Bruce Lipton hardly looks the part of a New Age guru.
He's got no pony tail, piercings or obvious tattoos. He comes off a bit like Paul Giamatti in the movie Sideways, the pudgy straight man, not the charismatic, good-looking guy on a binge. And, he confesses to liking donuts, despite the fact that his partner Margaret calls them "circles of death."
But the New Agers were at Capitola's Book Cafe in force Thursday to hear the scientist, who has left the mainstream by claiming that DNA can be changed through spiritual practice, talk about love and relationships.
The 68-year-old who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains for the beauty and quality of life, was plugging his new book The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth, a primer that mixes the chemistry of what happens to a body in love with tips on how to achieve love and ecstasy in daily life. He drew a standing room only crowd.
His book describes "the beginning of my transition from a marriage-phobic skeptic into an adult who finally took responsibility for every failed relationship in his life and realized he could create the relationship of his dreams," as he writes in the introduction.
"What if you could have your wishes and dreams come true every day?" he asked the Book Cafe crowd, before setting out a path toward helping them make that come true.
The Cliff's Notes version is that the we live most of our lives as unconscious as when we drive in a car talking to a friend. After the drive we can recall every word of the conversation, but not one second of the driving.
The trouble is that we spend so much time in the unconscious mind, which is like a giant digital recorder with no intelligent design, and had its patterns shaped by the time we were 7 and before we had a say in them. For many, that can be an endless loop of trauma.
Rather than trying to end it with Freudian rehashes of childhood, Lipton suggested that you could clear the slate and reboot at any time with therapies including self-hypnosis and Psych-K, a technique in which therapists reach the unconscious mind and its habits by studying a person's movements and their relation to patterns in the brain.
Too technical? His talk wasn't. It was affable and engaging, and didn't stray far from the concepts familiar to New Agers. The mind is powerful and self-destructive and only by changing it can we save ourselves and the world.
He paraphrased Albert Einstein's claim that you can't fix a broken world by doing the same things that broke it, and gave parents of teens or 20s a positive affirmation. Those kids who are still living at home and who have no interest in a stock portfolio may be the ones to save the world because they aren't participating in the things that brought us to the brink of what he says is the sixth extinction of life on the planet.
He was himself helping save something that was on the verge of extinction by speaking at the teetering bookshop, whose owner pleaded with people who enjoyed the talk to remember it next time they went to click on Amazon and save a few dollars.
Lipton, who looks considerably younger than his years, takes things further than his peers in biology when he says we don't have to be a prisoner of our genes any more than we have to be a prisoner of our subconscious, that we can change the things science thinks are locked in and predetermined.
His first self-published book, The Biology of Belief, sold 100,000 copies before it was picked up by a publisher and went on to sell boatloads more. He's a rarity in having serious academic credentials, such as a Ph.D from the University of Virginia, and a following, some of whom believe that crystals can heal.
His mix of mystical and scientific study has gotten him gigs around the world lecturing and teaching. Self-help guru Wayne Dyer is quoted on the cover of The Honeymoon Effect saying that it is "one of my favorite reads ever..." (Editor's note...Did you really need the ever?)
Lipton is either on the cutting edge or the butter knife of science. Some think he's breaking a new frontier of mixing mind and body; others claim he doesn't have proof to back his claims and he's more a chiropractor than a back surgeon.
Love, he admits, is an even newer field for him.
Lipton reminded those seeking love to keep a list of what they want in a mate, because if they leave things out, they were trusting nature to fill in the blanks. People in the audience were furiously scribbling notes and still lining up to buy the $25 tome. The talk was that good.
Lipton wasn't afraid to poke fun at himself and the whole New Agey thing. He looked around at all the self help books and asked people who read them if they really changed them? Answer, no, because they didn't reach the subconscious. They were more like Post-it notes.
During the question and answer period, people in the audience were staking out their therapeutic turf. There were self-hypnosists, Psych-K-ers and theta wave practitioners.
"Thats like a New Age Bingo," he said.
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