We are told that kissing is a relatively recent invention of Western Cultures — although some similar behaviors exist outside them. Many indigenous and Eastern cultures engage in similar customs involving noses and smell, rather than lips and taste.
I have seen instances in tribes from South America of group-mastication, where the women communally chew food which is later shared amongst the tribe. Human cultural history is rich with peculiar expressions of both our concern over and desire for something not entirely dissimilar to trophallaxis in ants: the sharing of enzymes, hormones, digestive consortia, and nourishment via the mouth (or, in ants, the anus). Although in humans some of these forms are reserved for sexual behavior, there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye or mind. Part of the reason is that each human being is a complex bacterial superculture capable of engineering itself according to need and opportunity.
The exchange of microbial consortia, however, is not an option: children denied the initial inoculations supplied by kissing, breast-feeding, and other forms of contact are at severe risk of developing complications which are not limited to their digestive or immune-systems. In direct conflict with our developmental needs, advanced technological and scientific cultures have long demonstrated their vested interest in reducing or attacking human-to-human and human-to-animal contact in a wide variety of domains. This activity places us in a situation where the intentional denial of birthright-assets leads us to depend on them for saleable substitutes.
Unbeknownst to nearly everyone the open denial of and attack upon our bacterial bodies represents an intelligence crisis. Our bacterial symbionts comprise a cornucopia of advanced nonhuman intelligence assets which act at once as a receiver and transmitter for forms and methods of sensing and relation that are entirely beyond the grasp of our religions, our science, and even our science-fiction. And the are permanently damaged and re-programmed by exposure to antibiotics...
If you saw someone going around blinding children, you’d probably be justifiably upset; but what’s going in our cultures is worse, and affects senses we do not even have names for. Our cultures and institutions have become so buried in hubris and habit that this sort of activity is considered protective, nurturing, and necessary.
The reality is that it’s killing our bodies, damaging our minds, and laying waste to anciently evolved biocognitive transports of interpersonal and interspecies relation.
=). ~ o ~ . ^%
Your Commensal Microbiota:
A Transentient (Network) Intelligence.
For 6/7ths of the history of life on Earth... the organ of knowing was the gut.
The approximate ratio of bacterial cells to animal cells in an adult body is: 2 to 1. It’s probably significantly different in a newborn, but we don’t yet have much in the way of related statistics. As I mentioned previously, modern science only recognizes your eukaryotic1 (animal) cells as you. When they talk about your DNA they’re actually talking about 1/10th of your DNA. Up until very recently, medical science overtly denied and largely attacked the outstanding majority of your cellular constituents.
In fact, they want to protect you from them.
Since ~50% of your cells are bacterial, I want you to consider this carefully before you decide what your brain is, whether or not you have a soul (and what that might be), and what it means to be alive as a human being. Ask yourself if there is not something more than ‘species’ involved in being an animal or plant — because what you call species and the aspect of evolution science is paying attention to is less than 50% of what’s going on in, around, and as you.
Think about this when you try to more deeply understand what is happening to you when you dream, activate or express your relational intelligence, or experience emotions such as joy, wonder, sexual desire, the desire for intoxicants, fear, hatred, love, disgust, horror, offense, &c.
How do you ‘know’ what you’d like to eat when hungry? Have you had an orgasm? Do you still wonder about this overwhelming phenomenon — or do you just take the stories you were sold for granted? What is actually going on inside during this experience? Do you feel sensations in your belly? In your torso?
Have you had a psychedelic experience? Do you really think that’s about your brain? Do you remember those sensations in your gut during onset, peak, and descent?
Have you ever awakened from a dream to feel your belly ‘swirling’? Ever fall, spinning, back into yourself after a dream? Have you ever had ‘the spins’ — either from illness, or from alcohol poisoning? Ever had food poisoning?
Ever fainted?
I hope that you do not really think that all of those experiences are ‘just your brain’ — because, let me tell you, if you took that thing in your head out of your body, it would neither have those experiences, nor survive its separation from the biocognitive hypersystem comprised by your body.
But strangely — the opposite is not true: children born anencephalous (missing most of their brains), can sometimes survive for quite some time. Nicholas Coke is one of them, and he managed to survive to celebrate his first birthday. Score one for the home team, the kid’s got guts.
Scientists want to tell you that, as far as awareness and personhood goes, it is all about your brain. They often neglect to mention that there’s a nerve trunk connecting the gut and the brain, but ~80% of the traffic is from the gut to the brain. What it comes down to is this: something vastly more amazing than either science or religion can admit is going on. In fact, both those of those ways of knowing have vested interests in either eliminating or co-opting the miracle we are, and practically no one is willing to admit it.
Even the miracle itself.
HU . ~ o ~ . IP
InfantSee
Go with your gut.
Fly ‘by the seat of your pants’.
Infants are the fastest class of learners I can locate amongst humans — but they can’t read and rarely avail themselves of formal languaging. When they want to ‘know’ about something, they often try to taste it. I suspect most mothers accept the common explanations for this behavior, the most obvious of which is breast-substitution.
Freud told us that the oral and anal fascinations were ‘phases’ of development which we were meant to move beyond, or else suffer the symptomatic expressions of ‘infantilism’, something which every wise adult would surely want to avoid.
Unfortunately, in this milieu the concept ‘wise adult’ is functionally oxymoronic, because, unless your mouth and anus fall off of you, you’d do well to remain ‘fascinated’ by them. There is a long catalogue of excellent ‘reasons’ for this, most of which have to do with your cognitive, relational and yes, physical health.
The realities of our psybiocognitive nature are far stranger than psychology (or any extant way of knowing) can can get a decent grip upon. Turns out that you’re a bit like the universe that expresses you: you’re something like a star with a special planet and a moon.
The star is analogous to the human expression of your organismal nature, which requires an extremely sophisticated set of foundations in order to arise as or emerge into (and as) our experience. In our analogy, the planet comprises your environmental and bacterial foundations. Viruses and fungi are also involved; many of them symbiose with or require animal and bacterial cells for their survival; and, of course, some are parasitic or prey on animal cells.
You and the environment are like fish and water — you comprise a unity — and one of the results is that you are bacterial ‘all over the place’. But deep within the strange tube that you’re wrapped around, microbial supercolonies are evolving at speeds that stagger the imagination — and they comprise an intelligence that modern humans are almost entirely unaware of. In fact, the dominant ways of knowing that currently express themselves as persons and cultures have no intention of admitting that bacteria play a role in your intelligence — yet.
This is about to change, because science has recently ‘discovered’ what they call the commensal microbiome: the bacterial universe of you. Some time from now researchers will begin to realize that a variety of human capacities and illnesses are linked to bacterial symbionts (and their lack) in the gut, intestines, and all over the body. The results will be interesting, but you can do better, and you don’t need to wait for science to catch up, because you are already advanced beyond anything science will understand in the next 1000 years.
Analogous to the Earth’s relationship to the moon, your representational intelligence (this is the stuff of which language and science are made) represents only a minute subset of your organismal intelligence. But it’s extremely compelling, primarily due to cues provided and emphasized by the cultures in which you participate.
It’s got gravity, it pulls on you, it’s a somewhat like a strange mirror in the sky of daytime consciousness. It’s visually charismatic; but it’s dead. Being dead doesn’t stop it from expressing something like desire: it wants other things to be dead, too — because things that aren’t dead are a threat to its sovereignty and dominance within our minds and cultures. Although it doesn’t actually exist in its own right, once ensconced in human agents it acts like a set of internal machines capable of directing a person’s mind and emotions in ways that insure its continuance, maintenance, dominance, and transmission (to other humans).
This intelligence is woefully incomplete, like part of a machine that models itself as a complete living person. In case this isn’t clear, you’re not a representation — and you cannot be adequately represented by descriptions and tokens2. While extremely sophisticated in certain domains, the specific forms of human representational intelligence which currently dominate our modern cultures are overtly toxic in many of their most important functional and relational aspects. Like a strange poison that appears to grant wisdom while killing your internal organs — the physical, relational and environmental costs of these habits vastly outweigh the benefits. Unfortunately (for us and nearly every complexly evolved animal on Earth) modern human cultures are too busy developing these diseases to to be concerned about their costs. They don’t even really believe in that there are any. Since they don’t exist, why examine them?
Let’s return to the ‘planet’ in our analogy. Your gut and intestines are probably the oldest distinct ‘organs’ evolutionarily, and they house a variety of symbionts whose characteristics and functions are as profound as they are obscure. Some of the features of your digestive system are now known as your enteric nervous system; an anciently evolved network-intelligence containing its own peculiar forms of neurons as well as astonishingly numerous bacterial supercultures, many of which can form complexly relational biocognitive symmetries (and senses) ‘on-the-fly’. Recently, (2011) allopathic medical experts have identified 3 major ‘enterotypes’; the gastric equivalent of a blood type, based upon the peculiar dominance of microflora in each person’s gut.
As if that were not sufficient, your bacterial symbionts represent your own advanced genetic engineering facility. Within, around, and upon the surface of your body, you have become a rich environment for (and of) fast-evolving (in comparison to the macroorganisms we usually think of as the anchors of physical evolution) bacteria whose peculiar developmental acquisitions are as unique to you as their species are common to humans and other animals who carry them. And when you touch another person, you transmit some of them. But when you share food, or clothing, or utensils — or bodily fluids — the transmission becomes something not entirely dissimilar to a planetary exchange of highly evolved organisms (transpermia).
Yet all of these descriptions and analogies are but crude sketches of what’s going on in, around, and as us. What’s actually happening isn’t much like the models that our common relationships with language can grant us access to. You’re an instance of something so astonishing that ‘universe’ doesn’t begin to tell the story. There is no story that compares to you and there never will be. Stories and descriptions are something humans cobble together out of language and ideas, not something we are. Science and religion are both too limited to introduce you to your world or yourself; but both of them are desperate to get you to think otherwise, for a simple reason: they need constant human attention, advertisement, and action — just to survive as ways of knowing.
Of course, infants have no conception of these matters, so, when they want to ‘know’ something they simply do what’s natural: they attempt to connect it directly to the anciently evolved brain that their guts comprise — through their mouths.
Poetically this could be described as ‘kissing the question’.
And back in the strange representation-dominated universe of adults, there are still a few domains in which adults practically cannot help but join in — and some of them, not surprisingly, lead to babies...
$( . ~ o ~ . ((
A papier-mâché model of the brain’s internal structure.
What is a Brain?
“Approximately 90% of the human body's total serotonin is located in the enterochromaffin cells in the gut, where it is used to regulate intestinal movements.” — Wikipedia
Perhaps our attempts to affect various mood disorders by involving Serotonin Re uptake Inhibitors are misguided. We may well be looking in the wrong part of the body for the solution. Foods could probably accomplish what pharmaceuticals only rarely manage, and at a much more reasonable cost.
@# . ~ o ~ . (]
Consider your own genesis. A almost impossibly sophisticated psybiocognitive hyperstructure called a human woman produces an egg. Somehow, across distances comparative to those between stars at its scale, the (woman)egg attracts a (man)sperm. They link. There’s an event analogous to star-birth as the totipotent supercell we call a human zygote emerges from the union and implants itself in the uterine wall. It then begins to diverge along what are sometimes called the animal and vegetal polarities. But that’s just the onset of an incredible series of profound repercussions.
What is time at the scale of a cell? If each cell represents a unique bubble of temporal and relational experience, then as they divide — they are dividing time. The outcome is temporal multiplication. As stars are to light, organisms are to time.
Common human ideas of termporality and span are skewed by our mechanical renditions of time — but time was never mechanical — time is relational. And at the scale of cells and their relations, a small amount of human time can be an eternity. I suggest that what you went through in the ~9 months you spent in the womb was roughly equivalent to the complete developmental span of our world. A complete recapitulation of development and evolution. Unique, yet simultaneously all-inclusive.
Like an incredibly long fuse whose sparking position is the living person you are, your ‘body’ reaches back through time and countless ancestors (and relations) to the first moment of Life on Earth. You are the living extension of those lives and relationships.
You can be seen as a living vehicle for the expression the future because it lives in you, as you. So, too, the entirety of the past.
$( . ~ o ~ . ((
When we talk about ‘the brain’ (or any organ in our body) we should understand that it’s not really as distinct as our language-games imply. In fact, our language games mislead us on purpose in order to produce the peculiar modes of focus that their goals and functions evoke. When someone says the phrase ‘your brain’ everyone is expected to understand that they are referring to the gelatinous lump of curiously wrinkled goo cradled in your rather oversized cranium — and maybe, by extension, the central nervous system.
While this is expedient for some purposes, it is grossly misleading in general. Without your heart, you do not have a brain. Lungs are similar. But this doesn’t go far enough, because without the environment — neither you nor your brain would exist.
When you get right down to it, the brain is something a bit more like a metaposition of organismal, interorganismal, and superorganismal relation. I would call this a psybiocognitive superposition — capable in most cases of unifying the otherwise distinct sensing modalities of the body, and organizing them into imaginal and emotocognitive coherence. Memory, plot, evaluation schemes, and response paradigms are made possible by less sophisticated modal convergences which can be ‘fed back’ recursively in order to result in vastly more sophisticated phenomenon such as creative expression.
Along with a variety of ‘housekeeping’ functions, the brain appears to be the seat of consciousness and awareness. But this appearance is somewhat misleading. I think that a more accurate model is that of an organ of assembly, where incredibly diverse streams of sensorial experience, memory, relational immersion and evaluation are woven together and find expression as our experiences of consciousness and awareness.
To jumpstart a broader understanding we need only realize that the brain is deeply enmeshed in the living universe and our world, just as we are. Though our bodies are reasonably distinct, they can never be separated from these relationships — most of which exist outside the relatively feeble capacities of descriptive language. And here is where things become problematical for science, because the brain’s actual nature and functions cannot be contained within or limited to the body, your species, or even your world. Your physical and relational foundations comprise an expression of the essential character and activities of timeSpace itself, not merely of its local or observable features. Your brain (and your mind) are not sourced in you — and their real connectivities extend far beyond your body and your lifetime; deeply into the environment, the planet, and even the Sun.
The terrestrial environment of the Earth (including the Moon) and its relationship to the Sun are not only expressed within your person and mind, but within the structure and activity of your brain. With the Sun it’s even simpler: no Sun? No brains. Not only that, but without the third planet’s swarms of brain-and-gut-carrying children, both the Earth and the Sun would themselves be catastrophically altered: they would lack the sensing, learning, feeling and consciousness capacities which their trillions of living children obviously endow them with.
But the relationship flows in both directions: events within our brains extend nebulously into every aspect of the terrestrial environment and its histories. Inversely, changes in environmental content, context, activity and function modify your brain (and the rest of you), and your own thoughts, feelings and activities alter the environment. What we call ‘memory’ is not merely something you possess, but something you encounter, participate in, and modify within your environment. The planet (the universe, really) is memory, and you’re immersed in it. Although it is not the kind that records words, the representations of plot we call stories, or ideas — per se — you may be assured that the Earth is brain-like, as is the Sun — and this is part of the reason why creatures on our world have brains. It is not as if they invented them. Quite the opposite. What’s going on is more like the morphemes comprising the word ‘invention’, and less like the definition.
There appears to be trend in the physical development of life on Earth which can be approximately stated as the localization (or internalization) of previously successful paradigms existing at broader scales. At these scales they exist in fabulously distributed conditions compared to the localizations that may later result. These relationships and their mechanics or functions are, over evolutionary time, refined and tuned until it becomes possible to assemble similar symmetries within individual organisms. Bluntly: before you get brains in organisms you have to have shockingly sophisticated superpositions of this paradigm existing as sustainable ecological transients within the developmental flow of terrestrial ecologies.
The process of internalization begins with relatively simplistic symbiosis events. Bacterial cells, originally incapable of self-directed movement within a medium, acquire spirochetes — and, bingo, we have little cellular motorboats. Now the spirochetes can benefit more directly from their own constant wiggling (because it now leads to feeding, constantly), and the cells can direct themselves more or less toward crucial metabolic resources (food). It sounds small, but over evolutionary scales of time the ramifications are magnificent. Complexly co-evolving multicellular supercultures appear to have been the source of plants, insects, animals and ecosystems.
Just out of sight, beneath the soil of any area rife with vegetation, the mesh of root systems, bacterial and mycelial networks comprise explosively diverse symbiotic supercultures. These networks transfer more than chemistries — they represent vast sensory meshes which conserve historical information about their environment and its constituents and changes. Memory. They are examples of a schema whose more advanced expression (and internalization within a given organism) might look much like the human brain (and the myriad extrinsic assets with which it naturally connects).
Evolution, as we understand it scientifically, is a sort of ratcheting game, where organisms ‘compete’ in order to acquire and conserve useful mutations. The key to this kind of game appears to be a relatively stable environment, since, if the environment should suddenly change radically, countless trillions of life-years of conservations can be erased forever. These conservations form foundations for future development, as well as extending the usefulness of those already acquired. All of this is fascinating, but I view it as a crude and woefully incomplete model which will undergo serious challenges as our comprehension of the terrestrial biome and organismal intelligence (which I refer to as biocognition) slowly advances. Within this model, the brain appears to act as something like a biorelational matrix — as opposed to a biocomputer, which many modern researchers believe it to be. This latter view is at once inflated and biased; human hubris is famous even amongst humans, and in this case, our fascination with our own machines has compelled us to believe we are made in their image. A devastating faux-pas. Your brain has about as much to do with a computer as you do with an animation drawn in frames on paper. Saying your brain is a computer is tantamount to saying that you must be a cartoon character ‘because you’re both animated’.
From my own research and observation I am inclined to view the brain as a strange inward compression and ‘flowering’ of more generally distributed capacities of organismal sensing, relational intelligence, and metabolic governance capacities once housed throughout the organism. This is really no different than any of the organs, each of which, like peculiar crystallizations, appears to have become more complex and distinct over evolutionary time. But there are many peculiar features of the brain that beg a deeper exploration; in part because it looks suspiciously as if the entire field of organismal experience is prone to become self-and-other interested. This interest has never ceased at mere survival, but is and always has been fundamentally relational. And this, it seems to me, is the real source of the evolutionary developments that would lead to brains: relation.
Given the necessary time, resources, and developmental luxury provided by the relatively stable environment, brains slowly acquired and expressed their complexity as physical expressions of the nature of organismal reality as it continuously seeks new stages of sophistication and ability. What may have begun as consolidation of sensing and metabolic regulation went on to become a peculiar species of organ which is not entirely unlike a flower: it seeks contact, and not merely for the purposes science would have us admit. Practically speaking, the human brain of today represents a transentient hyperstructure which is constantly at pains to express its passions for relation and contact with nearly anything it can get senses into — and that which it cannot penetrate with physical sensing — it reaches into with theory, imagination, speculation, and perhaps most importantly of all: dreaming.
Now here’s the thing I want to make clear: the living planet is incapable of generating children and features which are not like the basic schema of its own nature, activities, and character. So if when you awaken you see a world teeming with myriad creatures, each with eyes and limbs, hearts and brains, you can be fairly sure of something simple: our universe is like these strange organismal crystallizations of character and sensing.
Isn’t it amazing how curious they all are?
The Second Birth
“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” — John 3:3
Although no man shall reveal what the Great Mystery hath hidden for good purpose, all that is hidden is clearly announced to the observant by all that is near at hand.
In John 3, Jesus asks Nicodemus how he can count himself a ‘master of Israel’ and not understand the most fundamental truths pertaining to this very mastery? Nicodemus replies something which means approximately ‘Alas, we are but dedicated copyists, and though we know the surfaces with expertise, the content (often) escapes us.’
It seems that Nicodemus is after something deeper, and that within his familiar culture he finds little solace — else why should he approach a heretic (Jesus)?
But here’s something that must have puzzled Jesus: How could it be that Nicodemus, an Israelite, did not understand the ‘second birth’? Was it not common knowledge that God, through Moses, ‘parted the waters’ of the Red Sea, granting a second birth — and liberty — to the previously enslaved and persecuted nation of Israelites? And without this birth, how could they have known the power of God’s kingdom?
And what of liberty?
`' . ~ o ~ . +^
Those children who pass through the birth canal are usually inoculated with some portion of their mother’s commensals on the way out; sometimes their own meconium is involved, which, contrary to popular opinion is not sterile. Additionally, there is strong evidence that some bacteria can be passed to the infant prior to birth via intrauterine transports. What is far less clear is the effect that caesarian section births might have on the initial transference of maternal commensals during the birth process itself.
Now here’s where things start to evade our common models. During and immediately following our physical birth, we should hopefully acquire our mother’s carefully developed commensal microbiota through breast-feeding and constant contact. Orphans and those given up for adoption are at risk of losing these utterly crucial resources which jumpstart the digestive and immune systems, and I propose that these transfers also play key roles in the development of a wide range of relational and cognitive abilities.
But for those of us who received them, the bacteria that can survive in us begin growing and engineering themselves according to the unique assets and needs of the local environment(s) our bodies comprise. In many cases this process is interfered with by a variety of ideas, methods, and technologies which propose to protect us, often delivering harm and the explicit denial of birthright-assets instead. Common contact between mother and child during early postpartum experience provides what is probably the lion’s share of the early human-to-human commensal exchange. This is as it should be; in part because those organisms native to the mother’s body are already relatively well-suited for many of the peculiarities of the infant’s.
As newborns, if we enjoy the common presence and physical availability of the father, (and/or siblings, relatives, pets, etc.), we acquire a variety of commensals from them as well. I ask the gentle reader to be aware of the unexpectedly profound repercussions of these events. If you were born into a home with pets, you are vastly more inclined to be sensitive to them as full-fledged beings (and to their communications) for an obvious reason: you’re carrying their commensals inside you. When that dog licked your face, you were inoculated. But licking wasn’t required. The nose-touch of a cat, a slight peck from a bird. Even dust in the air within the house can carry animalian commensals directly into your nose, sinuses, throat and digestive system.
]] . ~ o ~ . {{
Kids. Incorrigible, aren’t they? You give them a bath, and next thing you know they’re outside again, digging in the dirt, and covered in… filth?
Not exactly.
I remember the hyperbolic exclamations of parents and grandparents whenever they noticed the slightest trace of dirt on my clothing or person. It’s not really their fault, however — scientists and doctors and corporations selling poison were busy convincing them that dirt (like nonsense to science, or autonomy to religion) was the hiding place of demons. The demons were called ‘germs’ and products like Lysol (literally lyse-all (cells)) were the champions of both cleanliness and health. Germs, you see, were dangerous. They could ‘spread themselves’. My grandmother once chided me severely for spitting. ‘You're spreading disease’. Actually, I was spreading myself. But she had lived through a time when some rather deadly diseases (e.g. tuberculosis) were easily spread through this vector, so she wasn’t entirely mistaken.
But there’s a lot more going on here than meets the tongue. Children acquire commensal bacteria from play, dirt, food, plants, insects, and... especially animals. I have noticed that children raised around animals comprise a relatively different behavioral and cognitive species from those that are not. This is not particularly surprising, since when that dog licks your face, what is going on is an exchange far more sophisticated than the sticky saliva that you may wipe off. It’s a marriage, and it’s relatively permanent. From then on, you will carry unique portions of each other within and on your bodies... and they will replicate and evolve at the astonishing rate of prokaryotes... of course, we can also acquire non-symbiotic parasites of various kinds from these same sources... such as the toxoplasmosis gondii organism which is commonly transmitted through contact with cat feces or dust produced when it desiccates. But this is no reason to avoid such contact, which, I suspect, radically alters our metabolism, our cognition (there is already evidence neurometabolic healing and support from bacteria acquired from dirt), and, I suspect, our relational intelligence. Our relationships with other organisms are not merely circumstantial: remember that 90% of the cells in our bodies arise from acquisition, not sexual reproduction. Ordinarily, in exposure to nature, we would acquire vast arrays of organisms which many modern humans never come into contact with. And it’s interesting that, as we drift further from nature, we are continuing to develop cognitive and relational diseases that have no real explanation. I suspect that some of these may have something to do with the loss of crucial biometabolic symbionts: bacteria which were long a common part of our acquisitions, but which our modern circumstances deprive us of, or destroy in and on our bodies. What I am suggesting here is that without common contact with a wide range of environments and sources... we actually fail to become human. Our metabolic and immune systems, our digestive and cognitive faculties... cannot develop in the ‘germ free’ vacuum and antibiotic drenched medicinal environments we have ignorantly imposed upon ourselves and our children.
It took until about the year 20003 for scientists to figure out that dirt was good for you. In fact, it took a lot of expensive research to demonstrate that playing in the dirt could actually dramatically benefit your health. Indeed, some of the little organisms in dirt could protect you and heal you in ways that no medicine on the planet can duplicate. How strange is that? The demons, it turns out, were actually angels. And all those people desperate to convince us that cleanliness was next to godliness found out that their definition of cleanliness was next to deadliness, instead of divinity. Nice job, Lysol.
}} . ~ o ~ . [[.
Some wild ascetic named Yokhanan of Immersions was apparently dipping people in the water of the River Jordan prior to Christ’s major ordeals amongst the stupid desert people who were so bound with their own hubris and superficial knowledge that whenever a teacher arose who wouldn’t kowtow to their idiocy, they tended to either banish them or murder them. But back at the river, before they imprisoned him and ripped his head off to please some sultry royal slut, Yokhanan was up to something amazing.
Here’s the scene I imagine: with the sun at its apex, Yokhanan would bring people into the river, and bending them gently backward, immerse them in the waters until they they began to drown. It took a strong man, because you had to insure that they got some of the water into their nose and eyes and maybe even their lungs4. And this submersion accomplished more than than we might at first imagine.
To be born of a human mother requires that you be immersed in the natal waters of the womb. For the religious, the spirit of God, or at least an angel acting in God’s agency ‘parts the waters’ and you burst forth into human life. But to truly understand and to become available to the necessary perceptions you must repeat this process at the universal scale. The ‘living waters’ of Earth and the ‘living light’ of the Sun become the transports of communion in this recapitulation of our first emergence into human existence. By immersion in the waters, you re-acquire the innocence you enjoyed within the womb, prior to your human birth, and when you emerge you are penetrated by the cleansing and inspiring spirit of God — and are thus re-born to the ‘next order’ of your existence — the universal birth.
Nothing could be more sensible.
Pre-Christian, post-Christian, or non-Christian — what was going on was a lot more sophisticated than we moderns can easily frame in the languages we use to attempt this.
Many people and animals regularly bathed there. Overflying birds dropped scat, fish and insects and nearly every other kind of creature used the river freely. Human burials in fields and on hills that fed into the river during rains or floods was common in this place and time. And runoff from simple graves and graveyards most likely entered the river through the water table. Dead animals, insects, and fish abounded within its waters, as in any such water.
And so whether immersed or merely sprinkled, one thing that was definitely being communicated was commensal bacteria — and not just from humans — from everything that lived — and from everything that died. Though we may debate the degree, it is practically impossible that this was not happening. And though the ancients probably had no articulate knowledge of these matters, they did have knowledge of an invisible link between all living beings, associated with the divine, which they called what they wished but we call spirit.
If absorbing commensals from a living person connects you directly to them across any distance — what happens when you carry commensals from the dead? Could spirit be partly instanced through connectivities enjoyed by physically distant colonies of once physically proximate bacteria?
Isn’t it fascinating to think that some aspect of the invisible connectivity we call spirit could indeed be physically represented on Earth — as microorganisms?
Sealed With A Kiss
“One last kiss — and one last whisper, then indeed, I shall depart.”
I have no idea what the range of ‘normal’ oral behavior during lovemaking is. I don’t really think there is any such standard, except as some specific culture dictates via tradition. But if you simply watch human beings kissing, it is pretty obvious that something quite intense is happening, and it’s an intensity they deeply enjoy.
That it doesn’t begin and end with the lips, mouth, or tongue is not particularly amazing5, but the intensity with which it may proceed is. A kind of hunger ensues, wherein the one doing the kissing can become moved to a desire comprising the most pleasurable madness. You want to kiss them everywhere; to breathe their breath, to bite their teeth, to lick their eyes.
What’s this all about?
Some of this can be ‘explained’ according to familiar paradigms — but we’ve overlooked something of crucial importance in our understandings and our evaluations: kissing is perhaps the single most effective method of exchanging commensal bacteria, hormones, and other biocognitive chemistries. So, effectively, the development of kissing in our modern cultures represents a method for insuring that adults commonly accomplish this important exchange, even in our germ-terrified cultures. And still, most of the adults are largely or completely unaware of this aspect of their amorous desires and behavior.
I feel relatively certain that we will eventually discover that our microbial consortia remain linked across distances. The longing you feel for your missing companion may be more than ‘merely’ emotional. There’s a physical component of them housed and developing in (and on, and as) your own body, and the place where this is most obvious is your gut.
Is that, by chance, where you feel the longing?
Well, what a coincidence.
