18 May 2021
A friend of mine sent me an interesting article the other day. It was entitled, “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs“.
It concerned a researcher named Michael Levin who is intensely interested in how electrical currents help shape our bodies. He calls it the ‘Bioelectric Code‘. He has been able to convincingly demonstrate how the mechanisms, some lower creatures use to grow and repair themselves, can be significantly altered through the judicious use of electric currents. And further that these changes are due solely to the introduction of the electric currents themselves; as the genomes of the creatures are not touched.
We’ve known for a long time that electric fields are an integral part of biology. Cells have ion channels that allow their inner and outer charge environments to be balanced in ways that are optimal for the cell’s health and functioning. Cells signal back and forth with other cells via electrical impulses via axons and dendrites. It is becoming ever more apparent now that cells employ the bioelectric spaces between them as a kind of inter-cellular Internet; they use it to build intricate and extensive communication networks that control the transcription of genes, the contraction of muscles, and the release of hormones.
The concepts of how creatures develop are moving away from earlier and simpler paradigms in which biological science visualized that genes defined proteins and proteins combined to create cells and that was much of the story of biology.
But we’ve known for some time that large parts of the morphogenesis puzzle were missing. How and why do some stem cells become livers and others become arms or eyes?
It was tempting, early on, to imagine that hidden inside of our genomes were intricate instructions, which we hadn’t discovered yet, which guided a entity’s development from its initial zygotic stage to its full expression as a mature creature.
But matters have turned out to be far more complex than that.
The things that have been accomplished in Levin’s lab are pretty amazing. One of his postdocs noted that in frogs, certain electrical patterns developed in areas where later features like faces and eyes would develop.
As an experiment, the postdoc imposed the electrical pattern that predicted an eye onto the developing frog’s stomach and, amazingly, an eye appeared there. And, once the eye was present, the frog’s nervous system began building optic nerves to connect the new eye to the brain by way of the spinal cord. Clearly, Levin and his students are onto something.
But, exactly what they are on to is still under debate; as you will see if you read the paper itself.
Levin’s former advisor, Clifford Tabin, says he is “agnostic” about how Levin’s “bioelectricity” should be understood. Levin would have bioelectricity be the be-all-and-end-all which largely explains how morphogenesis unfolds.
But others, like Daniel Dennett think that there are also many other moving parts required to make up the full picture. He feels that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other still unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.
If you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, by now, what any of this has to do with this piece’s title, “Awareness of Awareness“?
Well, we’re going to get to that. But there are still more pieces to tie in.
Dennett thought that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.
His list would indicate that the interactions between cells involve a lot more than just the magic of bioelectricity as Levin envisions it. But I don’t think we’re done yet drawing in relevant factors.
As many simpler units come together, Emergent Properties can come forth.
Ants, which are quite simple in and of themselves, combine into colonies which have quite complex behaviors. And it is these new behaviors which seemingly manifest from nowhere. No amount of study of individual ants would ever give a researcher the ability to predict the behaviors and properties of ant colonies. You can read more about all of this in Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
So, we have all the factors Dennett mentioned as ways that cells intercommunicate. And we also have a vertical functional assemblage that progresses from a few local cells into larger groups of cells organized as specific organs like livers, eyes, brains and hearts.
And through all of these organs and their inner organizations and their external communications and co ordinations are all the interactive communication technologies Dennett listed and probably more.
It gets harder and harder to hang on to to all these points at once. One strategy open to us is to realize, through logic, decomposition and analysis, some sort of a simplified picture of what our biological beings are.
But another and deeper insight is to see all of this coordinated movement of many parts as an all-at-once flow that is happening in the immediate now. A non-dualistic immediacy that has no notion of, nor need for, our decompositional analysis in order to simply do what it does.
Now, we are getting close to the point of this article, “Awareness of Awareness“.
If small groups of cells, as Levin asserts and I’m sure Dennett would agree, tend to coordinate their activities through bioelectric fields (and all of the other listed mechanisms) for their own greater good, then wouldn’t such a beneficial organizational mechanism repeat at all levels of organization?
Does not the heart regulate it own activities for the benefit of the heart, directly, and for the benefit of the overall organism, indirectly? And would not every sub-component do the same for itself and for the overall organism?
And what of the sense of self that pervades your overall organism? Is this not the highest level of communication among your disparate parts? Does it not act for the highest good of the organism it represents?
Does it matter if we can say if it is bioelectric or any particular mix of the other contributory items that Dennett mentioned?
From here, a hundred roads and a hundred questions beckon us. Questions about awareness vs. self-awareness. About duality and non-duality. About Free Will and Determinism. But all of them are arising from the dualistic side of us. The mind of cognition and abstraction. The side that decomposes in order to attempt understanding.
But none of that, as endlessly fascinating as it is to the mind, is what I’m interested in here.
I want to talk about the sense of self we feel when our awareness is aware of itself and aware of this material being which hosts the awareness.
Just as a few cells communicate and coordinate among themselves, think of the communication and coordination that occurs when you sit for a moment and empty your mind and let a feeling of peace and well being permeate through you – all of you.
Think of the signal sent for the benefit of the sender when you stop and consciously give thanks for all of the good things in your life.
Think of the message you are sending when you gaze at your body in the mirror and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts your awareness.
Truly, our awareness helps to maintain the boundaries of our existence. Not just because of its flight or fight capabilities but also because it coordinates and directs the sense of well being that serves to optimize our continued existence in the body.
To get to this place where these effects can be beneficently directed, much of the collateral confusion that arises, as a side effect of the mind’s conceptual, linguistic and abstraction capabilities, has to be discriminated and intentionally isolated.
It isn’t that these mental abilities are not valuable. They are immensely valuable and we would not have them if it were not so. But they are tools – they are not what we are.
The self aware, but untrained, mind is like an echo chamber or a mirror. And it is almost inevitable that our burgeoning awareness should mistake the contents of the mind (the concepts, the language and the abstractions) for itself. Many of these contents are instilled into us before we are mature enough to defend ourselves and to question and possibly reject what is being imprinted upon us.
At some point, if we are lucky, we become mature and independent enough to control the further inward flow of ideas. And then, if we experience unease at all the inner dichotomies and inconsistencies, we may begin to sort through the mess.
And, as the mess is cleared and we begin to increasingly identify with our awareness of awareness and to dis-identify with the contents of our minds and our egos, we can being to focus on the message we are sending when we consider ourselves and our bodies and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts us.
It is awareness intentionally giving loving concern and integration to the physical entity that hosts it for the mutual benefit of both.
Let us make a small aside here, to acknowledge all the religions, masters, schools and traditions which have tried unrelentingly for thousands of years to awaken us from the illusion that we are the contents of our minds. And who promised us, that if we could but realize the primacy of our awareness as being what we are, that we should then experience a deeper and more pervasive sense of subjective peace.
I am deeply grounded in science. And I am also deeply grounded in non-duality. I appreciate the power of the mind as a tool. And I also appreciate the immediacy and essential truth that manifests when I stop my mind and see this existence as an immediate and inseparable flow; that I am an inseparable part of.
Following the threads implied in the “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs” paper has enabled me to cobble a tentative connection between how the physical systems of our biological bodies function to communicate, coordinate and preserve themselves and the ideas of higher consciousness that arise from the meditative, spiritual and non-duality worlds in which this same preservation of what we are is deeply honored.
My thanks to my friend, Gerry, for sending me the article which provoked this piece.