A Spirituality of Life

Biology was central to my maturation as a human being. It helped me survive a harrowing childhood, diverted me from delinquency, gave me focus in young adulthood, and led me away from addiction. Ultimately, it provided an modest disability income that keeps me comfortable despite my inability to tolerate the bodily and emotional stress of employment. And the income freed me to focus on meditative growth. Beyond these personal gifts, biology fundamentally informs my understanding, practice, and experience of meditation.

While a livelihood is a personal benefit, Mindful Biology focuses on an important truth: a contemplative approach to the life sciences offers the same gifts that traditional wisdom paths have long delivered: feelings of connectedness, meaning, and love. From these feelings flow the ethical behaviors needed to sustain our communities and our world.

It is not a new belief system. It is a new use for an existing, widely accepted framework—the facts of life science. It's a usage that provides the same deep benefits of ancient traditions.

Reclaiming Our History

Biology is the study of life, and humans have always been keen observers of the living world. Hunter-gatherers understood local plants and game because their lives depended on them. This deep comprehension led them to respect—and indeed, worship—their living companions on this earth.

Today, modern ecology tells us the same thing: our survival depends on environmental health. The respect advocated by Mindful Biology reconnects us with humanity’s aboriginal relationship to nature, updated through current scientific understanding.

We know vastly more than our ancestors did about how life functions. We can describe it from molecular, genetic, metabolic, cellular, physiologic, anatomic, ecologic, and paleontologic perspectives. We have amassed a breathtaking corpus of knowledge. Yet, somewhere along the line, our deep, visceral connection to life got lost.

The causes are clear: urbanization, industrial food production, quasi-hermetic dwellings, and our leaders' obsessions around monetary profit. Most of us interact with nature only in passing—driving through a forest or walking through a park. Insects, spiders, and small rodents are deemed pests to be destroyed. So when these animals are—quite naturally—attracted to our warm homes and full pantries, we choose eradication over coexistence.

We live isolated from the very ecology that sustains us. At best, we form loving bonds with domesticated pets and try to limit our consumer waste. At worst, we harbor the delusion that technology can substitute for a balanced relationship with the biosphere.

Interdependence

A contemplative attitude toward biology corrects this delusion. It reminds us that nature is not merely "out there"—it is lao within us. We rely on plants to capture sunlight and synthesize the food we place in our digestive tracts; we depend on gut bacteria to digest that food and tune our immune systems to match the environment; we need insects to pollinate crops, decompose waste, and build healthy soil. We need birds to keep insects populations in a healthy range.

It makes no sense to destroy the systems that make our lives possible—whether on a global scale by disrupting the climate, or on a microscopic one by taking antibiotics unnecessarily. This is true not merely out of self-interest, but because we are in an active relationship with a living world. Wise and loving people tend their relationships with support and compassion; they do not mindlessly abuse what they depend upon. By analogy, we owe the Earth and its lifeforms that same respect and concern.

MindfulBiology brings human consciousness back into the human body where it actually lives, and links that body back to the Earth that gives it life. Through these connections, we cultivate awe for the biology all around us. Whether that biology operates on own skin or in a forest matters little; everywhere is the same living process.

When we recognize how much Life gives us—not just food and shelter, but the human experience itself—we naturally feel love and gratitude for our bodies and, by extension, the living world. 

Awe, respect, love, and gratitude: these are the fruits of science held with awareness, and they are identical to the values and rewards of all authentic spiritual traditions.