Praise for Ageless Body , Timeless Mind,  the #1 New Y ork T imes
bestseller with over 1 million copies in print, and Deepak
Chopra, heralded by Time magazine as one of the top 100 her oes
and icons of the twentieth century
“A groundbreaking book on the whole question of aging. Who might have
imagined that the secret to conquering this universal mystery lies not in our
physical bodies, but in our consciousness? Only the genius such as Deepak
Chopra. Fascinating.”
—Wayne Dyer , Ph.D.
“Unparalleled genius…Dr . Deepak Chopra shows us how to transform our
bodies—and our lives—by destroying the myths of aging and guiding us to
the source of our eternal youth.”
—Anthony Robbins
“A breathtakin g vision of human potential. If you incorporate the
knowledge…it will rejuvenate your body and mind.”
—Ken Blanchard, Ph.D.
“Deepak Chopra has written an important and inspiring book that opens the
mind and feeds the spirit.”
—Barbara De Angelis, Ph.D., author of Secrets About Men Every W oman
Should Know
“Dazzling.”
—Washington Post
“Effectively arguing that the body is not an object but a process whose
limits are not known, he combines an impressive store of mind/body
wisdom with current research showing that the effects of aging  are largely
preventable. Ageless Body , Timeless Mind  deserves a long life of its own.”
—San Francisco Chr onicle“Ambitiously and patiently , Dr. Chopra connects East/W est healing
practices into a fascinating, understandable ar gument.”
—Houston Chr onicle
“Deepak Chopra is being hailed as a modern-day Hippocrates for his novel
approach of combining ancient healing traditions with modern research.”
—Chicago Sun-T imes
“A guide to longevity that’s also a thoughtful and sometimes inspiring
reflection on our remarkable place in the cosmic scheme of things.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Brilliant and exhilarating.”
—London Daily T elegraph
“In the ’80s the biggest name in healthy words—aside from the cholesterol
guys—was Dr. Bernie Siegel, who asserted the power of positive thinking. The heir apparent for the ’90s is Dr. Deepak Chopra, who is busy
explaining why it works.”
—Sunday Sun  (Toronto)
“There is plenty to celebrate in Ageless Body , Timeless Mind. In a field
already becoming crowded with popular literature, Chopra manages to
cover the major  subject areas, yet at the same time brings to light unusual
research and fresh opinions. He provides a great deal of worthy practical
advice, as well as much food for thought in more philosophical arenas. I
found the book enjoyable, stimulating, and beneficial, and recommend it
heartily , both for those new to the subject, and for those already familiar
with the field.”
—Herb Bowie, author of Forever Alive
“Dr. Chopra’ s writing has great beauty , great power , great delight, and much
common sense.”
—Courtney Johnson, author of Henry James and the Evolution of the
ConsciousnessOceanofPDF .comAlso by Deepak Chopra
Creating Health
Return of the Rishi
Quantum Healing
Perfect Health
Unconditional Life
Journey into Healing
Creating Af fluence
Perfect W eight
Restful Sleep
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
The Return of Merlin
Boundless Ener gy
Perfect Digestion
The W ay of the W izard
Overcoming Addictions
Raid on the Inarticulate
The Path to Love
The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents
The Love Poems of Rumi (edited by Deepak Chopra;
translated by Deepak Chopra and Fer eydoun Kia)
Healing the Heart
Everyday Immortality
The Lords of the Light
On the Shores of Eternity
How to Know God
The Soul in Love
The Chopra Center Herbal Handbook
(with coauthor David Simon)
Grow Y ounger , Live Longer
(with coauthor David Simon)
The Deeper W oundThe Chopra Center Cookbook
(coauthor ed by David Simon and Leanne Backer)
The Angel Is Near
The Daughters of Joy
Gold for Enlightenment
Soulmate
The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire
Peace Is the W ay
The Book of Secrets
Fire in the Heart
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Y oga
(with coauthor David Simon)
Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives
(coauthored by David Simon and V icki Abrams)
Life After Death
Buddha
The Essential How to Know God
The Essential Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire
The Essential Ageless Body , Timeless Mind
The Third Jesus
Jesus
Reinventing the Body , Resurrecting the Soul
Why Is God Laughing? The Ultimate Happiness Prescription
OceanofPDF .comOceanofPDF .comCopyright © 1993, 1998, 2010 by Deepak Chopra, M.D. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc., New Y ork. www .crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the T ugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New Y ork, in 1993 and in paperback in the
United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a Division of
Random House, Inc., in 1994. A paperback edition with a new introduction was published in the
United States by Three Rivers Press in 1998. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chopra, Deepak. Ageless body , timeless mind : the quantum alternative to growing old
Deepak Chopra. —2d pbk. ed. Originally published: New Y ork, Harmony Books, 1993. 1. Longevity . 2. Mind and body . 3. V itality . 4. Aging. 5. Holistic medicine. I. T itle
RA776.75.C48 1994
612.6′8—dc20       94-19236
ISBN 9780517882122
eBook ISBN 9780307510754
v4.1_r2
a
OceanofPDF .comCONTENTS
Cover
Also by Deepak Chopra
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
New Introduction
Introduction from the 1998 edition
PART ONE  
The Land Wher e No One Is Old
IN PRACTICE : How to Reinterpr et Your Body
PART TWO  
Aging and A wareness
IN PRACTICE : Using the Power of A wareness
PART THREE  
Defeating Entr opy
IN PRACTICE : The W isdom of Uncertainty
PART FOUR  
The Science of Longevity
IN PRACTICE : Breath of LifePART FIVE  
Breaking the Spell of Mortality
IN PRACTICE : The T imeless W ay
About the Author
OceanofPDF .comACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was made possible by the loving support and encouragement
of the following people:
The friends who form my staff at Quantum Publications—Ro ger, Gita,
Carol, Mara, Steve, Bob, Joe, Sherryl, and Jimmy . Your genuine caring
inspires my work everyday . My wife and children, whose love is manifested in so many ways but
particularly in their unstinting patience and understanding. My agent, Muriel Nellis, whose  sage guidance has shaped every step in
my career as a writer . My editor, Peter Guzzardi—this book was his vision to begin with, and
only he knows what ingenuity and patience it took before these pages lived
up to his high ideal. Wayne Dyer, who offered me his devoted friendship and challenged me
to new heights. Geor ge Harrison, for his extraordinary love and friendship, and for his
generous contribution to the audio version of this book. And my loving parents, the best examples of graceful aging I have ever
known. Thank you all. I hope this book  reflects your best hopes for me and the
future of mankind. OceanofPDF .comNEW INTRODUCTION
The fascinating thing about aging is that no one has ever proved it was
necessary . That startling fact was true almost twenty years ago when this
book first appea red. It’s even more true today . Everyone ages. I knew that
going in. But I had been inspired by a saying from the ancient Indian
philosopher Adi Shankara, who declared that “people grow old and die
because they see other people grow old and die.”
An entire book emer ged simply by asking myself how this could possibly
be true. Modern medicine had provided some hints. First of all, the “new old age”
had emerged. Doctors were beginning to see older patients who were
younger in body and mind. Clearly there was no set pattern for aging,
certainly not the biblical three score and ten. (When asked recently when
old age begins, the average answer given to pollsters was that it begins at
eighty-five. An amazing number if you pause to think about it.) Second, the
brain has been redefined. When I went to medical school, and long
afterward, the conventional wisdom insisted that the brain lost neurons as a
person aged; it couldn’ t heal itself from traumas; it had no ability to grow
new brain cells. Now we know that all three assumptions were wrong. The
brain can renew and heal itself, and it can grow new connections throughout
a person’ s life. As a dramatic instance of this, many older people are now playi ng a host
of video games whose purpose is to keep their brains resilient and young. These “brain gyms” work on the principle that the brain grows new
pathways when ever it is faced  with new tasks. “Use it or lose it” was
already in the air when this book was written, but that slogan fell too far
short. Thanks to a new field known as neural plasticity—the study of the
brain’ s ability to change—researchers have come to believe that our brain’ s
resilience may be limitless.The last big discovery over the past twenty years is genetic. Most people
read the headlines about mappin g the human genome. It was a tremendous
accomplishment, and at last all three billion bits of human DNA could be
deciphered. What most people don’t know is that far from making DNA
easier to understand, this new map deepened the mystery . It turned out that
we had far fewe r genes than was supposed, about 20,000 to 30,000. Some
lower animals actually have more. We share basic life proce sses at the
genetic level with things as unalike as a banana and a gorilla. How those
basic processes evolved into a supreme creation like the human brain is
totally mysterious. Even more mysterious is the fact that it takes a fluid
combination of many genes to produce a single trait. This was a crushing
setback for anyone who wanted  to find a single cancer gene, fat gene, gay
gene, and so on. While it’s true that a single gene gives you blue eyes or
blond hair, a simple thing like how tall you are depends on up to twenty
genes. And even if you could analyze all twenty , you couldn’ t tell a mother
how tall her newborn baby will grow up to be; at most you would know
about two-thirds of the story . If you put these new discoveries together , an astonishing picture emer ges. If the brain and DNA aren’ t fixed, they must be changeable, and if they can
change, who is in charge? The brain doesn’ t change itself. DNA doesn’ t
dictate the experiences that you decide to have, or which befall you outside
your control. Modern Japanese children have the same genes as their
forebears, but instead of being a race of short people, the Japanese are now
the fourth tallest nation on earth . The ancient argument between nurture and
nature has been wiped off the slate. Nature sets the stage by giving you a
body , but mind is responsible for nurture, and whatever the mind wants to
do, nature will follow . For example, recent findings in the prevention of
heart disease show that if you adopt positive lifestyle change s—a better
diet, more exerc ise, positive stress management, and meditation —up to five
hundred genes will change their expression. That is, you will turn on the
good genes and turn off the bad ones. Lifestyle changes don’t come from
the brain, they come from intention, determination, judgment, and
understanding—all traits of the mind. Looking back, I am pleased and fulfilled that Ageless Body , Timeless
Mind  foretol d these developments. But I deserve no credit for beingprescient. Adi Shankara told me in advance what I needed to know: We
grow old and die because we see others grow old and die. The simplicity of
this idea is as revolutionary as its boldness. How did someon e, however
wise, have such an insight? Because in ancient India the most basic
teaching was that consciousness comes first. Out of absolute consciousness,
or pure Being, the entire creation emer ged. There are three levels of
creation: the world of visible objects, the world of subtle objects, and the
world of invisible objects. Visible objects are easy: rocks, trees, clouds,
stars. Our five senses are set up to navigate this first world. Subtle things
are not difficult,  either: emotions, thoughts, wishes, dreams, and fears. Our
minds are set up to navigate this second world. But the real specialty of the
ancient Vedic seers was the invisible world, where only consciousness
exists and only consciousness can know itself. In this world the seeds of creation are planted. Love, truth , beauty ,
wisdom, and the peace that passes understanding dwell here. Even though it
is invisible, the third world has infinite power . If we could stop being
distracted by the five senses and turn our attention inward, each of us would
find our true selves in the invisib le realm. There we would also discover the
power to create anything. An ageless body would not be impossible; it only
needs you to locate your timeless mind. I took my title from that promise,
and it still holds  good. Despite all the recent advances in science , we live in
a materialistic society where visible things are trusted and invisible things
regarded with skepticism. I had hoped that this book would be a beacon of
hope for anyone who has awoken from the trance of materialism. Today ,
almost twenty years later, that’s still my intent, the only difference being
that hope today burns much brighter . Deepak Chopra
December 2009
OceanofPDF .comINTRODUCTION FROM THE 1998 EDITION
It is now over five years since the first edition of Ageless Body , Timeless
Mind  was published. More than two million people worldwide have read
the book, and I continue to receive thousands of letters every monthly from
people who say that the book has changed their perception as well as their
experience of aging. Ever since the book was originally publishe d, there has
been a dramatic change in the way people are going through the aging
process. From time to time in the history of our civilization, people have
made major contributions to society in the later decades of life. Picasso,
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy , Geor ge Bernard Shaw ,
Winston Church ill, and many other luminaries were vital, creative and
youthful in their so-called old age. As I write the introduction to this book,
John Glenn is planning to go into outer space at the age of seventy-seven,
and only a few weeks ago I saw a woman on television take a skydiving
lesson at the age of ninety . Today , the fastest growing segment of the
American popul ation is over the age of ninety , and soon it will be over the
age of 100. We do not need to be convinced that something dramatic is
happening in the biology of aging. Moreover , research continu es to show
that the biomark ers of aging, such as blood pressure, bone density , body
temperature regulation, muscle mass, strength of muscles, the ability to
utilize sugar, sex hormone levels, hearing, immune function and near-point
vision, can all be improved, even later in life. In other words, the major
biomarkers of aging are all reversible. This means aging is reversible. I’m convinced that if you do the exercises in this book, you will
dramatically slow down and even reverse the aging process. Over the years,
people have asked me to summarize the principles of this book. It is
important to recognize that aging is a complex process orche strated by a
number of factors. However , it is possible to summarize the basic principles
contained in the pages that follow .Aging is reversible. Biological age does not correspond to chronological
age. You can be chronologically twenty years old, but if you’re emotionally
and physically burnt out, your biology will be that of an old person. Or you
can be seventy years old and by physically , emotionally , and spiritually fit
and your biology reflects the stamina, the vitality , the creativity , the
alertness, and the dynamism of youth. Aging, or entropy , is accelerated by the accumulation of toxins in the
body . These toxins occur as a result of a toxic environment,  toxicity or
contamination in food or drink, toxic relationships, and toxic emotions. Eliminating these toxins will influence your biological clock in the
direction of youth. Physical exercis e, including weight training, has a direct effect on the
biomarkers of aging and will reverse the aging process. Proper nutrition and nutritional supplements, including antioxidants, are
a very useful adjunct in slowing down the aging process. Meditation lowers biological age. Love is the most powerful and potent medicine. It heals but it also
renews. People continue to ask me, especially those who have not read the book,
what is a timeless mind, and how does it influence the biolog ical clock? More and more,  I’ve become convinced that our experience of time directly
influences the activity of such a clock. If you’re “running out of time,” your
biological clock will speed up. If you “have all the time in the world,” your
biological clock will slow down. In moments of transcendence, when time
stands still, your biological clock will stop. The spirit is that domain of our
awareness wher e there’ s no time. Time is the continuity of memory , which
uses the ego as an internal reference point. When we go beyond our ego and
enter the realm of the spirit, we break the barrier of time. Ultimately , both
the quality and quantity of life depend on our sense of identity . If we have
meaning and purpose in our lives and our identity is not tied to “a skin-
encapsulated ego,” then both the quality and quantity of life will be
dramatically enhanced. More than any nutritional supplement or exercise,
the most import ant thing that you can do to change your life is to practice
the following principles:Have your attention on the timeless, the eternal, the infinite. Get your ego out of the way . Be natural; relinquish the need to hide constantly behind a social
mask. Surrender to the mystery of the universe. Have a sense of communion with Spirit of Divinity . Be defenseless, relinquishing the need to defend your point of view . I wish you good  luck with your journey of life. We’ve met brief ly on the
cosmic highway . We shall meet again. OceanofPDF .comPeople don’ t grow old. When they stop growing, they
become old. Anonymous
If you were to destroy in mankind the
belief in immortality , not only love
but every living force maintaining
the life of the world would at once
be dried up. Dostoyevsky
I move with the infinite in Nature’ s power
I hold the fire of the soul
I hold life and healing. Rig V eda
Look at these worlds spinning
out of nothingness
That is within your power . Rumi
OceanofPDF .comPART 
ONE
The Land 
Where No One 
Is Old
OceanofPDF .comI WOULD LIKE YOU to join me on a journey of discovery . We will explore a
place where the rules of everyday existence do not apply . These rules
explicitly state that to grow old, become frail, and die is the ultim ate destiny
of all. And so it has been for century after century . However , I want you to
suspend your assumptions about what we call reality so that we can become
pioneers in a land where youthfu l vigor , renewal, creativity , joy, fulfillment,
and timelessness are the common experience of everyday life, where old
age, senility, infirmity , and death do not exist and are not even  entertained
as a possibility . If there is such a place, what is preventing us from going there? It is not
some dark continental landma ss or dangerous uncharted sea. It is our
conditioning, our current collective worldview that we were taught by our
parents, teachers, and society . This way of seeing things—the old paradigm
—has aptly been called “the hypnosis of social conditioning,” an induced
fiction in which we have collectively agreed to participate. Your body is aging beyond your control because it has been programmed
to live out the rules of that collective conditioning. If there is anything
natural and inevitable about the aging process, it cannot be known until the
chains of our old beliefs are broken. In order to create the experience of
ageless body and timeless mind, which is the promise of this book, you
must discard ten assumptions about who you are and what the true nature of
the mind and body is. These assumptions form the bedrock of our shared
worldview . They are:
  1. There is an objective world independent of the observer , and our
bodies are an aspect of this objective world. 2. The body is composed of clumps of matter separated from  one
another in time and space. 3. Mind and body are separate and independent from each other . 4. Materialism is primary , consciousness is secondary . In other
words, we are physical machines that have learned to think.  5. Human awareness can be completely explained as the product of
biochemistry . 6. As individuals, we are disconnected, self-contained entities. 7. Our perception of the world is automatic and gives us an accurate
picture of how things really are. 8. Time exists as an absolute, and we are captives of that absolute. No one escapes the ravages of time. 9. Our true nature is totally defined by the body , ego, and
personality . We are wisps of memories and desires enclosed in
packages of flesh and bones. 10. Suffering is necessary—it is part of reality . We are inevitable
victims of sickness, aging, and death. These assumptions reach far beyond aging to define a world of
separation, decay, and death. Time is seen as a prison that no one escapes;
our bodies are biochemical machines that, like all machines, must run
down. “At a certain age,” Lewis  Thomas once affirmed, “it is in our nature
to wear out, to come unhinged,  and to die, and that is that.” This position,
the hard line of materialistic science, overlooks much about human nature. We are the only creatures on earth who can change our biology by what we
think and feel. We possess the only nervous system that is aware of the
phenomenon of aging. Old lions  and tigers do not realize what is happening
to them—but we do. And because we are aware, our mental state influences
what we are aware of. It would  be impossible to isolate a single thought or feeling, a single
belief or assump tion, that doesn’ t have some effect on aging, either directly
or indire ctly. Our cells are constantly eavesdropping on our thoughts and
being changed by them. A bout of depression can wreak havoc with the
immune system;  falling in love can boost it. Despair and hopelessness raise
the risk of heart attacks and cancer , thereby shortening life. Joy and
fulfillment keep us healthy and extend life. This means that the line
between biology and psychology can’ t really be drawn with any certainty . A
remembered stress, which is only a wisp of thought, releases the same flood
of destructive hormones as the stress itself.Because the mind influences every cell in the body , human aging is fluid
and changeable; it can speed up, slow down, stop for a time, and even
reverse itself. Hundreds of research findings from the last three decades
have verified that aging is much  more dependent on the individu al than was
ever dreamed of in the past. However , the most significant breakthrough is not contained in isolated
findings but in a completely new worldview . The ten assumption s of the old
paradigm do not accurately describe our reality . They are inven tions of the
human mind that we have turned into rules. To challenge aging at its core,
this entire worldview must be challenged first, for nothing holds more
power over the body than beliefs of the mind. Each assumption of the old paradigm can be replaced with a more
complete and expanded version  of the truth. These new assumptions are
also just ideas created by the human mind, but they allow us much more
freedom and power . They give us the ability to rewrite the program of aging
that now directs our cells. The ten new assumptions are:
  1. The physic al world, including our bodies, is a response of the
observer . We create our bodies as we create the experience of our
world. 2. In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy and
information, not solid matter . This energy and information is an
outcropping of infinite fields of energy and information spanning
the universe. 3. The mind and body are inseparably one. The unity that is “me”
separates into two streams of experience. I experience the
subjective stream as thoughts, feelings, and desires. I experience
the objective stream as my body . At a deeper level, however , the
two strea ms meet at a single creative source. It is from this sourc e
that we are meant to live. 4. The biochem istry of the body is a product of awareness. Beliefs,
thoughts, and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold
life in every cell. An aging cell is the end product of awareness
that has for gotten how to remain new . 5. Perception appears to be automatic, but in fact it is a learned
phenomenon. The world you live in, including the experience of
your body , is completely dictated by how you learned to perceiv e
it. If you chang e your perception, you change the experience of
your body and your world. 6. Impulses of intelligence create your body in new forms every
second. What you are is the sum total of these impulses, and by
changing their patterns, you will change. 7. Although each person seems separate and independent, all of us
are conn ected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole
cosmos. Our bodies are part of a universal body , our minds an
aspect of a universal mind. 8. Time does not exist as an absolute, but only eternity . Time is
quantified eternity , timelessness chopped up into bits and pieces
(seconds, hours, days, years) by us. What we call linear time is a
reflection of how we perceive change. If we could perceive the
changeless, time would cease to exist as we know it. W e can learn
to start metabolizing non-change, eternity , the absolute. By doing
that, we will be ready to create the physiology of immortality . 9. Each of us inhabits a reality lying beyond all change. Deep inside
us, unknown to the five senses, is an innermost core of being,  a
field of non-cha nge that creates personality , ego, and body . This
being is our essential state—it is who we really are. 10. We are not victims of aging , sickness, and death. These are part
of the scenery , not the seer, who is immune to any form of
change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being. These are vast assumptions, the makings of a new reality , yet all are
grounded in the discoveries of quantum physics made almost a hundred
years ago. The seeds of this new paradigm were planted by Einstein, Bohr ,
Heisenber g, and the other pioneers of quantum physics, who realized that
the accepted way of viewing the physical world was false. Although things
“out there” appear to be real, there is no proof of reality apart from the
observer . No two people share exactly the same universe. Every worldview
creates its own world.I want to convince you that you are much more than your limited body ,
ego, and personality . The rules of cause and effect as you accept them have
squeezed you into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime. In
reality , the field of human life is open and unbounded. At its deepest level,
your body is ageless, your mind timeless. Once you identif y with that
reality , which is consistent with the quantum worldview , aging will
fundamentally change. Ending the Tyranny of the Senses
Why do we accept anything as real? Because we can see and touch it. Everyone has a prejudice in favor of things that are reassur ingly three-
dimensional, as reported to us by our five senses. Sight, hearing, touch,
taste, and smell serve to reinforce the same message: things are what they
seem. According to this reality , the Earth is flat, the ground beneath your
feet is stationary , the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, all because it
seems that way to the senses. As long as the five senses were accepted
without question, such facts were immutable. Einstein realized that time and space are also products of our five senses;
we see and touch things that occupy three dimensions, and we experience
events as happening in sequential order . Yet Einstein and his colleagues
were able to remove this mask of appearances. They reassembl ed time and
space into a new geometry that had no beginning or end, no edges, no
solidity . Every solid particle in the universe turned out to be a ghostly
bundle of ener gy vibrating in an immense void. The old space-ti me model was smashed, replaced by a timeless, flowing
field of constan t transformation . This quantum field isn’t separate from us
—it is us. Where Natu re goes to create stars, galaxies, quarks, and leptons,
you and I go to create ourselves. The great advantage of this new
worldview is that it is so immensely creative—the human body , like
everything else in the cosmos, is constantly being made anew every second. Although your senses report that you inhabit a solid body in time and space,
this is only the most superficial layer of reality . Your body is something farmore miraculou s—a flowing organism empowered by millions of years of
intelligence. This intelligence is dedicated to overseeing the constant
change that takes place inside you. Every cell is a miniature terminal
connected to the cosmic computer . From this perspective, it hardly  seems possible that human beings could
age at all. Weak and helpless as a newborn baby appears, it is superbly
defended against time’ s ravag es. If a baby could preserve its nearly
invulnerable immune status, we would all live at least two hundred years,
according to physiologists’ estim ates. If a baby could preserve its glistening
smooth arteries,  as supple as silk, cholesterol would not find anywhere to
lodge, and heart disease would be unknown. Each of a newborn’ s 50 trillion
cells is limpid as a raindrop, without a trace of toxic debris; such cells have
no reaso n to age, because nothing inside them has begun to disrupt their
perfect function ing. A baby’ s cells are not really new, however —the atoms
in them have been circulating through the cosmos for billions of years. But
the baby  is made new by an invisible intelligence that has come together to
shape a unique life-form. The timeless field has invented a new dance step,
the pulsating rhythms of a newborn’ s body . Aging is a mask  for the loss of this intelligence. Quantum physics tells us
that there is no end to the cosm ic dance—the universal field of energy and
information never stops transfor ming itself, becoming new at every second. Our bodies obey this same creative impulse. An estimated  6 trillion
reactions are taking place in each cell every second. If this stream of
transformation ever stopped, your cells would fall into disorder , which is
synonymous with aging. Day-old bread goes stale because it just sits there, prey to humidity ,
fungus, oxidation, and various destructive chemical processes. A chalk cliff
crumbles over time because wind and rain beat it down, and it has no power
to rebuild itself. Our bodies also under go the process of oxidation and are
attacked by fungi and various germs; they are exposed to the same wind and
rain. But unlike a loaf of bread or a chalk cliff, we can renew ourselves. Our
bones don’t just store calcium the way chalk does—they circul ate it. Fresh
atoms of calcium constantly enter our bones and leave them again to
become part of blood, skin, or other cells as the body’ s needs demand it.In order to stay alive, your body must live on the wings of change. At this
moment you are exhaling atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen
that just an instant before were locked up in solid matter; your stomach,
liver, heart, lungs, and brain are vanishing into thin air, being replaced as
quickly and endlessly as they are being broken down. The skin replaces
itself once a month, the stomach lining every five days, the liver every six
weeks, and the skeleton every three months. To the naked eye, these organs
look the same from moment to moment, but they are always in flux. By the
end of this year, 98 percent of the atoms in your body will have been
exchanged for new ones. A huge proportion of this endless change works to your benefit. Only one
enzyme out of millions reacts with an amino acid less than perfectly; the
rarest neuron among billions misfires; on a strand of DNA coded with
billions of pieces of genetic information, just one might fail to repair itself
correctly when damage occurs. These rare mistakes are imperceptible, and
you would think that they could not count for much. The human body is
like a great Shakespearean actor  who can play Hamlet a thousand times and
stumble over just one syllable. But the invisible cracks in the body’ s
perfection do count. The precisi on of our cells falters by slow degrees. The
ever-new becomes slightly less new . And we age. Beginning at age 30 and moving  at the snail’ s pace of 1 percent  per year,
the average human body starts to come unhinged: wrinkles appear , the skin
loses its tone and freshness, muscles start to sag. Instead of indicating three
times more muscle than fat, the ratio starts to become equal, eyesight and
hearing taper off, bones thin and become brittle. Stamina and endurance
steadily decline , making it harder to perform as much work as before. Blood pressure rises, and many biochemicals shift away from their optimal
levels; the most worrisome to doctors is cholesterol, which gradually rises
over the years, marking the insidious progress of heart disease,  which kills
more people than any other affliction. On other fronts, cellular mutations
begin to run out of control, creating malignant tumors that strike one person
in three, mostly after age 65. Over time, these various “age changes,” as gerontologists call them, exert
massive influence. They are the thousand tiny waves that bring in the tide
of old age. But at any given moment, aging accounts for only 1 percent peryear of the total change taking place inside your body . In other words, 99
percent of the energy and intelligence that you are composed of is
untouched by the aging process. In terms of the body as process,
eliminating this 1 percent of dysfunction would wipe out aging. But how do
we get at this 1 percent? To answer that, we must find the control switch
that manipulates the body’ s inner intelligence. The new reality  ushered in by quantum physics made it possib le for the
first time to manipulate the invisible intelligence that underlies the visible
world. Einstein taught us that the physical body , like all materia l objects, is
an illusion, and trying to manipu late it can be like grasping the shadow and
missing the substance. The unseen world is the real world, and when we are
willing to explore the unseen levels of our bodies, we can tap in to the
immense creative power that lies at our source. Let me expand on the ten
principles of the new paradigm in light of this hidden potential waiting
beneath the surface of life. 1. Ther e is no objective world independent of the observer . The world you accept as real seems to have definite qualiti es. Some
things are large, others small; some things are hard, others soft. Yet none of
these qualities means anything outside of your perception. Take any object,
such as a folding chair . To you the chair isn’t very large, but to an ant it is
immense. To you the chair feels  hard, but a neutrino would whiz through it
without slowing down, because to a subatomic particle the chair ’s atoms are
miles apart. The chair seems stationary to you, but if you observed it from
outer space, you would see it revolving past you, along with everything else
on Earth , at a thousand miles per hour. Likewise, anything else you can
describe about the chair can be completely altered simply by changing your
perception. If the chair is red, you can make it appear black by looking at it
through green glasses. If the chair weighs five pounds, you can make it
weigh two poun ds by putting it on the moon or a hundred thousand pounds
by putting it in the gravitational field of a dense star . Because there are no absolute qualities in the material world, it is false to
say that there even is an indep endent world “out there.” The world is a
reflection of the sensory apparatus that registers it. The human nervoussystem takes in only the most minute fraction, less than one part per billion,
of the total energy vibrating in the environment. Other nervous systems,
such as that of a bat or a snake , reflect a different world, coexisting with
ours. The bat senses a world of ultrasound, the snake a world of infrared
light, both of which are hidden from us. All that is really “out there” is raw, unformed data waiting to be
interpreted by you, the perceiver . You take “a radically ambiguous, flowing
quantum soup,” as physicists call it, and use your senses to congeal the soup
into the solid three-dimensional world. The eminent British neurologist Sir
John Eccles pierces the sensory  illusion with one startling but irrefutable
assertion: “I want you to realize that there is no color in the natural world
and no sound—nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty , no
scent….” In short, none of the objective facts upon which we usually base
our reality is fundamentally valid. As distu rbing as this may sound , there is incredible liberation in realizing
that you can change your world—including your body— simply by changing
your per ception. How you perceive yourself is causing immense changes in
your body right now. To give an example: In America and England,
mandatory retirement at age 65 sets an arbitrary cutof f date for social
usefulness. The day before a worker turns 65, he contributes labor and
value to society; the day after, he becomes one of society’ s dependents. Medically , the results of this perceptual shift can be disastrous. In the first
few years after retirement, heart attack and cancer rates soar, and early
death overtakes men who were otherwise healthy before they retired. “Early
retirement death,” as the syndrome is called, depends on the perception that
one’s useful days are over; this is only a perception, but for someone who
holds it firmly , it is enough to create disease and death. By comparison, in
societies where old age is accepted as part of the social fabric, elders remain
extremely vigor ous—lifting, climbing, and bending in ways that we do not
accept as normal in our elderly . If you examine old cells, such as ones that form liver spots on the skin,
through a high-powered micros cope, the scene is as devastated as a war
zone. Fibrous streaks run here and there; deposits of fat and undiscarded
metabolic wastes form unsightly clumps; dark, yellowish pigments calledlipofuscin have accumulated to the point where they litter 10 to 30 percent
of the cell’ s interior . This scene of devastation was created by subcellular processes that went
wrong, but if you look through less materialistic lenses, you will see that
old cells are like maps of a person’ s experience. Things that made you
suffer are imprinted there, along with things that brought you joy. Stresses
you long ago forgot on the conscious level are still sending out signals, like
buried microchips, making you anxious, tense, fatigued, apprehensive,
resentful, doubtful, disappointed—these reactions cross the mind-body
barrier to become part of you. The clogged, toxic deposits in old cells don’t
appear uniformly; some people acquire much more than others, even when
there is little genetic difference  between them. By the time you reach age
70, your cells will look uniqu e, mirroring the unique experiences you
processed and metabolized into your tissues and or gans. Being able to process the raw, chaotic vibrations of the “quantu m soup”
and turn them into meaningful, orderly bits of reality opens up enormous
creative possibil ities. However , these possibilities exist only when you are
aware of them. While you are reading this book, a huge portion of your
consciousness is engaged in creating your body without your participation. The so-called involuntary or autonomic nervous system was designed to
control function s that have slipped out of your awareness. If you began
walking down the street in a daze, the involuntary centers in your brain
would still be coping with the world, keeping on the lookout for danger ,
poised to activate the stress response at a moment’ s notice. A hundred things you pay no attention to—breathing, digesting, growing
new cells, repairing damaged old ones, purifying toxins, preserving
hormonal balan ce, converting stored energy from fat to blood sugar ,
dilating the pupils of the eyes, raising and lowering blood pressure,
maintaining steady body temperature, balancing as you walk, shunting
blood to and from the muscle groups that are doing the most work, and
sensing moveme nts and sounds in the surrounding environmen t—continue
ceaselessly . These automatic processes play a huge part in aging, for as we age, our
ability to coordinate these functions declines. A lifetime of unconscious
living leads to numerous deteriorations, while a lifetime of consciousparticipation prevents them. The very act of paying conscious attention to
bodily functions instead of leaving them on automatic pilot will change how
you age. Every so-called involuntary function, from heartbeat and breathing
to digest ion and hormone regulation, can be consciously controlled. The era
of biofeedback and meditation has taught us that—heart patients have been
trained in mind-body laboratories to lower their blood pressure at will or to
reduce the acid secretions that create ulcers, among dozens of other things. Why not put this ability to use in the aging process? Why not exchange old
patterns of perception for new ones? There are abundant techni ques, as we
will see, for influencing the involuntary nervous system to our advantage. 2. Our bodies ar e composed of ener gy and information. To transform the patterns of the past you must know what they are made
of. Your body appears to be composed of solid matter that can be broken
down into molecules and atom s, but quantum physics tells us that every
atom is more than 99.9999 percent empty space, and the subatomic particles
moving at lightning speed through this space are actually bundles of
vibrating energy. These vibrations aren’ t random and meaningless,
however; they carry information. Thus, one bundle of vibrations  is coded as
a hydrogen atom, another as oxygen; each element is in fact its own unique
code. Codes are abstract, and so ultimately is our cosmos and everything in it. Chasing the physical structure of the body down to its ultimate source dead-
ends as molecules give way to atoms, atoms to subatomic particles, and
these particles to ghosts of energy dissolving into an empty void. This void
is mysteriously imprinted with information even before any information is
expressed. Just as thousands of words exist silently in your memory without
being spoken, the quantum field holds the entire universe in unexpressed
form; it has been that way since the Big Bang, when billions  of galaxies
were compressed into a space millions of times smaller than the period at
the end of this sentence. Yet even before that infinitesimal dot, the structure
of the universe existed in unmanifest form. The essential stuff of the universe, including your body , is non-stuf f, but
it isn’t ordinary  non-stuf f. It is thinking non-stuf f. The void inside everyatom is pulsating with unseen intelligence. Geneticists locate this
intelligence primarily inside DNA, but that is only for the sake of
convenience. Life unfolds as DNA imparts its coded intelligence to its
active twin, RNA, which in turn goes out into the cell and imparts bits of
intelligence to thousands of enzymes, which then use their specific bit of
intelligence to make proteins. At every point in this sequence, energy and
information have to be exchang ed or there could be no building life from
lifeless matter . The human body derives its primary energy by burning sugar , which is
transported to the cells in the form of glucose, or blood sugar . The chemical
structure of glucose is closely related to common table sugar , sucrose. But if
you burn table sugar , you don’t get the exquisite, complex structures of a
living cell; you just get a charred lump of ash and traces of water and
carbon dioxide in the air . Metabolism is more than a burning process; it is an intelligent act. The
same sugar that remains inert in a sugar cube supports life with its energy
because the body’ s cells infuse it with new information. The sugar may
contribute its energy to a kidney , heart, or brain cell, for exam ple. All of
these cells contain completely unique forms of intelligence—the rhythmic
twitching of a heart cell is completely different from the electrical
dischar ges of a brain cell or the sodium exchanges of a kidney cell. As marvelous as this wealth of diverse intelligence is, at bottom there is
one single intelligence shared  by the whole body . The flow of this
intelligence keeps you alive, and when it ceases to flow, at the moment of
death, all the knowledge stored  in your DNA is rendered useless. As we
age, this flow of intelligence becomes compromised in various  ways. The
specific intellige nce of the immune system, the nervous system, and the
endocrine system all start falling off; these three systems are now known by
physiologists to function as the master controls of the body . Your immune
cells and endocrine glands are outfitted with the same recepto rs for brain
signals as your neurons are; therefore, they are like an extended brain. Senility cannot be looked upon, then, simply as a disease confined to our
gray matter; when intelligence  is lost in the immune or the endocrine
system, senility of the whole body is creeping in.Since all this happens at an unseen, unmanifest level, the losses go
unnoticed until they have progre ssed to a very late stage and are expressed
as a physical symptom. The five senses cannot go deep enough to
experience the billions of quantu m exchanges that create aging. The rate of
change is at once too fast and too slow: too fast because individual chemical
reactions take less than 1/10,000th of a second, too slow because their
cumulative effect will not show up for years. These reactions involve
information and energy on a scale millions of times smaller than a single
atom. Age deterioration would be unavoidable if the body was simply material,
because all material things are prey to entropy , the tendency of orderly
systems to become disorderly . The classic example of entro py is a car
rusting in a junkyard; entropy breaks down the orderly machinery into
crumbling rust. There is no chance that the process will work the other way
—that a rusty scrap heap will reassemble itself into a new car. But entropy
doesn’ t apply to intelligence— an invisible part of us is immune to the
ravages of time. Modern scienc e is just discovering the implic ations of all
this, but it has been imparted for centuries through spiritual traditions in
which masters have preserved the youthfulness of their bodies far into old
age. India, China, Japan, and to a lesser extent the Christian West have given
birth to sages who realized their essential nature as a flow of intelligence. By preserving that flow and nurturing it year after year, they overcame
entropy from a deeper level of Nature. In India, the flow of intelligence is
called Prana  (usually translated as “life force ”), which can be increased and
decreased at will, moved here and there, and manipulated to keep the
physical body orderly and young. As we will see, the ability to contact and
use Prana is within all of us. A yogi moves Prana using nothin g more than
attention, for at a deep level, attention and Prana are the same—life is
awareness, awareness is life. 3. Mind and body ar e inseparably one. Intelligence is much more flexible than the mask of matter that hides it. Intelligence can express itself either as thoughts or as molecu les. A basicemotion such as fear can be described as an abstract feeling or as a tangible
molecule of the hormone adrenaline. Without the feeling there is no
hormone; withou t the hormone there is no feeling. In the same way, there is
no pain without nerve signals that transmit pain; there is no relief from pain
without endorphins that fit into the pain receptors to block those signals. The revolution we call mind-body medicine was based on this simple
discovery: Wher ever thought goes, a chemical goes with it. This insight has
turned into a powerful tool that allows us to understand, for example, why
recent widows are twice as likely to develop breast cancer , and why the
chronically depressed are four times more likely to get sick. In both cases,
distressed mental states get converted into the biochemicals that create
disease. In my medical practice, I can see two heart patients afflicted with angina
pectoris, the typical squeezing , breathless pain that is typic al of heart
disease. One patient will be able to run, swim, and perhaps even mountain-
climb, totally ignoring his pain or not even having any, while the other
nearly faints with pain when he gets up out of his armchair . My first instinct  will be to look for a physical difference between them,
but I might or might not find anything. Cardiologists expect anginal pain to
appear when at least one of the three coronary arteries is 50 percent
blocked. This blockage is almo st always in the form of an atheroma, a
lesion on the inside of the arterial wall built up by dead cells, blood clots,
and fatty plaque. The 50 percent blockage is only a rule of thumb, however . Some angina patients are disabled by pain when they have only a single
small lesion barely obstructin g blood flow in one artery , while other
patients suffering from massive, multiple blockages of up to 85 percent
have been known to run mara thons. (Angina is not always caused by
physical blockag e, I should add. Arteries are lined with a layer of muscle
cells that can go into spasm and squeeze the vessel closed, but this is a
highly individual reaction.) In mind-body terms, my two patients are expressing their different
interpretations of pain. Every patient stamps his condition with a unique
perspective, and pain (or any other symptom) emer ges into awareness only
after it interacts with all the past influences at work in the mind-body
system. There is no single response for all people or even for the sameperson at two different times. Pain signals are raw data that can be turned to
many purposes. High-exertion athletics, such as long-distance running,
subject an athlete to pain that he interprets as a sign of accomplishment (“no
pain, no gain”); but the same pain, inflicted under other circumstances,
would be completely unwelco me. Track runners admire a coach who
pushes them to their limits; they might hate the same treatment in boot
camp. Medicine is just beginning to use the mind-body connection for healing
—defeating pain is a good example. By giving a placebo, or dummy , drug,
30 percent of patients will experience the same pain relief as if a real
painkiller had been administere d. But the mind-body effect is much more
holistic. The same dummy pill can be used to kill pain, to stop excessive
gastric secretions in ulcer patients, to lower blood pressure, or to fight
tumors. (All the side effects of chemotherapy , including hair loss and
nausea, can be induced by giving cancer patients a sugar pill while assuring
them that it is a powerful anticancer drug, and there have been instances
where injections  of sterile saline solution have actually led to remissions of
advanced malignancy .) Since the same inert pill can lead to such totally different responses, we
must conclude that the body is capable of producing any biochemical
response once the mind has been given the appropriate suggestion. The pill
itself is meanin gless; the power that activates the placebo effect is the
power of suggestion alone. This suggestion is then converted into the
body’ s intention  to cure itself. Therefore, why not bypass the deception of
the sugar pill and go directly to the intention? If we could effectively trigger
the intention not to age, the body would carry it out automatically . We have extremely exciting evidence to prove that such a possibility
exists. One of the most dreaded diseases of old age is Parkinson’ s, a
neurological disorder that produces uncontrollable muscle movements and a
drastic slowing  down of bodily motions such as walking, eventually
resulting in a body so stiff that the patient cannot move at all. Parkinson’ s
has been traced to an unexplained depletion of a critical brain chemical
called dopamine, but there is also a simulated Parkinson’ s cause d when the
dopamine-producing cells of the brain have been destroyed chemically by
certain drugs. Imagine a patient afflicted with this type of Parkinson’ s in anadvanced stage of frozen motion. Trying to walk, he can only take a step or
two before halting in place, as stif f as a statue. However , if you draw a line on the floor and say, “Step over that,” the
person will miraculously be able to walk right over it. Despite the fact that
the production of dopamine is completely involuntary and its stores are
seemingly exhau sted (as shown by the fact that his brain canno t signal his
leg muscles to take another step), merely by having the intention to walk,
the brain is awakened. The person may freeze again after only a few
seconds, but again you can ask him to step over an imaginary line, and his
brain will respond. By extension, the infirmity and inactivity exhibited by
many old people is often just dormancy . By renewing their intention to live
active, purposeful lives, many elderly people can dramatically improve their
motor abilities, strength, agility , and mental responses. Intention is the active partner of attention; it is the way we convert
automatic processes into conscious ones. Using simple mind-body
exercises, almost any patient can learn in a few sessions to conv ert a racing
heartbeat, asthm atic wheezing, or free-floating anxiety into a more normal
response. What seems out of control can be brought back into control with
the proper technique. The implic ations for aging are enormous. By inserting
an intention into your thought processes, such as, “I want to improve in
energy and vigor every day,” you can begin to assert control over those
brain centers that determine how much energy will be expressed in activity . The decline of vigor in old age is largely the result of people expecting  to
decline; they have unwittingly implanted a self-defeating intention in the
form of a strong  belief, and the mind-body connection automatically carries
out this intention. Our past intentions create obsolete programming that seems  to have
control over us. In truth, the power of intention can be reawakened at any
time. Long before you get old, you can prevent such losses by consciously
programming your mind to remain youthful, using the power of your
intention. 4. The biochemistry of the body is a pr oduct of awar eness.One of the greatest limitations of the old paradigm was the assumption
that a person’ s awareness doesn’ t play a role in explaini ng what is
happening in his body . Yet healing cannot be understood unless the person’ s
beliefs, assump tions, expectati ons, and self-image are also understood. Although the image of the body as a mindless machine continues to
dominate mains tream Western medicine, there is unquestionab le evidence
to the contrary . Death rates from cancer and heart disease are provably
higher among people in psychological distress, and lower among people
who have a strong sense of purpose and well-being. One of the most publicized medical studies in recent years was conducted
by Stanford psychiatrist David Spiegel, who set out to prove that the mental
state of patients did not influence whether they survived cancer . He felt, as
many clinicians  do, that assigning importance to a patient’ s beliefs and
attitudes would do more harm than good, because the thought “I caused my
cancer” would cause feelings of guilt and self-recrimination. Spiegel took
eighty-six wome n with advanced breast cancer (their disease was basically
beyond help with conventional  treatment) and gave half of them weekly
psychotherapy combined with lessons in self-hypnosis. By any measure this
represents minimal intervention—what could a woman do in an hour’s
therapy per week, time she must share with several other patients, to
combat a disease that is inevitably fatal in advanced stages? The answer
seemed obvious. However , after following his subjects for ten years, Spiegel was stunned
to find that the group receiving  therapy survived on average twice as long
as the group that received none. It was doubly telling that only three women
were alive by this late date, all of them from the therapy group . This study
is startling because the research er expected no effect at all. But a decade of
similar findings  came in from other researchers. A meticulous 1987 study
from Yale, repor ted by M. R. Jensen, found that breast cancer spread fastest
among women who had repres sed personalities, felt hopeless , and were
unable to express anger , fear, and other negative emotions. Similar findings
have emer ged for rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, intractable pain, and other
disorders. Dominated by the old paradigm, doctors hold a prejudice against such
results. As Larry Dossey points out in his insightful book Medicine andMeaning,  “The dominant message, incessantly preached from the editorial
pages of medica l journals and the podiums of medical schools, is that the
‘inherent biology of the disease’ is overwhelmingly important and that
feelings, emotions, and attitude s are simply along for the ride.” What the
new paradigm teaches us is that emotions are not fleeting event s isolated in
mental space; they are expressions of awareness, the fundamental stuff of
life. In all religious traditions the breath of life is spirit. To raise or lower
someone’ s spirits means something fundamental that the body must reflect. Awareness make s a huge difference in aging, for although every species
of higher life-form ages, only humans know what is happening to them, and
we translate this knowledge into aging itself. To despair of growing old
makes you grow old faster , while to accept it with grace keeps many
miseries, both physical and mental, from your door. The commonsense
notion “You’re only as old as you think you are” has deep implications. What is a thought? It is an impulse of energy and information, like
everything else in Nature. The packages of information and energy that we
label trees, stars, mountains, and oceans could be called Nature’ s thoughts,
too, but in one important respect our thoughts are different. Nature is stuck
with her thoughts once their pattern has been fixed in place; things such as
stars and trees follow a growth cycle that runs automatically through the
stages of birth, development, decay , and dissolution. We, however , are not stuck in our life cycle; being aware, we participate
in every  reactio n that takes place inside us. The problems arise when we
don’t take responsibility for what we’re doing. In his book The Holographic
Universe,  Michael Talbot draws a brilliant comparison with King Midas:
Because everything he touched turned to gold, Midas could never know the
actual texture of anything. Water, wheat, flesh, or feathers all turned into the
same hard metal the instant he touched them. In the same fashion, because
our awareness turns the quantum field into ordinary material reality , we
cannot know the true texture of quantum reality itself, either through our
five senses or by thinking about it, for a thought also transforms the field—
it takes the infin ite possibilities of the void and shapes a specific  space-time
event. What you call your body is a specific space-time event too, and by
experiencing its materiality , you miss the Midas touch that converts pureabstract potential into a solid thing. Unless you become awar e of
awar eness,  you won’ t be able to catch yourself in the act of transformation. 5. Per ception is a learned phenomenon. The power of awareness would make no difference in our lives if Nature
had outfitted us all with the same responses to experience. Clearly , this
didn’ t happen; no two people share the same perception of anything. The
face of your beloved may be the face of my worst enemy , the food you
crave may cause nausea in me. These personal responses have to be
learned, which is where differences originate. Learning is a very active use
of the mind, leading to very active changes in the body . Perceptions of love,
hate, delight, and nausea stimulate the body in extremely different
directions. In short, our bodies are the physical results of all the
interpretations we have been learning to make since we were born. Some transplant patients report an uncanny experience after receiving a
donated kidney , liver, or heart. Without knowing who the organ donor was,
they begin to participate in his memories. Associations that belonged to
another person start being released when that person’ s tissues are placed
inside a stranger . In one instance , a woman woke up after a heart transplant
craving beer and Chicken McNuggets; she was very surprised, because she
had never before wanted either . After she began to have mysterious dreams
in which a young man named Timmy came to her, she tracke d down the
donor of her new heart, which had come from the victim of a fatal traffic
accident; when she contacted his family , it turned out that the victim was a
young man named Timmy . The woman was stunned to discov er that he’d
had a particular fondness for drinking beer and had been killed on his way
home from McDonald’ s.
Rather than seeking a supernat ural explanation for such incidents, one
could see them as confirmation that our bodies are made of experiences
transformed into physical expression. Because experience is something we
incorporate (literally , “make into a body”), our cells have been instilled with
our memories; thus, to receive  someone else’s cells is to receive their
memories at the same time.Your cells are constantly processing experience and metabolizing it
according to your personal view s. You don’t just funnel raw data through
your eyes and ears and stamp it with a judgment. You physically turn into
the interpretatio n as you internalize it. Someone who is depressed over
losing his job projects sadness everywhere in his body—the brain’ s output
of neurotransmitters becomes depleted, hormone levels drop, the sleep
cycle is interrupted, neuropepti de receptors on the outer surface of skin
cells become distorted, platelet cells in the blood become stickier and more
prone to clump, and even his tears contain different chemical traces than
tears of joy . This whole biochemical profile  will alter dramatically when the person
finds a new job, and if it is a more satisfying one, his body’ s output of
neurotransmitters, hormones, receptors, and all other vital biochemicals,
down to DNA itself, will start to reflect this sudden turn for the better . Although we assume that DNA is a locked storehouse of genetic
information, its active twin, RNA, responds to day-to-day existence. Medical students at exam time show a decreased output of interleukin 2, a
critical chemical in the immune response that fights cancer . The production
of interleukin 2 is controlled by messenger RNA, which means that the
student’ s anxiety over passing his exams is speaking directly to his genes. This point reinforces the great need to use our awareness to create the
bodies we actually want. Anxiety over a medical exam eventuall y passes, as
does depression over a lost job, but the aging process has to be countered
every day. Your interpretation of how you are aging is critical to what
happens over the next four, five, or six decades. In neurological terms, a
brain signal is just a set of energy fluctuations. If you are in a coma, these
signals are mean ingless; when you are alert and aware, the same signals are
open to infinite creative interpretations. Shakespeare was not being
metaphorical when he wrote Prospero’ s line “We are such stuff as dreams
are made on.” The body is like a manifest dream, a 3-D project ion of brain
signals as they transform themselves into the state we call “real.”
Aging is nothing but a set of misguided transformations, processes that
should remain stable, balanced , and self-renewing but deviate from their
proper course. This appears as a physical change, yet what  has really
happened is that your awarene ss—whether in your mind or your cellsdoesn’ t matter— deviated first. By becoming aware of how that slippage
occurred, you can bring your body’ s biochemistry back into line. There is
no biochemistry  outside awareness; every cell in your body is totally aware
of how you think and feel about yourself. Once you accept that fact, the
whole illusion of being victimized by a mindless, randomly degenerating
body falls away . 6. Impulses of intelligence constantly cr eate the body in new
forms every second. Creating the body in new forms is necessary in order to meet the
changing demands of life.
_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:

        Praise for Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,  the #1 New Y ork T imes
bestseller with over 1 million copies in print, and Deepak
Chopra, heralded by Time magazine as one of the top 100 her oes
and icons of the twentieth century
“A groundbreaking book on the whole question of aging. Who might have
imagined that the secret to conquering this universal mystery lies not in our
physical bodies, but in our consciousness. Only the genius such as Deepak
Chopra. Fascinating. ”
—Wayne Dyer, Ph. D. “Unparalleled genius…Dr. Deepak Chopra shows us how to transform our
bodies—and our lives—by destroying the myths of aging and guiding us to
the source of our eternal youth. ”
—Anthony Robbins
“A breathtakin g vision of human potential. If you incorporate the
knowledge…it will rejuvenate your body and mind. ”
—Ken Blanchard, Ph.
The book received praise from various individuals, including Wayne Dyer, Anthony Robbins, Ken Blanchard, Barbara De Angelis, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and others.
Who praised the book "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind"?
The book argues that the secret to conquering the mystery of aging lies not in the physical body, but in the consciousness.
What is the main theme of the book "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind"?
The author, Deepak Chopra, aims to challenge the old paradigm and encourage readers to adopt a new perspective on aging, emphasizing the importance of consciousness and intention in determining one's physical state.
What is the author's intention with the book?
The author believes that the mind and body are not separate entities, but are interconnected and interdependent, and that the mind has the power to influence the body's functioning.
What is the author's view on the relationship between the body and mind?
The author argues that aging is not inevitable and can be reversed or slowed down by changing one's perception and intention, and that the body is capable of self-renewal and regeneration.
What is the author's stance on the concept of aging?