Since mankind did not endow itself with life, we may wisely assume that a source which transcends our understanding indeed did. And chiefly because its essence rests outside the parameters of our limited cognitive conjecture, we can’t answer for its motives. To compensate for this conceptual gulf, mankind has over the centuries drawn direct instruction from nature as guide and teacher. Her metamorphoses of species, plant cycles, and visible natural laws have inspired poets, lead to ingenious technological developments, and drawn forth the practice of shamanism. When the individual recognizes his relationship to the greater cosmos respect for the shared web of life results. Such thinking promotes those ethics which consider the welfare of the whole, the impact actions bear upon future generations. Unfortunately as modern society increasingly turns its back on nature and moved toward a model of so-called convenience based on rapid technological developments, a simultaneous decimation of species transpires. While science may be slow to honor the sacred relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, in fact the growing use of sport utility vehicles by mainstream America directly impacts the ozone, and augments the probability of violent storm systems spawned from global warming. We are born involved with one another as the poet said. Bible stories suggest that our ancestors recognized a relationship between the phenomena of weather and their understanding of God’s will, spoken through environmental conditions as a mandate from heaven. In contrast, citizens of the modern world have systematically been taught to discount this critical association. The speed of modern life diminishes our sense of connection. News reports on earthquakes, freak windstorms, the worst droughts of the century, the greatest fire outbreaks in decades are conceptualized as fragments. Few understand the rapidity with which the web of life is being torn asunder to support a model of wealth based increasingly on the decimation of species, habitat, and sustainable ecosystems. As an added assault, this perceived prosperity appears to be granting very little satisfaction in its wake. So says Harvard professor emeritus Robert E. Lane in his new book, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies.

The academic sciences train individuals to focus on specific criteria for “data-harvesting.” Each problem is analyzed separately without due consideration given to the net effect. Taken together the percentage of individuals using anti-depressants, abusing alcohol and illegal drugs, prone to violent outbreaks at home, or self-medicating with sugar speaks of an epidemic. Decades ago miners took canaries into the coal mines so that their shrill pitches would warn when poison gas was escaping. The myriad of social disorders plaguing modern society is the human equivalent of those canaries. The fundamental loss of contact with the natural world and the natural in ourselves is undermining human life. People have bought into a value system divorced from life’s genuine source by virtue of labeling systems rendering this sacred domain dirty, dangerous, and potentially diseased. A Harper’s Magazine essay entitled Planet of Weeds describes the vast lost of species directly related to the technological practices of the 20th century. Such carnage could only be tolerated by a society which has lost sentient awareness of the value of this sphere. Now on the brink of the 21rst century mankind appears to have crossed a threshold, and it’s unlikely that the world can be maintained (or sustained) in the manner in which it is currently being treated.

One of the most cherished elements of American democracy rests in a system of checks and balances implemented through three branches of government. Unfortunately an insidious cancer has recently acted upon all three. Our Judeo-Christian traditions should counter-balance actions driven by “the love of money as the root of all evil;” but current political leaders have blatantly sold out to the highest bidders. On the auction block is our very democracy! Ralph Nader warns young people: “If you don’t turn onto politics, politics will turn on you.” Quoting the late Superior Court Justice Brandeis he admonishes “You can have a democracy, or the concentration of wealth in a few hands. You can’t have both.” Given that timing proves critical to every event and historical invention, the “birth of the mapped genome” at this particular juncture in human evolution is ominous. The profit motive is currently out of control. A judicial climate of laxity towards corporate predators is the direct result of our two party system corrupted by campaign finance dollars. Naked profit is driving too many public policies. Mother Jones Magazine recently chronicled the manner by which FDA recommendations were tossed aside to speed genetically modified foods to supermarket shelves. Now at issue is food irradiation. Public Citizen recently reported on a ruling that will allow radioactively exposed metals to be “experimentally recycled” into “every day household appliances like baby carriages and toaster ovens!” Those elected to protect the public good are in essence turning a living population into virtual guinea pigs. Renown playwright George Bernard Shaw once related that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was that nothing was any longer perceived as such. The greatest tragedy of the 21rst century may be the growing fact that nothing is perceived as sacred. It is almost cliché to learn of young mothers hiding their newborn babies in garbage bins, while a traffic in human organs is purportedly underway utilizing the “human resources” of third world nations! When did life come to mean so little, regarded so cheaply? This perceptual black-hole accelerated when human birth was turned into a mechanical procedure. Studies done on severing the initial mother-infant bond raise deeper questions. The naturally nurturing act of breast-feeding was soon replaced by similac; then it was artificially inflated breasts, and now viagra. The most fundamental aspects of our humanity have been co-opted by artificial practices and facsimiles. This ongoing transposition of value from the genuine to the false bears directly on the discussion of bioethics and the insidious corporate claim to the human genome. Media permeates our shared atmosphere offering an endless feedback loop of euphemism. Such pervasive pretense allows for exquisite denial mechanisms, so much so that entire ecosystems are routinely sacrificed for malls and plastic theme parks. Eden is being stolen and sold back to us in damaged form! Our very food is genetically reconfigured and modeled after semblances. A legal scholar brainstormed the concept of “substantial equivalent” to effect an end-run around fair and just consumer protections so that we don’t even know what we’re eating! Assembly line production proves cheapest; thus when money drives the bottom line we must look cautiously at the one-size-fits-all model of “Aryan capitalism” now globally underway. Albert Einstein wisely related that no problem could be solved at the level of thinking which brought it about. Screenwriter Syd Field tells script-writers to know where their story is going before they get caught inside their own paradigm. America is a story in progress, yet it moves increasingly towards a model of education based on standardization, formatting young minds to fit into uniform consumer boxes. Students trained to answer the same test questions without regard for original, critical thought fits no democratic ideal. The history of human perception has always been held under tight parameters. First by the church (under threat of heresy); then that restrictive yoke was passed onto science. One view is based entirely on faith, the other on empiricism. Modern education focuses on categorical separations leading to a dangerous presumption: that one system will not interface, influence, or interfere with another. That is never the case in nature. Any foreign element introduced into a previously closed ecosystem has a tendency to wreak havoc. Mystical initiates believe mankind fell into a form of perceptual myopia when the sense-perceptible world of physical existence was taken for the only reality. This model deifies science, and therein lies the rub. Human intelligence is always fallible, and science does not have all the answers. A good example demonstrated recently was the loss of an expensive Mars probe. Two teams of scientists were busy using different measurement systems!

On the eve of the genome’s fateful mapping (June 2000) Larry King interviewed the Dali Lama who wisely related that “Intention is not found in the genes.” Meanwhile CNN reporters assumed the stance of cheerleaders disbanding their responsibility for journalistic impartiality by expressing abundant praise for these untested developments. Soon after this event a jury awarded several billion dollars damages to thousands impacted by the “miracle drug” phen-phen. With dangerous irony a massive “just say no to drugs” campaign compromises civil liberties and clogs the courts while a simultaneous battery of pharmaceutical drugs pounds the nightly airwaves seducing a great many people only too willing to disband the care and maintenance of their own body temples to the purveyors of the next magic pill. Time after time these chemical contrivances demonstrate serious side effects. Since we have no data on the probable side effects of “genetic therapy,” we must learn from those examples history reveals. Consider DES, thalidomide--its impact eluding a generation--and radiation. Any fifth grade student exposed to the concept of radioactive “half-lives” can imagine the consequences of radioactive exposure. Why is it then that our own nuclear regulatory commission allowed for the use of said substances before safe vessels were designed to house the inevitable wastes generated? Discover Magazine (January 2000) presented a map vividly depicting entire dead zones surrounding the U.S. Gulf coast, and the coastlines around Europe and Japan. As it stands the United States holds hundreds of toxic dumps awaiting “safe” clean-up while the E.P.A finds its staff and resources tied up in court battles focused on just a few. Those who profited at their community’s long-term expense routinely walk away from accountability. One wonders how accountability can be determined--no less enforced--when entire genetic lines are at stake? The laws written for our great land were inspired during an epoch when the statutes of limitation were unlikely to expire before the effects were wrought. In other words, the presumption of innocence belonged to an era wherein long-term risks to entire populations were not at stake. Our legal system is formulated on the basis of a singular direct causative agent. At present the many trespassers trafficking in pesticides, herbicides, radiation, and other chemical adulterants filtering through our shared ecosystems effectively arm one another with impunity as each continues in acts of wrong-doing. No chain of accountability can be established to suit the standards of jurisprudence. Take the example of Monsanto, the company that engineered the Agent Orange molecule still mutating children in Vietnam. Long after war is resolved, the genetic mutations move down the labyrinths of time and continue to bring misery to the innocent. During the trials at Nuremburg, nazi officers sought to defer accountability by stating that war itself was predicated on the requirement of following orders. Like these unconscionable warriors, Monsanto proves all too willing to profit directly from blood-money. Having never answered for Vietnam “war crimes,” it now stands to profit from a similar chemical incentive aimed at the civilian population of Columbia. This would not be so troubling if Monsanto--demonstrating its track record in an heinous disrespect for life--didn’t have its fingers in the collective genetic cookie jar. It’s one of the foremost exploiters of the bio-tech frontier currently claiming copyright to seeds. What kind of person or institution can lay claim to that which belongs to the Divinity? Only in an epoch of unchecked, unmitigated greed could the concept of attaching copyright to seeds be considered, no less passed into law. Many of the new seeds derived from recombinant DNA represent the human equivalent of “shot gun weddings.” Not surprisingly their progeny is sterile! The method by which genes are combined is rape at its most primal level. The poetic voice of Kahlil Gibran taken from The Prophet offers: “if you bake a bread with bitterness, you bake a bitter bread.” We must ask not only what the product will taste like, but what indeed it represents energetically. Truly a belief in gravity is not required to experience its effects. Because science fails to honor the intelligence divinely planted in nature does not mean it doesn’t exist. Creation is still creating itself. Earth mother (Gaia) oversees this process with an element conspicuous by its absence to mainstream genetic corporations: Love. Her self-correcting adaptation mechanisms have derived as a result of eons of trial and error in her own laboratories. Human beings are in no position to take liberties bearing unforeseen consequences on Divine Creation, a legacy intended for all. There is no fail-safe here, no process by which genuine accountability can be implemented. In a less fiscally compromised climate demonstrating respect for life, law would hold the predatory urges of corporations in check to protect the greater good. Since these protections are not in place, the dismembering of the genome may well prove the split of the atom a walk in the park in comparison! A certain spiritual maturity is required by society to recognize life’s intrinsic value. Every child remembers The Cat in the Hat. In this classic Dr. Seuss imparted a basic premise drawn from physics. Once you take something apart and make a mess, you can’t hide from the consequences. And it will not spontaneously fix itself! Profound questions must now be asked; however with presidential debates sponsored by Anheiser Busch one might conclude that politics-as-sport represents the new opiate of the peoples. The U.S. bows down to a model of profit gained and all else compromised. Wall street has become a religious shrine; and arty cows (metaphorical golden calves) are suddenly abounding around New York City! Is Biblical metaphor being portrayed to point out the newly fashionable worship of mammon? Meanwhile the natural world “rocks and rolls” setting statistical averages asunder. The cost to agriculture, habitat, and human life is not being counted on the current fiscal balance sheet. One wonders when the purveyors of the Midas Touch economy will wake up? Should a Brave New World genetic marketplace ensue, what will happen when computer-based technology lapses due to electrical surge, or miscalculates on the basis of a programming error? Are we willing to live in a world where genetically modified handicaps mock the grace with which our bodies were Divinely designed? What indeed would Hamlet say to the skull of Yorick in such a context? I’m afraid what ails us isn’t in our genes, but in the choices drawn from a disturbed and disturbing socio-economic marketplace culture. Encouraging the worst in people through the shaping mechanism of media resources are directed at countless crisis management programs. With compassion on the scarcity list, illness becomes humanity’s teacher. What will replace this guide in awakening patience, compassion, and tolerance if genetic therapy wipes out all disease? Shall we shape a body politic desensitized to feeling and caring? And what of diseases like diabetes which arise from a fundamental misuse of lifestyle choices?

Great teachers remind us that the body is only a vessel. Poets, mystics, and shaman see sacred relationship everywhere; and grant us their eyes that we might witness spirit permeating all nature to inspire the manifold, ingenious ways She manifests and regenerates herself. Life is a gift pulsating with a mysteriously Divine, vital electricity. Its perpetual current arises out of the eternal draw of Yang for Yin. This organic magnetic yearning results in evolution, as the perpetual reach towards new embrace results in ever-changing combinations. Each one a potentially improved amalgam drawn from the best possible genetic interlude any two (the parents) can offer. Life moves to this inexorable beat. It represents a binary code: the quintessential Divine equation derived from equal sums of male and female parts. This anatomical poem acts as a virtual commandment. It speaks life’s silent fundamental language to animate every particle in its electron-dance around each atom’s nucleus. Intended to balance, the myriad Divine equations represent the erotic courtship rituals energizing all kingdoms, as well as the heavens themselves! To understand any equation we must first honor this one; for from this equation do all others derive, and without it do all others depart from their Truth and lose sustainability. We must understand matter as the manifestation of this holy allegiance portrayed ostensibly in the shape of the dancing double helix. These inform every life form with its unique character. To mimic partial content is to render the mechanism dull like the birthing mother given a drug to inhibit the natural onset of her labor pains. Because this template is fragile, and far too precious for modern mankind’s understanding, it is no domain for men in work boots to enter!

In the final analysis if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the experience of our ancestors must be encoded within our cellular memories. The great Biblical flood lends possible credence to Plato’s references to Atlantis. If such a society reached that state where sculpting genetic matter to its own specifications was possible, what led to its demise? And further, what seduced its citizens into a false sense of safety surrounding this extremity of hubris? Edgar Cayce, America’s “sleeping prophet,” held that the Atlanteans endeavored to turn back the very tide of evolution by molding an intended slave caste. The reversal of the Divine mandate for progress, freedom, and increased emulation of intrinsic Divinity led the very elements themselves into rebellion. Weather events proved so catastrophic that the mundane slate was cleared for a new humanity. Cayce also warned that many Atlanteans would reincarnate in America during the twentieth century, well in advance of our current “play god” technologies. Even if taken as a cautionary tale, when life itself is being traded on Wall Street for profit, the incentive to “build” a laboring caste is not outside the realm of possibility. Already weather systems send repetitive warning signs, but the populace has been taught not to listen. In a word, the petri dish into which the seed of biotech has been thrust is a polluted one, seen through the diminished light of our morally compromised lens. History may well construct a mythology suitable to this epoch’s moral juncture, and the road eventually taken. Let us hope that road has not already been paved by greed.