My blog’s tagline includes the word spirituality, which has devolved into a vague term that can mean almost anything. In the interest of clarity and to balance the two previous posts that emphasized material takes on human life, this essay will outline my spiritual path and beliefs. Readers may or may not be interested, but it helps me to spell out my philosophy from time to time, especially since it’s still maturing.

What follows rambles through my ideas about different metaphysical stances, to my own personal experiences with them, to a description of my current stage of development. Since my understanding of the world’s religions is superficial, at best, don’t be surprised if my statements about faith and practice sound obvious or naive.

Two posts back I stated that our animal identity constitutes “the most central and accurate description we could give of ourselves.” After all, it seems unarguable that humans are mammals with large brains. Even while writing that sentence, however, I remained aware that many resist considering themselves ‘mere’ biological organisms. Indeed, when I posted the same essay on my Psychcentral blog, the following comment came in:

Hmmmm, so we are reduced to “cycles of carbon and calcium?” I prefer that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” by our creator. As a believer, I will be returned to Him.

This reader’s opinion probably resonates with many who consider themselves religious or faithful. Here’s an edited version of what I wrote in reply:

You bring up the other common opinion about ultimate identity: that we are best described as conscious entities (souls) inhabiting organic forms. But even if one takes that view, at death the body is still reduced to its constituent elements and recycled in the biosphere. The two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. In fact, since our biological form is apparent, while our spiritual nature remains debatable, even believers should look for ways to interweave the two perspectives. To deny our biology is to deny material reality, just as to deny our divinity is to deny higher meaning.

Divinity, as I intend it here, is a loose term meant to suggest that we have inner measures of soulfulness that go beyond the solid, predictable qualities of organic matter.

In the opinion of Christians and Muslims, each person has an immortal soul that is born once to this world and then consigned to eternal bliss or damnation based on a lifetime’s accounting of virtue, sin, faithfulness, and redemption. The sensible person thus works toward righteous behavior in order to secure a place in Paradise.

According to many Hindus and Buddhists, a soul (or its equivalent) is reborn repeatedly through time because of karmic entanglements accrued in previous incarnations. The wise soul engages in right action to limit such attachments and thus escape the cycle of death and rebirth.

Not all religions postulate an eternal and personal soul. For instance, Western Buddhist teachers seldom mention reincarnation. They discuss the basic principles of detachment and right behavior without reference to rebirth. This obviates the need to discuss a soul-entity, and in fact the Buddha himself rejected the existence of a discrete soul, since he found no evidence for any consistent, fixed self in his deep explorations of mind. Most Buddhists in the USA seek direct, meditative insight into the nature of consciousness as the ultimate goal of practice and don’t worry about escaping the cycles of birth and death. The focus is on mental process without invocation of any divine or eternal soul.

Many contemplative traditions (including some strains of Sufism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism) also reject the personal soul-concept. However, they do so by invoking a universal consciousness that subsumes the individual. This is the non-dual stance, which sees no meaningful distinction between soul and body, or between spirit and matter, or between God and individual souls. According to this philosophy, all beings arise as creative expressions of one vast Presence that manifests in myriad forms but retains core unity, which unenlightened humans fail to grasp. Such analysis rejects boundaries as illusory, whether between individuals, between people and animals, or between people and Divine Nature. We are viewed as all of one body, in the deepest sense. This perspective is essentially ecological and fits well with what we see in the biosphere.

Those of conventional scientific persuasion bristle at mention of either soul or universal consciousness. They see any suggestion of mystical reality as unfounded, infantile, and dangerous. But there is no scientific evidence that rules out either individual souls or cosmic consciousness. Quantum mechanical principles such as entanglement and non-locality provide plausible, if completely unproven, mechanisms whereby enduring impressions of mental life could be retained in the cosmic matrix without violating established physical laws. These ‘recordings’ could possess all the qualities we expect of discrete souls or universal awareness.

Over the years I’ve explored many different metaphysical positions. Raised as an atheist and educated extensively as a biologist, I never seriously questioned the strict materialist perspective until age twenty-nine. At that time, as I entered Alcoholics Anonymous and felt encouraged to find a ‘higher power,’ fate connected me with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Quakerism eschews dogma and doctrine in favor of direct, experiential discovery of ‘the light of Christ’ within each of us.

In 2000, after a series of profound (even shattering) spiritual experiences, I converted to Catholicism. For many years I went to mass several times a week and tried hard to buy into the Roman Catholic worldview. But although I appreciated the call to mysticism and the sacred rituals, the Church’s dogmatism, reactionary sociopolitical views, and rejection of female priesthood alienated me.

As an alternative, I explored Buddhist meditation. For two years I went to local meditation centers for weekly sittings and occasional longer retreats. At the same time, I undertook an intensive program of reading about Buddhism. The emphasis on silence and detached observation of thought felt quite helpful and fit with the clinically oriented mindfulness meditation I’d learned ten years earlier in classes at a local medical center. But in the end, I had trouble with Buddhist emphasis on emptiness and detachment. Although I see the value of exploring these qualities, they offer little in the way of felt love or sweetness. Meditative consciousness is vast and reverberant, but not inherently warm.

Next, I explored a Hindu offshoot at a retreat center that opened a couple of miles from my home. The monastics taught me to visualize my soul as residing in the area of the third eye in the middle of my forehead. I learned to concentrate on my soulful qualities rather than my bodily identity. This approach challenged me at first, because so much noise and confusion seems to arise in my head, and focusing my attention there failed to quiet the uproar. At the suggestion of a skilled meditator, I adjusted the technique by moving my conscious centerpoint to my heart, where there is more peace and warmth. Before long, I awoke to the powerful illumination of an ancient inner awareness that has little use for my day-to-day worries, ambitions, and desires. This inner light feels like a combination of personal soul and universal Presence arising from the cosmos itself.

Oddly, and beautifully, I now find myself having gone full circle. After all my explorations I am back at the Quaker starting point, only with a much more palpable sense of that divine light within each of us. This is experience and not belief. I cannot justify it in rational terms and see no reason to try. All I can do is describe what happens when my meditations go well. It matters little to me whether my direct apprehension of love, unity, and rightness resides only in my brain or truly connects, as it seems to, with a cosmic consciousness. Because it is experiential and not referential, it feels quite solid and unshakable. Some days I interpret my soulfulness in mystical terms, and other days I think about it in purely neurological ones. But no matter what I believe about this state of mind, it brings me peace.

Every person must choose her or his own path, and I have learned to judge no one’s, not even my own. Those who prefer material atheism have adopted a belief system that requires no leap of faith and has a logically satisfying internal consistency. Those who believe in heaven or reincarnation, and who view souls as eternal and individual, have found a comforting formula that gives meaning to what happens here on earth. Those who meditate mindfully to enter spacious states of consciousness experience inexpressible mental stillness. Non-dualists, in turn, use their practice to find (what seems like) experiential confirmation of an ageless and infinite cosmic unity.

For my part, I know only that there is something that feels divine and non-egoic in the center of my chest. It beats like a spiritual heart throbbing in unison with the biological pump that moves my blood. My metaphysical position is neither more nor less valid than any other. It has features in common with the tenets of materialism, since my bliss seems deeply rooted in my biology. It shares some aspects of the soul-religions, because the brightness within acts like an eternal spark that illuminates my better nature. Consciousness also feels enhanced, as I tune into the infinite harmony that comes with silent meditation. My practice has non-dual aspects too, since in its highest expression I feel merged with all beings and all Nature.

This is my spiritual trail, which has been blazed through two-and-a-half decades of searching and introspection. I believe each of us must choose whatever path feels right. We should seek the tradition(s) that can heal both our own wounds and the troubles of the larger world.

So although I spent two posts honoring humans as living, breathing organisms, it feels vital to round out the discussion with my conviction that we also embody a loving, timeless Presence that permeates and transcends our material forms. This may be a personal soul, or a universal one. It may be pure consciousness or an artifact of brain physiology. No matter. It dwells within each of us, waiting for the day we abandon our desperate scheming and open to Life in all its terror, splendor, and Grace.

Imagine someone asks you this question: “What are you?”

We seldom get queried in this way, since the more typical questions are: “Who are you?” or “What do you do?”

So take a moment to answer the question of what you consider yourself to be, first and foremost. Some of us will answer with our careers: “I’m a physician.” or “I’m a writer.” Others will state an important social connection: “I’m a mother.” or “I’m an American.” A few will refer to religion: “I’m a Muslim (or Atheist, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, etc).”

But few of us will reply, without forethought: “I am a warm-blooded animal that walks upright on its hind limbs and possesses an enlarged brain.” And yet, that is probably the most central and accurate description we could provide.

Look back in time some five-thousand generations, or one-hundred-thousand years. Anatomically modern humans walked the earth, but most contemporary roles didn’t exist. Concepts about personality and social function, if articulated at all, must have been of more limited scope. We have no way of determining the language environment of these beings. No doubt people back then related to others as parents, children, and tribal members. Some may have been Shamans; some may have been leaders. So as individuals they may have had feelings about basic categories of identity and perhaps even words for them. But my guess is that they were far more aware than we are of their kinship with other animals and nature at large. The biological urgency of nutritive, protective, and reproductive drives may well have dominated their consciousness in place of the concerns about money, time, and networking that occupy our lives in the information age. They probably understood much more intuitively than we do how similar humans are to bears, monkeys, wolves, and antelope.

Humans were living, breathing, eating, defecating, copulating, and nurturing as animals long before they were writing, analyzing, conceptualizing, and philosophizing as citizens. Despite this, today we give far more attention to our concepts, and our feelings about our concepts, than we do to the basic biology that keeps us in the game. How many of us read a newspaper at breakfast or a magazine while sitting on the toilet? How many of us listen to our iPods while running or watch TV while digesting dinner? All these practices act to divorce us from our bodies. However, unlike unions between lovers, matrimony between mind and body is always “’till death do us part!” There is no chance of divorce, only alienation.

The powers of silence that I touted in a recent post may offer a return to our native state of mind. Before we learned to escape into the constructed realm of symbols and society, we remained grounded in the given world of bodies and biology. Make no mistake, I believe that language can help people heal, as evidenced by my efforts in writing these essays. But even more healing is learning to live beyond words, to dwell as organic beings embedded in the biosphere and related to all other life forms through an elaborate, eternal interchange. The material of our bodies came from the earth and constantly exchanges with it. Every calorie that keeps us alive is owed to some other organism that preceded us. Once death meets us at the end of our days, our physical forms will be released so their elements can again enter the timeless cycles of carbon, calcium, and creation.

In the meantime, we can find simple, lovely contentment by embracing, in silence, our bodies with their constant throbbing, gurgling, aching, hungering, and aging. Rather than feeling beleaguered by our organismic limits and imperatives, we can learn to honor them. Rather than hating how time drains the bloom from our faces and erases the potency from our contours, we can honor the natural, inevitable, and majestic seasons of every life.

Whenever the opportunity arises, I like to watch insects and other small creatures. The delicacy of their movements, the purposefulness of their travels, and the incredible intricacy of their bodies all impress me. A warm feeling of affection for these little beings often follows. If even a gnat displays this miracle of life, imagine how impressive you are as an organism. Think of the formidable truth of your brain, with its thousand-trillion synapses mediating a torrential flow of information. Remember the marvelous fact that you grew from a single cell inside the body of another organism much like you in every way.

With the stillness of meditation one begins to feel the ticking of the body, the flow of consciousness in the brain, and the exchange of air in the lungs. These activities are never-ending while we live, and through them our bodies are continually inviting our affection. Our living processes can be seen as somatic seductions that can help us reconnect with our true forms and escape the complicated tangle of words. They reach out to us every moment, beckoning us back into the sublime experience of living as warm-blooded bipeds on this ancient and bounteous earth.

Every once in awhile it pays to look within.

Deep inside our cells, there is a great deal of hollowness. This isn’t the emptiness that Buddhist meditators seek to apprehend directly, but simply a surprising lack of substance. For instance, if we enlarged the nucleus of a carbon atom up to the size of a basket ball, the nearest electron would orbit several miles away. So an accurate model of a DNA molecule, with its carbon, nitrogen, and other atoms spiraling in a helix, would look like myriad tiny dots very widely separated. The same with every other biomolecule that comprises our bodies.

Yet these specks are arranged with stunning precision in complex molecular machines that perform all the functions a lifeform requires. Proteins slide along DNA strands and copy them so our cells can regenerate, or so we can mate with the opposite gender and generate a new being. Proteins form enzymes that convert the sugars we eat into energy that allows us to perceive, move, and live. Proteins form receptors that detect hormones and neurotransmitters to sculpt the way we feel.

All these fabulous processes occur in cells, which in our bodies number trillions. Microscopic in size they are specialized as muscle cells, nerve cells, reproductive cells, skin cells, immune cells, and so on. All of this life orchestrated by ceaseless neural, hormonal, and sensory signals that we can’t begin to track consciously. At our best we might be aware of a tiny fraction of the activity that affects us from within and without.

And yet here we are: me writing, you reading, feeling very ordinary about it all. We hold notions about history. Perhaps we believe the universe to be random, and our presence here merely the result of happenstance. Perhaps we believe in a creative deity that formed us all. Perhaps we don’t know what to believe, or don’t care about origins, but we know our names and our families and our personal stories. So much information, so much interpretation, so much conjecture, our minds mulling things over but seldom stopping to look at the miracle this all represents.

For make no mistake: no matter how we came to be, we are miraculous. And so is the tiniest single-celled organism whirling about in a puddle outside. This is the beauty of biology, the stunning complexity and fecund activity of living.

My high school sweetheart’s mother was a research biologist. When she found out I shared her passion, she bought her daughter contraceptives. In her opinion, every life scientist starts out interested in sex, then moves on from there. Of course, that also describes the average teenaged boy, but I’ve never forgotten what she said, because yes, sex was one of the aspects of life that drew me in. But so did maple trees, dragonflies, ant colonies, turtle eggs, and mold.

Life is so miraculous, so utterly sublime, that it is worth remembering that we don’t just observe biology, we experience it. The next time you hear a meditation teacher guide you to follow your breathing, picture the inhalation bringing air into your lungs, and imagine the gases diffusing into your blood. The red cells extract oxygen while your heart pulses the soupy fluid through your body. Some of it races to your brain, powering acts of noticing, meditating, and loving.

Why did I choose to write about this tonight? Because of desire. Not only my yearning to highlight the majesty of the biosphere, but also my own bodily stirrings that make me want to breathe, eat, copulate, and ponder. All these urges propel me through life, as I stumble to make sense of it all and not hurt anyone in the process.

How could something as ancient and natural as desire be a bad thing? Hunger, and the striving it stimulates, are the bases of survival.

But don’t forget that unmanaged desire does lead to problems. It seduces us into bad decisions. It leaves us panting with frustration. It angers us.

Imagine, for a moment, that everything in your life felt wanted, exactly as it is. Imagine not worrying about expenses, or feeling frustrated with unreliable people, or irritated on the job, or wishing that your partner would act just a little more understanding. Imagine if you had no desire for anything to be different from the way it is in this very moment. I submit that would be true freedom.

But would it be true life?

Some day I hope to find ultimate peace and permanent, penetrating insight. It would be nice to never lapse into wanting anything other than what I already have. Until I find lasting grace, however, I will muddle along. I will montor my urges and aversions, my regrets and hopes, and I will try to make sensible choices. There is hope for realization, but in the meantime, there is life.

The next step in this series is to start talking about my upbringing and why it led to problems with mood instability. This shifts the focus from viewing the general picture to looking at a particular case. And yet, what follows is not just my story, but every story. The details differ, but we all have suffered good and bad times, we’ve all been hurt, and we’ve all learned from experience. We’ve also all developed in a womb and we face the same end. In truth, the differences are far less impressive than the similarities. Keep that in mind while reading my unique personal history, and pay attention to how my particular trajectory reflects the human condition as we all live it.

At the outset of this writing project I said this story would start at the beginning. So let’s go right back to my first moment: that of conception. I don’t mean to raise the abortion debate here, so understand that my point isn’t necessarily that my soul manifested at the exact instant a minuscule, writhing spermatozoon from my dad penetrated the massive, nutrient packed ovum produced by my mom. But until then, the universe had never before seen that precise combination of genetic and epigenetic information gathered in a single cell. At that moment, a goodly portion of my fate was sealed.

The moodiness so common in my mother’s family (as well as her artistic sensibilities) and the alcoholism so common among my father’s relations (as well is his analytical prowess) were carried forward to me in that mix of DNA. But just how moody, artistic, alcoholic, or analytical I became remained to be shaped by time and circumstance.

As the fertilized egg divided, then divided again, as it grew into a solid ball of cells in those first few hours and days, it was affected by the chemical mix of my mother’s fluids. Her hormones and cellular messages affected my rapidly expanding mass of protoplasm. By the time I implanted in her uterine wall and the love affair of blood vessels known as a placenta formed, I’d already tapped many sources of information not present at conception. As I developed in her uterus, my little growing body continued to be affected by myriad substances, sounds, and motions. Her breathing and heart rate formed the universe of my mood at that time. If she felt worried and depressed, I shivered in my dark, watery world. If she laughed with ecstatic delight, I shimmied with pleasure.

And if she took a medication, which was commonly done by pregnant women in those days, I took it too. If pesticides entered her bloodstream, they entered mine. When she smoked or drank, I felt the rush of nicotine or the loosening of alcohol. If she walked near the exhaust of an automobile, the fumes from leaded gasoline entered her lungs and moments later a heavy metal circulated through my nervous system as it produced millions of vulnerable growing cells each hour.

At the same time, the thousands of genes on my DNA molecules were orchestrating my formation. My sex, coloration, facial features, and internal arrangements were laid down. I took the form of a European male baby because I carried European genes and a Y chromosome. It is likely that brain structures were genetically shaped in ways that determined many personality traits: my introversion, my sensitivity, maybe even my seriousness.

And yet all these genetic traits were modified at every moment by countless influences from outside. The genes were painting my portrait using pigments acquired from the environment.

Did a separate soul enter at some point? Did a consciousness already familiar with birth and death take residence in that little baby growing inside a moody woman in 1958? Do we play this game of life over and over as reincarnationists believe? It isn’t possible to be sure. I’ve read the evidence that supports the concept and find it intriguing but not quite decisive. The jury is out. But there is little doubt that the person who I became differs in important ways from everyone else in my family, even as we also share many traits. Whence the source of that uniqueness? Genes? Environment? Prior lives? The touch of God?

All I know for sure is that the day came when my mother’s womb decided my time had come, and uterine contractions pushed me into the waiting world. For better or worse, my qualities were already guiding me down my own unique path. Even at that early stage I was already the product of both my genes and the emotional and chemical milieu which formed me, which nurtured me as I grew from a single cell into a lively baby in just nine months.

Well, this is the second anniversary of the launching of WillSpirit (my blog’s title didn’t sport an exclamation point until this year). It’s odd, looking back, to realize how clueless I was starting out. I had little clarity about my direction or subject matter, but high hopes for success. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

But upon reviewing my first post (an excerpt is quoted below), what strikes me is how my ideas at the start were not that different from my ideas now.

Naturally, I’m more seasoned. Hopefully, I’ve matured a little as a writer. And of course I’m much more realistic about what blogging can and can’t do for a person or a career.

But it surprises me to read that my very first post announces: “I don’t think anyone has perfect mental health.” Plus, it cites the body as an important participant in mental wellness. These pronouncements sound very similar to the sorts of statements I’ve been making lately. Not to mention that a year after starting the blog, I trained as a physician acupuncturist in order to offer somatic treatments in support of mental health. The more I change, apparently, the more I stay the same.

True, today I’d be less likely to emphasize biology as the main determinant of our essential nature, and much more inclined to acknowledge an equal contribution of divinity or Consciousness (with a capital ‘C’). But this seems like a quantitative shift, not a qualitative one.

Anyway, I’m posting this little tribute to the past as a way of thanking my readership. It’s been small but supportive all along. Recently, after I started speaking forcefully about the toxicity of the conventional mental health system, WillSpirit! enjoyed a big jump in the number of visitors. But the people who comment, at least, remain as gentle and sagacious as ever. And that has been the true value of blogging: it’s connected me with others who value compassion, growth, and wisdom. Thank you. Thank you.

I’M STARTING BLOG #184,876,598 ON THE INTERNET!

Just kidding. I don’t know what number blog this is, though I imagine I’m within a hundred million or so of being correct. Which means I doubt you are even reading this. If you are, in fact, an actual person reading my actual first post, then you deserve my eternal gratitude. Thank you. Thank you.

I am working out what this blog will be about, but I see three main subjects as likely to come up. They are related, at least in my mind:

1.   God, or something like it.

2.   Biology, as our essential nature (though refer to ’1′ above for a possible add-on to our biology).

3.   Mental health, which I interpret broadly. I don’t think anyone has perfect mental health. It is a question of working toward improvement. In my mind, mental health includes emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and even somatic health. Only with all these components in harmony, more or less, can we be said to be in a state of true mental health…

It must be obvious to anyone paying attention that WillSpirit has dropped down on my list of priorities. But it remains dear to my heart, and I recently responded to a reader’s comment at length. Because that discussion furthers the topic of my last post, I’m elevating it to the level of a post of its own. This is something I’ve done many times before. Partly the cause is laziness, but mainly it’s because the best way to formulate one’s thoughts is to address valid critiques offered by others. Here’s the comment from Jane-Ellen:

Why “strange” modifying coincidences? I’m sure you are aware that statistics, and the human mind’s many times proven aptitude for forgetting failures of coincidence and latching on to examples, require such coincidences.

Here’s my response:

One can divide world views into two basic groups. On there one hand there is the Newtonian picture: all experience is traceable to matter (or by extension energy); there is no inherent direction or meaning in the cosmos; and everything is random. The opposite opinion is that the universe is not reducible to Newtonian mechanics, has both meaning and direction, and although random on some scales still manifests inherent organizing tendencies.

This isn’t simply a question of atheism vs spiritualism. The problem can be framed in more modern terms, and in fact rather succinctly: do quantum mechanical behaviors have non-trivial influences on macroscopic events? There can be no question that at the smallest scales of reality Newtonian pseudo-random determinism breaks down. But does the strange behavior seen at atomic and subatomic scales have any manifestations in our day-to-day lives? If so, then all manner of truly strange (meaning directed) coincidental events are possible. Mind would have some influence over matter, and hence over the course of history. We would live in a universe that could, indeed, be considered spiritual, though in a scientific way.

The jury is still out on this. If you want to read some works that very cogently challenge the Newtonian view, and present strong supporting evidence, start with Rupert Sheldrake’s, The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Powers of the Extended Mind. See if you can honestly dismiss the mountains of data he amasses that suggest traditional physical models are simply not sufficient to explain many mental phenomena. Then look at Quantum Aspects of Life, edited by Derek Abbot and Paul Davies. This text presents both the pro and con sides of the argument for significant quantum effects in macroscopic living systems.

The jury is indeed still out. But contrary to the views presented by convinced atheists, the idea that Newtonian principles are insufficient to explain life is neither ruled out nor marginal. Very prominent scientists are beginning to state, quite openly, that the twentieth century’s mechanistic, materialistic philosophy was incomplete. So sure, any coincidence can be explained in two ways. Maybe dozens of coincidences can, even when they all seem to point to the same kind of directedness in the cosmos. But whether either explanation is the correct one must be determined on the basis of all the evidence at hand. After a great deal of reading about this subject, I think there is a pretty good chance that the universe is more interconnected and subtle than I was led to believe in college. Not all intelligent, scientifically trained people agree with this view, but many do.

One of my recent reads was Darwin’s Blind Spot, by Frank Ryan. Having studied biological sciences in college, graduate school, and medical school, it surprises me that a significant battle among evolutionary biologists completely escaped me until now. Although Ryan’s book held little factual information that was new to me, I learned that behind the scenes almost since the time of Darwin a philosophical struggle has roiled through evolutionary sciences. In brief, it pits those who emphasize individuality and competition against those more inclined to highlight interdependence and cooperation among organisms.

Why do I mention this conflict in a blog devoted to ‘Peace, Balance, and Clarity‘? Because the disagreement is emblematic of a much larger tension in modern society. On the one hand, we have those who value rugged individualism, unfettered markets, and aggressive exploitation of resources. On the other are those who build their lives around ego-denial, cooperative exchange, and conservation. It would be difficult for me to write this without making my own preferences obvious, so I’ll state openly that it seems excruciatingly clear to me that the era of raw competition in human culture must come to a close, to be replaced by an ethos of inter-reliance. Only then will we find anything like true peace in the world.

But it is also clear that many would disagree. Especially here in the United States, where freedom is defined in marketplace terms, the idea that humans could actually cooperate and trust one another beyond the ethic of tit-for-tat gets treated as naive and laughable. Whereas many countries have perfectly respectable socialist parties, in the USA socialism is a dirty word.

The naked hostility that market-indoctrinated scientists have expressed toward those biologists who dare to point out the massive interdependence and cooperation that underly evolution comes as no surprise in this culture. The question is, can this bias be changed?

Fortunately, Ryan’s book does not stand alone. Many other texts have been written with an eye toward enlightening people about the power and universality of symbiosis (a technical term which is variably defined, but loosely refers to unrelated species depending on one another for survival). I find it encouraging that the scientific mainstream is awakening to the limitations inherent in Darwin’s vision of evolution, wherein adaptation is postulated as solely due to unmitigated competition between organisms. It is a sign of positive change.

But doesn’t science stick to simple facts? Isn’t it a cool, rational enterprise that prizes open-mindedness? Not much more than any other human activity, it turns out. The great geniuses come in two broad categories. Some, like Einstein and Darwin, solve a discipline’s difficult problems after they’ve been building for some time. These are the fortunate ones, who achieve acclaim quickly. Others have a more difficult road, in that they solve problems that other scientists don’t even want to see. They take much longer to be recognized, and seldom achieve the Godlike status of the ones who rescue a field from acknowledged confusion.

And why wouldn’t scientists want to see certain facts? Often because they fly in the face of broader cultural values. In the case of cooperation as a prime mover in biology, it has long faced opposition because it directly contradicts capitalism’s claims of reflecting the order of nature. An evolutionary theory based on competition (survival of the fittest) works nicely to bolster the insistence by dominant marketeers that unchecked opportunism is the best foundation for society. Scientists depend on the ruling powers for funding and positions, and are therefore inclined to view reality in ways that support the competition ethic.

In contrast, a biological theory that demonstrates widespread cooperation in nature and demotes the value of strife as an agent of evolution undermines those who insist unregulated competition will somehow solve the world’s problems.

It probably looks like I’m getting off-track here. I implied this post would touch on spiritual issues, but I’m writing about political ones. It turns out that in this case the two are related. The universal teaching of spiritual systems is that we are interdependent and should treat each other accordingly. Until recently, cynics could point to the accepted theory of evolution as indicative of a natural order devoid of such ethos. Now that the tide is turning, it is becoming increasingly clear that the higher truths sages have espoused for ages are reflected in a deep and profound way in the structure of life itself.

In an earlier post, I praised Douglas Hofstadter’s vision of consciousness as a product of recursive and resonant self-reflection. The point of that essay was to highlight the profound value of observing one’s inner life: mindfulness brings one to the threshold of the sacred. Without in any way focusing on meditation, Hofstadter captures the essence of contemplative practice.

There are aspects of his philosophy that trouble me, however. In particular, I mentioned in passing that Hofstadter believes a computer could embody a self if it were sufficiently complex and possessed motivational drive. Although this sounds sensible in theory, in actual fact it seems unlikely that a synthetic consciousness could ever be similar in any meaningful way to a human mind. I’ve been reading a number of authors who write about consciousness, the brain, and the prospects for artificial intelligence. As near as I can tell, they divide fairly neatly into those who think machines will someday emulate the human mind, and those who believe computers will never achieve consciousness. On the whole, it appears that those with primary backgrounds in mathematics or computer science tend toward the former position, while biologists tend toward the latter. Those with religious perspectives also contend that consciousness is uniquely human, but I’m setting their positions aside for the purposes of this post.

Since I am a former research biologist and a trained physician, it should be no surprise that I believe human consciousness lies beyond the capability of machines, no matter how advanced. Hofstadter has made an important contribution in recognizing reflection as the key to an entity having a sense of self. It may be that auto-observing machines will someday be created, and perhaps they will have selves of some sort. But whatever awareness arises will not be human, or even human-like.

The philosopher Alva Noë makes the point that even minute single celled organisms have well-defined agency. They move toward nutrients and away from threats, for instance. In other words, there is a motivated quality to life all the way down to the unicellular level. The fertile yearning and striving characteristic of living things arises at the very trunk of the tree of life.

I think this is a central and important point. Much of our conscious experience comes from our biological imperatives. In fact, some have proposed that even our capacities for art, song, and innovation evolved because early humanoids with such skills were more sexually attractive than those less talented. The patently biological reproductive drive may underly the most rarefied human activities.

Even if a machine could be designed to pursue goals in an internally motivated way, such behavior would be a high-level addition to its programming. The device might look very human-like to an external observer, but its motivation would be an accretion onto a logic-gate architecture; it seems very unlikely that the inner experience of such a machine would resemble human consciousness at all. Semiconductor logic gates do not embody desire, whereas yearning is utterly fundamental to life. Self-reflection may engender the mysterious quality of conscious awareness, but drives establish the core experience of every biological organism.

As we all recognize, biological drives also underpin much of our misery. Who hasn’t been stung by amorous (read: reproductive) yearning? Who hasn’t developed excessive hunger for one or more bodily pleasures? How much of our suffering comes directly from our identities as organisms with powerful instinctive desires? The same is true for our joy, at least in its less refined forms. Isn’t it the case that passion and excitement come directly or indirectly from biological currents? In some sense or another, these currents can be detected in every living cell.

So although self-reflection may be central to our feelings of self-identity and conscious awareness, much of our experience originates far below any such complex mental activities. Much of our sense of being human results from the more ancient condition of being a living organism, writ large.

The key to satisfaction is to reconcile the high-level awareness that comes from self-reflection with the surging forces of instinct roiling around our cells, tissues and organs. The watcher may be the product of recursive self-reflection, but what it watches is the moist and messy business of life.

In recent months, a plan has formed to wean myself away from the comforting bosom of therapy. A post I wrote six months ago detailed the huge amount of psychotherapy and group work I’ve completed. Some of it enlightened me, some of it led me astray, and much if it had little effect at all.

Just as I prepare to swear off therapy forever, fate has brought me a counselor who truly helps me. Partly it’s a good personality match; partly the ACT philosophy he adheres to works well for me (as discussed on this site many times); and partly I’m finally ready for a fundamental change.

Not that I’m close to ‘cured’, or even ‘stable’, but something inside seems to be shifting. One good example came in my most recent session. It was the first in almost two months, and had been arranged as an urgent appointment because of severe depression.

The biggest reason for my suffering, being perfectly blunt, has always been self-hatred. My upbringing beat it into me. My earliest memories are of my parents’ bitter divorce, during which it became obvious that my dad despised the role of father. In most of my memories of my mother, she lies in bed nearly catatonic with depression. She couldn’t offer much love. After that came her death, a probable suicide; a six-year-old takes a mother’s dying as a personal rejection. Within weeks I began living with my bitter father and sadistic stepmother. The woman humiliated and tormented me with cold, calculated efficiency. (Those interested can read about her in a memoir fragment .) My dad, narcissistic and obsessed by his work, was also an alcoholic. In short, my childhood taught me to feel unwanted, unworthy, despised, tormented, and abandoned.

Sadly, I still feel all those things, only now the hatred comes from my own heart. This is probably the most sensitive secret I’ve revealed on a site riddled with self-disclosure. It is the root of the worst of my problems. It keeps me at arms length from life and loved ones, because I never believe I deserve either.

My counselor and I have talked about this self-loathing many times. On this last visit, he instructed me to hold out my hand. “Can you love your hand?” he asked.

To my surprise, the answer was, “yes”; loving a body part seemed easy. The full significance did not sink in right away.

My adoration of biology, which goes back to my earliest days gardening and fishing with my grandfather, makes admiration of anything alive no problem at all. People, redwood trees, mice, and all other living things enthrall me. I’m even fascinated by mosquitoes. I have an inborn reverence for everything that lives. But until recently, I had never honored myself for my own biology.

For some time, I’ve practiced a meditation where I simultaneously feel and visualize my internal physiology. I sit on my meditation cushion and breathe, all the time imagining the air seeping into the tiniest passages and pockets of my lung. I think of the oxygen turning my blood corpuscles bright red. While concentrating on the sensation of my heartbeat, I form a mental picture of my heart pumping this freshened blood to the rest of my body.

Even though I regularly settle into my biological nature, it had never occurred to me to love myself as a living organism. I was too busy hating my personality, my decisions, and my sins. All my hatred has been directed at me. Which raises the question, “what am I?” Am I a disembodied mind? Can I really separate what goes on in my brain from the body that holds it? The obvious answer is “no”.

After my appointment with the therapist, I did my usual ‘biological’ meditation, only this time I honored the miracle of my animal form, and allowed reverence to surface. At the same time, I held the thought that I am my body. After all, the sensation of a mind separate from the physical self is an illusion, or even a delusion. It’s the ego’s way of isolating and empowering itself. The truth is that body and self are one. In accessing my respect for my own life processes, I discovered a bit of love for myself. It feels wonderful.

Not long ago, I thought my recent spiritual growth had banished inner darkness. Soon after, I found myself fueling a depression with my habitual self-contempt. The old obsessions, regrets, and fears returned with full force. Having learned from that relapse, and despite this insight about my value as a living animal, I will be shocked if the horrible despair does not soon resurface. On the other hand, perhaps I will remember to feel reverence toward my body, and the biological mind it supports. Perhaps I will feel a trickle of love for myself.

The idea to write about chameleons in my last post came via a mailing from the California Academy of Sciences. Only I did not mention chameleons, and wrote about the institution’s new building instead. Thinking about why I got sidetracked, I realize the structure has peeved me ever since I visited it after completion. In the process of learning to be a docent, I attended a series of some twelve lectures about the new structure, and it sounded like the coolest thing ever. But when I entered it, the place just seemed sterile to me. The exact opposite of what I expect from a museum about life and nature. Why the place struck me that way remains a a bit of a mystery. Inside, they built an enclosed rainforest. Yes, an actual jungle with trees climbing dozens of feet, vines, waterways, and all manner of creatures. Granted, the animals all live in display cases (except the butterflies, which flutter freely), but the glass boxes present the organisms well. They look as natural as possible under the circumstances. The effort to do something unique and mind-blowing succeeded. And that without even taking the vast aquariums into account.

Maybe I complain about its success. The museum does such a fantastic job of bringing a tropical jungle environment to San Francisco, that it reminds me of the words from the 1970 Joanie Mitchell song, “Took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum”. She wrote the lyrics about a botanical garden in Hawaii, but the Academy takes the concept a step further. Oddly, the sense of that song fulfilled as a prophecy bothers me as much of anything. Has it come to that? A jungle in a bubble?

So I ended up writing about glass enclosures, and comparing them to the way our culture encourages people to rope in feelings, sensitivity and intuition. Our emotions are ‘supposed’ to remain confined, and not let out into the rational world of purchase and finance. We are to wall them off, the way the museum separates dirt, leaves, and bugs from the people walking concrete ramps in designer sneakers. A doomed and misguided stricture, it wipes all the messy ‘nature’ from the human psyche, leaving us with the machine like computations and reasoning of the brain’s neocortex (the evolutionarily ‘newest’ area of the nervous system, much enlarged in humans). When one compares the neocortex to the ‘older’ parts of the brain, sometimes called the ‘reptile brain’, a clear cut difference in regularity and modularity jumps out at you. On a functional level, the neocortex consists of repeating units of nearly identical cellular arrangement, which the brain adapts to different types of information processing in different regions. The ‘lizard brain’ on the other hand, looks chaotic, disorganized, and confusing. More organic and less like a biological iMac. The neocortex, don’t get me wrong, must be the most miraculous structure in the universe. Its capacity for figuring things out, speaking and symbolizing, creating art and song, and all the other human accomplishments must make God proud, if there is a ‘creating’ God (frankly, I kind of doubt that, but I remain open-minded and respect others who have faith that an omniscient consciousness built the universe).

Still, we share the more ‘organic’ appearing and deeper brain structures with a larger proportion of the animal kingdom. Like chameleons. (Did you think I’d forgotten about them?) What I read in that Academy publication said that chameleons don’t change their color so much in order to blend into their surroundings, as they do as an expression of ‘emotion’. It gladdened me to see affective responses freely ascribed to an organism as foreign as a lizard. When people muse about whether other animals have feelings (a discussion that happens more than I like) it immediately occurs to me that they have never loved a pet. Anyone who has bonded with a dog or cat does not need to conduct experiments to try to figure out if the animals emote. Those who love pets know that our non-human companions never stop expressing inner states that look very much like what we would call (for example) happiness, frustration, desire, or love. But I’ll have to admit, seeing the label ‘emotion’ attached to the interior world of a lizard surprised me. Not that I disagree. Even spiders seem to experience fear, for instance (ever tried to catch one and seen how it runs away in a ‘panic’?). Still, I usually think of chameleons as rather prosaic creatures.

Apparently such thoughts border on homo sapien bigotry. I humbly apologize to all reptiles for assuming they lack strong feelings. A male chameleon, in the throes of romance, will display crimson and green in vivid patterns, while puffing up like a decorated soldier on review. The female, if impressed, responds with a toned down version of the same coloration. If bored and uninterested, she turns brown. Would that human females were so easy to read.

Emotions are ancient. We share them with many (perhaps most) creatures on earth. They comprise one of our most touching bonds with the animal kingdom; unlike rational thought, which sets us apart. Emotions transform animals from machine-like entities with robotic needs for food and sex, into souls. Rather than acting like stimulus-response algorithms (if low on fuel, move toward food; if tanked up, search for a mate), they become seductive and flirtatious, ravenous or comfortably sated. Maybe just semantics, you might respond. How do we ‘know’ that a lizard flirts? Aren’t I just anthropomorphizing, to suggest such a thing? Yes. I am doing exactly that. If it looks like seduction, why not assume the lizard ‘feels’ amorous. Why should we jump to the arrogant conclusion that the chameleon has nothing going on inside. Just because we make machines that are incapable of emotion (though people try to make robots that emulate feelings; with eyebrows that move, for instance), have we justification for assuming that evolution works the same way? Does it really make ‘rational’ sense to postulate that emotions as we experience them popped into being along with the neocortex? Isn’t a more parsimonious explanation that they have been here all along? That the only human addition to the realm of feelings is the ability to speak, write, paint, and sing about them?

In that view, which I believe makes the most sense (even though it cannot be validated scientifically), emotions have an primeval heritage that we would do well to honor. Passions animate. They bring us the luxuriant and consuming experiences in life that intellect cannot comprehend. They are the language of the soul, and may even be the closest biological correlate to the ‘spirit’ world. They make animals precious. If other creatures have feelings, then they demand better treatment than they often receive. And so do we.

If feelings come to us from the earliest forms of crawling life, then they define the animal kingdom in a fundamental way. (Some would even say plants have feelings. I am not ready to go that far, but who really knows?) As I said in the last post, emotion should not be treated like an unnecessary and accidental nuisance. A world of ‘Spocks’ would be an uninteresting planet (would you want to be a Vulcan?). Feelings have a noble lineage, bond us to the natural world, and bring texture to life. Reason just figures things out.

When younger, I thought of myself as a chameleon. I used the term in a sense that the Academy tells me was inaccurate. Chameleons do not go around matching the environment. So calling people who try to blend in with every crowd by that name spreads a false myth about the lizard. In any event, my camouflage skills worked poorly. Yes, I changed from group to group, but even so I seldom ‘fit in’. I made a poor chameleon, in that sense.

With my new understanding of the animal, however, I deserve the chameleon gold medal. My emotions spread through my whole being, and completely change the face I put toward others. When depressed, I am distant, pessimistic, and terse. When happy, I become intimate, excited, and voluble. Two completely different animals.

We are all chameleons in that sense. We all change our aspect according to our inner world’s weather. Some hide their condition better than others, and alter their hue less obviously. Perhaps their inner winds blow less intensely, their passion heats without searing, and the sleet of sadness stings only a little. Or maybe they just enclose the storms better than those with more demonstrative behavior. Either way, we also know people can have such histrionic responses that the main body of humanity shies away, calls them ‘ill’, and wants them to ingest synthetic chemicals. I’m one of those ‘overly emotional’, and ‘too sensitive’ human animals. Society tells people like me to settle down.

Je refuse! I plan to wear my heart on my sleeve with gusto. Not that I want to create havoc in my life, harm others, or ‘lose it’ at inopportune times. But when the ‘spirit moves me’, I shall dance. I will boogie with all the myriad beasts on this earth, and be proud of my strong emotions. My feelings will bind me in spirit with all my furry, feathery, and scaly companions on the dance floor. Including the ‘cold-blooded’, but kaleidoscopic and ardent chameleon.