of genetic information. Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The bases in the DNA molecule carry the different codes. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences. Each strand of DNA is in the shape of a double helix and serves as a pattern (like a dress-making pattern) for duplicating the sequence of bases. This is critical when cells divide because each new cell needs to have an exact copy of the DNA present in the old cell.
Each cell has its own power generators (mitochondria) and each is like a tiny battery with a charge of 40-90 millivolts. That may sound small, but imagine how much electricity and electromagnetic energy 70 trillion cells can produce! All the cells in the body together produce an electric current and an electromagnetic field that can be detected and measured by an Electrocardiography, Electrocardiogram, and Electromyography (ECG, EKG, and EMG). An Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a test to measure the electrical activity of the brain. Major breakthroughs in discovering cellular electricity have come from using voltage-sensitive nano-particles, and these breakthroughs have discovered electric fields inside cells stronger than those produced by lightning bolts! Yes, I said lightning bolts. It amazed me too. University of Michigan researchers, led by chemistry professor Raoul Kopelman, found electric fields inside cells as strong as 15 million volts per meter, roughly five times stronger than a lightning bolt.3
The cells produce bio-electricity to store metabolic energy so they can deliver energy in order to do work, to trigger internal changes, and to send signals to other cells. It is not only found in humans but also in animals and plants—even certain minerals generate electricity. For example, all types of crystals produce electricity when heated (pyroelectricity) or when under pressure (piezoelectricity). Granite produces electricity when under pressure. The granite stones inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt emit an electrical field, because they are under enormous pressure.
The electrical power of the body has been known since ancient times. It has been called the ka (in ancient Egypt), élan vital (in France), and qi (pronounced chee, sometimes spelled chi) or qigong (pronounced chee gung, and literally meaning “life-energy” or “life-flow” in the East).
Interestingly, the body’s bioelectric field extends beyond the body, generating an auric field around it. Edgar Cayce could see this energy field in the form of colors. He observed that the colors changed as the energy of the person changed. The electromagnetic field around the body can be experienced using a simple little maneuver: press the tips of your fingers on both hands together tightly, with a little space between your palms, and hold this for one full minute. When you gently let go, you will feel a magnetic attraction between the fingers, as if they do not want to separate from the other hand. Another little test is to put your hand, palm-open up (like “high five”), close to another person’s open hand, and then feel the energy between the two. This is the usually unseen field surrounding each body. On one occasion, Edgar Cayce was about to enter an elevator in New York City when he noticed that no one on the elevator had an auric field. He stopped cold and did not get on. He had never seen people without energy fields. To his dismay the elevator malfunctioned and everyone on it died in the crash. Cayce felt that their life-force or spirit had already left their bodies by some precognitive knowing of what was about to happen.
Human bodies are generators. Each person generates about 60 watts of power while walking. According to a January, 2011, report by the BBC News, the Stockholm Central Station, through which about 250,000 commuters pass every day, uses a special ventilation system that draws in the accumulated human body heat in the station and passes it through a heat exchanger and heats water for central heating. The developers estimate that it lowers the energy cost by about 25 percent.
The Human Brain
A single human brain cell can hold five times more information than an entire encyclopedia set with volumes of information! An article in Scientific American states that the storage capacity of the human brain in electronic terms is thought to be as much as 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes)! That’s enough capacity to hold 3 million hours of TV shows!4
This is the marvelous outer, visible life. In the next chapter, we’re going to take a look at the surprising inner, invisible life.
chapter 2
Inner Life, Invisible Life
For all of the amazing wonders of the universe and the human body, as presented in Chapter One, an enormous amount of the grand vision of life is invisible!
For example, the stars, planets, and galaxies that can be detected make up only four percent of the universe! Four percent! The other ninety-six percent is made up of substances that cannot be seen or easily explained. These invisible substances are called “dark energy” and “dark matter.” Astronomers base their existence on the gravitational influence that they exert on normal matter (the parts of the universe that can be seen).
Let’s just consider this a bit more; our universe may contain as many as 100 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars, massive clouds of gas and dust, countless planets and moons, and enormous amounts of cosmic debris—yet everything that we see is only four percent of the total mass and energy in the universe!
Genes Do Not Direct as Much as They Respond
What about the human body? In Chapter 1, we discussed how physical life required a cell with genetic material (DNA), and we assumed from this that our life is determined by our genes. It only makes sense, right? Well, it turns out that this is not necessarily so, for research has determined that it is not the insides of a cell that determine outcomes but the receptors around the membrane of the cell that respond to the stimuli of our perceptions, vibrations, and environment! Identical twins have the same genes yet one may develop cancer while the other does not. Why? How? Siblings who come from the same gene pool, but live in different settings and environments, may develop different ailments. Why? How?
Dr. Bruce Lipton, a biologist, explains it this way when speaking on the topic of his book The Biology of Belief: Cells, like computers, are programmable and the program lies outside the cell/computer. The genes do not program the cell! The nucleus is simply a memory disk, a hard drive that contains the DNA programs that encode the production of proteins. We can edit the data that goes into our bio-computer just as we choose the words we type into a computer! Our cells are like programmable personal computers!5
Lipton adds, “The energy in your body is reflecting the energy around you because the atoms in your body are not only giving off energy, they are absorbing energy. Every living organism communicates with these vibrations. Animals communicate with plants; they communicate with other animals. Shamans talk to plants with vibrations … Quantum physicists reveal that underneath apparent physical structure there is nothing more than energy, that we are energy beings … Quantum physics says the invisible energy is one hundred times more efficient in conveying information than are material signals (e.g., drugs). What we are beginning to recognize is that there is an invisible world that we have not dealt with in regard to understanding the nature of our health … In other words, rather than focusing on matter, in a quantum world we focus on energy … When you interact in your environment you are both absorbing and sending energy at the same time. You are probably more familiar with terms such as ‘good vibes’ and ‘bad vibes.’ Those are the waves at which we are all vibrating … When we understand that genes are just respondents to the environment from the perceptions handled by the cell membrane, then we can realize that if life isn’t going well, what we have to do is not change our genes but change our perceptions. That is much easier to do than physically altering the body.”6