The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [40]
Finally the manager of the warehouse retrieved the call and restored the blessed silence. In the quiet, still air, I heard the manager respond, “Yes, he’s here.” I looked up at that moment, from the darkest depth of my life, and saw the phone being extended toward me. It was the Caribbean-based medical school that had hired me two years earlier. The president of the school had spent two days tracking my erratic trail from Wisconsin to California so he could ask me if I would be interested in teaching anatomy again.
Would I be interested? Does a bear relieve himself in the woods? “How soon do you want me?” was my reply. He said, “Yesterday.” I told him I would love the job but needed an advance on my salary. The school wired the money that same day, and I split the proceeds with my crew. I then flew back to Madison to prepare for an extended stay in the tropics. I bid farewell to my daughters and hastily packed my clothes and a few household items. Within twenty-four hours I was back at O’Hare Airport waiting for Pan Am’s Clipper Ship to the Garden of Eden.
By now you’re no doubt wondering what my failed rock ‘n’ roll career has to do with quantum physics—welcome to my unorthodox lecturing style! For the linear-minded, we’re officially back to quantum physics, through which I was delighted to learn that scientists cannot understand the mysteries of the universe using only linear thinking.
Listening to the Inner Voice
While I was waiting for the flight, I realized suddenly that I had nothing to read while strapped into a seat for five hours. Moments before the gate was to close, I left the line and ran down the concourse to a bookstore. The task of selecting one book out of hundreds of choices, while simultaneously envisioning the possibility that my plane’s doors would close and leave me behind, almost paralyzed me. In a state of confusion, one book jumped out at me, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature by physicist Heinz R. Pagels. (Pagels 1982) I quickly scanned the jacket and found that it was a quantum physics text written for the lay audience. Stubbornly adhering to the quantum physics phobia I had displayed since college, I immediately put the book down and began to search for something lighter.
As the secondhand on my mental stopwatch entered into the red zone, I picked up a self-proclaimed best seller and ran to the cashier. While the clerk was preparing to ring up the best seller, I looked up and saw another copy of Pagels’s book on the shelf behind the clerk. Midway through the checkout process, with time running out, I finally broke through my aversion to quantum physics and asked the clerk to add a copy of The Cosmic Code.
After I boarded the plane, I calmed down from my adrenalized trip to the bookstore, worked on a crossword puzzle, and then finally settled down to read Pagels’s book. I found myself burning through its pages, even though I had to continually back up and read sections over again and again. I read through the flight, the three-hour layover in Miami, and an additional five hours en route to my island paradise. Pagels was completely blowing me away!
Before boarding the plane in Chicago, I had no idea that quantum physics was in any way relevant to biology, the science of living organisms. When the plane arrived in Paradise, I was in a state of intellectual shock. I realized that quantum physics is relevant to biology and that biologists are committing a glaring, scientific error by ignoring its laws. Physics, after all, is the foundation for all the sciences, yet we biologists rely on the outmoded, albeit tidier, Newtonian version of how the world works. We stick to the physical world of Newton and ignore the invisible quantum world of Einstein, in which matter is actually made up of energy and there