I was asked this morning: Do you think political change will solve our pandemic problems?
My answer: What we need is knowledge. They do say that you learn from success, but if you make any mistakes make sure you learn from them.
We have had so many warning signals and we should have learned so many lessons during the pandemic about what life is, how it works, and what is important. Our task is to assimilate and apply the most profound implications of what we have experienced. To seek the truth. That is a way ahead. A road out of the pandemic maze.
Immunity is Learned by Our DNA
Since its discovery 70 years ago, DNA has been largely and crudely conceived as a static repository of information. Rather like a fixed manual that our physiology refers to for instructions. The discovery of epigenetic phenomena and the increasing understanding of RNA and its expression in biomolecular activity should have changed that understanding.
Moreover, DNA self regulates and expresses different aspects of its structure. Genes can become upregulated or downregulated during different periods of life. In more understandable language, our DNA can learn from experience how to function so to speak—as we ourselves also learn from experience. DNA certainly has capabilities that remain unknown and unused.
Our physiology is daily challenged by billions of toxins, pathogens, bacteria, viruses, fungi, and microorganisms. Some of these are our long term partners where containment is routine. Some are inevitably newcomers requiring a learning curve on the part of the immune system. The overall complexity of immune responses goes far beyond the possibility of complete intellectual understanding, man made control, or successful safe modification.
The DNA, Individual Identity, and Field Phenomena
The implications of how DNA is in every one of billions of cells but somehow expresses itself as a whole single person have never been adequately tackled scientifically and theoretically. We could say this is the enigma of individual identity, genetics, and memory.
DNA is at the heart of a WHOLE genetic system and the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Our genetic system has its silent non-changing nature and its changing expression, but this is not a mechanical system. It acts more like a unified field.
Physical fields like gravity are everywhere and they appear to have static rules, but they exhibit characteristics of both waves and particles and their quantum nature ensures that the apparently static rules can be bypassed. Quantum mechanics also ensures that the entire history of events remains connected with the present as it creates the future.
Go deeper and physical fields have more amazing properties. DNA is obviously an expression of more fundamental and more unified physical laws. To describe these, you need non-abelian mathematics—the unified field level thinks for itself as it creates time and space. A unified field structure cannot depend on anything outside of itself in order to express itself and its expressions are part of itself. It is self-referral. Self-referral is a suitable descriptive analogy for DNA.
Self-referral is the hallmark of our consciousness (we create from within ourselves) and the hallmark of DNA. Both have a silent phase and an active expressed phase, inseparable companions through the journey of life. Everything that goes on in our physiology has been an expression of the DNA in our very first cell. As such, physiology is a connected WHOLE. The mechanism for this WHOLENESS is not yet understood.
Human Genetic Modification is Inherently Unpredictable
Even changing a part of the whole genetic and physiological structure can have drastic consequences. It is known that transplant recipients can change in character. Heart recipients especially can acquire the memories and behaviours of their donors. A vegetarian concert pianist may suddenly become interested in eating hamburgers and rushing about on motorcycles if these interests coincide with those of their heart donor.
Use biotechnology to modify DNA and you are challenging the whole structure of life. Seek to modify its immediate fundamental expressions through messenger RNA, and you risk severing the connection of the physiology with some functions of the DNA. In parallel, you risk modifying the connection between consciousness and DNA, mind and body. You could be modifying your self-expression.
Messenger RNA carries information between the DNA and the physiology. Command RNA to perform differently and you are as if ordering a lead actor in a play to speak lines that are not part of the script and yet thinking that the play will still be understandable. In other words, gene therapy can change the script of life and thereby endanger health. Ultimately health is wholeness, physiology has a script, seek to edit it at your peril.
The generally accepted medical biotechnology paradigm or outlook involves the objectification of human physiology. Physiology, including its genetic roots, is largely treated as a machine. One simple analogy might be a heat pump with a remote controller. We can press a button to make the temperature go up or down. Physiology is not a machine in this sense, it is a whole self-referral conscious system. Gene therapy involves allowing someone else to reprogram or redesign your own buttons based on very limited knowledge and crude understanding. The outcomes are known to be at best uncertain and in some cases catastrophic.
Mind and Body, Two Sides of The Coin of Life
Given the risks associated with the current course of medical biotechnology, will we have to step out from under the biotech umbrella to escape? Yes. What will this involve? Organic agriculture, avoiding ultra processed foods, rediscovery of traditional natural remedies, detox, consciousness-based education, and spiritual renewal—some or all of these? It will be life-changing.
In my opinion, our hope for the future resides with the natural world of plants and herbs, and with human consciousness. Technologies of consciousness do not require a biotechnologist, we are in sole charge of our own consciousness. Cultural and spiritual history records that the heights of human consciousness—compassion, vision, leadership in its most enlightened sense—have been attained by some.
True, we have to avoid the pitfalls of mood making and an overly fertile imagination. The pandemic has reinforced the fact that those imagining themselves to be all-knowing very often aren’t. There was an article in the Guardian today “Secret life of Gerald: the New Zealand MP who spent a lifetime crafting a vast imaginary world”. I jokingly thought that such could be said of all politicians and then realised it could be true of all of us. ‘What if’ and ‘if only’ inhabit our waking hours and thoughts, but that doesn’t invalidate the authenticity of the evolutionary journey we are all making.
Ultimately our personal consciousness is travelling on a road to a worthwhile destination. The evolutionary road or substrate on which consciousness travels is structured out of our human genetics and nourished by the food we eat. If we randomly alter human genetics, or debase our traditional food sources, we may be blocked or diverted, and unable to progress.
Technologies of Mind and Body Have a Place in Medicine and Beyond
Undoubtedly there are technologies of consciousness—steps to take and guidance that can be given to maximise clarity of consciousness and the resultant benefits for health. There are proven benefits also in organic fresh foods. Do meditation and fresh food deserve a place in medicine? Yes. Consciousness cannot be incompatible with the science of genetics—our DNA is permanently paired with our own consciousness.
My book Your DNA Diet contains over 800 supporting references in the scientific literature. It presents the thesis, based on a growing body of research, that the DNA of the food we eat provides essential support for health. When we eat fresh food, we are consuming order, or we could even say ‘intelligence’, which is essential to health. If we don’t eat, we rapidly lose health. Meditation has also been found to have profound benefits for health.
Just consider that when we report that we are healthy, it primarily means we ‘feel’ well. Every medical condition is paired with the psychology of the patient. Mind and body are intimately connected. In most cases our ‘state of mind’ and adequacy of diet are the paramount contributors to health. Most illness has a psychosomatic component—it is caused or complicated by mental stress or dysfunction. It goes without saying that improving our mental disposition and eating healthy food is beneficial.
Are There Objective Benchmarks of Consciousness?
I helped support a school in Merseyside in the UK which includes the practice of meditation. The academic and creative success of the school in GCSE exams as well as art, poetry, and writing competitions eventually ensured it gained full government financial support which shows that meditation can be objectively integrated into curricula.
Meditation is subjective, but it can be taught as a systematic technique. As with any objective technology, it can have repeatable results. It does have signposts of attainment. There are studies showing that brain functioning improves paired with higher academic achievement and psychological characteristics such as field independence—the capacity to see the big picture while focusing on details.
We are familiar with waking, dreaming, and sleeping states of consciousness each of these is paired with a different style of physiological functioning. Transcendence is recorded as an authentic experience in historical and contemporary accounts. It appears during those moments when we slip into the timeless oceanic feeling that lies behind the changing surface of life. It is often referred to as the fourth state of consciousness. An all-encompassing state of inner awakening that Walt Whitman attempted to express in his book Democratic Vistas:
“There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal….In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, …creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account…”
This hints at profound capabilities of the human mind, supported by physiology and DNA, that we can aspire to, that await development. If we are seeking the highest Truth in its broadest sense, we must remember that Truth is a unified state of Being. Others might refer to it as a state of Grace in the presence of the Will of God. Or as Einstein said:
“The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”
Whatever we call TRUTH or however we describe the experience (and words always fall short), it is a timeless experience of Wholeness. An experience much needed in modern times. A firm anchor to ensure we are not swept off our feet by the ups and downs of circumstances and the machinations of unthinking politicians, unethical predators, and incautious experimenters. Truth can light a way ahead.
Guy Hatchard PhD is formerly a senior manager at Genetic ID a global food safety testing and certification company (now known as FoodChain ID).
Guy is the author of Discovering and Defending Your DNA Diet
