Welcome to daily breath. This is Deepak Chopra. We've been exploring the 10th secret of the self.

Death makes life possible.

Today I would like to share a phenomenon in biology that helps support the whole notion

that death is completely connected to life. This phenomenon is called

apoptosis in biology.

What is apoptosis?

Apoptoes is programmed cellular death.

Your stomach cells, for example, are programmed to die every five days.

If they didn't die, then you wouldn't have new stomach cells to digest food because cells wear out like anything else.

Your skin cells die once a month.

So your skin can remain relatively supple unless you want to be an

alligator in which the skin cells take a longer time to die and be born again.

So alligator leather lasts a long time. That's all your

skin is. Leather recycling itself. Similarly your skeleton dies every three months. The skeleton you have right now wasn't the

one that you had three months ago. Actually in one year you replace 98% of all the items in your body. So right now I'm speaking to you with my

year 2020 model and my year 2019 model is already dead. So I'm constantly replacing my body just

actually even faster than I can replace my clothes. So why do cells die? They die in

the interest of the whole body so the body can remain whole fresh and functioning.

When a cell forgets to die we call it cancer. Cancer is the loss of the

memory of death.

So a cancer cell has forgotten that is part of the whole body.

It goes on an individual quest for immortality.

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