Prarabdha and Free Will

Biology of Belief:The Missing Link Between Prarabdha and Free Will
http://www.indology.net/article68.html
Dr. Ramesam
 
ABSTRACT: Traditionally the Karmaphala (effect of actions) is classified as Sanchita (long-term storage), Prarabdha (current suffrage) and Agamika (future in-store). On one hand Bhagavad-Gita says that we are mere helpless puppets mounted on an ever-moving machine and our life is subject to an inevitable momentum. On the other hand our Upanishads and many other scriptures point to a way of escape (Nirvana) from the eternal churning Samsara. On one hand it is projected as if freewill has no basis and on the other, it is shown that relief from the worldly struggles are in our own hand. How does one reconcile this contradiction?
 
What is the missing link between the current suffrage (prarabdha) and free will?
 
Biology tells us that we are what our genes are. But current research on how environment can influence the gene expression has given rise to the new science of Epigenetics. Prenatal research findings demonstrate the influence the environment present in the mother’s womb has on the fetus and the way the child’s mental and physical healths get affected for life. The importance of caring, vibrant and stimulating environment in early childhood development has long been established.
 
The effect meditation and firm self-confidence have on our health to the extent of even affecting the genes is being documented through collaborative research by neuroscientists, psychiatrists and meditation practitioners.
 
Environmental factors including directed thinking appear to have an ability to modify the proteins that act as gates in activating or turning off the genes, thus controlling the gene expression.
 
It is established that thought is a form of energy. Directed thought and meditation are shown to have demonstrable influence in changing the neural circuits in the brain overriding genetic disposition.
 
Confident positive and intense thinking within a carefully orchestrated belief system (not blind dogma) appears to have the potential of bringing about a transformation in an individual superseding the genetic effects.
 
Genotype is perhaps comparable to Sanchita, and Phenotype to Prarabdha.
 
The Prarabdha is subject to constant modification depending on the environment. Individual’s thoughts, whether one is consciously aware or unaware, also effect the gene expression. By creating a facilitating and enabling environment (Satsangatya), it can be possible to alter the program in the genes to the extent that their self-perpetuating character is curbed. This can form the biological basis for ending samsara. One can have a healthy happy body and mental attitude and be not at the mercy of genetic dispensation.
 
1. INTRODUCTION:

Prof. John Smythies, Director of Neurochemistry and Alternative Medicine at The Center for Brain and Cognition, UCSD, commented that I seem to be sympathetic to his cousin’s (Dawkins, 1989) idea of a ‘selfish gene’ in my article “Religion Demystified.” According to Prof. Margulis (2002), the unit capable of replication is a cell. She wryly remarked about Dawkins that a gene does not have a ‘self’ to be selfish. A gene is only a record of information. Irrespective of whether the replicator is a gene or cell, my argument there was about the survival mechanisms a given “packet of information” evolves to perpetuate itself. Based on the concept of a Meme proposed by Dawkins in 1976, Blackmore (1999) elaborated on the tendency of even ideas and thoughts in perpetuating themselves. Buddhists call self-perpetuation through cycles of transmigration as samsara. Breaking this eternal chain is Nirvana. I hope, in this essay, to examine from current biological knowledgebase if it is possible to outwit the program of self-perpetuation indelibly written in the replicating units and be freed from samsara.

The first question that comes is whether we can act with our own volition to liberate ourselves from the cycle of birth and death? Several parts of Bhagavad-Gita answer in the negative. By the Maya of the Supreme, we revolve like puppets mounted on a machine (Sloka 61, Ch XVIII); we are only an apparent cause and whatever has to happen has already happened (Sloka 33, Ch XI); because of the reason that Prakriti produced everything, the world goes round and round (Sloka 9-10, Ch IX); Prakriti performs all actions and only an egoistic fool thinks that “I am the actor” (Sloka 27, Ch III). Thus our hands appear to be tied down for any willful action.

But Seers, sages and visioneers from ancient to modern times have stressed the significance our thinking and a strong belief in what we think have in molding our character. For example:
“Let one, therefore, keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks that he becomes: this is a mystery of Eternity.” – Ch: 6, Maitri Upanishad.

“If one thinks of oneself as free, one is free, and if one thinks of oneself as bound, one is bound. Here this saying ‘Thinking makes it so’ is true.” – Sloka 11, Chapter I, Ashtavakra Gita.
“The man who is attached to the Real becomes Real, through his one-pointed devotion. Just as the cockroach thinking intently on the Bhramara is transformed into a Bhramara.” –Sloka 358, Vivekachudamani.

“Really, it has been your thoughts that have made you feel alternately weak and strong. You have seen how your health has exactly followed your subconscious expectations. Thought is a force, even as electricity or gravitation. The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.” – Shri Lahari Mahasaya’s words as narrated by Shri Yukteswar, quoted in Yogananda (p: 118, 1946).

“There can be miracles, when you believe
Though hope is frail, it’s hard to kill
Who knows what miracles, you can achieve,
When you believe, somehow you will
You will when you believe.”
- Sung by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (I)  in the Movie, “Prince of Egypt” , 1998.

If everything is pre-ordained and pre-programmed in genes or whatever, it will lead one to a fatalistic state of mind. On the other hand, if one could alter people through a purposeful control of environment, society could not have reached the diversity that it enjoys today.

Admittedly, both nature and nurture do play a role in making an individual what he/she is. Much has been written on this. Yet, there does seem to be something more.

2. EPIGENETICS:

Biology tells us that we are what our genes are. Our skin color, color of the eye and hair are decided based on the amount of protein melanin produced by the cells as per the genetic instructions. The stress we can take is dependent on the base levels of cortisol and our anger depends on the base levels of adrenalin that our cells are programmed for. The genes code all the 100,000 odd proteins that make up not only the structure of our body but also define the way our brain functions (hence our mental attitudes and personality). Everyday a gene is identified for a specific disease or character in our body.

But if genes predecide everything, there will be nothing like a personal responsibility for the actions of the individual. Any action done by him/her would not be at his/her volitional discretion but could be totally attributed to the genes within him/her. This approach will offset the basis of all our legal jurisprudence. Society would have to pay the price for the actions of criminals and bear silently the afflictions caused by genetic disorders.

Nathanielsz (2001) says, there is a “gene myopia in our society: a belief that it is the genes alone that determined our health and well-being throughout our life.” The coded genetic information accumulated through the millennia of years of evolution is undoubtedly stored in the DNA. What appears to be more significant is the mechanism of gene expression rather than the presence or absence of a specific gene. Whether a particular gene expresses itself or not or how a protein can form through multiple pathways of instructions of several genes is being now understood. The view that mutations and recombinations in DNA determine the phenotypic traits is getting modified with the emerging science of Epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the DNA sequence. It provides a handle to understand the mechanisms in phenotype transmission and development through gene activation and inactivation without necessarily changing the genes.

Studies of protein synthesis reveal that epigenetic “dials” can create 2000 or more variations of protein from the same gene blue print. Epigenetics is serendipetitiously throwing light on the rationale of the ancient teachings which say that consciously directed thinking can bring about a change in our personality.

3. ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS HERITABLE CHARACTERS:

If only genes determine the mental and physical condition of a person, one would expect identical twins to have exactly the same characteristics throughout their lives. But this is not so. Fraga et al (2005) examined the global and locus-specific differences in DNA of a large cohort of monozygotic twins (those sharing a common genotype). Though the twins were “epigenetically indistinguishable during the early years of life, older twins exhibited remarkable differences in genomic distribution affecting their gene-expression portrait.” The authors also established that “these epigenetic markers were more distinct in the twins who were older, had different lifestyles, and had spent less of their lives together, underlining the significant role of environmental factors in translating a common genotype into a different phenotype.”

Prenatal research shows that it is not merely the post-birth environment that influences an individual. The environment within the mother’s womb too has very significant effect on the health and personality of an individual.

After an elaborate study of the varying environment to which fetus are exposed, Nathanielsz (2001) even goes to the extent of saying that “there are no such people as identical twins,” – that is people identical in all respects because they share an identical genome. He boldly states, “Biomedical research over the past decades has conclusively determined that the physical, hormonal and even emotional interaction between a mother and the child in the womb has a concrete effect on that child’s physical and mental health for decades to come. This discovery is the single most important story to come from biomedical research since the determination of the structure of the gene.”

According to Nathanielsz, there are critical periods during prenatal development when the environment in the womb is more important than the genes on the health we enjoy throughout our life. “Chronic maternal stress during pregnancy – both emotional and physical – can interfere with how the fetus utilizes nutrients and can affect how well or poorly a child functions psychologically throughout life.

” The mother’s cortisol levels during pregnancy have a significant influence on the child’s personality. “Several groups of researchers in a variety of laboratories throughout the world have shown that a fetus’s exposure to excessively high stress hormones will permanently alter the activity of critical components of the stress machinery later in life.” Developing embryo and fetus can be very sensitive to the toxic effects of even small amounts of unwanted, disruptive chemicals, which may virtually be harmless for adults.

An example of the mindset that is generally prevalent is the misconception that the formation of fingerprints is completely under genetic control. Nathanielsz clarifies that, “The specific pattern of fingerprint ridges that form is determined in large part by the extent of swelling in the finger pads at the precise time when fingerprints are forming, around the 10th week of development. When the prenatal environment is challenging, the fetus makes priority of getting blood to the brain, which also happens to push more blood into the developing finger pads, causing them to swell. So when the fetus is short of oxygen for any prolonged period around the time the fingerprints are forming, and blood flow to the brain and head becomes a priority, there will be more whorls formed than flat arches.” He observes that the embryo is in constant communication with the mother and vice versa through hormones and thus the mental state of the mother influences the later life of the baby irrespective of the genes.

He writes, “although our genes are indeed fixed at the moment of conception, the more complex the trait involved, the more the environment in the womb affects what our bodies do with those genes. Information from the environment around the fetus, in other words, helps determine which genes are switched on, which are switched off, and when these alterations in gene activity occur.”

Nathanielsz makes the important comment that “by taking information from the womb and the world beyond and building that information into the expanding and developing circuitry of his brain and body, your baby is learning and developing.….What we know is that a highly stressful pregnancy will influence the environment in which the fetus develops, and will mold stress circuits in his brain and body. These altered stress circuits may program your child’s brain so that he is less able to keep a lid on roiling emotions and more likely to let anger and frustration boil over when difficulties arise.”

Alterations in endocrinal system, brain development etc are well documented through several studies for the adults who had undergone traumatic experiences during childhood. On the basis of extensive genetic research, psychiatrists at the Washington University have determined that four aspects of temperament are 50 –60 % heritable. These characteristics manifest themselves early in life and involve preoccupational biases in perceptual memory and habit formation. The other 40-50 % of personality is determined by character variables like self-directedness, cooperativeness and self-transcendence. These dimensions of character are shaped by family influences, and mature in adulthood, influencing personal and social effectiveness.

Nobel Laureate, Dr. Kandel says, “One of the most interesting findings was that genes are actually being turned on — they are not the invariant controllers of behavior, but, rather, they are being turned on and off by environmental stimuli, such as our interactions with other people.”

Gabbard (2000) surveyed the literature discussing the mutual influence of genes and environment from a psychiatric angle. He found that the brain responds to environmental influence through the alteration of gene expression. He holds, following Kandel, that learning process may produce alterations of gene expression. Preliminary evidence from other species (like crayfish, rhesus monkeys) indicates that even social cues available in the environment influences the way in which a specific neurotransmitter affects an organism. In crayfish, investigators identified a neuron whose response to the neurotransmitter serotonin differs dramatically depending on the animal’s social status! If the social status of the animal changes, the effect of serotonin also changes.

It is obvious from the above that our genetically inherited characters are influenced by the environmental conditions we are exposed to whether it is in our mother’s womb and later on in the world. Though the basic body structure, color of the skin etc are defined by the genes at the time of conception, what we are in our health and personality depend on the environment including our biosocial relationships in the world and how we perceive our own position relative to the world around.

4. OVERRIDING GENETIC PROGRAMMING:

Way back in 1988, the work of Dr. J. Cairns at Harvard revealed that organisms could change their genes to accommodate environmental alterations. However, much of the research effort for decades has gone towards genes as carriers of personality traits. Lipton, B.H., (2005) says, “chromosomes proteins are turning out to play as crucial a role in heredity as DNA.” In the chromosome, the DNA forms the core, and the proteins cover the DNA like a sleeve. The activity of the gene is “controlled” by the presence or absence of the ensleeving proteins, which are in turn controlled by environmental signals.

Based on his work on the cloned endothelial cells that line the blood vessels, Dr. Lipton says that cells monitor their world closely and change their behavior based on the information they pick up from the environment. For example, cells cultured in the lab would gravitate toward nutrients but would retreat from noxious agents. The cell wall acts like a brain for the cell. The fundamental structure of the cell membrane is that of a semi-permeable barrier. There are two classes of integral membrane proteins – receptors and effectors within the cell wall. Receptor proteins, which are functionally equivalent to our sensory receptors, recognize signals and elements within the cells’ environment. Cell receptors recognize both chemical (food, hormones, toxins) and physical (electromagnetic) signals. Effector proteins are responsible for the cells structural and behavioral characteristics.

This gives us a clue that careful control of the environment to which our body cells are exposed to, we may target a specific behavioral outcome: e.g. a pleasant incense smell may have a calming effect on the mind – like at the time of meditation. (In fact Newberg and others (2001) report that that certain odors can result in very specific emotional responses: lavender evokes feelings of relaxation and calm while acitic acid has been shown to trigger feelings of anger and disgust).

Meisler (2005) explains that turning on and off the genes is a major activity of all living cells. Francois Jacob and Jacque Monod found 50 years ago that sugars in the food supply turn on the genes required for their own digestion. In addition, when bacteria are transferred from a medium containing the sugar lactose to a medium without lactose, the bacteria turn off their lactose-metabolizing genes. Almost 10 percent of the genes in the human genome produce proteins that regulate the expression of other genes. One of the mechanisms of switching on a gene is through short chains of DNA sequences, known as enhancers, which recognize specific proteins and chemicals and get turned on in the presence of that molecule.

5. THOUGHT IS ENERGY:

Thought originates in the brain as a result of neuronal firing. The constant hum of neural firing generates a measurable electromagnetic field. Conscious processing in the brain generates a field of 35-40 Hz usually called gamma activity. The lower ranges are alpha, beta, theta and delta. Efforts are already on to harness the “thought energy” for mechanical purposes.

Experiments at Armstrong Laboratory’s Alternative Control Technology lab unleashed the energy of brain waves to command a flight simulator. Wheel chairs that can move and turn by simple thoughts of “Go right”, “Go left” are designed for handicapped persons. These examples clearly demonstrate that ‘thinking’ is a form of energy. Based on this Lipton (2005) answers the question: “How is it possible for the mind to override genetic programming?”

He says, “Thoughts, the mind’s energy, directly influence how the physical brain controls the body’s physiology. Thought “energy” can activate or inhibit the production of proteins that affect the cell’s function via the mechanics of constructive and destructive influence.”

6. INFLUENCE OF BELIEF ON BODY CHEMISTRY AND GENES:

All beliefs are basically a thought. It may be our name or an experience, belief is something we have accepted and stored in memory. If the acceptance is unverified and blind, it is a dogma. A set of beliefs becomes a belief system. That such a system has remarkable influence on our bodily and mental health is being established through several studies from diverse fields.
The best-documented effect of belief is the Placebo Effect. It was over 50 years ago that Dr. H.K. Beecher reported the Placebo Effect, by which over a third of the patients get better by a mere illusion of treatment. This beneficial effect, according to Dr. Benson (1993) depends on (i) the belief of the person, (ii) the belief of the healer, and (iii) the positive and trusting relationship between the two. Dr. Benson says “belief – including the expectations for healing fostered by such belief – had the power to release significant quantities of the powerful dopamine neurotransmitter, which has been linked to feelings of well-being and happiness.” Zubieta (2005) did an experiment on volunteers with a belief in a pain killer (actually a placebo) administered by them. They compared the brain scans of pain-only phase with the pain-plus-placebo phase using positron emission tomography.

They found that when the placebo was being administered, the brains released significantly more endorphins, the brain’s natural painkillers. The placebo effect could possibly be linked to the belief the volunteers had in what was administered to them.

Negative beliefs (Nocebos) too work in a similar way but with negative effects. It is observed that when the body is fed with images of disability and despair, it accepts these limits as truthful and responds with impairment. “Drs. C. Butler and A. Steptoe studied in 1986 the effect of competing powers of suggestion on asthmatics at the University of London. They found that bronchial constriction was caused by belief and prevented by belief unrelated to any drug taken.” If the nocebo is stored unconsciously, the effect could be much more than the consciously wished for action. Dr. Lipton opines that once programmed into the subconscious mind, the nocebos control our biology for the rest of our lives…unless we can figure out a way to reprogram them. It is so because the subconscious mind can process 20 million environmental stimuli per sec vs. 40 by the conscious mind.

It is interesting to note that, “neurological research reveals that before we consciously color the world around us with our thinking and acquired beliefs, brain mechanisms mark our perceptions, forming opinions and assigning emotional values. Before we have even a chance to mull over the presence of a new sight or sound, regions of our brain react by assigning an initial but influential value to it.

These automatic attitudes make us incapable of utter objectivity or neutrality.” According to Dr. Lipton, basic behavioral patterns, beliefs and attitudes we observe in our parents become “hard-wired” as synaptic pathways in our subconscious minds. “Subconscious mind takes over the moment our conscious mind is not paying attention. The conscious mind can think forward and backward in time while the subconscious is always operating in the present.”

This emphasizes the need on our part to be ever vigilant and be in a state of constant awareness.

Dr. J. S. Levin reviewed in 1994 hundreds of epidemiologic studies to conclude that belief in a power lowers death rates and increases health. Dr. Benson observed that, “Practicing medicine and conducting medical research, I’ve learned that invoking beliefs is not only emotionally and spiritually soothing but vitally important to physical health.” Dr. Benson concludes that our brains often cannot distinguish external from internal “reality.”

 When you dream that you are being chased, your heart rate increases just as it would if you were really being chased. For your brain this is reality. Our brains are wired for beliefs and expectancies. When activated, the body can respond as it would if the belief were a reality.

7. RELAXATION:

We hardly need any evidence to say that out thoughts profoundly affect our body chemistry – whether it is anger or anxiety, pleasure or depression. What is important, however, is that conscious severing the prior thought also produces characteristic biological and molecular changes in the human body.

“Relaxation exercises bring about a remarkable calming of body and brain as established from fMRI studies at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Calming response may cause the body to release increasing amounts of nitric oxide throughout the body. This nitric oxide in turn counters the negative effects of the stress hormone norepinephrine.” Dr. Benson (2003) feels that the whole nitric oxide mechanism may somehow be connected with what we think of as the “mind.”

Dr. Benson writes that, “The potentially destructive stress response typically occurs automatically when an outside stressor – such as pressure as work, fear, or anxiety – causes the body and brain to go on full alert. Animals and humans share this stress-response. The relaxation response (by “letting go”) is peculiarly human in that it tends to arise from a specific act of volition or a conscious relaxation strategy.” Placebo effect when combined with relaxation response magnifies the beneficial impact on health.

8. INTENTIONAL LEARNING AND PLASTICITY OF THE BRAIN:

Current brain research is establishing that brain has tremendous plasticity. This is in contrast to the earlier view of the neuroscientists that the neural circuits, when once formed in childhood, do not change. “Even though we are born with a set of instructions and neurosignatures, our brains perpetually recruit new nerve cells and nerve-cell activation patterns to handle its daily inputs.”

With a treatment protocol that mimics Buddhist meditation technique of “Mindful Attention,” Schwartz (2003) could show through brain scans the changes that came about in the activity of parts of brain (particularly the caudate nucleus) when his four step therapy was followed by the patients of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He established the plasticity of brain to learn new things (change the neuronal connections) under the intentional activity of the mind. Dr. Schwartz says in Chapter X:

“It seems that neuroscience has tiptoed up to a conclusion that would be right at home in the canon of some of the eastern philosophies: introspection, willed attention, subjective state – pick your favorite description of an internal mental state – can redraw the contours of the mind, and in so doing can rewire the circuits of the brain, for it is attention that makes neuroplasticity possible. The role of attention throws into stark relief the power of mind over brain, for it is a mental state (attention) that has the ability to direct neuroplasticity.”

Dr. Gabbard says that cognitive behavioral therapy (which tries to teach people how to change harmful thoughts and beliefs) appears to cause biological changes in people with panic and many other disorders. More recently, in 2005, Dr. R. DeRubeis of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues have conducted the largest clinical trial ever designed to compare talk therapy with chemical antidepressants. The result is that talking works as well as pills do and with reduced relapse rates.

9. MEDITATION:

Meditation practitioners claim that meditation is a mental training and a process of familiarization with one’s own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion.

Dr. Benson’s team conducted several studies on the effect of Meditation on Buddhist monks and also Sikhs. They documented that the Buddhist monks during meditation could indeed dry icy, wet sheets on their naked bodies in temperatures of 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

From MRI studies at Harvard Medical School on Sikhs, they could see that the brain combined areas of quietude with cerebral activity during meditation. Those areas of the brain associated with attention, space-time concepts and executive control functions became active. They observed significantly increased blood flow in the limbic system and brain stem that control autonomic nervous system. But this increased activity actually resulted in lowering respiratory rate and heartbeat.

Newberg and others (2001) showed that during peak moments of meditation neurons in the posterior superior parietal lobe exhibit unusual activity. This area of the brain has the primary job to orient the individual in physical space.

Lutz and others (2004) found “that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation.” The data obtained by them suggest that mental training through meditation involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes.

All the above examples of studies show the influence a meditative mind has on our brain. One could rise the question how the invisible mind could affect a physical brain.

The dichotomy of mental and material has a historical reason at least in the west. That goes to the times of Descartes. Ever since he introduced the concept of Mind-body duality, the exact link between mind and body or the causal relation between the mental and physical remained an unsolved problem. Prof. Searle (2004) argues convincingly that this dilemma has arisen because of the terminology we are caught in. Mental and physical have been defined so as to be mutually exclusive.

‘Mental’ is defined as qualitative, subjective, first-personal and therefore, immaterial and indestructible. ‘Physical’ is defined as quantitative, objective, third-personal and therefore, material and destructible.

He feels that once we revise the traditional categorization, “there is no problem in recognizing that the mental qua mental is physical qua physical.” According to him, it is a continuous spectrum from mental to physical as can be seen from functional properties.

10. FREE WILL:

Granted that genes are controlled by environment and genetic expression can be altered by thought through meditational techniques, a question still remains about the freedom we have in making a choice. In other words do we have free will? This is another of highly controversial issues. Literature abounds with a range of positions taken by scholars – from extreme determinism to total freedom and all hues in between.

Prof. Searle (2004) very ably and in an inimitable style expresses the problem of free will. In his words, “There is a special problem about free will because we have two absolutely irreconcilable convictions, each of which seems to be completely correct and, indeed, inescapable. The first is that every event that occurs in the world has antecedently sufficient causes. The sufficient causes of an event are those that, in a particular context, are sufficient to determine that that event will occur. Our second conviction, that we do in fact have free will, is based on certain experiences of making up our mind to do something and then doing it.

It is part of our conscious experiences that we experience that causes of our decisions and actions, in the form of those reasons for those decisions and actions. … We do not know how free will exists in the brain, if it exists at all. We do not know why or how evolution has given us the unshakable conviction of free will. We do not, in short, know how it could possibly work. But we also know that the conviction of our own freedom is inescapable. We cannot act except under the presupposition of freedom.”

Dennet (2003) holds that Free will is “not only not eternal, it evolved, and it is still evolving.” According to him, it is a creation of human activity and beliefs like any other human creations.
Free will may be compared to the air we breathe. It is everywhere. It appears to be within the environment. To give a very crude example: When we exercise franchise, we feel we exercised our free will. When the results come out with landslide victories, psephologists talk of “waves” in favor of the winning candidate. That means our free will was apparently influenced by the environmental “wave” effect, though we are smug with our feeling of free will. In a philosophical way, this can be extended to say that the genes may also affect the environment and in turn get affected by it.

Whatever way it functions, we have a choice of freely willing a desired outcome through an orchestrated belief system of mutually reinforcing group of people and thus create an environment that can alter our gene expression. We may call such dedicated group of people as satsanga and associating oneself with that group as satsangatya. Through such an action, it seems biologically quite possible that one may curb the tendency of self-perpetuation programmed within the genes.

11. CONCLUSIONS:

The sum total accumulated experience genetically coded and stored within the DNA is comparable to the Sanchita karma – the long-term effects of the survival efforts of a species. This is manifest 100 per cent in the genotype at the time of conception by the union of sperm and ovum. When once the embryo forms and the fetus is on a path of development through cell division, the genetic information gets constantly modified under the influence of the environment existing in the womb of the mother.

Even after the baby is born and grows to be an adult, the expression of genetic characters is constantly subjected to the environmental influence. The phenotypic characters resulting from the environmental influence on the genotype can be compared to Prarabdha. Therefore, it is the environment that decides the prarabdha.

The word environment as used here is wide and all-embracive. It refers not merely to the physical aspects but includes the mental state of the mother when the child is in its mother’s womb and the mental state of the individual and the persons with whom the individual interacts. Prenatal research findings and current developments in psychiatry and neuroscience attest to this fact.

Recent advances in the studies on brain have established its tremendous plasticity and learning as a mechanism through which the synaptic connections are altered. It has become evident that thought is a form of energy and concerted thoughts, like meditation, can reset neuronal connections in the brain. A group of mutually reinforcing individuals with an orchestrated thought process through a belief system can be called satsanga. Association with such a group (satsangatya) provides a facilitating environment to obtain a directed change overriding genetic program in an individual. Setting “no more self-perpetuation” as a goal, it is possible that one can neutralize the genetic program of self-perpetuation written in the genes in this life itself. Simple actions taken for the day-to-day sustenance of the body do not produce any lasting effects that will be written into the long-term memory of the genes. There is no karmaphala that accumulates from such actions.

12. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I make no claim of originality in this write up. Many of the ideas quoted mostly in their own words are from experts in their respective fields of research. I am indebted to all the authors whose references I cited when possible and to those whom I could not cite. What I tried to do is to string the gems of ideas that I could glean into a garland and present it here. If there is any mis-representation, the fault is mine. I hope and trust you will be able to see the beauty of this garland and possibly improve it.