Bruce Lipton is the best-selling author of The Biology of Belief and co-author with Steve Bhaerman of the newly released, Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and How to Get There from Here. After receiving a PhD degree from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in the early 1950s, he embarked on a career as a developmental biologist and paradigm-shifting medical researcher that has spanned more than four decades.

Dr. Lipton, maybe we should start with the basics. As a global community, we’ve gotten ourselves into “this fine mess” through poor choices and irresponsible actions. What shapes our behaviour?

Human behaviour is the consequence of a large, collective number of personal individual beliefs. The more people who share the exact same beliefs, the more they manifest an energy field which then precipitates a complementary physical field. The way that we’re living and the beliefs that we entertain collectively are materializing as an expression.

The way we’re living today, only five per cent of our lives is controlled by the conscious mind—the seat of desires and aspirations. That means 95 per cent of our lives is controlled automatically by the “default,” which is unbconscious programming, and which is primarily downloaded from observing other people’s behaviour. Whatever our parents, family and teachers said to us, like “you’re not loveable, you’re not smart enough, you’re not good enough, you can do better, you don’t deserve anything—that all becomes part of our unbconscious mind’s programming. Then, by definition, 95 per cent of the time we’re unconsciously operating from subconscious mind and, in that state, unaware that we’re manifesting the consequences of programs acquired from other people.

On a conventional day we’re five per cent conscious of our behaviours and moving towards where we want to go, and 95 per cent unconscious and moving towards wherever the program derived from others say we’re supposed to go. The Jesuits knew this 500 years ago. They would say, give me a child and I’ll show you the man. They also said, give me a child until it’s six or seven and it’ll belong to the church for the rest of its life. Which means, give me your first six years and I own the rest of your life. Why? Because you’re going to be operating from the unbconscious programs we download into your mind for most of your life. This is how we become cultivated, cultured, encultured and enslaved.

If it’s collective thinking that’s affecting the future of the planet, who or what is doing such large scale, destructive programming?

Our behaviour is based on our beliefs, and our beliefs reflect beliefs we acquire from institutions like academia, religion, politics, the economy and health care. These institutionalized beliefs have shaped and held the world’s current mass thinking. Originally, the current beliefs were very useful in helping civilization evolve; however, our continued use of these beliefs is now detrimental and leading us to extinction. The crisis the world now faces is evidence that these beliefs are profoundly flawed.

Since the 1870s we’ve lived in a world where we seek truth through science. When we ask, “Is it true?” we’re really asking, “Is it scientific?”  When opinion is handed down from science, we buy it as “truth.” However, frontier science has recently challenged the fundamental “truths” of conventional science, truths that represent the foundation of today’s beliefs. Though science is changing its truth, the public is unaware of this new knowledge. Simply, we’re living by truths that are no longer valid.

“Belief” is a concept that we most often associate with religion. How does religion fit into this picture?

The role of “belief” in our lives isn’t new stuff—it’s ancient. I’m not a religious person, especially because I think that in part, the institution of religion has led to many of the problems that we currently face. But if you just listen to some of the words attributed directly to Jesus, not particularly other people’s interpretations of them, he offered, “You can heal your life with your belief. You can do all the miracles I can do, but you don’t believe.” This wisdom in light of the “new” biology is absolutely true.

There are fundamentalist Christians in the south who do something mind-blowing and profound—in testifying that God protects them, they drink strychnine poison in toxic doses. And nothing happens to them. That’s kind of miraculous, isn’t it? Other people walk across hot coals. If they fully believe they can, they’re not going to get burned. Questioning that belief in the middle of the walk leads to burns and blisters. In other words, the fundamental truth is that we’re not victims, we’re creators and it’s all based on our beliefs.

You wrote that, “The new biological imperative for humankind necessarily involves the understanding that we’re all in this together and survival of the fittest must now give way to ‘thrival of the fittingest.’”

The current model of life and science is flawed. The Darwinian concept, which is a fundamental cultural belief in our civilization, is that life is a struggle for existence and competition for fitness is the primary drive. If we build a culture based on competition where does it lead? It basically leads to war. That’s a perception of a belief that’s been enculturated and expressed as a competitive world where we say in effect, “Screw the other person.” But the fact is that real evolution isn’t based on that principle. It’s based on completely the opposite—on cooperation. Our fate is linked to how well we cooperate with Mother Nature. If we wonder why the competitive model is not working, it’s because evolutionally it’s the pathway to death; it’s completely contrary to the way evolution actually works.