Gregg Braden on Cracking the Genetic Code

Gregg Braden

Gregg Braden was kind enough to contribute a wonderful story about the mechanics of prayer to my book, Sixty Seconds: One Moment Changes Everything. It deepened my understanding of universal laws and transformed the way I prayed.

Gregg was gracious enough to regale me with a second story as well. I’m privileged to present it here for the first time. I’ll start it with a brief introduction:

 

Braden, a best-selling author and internationally renowned speaker, is a pioneer in bridging the wisdom of our past with the science, healing, and peace of our future. After serving as a senior computer systems designer for Martin Marietta Aerospace, a computer geologist for Phillips Petroleum, and the technical operations manager for Cisco Systems, Braden’s work is now devoted to inspiring humanity to build a better world. His books include The Spontaneous Healing of Belief, The Divine Matrix, Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer, The God Code, and The Isaiah Effect.

During the last years of the Cold War, I was working as a computer systems designer in the aerospace industry. It was a very frightening time for those of us who were working behind the scenes. We knew how close the superpowers had come to doing the unthinkable, of unleashing the forces of nature on civilian populations through weapons of mass destruction.

It was during this time that I had an important insight about our existence as a species. I had always felt strongly, both from a scientific and philosophical point of view, that we are an intentional species, that we are more than a fluke of biology that somehow managed to evolve over a long period of time. So it made perfect sense to me that whoever or whatever was responsible for our being here would have left us a clue—a clue that would show us that we are part of one another, that we are greater than the differences that have led to so much conflict and mutual destruction.

Against this backdrop, and as a trained scientist, I began looking for that common denominator that would tell us that we are indeed an intentional species. It was a journey that led me from the pristine highlands of central China and Tibet to the rugged tombs and deserts in Egypt, to the aborigines in Australia, and to the remotest parts of Nepal and India.

Andes Mountains

The story I heard in all of these places was universal. The Quechua in the Andes Mountains of Bolivia and Peru, for instance, have beautiful tapestries of their creation stories showing that the original humans came from another world. These are the same stories you’ll find on temple walls in Egypt, in the oral traditions in Tibet, and in sand paintings and tapestries in the desert of the southwestern United States.

But all those people and places simply told the story of how we got here. There was no explanation of why we were placed here or how we could communicate with the mysterious force that created us. The admonition I encountered in every mystical or spiritual tradition was that the answer could not be found in a text, on a temple wall, or anywhere outside of ourselves—that if we wanted that kind of information, we had to look within.

Temple of Apollo

The text over Apollo’s temple at Delphi in Greece, for example, reads Know thyself. Now, that’s a broad, sweeping statement that people view as simply a metaphor—“look within”—meaning look within the deeper experience of your life or your perceptions.

It calls to mind the story of Heinrich Schliemann, the nineteenth-century amateur German archaeologist who was fascinated by Homer’s The Iliad. Back then, The Iliad was believed to be a fictional account of a great battle between the forces of Light and Dark, a metaphor for the conflict between good and evil. Schliemann woke up one morning and thought, What if this isn’t a metaphor? What if it’s a literal account of something that actually happened? If I literally followed the clues, where would they lead me?

And that’s what he did. To make a long story short, he traveled to Greece and began excavating through nine different levels of nine different cities that had never been revealed before. On the ninth level he excavated the gates of the ancient city of Troy. And for the first time, the world knew that Troy really existed—there was a Trojan horse, there was a Trojan war. And all that Heinrich Schliemann did was follow the literal clues.

I mention this story to illustrate the possibility of finding literal clues in ancient sacred religious texts. What if all the references to looking within aren’t metaphors? What if they’re literal instructions? And if we literally look within, where exactly should we be looking? It was around this time, in 2000, that the Human Genome Project was being published. If there was a clue to be found, it made sense to me that it would be found in our DNA, because that was the code of life within every human being.

By this time, I was working in a form of software development called Pattern Recognition. The first time I saw a DNA sequence roll across my computer screen, I thought, I don’t know what this is saying, but it’s certainly not random. Scientists often refer to DNA as the “language of all life,” but they mean that metaphorically, not that it’s an alphabet with letters. Still, I began wondering if the patterns I saw in that DNA sequence could be a literal language of some kind.

As I began exploring ancient texts, such as the Sefer Yetzirah, I found more and more clues that led me precisely in that direction. The Sefer Yetzirah is the third mystical book of the Kabbalah. It’s filled with so many mystical metaphors that many scholars believe that it’s worthless. In fact, when I discovered that the Sefer Yetzirah isn’t even included in most translations of the Kaballah, I thought, Wow! There’s a book out there that’s so mystical, nobody wants to use it? That’s the one for me!

The Sefer Yetzirah is a relatively short text of a thousand lines. It’s written as if an observer who was present the day God created the universe was giving blow-by-blow instructions. As I literally followed these instructions and combined them with the best science of our time, I found that I was able to mathematically link the chemical elements in DNA strands in our bodies with the letters of such ancient root alphabets as Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. Through a very methodical process of substituting letters of the alphabet for this genetic code, lo and behold, the code began to spell words. And the words began to spell sentences. And the sentences made sense.

We can now look at each cell in the human body as a library—and within the library, we can look at the chromosomes as books. Twelve years after the concept first occurred to me, we found the first key to the first layer of genetic code, which is the “introduction” to the first “book” in us. The very first sentence that was translated came across my fax machine one night in the wee hours of the morning. I was working late in my office in a remote area of northern New Mexico—my nearest neighbor was more than a mile away. As the message from the linguist finished printing and I read the translation to the very first sentence in the genetic sequence of all life, I said to myself, Oh, my God. The sequence literally translated into the words, God/Eternal within the body.

It was a deeply, spiritually moving moment. What we have since come to discover is that God/Eternal within the body is the message we find in all carbon-based DNA, which is all life as we know it. So from a blade of grass to a single-cell amoeba to the complexity of the human body, the divine spark within every living thing expresses itself through these five simple words.

I think it will take awhile to really anchor this concept because it is so profound. While the code didn’t tell us who God is, or where God came from, or why it was put there, it is there. This code is a powerful example of what we can gain by combining science and spirituality—the old and the new ways of knowing—and weaving them into a greater wisdom. We are not looking at purely evolution or purely creationism. It is a hybrid theory in which evolution is the result of an intentional process.

I had always believed that we are all connected to one another, that life is precious, and that we are part of a greater existence. And watching a code that was left to us hundreds of thousands of years ago suddenly come to light—and be translated from Arabic, Hebrew, or Sanskrit into a language that we understand—validated that connection in a way that nothing has before or since.

At a time when we believe that we are so different from one another that we must kill one another to justify those differences, we need look no further than the message that has been placed within our bodies to remind us that, at the most fundamental level, we are all one family. Cracking this code also means that we are now able to communicate with the intelligence that underlies our existence. And that changes everything.

 

ABOUT PHIL BOLSTA

Phil is the author of Sixty Seconds: One Moment Changes Everything, a collection of 45 inspiring, life-changing stories from prominent people he interviewed, including Joan Borysenko, Deepak Chopra, geneticist Dr. Francis Collins, acclaimed sportswriter Frank Deford, Dr. Larry Dossey, Wayne Dyer, Dan Millman, Caroline Myss, Dr. Christiane Northrup, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, Dr. Bernie Siegel, James Van Praagh, singer Billy Vera, Doreen Virtue, Neale Donald Walsch, and bassist Victor Wooten.

Here is a three-minute video that introduces you to Phil and his book.

Reading this book is like spending a few minutes face to face with each of the contributors and listening to their personal stories. Click here to read unsolicited testimonials from readers. Learn more by visiting the official Sixty Seconds website.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• “The God Code”, with author Gregg Braden
• Video: Interview with Gregg Braden
• Stay in in style for less £££

Tags: creation story, DNA, Gregg Braden, The God Code