Today’s wake-up word is histocompatibility. Also known as tissue compatibility, histocompatibility is the property of having the same, or sufficiently similar, alleles of a set of genes called human leukocyte antigens (HLA), or major histocompatibility complex (MHC) so that a cell is accepted among the biological community.
Each of us expresses unique HLA proteins on the surface of our cells. This communicates to the immune system whether the cell is part of the self or “other”. If it is detected as “other” it is marked as an invading organism. Immune cells called T cells, when working properly, can recognize foreign HLA molecules. This recognition triggers an immune response aimed at destroying foreign (or sick) cells.
Histocompatibility testing is important when considering the probability of success in organ, tissue, or stem cell transplants. The donor’s HLA alleles and the recipient’s has to be similar enough so it doesn’t trigger the immune system of the host body to reject the transplant.
The process map of this biological subsystem is similar to the way we express social behaviors such as the development of culture and the use of story maps to establish in-group affinity or out-group antagonism. It illustrates how we use a currency of familiarity to establish friends from foes. How we nourish and protect self-similar architectures to maintain coherence over time. It begs the question: Is what we experience as us already established by the story told through the structural architectures of nature on which our coherence depends? Maybe.
This video aims to reveal how nature expresses a story and how we are part of that story. – How echoes of coherence appear and reappear on multiple levels – and through these structures, nature informs us how we can develop toward a more mature state with more capability to realize self-determined possibilities. To participate in defining our experience rather than being totally defined.
The question increasingly demanding attention to satisfy our natural hunger for a meaningful life is; “Where will we choose to go?”, “What will we do?”. We used to have to face what to run from. Until 1800 or so most of us were poor. This eliminated the question of what to do. The demands of the environment defined what to do. Most of us had to run just to stay still. When these continuously urgent and substantial dangers chased us, they also defined us. When mortal threats began to diminish so did the defining force of the inherent compulsion to act. Since those prior demands also wired us for a predefined purpose, we are now faced with the proposition of needing to define ourselves to be fit for purpose. We still crave purpose because of the way we were defined by the environment but we have the additional task to participate in the defining process. We must now craft and entrepreneurially cultivate a meaningful mission rather than submit to the former demands so heavily imposed on us by the environment.
The newfound freedom to define ourselves is not an easy proposition. Most of us are not wired to take a lead role in defining our lives. We are wired to school like fish. In the past, we did this by necessity to produce the safety of the crowd. As a consequence, most of us are wired to follow – to find out what the social currency of acceptance in the group is and reflect that back so we can belong. Newfound wealth has afforded us the freedom of individual choice, but many of us now drown in this sea of opportunity. We squander it on the altar of fickle fads and exaggerated postures that follow pointless social trends. This behavioral fools gold glitters but offers little of substance and authenticity and we are left hungry, depressed in an existential crisis for want of purpose, for meaning.
Lost in our words, many of us display an empty shell of what was once a more difficult but also more noble, meaningful, and substantive existence. Like the free-range bovine creatures that once roamed grasslands developed a wary eye on predators and traveled on a cyclic journey of necessity staying nourished by the rains that lit up the prairie with grasses – all their behavioral hungers dovetailed to protect the integrity of the community – our native drives were also crafted in the fires of necessity. We had to leave the once nourishing and protected environment of the trees when the climate changed and adapt to new rules of integrity. We searched for and found lands of promise and these stories became intertwined with our myth-maps. These traits, also born of the necessity for purpose have now been corralled into stock pens. Many of us moo and grunt until our life, largely stripped of its former meaning, is expired. Marketers have hijacked these once proud and useful drives, and now exploit them to farm the now denatured people who do not know their own purpose, nor that they hunger for one. This has resulted in what has been called a meaning crisis.
John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom
Episode 2 of “Things That Matter” explores the origins of the story maps that sometimes inform and sometimes delude us. As always, feedback and suggestions on how to make this a more useful tool for sharing “things that matter” are welcome.
This research documentary on the hypothesis that water has the capacity to retain memory reminds me of claims made years ago by Dr. Masaru Emoto on Water Consciousness. It’s definitely not conventionally accepted science. These experimental results explore some strange aspects of water. Fringe science? Maybe. Fascinating and thought-provoking? Definitely.
My guess is it is hard to digest these types of experimental results in the scientific social body since we have no linear way to trace the phenomena to a source and thereby understand it using our conventional materialistic conceptual models of physics and biology. We only have these quizzical defiant results of experimental outcomes which we then try to fit into our existing models. Our penchant to reject phenomena that runs counterfactual to our assumed models of reality is notorious.
I suppose the social structural aspects of science may be a key factor. Science as a social body, like all established social bodies, includes a priest class of respected and decorated guardians. These guardians of the zeitgeist of conventional dogmas keep them well-nourished and protected. Massaging information into existing narratives to protect the integrity of the existing group, including its perspective is a quite human thing to do. Rejecting things that do not fit is also part of this guardian aspect. Groups develop immune systems. It happens on any number of human social fronts because of how we value stories as a social binding agent. Acceptance and rejection of data is often motivated by deeply seated biological algorithms that are detached from the superficial rationalizations we use to express devotion to satisfying them. This includes how we nourish and protect the integrity of institutional community environments. The people who inhabit scientific domains depend on this social defense architecture because it satisfies social drives for validation, purpose, meaning, and livelihoods.
I fit this phenomenon into the same category of the weird outcomes that characterize the double-slit experiments. These results differ based on whether or not a measurement device is applied as light passes through slits. I wonder if there might be a connection to the research that found cat purrs have a positive effect on bone healing. Science traces this to a triggering of the release of endorphins and so on but there may be something else at play that is beyond the model of the current scientific lens.
Consciousness or episodic memory, indeed the recording of patterns without the preapproved conventional neuron model is blasphemy in a science society so heavily dependent on the campfire of certainty that emanates from a materialistic explanatory lens. Perhaps anthropocentric perspectives morphed rather than died out in the West with the age of enlightenment. It does seem consciousness in any form as an influence outside the boundaries of materialistic conventions is the third rail of western science. Anyone that touches it in unapproved ways, or discovers experimental data that counters conventional views, is excommunicated from the scientific social body. Materialism as the axiom by which all things should be measured renders great insight, but like any virtue applied too zealously becomes a vice, it does come with a generous side dish of blind spots. Maybe this is one of them. Stay tuned…
An Iroquois village showing longhouses The member tribes of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy,
Today’s wake-up word is Orenda: It is the concept of spiritual energy thought to be inherent in all natural things to various degrees – the collective power of nature’s energies expressed through the living energy of all natural objects believed by the Haudenosaunee Native American Nations. (The Iroquois is what Europeans called the Haudenosaunee, which was actually a confederation of Native American nations who had found peace and prosperity by way of cooperation with each other). Orenda was thought to be a transmissible spiritual currency that, if one was able to harness it, could be channeled according to the will of the individual.
The Seventh Generation Principle was born in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) culture. It was the philosophy that decisions made in the present should result in some beneficial dividends at least seven generations into the future.
From my current perspective, the concept of leadership in our world is rooted in the solemn responsibility to cultivate the progress of the community we live in and depend on over time. It is to point our talents toward contributing to a higher quality of living experience now and in the long run, as well as to continuously renew this commitment with each generation both in word and deed.
Here’s some additional background on the Haudenosaunee
Since the podcast I am working on developing is called – Things That Matter – starting off with the nature of a thing seems fairly appropriate. This video concentrates on outlining a map of how we map things. As always, feedback and suggestions on how to make this a more useful tool for sharing “things that matter” are welcome.
The Wisdom Of Life 