This explains the notion that we continually share atoms with every living thing on earth and also contain atoms from every person who ever lived on earth.  It also reinforces the idea that our bodies as something permanent is illusion.

Excerpted from a conference in Massachusetts, 1992, The Higher Self, Deepak Chopra, MD

“In every second of your existence, you are renewing your body more easily, more effortlessly and more spontaneously than you can even change your clothes.  In fact, the physical bodies that you’re using to sit on these chairs are not the ones you walked in with a little while ago.  One can take a number of life processes to see how literally true that is.

Even with one breath that you inhale, you take in 10 to the power of 22 atoms from the physical universe, it’s an astronomical amount of raw material that comes into your body, and ultimately ends up as your heart cells and brain cells and kidney cells and neurons and DNA and so forth.  Each breath that you exhale — you breath out 10 to the power of 22 atoms — you’re literally breathing out bits and pieces of your heart, kidney and brain tissue, and technically speaking we’re all intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time.  The great American poet Walt Whitman said, “Every atom belonging to you, as well belongs to me.”  And this is not a metaphor of poetry, it’s fact of physiology.

The fact is that every atom belonging to you really does belong to me.  You can do mathematical calculations based on radioactive isotope studies and show without a shadow of doubt that right now in this moment in your physical body you have a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ, or Buddha, or Leonardo De Vinci, or Michael Angelo, or Ghenges Khan, or Mahat Magandi, or Saddam Hussien, or Edie Ameen, or anyone else you care to think about.  In just the last three weeks a quadrillion atoms have gone through your body that have gone through the body of every other living species on our planet.  You could think of a tree in Africa, a squirrel in Siberia, a peasant in China, and you have raw material in this moment in your physical body that was circulating in that body just about three weeks ago.

In less than one year you replace almost your entire body — 98% of all atoms in your body have gone.  You make a new liver every six weeks, a new stomach lining every five days, a new skin once a month, a new skeleton — it seems so hard and solid — but it is renewed every three months.  Even the brain cells that you think with have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen — they weren’t there one year ago.  And the DNA which holds memories of millions of years of evolutionary time — the actual raw material comes and goes every six weeks like migratory birds.  And if you want to be a bit of a stickler about this, and account for the last atom in every little bit of collagen and cartilage, then in less than two years you replace your entire body down to the last atom.

So if you think you are your physical body, you certainly have a bit of a problem — about which body are you talking?…the body I had last year is dead and gone — it came from the dust, it’s back into the dust, it’s recycled earth, water and air.  My body from 1991 (since I spoke here the last time) is dead!  And since I haven’t died, I think it’s quite obvious that we don’t need to look further for scientific proof that life exists after death.”