The point is that all organisms are part of a community and share their genes. It has also been recognized that when we eat genetically modified foods, the bacteria in our gut can pick up and incorporate the food’s genetically engineered genes. Our tampering with Nature is even changing the genetic organization of the bacteria within our own digestive system! We will probably only find out the costs of genetic engineering when the fruits of our labor come back to bite us.

Dealing With Stress

Survival is very much tied in with growth mechanisms that replace the number of cells we lose every day as a result of normal attrition. But another part of our survival behavior engages a completely different set of mechanisms: those we use for our protection. Protection shuts down growth processes and allocates energy to behaviors needed to sustain us in a threatening situation. We engage in either growth or protection mechanisms every moment of our lives, funding these activities with our life energy. It takes energy to grow and it takes energy to protect ourselves. When we engage in protection mechanisms, we close ourselves down and conserve energy by shutting off growth.

Nature designed us to use protection in acute responses like running away from a saber tooth tiger. But if we maintain protection for too long, we compromise our survival. What really becomes important is this: how much of our lives are in growth and how much in protection? The more we live in fear, the more we allocate our energy into protection. The more afraid we become, the more we shut down growth—to the extent that we can be scared to death. In the world that we live in today, the protection response has become a greater and greater percentage of our everyday life experience; most of us are living in very high levels of stress and are continuously debilitating our system by interfering with growth. Cells cannot move in both directions at the same time. They are either in growth, open to the environment and assimilating what’s going on, or in protection, shutting themselves down waiting for the environment to clear itself before again expressing their normal functions. We are a community of cells that responds to perceptions generated by our central nervous system. 

Today we have fears from which we seemingly can’t escape. Who is Al-Qaeda and where are they? Where is the bird flu? We are presented with fears that threaten our survival, perceptions that cause us to question whether we can stay alive. Those perceptions cause us to get into a protection posture and shut down life-conserving growth. This is important because it affects almost everybody on the planet today.