Our culture attributes many of our shortcomings to genetics. We think this confuses mechanism for cause, and that we all have gold medal genes.
This article is aimed at everyone who has the cognizance to read it (perhaps after translation). All the ideas presented here, of course, still apply to everyone playing the actual game.
None of this is medical advice. Always follow the advice of your doctors.
Programs and processes
Let’s put on our nerd hat for a few minutes to discuss the difference between computer programs and processes. A computer program is a file on disk that was written for a specific task. Some programs manage hardware. Others interface mostly with the user. You can see many programs displayed on the screen, but most run silently in the background doing housekeeping and providing various services to yet other programs.
A computer process, on the other hand, is a computer program that has been loaded into memory and is actively running. One program can be loaded and run multiple times, even concurrently. When a process ends, the program on disk remains unchanged. A program is essentially a template for a potential process.
Processes can only exist when there’s a corresponding program on disk. Programs can exist on disk with no corresponding process in memory. One is necessary for the other, but not the other way around.
Computers ship with lots of programs (the operating system). Some programs are designed to start up (boot or bootstrap) a computer. Others exist to shut it down gracefully. These startup and shutdown programs are instructive examples. They’re both quite necessary for computer operation, but they aren’t active for the majority of the runtime of a computer. Furthermore, nobody wants both startup and shutdown code running at the same time; that would be silly.
Beyond the bare necessities, the users are the ones who determine which programs actually get to run as processes, for how long, and how often.
Productive understanding of genetics
Everyone has heard of DNA; it’s our genetic coding. DNA is largely fixed and is our biological analog of a computer program. Your actual physical characteristics, on the other hand, are analogous to the collection of running processes on a computer. It turns out that we have some amount of control over our physical characteristics despite unchanging DNA.
The relatively new field of epigenetics is the study of differences in physical characteristics that aren’t explained by changes in the DNA. In a very real sense, genes can be switched “on” or “off” (expressed or not expressed) by various factors including environment, diet, and lifestyle.
The following is an example that perfectly makes our point about diet. Trial participants eating more citrus fruit were observed to experience epigenetic changes. Indeed, a little orange juice in our diets switches “on” over 3,400 genes related to improved circulation. Researchers are beginning to link lifestyle changes with increased life expectancy via the same epigenetic mechanisms.
Maybe the most satisfying collection of epigenetic changes comes from our own thought processes. When researchers speak of environment and lifestyle, they often explicitly include stress. Our abilities to cope with stress follow largely from our attitudes about our surroundings and other habits of thought.
Admittedly, we’re a little hard on academic researchers, but in this case, we’re pleasantly surprised. Here’s a paper reviewing some of the associations made so far in the field. Various mindfulness activities (Yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, etc) were found to increase immunity, decrease inflammation, and decrease cortisol. Alternately, skip to the summary table.
Epigenetics is a new field making steady progress, and nobody expects that to stop tomorrow. Therefore, we should be excited to expect much more to come.
One generation to the next
People are very quick to blame their parents for anything they don’t like in their lives. They blame their genes, their circumstances, and even their communities. Gold medal genes are something everyone else has. We’ve had it so easy for so long, that people have stopped taking responsibility for their outcomes. They’re playing according to the clueless rules.
Poor health is pervasive in modern society. While the numbers aren’t hugely important, we estimate that population-wide poor health is attributable to the following “causes”.
- 80% diet
- 19% lifestyle
- 1% other factors including genetics
If this wasn’t a site dedicated to the law of attraction, that would be the end of the story. Those numbers live in the world of facts, but we believe there’s a larger truth. The diet, lifestyle, and genetics mentioned above are only mechanisms and live downstream of the cause.
“Even diarrhea is hereditary because it runs in your jeans.”
6th graders everywhere
Still, most people want to point to their similar-looking family members and blame poor health entirely on their genes. What people forget is that habits of thought and attitudes are passed down through the generations as thoroughly as DNA. Black sheep of the family buck the trend a little, but overwhelmingly we continue to think similarly to how we were raised to think. Children absorb their parents’ habits and attitudes like a sponge (even before birth), and the law of attraction therefore follows suit.
From silver to gold medal genes
We think everyone reading this has world-class gold medal genes.
Michael Phelps is a gold medal athlete in swimming. As the record-holder for the most number of Olympic gold medals in history, he literally has gold medal genes.
Let’s play a game, and imagine what would happen if tomorrow he decided to compete professionally in another sport like running. Would he bring home the gold? Probably not. We suspect he would still perform above average because of his drive and existing fitness, but also because the average person is at home on the couch. His build and skeleton are all wrong for running, and he’s not terribly optimized for most other sports. We jokingly say he’s the Frog Mario of athletes. He’s only a gold medal athlete for the sports that play to his strengths.
For every sport that gets played on television, there are countless other sports that haven’t even been invented yet. We’re all optimized for something, and to a large extent, we get to control whether or not that something makes its way into our experience.
Sports. Careers. Significant others. Ideas. Health outcomes. Wealth opportunities. Everything is managed by the law of attraction. Should sports or health be any different?
Gold medal genes
We all have genes and lots of them. Those genes include code to facilitate growing up but also physical death. Others handle healing, housekeeping, maintenance but also aging. Whether or not those processes express ideally are reflections of our intent at various levels of our being. Early on, our inner beings exert most of the influence, but as we develop patterns of thought here in our physical bodies, we exert more influence from here.
It’s nice that researchers are starting to identify some of the mechanisms behind the process, but given what you’ve read elsewhere on this site, it’s a little immaterial. On the other hand, if you need a little help broadening your acceptance of the subject, a little science in this case can go a long way.
The law of attraction gives us everything we want, but our physical bodies respond the quickest to our thoughts. Allowing better health is a fantastic playground for consciously working with the law of attraction. You know if you’re going in the right direction based on how it feels, and don’t be surprised if you need to reconsider a couple of your internal guardrails. You’re in the driver’s seat, and you can always steer in a new direction. The road is your gold medal genes, but you choose where to go.
