Consciousness Influence Epigenetics in the Development of Disease

By Ingrid Fredriksson

Body and soul belong together - a healthy soul in a healthy body

When we do not listen to the soul, the body begins to speak.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authors' Tranquility Press
• Release date: Mar 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781959930426

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Introduction

My interest in consciousness was awakened when by chance I attended a conference on consciousness in Stockholm 2006. There, I came in contact with Dean Radin, Jessica Utts and other well-known names in consciousness research. After that I have gone to every (Toward a) Science of Consciousness (TSC) in Tucson and all over the world. The Science of Consciousness conference takes place every other year among cacti and rattlesnakes in Arizona and every other year somewhere else in the world.

Rattlesnakes yes, they appear when it is dark. In Arizona, I was on a so-called side trip. On the way home from Mt Lemmon, five climate zones higher than Tucson, it was downhill. A bicyclist lay in front of the bus both long and well so that it was almost impossible to drive again. The driver started looking in the rearview mirror and it started to smell like burnt slats. The Conscious people became worried, and the bus had to be stopped. Then some refused to go on board again. No new bus could be found, so in the evening we stood there halfway down the mountain and miles from the nearest person…Personally, I was not a bit worried, but after all these hours I was in need of a ladies' toilet. I walked a bit ahead on the road, the darkness began to settle, and I stepped into the dry bushes.

Tchi, tchi, tchi, I hear… I walked a few meters back but still hear the same sound, although this time a little bit weaker. The next day, I asked an elderly lady at the Arizona Visitor Center what kind of sound I had heard. Thank God you are alive and well, she said, It was a rattle-snake! A rattlesnake! And it was not like on Värmlandstrafik's new buses, where at the back of the bus, there was of course a toilet. Never look for ladies' rooms by the side of the road in Arizona, not when it's dark anyway! Tchi, tchi tchi, I still feel shivers down my spine when I think about it!

Sir Roger Penrose is one of the Nobel laureates who usually participates. In 2019, I returned from the TSC in Interlaken, Switzerland where I gave a talk about epigenetics, Can Consciousness Influence our Epigenetics and can Epigenetics Influence our Consciousness. I have also been to some of the SAND conferences in California. (I met Karl Pribram and heard him discuss the hologram in one of them). This is how my new conscious life began.

I really liked it!

I am the author of 22 books in Swedish and English (www.ingridfredriksson.com), including three books on consciousness. In my first book in this area, Aspects of Consciousness: Essays on Physics, Death and the Mind,¹ Dr. Amit Goswami is a co-author with his chapter Conscious Economics. He seeks to bring the qualities of a new scientific paradigm – based on quantum physics and the primacy of consciousness – to the traditional study of economics. Other well-known co-authors in my books on consciousness are Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and Deepak Chopra’s co-authors Attila Grandpierre and Menas Kafatos, to name a few.

Before my new conscious life, I had studied public health science. As part of the course, I took in health and medical care administration, we were all asked to perform a study. I then did what no one else did, which was to ask the patients who were waiting for surgery what it was like to wait. If you were waiting for a new hip joint, you would of course be in pain, but if you knew when you were going to have surgery, you would not be in as much pain. He who is free is healthy!

After this study, I published the articles H2O, just ordinary water and There is no death, as well as a scientific article on water. In Hong Kong, I then got the idea to publish a book with scientist having different specialties. This led me to write three books on consciousness. The first was Aspects of Consciousness followed by Mysteries of Consciousness with Deepak Chopra's co-author Menas Kafatos and then most recently Essays of Consciousness: Towards a New Paradigm. The famous author Lynne McTaggart has interviewed many of the scientists that have contributed to my books, The following year, 2007, there was a Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Salzburg, Austria, where, among other things, Karl Pribram, gave an interesting lecture and we became good friends.

Henry P. Stapp, Karl Pribram, and Patrik Heelan at Red Bulls restaurant in Salzburg the summer of 2007. Photo Ingrid Fredriksson.

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¹ Fredriksson, I. ed. Aspects of Consciousness: Essays on Physics, Death and the Mind, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

Chapter 2:

The Story about the Hologram

On his part, David Bohm a physicist from the University of London had been one of Einstein’s discussion partners. Bohm’s textbook Quantum Theory was published in 1951 and soon became a classic. Einstein said of it that he had never before seen quantum theory so clearly presented. Bohm was looking for a deeper explanation of reality, dissatisfied as he was with the explanations of the standard interpretations of quantum physics.

Albert Einstein, illustration by Hans Arnold.

Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University, also sought something other than the explanation provided by the standard models to solve neurophysiological puzzles. The two of them, Pribram and Bohm thus approached different problems in their respective disciplines based on the premise that the brain, as well as the entire universe, is a hologram. Through this shift in perspective, they found solutions to many problems. The holographic model was capable of explaining phenomena that were inexplicable (and whose existence therefore were denied by scientists), among which are telepathy, precognition, near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), and psychokinesis.

Karl H. Pribram, was born in Vienna, Austria, and became professor at Georgetown University, and eventually emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University. Pribram was board certified as a neurosurgeon and did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific association cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain. To the general public, Pribram is best known for his development of the holonomic brain model of cognitive function and his contribution to ongoing neurological research into memory, emotion, motivation, and consciousness.

While the theories that enabled the development of the hologram were formulated already in 1947 by Dennis Gabor (who later won the Nobel Prize), it was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Pribram’s theory received more persuasive experimental support. When Gabor first conceived the idea of holography, he wasn’t thinking about lasers. His goal was to improve the electron microscope, then a primitive and imperfect device. His approach was mathematical, as he used a type of calculus invented by the 18th-century Frenchman Jean B. J. Fourier.

What Fourier had developed was a mathematical way of converting any pattern, no matter how complex, into a language of simple trigonometric waves. He also showed how these wave forms could be converted back into the original pattern. Modern applications of Fourier analysis are how a television camera may convert an image into electromagnetic frequencies and how a television set may convert those frequencies back into the original image. The equations Fourier developed to convert images into wave forms and back again are known as Fourier transforms.

Chapter 3:

Pribram and Bohm Together

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, various researchers contacted Pribram and told him that they had uncovered evidence that the visual system worked as a kind of frequency analyzer. Since frequency is a measure of the number of oscillations a wave undergoes per second, this strongly suggested that the brain might be functioning like a hologram. ²

Considered together, Bohm and Pribram’s theories provide a profoundly new way of looking at the world: Our brains mathematically construct an image of the external objective reality by interpreting frequencies that ultimately are projections from another dimension, reflecting a deeper order of existence beyond space and time. The brain in other words is itself a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe.

For Pribram, this synthesis made him realize that the objective world does not exist, at least not in the way we are accustomed to believing. What is out there is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies. Reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into sticks and stones and the other familiar objects that make up our world. But then the question becomes how the brain (which itself is composed of frequencies of matter) is able to take something as insubstantial as a blur of frequencies and make it seem solid as we touch it.

The kind of mathematical process that Beksey simulated with his vibrators is basic to how our brains construct an image of the world out there, Pribram states. In other words, the smoothness of a piece of fine china and the feel of beach sand beneath our feet are really just elaborate versions of the phantom limb syndrome. According to Pribram, this does not mean there aren’t china cups and grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through the lens of our brain, it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we’d experience it as an interference pattern. Which way of seeing is real and which one is an illusion? Both are real to me, says Pribram, or, if you want to say so, neither of them is real.

This state of affairs is not limited to china cups. We, too, have two very different aspects to our reality. We can view ourselves as physical bodies moving through space. Or we can view ourselves as a blur of interference patterns enfolded throughout the cosmic hologram. Bohm believes this second point of view might even be more correct, for to think of ourselves as a holographic mind/brain looking at a holographic universe is again an abstraction, an attempt to separate two things that ultimately cannot be separated. Neither Dennis Gabor, David Bohm or I thought of the universe as a hologram. The holographic arrangement is an enfolded (implicate) background for the space-time universe we navigate. It is a potential reality rather than the experienced reality that we navigate, says Karl Pribram.³ Karl Pribram passed away on January 19, 2015.

Do not be troubled if this is difficult to grasp! It is relatively easy to understand the idea of holism in something that is external to us, like an apple in a hologram. What makes it difficult in the case of our own brains, is that we are not looking at the hologram. We are part of the hologram. This difficulty is another indication of how radical a revision Bohm and Pribram were trying to make of our way of thinking. Yet, this is not the only radical revision. Pribram’s assertion that our brains construct objects pales compared to one of Bohm’s conclusions, which is that we also construct space and time. The implications of this view are just some of the subjects that will be examined as we explore the effects that Bohm and Pribram’s ideas have had on the work of researchers in other fields.

Hence, near-death experiences and many other paranormal phenomena are, in general, perhaps only the clinical description of our right-side temporal lobe withholding information from a time – and space-free non-local reality. These visions often contain precognitive elements like those that were documented by parents that had babies who suddenly died through cot death. If reality is not dependent on time, then precognition would for instance reasonably be possible.

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² Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, p. 27.

³ Karl Pribram, Private communication, Jan 2009.

Chapter 4:

Edgar Mitchell and Russell Targ

At a conference in San Jose, south of San Francisco, I met Edgar Mitchell, who was one of the astronauts who had walked on the moon. Dr. Mitchell, was however as interested in the inner, psychic space as he was in the external space. During Apollo 14's journey to the moon, he thus conducted ESP (extrasensory perception) experiments together with four persons back on Earth. These experiments involved him telepathically trying to send images of the five ESP symbols in a certain order to the receivers on Earth, who then tried to intercept his broadcast. Among the four was the Chicago-based Swede Olle Jönsson (Olle Jonsson). They are considered to have achieved significant results, and Mitchell comments that it is clear that ESP ability is independent of distance. The results are reported in Professor Rhine's Journal of Parapsychology.

I had a good rapport with Edgar Mitchell. He wanted a copy of my book Aspects of Consciousness⁴ but could not contribute because what he wrote had already been published elsewhere. But Russell Targ and Elizabeth Raucher are in that book. Russell Targ was the first to write an essay in Aspects of Consciousness.

Russell Targ and Ingrid Fredriksson at a SAND, Science and Nonduality, conference.

Russell had worked for the CIA, which at the time had a budget of between $ 20 and $ 60 billion. These financial means were among other things used to explore Remote Viewing. The Russians had been exploring techniques for this and the United States was afraid of again falling behind as the Russians had been first in space with Sputnik. I then asked, why had the money been withdrawn? Presumably this was because America is a very religious country. Remote viewing came from God, but it was not in the Bible, and so if it did not come from God, it must have come from Satan. So there was a cross stop for this research. (This was what I myself heard, but others may deny it).

As I said earlier, since 2007 I have been interested in, and attended the conferences on consciousness called Science of Consciousness. Through this, I have become interested in epigenetics, the study of how the activity of genes is turned on or off. Such mechanisms may have an influence on our health and explain how health is affected by the outside world. These mechanisms may be affected by nutrition and stress, as well as above all by our thoughts and feelings. How stress affects us physically and mentally has been extensively probed in the scientific literature.

Amit Goswami and Ingrid Fredriksson at a SAND, Science and Nonduality, conference not far from San Francisco.

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⁴ Fredriksson, I. ed. Aspects of Consciousness: Essays on Physics, Death and the Mind, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

Chapter 5:

Emotions

Amit Goswami, PhD, is a professor of theoretical physics whose research has been focused on quantum physics and consciousness. He claims that Much of the data of mind-body disease (psychosomatic illness) say it is stress related. First, we need to define some terms. A stressor is an outside agent, such as a death in the family, a math problem or an exam, a boring job, and so on. Stress is how he or she mentalizes the feeling as associated with the reaction to the stressor.⁵

Emotion is feeling the language of cells, says Dr. Bruce Lipton.⁶ Contrary to in an outdated understanding of genetics, your genes aren't actually on or off. Different substances cause different responses from your genes, and since it is your brain that decides what signals these send to the cells, it is actually your consciousness that determines how you feel, Lipton now says in an updated version of The Biology of Belief.