ATOMS

"Let's look at our senses. My senses tell me first of all that my body is physical, anatomical and static. But in reality, the body seems anatomical to us through our senses; the body is like a flowing river, constantly changing. The physical body that you are using to sit on a chair and read this magazine is not the same physical body that you came into the room with a little while ago. When you take one deep breath you inhale 10²² atoms from the universe. That's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. It's an astronomical amount of raw material that comes into your body every time you breathe in. Every time you breathe out, you breathe out 10²² atoms that have their origin in every cell of your body. So, we are all intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time. I am breathing everything that's inside you and you are breathing everything that's inside me. We are actually exchanging atoms all the time."

"It is possible today to compute the total number of atoms in the atmosphere on planet Earth. It's possible to compute what you are inhaling and exhaling in one breath. With a little more calculation, we can show beyond a shadow of doubt that right this moment you have in your physical body at least a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ, or the Buddha, or Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden, or George Bush. You have a million atoms right now that have been in the body of every single being that has existed since the dawn of creation. In just the last three weeks a quadrillion atoms (quadrillion means ten followed by fifteen zeros) have gone through your body and they have gone through the body of every other living species on this planet. So think of anything in the ecosystem right now - think of a tree in Africa, think of a squirrel in Siberia, think of a peasant in China, think of a taxi-driver in Calcutta, think of a small child in Afghanistan - and you have raw material in your body that was circulating there only three weeks ago. In less than one year you replace ninety-eight per cent of all the atoms in your body."

"At the atomic level you make a new liver every six weeks; a new skin once every five days; you replace your skeleton every three months; and you replace the raw material of your DNA every six weeks - it comes and goes like migratory birds. Your DNA contains the memories of millions of years of evolutionary time. That's what DNA is: DNA is the metabolism of experience. We metabolise our experience and we record it as DNA. DNA has metabolised the experience of your human ancestors, your animal ancestors and your microbial ancestors."

... Deepak Chopra, from FLAWS OF PERCEPTION