As Buddhists have been telling us for thousands of years, the self is an illusion.  In neuroscience, the seat of consciousness can’t be localized in the brain, or even the body with any certainty.  There are strong examples of some people who continue to be aware after death.  People who are intimate experience ways of knowing when something is wrong with their loved ones who are far away.  Carl Jung was convinced that there was a collective unconscious that stored and shared knowledge across all boundaries.  New developments in theoretical physics suggest that everything we know as matter, space and time are built on misunderstandings of how the universe works.  I have often felt that the me I see is not the real me, that thinks and dreams.

So what are we doing here and why do we exist?  Who or what am I?  Such big questions should have big answers.  But I am beginning to think that the answer is actually very small.

In all of the hubris of the mechanistic model of medicine. the focus had been fighting a war on disease.  The body is our battleground and pharmaceuticals and surgical tools are our weapons. Yet as hard as we try to attack, the ‘enemy’ keeps stepping aside and changing course so that we are often a step behind.  While vaccines have created a dramatic reduction in some deadly and crippling diseases, so many other viral invaders have taken their place.  Our sterile world of sanitized babies and aversion to dirt has robbed our bodies of the practice needed to build up a strong immune system.  When some hostile bacteria do get a foot hold we rush in with antibiotics to save the day.  Yet our hospitals are over run with resistant bacteria. About 100,000 people become ill each year from hospital acquired resistant infections.  So what are we doing wrong?

Scientists are making inroads in explaining the ways in which gut microbes alter the effectiveness of certain medicines, influence our immunity and metabolism, and even affect our mood. Their findings suggest that modulating the microbial communities within us — perhaps as simply as through dietary modifications — could potentially address a wide range of conditions, including inflammatory diseases, obesity and anxiety. http://www.livescience.com/39762-microbe-host-dynamics-nigms.html

Our gut bacteria also play a role in the manufacture of substances like neurotransmitters (including serotonin); enzymes and vitamins (notably Bs and K) and other essential nutrients (including important amino acid and short-chain fatty acids); and a suite of other signaling molecules that talk to, and influence, the immune and the metabolic systems. Some of these compounds may play a role in regulating our stress levels and even temperament: when gut microbes from easygoing, adventurous mice are transplanted into the guts of anxious and timid mice, they become more adventurous. The expression “thinking with your gut” may contain a larger kernel of truth than we thought.

Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do well to begin regarding the human body as “an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Our bodies’ microbiome is home to around 100 trillion different organisms.  More than 99% of the genetic material in our bodies is not human.  There are literally pounds of these organisms in and on our bodies.  Without them we would die.  So did they evolve to serve us, or did we evolve to serve them?  After all, they can control us, but we can’t control them.  We act on emotion and our sense of ‘self’ but how do we really know what that self is?  Maybe we are a colony without any meaningful existence as a single organism.

Could all of evolution be driven by the needs of bacteria to control their environment?  Some researchers even think our genetic material has been rewritten multiple times by virus activity.  Some comets may have seeded our planet with bacteria or viruses from other worlds.  All human cultures say that we were made by the gods, and that the gods taught us the skills we needed to survive.  So now we are diligently reshaping vast parts of this world, and taking our tiny overlords to all corners and beyond.  Is the voice of god really the chemical signals from inside to serve and obey?

I wonder if the interconnections of friends and families goes beyond the bonds of affection.  Once we share bacteria with someone, we may become intertwined in a larger network.  The ‘spooky action at a distance’ described by Einstein and others could link back to the interconnected particles of matter that came from the same source.  The shared state that entwined particles have is known to span vast distances of time and space.  Are the paranormal forces at work in our lives, not our own but the product of other beings inside us?  Do they somehow fundamentally shape our perceptions with their signals so that we can never see past the veil?