Is My Body Unchangeable?

We have been accustomed to think that because we are alive and have a physical material body, which looks pretty much the same from year to year, that we do not change much. That our skeleton or teeth, which are the hardest substances in our body do not change much throughout our lives, well definately think again. Our physical bodies are in constant change and recreation even though we may not feel it, think it or maybe even believe it is actually happening.

I am going to include a snippet from the book, Quantum Healing, by Deepak Chopra, M.D., as it says this all so well.

The Greek philospher Herclitus made the famous remark, ″You cannot step into the same river twice,″ because the river is constantly being changed by new water rushing in. The same holds true for the body. All of us are much more like a river than anything frozen in time and space.

If you could see your body as it really is, you would never see it the same way twice. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago. The skeleton that seems so solid was not there three months ago. The configuration of the bone cells remains somewhat constant, but atoms of all kinds pass freely back and forth through the cell walls, and by that means you acquire a new skeleton every three months.

The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach lining every four days, with the actual surface cells that contact food being renewed every 5 minutes. The cells in the liver turn over very slowly, but new atoms still flow through them, like water in a river course, making a new liver every six weeks. The DNA is also replaced every six weeks. Even within the brain, whose cells are not replaced once they die, the content of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on is totally different today from a year ago.

It is as if you lived in a building whose bricks were systematically taken out and replaced every year. If you keep the same blueprint, then it will still look like the same building. But it won't be the same in actuality. The human body also stands there looking much the same from day to day, but through the processes of respiration, digestion, elimination and so forth, it is constantly and ever in exchange with the rest of the world.

Certain atoms - carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen - pass through the body very quickly, being and essential part of the things we use up the fastest - food, air, and water. If it were up to only these elements, we would be creating new bodies for ourselves literally every month. However, the pace of renewal is slowed by other elements that do not flow through us very rapidly. The calcium bound into our bones can take a whole year to replace itself - some authorities extend the time to several years. Iron, the component that makes the red blood cells red, is held on to quite tenaciously, being lost mainly through the sloughing of dead skin cells or the actual loss of blood.

Even though the rates of change may differ, change is always there. What I am calling ″Ingelligence″ takes on the role of guiding this change so that we do not collapse into a heap of bricks. That is one of the most obvious facts about the physiology, but intelligence is so changeable, so quick on the move - in other words, so alive - that medical textbooks devote almost no space to it at all.

To get an idea of how limited our current knowledge is, consider the structure of a neuron. The neurons that compose the brain and central nervous system ″talk″ to one another across gaps called synapses. These gaps separate tiny branchlike filaments, the dendrites, that grow at the ends of each nerve cell. Everyone possesses billions of these cells, divided between the brain and the central nervous system, and each one is capable of growing dozens or even hundreds or throusands of dendrites (the total estimated at 100 million million), meaning that at any one time, the possible combinations of signals jumping across the synapses of the brain exceed the number of atoms in the known universe. The signals also communicate with one another at lightning speed. To read this sentence, your brain takes a few milliseconds to arrange a precise pattern of millions of signals, only to dissolve them instantly, never to be repeated again in exactly the same way.

In medical school, we were taught a simple model of how neurons communicate: an electrical charge forms on one side of the synapse, and when the charge is large enough, it jumps like a spark across the gap to deliver a signal to another nerve cell. Assuming that this is the correct mechanism (in reality it isn′t), the description we learned in our neurology textbook in 1966 told us next to nothing about how neurons act in real life; the book model makes sense only for a single nerve cell, isolated, stopped in time, and stripped of context. In truth, the action taking place at the gaps in the nervous system is like that of a cosmic computer reduced to a microcosmic scale. This awesome computer operates continously, handles hundeds of programs at a time, deals in multiple billions of ″bytes″ of information every second, and, most miraculously of all, knows how to run itself.

It is not really our medical training that was at fault here. How can any textbook possibly describe this whole process? To think is to form patterns inside ourselves that are just as complex, fleeting, and rich in their diversity as is reality itself. Thinking is the mirror of the world, and nothing less. Science simply does not have the tools to look at such a phenomenon, which is at once infinite and alive. The living body will not stop to be studied, certainly not as a whole. So when it delivers a shock to science, as in a spontaneous cure of cancer, medicine all but halts in its tracks, bewildered to find that life does not behave as neatly as a laboratory model.

So as for the existence of life after death, we are constantly outliving the death of our cells!

Another interesting thing that Deepak points out is that at the atomic level when we exhale, we are actually breathing out bits and pieces of our organs, and simultaneously inhaling bits and pieces of everybody around us. In fact using radio isotype testing, it can be proven that within each one of us, we have a million atoms which once belonged to Jesus, Buddha or in fact anybody who has ever walked the face of the earth. In the past 3 weeks, a quadrillion atoms, that is 10 with 15 zeros after it, have passed through every single species on the earth. That is, it passed through a lion in Africa, a taxi driver in India, a business man in the United States, a squirrel in the next town over, you next door neighbor and even yourself. So it is a literal fact that we are ALL ONE. We all share the same cells, just like all the water on the earth is continuously recycled. There is no new water ever created on the earth, it is only recycled. So if you thought that the statement that we are all One and share the same body, etc., was just some New Age mumbo jumbo or just religious ramblings, think again!

So some interesting questions derived from all of this could be, if just about all the cells of the human body are recreated every year, then why does chronic disease stick around. Why does it stay in place after brand new cells are recreated anew? Is it thoughts and emotions that may be recreating these diseases and making them seem like they have always been there? If brain cells are recreated, then how do thoughts and memories remain? Are thoughts and memories actually stored in the body? Since the physical body is recreated anew in one year or so, then is it possible that there really can be these other bodies, such as the Mental Body, Emotional Body and Spiritual Body? This seems to be very compelling scientific evidence for the existence of these other bodies. All of these bodies together form the Wholistic (Holistic) You. You are not just merely your physical body, but have at least 3/4 more of you which may very well be the true cause of some of your diseases. It is naive to look just at a symptom without investigating what may be the true cause of it.

So with the body being built anew in realitvelyl such a short period of time, the role of food in our lives is that much more important. We have all heart the phrase, ″You are what you eat.″ Yet now it takes on an extremly more timely and important role. What you eat today can quickly become or interfere with your health. On the flip side, the good news is that if you have had a poor nutitional diet and then change, it a relatively short timeframe, you can build a new improved healthy you!

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/hide comments

Show/hide comment form