by David R. Hamilton, Ph.D.

Every thought and feeling changes something in the body. Ever been embarrassed? Did your face go red at the thought of people looking at you or knowing something private about you? Of course it did. Your thoughts are affecting your biology!

On the positive side, our thoughts can have far reaching health-giving consequences. For example, scientific studies have shown that thinking and feeling care or compassion for another person can bring coherence to the rhythms of the heart. One study even found an increase in key immune chemicals after 5 minutes of such loving thoughts.

Thoughts and emotions even bring about changes at the level of the DNA. Our genes continually switch on and off as the body goes about it’s basic house-keeping. However, our thinking influences the process.

Take a simple example. Say you fall and scrape your knee. As the body begins to repair itself, genes switch on to provide the materials needed for repair, like hormones, clotting factors, even new skin. But if you were focusing your attention on stuff that made you sad, or even believing that you would take ages to heal, then genes would switch on that would interfere with the healing process.

On the other hand, if you imagined that the wound was healed and believed that your thoughts would help, then genes would switch on and you would heal faster.

Additionally, strong emotions like fascination, wonder, awe, excitement, and enthusiasm, as well as spiritual states of consciousness, are so powerful that they even switch on genes that cause brain cells to grow in adults – something that, up until a few years ago, was believed to be impossible. The key is the interaction of emotions with DNA.

This all happens inside the body. Where it gets really interesting is when our thoughts affect things outside of the body.

Some scientists placed organisms in test tubes and found that people could influence them just by intending for them to change. For instance, people could either mentally speed up or slow down the mutation of E-coli on command.

Some university research has also shown that a thought about a person is registered in their body. While hooked up to devices measuring electrical resistance in the skin, scientists measured changes in people depending on the thoughts held about them by people in another room.

These things are able to occur because all life is interconnected at the quantum level. A thought not only affects your body, but it ripples throughout the invisible web that interconnects all of life. Each of us affects the whole.

Therefore it is possible for us to make a real positive difference in the word by changing our attitudes and behaviours towards each other. In a very real way an act of kindness in your own home or workplace will ripple throughout the interconnectedness of life and make a difference in the lives of people on the other side of the world. And ultimately, it’s not so much the act, but the space of love it came from that it most important. It’s the thought that counts.

So if you want to see a world you dream of then start with yourself. Each of us can make a real difference, regardless of our status in life. Everyone is important. And that means You!

A simple formula is to show love for self, love for others, and love for nature.

www.drdavidhamilton.com

by David Hamilton Ph.D.

If you ask someone for help, more often or not they will. When you visualise something happening in your life, it is like sending out a call for help that is picked up unconsciously by people. Then, people who can help you are unconsciously drawn to you. Have you ever noticed that someone new has come into your life after you started hoping, praying, or visualising for something in particular to happen, or that someone you knew gave you new information or assistance. You also attract intuitions and suddenly get inspired with new ideas.

Quantum physics has revealed an interconnectedness to all things. And Carl Jung suggested that we share a collective unconscious mind. It has parallels with the Internet. Computers are separate from each other as they sit on our desks, but they are connected via the Internet, which is a shared repository of information. Similarly, the collective unconscious mind is a shared hive of information that all of us are connected to. When you hope, pray, or dream of something you want, your intention is felt by people at an unconscious level. Then the people who can help are drawn to be in the same place at the same time as you.

I often describe it using the metaphor of a spider’s web. How does a spider know that a fly is trapped in its web? It feels the vibrations. So in the same way, people feel the vibrations (at deep unconscious and quantum levels) of your hopes, prayers, dreams, and intentions, as you do theirs.

So when you want something in your life, imagine it clearly. And imagine it as if it is happening now. Your thoughts will attract it, either as intuitions and ideas or as people showing up in your life.

Most of us are experts at what I call the law of repulsion. I was a master of it for years. Whenever I wanted something, I must have invoked the law because I always seemed to get the opposite. Things got worse. It led me, when I was growing up, to conclude that if I wanted something there was no chance I could have it. I could only have the things I didn’t want, which was a bit of a bummer.

But the law of repulsion is really the law of attraction in disguise. We sometimes repel our goals because we spend more time complaining about how bad things are at the moment or that ‘ it’s not happened yet ‘, than we do actually imagining what we want. And just as energy flows to where attention goes inside the body, so reality flows in the direction of what you put your attention on in your life too.

The key is to keep your intention, periodically, on what you want instead of the opposite, which is what is happening now. When faced with current reality, just affirm that it is changing. What you want is coming to you. Play pretend, like a child does, every day or so for a couple of minutes.

For some people, change is rapid when they do this. For others, it’s a more gradual process and it takes discipline. But it’s worth it.

You can even wish the best for other people. I have noticed that good stuff happens in their life when I do this. People often show up in their life too, or little miracles happen in their life. All you are doing is giving them a little unconscious mental assistance, like you’re an angel I suppose.

I am a great believer in using the power of intention to make a positive difference in the lives of others, and in the world. I believe that we are far more powerful than we have ever believed ourselves to be. I believe that we have the ability to change the world. All we need to do is try.

Every act with a genuine heartfelt intent behind it sends out vibrations throughout the web that attracts new realities. So it’s not so much what you do, it’s the heartfelt intention behind it that’s matters. In other words, it’s the Thought that Counts!

www.drdavidhamilton.com

David Hamilton is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief. Get the DVD:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by David Hamilton Ph.D.

The scientific view of the brain was previously that it is hardwired. In other words, we are born with brain cells wired up in a particular way that is unchangeable except that our total brain cell count declines with age.

New discoveries in neuroscience have revamped that view. A common term now used is ‘plasticity’, where the brain moulds, changes, and grows depending upon what you are focusing upon.

So, say you were focusing on things that you were grateful for. Brand new connections would spring up between brain cells as you begin to grow an entirely new network connecting brain cells (neurons). This is called a neural network. Many neural networks are created by us….by what we choose to give our attention to.

Therefore your brain and body is not something that you are simply born with, whose health and functioning you can do nothing about. Instead, you are continually growing, changing, moulding, and shaping your brain and your body. You have far more of an effect on your mental and physical health than you’d think. In many ways, it comes down to what you choose to give your attention to.

And with practise you can develop great control over what you give your attention to. In a sense, you can build up your ‘attention muscle’ in the same way that an athlete might develop leg or arm muscles. Regular meditation is a great way to do this, and some recent neuroscience discoveries of meditators have confirmed this. Through repetitive meditation their brains grew significantly more neural connections than control groups who didn’t meditate. And in particular, much of this growth was found in the area of the brain that controls free will.

www.drdavidhamilton.com

David Hamilton is one of the experts featured in the documentary Beyond Belief.  Get the DVD at:  www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

by Dr. David Hamilton

I love to meditate and have made it a daily practice. Being quite scientifically minded I love to monitor how it benefits me. Among other methods I often use the Heartmath FreezeFramer (see http://www.heartmath.com ) so that I can see how my meditations affect the rhythms of my heart.

Doing this helps me to stay in a meditative state for the duration of my meditations (usually 30 – 45 minutes). Any loss of concentration usually shows up quickly on the screen of my laptop as my rhythms lose their coherence. By periodically glancing at the screen, I am reminded to keep my focus.

Meditation has been shown to have many positive effects on the body. It is believed that around 80% of all health problems are either negatively affected by stress, or that stress had a hand in their creation. Meditation is a well-known antidote to stress and so has a positive effect on many health complaints.

Since the widespread use of MRI scanners, scientists have been able to explore the effects of meditation on the growth of the brain. In one recent study (published in the journal, ‘Neurobiology of Ageing’), scientists Giuseppe Pagoni and Milos Cekic, from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, looked at the grey matter volume of the brain to measure the effects of Zen meditation.

Cerebral grey matter volume usually decreases with age, so the study compared the grey matter volume of 13 people performing Zen meditations against that of 13 control people who weren’t meditators.

What they found was that grey matter volume decreased as expected in the control group but not so with the meditators. In other words, meditation had a ‘neuroprotective’ effect: It slowed down the rate of ageing.

Many studies have shown similar anti ageing effects. It has been found also, for instance, that meditation can slow down the decline in levels of the hormone DHEA, which also usually declines with age.

David Hamilton is one of the experts in the documentary Beyond Belief: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

Short video produced by David Hamilton.  You can see David in the film Beyond Belief:   www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

By David R. Hamilton, Ph.D.

There’s an amazing story of the power of the placebo effect that I love. It was recorded in 1957 and demonstrates just how powerful the human mind can be.

A patient had advanced cancer of the lymph nodes (lymphoma) and was told that he had no more than a few weeks to live. He couldn’t get radiotherapy or chemo because he was anemic but he had heard of a new experimental anti-cancer drug called krebiozen and begged his doctor to give him some. So the doctor gave him an injection of it.

Within a few days of the injection he was out of bed and walking about the ward at the hospital. Very quickly the tumors, which had been the size of oranges, had shrunk and were now golf ball sized. His rapid improvement continued and he was soon released from the hospital totally free of cancer.

But about 2 months later there was a story in the papers saying that krebiozen was no good. The man read it, believed it, even though krebiozen had worked for him, and within days his cancer had returned and he was back in hospital.

His doctor, realizing there were few options, then told him a lie because he believed that the patient’s recovery had more to do with his belief in krebiozen than in the drug itself. So he told him that the papers had got it wrong and that the drug really was a great drug. The doctor told him that the cancer probably came back because the batch of drug he got had gone off a wee bit while it was sitting in the hospital pharmacy. He told him that a new batch of double strength krebiozen was due at the hospital soon and he could get an injection of it.

Of course, there was no double strength stuff. The doctor made it up. A couple of days later, pretending that the double strength batch had just been delivered, the doctor gave the patient the injection. But it was an injection of pure water – a placebo. You know what? The cancer rapidly disappeared. The man was healthy and free of cancer once again. He believed it was double strength krebiozen and his belief cured him.

But, once again, about 2 months later the papers ran another story, this time giving krebiozen a death sentence. Apparently the trials had shown it to be useless. This proved to be the last straw for the patient because his tumors quickly reappeared, he was taken back into hospital, and he died 2 days later.

The power of belief!

So if ever someone tells you that something can’t be done, or that you can’t be healed, choose to listen to your inner wisdom that says you can. Faith can move mountains.

This article is Copyright © 2008 by David R. Hamilton Ph.D.

www.drdavidhamilton.com

David Hamilton is one of twenty four experts featured in the film Beyond Belief: www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com

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