alarmed, your body made more than 300 billion new ones today! An adult body is composed of 7 octillion atoms (that’s a 7 with 27 zeroes behind it)! The biggest molecule in our bodies, chromosome 1, contains 10 billion atoms! And yet, there is so much empty space in a single atom that if we were condensed to remove that space, we’d be the size of a cube 1/500th of a centimeter square. That’s a lot of empty space. The nucleus that makes up the vast bulk of an atom is so much smaller than the whole atom that it may be compared to a fly in a cathedral!
Our bodies have approximately 60,000 miles of blood vessels! The distance around the Earth is about 25,000 miles, meaning that our blood travels through our body a little over twice the distance around this planet.
Our feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce over a pint of sweat a day! And the human feet contain 25 percent of all the bones in the body, that’s fifty-two bones!
The egg my mother produced to make my body actually formed when she was an embryo! The largest cell in the human body is the female egg, and the smallest is the male sperm!
I could go on and on listing amazing features of the human body. It is truly a remarkable creation. But now let’s focus on how this body is arranged, and how that arrangement affects our existence.
The human body is a complex organism composed of seventy-eight organs, thirteen of which are major (such as the brain, lungs, liver, kidneys, and so on). The various organs are composed of millions to trillions of cells that have the same or related functions. Each cell has components that allow it to function almost independently. Except for red blood cells, each cell has its own command-center containing its twenty-three pairs of chromosomes containing DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA is a self-replicating material present in nearly all living organisms as the main constituent of chromosomes. It is the carrier of genetic information. Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The bases in the DNA molecule carry the different codes. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences. Each strand of DNA is in the shape of a double helix and serves as a pattern (like a dress-making pattern) for duplicating the sequence of bases. This is critical when cells divide because each new cell needs to have an exact copy of the DNA present in the old cell.
Each cell has its own power generators (mitochondria) and each is like a tiny battery with a charge of 40-90 millivolts. That may sound small, but imagine how much electricity and electromagnetic energy 70 trillion cells can produce! All the cells in the body together produce an electric current and an electromagnetic field that can be detected and measured by an Electrocardiography, Electrocardiogram, and Electromyography (ECG, EKG, and EMG). An Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a test to measure the electrical activity of the brain. Major breakthroughs in discovering cellular electricity have come from using voltage-sensitive nano-particles, and these breakthroughs have discovered electric fields inside cells stronger than those produced by lightning bolts! Yes, I said lightning bolts. It amazed me too. University of Michigan researchers, led by chemistry professor Raoul Kopelman, found electric fields inside cells as strong as 15 million volts per meter, roughly five times stronger than a lightning bolt.3
The cells produce bio-electricity to store metabolic energy so they can deliver energy in order to do work, to trigger internal changes, and to send signals to other cells. It is not only found in humans but also in animals and plants—even certain minerals generate electricity. For example, all types of crystals produce electricity when heated (pyroelectricity) or when under pressure (piezoelectricity). Granite produces electricity when under pressure. The granite stones inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt emit an electrical field, because they are under enormous pressure.
The electrical power of the body has been known since ancient times. It has been called the ka (in ancient Egypt), élan vital (in France), and qi (pronounced chee, sometimes spelled chi) or qigong (pronounced chee gung, and literally meaning “life-energy” or “life-flow” in the East).
Interestingly, the body’s bioelectric field extends beyond the body, generating an auric field around it. Edgar Cayce could see this energy field in the form of colors. He observed that the colors changed as the energy of the person changed. The electromagnetic field around the body can be experienced using a simple little maneuver: press the tips of your fingers on both hands together tightly, with a little space between your palms, and hold this for one full minute. When you gently let go, you will feel a magnetic attraction between the fingers, as if they do not want to separate from the other hand. Another little test is to put your hand, palm-open up (like “high five”), close to another person’s open hand, and then feel the energy between the two. This is the usually unseen field surrounding each body. On one occasion, Edgar Cayce was about to enter an elevator in New York City when he noticed that no one on the elevator had an auric field. He stopped cold and did not get on. He had never seen people without energy fields. To his dismay the elevator malfunctioned and everyone on it died in the crash. Cayce felt that their life-force or spirit had already left their bodies by some precognitive knowing of what was about to happen.
Human bodies are generators. Each person generates about 60 watts of power while walking. According to a January, 2011, report by the BBC News, the Stockholm Central Station, through which about 250,000 commuters pass every day, uses a special ventilation system that draws in the accumulated human body heat in the station and passes it through a heat exchanger and heats water for central heating. The developers estimate that it lowers the energy cost by about 25 percent.
The Human Brain
A single human brain cell can hold five times more information than an entire encyclopedia set with volumes of information! An article in Scientific American states that the storage capacity of the human brain in electronic terms is thought to be as much as 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes)! That’s enough capacity to hold 3 million hours of TV shows!4
This is the marvelous outer, visible life. In the next chapter, we’re going to take a look at the surprising inner, invisible life.
chapter 2
Inner Life, Invisible Life
For all of the amazing wonders of the universe and the human body, as presented in Chapter One, an enormous amount of the grand vision of life is invisible!
For example, the stars, planets, and galaxies that can be detected make up only four percent of the universe! Four percent! The other ninety-six percent is made up of substances that cannot be seen or easily explained. These invisible substances are called “dark energy” and “dark matter.” Astronomers base their existence on the gravitational influence that they exert on normal matter (the parts of the universe that can be seen).
Let’s just consider this a bit more; our universe may contain as many as 100 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars, massive clouds of gas and dust, countless planets and moons, and enormous amounts of cosmic debris—yet everything that we see is only four percent of the total mass and energy in the universe!
Genes Do Not Direct as Much as They Respond
What about the human body? In Chapter 1, we discussed how physical life required a cell with genetic material (DNA), and we assumed from this that our
