On Connectedness--DNA, Language, Potential

It is known that each individual cell in the human body contains the entire genetic code for the organism. At the same time, our inherited genetic code is a form of collective memory, known to us primitively as instinct, to which we may either add our own mutations in the form of individual traumas and excesses or merely accept those which the angel of history delivers to us. In a certain sense, the individual has a certain capacity, manifest or not, to transmit the message of all of humanity and all of creation, from whence it arose, in a single breath. The message itself suffers under the confines of symbolic language, which, just as with our DNA, we inherit as the mutated grunts and groans of earlier species—copies with no recourse to an original. Our bodies and our symbolisms move toward evolutionary perfection, yet we are always painfully aware that even the Goethe's and Beethoven's of the world are still just Nth digits of Pi, paling in comparison to what infinity has to offer.

The principle affliction of mankind is neither its mortality nor its insatiable appetite for power, but its inability to connect with itself and the universe around it. It fancies itself alone in the cosmos, sometimes with, sometimes without an equally individual and lonely creator. Of all my proposals in this essay, perhaps the most controversial is the idea that our seeming inability to connect with others will be lessened to the degree that we are able to perceive and know our Others in new ways.

If indeed we as humans share with insects, snakes, sharks, bats, and dogs a common ancestor, then it follows that it is within our potential to develop as least as well as these creatures those senses which have been favored in their evolution and apparently disfavored in our own. A few of the most commonly known examples: many insects can see ultraviolet light and some are suspected of seeing infrared, sharks are able to sense electric charges and can also navigate through magnetic orientation, eels may electrocute their prey, bats navigate with sonar. Most recently, dogs have been shown to be able to detect cancer in humans, either by smell or by some other as yet undefined sensory capability. The examples are predictably numerous. Further, it seems entirely possible that other senses which are not known to exist innately in any living creature, such as sensitivity to radio or microwaves, may at some point occur as mutations along our genetic path.

The human brain is infinitely more complex than that of a butterfly, yet we are baffled by its ability to see ultraviolet as just another color. How difficult could it really be for us to direct our evolution in such a way as to favor the ability to distinguish this color? Imagine how much closer we could draw together were we able to perceive each other in ways never before imagined? What if you could not only see me in a new color spectrum, but could also feel the magnetic field around my body, the specific gravity that pulls us together and the electric currents generated in my brain and in my muscular movements? What if you were even able to use your own electrosensitivity to trace the synaptic firing in my brain and willfully reproduce it in your own brain, thereby thinking as I think and feeling as I feel? The more you are able to perceive me, the more you know me, the more you see that we are connected in countless ways, the more fully you will be able appreciate my otherness and love me. And I you.

The development of consciousness must not be simply a series of technological advances. In fact, technological developments which increase our ability to detect those phenomena which remain undetectable to our individual brains have done seemingly little to decrease human isolation, mainly because they are controlled by governments, corporations, and ultimately, philosophies which contemn the individual subject as such. Night vision goggles are used for warfare. Radio mostly serves up G-rated commercials and artless music, metal detectors are used to screen air passengers for bombs. One sure way for the individual to side-step the established systems of control would be to develop as best s/he can the ability to perceive the universe, if not directly, then at least through the mediations of his or her own perceptive capabilities.

I suspect that the sensory abilities of our "animal" cousins are not lost to human DNA lines completely, just as countless inessential and even harmful recessive genes survive by riding along with essential ones in the caravan of our genetic history. These abilities manifest themselves, on occasion, in the person of the psychic, the lunatic, the shaman, the poet, but often it is with everyday people whose quotidian experience escapes the focus of the news-hungry public. In the same way that the vastness of daily experience is quashed by the exquisite filtering power of the brain, those people to whom we might connect and from whom we might learn to perceive ourselves and others are all around us, in the checkout line, the unemployment line, at the bar and in the brothel. The universe presents us with myriad opportunities and signs, yet they remain in our perceptual blind spots, they appear as white noise, which must first be noticed to be decoded, in the same way that a dream has first to be recognized as such before it can be ridden like chariot into the margins of the mind. Yet just when our dream-chariot seems to arrive at the mind's outer limits, the last digit of Pi, the margins unfold yet again, adding to the origamic beauty of eternity.

The mind is lustfully eating its fill, overwhelmed by an orgy of infinite possibilities, yet the body yearns for the here and now, for FINITE action. But what action is worthy of the thought which provoked it? Perhaps an act of love, and act of life, an absurd act, an unpredictable act. If I lie down on the ground and kiss the earth, if I copulate with the sand on the beach, I may well be arrested or scorned as a lunatic, yet my act is an act of love—it is an act of life. It is the first act, the original. From it may evolve a new world order, a new language, a new divergence in the path of humanity. If the single cell contains not only the code for the entire being, but also the history of the entire universe, then the old adage must be true: "Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world."