requires a shift out
of time-bound awareness into timeless awareness. There are many
gradations to this shift. For example, if you are under extreme time pressure
at work, your body’s reaction to the pressure is not automatic; some people
thrive under time pressure, using it to fuel their creativity and energy, while
others are defea ted by it, losin g incentive and feeling a burden that will
bring no satisfaction compared with the stress it creates. The person who responds with creativity has learned not to identify with
the time pressure; he has transcended it at least partially, unlike the person
who feels constriction and stress. For him, identification with time has
become overwh elming—he cannot escape the ticking of the internal clock,
and his body cannot help but mirror his state of mind. In various subtleways, our cells constantly adjust to our perception of time; a biologist
would say that we have entrained, or locked in sequence, a series of
processes embracing millions of related mind-body events. It is all-important to realize that you can reach a state where time-bound
processes can be realigned. A simple analogy demonstrates this: Look at
your physical body as a printout of signals being sent back and forth
between your brain and every cell. The nervous system, which  sets up the
kinds of messages being sent, functions as the body’ s software;  the myriad
different hormones, neurotransmitters, and other messenger molecules are
the input being run through the software. All this constitutes the visible
programming of your body. But where is the programmer. He is not visible,
yet he must exist. Thousands of decisions are being made in the mind-body
system every second, countles s choices that enable your physiology to
adapt to the demands of life. If I see a cobra on the path in India and jump back in fear, the visible
apparatus controlling this even t can be seen in the muscle reactions I
display, which are triggered by chemical signals from my nervous system. My increased heartbeat and panting breath are other visible signs that the
hormone adrena line has kicked in, secreted by the adrenal cortex in
response to a specific brain chemical (ACTH) sent from the pituitary. If a
biochemist could track down every single molecule involved  in my fear
reaction, he would still miss the invisible decision-maker that decided to
have the reaction, for even though I reacted in a split second, my body
didn’ t jump back mindlessly. Someone with entirely different programming
would exhibit entirely different reactions. A snake collector might bend
forward with interest; a Hindu devotee, recognizing a form of Shiva, might
kneel in awe. The fact is that any possible reaction might have occurred—panic, rage,
hysteria, paralysis, apathy, curiosity, delight, etc. The invisible programmer
is unlimited in the ways he can program the visible apparatus of the body. At the moment I stumbled across the snake, all the basic processes of my
physiology—breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, perception, and
thinking—depended on the meaning  that a cobra held for me perso nally. One sees the truth in a saying from Aldous Huxley: “Experience  is not what
happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. ”Where can you locate a meanin g. The quick and easy answer  is to say
that it is located in the brain, but this organ, like every other, is in constant
flux. Like migrating birds, billions of atoms are flying in and out of my
brain every second. It swirls with electrical waves that never form the same
pattern twice in a lifetime. Its basic chemistry can shift if different kinds of
food are eaten for lunch, or if a sudden mood swing is experien ced. Yet my
memory of the snake doesn’ t dissolve in this sea of change. My memories
are available to the programmer who stands above memory, silently
observing my life, taking account of my experiences, always ready to
entertain the possibility of new choices. For this programmer is nothing but
the awareness of choice. It appreciates change without getting
overwhelmed; therefore it escapes the time-bound limitations that arise in
the normal cause-and-ef fect world. The “me” who is afraid of snakes learned that fear somewhere in the
past. All my reactions are part and parcel of the time-bound self and its
tendencies. In less than a thous andth of a second, its preprogrammed fear
arouses the whole sequence of bodily messages that produce my actions. For most of us no other “me” is apparent, because we haven’ t learned to
identify with the decision-make r, the silent witness, whose awareness isn’t
defined by the past. Yet in a subtle way, we all sense that something inside
us has not changed very much,  if at all, since we were infants. When we
wake up in the morning there is a second of pure awareness before the old
conditioning automatically falls into place; at that moment you are just
yourself, not happy or sad, not important or humble, not old or young. As I wake up in the morning, this “me” dresses itself in the mantle of
experience very quickly; in a matter of seconds I remember that I am, for
example, a 46-year -old doctor who has a wife, two children, a home outside
Boston, and ten minutes to get to the clinic. That identity is the product of
change. The “me” who is beyond change could be waking up anywhere—as
a 5-year -old in Delhi smelling my grandmother ’s cooking, as an 80-year -old
in Florid a listening to the wind  rattling the palms. This changeless “me,”
whom the ancient sages in India simply called the Self, serves  as my real
reference point for experience. All other reference points are bound by
change, decay, and loss; every other sense of “me” is identified with pain or
pleasure, povert y or wealth, happiness or sadness, youth or old age—everytime-bound condition that the relative world imposes. In unity
consciousness, the world can be explained as a flow of Spirit, which is
awareness. Our whole goal is to establish an intimate relations hip with Self
as Spirit. To the extent that we create this intimacy, the experience of
ageless body and timeless mind is realized. 10. W e are not victims of aging, sickness, and death. These ar e
part of the scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of
change. Life at its source is creation. When you get in touch with your own inner
intelligence, you get in touch with the creative core of life. In the old
paradigm, contr ol of life was assigned to DNA, an enormous ly complex
molecule that has revealed less than 1 percent of its secrets to geneticists. In
the new paradigm, control of life belongs to awareness. All the examples
cited here—of children who can curtail the secretion of growth hormone,
medical students who alter their output of interleukins when they feel
anxious, yogis who can manipulate their heartbeat at will—indicate that the
most basic bodily processes respond to our state of mind. The billions of changes occurring in our cells are only the passing
scenery of life; behind their mask is the seer, who represents the source of
the flow of awareness. Everything I can possibly experience begins and
ends with awareness; every thought or emotion that captures my attention is
a tiny fragment of awareness; all the goals and expectations I set for myself
are organized in awareness. What the ancient sages termed the Self can be
defined in modern psychologica l terms as a continuum of awareness, and
the state known as unity consciousness is the state where awareness is
complete—the person knows the whole continuum of himself without
masks, illusions, gaps, and broken fragments. Because we don’t maintain the continuity of our awareness, all of us fall
into gaps of one kind or another. Vast areas of our bodily existence go out
of our control, leading to sickness, aging, and death. But this is only to be
expected when awareness has become fragmented. In a famous series of
experiments at the Menninger clinic in the early 1970s, a noted spiritualadept from India, Swami Rama, demonstrated the ability to raise his
heartbeat at will from 70 to 300, a rate far beyond the normal range. Essentially, his heartbeat became a flutter that no longer pumped blood in
the norm al rhythmic fashion. In an ordinary person, cardiac flutter can
cause heart failure and other serious or even fatal problems. Such
occurrences af flict thousands of unsuspecting people every year. However, Swam i Rama was unaffected by this cardiac event because it
was under the direct control of his awareness. What this implies is that a
person who dies in a matter of minutes from a sudden interruption in his
normal heartbea t (this category would cover all kinds of arrhythmias,
fibrillation, and tachycardia) has actually suffered a loss of awareness. In
our mate rialistic worldview, we localize this loss in the heart muscle, saying
that the electroc hemical signals that coordinate a healthy heartbeat have
become disordered. Instead of orchestrating their individual twitches into a
smooth, unified pulsation throug hout the whole heart, billions of heart cells
lapse into chaotic, isolated contractions, making the heart look like a bag of
writhing snakes. Yet this horrifying spectacle, which every cardiologist dreads, is
secondary; loss of awareness among the heart cells is primary. This loss of
awareness isn’t local but general. The person himself  has lost
communication with the deep levels of intelligence that govern and control
all his cells—indeed, every cell is nothing but intelligence organized into
various layers of visible and invisible patterns. An adept like Swami Rama
shows us that our awareness is not meant to be thus fragm ented and
curtailed. If one knew himself as he really was, he would realize that he is
the source, course, and goal of all this flowing intelligence. What the
world’ s religious traditions call Spirit is wholeness, the continuity of
awareness that oversees all the bits and pieces of awareness. We are made victims of sickness, aging, and death by gaps in our self-
knowledge. To lose awareness is to lose intelligence; to lose intelligence is
to lose control over the end product of intelligence, the human body. Therefore, the most valuable lesson the new paradigm can teach us is this:
If you want to change your body, change your awareness first. Everything
that happens to you is a result of how you see yourself, to an extent you
might consider quite uncanny. In the sea battles of World War I, Germansailors were sometimes stranded in lifeboats  for days or weeks after their
ships were sunk. Invariably, the first men to die were the youngest. This
phenomenon remained a mystery until it was realized that the older sailors,
who had survived earlier sinking s, knew that the crisis could be weathered;
lacking such experience, the young sailors perished becaus e they saw
themselves as trapped in a hopeless situation. Taking a clue from these incidents, animal researchers have been able to
induce rapid aging, disease, and early death in laboratory rats and mice by
putting them in situations of high stress, such as by throwing them into
tanks of water with no escape. Animals that have never met such a situation
perceive it as hopeless and quickly give up and die. Animals that have been
gradually conditioned to the tanks persevere and survive, swimming for
long hours without signs of stress-induced deterioration of their tissues. Much of the history of human aging has been characterized by
hopelessness. Our fearful images of growing old, coupled with high rates of
disease and senility among the elderly, resulted in grim, self-fulfilling
expectations. Old age was a time of inevitable decline and loss, of
increasing feebleness in mind and body. Now our whole societ y is waking
up to a new awareness of aging; people in their sixties and seventies
routinely expect  to be as vigorous and healthy as they were in their forties
and fifties. But one underlying assumption— that humans have  to age—has not been
radically challenged. Having to age is a fact we inherited from the old
paradigm, stubb ornly fixed in our worldview until a shift in awareness can
bring new facts to light. A world view is just a way of arranging the infinite
energy of the universe into a system that makes sense. Aging made sense in
a scheme of Nature where all things change, fade away, and die. It makes
much less sense in a world where an endless flow of ever-renewing
intelligence is present all around  us. Which view you adopt is your choice. You can choose to see the rose bloom and die; you can choose to see the
rose as a wave of life that never ends, for next year new roses  will spring
from the seeds of this one. Matter is a captive moment in space and time, and by seeing our world
and ourselves materialistically, we make the captive aspects of the universe
assume too much importance. As this book unfolds, I want you toexperience just how fluid and effortless existence can be when your
worldview shifts. Despite its solid physical appearance, your body is very
much like a river, akin to the sacred river so beautifully described by
Hermann Hesse  in his spiritual novel Siddhartha. In that book there comes
a point when Siddhartha, the seeker of enlightenment, finally finds his
peace. After years of wandering he ends up beside a great river in India,
where an inner voice whispers, “Love this river, stay by it, learn from it. ”
To me, this whisper says someth ing about my body, which flows on and on
in its life processes. Like a river, my body changes as the mome nt changes,
and if I could do the same, there  would be no gaps in my life, no memory of
past trauma to trigger new pain, no anticipation of future hurt to make me
contract in fear. Your body is the river of life that sustains you, yet it does so humbly,
without asking for recognition. If you sit and listen to it, you will find that a
powerful intelli gence dwells in and with you. It isn’t an intelligence of
words, but compared to the millions of years of wisdom woven into one
cell, the knowledge of words doesn’t seem so grand. Siddhartha wanted to
learn from the river and to listen, which is tremendously important. You
have to want to rejoin the flow of the body before you can learn from it, and
that means you must be willing to open yourself to knowledge that was
overlooked in your old way of seeing. Hesse went on, “It seemed to him that whoever understood this river and
its secre ts, would understand much more, many secrets, all secre ts. ” All that
has ever happened to you is recorded in your body, but, more important,
new possibilitie s are there, too. Aging seems to be some thing that’s
happening to you, when in fact it is something your body has largely
learned to do. It has learned to carry out the programming fed into it by you,
the programmer. Since so much of this programming was unconscious,
dictated by beliefs and assumptions you hardly knew you held, it’s
important to shatter the whole edifice of thought that gave you the material
world as you know it. Now we need to return to the body, for the intimate experience we have
of our physical selves contains the most personal truth. Being comfortable
with its present-moment feelings allows you to escape the shadow of threat
that hangs over everything when order is losing the battle with entropy. Such a world is the one we were taught to believe in. There is another way
and another world. This was the greatest lesson Siddhartha learn ed from the
river. At the end of the novel he speaks about it with his oldest friend and
companion, V asudeva:
“Have you also learned that secret for the river; that there is no
such thing as time. ”
A bright smile spread over Vasudeva’ s face. “Yes, Siddhartha. Is
this what you mean. That the river is everywhere at the same time, at
the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the
current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the
present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow
of the future. ”
“That is it,” said Siddhartha, “and when I learned that, I review ed
my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the
mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by
shadows, not through reality. ”
He spok e with delight, but Vasudeva just smiled radiantly at him
and nodded his agreement. The delusion fostered by centuries of materialism is that we can conquer
the river and control its flow; if we did, our only achievement would be to
die. The truth about each of us is that our life spreads out in larger and
larger fields of experience. Ther e is no limit to the energy, infor mation, and
intelligence concentrated in one person’ s existence. In physica l form this
infinite creativity has been embodied in your cells; in unmanife st form it is
expressed in the mind’ s silence, the void that is actually a fullness of untold
possible meanings, possible truths, possible creations. The emptiness at the
core of every atom is the wom b of the universe; in the flicker of thought
when two neuro ns interact there is an opportunity for a new world to be
born. This book is about exploring that silence where time’ s breath does not
wither but only renews. Look to the land where no one is old; it is nowhere
but in yourself. OceanofPDF. comIN PRACTICE:
How to Reinterpret Your Body
The first step toward experiencing your body in a different way is to change
your interpretation of it. No two people experience their bodies in exactly
the same way, because each of us interprets experience—including the
experience of inhabiting a body—according to his own personal beliefs,
values, assumptions, and memo ries. An aging body involves one style of
interpretation; an ageless body involves an opposite style. Try to let go of the assumption that your body is aging because things
just are that way. If you feel certain that growing old is natural, inevitable,
and normal, I don’t want you to erase those assumptions instantly. You
couldn’ t do that if you tried, for the old paradigm has taught all of us to
accept these assumptions without question. However, while still honoring
your deep belief  in aging, sickn ess, and death, allow yourself to set aside
the old paradigm for a moment. The quantum worldview, or the new paradigm, teaches us that we are
constantly making and unmaki ng our bodies. Behind the illusion of its
being a solid, stable object, the body is a process, and as long as that
process is directed toward renewal, the cells of the body remain new, no
matter how much time passes or how much entropy we are exposed to. The great enemy of renewal is habit; when frozen interpretations from
the past are applied to the prese nt, there will always be a gap, a mismatch
between the need of the momen t and the solution from the past. To have a
renewed body, you must be willing to have new perceptions that give rise to
new solutions. The exercises below are designed to help you open up new
perceptions. Some are exercises in absorbing the new knowledge of the
quantum worldv iew as it applie s to your body. Others are exercises in newexperience, gaining an inner feeling for that level inside your body that is
ageless. Ideally, as we move on to later exercises, knowledge and
experience will begin to fuse—that is the sign that you are fully
assimilating this new worldview in place of the old. Exercise 1: Seeing Thr ough the Mask of Matter
The most impor tant step in gaining the experience of ageless body is to
unfreeze the perceptions that have locked you into feelings of isolation,
fragmentation, and separatenes s. These frozen perceptions reinforce the
idea that only the reality of the five senses can be believed. So let us see if
we can go beyond the senses to find a level of transcendental experience,
which is in fact more real than the world of the senses. Look at your hand and examine it closely. Trace its familiar lines and
furrows, feel the texture of the skin, the supple flesh cushioning the
submer ged hardness of bone. This is the hand your senses report to you, a
material object composed of flesh and blood. In this first exercise we will
attempt to “thaw out” your hand and give you a different experience of it
beyond the reach of your senses. Holding the image of your hand in your mind’ s eye, imagine that you are
examining it through a high-pow ered microscope whose lens can penetrate
the fines t fabrics  of matter and energy. At the lowest power, you no longer
see smooth flesh but a collection of individual cells loosely  bound by
connective tissue. Each cell is a watery bag of proteins that appear as long
chains of smaller molecules held together by invisible bonds. Moving
closer, you can see separate atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on,
which have no solidity at all—th ey are vibrating, ghostly shadows revealed
through the microscope as patches of light and dark. You have arrived at the bound ary between matter and energy, for the
subatomic particles making up each atom—whirling electro ns dancing
around a nuclea r core of proton s and neutrons—are not spots and dots of
matter. They are more like traces of light left by a Fourth of July sparklerwaved in the dark. At this level you see that all things you once took to be
solid are just energy trails; the instant you see one trail, the energy has
moved elsewhere, leaving nothing substantial to be touched or seen. Each
trail is a quantum event, fleeting, dying out as soon as it is noticed. Now you start sinking even deeper into quantum space. All light
disappears, repla ced by yawning chasms of black emptiness. Far away on
the horizon of your vision, you see a last flash, like the farthest, faintest star
visible in the night sky. Hold that flash in your mind, for it is the last
remnant of matter or energy detectable by any scientific instrument. The
blackness closes in, and you are in a place where not just matter  and energy
are gone, but space and time as well. You have left behind your hand as a space-time event. Like all space-time
events, your body has to have an origin beyond the fourth dimension. There
is no such thing as “before” or “after” in this region, no concept of “big” or
“small. ” Here your hand exists before the Big Bang and after the universe’ s
end in the “heat death” of absolute zero. In reality these terms are
meaningless, for you have arrived at the womb of the universe, the pre-
quantum region that has no dimensions and all dimensions. You are
everywhere and nowhere. Has your hand ceased to exist. No, for in crossing the boundary of the
fourth dimensio n, you didn’ t go anywhere; the whole notion of place and
time simply doesn’t apply anymore. All the grosser levels of perception are
still available to you; your hand still exists at all these levels you have
traversed—quantum, subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular—connected by
invisible intelligence to the place where you now find yourself. Each level
is a layer of transformation, completely different from the one above or
below it, but only here, where there is nothing but pure inform ation, idea,
creative potential, are all levels reduced to their common origin. Ponder this exercise for a moment to absorb its lessons:
•  The three-dimensional body reported by the five senses is a mirage. •  Every solid particle of matter is composed of more than 99. 99 9 percent
empty space. •  The void between two electrons is proportionately as empty as the
space between two galaxies. •  If you go deep  enough into the fabric of matter and energy, you arrive
at the origin of the universe. All events in space-time have a common
source outside the reality we perceive. •  Beyond the quantum, your body exists as pure creative potential, a
multilayered process controlled by intelligence. Now examine your hand with a new understanding—it is the stepping-of f
point for a dizzying descent into the dance of life, where the dancers
disappear if you approach too near and the music fades away into the
silence of eternity. The dance is forever, and the dance is you. Exercise 2: Closing the Gap
Now that we have touched that level of quantum space unde rlying all
physical existen ce, I want you to become more comfortable there. Ordinarily we think of space as cold and empty, but quantum space is full—
it is the continuity that connects everything in the universe. When the
quantum field is active, it gives rise to a space-time event; when it is quiet,
there is just quantum space. But this doesn’ t signify that the field has gaps
in it—im agine the Earth surrounded by lines of magnetic force radiating out
of the north and south magnetic poles. All the separate magnets on the
planet participate in this field. They are small, separate outcroppings of
magnetism, yet even when a magnet is not in your immediate vicinity, the
magnetic field surrounds you. A horseshoe magnet is a local outcropping of
the field (a space-time event), while the lines of the magnetism surrounding
the Earth are a nonlocal, invisib le presence. Both are connected as aspects
of one underlying field of ener gy. Because your body emanates electromagnetic frequencies, you are yet
another expressi on of the same field. The pulsations of nerve signals racing
along your limbs, the electric charge emitted by your heart cells, and the
faint field of current surrounding  your brain all demonstrate that you are not
separate from any form of energy in the universe. Any appearance of
separation is only the product of the limitation of your senses, which are not
attuned to these ener gies. Imagine two candles standing about three feet apart on a table in front of
you. To your eyes they appear separate and independent, yet the light they
cast fills the room with photons; the entire space between them is bridged
by light, and therefore there is no real separation at the quantum  level. Now
carry one of the candles outside at night and hold it up against a background
of stars. The pinpoints of light in the sky may be billions of light-years
away, yet at the quantum level each star is just as connected to your candle
as the second candle in the room; the vast space between them contains
waves of ener gy that bind them. As you look at the candle and the distant stars, photons of light from both
land on your retina. There they trigger flashes of electrochemical dischar ge
that belong to a different vibratory frequency from visible light, yet they are
part of the same  electromagnetic  field. Therefore, you are another candle—
or star—whose local concentrati on of matter and energy is one outcropping
in the infinite field that surrounds and supports you. Think about this organic connection between everything in existence. The lessons of this exercise are
•  No matter how separate anything appears to the senses, nothing is
separate at the quantum level. •  The quantum field exists in, around, and through you. You are not
looking at the field—in every wave and particle, the field is your
extended body. •  Each of your cells is a local concentration of information and energy
inside the wholeness of information and energy of your body. Likewise, you are a local conce ntration of information and energy in
the wholeness that is the body of the universe. When you begin to own this knowledge, nothing in your environment
will feel threatening to you. As a result, the fear of separation will loosen its
hold over you, and the unbroken flow of awareness will counter entropy
and aging. Exercise 3: Br eathing the FieldThe quantum field transcends everyday reality, yet it is extremely
intimate to your experience. To fetch a word from your memor y, to feel an
emotion, to grasp a concept—th ese are events that change the entire field. The eminent British physicist Sir James Jeans once remarked, “When an
electron vibrates, the universe shakes. ” There is no flicker of activity in any
of your cells that goes unnoticed across the entire quantum field. At its finest level, every physiological process registers in the fabric of
Nature. In other words, the more  refined a process is, the more connected to
the basic activity of the cosmos. Here is a simple breathing exercise that can
give you a remarkably vivid experience of this phenomenon. Sit comfortably in a chair with your eyes closed. Gently and slowly
inhale through your nostrils, imagining as you do so that you are drawing
the air from a point infinitely far away. See the air gently coming to you
from the edge of the universe. Feel it coolly suf fusing your body. Now slowly and easily exhale, sending every atom of air back to its
source infinitely  far away. It may help if you envision a thread that extends
from you to the far reaches of the cosmos; or you might visualize a star
hovering in front of you that is sending light from infinitely far away—in
either case, imag ine the thread or the star as your source of air. If you aren’ t
a good visualizer, don’t worry; just hold the word infinite  in your mind as
you breathe. Whatever technique you use, the aim is to feel each breath
coming to you from the quantum field, which at a subtle level is actually
happening. Reestablishing the memory of your connection with the
quantum field will awaken the memory of renewal in your body. Exercise 4: Redefining
Having absorbed  the knowledge that your body is not a sculpture isolated
in space and time, redefine yourself by repeating the following statements
silently to yourself:
I can use the power of my awareness to experience a body that is
Flowing instead of solid
Flexible " " rigidQuantum " " material
Dynamic " " static
Composed of information
and ener gy" " random chemical reactions
A network of intelligence " " a mindless machine
Fresh and ever -renewing " " entropic and aging
Timeless " " time-bound
Another good set of redefining statements:
•  I am not my atoms, they come and go. •  I am not my thoughts, they come and go. •  I am not my ego, my self-image changes. •  I am above and beyond these; I am the witness, the interpreter, the Self
beyond the self-image. This Self is ageless and timeless. Repeating these statements serves as more than a mental reminder. As a
process rather than an object, the human body is constantly  filled with
messages of every kind; the verbal messages we hear in our heads are just
one version of the information being exchanged from cell to cell every
second. Because  every person’ s awareness is colored by past experiences,
the flow of information inside us is influenced by unconscious imprints we
are barely aware of. We will examine in detail how these unconscious
imprints break down the smoo th flow of messages, creating the loss of
intelligence that results in aging. For the time being, know that you can change these imprints by giving
the unconscious  new assumptions and beliefs to operate with. Every
thought you have activates a messenger molecule in your brain. This means
that every mental impulse gets transformed automatically into biological
information. By repeating these new statements of belief, affirming to
yourself that your body is not defined by the old paradigm, you are
allowing new biological inform ation to be produced; and, via the mind-
body connection, your redefined sense of yourself is being received by your
cells as new programming. Thus, the gap between your old, isolated self
and the image of yourself as an ageless, timeless being starts to close.
6 months
At what age can a baby recognize optical illusions?
Recognizing that we are not victims of aging, but rather creators of our own reality through our beliefs and awareness.
What is the key to escaping the fear of aging, according to the author?
It highlights the fact that our bodies are not fixed and unchangeable, but rather are constantly being influenced by our beliefs and awareness.
What is the significance of the statement "I am not my atoms, they come and go"?
The old paradigm views aging as an inevitable and natural part of life, while the new paradigm suggests that it is a result of our beliefs and conditioning.
What is the main difference between the old and new paradigms regarding aging?
Nurture the knowledge that the world is not separate from you, but rather an extension of your own awareness.
According to the text, what is the most important thing you can do to experience a world without aging?