organelle

2nd March 2010

Post with 6 notes

The Gut, Biodiversity, The Nervous System, and Planetary Crises

“It may be surprising to learn that the human gastrointestinal tract is home to (10 to the 14th power) bacterial organisms. In fact, there are more bacteria in the gut than there are somatic cells in the body. These resident bacteria are referred to as commensal microbiota, and their arrival during the first few postnatal days sets up a symbiotic association that is necessary and crucial to normal physiology. This lifelong association is essential to host pathogen defense and plays an important role in nutrient uptake and metabolism. Immunologists have been aware of this system and its importance to the development of the muscosal and systemic immune systems for a long time. What is new and noteworthy is emerging evidence that gut microbiota influence behavior and central nervous system (CNS) function.”

— Effects of gut microbiota on the brain: implications for psychiatry, Karen-Anne Neufeld, BSc; Jane A. Foster, PhD

I believe the final sentence in the above excerpt demands special attention as it relates to communications amongst the members of the biospheric cogniscia

“Nowhere in the study of human biology are basic concepts changing more rapidly than with respect to the human microbiota. Microorganisms were first shown to cause disease in humans in the 1800s, and after this finding, the popular and scientific views of the microbial world became dominated by the quest to understand, prevent and cure microbial disease. This led to millions of lives being saved through improved hygiene, vaccinations and antibiotics. However, most inter- actions between humans and microorganisms do not result in disease. Beneficial host–microbe interactions have been studied for more than a century, but it was not until the advent of molecular biology that the pathogen-dominated view of human-associated microorganisms began to change.

Gene-sequence-based approaches have recently allowed complex microbial communities to be characterized more comprehensively and have removed the constraint of being able to identify only microorganisms that can be cultured, greatly increasing knowledge about commensal microorganisms and mutualistic microorganisms of humans (that is, organisms in a relationship in which one partner benefits and the other is unharmed, and organisms in a relation- ship in which both partners benefit, respectively), as well as human pathogens. Researchers are now finding that host–microbe interactions are essential to many aspects of normal ‘mammalian’ physiology, ranging from metabolic activity to immune homeostasis. With the availability of new tools to investigate complex microbial communities and the expanded appreciation for the importance of the human indigenous microbiota, this is an opportune time to apply ecological and evolutionary principles to improve the current understanding of both health and disease.”

— An ecological and evolutionary perspective on human–microbe mutualism and disease, Les Dethlefsen, Margaret McFall-Ngai & David A. Relman

()! .~o~. {[}


Just as the diversity of commensal microbiota and other conditions of intra-cellular, organ and metabolic health dramatically affect both our mental function and our immune system, our planet has similar features and capacities which until very recently depended upon extant biodiversity for their robust protective, relational, nutritive and prophylactic activity.

The shocking and incredibly sudden damage we have inflicted upon biospheric diversity (primarily at the scale of animals and ecosystems) has severely impacted planetary health and healing, creating in effect a exploding crisis in which protections which have long been active have suddenly and egregiously disappeared. The biodiversity we’ve erased previously acted as shock-absorbers, communications and intelligence assets, and an immunity system.

We should pause to note that Earth’s experience of time differs dramatically from our own, and to her only some few heartbeats have passed, while for us it has been 500 years. Effectively, she is in shock, and her temperature will fluctuate wildly, her inner clock has gone haywire, and she shall certainly shiver, shake and bleed. Her heartbeat, metabolic status and ‘blood pressure’ are also fluctuating wildly.

The results of these events are feeding back into every species on the planet — since we are not ‘part’ of Earth, but instead living instances of Earth. This then feeds back into the planet, and the resultant reflexive cycle creates a recursively expanding nightmare with terrifying consequences including but not limited to ‘auto-immune’ disorder on a planetary scale. This means simply ‘the elements of her body will attack each other, failing to recognize itself as self’ —just as we have done to the other species of the world.

The biodiversity which required millenia to establish cannot be ‘healed’ — it is gone and there is no ‘pill’ or ‘therapy’ that can replace it. In fact, if history is any measure, what will happen once the various nations realize what they are up against is the wholesale erasure of the remaining resources in the hope of stockpiling survival assets for specific groups of people and nations. A part of this activity is sure to include another infamous facet of human capacity: the wartime ‘denial of assets to the enemy’ move which stipulates that assets one cannot acquire for themselves or allies be destroyed or poisoned so that others cannot use them against you. This is not the future I am speaking of, but the present.

Could it be that as we annihilated the anciently conserved commensal bacterial symbionts in our own guts with antibiotics and other toxins, we set ourselves up to become omnicidal maniacs who could no longer recognize ourselves in the eyes and bodies of the creatures and ecosystems that comprise our most ancient and treasured symbionts?

Unfortunately, we shall now we shall see firsthand what ‘multiple sudden opportunistic infections’ look like at the scale of a world, rather than that of a person, or a people.

[[+- .~O~. :”{/

Now here’s the encouraging part of this story: each of you contains a massive powerhouse of nonhuman intelligence which is not only older than humanity, but probably older than the solar system. This isn’t in conflict with your religions or your lack of them, it’s involved in both. Within your stomach and your intestines, in your mouth — in your whole digestive tract — you contain a living library older that the Sun and Earth. This library has seen many worlds, and has been directly involved in solving every possible problem that has ever arisen for any organism or group of them. It is a biocognitive hypersystem comprised of: you guessed it, commensal microbiota.

Everything you have been taught has convinced you that only humans are intelligent and that our intelligence is a possession. Well, that’s half correct: we’re possessed by a form of intelligence which mimics brilliance but actually ••sucks, violently••. That’s the representational intelligence that we believe to be located in our brains. Of course, without guts we do not have brains, so I think we’ve been deceived (this is like the opposite of being received and welcomed). For thousands of years, women, children and men have become sages and heroes by accomplishing a single, rather simple but unexpectedly powerful task: they have re-activated the intelligence in their gut.

The most amazing thing about this is that two or three people who accomplished this •and were able to overcome the initial threats• and unify their inner intelligence would become something so amazing that no story could hope to contain it. This is what the myth of the Jedi is actually about, it’s a coded prophecy about the return of the power to activate the gut intelligence on a broad scale. Many throughout history have accomplished it without any idea what it was they were accomplishing. Hypatia of Alexandria, Joan of Arc, Socrates, and Leonardo Da Vinci comprise familiar examples.

That’s the first part of the encouragement (en C our Age Ment).

The second part is this: Earth is an anciently evolved biocognitive hypersystem capable at her scale of accomplishing many things we cannot hope to imagine or even craft language about. But a few of them can be at least vaguely framed.

For the past 50 years, she has been awakening new powers in her children, and particularly her human children. Many of them were confused, because their cultures not only held no guidance related to these matters, but often openly attacked anyone in whom they were present, branding them ‘insane’ or otherwise undesirable, and literally torturing them. Nonetheless, the children who are not largely destroyed outright by these attacks have been and continue to be born with the power to withstand these withering circumstances, and more, given the opportunity they will unify in her behalf — and the results will be staggering. But it is not only the children who possess this capacity! Do you recall some strange desert prophet who talked of being ‘born again’? Allow me to suggest that a part of this process is to -reundergo the entire history of your gut intelligence’s colonization and establishment in your own body-.

Gralien Report on Children Who Hear Voices

Reuters: On the study involved

The second encouragement is that Earth is well-adored in the celestial neighborhood and abroad (no pun intended), and when she awoke to the fact that some 60-80% of her biocognitive diversity disappeared ‘overnight’ she set up an alarm call that has been heard for light-years around. This alerted a variety of anciently evolved and profoundly endowed protectors (unfortunately it also alerted a variety of predators as well) and many of these (both of them) are either local and at work, or en-route.

On the dark side of this matter, the sudden appearance of 2010 AL 30 and 2010 AG 30 bodes ill. These ‘spirit twins’ are wonderful when they appear in spirit form, but deadly when they appear in physical form (if I have made sense of the signs properly). This specific incident is a sign or grave peril if I have understood it correctly. I wish there were some Navajo I could speak with regarding it.

The third is this: when Earth is in trouble, she is like a profoundly endowed royal personage, and she immediately ‘opens the storerooms of wonders’ to any who will take up her cause, and the causes of her children. Those who make this choice in the core of their hearts will be received, not deceived, and they will be endowed with abilities and understandings so far beyond anything available to their representationally-mastered cultures and relations as to appear to be of another species entirely. And they will become precisely that, for the time of the representational dominance again draws to a close, and the children of the little mists are rising now, together, to usher in a dawn so miraculous that it will transform not only the present, but the entirety of human history.

How do you transform human history? You do something so beautiful that it transforms the meaning of the millennia of confusion, omnicide, sacrifice and rape that had until that time largely been its outcomes. That’s the task before us in this generation. It won’t be accomplished in the ways we are familiar with, but with an entirely new sort of liquid fellowship — a fellowship with no formal name, or goals, an invisible sister/brotherhood which assembles, acts, and disappears before it can be praised or noticed. Something that flows and accepts no token of identity or label, but is so powerful that no force can stand against it. Indeed, it is authorized by the very source of all forces, and thus requires no authority or name of its own.