It has been proved in numerous scientific experiments that human thought can affect bacteria, yeast, plants, ants, chicks, mice and rats, cats and dogs, human cells and even the brain rhythms of other human beings, where the most ordered mind prevails.
According to Bruce Lipton, an internationally recognized authority on bridging science and spirit, whatever the mind perceives, it passes the message on to the trillions of cells in our bodies which then adjust to that perception.
You’ve probably heard of the placebo effect, but you might be less familiar with its opposite, called the nocebo effect. If the body is informed it has cancer it believes it. Told the opposite, it believes it. This is the Nocebo and Placebo effect.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
For instance, there is the much-documented story of the man infested with cancerous tumors the size of oranges that disappeared ‘like snowballs on a griddle’ after taking a so-called wonder drug, which the man was convinced was the answer to his death sentence. But when the drug was debunked as useless his cancer came back.
Then his doctor pretended an even more miraculous drug had been discovered and injected him with plain salt water. The growths once again disappeared. A few months later the American Medical Association published another debunking article and the man died shortly afterwards.
Belief is the key. Another example of the Nocebo effect is the true story of triplets who were born in the backwoods of Montana. Because it was Friday the 13th the superstitious midwife predicted that each one of the girls would die one day before, respectively, their 16th, 21st and 23rd birthdays. And, because their mother unwisely repeated this to them as children, and their minds believed it, they did.
Quantum scientists say we are governed by information fields, in which disease is just scrambled information. So is the Nocebo effect a case of the mind creating one of a million probabilities that exist ‘out there’ (‘the Observer Creates Reality’ perhaps)? It mentally constructs a scenario which is then projected back as a reality. On the positive side, could this theory be used as a healing modality?
The Nocebo effect works with plants, too. In his book In Resonance With Nature Hans Andeweg tells of how he found that when he told a landowner that his trees were in bad shape they took on that bad shape from the moment of his diagnosis. And this gives us a vital clue as to where the energy comes from to bring about change.
With placebos we normally assume that it’s the patient’s own mind that ‘believes’ something and that belief brings about a cure. But, in Hans Andeweg’s case it couldn’t be the trees that had the belief – it had to be HIS belief that was the governing factor. He believed the trees were sickly and they were sickly (as far as the landowner was concerned, his trees had been mostly perfectly healthy until Andeweg had been called in).
I don’t wish to muddy the waters here but I suspect this might have been a case of retro-causality or backwards causation. This is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect (sick trees) precedes its cause in time (Andeweg’s diagnosis). In the Quantum World there is no such thing as time and space – all time is now. In fact Einstein insisted: ‘The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ But let’s not go any further down that rabbit hole now.
From our contention that Andeweg’s BELIEF played a crucial role, we could extrapolate that when a ‘miraculous’ cure happens it could be the belief of the medical practitioner that’s as important as the patient’s. The annals of medicine are full of stories of unexplained and extraordinary healing. Often what all the disparate examples have in common is that the healing is preceded by some kind of profound personal change.
One doctor said, ‘The patient who begins their journey is a different self from the one who ends it.’ Recovering sufferers were observed to have had a ‘dissociative experience’ or had about them a ‘differentness’ or experienced ‘an existential shift’ that set them on the path to remarkable recovery. Could it be that, by believing in creating a new self, the Minds of these patients caused a ‘collapse of the wave function’ to bring into being a different self, one without cancer, for instance?
As I mentioned earlier, in his ground-breaking book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, Bruce Lipton documents proof that it’s the mind’s perception of the environment, not our genes, that controls life at the cellular level. The mind passes messages to the body’s trillions of cells which act on those messages. If told you have cancer, the body believes it (the nocebo effect) but when told the opposite, the body accepts it (placebo effect).
In one experiment a group of cancer patients were injected with plain salt water. Thinking they were being treated with chemotherapy they lost their hair. In another experiment doctors found that the more dramatic the treatment the bigger the placebo effect. Big pills seemed to work more effectively than small ones. And even though the medication was inert it seemed to spark a physical mechanism as real as any drug. Not only did it relieve pain it also slowed the breathing and heart rate, just as opioids do.
So be careful of the power of belief. This power is the reason that medical diagnoses often become self-fulfilling prophesies. People often heal themselves when they have been convinced that healing is taking place – their unconscious minds then manufacture what is necessary for a cure. It has been proved scientifically that if a treatment signifies care and hope to the patient, it often works.
But this ‘belief effect’ isn’t confined to healing. Addressing the topic of drugs trials, Bruce Lipton talks of the ‘Experimenter effect.’ He says that if the trials are paid for by the pharmaceutical companies the outcome is often in their favor. This is not because of cheating, but rather because the mindset of the experimenters influences the outcome of the experiment.
He points out another interesting observation – that 95-99% of our body is controlled by our subconscious, which has mostly been pre-programmed by the age of six. After that it needs to be re-programmed to counter negative traits. This would explain how emotional traumas experienced as a young child will often manifest in physical, mental or emotional illness much later in life. I knew an 80-year-old afflicted with a lifetime of physical and mental torture until a therapist uncovered sexual abuse which had occurred at the age of six. Sadly, that client was only able to enjoy a few years of peace before dying.
Anthony Talmage is author of four books in his Psychic Mind series, Dowse Your Way To Psychic Power, In Tune With The Infinite Mind, Unlock The Psychic Powers Of Your Unconscious Mind and the just-published Crack the Cosmic Code (and write your own tomorrow) all available in Kindle, printed and audio versions from Amazon. Anthony also covers more of the above themes in his popular podcast, available for free to listen or download here. It’s had over 18,000 downloads so far!
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