embracing species & body


Do you struggle to feel positive about humanity? How about your own human body? I certainly do. 

Ever since I began connecting biological information to spiritual practice, I've yearned to feel more love for Life, including the living forms we call 'human civilization' and 'the human body'. 

That's not always easy. Both our unhealthy civilization and the fallible body pose challenges.

I often feel discouraged by humanity’s violence, environmental degradation, and cruel injustices. I am dismayed by the insatiable greed of the ultra-rich—a tragic mental illness condemning millions to privation. It's a genuine challenge to feel good about our deluded, destructive species.

As for my own human body, I fear illness, injury, and loss of function. And even though I've successfully navigated versions of these difficulties in the past, I fear the ones to come. On top of the body’s vulnerability, I struggle with its decline in appearance, strength, and vigor as years pass. I'm not alone in any of this, which makes feeling good about the human body even more challenging.


ESCAPISM

These harsh realities tempt me to set myself apart:

I love Life on earth too much to rely on ideas that reject it, whether collectively or individually. What I need is a way to feel good about living in this historical epoch, this fallible human body, this ailing society.


AVOIDING SPIRITUAL BYPASS

In the past, when I wrote and taught about embracing our bodies and our species, I highlighted beauty: the intelligence of biology, the wholeness of the biosphere, the majesty of evolution, and so on. All that is fine, but it's incomplete. By celebrating beauty while ignoring ugliness, I inadvertently projected strained positivity and "spiritual bypass."

Parasitism, predation, malignancy, pain, and decay are fixtures in Life. They must be clearly seen and compassionately understood if we are to grow spiritually. 


A PERSONAL STORY

To make these abstract concepts concrete, it helps to begin with the body. I’ll use one of my own struggles as an example.

As a toddler, I felt profound angst during my parents’ breakup. Shortly after my father moved out, I contracted pneumonia and was treated with tetracycline while hospitalized under an oxygen tent. The medication discolored my teeth; when my adult dentition grew in, they looked grayish brown. Painfully self-conscious, I learned to smile with a barely open mouth. 

Other dental problems followed. My father discontinued my orthodontic treatment when the costs escalated, leaving me with malocclusion. By my early twenties, severe bruxism (teeth grinding) was causing broken molars and receding gums.

Embarrassment about my teeth remained painful as I approached midlife. I splurged on cosmetic veneers, only to conclude they looked fake. The expensive dentistry did not relieve my self-consciousness; it merely changed the cause of it.

Now, as I move through my late sixties, that intense self-focus is finally behind me. As my body's imperfections grow ever more obvious, it seems a waste of energy to stress about how my teeth look, or even the pain and expense they cause. A wiser part of myself has taken charge, embracing this body as a hard-working organism with its own natural seasons.


ALIVENESS

Through this journey, I have come to look at human Life through two distinct but connected lenses: Wise Awareness and Creative Biology. Together, they form what I call Aliveness. It is both the background of our experience and the generator of it. Let's look at its two components:

Wise Awareness: The Steady Observer

The next time you look in the mirror, wonder about who is looking. Focus not on the image seen, but on the awareness that sees it.

When I do this, it becomes obvious that the aware being, the "I", who looks at my face now is not different from the aware "I" who looked fifty years ago. The outer appearance has changed; the inner awareness has not. This deep inner awareness is not bothered by bodily problems. It is not anxious; it is simply present, meeting the here and now with a kind, caring attitude, without comparing the way things are against imagined and unattainable ideals.

Contemplative practice helped me awaken to this steady background of experience. Practice showed me that awareness isn't a belief; it is the ever-present basis of human experience. The more we connect with it as the stable foundation of everything else, the easier time we have accepting both our fallible bodies and our disappointing species. 

Creative Biology: The Life Force

Pure awareness can feel elusive. It’s often easier to observe the living creativity of the human body. Consider some examples of how Life helps in the face of trial:

Aliveness is powerful, combining as it does the wisdom of awareness and the creative power of biology. When not confused by ideas of what ought to be, our inner aliveness has a natural capacity to meet situations in wise and empowered ways. 


Aliveness in Action

My dog, Penny, was stung by a bee last week. She immediately reacted with distress. She plaintively lifted her paw and lost her usual pep. Yet a swift, wordless fortitude soon emerged. She accepted how her reality now included this discomfort—she adapted. This ready acceptance worked together with a natural healing response in her body, so after a few hours she was back to normal, with no lingering complaints and no self-pity. What a combination of wise awareness and creative biology!

Unlike Penny, the human mind fights reality, wasting energy by insisting on changes that aren't possible. Our verbal minds thus blunt aliveness, though in time it often takes charge. My dental saga was simply the messiness of Life, which my mind resisted for decades while aliveness nudged home a simple lesson: bodies are transient and imperfect.

Just as the deep aliveness of the human individual helps us accept the body despite its superficial problems, the profound aliveness of nature can help us embrace humanity despite its escalating dysfunction.


BALANCE & IMMUNITY

In my college biology classes we studied ecological succession—how disrupted environments recover. A freshly solidified lava field looks sterile, yet over time wind-blown debris settles, hardy insects make homes, and pioneering weeds take root. Eventually, a forest regrows.

We see the same self-regulation in predator-prey dynamics. When rabbits overrun an environment after a burst in vegetation, predators like coyotes and hawks multiply, and the rabbit numbers settle back into balance. Then, if predators get too numerous, rabbit numbers drop further, until starvation and disease cull the extra hawks and coyotes. Somehow, a harmonious balance emerges out of the drama of eating and being eaten, hunger and disease, destruction and succession.

Humanity often imagines itself in control of the living world, but that's an illusion. Nature will constrain our excesses. The Covid pandemic, record-breaking heatwaves, rising cancer rates in young people, and explosive wildfires are signs of nature's response. Its corrections can cause a lot of human suffering, but they are oddly reassuring: balance will be restored, one way or another.

From the beginning, biology has involved life forms eating life forms. Because organisms resist being eaten, defenses evolved. For example, porcupines grew quills to deter predators, and mammals developed highly sophisticated immune systems to fight off parasitic life forms, rogue malignancies, and decay.


CULTURAL IMMUNE DEFICIENCY

Our global society is currently facing a crisis of inadequate immune function, and both sides of the political spectrum are hollering for remedies. There are many forms of social parasitism and predation, and people with different political opinions will focus on different ones. Those on the right tend to focus on urban crime, terrorist attacks, welfare abuse, and wasteful use of tax dollars, while those on the left focus on predatory pricing, laws helping the ultra-rich hoard wealth, and wars that only benefit corporations. Yet both sides would probably agree: the root problem is a lack of protection against predatory, parasitic, and destructive forces—a lack of immunity.

Humanity has some immune functions already. Laws, courts, police, and punishments of various types are efforts to rein in predation and parasitism. A lot could be said about how well or poorly they work. But one certain truth is that they don't work well enough. Too many toxic forces  thrive in spite of them. We need more effective protection, including systems that inspire people to be their best selves. It's not enough to threaten, command, and punish when they're being their worst.

From its beginnings, Mindful Biology aimed to resolve a problem related to cultural immunity. I was struck by the ways our modern understanding of the world undermines belief in moral realism, the idea that morality is somehow built into the fabric of the universe. Commitment to morality is a key benefit of religions (despite their frequent lapses into absolutism, hypocrisy, and shaming). In our world today, moral realism has been displaced by the belief that moral values are cultural, constructed, and not connected to anything beyond human preference. 

After a series of powerful mystical visions, I felt called, even compelled, to build a system of reverence that incorporated the best of both religion and science, while providing a framework free of dogma, whether spiritual and secular. The visions also made my own moral rectitude feel of central, crucial importance. As I began building the ideas and practices that compose Mindful Biology, I felt uneasy saying anything about ethics. People I trusted seemed to hold very different views, and who was I to weigh in on one side or the other. 

Gradually, though, I felt an inner guidance nudging me to focus on widely held values around fairness, kindness, wellness, and other life-enhancing values. For a time I thought of them as esthetic choices: some people consider them beautiful, but some don't. Then I realized they all support a central, overriding necessity: the thriving of Life. Once I made the connection between ethics and the continuance of Life, morality no longer seemed merely esthetic; it was a necessary part of reality. 

Though I don't rule out forces we can't see, we don't need to look to them for moral direction; we can look to Life. Without doubt, Life is committed to Life, and enduring human values boil down to behaviors that foster wellbeing. Key elements include:

These keys to moral realism align with biology, yet each also aligns with aspects of one or more ancient traditions, such as indigenous spiritual systems, Taoism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. I have no idea how humanity should weave them into our current civilization, but I suspect contemplative practice has a role to play. 

It's natural to ask: if Life entails moral realism, why does it also support parasatism and predation? Why is there disease and destruction?

Life's balance does not come from moral reasoning; it comes from the cause and effect. Too much crowding promotes disease. Abundant prey leads to more predators. Humans can wait for nature to restore balance, but the cost in suffering will be high. Moral reasoning is possible, and it depends only on anticipating obvious consequences. If we overheat the planet, wildfires will increase. If we deplete fresh water supplies, people will die. The morality Life suggests isn't about right and wrong; it's about caring about the effects of our actions on our likelihood of thriving versus misery.

Since the rise of city-states, a key issue has been the way the wealthy and powerful thrive by condemning the poor and marginalized to misery. It's tempting to accuse those on top of the social pyramid—the parasites and predators—of evil selfishness. But from another perspective, this is just a temporary imbalance. It may last another few thousand years, but sooner or later misery will be universal, or thriving will be widely shared. If we wait for nature to intervene, we'll get the former. If we listen to Life and build an immune system, we can the latter out of the current mess.

I'm reminded of the charming and instructive movie, "The Biggest Little Farm". It documents the benefits and difficulties of a nature-based approach to farming. In one scene, a pen of chickens has decimated by it rampaging coyote, who killed dozens more than it could eat. We might accuse the coyote of cruelty, and probably it did enjoy its murderous spree, much like highly selfish humans enjoy harming those with less power in economics, politics, and weaponry. But we can also see how this was an artificial situation, something was out of balance and found tragic correction. The coyote got one full meal out of the destruction, not a strategy to sustain its species, or even its own offspring, over the long term. 

The Way Forward

The point is, we can build cultural immunity, no matter what cynics say about human nature. Back when all humans lived in small groups, toxic behavior was held in check by alliances, shaming, and exclusion. Long before that, Life created the fantastically effective mammalian immune system. As a living system, our civilization can evolve effective, sustainable immune mechanisms to keep parasitism and predation in check. And it must, if our species is to survive. 

But what if it doesn't? What if humanity succumbs to its own destructiveness? That's not an outcome to hope for, but it's one way balance might end up restored. And it would be consistent with how Life works. Most species only last a few million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around about 300,000. Extinction in the near future would be premature by this measure, but H. sapiens wouldn't be the only species to end after a short run.

There seems little doubt that societal and/or ecological collapse is possible. We should do everything we can to prevent it. For people of caring heart, it feels important to land on the side of immunity rather than parasitism. Yet, we also do well to keep in mind that all of this is part of Life; societal patterns are just new expressions of old dynamics. Our species–—though unique in many ways—remains subject to the same rules, solutions, and outcomes.


LOVING OUR SPECIES

In day-to-day living, the issue is learning to love humanity despite its collective illness. Siding with cultural immunity surely means cultivating compassion, something our society is light on these days.

Some weeks ago, I passed an unfortunate homeless man on a trail. He lay in quiet disarray until I walked by, when he began screaming, "GET OUT OF MY LIFE! GET OUT OF MY LIFE!" Hearing his despair, his desperate wish to be safe and alone, I felt deep compassion. I didn't feel superior; I've been confined on psychiatric wards myself, so I'm all-too-aware of how the inflamed the mind can become. This was an ill human being, and I know what illness feels like. There didn't seem to be anything I could do to help, but at least I cared. 

I try to hold our ailing civilization in the exact same way—with understanding and compassion for a suffering life form, without imagining myself better or separate. Humanity's dysfunction is obvious and painful. Many people do great work and try to make the world healthier, but the forces that oppose fairness and sanity are strong. More and more, I can hold all that without despair, feeling gentle compassion for the suffering of humanity. I firmly believe that more and more people doing simply that will be an important step toward effective immunity. Perhaps compassion is a small step, but like they say about the 1,000 mile journey... 

When we insist humanity must get better NOW, we live in disappointment. A less stressful alternative is to feel good about our species as it is today. We can hold in mind the truth that unsustainable behaviors will end, sooner or later, either by human problem solving or Nature’s rebalancing. Meanwhile, in this moment, we can hold the collective pain, confusion, and grief with open minds, hands, and hearts.


FOCUSING ON ALIVENESS

The human species is as alive as any life form. In feeling better about it, it helps to focus less on situations and individuals, less on disasters and bad actors, while paying more attention to our shared birthright of aliveness. 

Recall how aliveness grows out of deep awareness and creative biology. These two always work together. Awareness isn't just about thought; it's about taking in the sensations, perceptions, and knowings—all the bodily signals—that make up each moment. And biology isn't a dumb mechanical process beneath a superior mental one; it enlivens and shapes awareness. Aliveness is the combined power of both, and it is here to help us.

It is worth noting some of its key features: 

Aliveness enables human reflection, compassion, and courage. It enables growth and maturation. With all these wise capacities, humanity can create the needed cultural immune system, when circumstances and collective will align.


CRISIS & RESOLUTION?

It took major personal crises for me to step onto a wiser path. Perhaps our civilization requires the same. Whatever happens, aliveness will work toward healing and repair, even if we don't notice it. With aliveness on our side, we might recover sanity and survive. 

But what if we don't? What if humanity goes extinct? Well, that too is part of Life—as stern as it is magnificent. This can be accepted, though it's surely painful.

Beyond the power of aliveness to help us repair and heal, or to find peace when repair isn't possible, we can enjoy Life's beauty in the here and now. Let beauty be our guiding star as we stagger toward a better society, with fairer treatment of other societies, other species, the whole earth, and our own living bodies—doing their best. We may not succeed, but we can try.

Fortitude is key, and luckily it's another quality of aliveness. Fortitude to keep trying got me through many situations that felt overwhelming, when I doubted my ability to survive. Knowing its power—and how it leads to both creative solutions and wise acceptance—helps me feel better about the human species and my own human body.