Super Brain (30 page)

5. The balance between inner and outer worlds is always maintained

Cells don’t get hung up about their inner world. They aren’t neurotic or anxious about the future. They harbor no regrets (although they certainly do carry the scars of the past—ask the liver of an alcoholic or the stomach lining of a chronic worrier). Because they don’t complain, it’s easy to assume that cells have no inner life, but they do. The dividing line between inner and outer is the cell’s outer membrane. In many ways it is the cell’s miniature brain, because the cell receives all its messages at the receptor sites that crowd the cell membrane by the thousands. These receptors let some messages in and keep others out. Like floating lily pads, they open out to the world but have roots that reach beneath the surface.

On the inside, these roots allow various messages to go where they are needed. If you experience denial or repression, or the censorship of certain feelings and the eruption of others, or if you feel
the tug of addiction and the inflexibility of habits, all those things can be traced to the cell membrane. Receptors are constantly changing, fulfilling the need to keep the inner and outer world in balance. This is yet another aspect of the gift of adaptability. Deepak likes to say that we don’t just have experiences; we metabolize them. Every experience turns into a coded chemical signal that will alter the life of your cells, either in a small way or in a big way, either for a few minutes or for years at a time.

Trouble arises when a person seals off his inner world and fails to match it to the outer world. There are two extremes here. At one extreme are psychotics, whose only reality is their distorted thinking and hallucinations. At the other extreme are sociopaths, who have no conscience and barely any inner world; their whole focus is exploiting other people “out there.” In between these two poles lies a vast array of behaviors. The inner and outer worlds become imbalanced through all kinds of defensive mechanisms. In other words, we insert a kind of screen that separates the outer world from the way we react to it. The kinds of screens that people put up include the following:

Denial—refusing to face how you really feel when things go wrong.

Repression—growing numb to feelings so that events “out there” can’t hurt you.

Inhibition—clamping down on feelings, using the logic that diminished feelings are safer as well as more acceptable to society.

Mania—letting feelings run wild, without regard for the repercussions that will come your way from society; the opposite of inhibition.

Victimization—denying yourself pleasure because others won’t give it to you, or accepting the burden of pain because you feel you deserve to.

Control—seeking to place fences around both the inner and outer world so that neither can break through your boundaries.

Domination—using force to keep others in an inferior position while you indulge in your own power fantasy.

What would it be like for you to live without these screens? In a word, you would have emotional resilience. Studies of people who have managed to live in good health to the age of one hundred indicate that their biggest secret is the ability to remain resilient. Centenarians have suffered the same setbacks and disappointments as everyone else, but they seem to bounce back more easily and to let the burden of the past weigh lightly on them. Emotional resilience implies that defensive mechanisms are not very present, because when they are, a person holds on to old hurts, harbors secret resentments, and incorporates stress rather than throwing it off. Your body pays the price for every defense you put up.

Cells don’t act in any of these distorted ways. Instead, there is in-flow and out-flow, the natural rhythm of life. The cell’s inner response matches external events. To restore this rhythm in yourself requires awareness. Everyone has psychological baggage, and our tendency is either to protect our inner self from more hurt or to ignore our inner life because it’s too messy to face. The path that leads to a balance between “in here” and “out there” might go something like the following:

This feels bad. I don’t want to deal with it
.

It’s not safe to show how I feel
.

The world is a scary place. Everyone has a right to protect themselves
.

I’ll deal with my issues tomorrow
.

Things don’t seem to be getting better on their own
.

Maybe I need to face my hidden attitudes and suppressed feelings
.

I’ve looked inside, and there’s a lot of work to do. But it isn’t as scary as I imagined
.

It’s a relief to let go of old issues
.

I’m beginning to feel more comfortable in the world and a lot safer
.

6. Toxins and disease organisms are immediately spotted and defended against

If cells had an opinion about the way we conduct our lives, they would no doubt express amazement at how much we tolerate toxins. By nature, cells instantly expel toxic substances or counteract them. The immune system’s chief assignment is to separate harmful invaders from harmless ones. The kidneys’ assignment is to filter toxins from the blood. A vast array of bacterial flora are in your intestines and need to be there (taking an antibiotic will indiscriminately wipe out most of the bacteria in your body and will throw off your digestion for a while, perhaps dramatically), and an equally vast range of biochemicals course through the blood. The immune system and kidneys have evolved to tell the good from the bad. Your body’s intelligence is finely attuned to toxicity and guards against it. The same lesson has been harder for human beings to learn.

When mainstream medicine ignored the campaign for a more natural diet and against food additives, it did a disservice to the public welfare. Ever since the meat and dairy industries began massively adding hormones to speed up the production of meat and increase drastically the amount of milk that dairy cows give, suspicious changes have occurred in public health, such as the early onset of menstruation in young girls and a rise in breast cancer. (Breast tissue is highly sensitive to foreign substances and can easily mistake them for hormonal signals.) Even today the average physician has minimal education in nutrition and diet. But doctors should have
joined the campaign against potentially toxic contamination of our air, water, and food.

Populations with contaminated water and inadequate sewage are prone to all kinds of epidemics and shortened life span. But we have not yet studied the correlation of life expectancy with additives in the “normal” American diet. The government monitors the use of pesticides and insecticides by law, yet it rarely pursues and prosecutes violations. Huge market forces at work promote fast food, quick-to-market beef, high sugar content, and a wide range of preservatives. But no one needs to wait for studies to pinpoint which additive is toxic and which isn’t. A high-fat and sugar-laden diet is already risky. Caution is the best attitude; eating a natural diet makes the best sense. Why not favor the least toxicity in your diet that you can reasonably achieve?

This shouldn’t turn into a rationale for extremes. To date, no study has shown that people who obsessively take large amounts of supplements or who rigorously eat organic food live longer than people who eat a normal balanced diet.
Toxin
is a scary word, but a balanced approach is better than total purity motivated by fear. Pesticides and insecticides are legally mandated to degrade by the time food comes to market, and they are washed off when produce is processed for sale—in any event, washing your fruits and vegetables at home should be standard practice. It’s sensible not to entirely trust the food industry, who reassure us that we don’t ingest enough preservatives, additives, and pesticides to harm us. Over a lifetime, you are what you eat. That is warning enough.

The campaign for a better diet is part of the overall trend toward higher compliance (if only it would move faster), and the bigger problems are the invisible toxins that degrade well-being. They, too, are well publicized: stress, anxiety, depression, domestic violence, and physical and emotional abuse. You can’t see or taste these toxins, but the same difficulty—noncompliance—is at work. People put up with toxic lifestyles far too much. They behave in ways that impact
their bodies very badly, or they endure similar behavior from family, friends, and coworkers. The solution is awareness, honestly looking in the mirror and finding a way to expel invisible toxins from your life. The pathway looks something like this:

I’m strong and healthy. I can eat anything I want
.

Nothing seems to be going wrong
.

“Natural” is for ex-hippies and people who worry too much
.

I’ve looked into it, and there are more toxins than I thought
.

Better to be safe than sorry
.

I have to change today if I want to be healthy tomorrow
.

I can wean myself off processed foods if I try
.

I deserve a state of well-being. It will take effort, but it’s worth it
.

Ridding your life of invisible toxins follows a different pathway but not that dissimilar. You move from thinking
I can put up with this
to
My life is being damaged
and finally to
I deserve a state of well-being
. Rationales and inertia are powerful things. We can spend years putting up with toxins because our minds find reasons not to change. Recognize how powerful these forces are, and respect them. You don’t need to mount a frontal assault in an attempt to purify your life. It’s good enough to evolve in the right direction. The wisdom that took billions of years to evolve in cells deserves a few years of serious consideration from you.

7. Death is an accepted part of the cell’s life cycle

Cells manage something we can only envy and barely understand: they put all their energy into remaining alive, and yet they are not afraid to die. We’ve already touched on apoptosis, which is programmed death that genetically tells a cell when it is time to die. But most of the time cells divide rather than die in the way we fear our own death—they defy mortality when they turn themselves into a new generation of cells. Reincarnation happens before your very
eyes, if you are watching cell mitosis through a microscope. Human beings have a more unsettled attitude toward dying, but over the past few decades—accelerating after Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s groundbreaking 1969 book,
On Death and Dying
—our social attitudes have become less fearful.

The wisdom of cells correlates perfectly with the world’s great teachers of wisdom. Death is not the equal and opposite of life. It is part of life, which overarches everything. Whatever is born must die, and yet in the cosmic scheme, to die is only a transition to another kind of life. Renewal is nature’s constant theme. These themes are controversial when people compare their religious beliefs and when they war over dogmatic truth. But cells are not theological, and neither is Nature as a whole.

A skeptic will fire back at any faith-based view of life, contending that the universe is cold and impersonal, ruled by random events, and ultimately indifferent to human existence. Strangely, the contest between faith and skepticism doesn’t seem to impact how a person approaches their own mortality. Coming to terms with dying is so personal that it transcends belief. There are devout believers who quake with fear at the prospect of dying, and skeptics who face it with equanimity. The essential point, first made on a wide scale by Kübler-Ross, is that dying is a process that passes through stages. By now those stages are familiar: grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. (Deepak knows two sisters who attended their eighty-nine-year-old mother as she was going through hospice care. Each sister sat on one side of the bed, taking turns reading aloud from
On Death and Dying
, hoping to offer solace to their mother, who was listening quietly with eyes closed. Suddenly it dawned on them that she had died. Spontaneously one sister exclaimed, “But you’re only on stage four!”)

In the intervening years, disagreement has arisen over whether Kübler-Ross correctly described the stages of dying and over the order in which they occur. But the bigger lesson is that dying should
be as dynamic as living, an experience that evolves as you enter it for yourself. Some cultures, such as Tibetan Buddhism, offer extensive preparation for death and a highly detailed theology of various heavens and hells (although these
bardos
are better thought of as states of consciousness after the physical body has been left behind). The West has no such tradition—except among Native Americans—and each person must consider the issue of death on his or her own. But consider it we must. If you are afraid of death, it is bad for your body, not because death looms so darkly but because fear of any kind is toxic.

The picture of feedback loops constantly sending messages to your cells is inescapable. The good news is that the sting of death is largely psychological, and so you can remove it. Nature is on your side. The vast majority of dying patients have come to terms with it; hospice workers often note that it is the family of the dying person who have the greatest anxiety and suffer from the most stress. Moreover it’s too casual, and mistaken, to link aging and death. Aging happens to the body; death happens to the self. Therefore, the person who has the strongest sense of self, who has deeply investigated the great question of “Who am I?” is likely to have the most calmness in the face of death.