It is even more futile to try to control your mind one thought at a time. No matter how many years you spend judging your thoughts—rejecting the ones you dislike, and censoring those of which you disapprove—your mind will keep bringing them around. In fact, bad thoughts are more likely to return, as every guilty person knows.
Soft focus sees the mind as a whole. You view thinking as if on a wide screen, accepting that any possible thought can come along. Instead of being a problem, the endless flow of thought becomes the fertile ground of change. The flood cannot be tamed. Nor should we want it to be, because the glory of the mind is that it draws from a thousand springs. Every mental event is temporary: it exists in the moment and then vanishes. Yet, strangely enough, the present moment is connected to eternity, because the present is the only time that is constantly renewed.
Do you see your mind through soft or hard focus? Let me give you some practical distinctions:
Hard Focus
Your mind is overworked. It’s exhausting keeping up with it.
You feel a strong aversion to guilty and shameful thoughts.
You push bad memories down out of sight.
You wish you had more control over your thoughts.
You berate yourself when you make a mistake. You call yourself an idiot or stupid.
You struggle between good and bad impulses.
Images you don’t want to see pop up anyway, as if on their own.
A strong voice tells you if you are being good or bad.
You find yourself being vigilant in case something unexpected should happen.
You know God sees you, but you try not to think about that.
As you can see, hard focus stands for more than a habit of mind. It’s the quality of attention you are paying to yourself and the world. The act of seeing is never neutral. If your attention is wary, hypervigilant to every kind of risk, worried about what can go wrong, your quality of attention is unhealthy. (I’m reminded of the woman who visited her doctor twice a year, every time suspecting that she had cancer. Her checkups were good for fifty years, but finally the day came when her tests revealed that she did have cancer. “See?” she said self-righteously “I told you so!” Doctors exchange this story to reinforce the point that patients are stubborn, but I can’t help thinking about what kind of life the woman had for fifty years until her worst nightmare finally came true.)
A different quality of attention is developed by soft focus.
Soft Focus
Your mind is calm and not overworked. You enjoy being in its presence.
You don’t feel haunted by guilty and shameful thoughts.
Your memories fill out your experience; you accept them for what they are.
You don’t try to control your thoughts. The more freely they come, the better.
When you make a mistake, you accept it and quickly move on. Not every idea can be perfect or brilliant, and mistakes are often the best teachers.
There’s a contrast between good and bad impulses, but you take both in stride. Sometimes you take secret delight in so-called bad thoughts, knowing that they’re just another part of your experience.
Unpleasant mental images don’t make you afraid or disgusted. You can adapt to the mind’s darker side.
You aren’t plagued by a judgmental voice telling you that you’re bad or unworthy.
You aren’t braced for the next disaster around the corner.
If God is looking down on you, he approves of what he sees.
Each item here translates into a new way of approaching your life. Having looked over this list, you may be surprised at how many aspects of hard focus you have accepted as positive. I hope they don’t look that way anymore. Once you see that soft focus is a healthier way to relate to your mind, it’s much easier to bring positive change into your life. After all, what you see you can heal; what you don’t see will remain the same.
Habits of mind are elusive. At the moment we cannot prove that hard focus directly injures the body while soft focus heals it. But because the body is only energy, and because energy is altered by awareness, the value of having healthy awareness speaks for itself. We attach positive value to things for all kinds of reasons, influenced from birth by parents, friends, school, peer groups, and society in general. For good or ill, these influences narrow the mind by fixing its beliefs and assumptions. If you were brought up in a family environment where rigid distinctions were made between right and wrong, where being judgmental came naturally, and where perfection, discipline, and self-control were preached, any and all of these influences will have become internalized over time. Children have no resistance to having their minds shaped. At the social level, we are so accustomed to viewing the world in terms of heroes and villains, us-versus-them, winners and losers, that these harsh divisions become habits of mind. It takes a conscious shift to move from hard to soft focus, and yet that is a powerful way to dissolve the energy that glues rigid habits in place.
Breakthrough #4
You Can Improve Your Genes
A breakthrough sometimes comes from seeing a simple truth hidden behind a tangle of complications. Genes are the most complicated thing about the body. Yet there is a simple truth behind them, which is this: you can change your genes, and therefore you can improve them. You are talking to your genes when you do simple things like eating and moving. That’s why a recent study showed that people who alter their lifestyle significantly—by eating better, exercising more, and practicing meditation—caused changes affecting perhaps five hundred genes. The changes supported their new lifestyle, and they started within a few weeks. But we should have suspected all along that genes don’t sit in a remote castle as silent observers. Even a strong emotion may be enough to alter a gene, because emotions require a shift in brain chemistry—brain cells secrete new chemicals for sadness or happiness, confidence or shyness, when their genes tell them to. The most seemingly stable part of the body turns out to be amazingly fluid and flexible. The code of life is a streaming message that never ends.
Biologists used to claim—and many people think they still do—that we are born with a set of genes that are fixed and unchangeable. But that’s like saying we were born with a pair of hands that are unchangeable. In fact, if you are a concert pianist and you have a twin who became a bricklayer, your two hands would be completely different in appearance, flexibility, and skill. Those differences would be reflected in different brain patterns. Your motor cortex will be imprinted with piano playing, your twin’s with bricklaying. Identical twins are born with the same set of genes, yet if you take their genetic profile at age seventy, their genes are totally different.
What has changed is a realization that genes only affect you if they are switched on; they have no effect if they are switched off. Twins are only born identical; they go through life having unique experiences, and those experiences switch some genes on and others off. Everyone’s body is the end product of a lifelong process that turns switches on or off. Along the way, three possibilities can occur:
A gene may turn on and off on a fixed schedule.
A gene may turn on and off depending on the person’s behavior and experiences.
A gene may turn on and off as a combination of the above.
Two out of the three possibilities leave room for you to choose what your genes will do. This is good news, because for decades we’ve been told that genes are fixed. They give us our inherited traits and determine what happens in our bodies. Almost no room was left for choice. Yet you don’t have to be a twin to wind up at age seventy with a unique genetic profile—it happens to all of us. You are working with the same three possibilities: your behavior won’t affect certain genes, it will have a strong effect on others, and for the vast majority of your genes, nature and nurture both play a crucial role.
When people think about genes, the example of blue eyes always comes to mind. If you have inherited a specific gene, your eyes will be blue, and if you have a different gene, your eyes w
ill be brown, green, or hazel. It turns out that this is the exception, however, not the rule. There is no single gene that determines height, for example. The latest research shows that more than twenty genes are involved in how tall a person will grow (some experts raise the number to one hundred genes), and even when they are analyzed, those genes can’t tell you if one baby will grow up to be short and another tall. There is a general correlation that a mother’s height influences her son’s, and a father’s height influences his daughter’s, but we all know children who are drastically taller or shorter than their parents. When two short parents give rise to a very tall child, nobody really can explain why. Scientists can’t even decide if genes account for 90 percent of height—the old conclusion—or as little as 30 percent.
Outside factors aren’t reliable predictors, either. We might assume that a better diet makes people taller, but the younger generation in the Philippines is growing shorter despite better economic conditions. We might assume that a tall ethnic group would keep growing taller, but the Plains Indians were among the tallest people on earth when Europeans settled America, and now they aren’t. Americans were taller than their European counterparts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but now the Dutch have surpassed them, along with several Scandinavian nations. The pace of change can be fast or slow. The Dutch took 150 years to become the tallest people in the world; the Japanese have jumped up in height just since World War II. (In the animal kingdom, there were only forty breeds of dogs in the world before a craze for developing new breeds swept through Victorian England. Since 1870, that number has jumped to four hundred.)
A few decades ago, medical researchers found that diabetes and sickle-cell anemia ran in families through inherited genes, and wondered if perhaps the same was true for other traits, like depression and schizophrenia, that also seem to run in families. Hope grew that eventually all disorders, physical and mental, could be detected and cured at the genetic level. Parents could find comfort in the knowledge that their child-rearing skills didn’t create mental disturbances in their offspring. People suffering from depression, anxiety, obesity, and a host of other complaints could stop worrying that their choices had created the problem. Genes were at fault, and genes would come to the rescue.
If mapping human DNA was the Holy Grail ten years ago, now there are a thousand holy grails—attributing a specific gene to every specific disorder. News stories flood the media about a so-called fat gene, or a gene for Alzheimer’s, and perhaps even a gene that makes people believe in God, the “faith gene.” All of these announcements wound up bearing little fruit. The single-gene theory is quickly being abandoned, although the public continues to believe in it. In recent years, moreover, the genomes of thousands of individuals have been mapped, and to the shock of researchers, there turn out to be at least 3 million differences in the genetic makeup of any two people (a huge number considering that we possess only 20,000 to 30,000 genes, far less than anyone supposed).
Genes cannot govern all the other factors that make you who you are. A gene didn’t give you a love for gardening, a mania for collecting postage stamps, a taste for Bach, or an image of the person you would fall in love with. What would happen, though, if we stopped looking at DNA physically? Let’s bring genes into the field of awareness and see how they respond. DNA is a memory bank storing every experience from the past that makes us human. Instead of letting those memories use you, you can learn to use them.
Your DNA is no more physical than other parts of your body; it is made of energy, and you can change its energy patterns through a change of awareness. You were born with some predispositions that will determine how your body turns out, yet as you inject your own desires, habits, and intentions, a fixed trait will turn out to be very malleable—a mere wisp of desire is enough to affect DNA. How ironic that the two things that medicine thought were fixed, the brain and DNA, turn out to be the keys for reinventing the body.
Mariel’s story
The big question isn’t whether you can improve your genes, but how far you can take the process. Genes stand in the way of change only because we accept that they have power over us. Yet some people find a way to overcome their genes. Mariel, now in her thirties, was born with a congenital eye defect that couldn’t be corrected with surgery. “I grew up knowing that my sight would fade away as I grew older,” she said. “As the years went by, I faced the challenge of constantly adjusting to new limitations. By the time I was out of college and going to graduate school, small print was very hard to read.”
One day Mariel was in the library and found herself unable to read the card catalog. “They had just switched to a microfiche system, and trying to make out the tiny print on the screen was very frustrating. On an impulse, I got up and walked into the stacks. I headed to the general area where the book I wanted was located. When I got there, I intended to ask for help, but since no one was around, I reached up at random and grabbed a volume. It turned out to be the very one I wanted.”
At the time Mariel saw this as a coincidence, albeit an extraordinary one. But over time a pattern began to emerge. “I found that I could see without using my eyes. I was able to recover lost objects like keys or a wallet without having to search high and low. At first I assumed that I was just retracing my steps, the way most people do when they lose something. But one day I came home from a restaurant to find that my checkbook was gone. Before I could even try to recall where I left it, a visual image flashed in my mind, showing a checkbook lying in a very specific place in the restaurant parking lot. It had fallen out of my purse when I pulled out my car keys. So I went back to the retaurant, and the checkbook was lying exactly where I’d envisioned it.”
Mariel came to rely on her newfound second sight. “If I’m writing a paper and need a specific citation, all I need to do is open the reference book and the pages will fall open to the passage I want. This doesn’t happen every single time, but it seems to work just when I need it most.”
“What’s your explanation for this?” I asked.
“It was tempting to think there was a special connection between me and God,” she said. “Then I ran across an article by a neurologist about sighted people who suddenly become blind, usually in an accident. Some people simply resign themselves to being sightless, but others adapt in amazing ways. One blind man took up roofing. He specialized in extremely complex roofs with multiple gables and steep pitches. He preferred working at night, much to the consternation of the neighbors. These were roofs that even a sighted person would be wary of climbing on in full daylight. Another person I recall developed a skill for designing intricate gearboxes whose complex workings he saw only in his mind’s eye. He hadn’t had this skill before a sudden leak of acid sprayed him in the eyes and blinded him. Only then did he discover that he possessed this remarkable ability.”
Everyone’s genes hide secret potential. One need only turn to the work of the late Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita from Mexico, who attracted general scorn thirty years ago when he suggested that the brain was capable of “sensory substitution.” That is, a blind person could learn to “see,” for example, by substituting the sense of touch for the sense of sight. Braille already gave us a clue that something akin to this audacious idea was possible, but Dr. Bach-y-Rita went much further. By the time of his death at age seventy-two, he had developed a mechanism known as a “Brain Port,” a small paddle that fits on the tongue. Using a grid of six hundred electrical points attached to a camera, the Brain Port can deliver a picture to the tongue of whatever the camera sees. This picture consists of electrical impulses conducted to sensory receptors for touch, yet after some practice, the blind person’s brain actually “sees” the image.
The evidence is not just anecdotal. MRIs have shown that the visual cortex of a blind person lights up when signals are sent to the tongue. In a recent report on public television, one could watch blind patients throwing a tennis ball into a trash can from twenty feet and walking a curving path without goi
ng out of bounds. But sensory substitution goes further. A woman who had lost her sense of balance as a side effect of an antibiotic could not be helped by drugs or surgery because the entire vestibular labyrinth in her inner ear had been rendered completely useless. Yet by training with the Brain Port, which told her tongue when she was upright and when she wasn’t, she regained her balance. Something even more remarkable followed. When the woman took off the Brain Port device that enabled her to balance herself, she didn’t immediately lose her balance again. One hour of training held good for about an hour after it ended. As she progressed, a day of training held good for a day afterward. Eventually, to the amazement of the experimenters, she could walk and ride a bicycle without wearing the Brain Port device at all.
The brain’s vestibular system is extremely complex, and yet much or all of it found a substitute elsewhere, in a region of the brain that formerly wasn’t devoted to equilibrium at all. Not only has Dr. Bach-y-Rita proved his point that the brain is more flexible than commonly supposed, but his research suggests that the brain is much more creative as well. How does an organ that is mostly water, governed entirely by electrochemical impulses, know that a person needs a new way of sensing, one that so far as we know isn’t necessary to human evolution?
Seeds of change
The brain’s hidden potential comes down to the gene’s hidden potential. A brain cell can’t make a new move unless its DNA sends out new chemical signals. Instead of getting tangled up in organic chemistry, which will never transcend the physical level anyway, you need to realize that you are talking to your genes all the time. For every trait that is fixed, such as eye, hair, and skin color, myriad genes are weaving a complex pattern of response to the following factors:
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul Page 8