Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Author:Jon Kabat-Zinn [Kabat-Zinn, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781401381967
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

This opening to the life

we have refused

again and again

until now.

Until now.

DAVID WHYTE

φIndeed, cosmologists now view the universe as consisting of about 30 percent “dark matter,” perhaps sequestered in black holes, and of greater than 65 percent “dark energy,” which may be responsible for the force behind the universe’s expansion, a kind of anti-gravity.

EVEN OUR MOLECULES TOUCH

Francisco Varela, polymath cognitive neuroscientist, neuro-phenomenologist philosopher, and dedicated dharma practitioner, co-founder of the Mind and Life Institute, which holds periodic dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama, died at a young age in 2001. Francisco used to emphasize those properties of the immune system that transcended its role as an effective defense system against outside invaders. For the immune system also serves as a self-sensing system, with mechanisms that allow the body continually to monitor and affirm its “self-ness,” the utterly unique molecular identity of all its constituent structures, through molecular touching. At the same time, Francisco emphasized that this self-quality that we could call “my” bodily identity doesn’t actually have an independent existence any more than we do, but emerges dynamically out of the complex interactions among its constituent parts.

Sometimes the immune system is referred to as the body’s second brain because it is capable of learning and changing and remembering in response to changing conditions. Anatomically, it is partially localized in the thymus, the bone marrow, and the spleen, and in part, it is non-localized, in that its lymphocytes and the antibody molecules they produce can circulate independently in the blood and lymph. Lymphocytes have specialized receptor molecules (including antibodies) embedded in their membranes which allow them to “feel” the contours and architecture of the body at the molecular level, the topology of its circulating molecules, its cells, its organs, and its tissues, and thus know itself and identify non-self “foreign invaders” through continual surveillance and mechanisms for highly specific molecular recognition.

Even in the absence of foreign invaders or disease processes, there seems to be a continual conversation among all the members of the society of cells that constitutes the body, carried on through the language of immune signaling and recognition. The conversation coordinates all the various functions of the body on a cellular level. Without it, even in the absence of infection, the body would degrade. As Varela put it:

The sense organs that relate the brain to the environment, such as the eyes and ears, have parallels in a number of lymph organs. These are distinct regions that act as sensing devices and interact with stimuli: for example, patches in the intestine that constantly relate to what you eat.

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