Simple point. I have two guitars that are tuned the same. If I pluck the A string on guitar #1, the A note on guitar #2 vibrates. Why? It’s the same vibration. Harmonic resonance. Constructive interference. I pluck the string on this guitar, but I activate the string on that guitar… Amazing!
– Bruce Lipton

In a recent conversation with cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, we had a chance to pose several questions directly from the UPLIFT community, creating a dynamic exploration of the power of our mind and heart to create our reality. The following is a glimpse into the conversation and Bruce’s powerful insight into how we overcome limiting thought patterns and subconscious programming to create a life, and a world, that we love.

Our Thoughts Don’t Stay in Our Head

Historically human brain waves and electrical activity were measured with a device called an electroencephalogram (EEG) which involved connecting wires and flat metal disks (electrodes) to the scalp of the person being studied. In more recent times, scientists have realized that the electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain can be read using a magnetoencephalogram (MEG) in the magnetic “field” outside of our body. As individuals, our thoughts are constantly creating this electromagnetic field which stretches well beyond the borders of our body. As Bruce tells us,

Our thoughts are not contained inside our head. When we have a negative thought, it’s not just a negative thought bouncing around in our head. It’s a broadcast. In the world of quantum physics, it’s an impulse that will return a similar response (The A string of my guitar activates the A string in yours, right?). What’s the relevance? There could be ten people out there – nine in a positive state of mind, one in a negative. If we send out a negative broadcast, who is going to pick it up? Not the nine positive people – they aren’t tuned to that frequency. Who is going to pick it up is the negative person. What happens if we activate a negative person with our negative broadcast? We bring them into our life!

As Bruce points out, all of our ‘notes’ are broadcast out there. If we want to harmonise our negative thoughts with others in the same field, we can do that. “As you’re sitting in traffic, brewing up negative thoughts, you’re actually creating a negative future response before you even get there.

When we become aware of this, we can begin to catch ourselves and realize that we have a choice.” Because if we want to harmonize our thoughts with positive new possibility we can do that too, and we’ll find ourselves attracting a totally different orchestra.

Why do people get hooked on negative thoughts in the first place?

In short, because most of our thoughts come from subconscious programs. As Bruce explains, the challenge of catching ourselves in negative thought patterns is that “most of the time when we think, our conscious mind leaves the present moment. When we leave the present moment, our subconscious default programs kick in.”

Bruce estimates that 95% of our life we are running the default programs because “that is how much time we spend thinking. And most of these default programs are the disempowering, self sabotaging, limiting programs that we got during the first seven years of our life.”

Repetitive thoughts tell you right away that you are playing a program over and over again. That should be the alarm that says, “I’m playing the program.” And it’s a wake up call if you catch it. When you notice you are having repetitive thoughts, you’re playing a tape. And the moment you realize that, you can stop playing the tape. Now you’ve taken the power back. And you can choose to play something else. But if you don’t do something in that moment to take back the power then you’ll just drop back in and keep playing the default tape over and over again… and believe me, it doesn’t get better every time it plays!

How do we stop our negative thought process?

According to Bruce, the first step is to interrupt the pattern. That’s all fine and good, but with 50,000+ thoughts a day coming through each of our heads, the next question is, how can we possibly catch all the potentially negative thoughts and stop them from broadcasting?

It seems an impossible mission. And according to Bruce, it is an impossible mission for the brain alone. “When we use our mind we rationalize and use calculations. One thought leads to and connects with the next thought and that’s fine except that if you have one error in your processing, one faulty thought, your end result answer will be faulty.”

Fortunately there’s a greater power at play in each of our bodies, which has a broadcast capacity many times more powerful than that of our brain… It’s called the heart.

The overriding power of the Heart

According to HeartMath Institute Director of Research, Rollin McCraty, (in his paper Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Communication Within and Between People), “The heart is a sensory organ and acts as a sophisticated information encoding and processing center that enables it to learn, remember, and make independent functional decisions…” And the heart happens to generate the largest electromagnetic field in the body – about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain.

In Bruce’s words, “What’s different about the heart is that the heart doesn’t do calculations. The heart reads energy.” And it’s a language available to all of us.

The first language of communication is energy. Vibration. There’s a whole range of energy we as humans feel, but essentially there’s two kinds of vibes. There’s good vibes and bad vibes. Bad vibes take away your energy and good vibes enhance your energy. The vibes don’t tell us the words, they don’t tell us the details or rational thought. They just tell us if this energy is good for us or bad. When an animal feels bad vibes what do you think it does? It moves away. How does it know? Because its life is based on energy. You have energy, you gain life. You lose energy, you lose life. This is the primal communication form of everything from bacteria to humans.

Trusting the vibration of our heart

According to Bruce, only we humans forgo reading and following that energy. Instead, we often go up into our heads and rationalize what we think we should do based on our mental analysis of the facts, often at the expense of what our heart knows and is telling us. When we consider how much further out into the field our heart energy reaches than the mind, it’s a wonder that we would ever listen to our thoughts above “the vibe”.

Even though it might not always make sense in the moment, according to Bruce, the heart path is the most direct path because the heart will always tell us where the energy is. “You can think about it all you want but when you come down to your final choice, put it in your heart and ask the question. Which one feels better? The one that feels better in your heart is already telling you the answer. Go with that one.”

As I’m listening to Bruce I find myself wondering how much time and energy would we save as humanity if we respected the wordless knowing in each other’s hearts and allowed ourselves to trust the energy of the heart in all of our collective endeavors.

In the challenging complex world we live in… how do we stay connected to the path of good vibrations?

The very best thing is to keep your mind and energy in the present moment – rather than doing all the thinking that we are so used to doing, which instantly pulls us out of the present moment and back into our programs. When we’re in the moment, we’re in the heart. It doesn’t mean everything is working perfectly, but it means we’re not terrorizing our self, because that’s where the real problems come from. When we brutalize our own system by being afraid and feeling victim, that’s when we know the subconscious is running, and we’re not running the show.

The Creative Power of Love

If you want to know what happens when we aren’t playing the default programs, go back to when you fell in love and tell me what it was like?

According to Bruce, the one time we all naturally keep our mind and heart in the present (often without knowing we are doing it) is when we fall in love. “It is the one time when we naturally stop playing the programs and start living from our conscious creative mind. If you have been dreaming about this relationship your whole life and all of a sudden it shows up, why would you be anywhere but the current moment?!”

In listening to Bruce, I recall when my wife Ash and I first met 21 years ago. At the time, there were all sorts of obstacles unfolding around us but it was as though none of those obstacles existed as something we were worried about. We were so captivated by the energy that was emerging between us that it felt like we were being carried by a wave above any challenges. In Bruce’s words, “The challenges were still there, but they didn’t take away your energy or joy because you were fully in the moment, literally able to transcend them.”

When we are having that love experience the conscious mind stays in front and that’s the moment of power. The moment we start thinking we go on autopilot and then we’re no longer driving the vehicle. You can feel it in your heart. If you are in a good place and you are in harmony and happy, you can feel it’s a really wonderful thing. But the moment you start to get into doubt and mistrust and fear you can feel that love and pleasure starts to disappear from your heart. You can feel it. It feels different. So during the day the basic question is, are you living in a troubled state of mind (which means you are really just calculating from programs) or are you present to, immersed in the moment and therefore the joy of life?

Falling in Love with Life

Most people believe that you die and if you live well you go off to someplace called heaven. I would like to suggest an alternative understanding, that we are born into heaven, and this present moment is a place where we are most creative. This is where we manifest our dreams. Most of our ideas of heaven are really based on their life on earth so to look for it somewhere else is silly. All the visions and dreams that we talk about are all doable right here.

So according to Bruce, we don’t need to try to fight the old story of what’s not working around us. We simply need to walk outside the old story and build a new story. “People will leave the old story when they see a new story working. Every individual who changes their own story, is changing the vibrational environment within which we all live.”