look to the future and dream of new vistas and bold landscapes in our not-
too-distant reality, the body, whose currency is feelings, resists the sudden
change in direction.
Accomplishing this about-face is the great labor of personal change. So
many people struggle to create a new destiny, but find themselves unable to
overcome the past memory of who they feel they are. Even if we crave
unknown adventures and dream of new possibilities ahead in the future, we
seem to be compelled to revisit the past.
Feelings and emotions are not bad. They are the end products of
experience. But if we always relive the same ones, we can’t embrace any
new experiences. Have you known people who always seem to talk about
“the good old days”? What they’re really saying is: Nothing new is
happening in my life to stimulate my feelings; therefore I’ll have to reaffirm
myself from some glorious moments in the past. If we believe that our
thoughts have something to do with our destiny, then as creators, most of us
are only going in circles.
Controlling Our Inner Environment:
The Genetic Myth
So far, in discussing how the quantum model of reality relates to change,
I’ve spent most of the time talking about our emotions, the brain, and the
body. We’ve seen that overcoming the recurring thoughts and feelings that
the body memorizes is a must if we are to break the habit of being
ourselves.
Another major aspect of breaking this habit has to do with our physical
health. Certainly, in the hierarchy of things that most of us want to change
about our lives, health issues rank way up there. And when it comes to what
we’d like to change about our health, there is one set of dogmas that we’re
going to have to examine and dispel—the myth that genes create disease
and the fallacy of genetic determinism. We will also look at a scientific
understanding that may be new to you, called epigenetics: the control of
genes from outside the cell, or more precisely, the study of changes in gene
function that occur without a change in DNA sequence.^3