Cellular Unity
Like Josh and me on Mount Rainier, humanity has been lost in the wilderness for generations. Like Josh and me, humanity did not heed the first warning signs of impending trouble. And like Josh and me, humanity kept on going, relying on what tools it had, although it has been blind to half of reality, as if a mist (or cataract) had covered its eyes. This is why today we are in such a massive, global crisis.
But the part that reminds me most of my personal ordeal is the fact that the only way out of this crisis is with each other. This time, it truly is survival for all, or for no one at all.
The average adult human body contains roughly ten trillion cells (10,000,000,000,000). Placed side by side, they would circle the earth 47 times! Not one of them is autonomous. Instead, they all work in perfect harmony to support and sustain the body they live in, sometimes at the expense of their own lives. As a result, their “awareness” stretches far beyond their cell membranes and encompasses the whole body. The harmony between cells is what makes a healthy body such a perfect and beautiful machine.
A healthy body has such an effective maintenance mechanism that if even a single cell were to neglect its duties and work for itself, the body would detect that cell and then heal it or kill it. Without yielding to the dominion of the body, no organism could ever be created because its cells would not be able to cooperate and work for the good of the whole body.
In fact, a cell that works for itself instead of for the body is called a “cancerous cell.” When such cells succeed in multiplying, a person develops cancer. The end result of cancer is always the death of the tumor. The only unknown is whether the tumor will die because it was killed by the body or by the drugs, or because it killed its host body, thus killing itself. Whether we are aware of it or not, when we act for ourselves, disregarding the needs of the whole, we become cancerous cells in the body called “humanity.”
Before we realized we could change the environment to fit our needs, we were healthy cells in humanity, in natural harmony with the call of nature. But once we realized we could “bend” nature to our benefit, we divorced ourselves from that harmony. Therefore, to avoid disrupting nature’s balance, we have to become consciously harmonious with it.
However, we haven’t yet been able to do so. Because we’ve been unaware of the interplay between the desire to give and desire to receive, we have been taking nature for granted, believing that it would be there for us regardless of our behavior.
In complex, integrated systems, the rule is that the system dictates and the individual yields, just as with the example of cells in a body. As humanity grew in numbers and began to build increasingly complex societies, our need to match the rules of integrated systems became more pressing.