Author name: Bryan Hubbard

I read the most extraordinary thing about you the other day.

According to biologist Rupert Sheldrake (The Science Delusion, Coronet, 2012), every cell in the human brain is renewed every four months or so.  This means that your brain is utterly different from what it was last November.

But although every cell has been renewed, your memory hasn’t been affected.  You can recall – as you could in November – your name, where you live, your marital status, your work, and so on.

And you can still remember the way you were bullied at school, or the time you scraped your knee in a nasty biking accident – and, since those times, your brain has completely renewed itself 90 times or more.

This is a real problem for the materialists.  It suggests that memory doesn’t sit in the brain at all – how could it?  The whole web of connected memories that create identity and self would also be somewhere else.

So where is it?  It can’t be somewhere else in your body – or even dispersed through your body – because that renews itself as frequently as your brain, and so the same issue applies.

The other day I met up with an old friend, who was naturally very anxious about his wife having chemotherapy for her cancer.  He described the cancer as an ‘alien force’ that was growing in his wife’s body.

Many of us see cancer in that way, and we’re encouraged to do so by doctors who talk about attacking the invader with chemotherapy and radiation.

But is that a good description of what really is going on?  Is that the best way of seeing cancer and, from that, achieving true healing?  In other words – where do ‘you’ end and the cancer begin?

If we change, can we change the world?  And have you noticed that everyone climbs Everest these days?

Surprisingly, these two questions are linked, and the second provides the key to the first.

The idea of personal transformation – enlightenment, if you will – is at the heart of all religions.  Jesus believed that his teachings would change the person, and the world, and bring heaven to earth.

But even if personal change is possible, how can we change the world at the same time?

A wonderful young journalist who, amongst other things, is helping her mother overcome cancer without resorting to chemotherapy interviewed me the other day.  She wanted to talk because of her interest in my Time-Light philosophy and because I helped my own mother beat breast cancer when she was given just three months to live.

There’s a strong connection between the Time-Light model and healing.  The model suggests that ‘we’ are made up of three time bodies or selves: Present, Past and the Potential.  As such, there are three root causes of cancer, and any chronic disease.  There are physical causes, such as smoking, diet and pollution (Present), there are emotional causes (Past) and there is the suppression of our creative, and most loving, instincts – the very reason we’re here on earth (Potential).

Like so many millions of others, I didn’t have the best of starts in life.  I suppose I was more fortunate than most because my abuse was never physical, it was always mental or emotional.  My tormentor was my father, who resented me being around.

My mother told me one incident when I was two years old.  My father screamed at me for being stupid because I had picked up a piece of litter (trash) and didn’t know to put it in what he called the “waste disposal receptacle” instead of just pointing at the trash can.

Also, he refused to acknowledge me by name until I was around eight years old.  Until then, he would only whistle for me as if I were the pet dog.  His interest in me was underwhelming; he never attended any school function, and when my English teacher wrote to my father that I should be tutored for Oxford University, the letter went straight into the bin, or waste disposal receptacle.

I write this not to garner sympathy – I feel none for my eight-year-old self because I have not known any different – but to raise two important questions: why do some of us behave the way we do, as my father did with me, and what are the longterm effects for the victim?