Similarly, when we are anxious, our body makes ‘jittery molecules, and they’re not just made in the adrenal glands’; and when we are exhilarated, our body makes ‘immuno-modulators that act as powerful anticancer drugs.’

The cells of our immune system, which protect us from cancer, infectious disease, and degenerative disorders, also have receptors to chemical messengers that are the material equivalent of thought, describes Chopra.

“The immune system is a circulating nervous system; it’s intelligent, and it’s moving around in the body.” So, we can’t have a thought, or a feeling, or a desire without our immune cells knowing it, he cautions. “The immune cells are actually eavesdropping on our internal dialogue.”

He recounts how, during his stint as a resident doctor in a psychiatric ward, he noticed that some of the patients with psychoses had no concept of time. “As a result, their bodies didn’t seem to age. I saw a sixty-year-old woman who looked as if she were thirty years old. There were many such individuals…”

If you are always in a hurry and always trying to beat time or compete with time, you are causing those hurried types of changes in your biology, Chopra reasons.

“On the other hand, if your interpretation of time is truer to reality, which is, in fact, that there is only an eternal present, then your biology will reflect that truer notion.”

Elsewhere in the book, the author uses the IT (information technology) analogy, and describes the nervous system as the hardware, and the chemical changes that occur in the body as the software.

“The software, or program, changes according to your thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and desires.”