Healing is Intrinsic to Life

(biological, evolutionary, & medical data)

Part I.

We know that human beings recognize beauty and are drawn to the beauty of Life. Observation of a child’s first smile of recognition allows us to reasonably assume that it was the beauty of a sunset, or of the night sky, or of the human smile that, suddenly aware they both saw (and felt) the same beauty, caused our forebears to look into each others’ eyes with recognition and awe.  The physical experience of holding one another would have had us stand upright.  The desire to know more about each other would have propelled language development.

Observation of nature (i.e., the study of biology) is likely humankind’s earliest scientific endeavor. The etymological roots of the word “biology” go deep – reaching down, before the Roman Empire, into ancient Greece.  Both “bios” (life) and “logia” (denoting a subject of study or interest) are Greek.  The Romans adopted logia but not bios; from this we know that the French, “la biologie” (the study of the creative Divinity in Life) arrived in the French countryside not from the conquering Romans but by way of the ancient Greeks. Not until the early 19^th century, did the German language appropriated the feminine “la biologie” to coin the word “Biology” now accepted as English.  The linguistic evolution of the word we use today tells us how previous cultures have understood the meaning of the word they were using.  This paper, although using the German derived “Biology,” refers to the Greek then French “la biologie” meaning the study of the Divine in Life.

Our inherently limited human understanding of what Life is

Humans, “observing” life around us since our earliest animal ancestors, have always understood there to be an actual limit to what can be understood about Life.  Comparing a living creature to one who is clearly no longer alive, we can observe how they differ, record those differences as measurements, and thus scientifically prove the material differences between life and death (e.g., in movement, in weight, in temperature, etc.) On the other hand, our words such as “spirit,” “life,” and “love,” cannot be explained in these terms.  Our intellectual brain, in itself material (material neurons and material neurotransmitters), cannot explain what cannot be measured. Like other animals humans observe, and we can feel; unlike other animals, humans can describe and record. Again, humans can both describe-and-record and observe-and-feel, but our intellectual (i.e., verbal) “thinking” brain will not allow (verbal) explanation or (intellectual) understanding of what it cannot measure.

With publication of the Origin of the Species, Darwin challenged western intellectual “thinkers” to accept the causal phenomenon, “evolution.” Darwin had observed evolution, and he could measure the changes in evolving life forms. Admittedly, however, he was unable to explain the cause of evolution. Would European academic “thinkers” accept the science of evolution?  Academia deftly avoided addressing the issue Darwin raised.  In coining the word “teleological,” Germanic Biology dismissed as “unscientific” any causation that could not be measured (1). In a sense, while accepting the “idea” of evolution, European science refused to even consider as possibility a creative Life force they could not explain. Such rigid, materialistic, and actually anti-scientific and anti-intellectual “thinking” have long dominated academic Biology.

Our human intellectual brain evolved incorporating our animal instinctual connections with Life, and human children are born genetically prepared to feel and trust those instincts. Humans suffer when we lose conscious awareness of those animal instincts guiding us to our own happiness.

The structure of this essay

          The goal of this essay is to share a biological understanding of our human suffering. First, we describe the biological evolution of “human-ness” through a chronological discussion of accepted biological “truths.” Often without measurable scientific data to support them, these truths are accepted as scientific fact by the weight of observational evidence confirming them (2).  An established foundation in knowledge of human evolution allows a fresh look at the history of human civilization. Scientific data from academic paleontology, archaeology, history, and linguistics help explain our modern human alienation from nature and from happiness.  Epidemiological and pharmacologic data allow understanding of how human unhappiness passes from generation to generation.  The weight of this scientific data, as I see it, convincingly proves the beauty of our human species. Within a biological framework, we can only see the cause of our suffering to be a tragic but inevitable human mistake. Within that biological framework, the wisdom of its lesson gives humanity a structure and the tools to avoid continuing a mistaken understanding of mankind, the cause of much suffering.

 

Relevant biological truths

1.  While we cannot understand the cosmic origins of energy, we can understand Einstein’s equation e = mc² (energy = mass of matter times the speed of light times the speed of light again)(3). The equation demonstrates that matter is, in fact, concentrated energy. Matter and energy, one and the same, are both measurable.

2.  The atom, the basic unit of matter, has the energy of concentrated positive charge held within its nucleus. Over the eons of time our solar system has existed, the structure of atoms (the positively charged nucleus surrounded by a negatively charged cloud of electrons) has bound them into increasingly complex molecules.

 3.  Over time, increasing complex molecules suspended in water (H₂O) have evolved into increasingly complex life forms (4).  Plant cell photosynthesis evolved using solar energy to chemically bind water (H₂O) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) molecules into the longer-chain carbohydrate molecules that fuel plant and animal life.  In the process oxygen (O₂) is released into our earth’s atmosphere.

Sunlight + 6H₂O + 6 CO₂   > C6H12O6 + 6O₂

Living cells utilize the energy stored in carbohydrate molecular bonds by using oxygen to then "burn" (break down) the molecules in a highly controlled cascade of reactions that make that energy available for growth, metabolism, and reproduction.   This cascade of reactions, called the Krebs Cycle or citric acid cycle, releases water and carbon dioxide as bi-products.

6O₂ + C₆H₁₂O₆ > 6H₂O + 6 CO₂  + Chemical Energy

 4.  The serotonin molecule is found ubiquitously in living cells. In plants the molecule is intricately involved in the photosynthetic process(5).  Because of serotonin, plants orient themselves to the sun thus capturing maximum sunlight throughout the day. Animal cells, similarly, use serotonin to communicate with the living world around them.  Serotonin guides the behaviors of one-celled paramecium. Multi-cellular animals depend on serotonin communication to allow "harmony" with the environment, between adjacent cells, and within the organism as a whole (6). With the evolution of the animal brain serotonin evolved as a neurotransmitter allowing  the integration of information  from both the internal and external environment in guiding increasing complex survival behaviors.  It is safe to assume that serotonin cellular communication guided the changing animal forms through evolution (7). It makes sense to understand the body’s meridians and energy fields in terms of serotonin. Serotonin integration makes sense of the healing power of spiritual practices such as T’ai chi and meditation.

5. We now know that this serotonin-mediated “wholeness” is what the Greeks meant by the word “health. ” Cellular development, growth, adaptation, and evolution are always advancing towards an organism’s continued health. Life does not move backwards: towards illness, youth, or pain. Deprived of food and/or oxygen, Life forms do not de-differentiate; they simply die. The decomposition of once living material recycles organic compounds maintaining the health of all Life on earth.  The Greek root of “wholeness” and “healthy” is also the root of the word “Holy.” In its immanent ability to heal itself, humankind has always recognized the Divinity inherent in Life. Awed beyond words by the incomprehensible power of Divine Guidance towards “Good,” some Peoples do not refer to it by name: the Mbuti (8), for example, refer to it as, “the Forest.” Other Peoples use terms similar to  “YHVH,” the “Tao,” “God,” “Life,” “Love,” “Allah,” and the “Great Creator.”

6.  Within this context of Divine Guidance, biologists define a “species” as those individuals whose gametes (egg and sperm) unite in sexual reproduction.  Experimenting to find new sources of energy, life forms adapt and evolve through a trial and error process during which new species emerge and others become extinct. Species survival requires that adaptations protect individual reproduction throughout the life cycle (e.g., embryo > fetus > sexually immature > > sexually mature > gamete > embryo).  A Fundamental Biological Principle states: A species’ survival depends on its protecting the most vulnerable stage of its life cycle.  

7.   Animal brain cell activity consumes tremendous energy.  Major changes to animal brain organization occurred as fish evolved to reptiles, and reptiles to mammals. Protecting species survival (protecting the most vulnerable stage of the life cycle) required profound anatomical and behavioral modifications simultaneously protective of individual animal survival. Porges’ Polyvagal Theory demonstrates that, as the piscine brain evolved to become the reptilian brain, and as the reptilian brain adapted to mammalian needs, those evolutionary changes incorporated and protected existing brain structures(9).

(Fish) The primitive parasympathetic nervous system allows fish threatened by predators to dramatically drop their heart rate, shut down cellular metabolism, and “play dead” (dangerously inedible to larger predators).  The molecule noradrenalin, released from cells of the fish brain locus ceruleus, triggers the drop in heart rate that results in the fish’s protective “playing dead” behavior. The fish’s “cold-blooded” metabolism allows its survival under conditions of minimal energy availability (e.g., food and oxygen) for long periods of time.

  

(Reptiles) While fish do produce adrenalin, it plays no role in the fish response to life-threatening danger.  As animals evolved to live in the increased oxygen concentration of ambient air, the parasympathetic nervous system became less protective of individual survival. Being more protective, the reptilian sympathetic nervous system evolved as the reptile’s first-line-of-defense. Unlike noradrenalin that slows metabolism, adrenalin maximizes full energy expenditure in the reptilian “fight or flight response.” Adrenalin increases the heart rate and its pumping power while diverting maximum blood flow to the powerful large muscle groups of fight and/or escape. Simultaneously, the adrenalin constricts blood flow to digestion, the extremities, skin, and the brain. Sympathetically aroused, reptilian metabolism serves only its all-or-nothing, uncontrollable, and mindless self-protective defense. When the sympathetic nervous system is exhausted, the reptile’ parasympathetic system releases noradrenalin and stops the heart.

(Mammals) With an autonomic nervous system composed of both piscine parasympathetic and reptilian sympathetic neuronal systems, mammals evolved with the ability to automatically control their heart rate and metabolism. Homeostasis allowed mammals to maintain an internal environment of constant temperature, pH, etc., greatly facilitating metabolism and, thereby, increasing brain oxygenation. Homeostasis allowed the mammalian in utero fetal development that dramatically distinguishes mammals from their egg-laying reptilian ancestors. The maternal/fetus in utero unit (now the most vulnerable stage of the animal life cycle) demanded a behavioral first-line-of-defense more protective (less energy depleting) than the reptilian fight-or-flight response. Parasympathetic fibers once innervating fish gills (nonfunctional in reptiles) evolved to innervate mammalian muscles of respiration and vocalization. Threatening posture and loud vocalization became the mammalian first-line-of-defense against danger (10). [To clarify: the parasympathetic nervous system protective of fish, in mammals, divided into the mammalian parasympathetic nervous system (triggering loud, threatening defensive behaviors) and the mammalian vagal system (controlling heart rate and circulation)]. Mammals retained their adrenalin-mediated sympathetic nervous system as well as their locus-ceruleus-controlled parasympathetic control of heart rate.

7. The shift from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion allowed primates greater flexibility of the shoulder girdle expanding primate lung capacity and improving fetal oxygen delivery. The mammalian parasympathetic nervous system further evolved innervating muscles of facial expression and, thus, preparing primates for primitive speech and language development.  Adult loud screeching, dramatic gesticulation and facial expression, and arboreal habitat gave increasing protection to the primate carrying a fetus in utero.  With evolving intellectual reasoning and language, the primate fetal brain size continued to increase.

8. Many theories have been advanced explaining our human upright stature including gazing across the savannah, minimizing exposure to the sun. None contradict the idea that increased body flexibility allowed primates greater intimacy with one another than other animals (11).  We know the deep emotional connection created by looking in a loved one’s eyes, by sharing the beauty of a sunset.  We know the internal impetus to hold one another in our arms. Three million years ago, Australopithecine species with a brain at birth the size of a chimpanzee’s walked upright, and fossil evidence strongly suggests them walking hand-in-hand.

By two million years ago the humanoid (now the Homo erectus) fetus had reached the maximal cranial size that the (upright) maternal pelvis could accommodate through the birth canal (12,13). The Homo erectus brain at birth was the same size as our own newborn’s.  At maturity, the Homo erectus brain was that of a Homo sapiens 3-year-old.

9. In the one and a half million years separating Homo erectus and the emergence of our human species, emerging language capacity, emerging capacity to reason, and our emerging human culture shaped the human cortex as it shaped our human childhood. Our Homo sapiens brain utilizes fully half the oxygen carried by human blood pumped by the human heart. It has been reliably asserted that our childhood defines our Homo sapiens "human-ness, (14)” and childhood is the most vulnerable stage of the Human life cycle. Protecting children, their fathers, grandparents and communities took an increasingly important role educating each child to become a competent adult (e.g., sexually mature, prepared to raise children of their own). With our evolving capacities for reason, patience, and humor, we learned to control anger by consciously maintaining full cerebral blood flow in the face of danger. This ability to feel anger without sympathetic adrenalin release became our human first-line of protective defense. Deliberate control of adrenalin release and peaceful resolution of conflict distinguish Homo sapiens from our animal forebears.  Born with a human genome evolved to allow full human development, each child requires human cultural education that will teach each child the patience to allow feeling and trusting Divine Guidance. With that education, each child learns to honor the Divine Guidance inherent in all Life. This conscientious education of our children teaches them to thrust their humanity. That humanity has always demanded that we steward our earth, that we protect the holiness of health, and that we educate each child to do likewise.

 Part II

The Problem:    

            The World Heath Organization (WHO) first published their report on the Global Burden of Disease in 1996 (15). Rarely quoted but highly researched, the study compared the economic and social burden of specific diseases on developing countries and on those with established market economies (16).  Unipolar depression and related disorders (e.g., alcohol use, road traffic injuries, self-inflicted injury) placed 22% of the total burden of disease on countries of the economically developed world -- more than all cancers combined. In comparison, depression and related diseases account for only 6.4% of the burden of disease placed on economically undeveloped countries.  This data only highlights the question that discerning social thinkers have long asked themselves. How can we understand the profound (perhaps epidemic) unhappiness found in those cultures utilizing the greatest percent of our earth’s material resources?

           
An Answer:

“Honorable men and women just like us” have walked the earth for between 150,000 and 200,000 years (Stephen J Gould) (17).    By “honorable” we can trust that Gould was referring to our species’ highly evolved and highly developed ability to trust an inexplicable power greater than ourselves to resolve conflict and to protect childhood neurodevelopment. In the, say, 175,000 years humans have walked the earth, we find only spotty archaeological evidence of human violence -- beginning 30,000 years ago (18). Only 5700 years ago, in 3500 BC, does inhuman violent conquest and cultural subjugation appear in archaeological records. Beginning in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, a humanly-inconceivable wave of violence would eventually dominate western European civilization (19).

Brutally subjugating and destroying established agricultural communities, Sumerian tribes built their Empire. The fallen communities had lived together, worked together, raised families together, and intermarried among themselves for thousands of years. They spoke a language of mutual understanding that, carrying their culture, had evolved over all of that time [Linguistic science can trace the movement of peoples over the world with the accuracy of DNA comparison (20).] Linguistic evidence proves the Sumerians to have had no language of origin. Composed of ruthless individuals, these tribes relied on self-serving cruelty as their primary means of communication. The hodge-podge creole “language” coordinating their violence was only that.  The violence unleashed on humanity by Sumerians in Mesopotamia would.  It would invade the islands of Minos and Mycenae, destroy Troy, conquer and then dominate Hellenic civilization, and eventually invade Europe as the conquering Roman Empire.  Simultaneously, and moving northeast, they would become the Scythians and then the Nomadic Hordes of the Altai Mountains threatening China.  During periods they were expelled by the Chinese, they became the Turks (the Huns, the Magyars) wrecking havoc on agricultural communities in Eastern Europe and establishing the Turkish empires that would battle, until the present, for European wealth and sovereignty (21).

Valid and reliable data reported in The Science pages of this website Recent  demonstrate that without adult care and guidance children grow up constantly insecure and feeling the need to protect themselves. Happy, trusting humans remember the strict and nourishing education they received as children.  A human child, deprived of human education and never the center loving guidance, learns to rely for survival on their deep and powerful reptilian sympathetic adrenalin response. Growing up, children further protect themselves using their developing intellect in the service of that reptilian brain.  Without a “humanizing” education teaching them the patience to trust and honor Divine Guidance, [intelligent-but-reptilian] children survive by playing at Life as a game they know needs to be won. A welcome sense of security rewards them when they win. But that security is only fleeting. From early on they learn to jealously protect themselves from any perceived competition at the game. While perhaps seductively “cute” as children, they grow up a dangerous threat to Divinely Guided Life on earth.  

Believing themselves at constant at risk, unable to tolerate the most minimal frustration, [IBRC-persons] threatened a communal harmony built on honor and trust of Life’s inherent divinity. Banishment was a sad but, at least, apparently harmless solution to the problem of incorrigible children now incorrigible youths. While seemingly protective of human culture banishment effectively, and perhaps forever, deprived these frightened souls from access to healing and loving care. Sumerian tribes had been isolated from humanity, human education, and healing human love for untold generations.

It’s clear that wandering, ruthless, inexpressively violent nomadic peoples, each of them, was once a terrified newborn “selfishly” holding on to Life as best it could. Invasion of the Fertile Crescent and the founding of Mesopotamia would begin a New Age of Humankind. With a written language created to protect their spoils of war, the Sumerian would write European history and define “human civilization” from the perspective of their frightened, competitive, and individualistic worldview.   With the stroke of a pen, ruthless barbarians became Conquering Heroes.

The history-based and anthropologically-accepted view of humankind’s seamless move from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to modern civilization cannot stand under the weight of scientific evidence. It is beyond human reason to think that humans living in community and entrusting their lives to earth’s fertility would simply, one day, start torturing and conquering one another.  No, that’s not what happened.

Exposed to life-threatening fear, children forever after suffer the explosive, uncontrollable the autonomic hyper-reactivity of Locus-Ceruleus Activation (LCA).  Worry that prevents childhood play teaches children to cut themselves off from their feelings -- leaving them with the crippling pervasive dysphoria of Serotonin-Neuron-Communication-Dysfunction (SNCD).

Locus-ceruleus activation (LCA), the neurobiological term best explaining autonomic hyper-reactivity, is caused when inescapable, life-threatening fear activates locus ceruleus cells deep within the human brain (23). As with fish, alarm that activates the locus ceruleus causes noradrenalin release and effectively stops our heart.  Warm-blooded and highly evolved, our human brain alone utilizes half the oxygen and glucose (fuel) in every pump of blood. Decreased flow causes immediately build up of blood carbon dioxide (carbonic acid); the slight acidity (lowered pH) triggers maximum adrenalin release. Conditions permitting, adrenalin restarts cardiac pumping.  In this way, our human survival is protected,  but only at the expense of LCA’s autonomic hyper-reactivity. Thereafter, locus ceruleus noradrenalin release will be triggered by any body memory of the life-threating event and, itself, trigger the massive adrenalin release of autonomic hyper-reactivity.  Unintelligible to our slower “thinking” brain, the all-or-nothing autonomic hyper-reactive response seems to come from “out of the blue” and without intelligible cause. Typically, men react with explosions of physical violence they cannot control and, often, cannot remember.  Typically, women experience LCA as a terrifying feeling of suffocation (noradrenalin), followed by the pounding heart, shaking, sweating, numbness, nausea, and disorientation. Sometimes bringing with it memories of that original helpless terror, sensation of a pending attack can trigger the self-injury (head-banging, cutting, burning, or punching a wall) that will parasympathetically mitigate the pain of LCA. Children exposed to fear they experience as life-threatening develop the behaviors characterized as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

With no understanding the hyper-reactive behaviors that get them into trouble, children with LCA grow up trying to control their behaviors by controlling their feelings. Their tireless efforts to “be good” eventually cut them off from conscious awareness of their feelings. Serotonin-neuron-communication dysfunction (SNCD) is the neurobiological result of growing up too frightened to play. Any family situation troublesome enough to prevent a child (even only one of several children) from playing is teaching that child to consciously and deliberately ignore the instinct to play, but also the instinct to eat only when the body is hungry and to rest when the body is tired.  Curious free play is developmentally essential for normal human sexual happiness. Through the exploration of our bodies, our world, and our competencies, we learn to feel and trust our body’s biological connection to the Divine. As we playfully move through childhood, and then through adolescence, our conscious awareness of “being held by a Goodness much bigger than ourselves” grows richer and more sensitive with every new experience.

“Pervasive dysphoria” describes the black, empty free-fall of nothingness felt when, instinctively looking to our natural instincts, we find only blankness. The pain is indescribably terrible. In an effort to avoid that pain, SNCD sufferers deliberately deny themselves the peace of an  “empty” mind. Thinking (focusing their mind on intellectual thoughts) is protective, as is busy-ness, engaging conversation, and compulsive exercise. Through experience, adults with SNCD learn to protectively disengage themselves from feeling in “the present moment.” The present moment is that place where we, as animals, are closest our natural instincts – instincts evolved over billions of years to connect our otherwise-simply-material-body to the Divine Guidance that gives it Life.

 In studying “unipolar depression,” the World Health Organization was studying the effect of fear on the vulnerable childhood neurodevelopment.  The chronic unrelenting unhappiness of frustration intolerance, autonomic hyper-reactivity, and pervasive dysphoria together place 22% of the societal burden of disease on our health and our market economy.  It seems important to ask, “Who carries the societal burden?” Understanding market economies, we cannot help but ask ourselves, “Who, in this market economy profits from “caring for” that burden?”

 Safe, effective medications that fully treat both LCA and SNCD respectively have been on the marketed for 35 and 25 years respectively. Both clonidine and fluoxetine are molecular band-aids that simply block locus ceruleus and serotonin neuron receptors respectively. Both are safer than the Band-Aide that, in protecting a wound from infection, obstructs it from natural, healing oxygen.  Inert, simply sitting on their specific molecular receptors, clonidine and fluoxetine molecules allow normal brain functioning with no possible physiologic complication (no side effects).

Clonidine’s mechanism of action is just that simple. Clonidine molecules react with activated locus ceruleus receptors. By blocking them from being triggered to release noradrenalin release, clonidine molecules block the LCA cascade and block autonomic hyper-reactivity.  [Like the clonidine molecule, the medication guanfacine molecule is referred to biochemically as an “alpha adrenergic agonist (A2 agonist).” Both molecules react with locus ceruleus receptor molecules and, in doing so, prevent the noradrenalin release otherwise released in reaction to body memories of the original traumatic experience.].

          Fluoxetine’s mechanism of action is as easy to understand when one understands normal serotonin neuron functioning. Serotonin neuron communication takes place in the synaptic space between a pre- and post-synaptic neurons. Three consecutive but simultaneous reactions occur when a neuronal (electrical) impulse carried by the pre-synaptic neuron reaches the synapse.  It all happens, essentially, at the speed of light. 1) At the synapse, the electrical impulse is transformed into the chemical energy that opens presynaptic serotonin-storage-vacuoles into the synaptic space. 2) Now in the synaptic space, serotonin molecules chemically react with post-synaptic neuron receptors creating an electrical charge and thereby completing serotonin neuron communication. 3) The same serotonin molecules in the synaptic space chemically react with molecular pre-synaptic reuptake receptors and are thereby recaptured into storage vacuoles for continued reuse.

Children are born, as other animals, highly sensitive to the serotonin neuronal messages urging them to explore their world  (i.e., to play).  Deliberately “doing as they are told” and consciously blocking the urge to play, the child’s brain slowly decreases serotonin’s chemical affinity with the postsynaptic receptor. When this chemical resistance eventually blocks serotonin neuron communication, the childhood brain loses conscious connection to our animal instincts (i.e., Divine Guidance).  Fluoxetine, binding with the pre-synaptic receptor and thereby preventing serotonin reuptake from the synaptic space, chemically “pushes” serotonin’s reaction with the post-synaptic receptor. In doing so, fluoxetine restores normal serotonin neuron functioning allowing conscious awareness of our connection to Divine Guidance.

 Taken at too high a dose, both clonidine and fluoxetine cause a mild “toxic” reaction of little importance except that this brief, predictable and mild reaction allows patients’ to determine their own individual therapeutic dose.  The very safety of these medicines (with no side effects, effective at each patient’s therapeutic dose, and with a mild toxic reaction when more than enough is taken) means that, taken with understanding of these principles, these medicines can do no harm.  It also means that the medicines can be exploited, for profit, as long as doctors and patients are ignorant of their simple, straightforward pharmacology. 

Deliberate misinformation including reported sexual side effects and fatigue, as well as inaccurate dosing information (22) allows Eli Lilly to market fluoxetine for $2/capsule with the specific intention that the dosage be therapeutically ineffective (i.e., so patients will pay highly for medicine with, at best, only superficial benefit) (23).  Clonidine, marketed as a treatment for hypertension and with misrepresentation of dosing and pharmacology, is essentially withheld from patients whose autonomic hyper-reactivity would be fully treated by a therapeutic dose.  Protecting their own financial security, the American Psychiatric Association deliberately keeps the American public ignorant of the neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities of young children. (24).

The cruelty of inhuman selfishness can at times seem too terrible to bear. As I’ve come to understand that cruelty within a biological perspective, I recognize it as impersonal – as a tragic, but inevitable, human mistake.  There is no “evil spirit” here but a cultural consequence of human ignorance and consequent fear.  Only very recently have we had the solid scientific data – making common sense and supported by all available evidence – that allows a compassionate understanding of our human suffering.  Within this biological perspective our suffering becomes the guide to our healing.  Knowledge of la biologie demonstrates beyond contradiction the self-healing nature of Life itself.

Living cells have “played” within the matrix of Life’s Divine Guidance for over 3,000,000,000 years. Constantly evaluating/trying “this and that,” cells have evolved with perfect ease. Seen in the context of the 175,000 years that “honorable men and women just like us” have walked the earth, our 5700 years of cruelty and suffering can be seen as a mistake we had to make.  A mistake we have to address.  It was inevitable that, ignorant of the human vulnerability born with every newborn child, some children would “fall through the cracks” of human education. It was inevitable that, ignorant of the vulnerability of our finite earth, we would banish dangerous frightened souls from human love. It was inevitable that, too hurt to feel or trust the Divine Guidance inherent in Life, some of us would seek the false security of a Golden Calf.   

Beyond demonstrating the spiritual harmony of Life itself, a biological perspective demands that we recognize the absolute natural beauty of our human species. It demands that we devote our energy and resources to protecting every one of us from the dangerous adrenalin fight-or-flight response that, yes, allowed us once long ago to emerged from the seas. Conquering fear and caring for one another, we can then let the sacred mystery of the Divinity inherent in Life move our species towards joyful harmony with Life on our Earth.