Opening to Life: Autoimmunity and the Spirituality of Fermentation
Charles Eisenstein 4 Nov., 2003God is the wildest being in existence. The presence of His spirit in us is our wildness, our oneness with the wilderness of Creation. That is why subduing the things of nature to human purposes is so dangerous and why it so often results in evil, in separation and desecration.
-- Wendell Berry
It is a commonplace that the word "health" is a synonym for wholeness. Accordingly, a state of disease, whether we classify it as physical, psychological, or spiritual, is a state of not being complete, not being fully oneself.
Different societies exhibit different disease patterns. In the modern era, the most rapidly growing and most lethal diseases are almost all some variation of autoimmune dysfunction. Diseases such as autism, diabetes, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, lupus, asthma, arthritis, AIDS of course, and even, according to some, arteriosclerosis, are recognized as having a substantial autoimmune component. Meanwhile cancer and allergies also involve dysfunction in the immune system, which at its most fundamental level depends on the body's ability to distinguish self versus not-self.
With only slight overgeneralization, we can therefore say that today's major killers arise from a confusion between self and not-self. Or, you could say, a confusion about our selves. A confusion about who we really are. (As an aside, the psychological epidemic of our era -- depression and anxiety -- also arises from a self-rejection similar to physical autoimmune disease. These along with chronic fatigue syndrome blur the boundary between physical and psychological.)
This stands in contrast to the killers of past centuries, which resulted not from self-confusion but from an inability to fight invasive not-self organisms. There was no confusion here! The invaders -- smallpox, plague, cholera, influenza, typhus, polio, and so forth -- thrived in the conditions of "civilization" -- crowding, filth, squalor, rats, open sewers, etc., and they were deadly. Now, at least in our society, conditions conducive to mass epidemics of highly infectious disease no longer exist, but people are still dying and suffering from ill health nonetheless. Yet, by and large, our medical institutions are still thinking in terms of fighting the invaders.
I would like you to consider the following possibility: the rise of autoimmune diseases - a confusion between self and not-self on a physical level - arises from a corresponding confusion about what the self is on a spiritual, psychological, and social level. In other words, we do not know who we are. Can you think of a better description than that of autoimmune disease?
When I say, "we do not know who we are," I'm not talking about some airy-fairy spiritual realm. I mean it on all levels, starting with the basic biological definition of the self. And it is this confusion, on the level of basic biological science, that has given rise to many of the health problems that fermentation and probiotic diets seek to address. All the levels I will talk about -- biological, psychological, social, and spiritual - are not really separate; they each contain all the others. But embodied as we are in linear time, we have to start somewhere, so let's start with biology.
In biology, the definition of an organism is usually associated with the phenotype; that is, the physical expression of the DNA in the germ cell. The guiding paradigm (which is under increasing assault even in mainstream biology) is that the DNA is a kind of program or blueprint for the construction of the organism, i.e. the phenotype, which is defined as the "expression of the genes." According to this definition, your organs are all parts of self, as are all their constituent parts. However, other organisms living on or in you are not part of self; they are termed parasites, pathogens, or symbionts. Whatever their relationship, harmful or beneficial, they are not you. You are just their host. They are separate organisms with their own DNA.
This paradigm is intimately linked with Neodarwinism, which explains evolution in terms of random mutation followed by natural selection; in other words, in terms of competition. In Neodarwinism, organisms are essentially survival-and-replication machines; that is, they are constructed and programmed by their genes to ensure the survival and replication of those genes. The worldview stemming from Neodarwinism is essentially adversarial: we compete with other organisms for food and other resources; we seek to use other organisms as food and stop them from feeding off us. While any given species might incidentally benefit other species and contribute to the viability of the ecosystem and the planet, the deepest explanation of its morphology and behavior lies in competition, replication, and survival. In this view, bacteria might help us incidentally, but their primary imperative is their own survival and replication.
This view has been dominant for well over a century now in biology, and it therefore infuses all the sciences that have arisen from biology -- including medical science. Actually it goes back even further than that, since Darwinism itself arises naturally from what Fritjof Capra calls the Newtonian World Machine -- the belief originating with Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and Bacon that the universe and everything in it, including the human body, is a fantastically complex machine best understood by taking it apart. And actually we could trace it roots back even farther, to the advent of agriculture thousands of years ago, or even further to the cosmic birthing of individuated consciousness -- God's means to experience Godself. In our age the individuation has been completed and the reunion is beginning on all levels.
It is clear today that the competition-based, survival-and-replication driven model of life is deeply flawed and incomplete. The basis of life is cooperation, not competition - an argument actually put forth in Darwin's time by Alfred Russell Wallace. It was rejected then, probably because Darwinism fit in much better with the ultra-competitive socioeconomic climate of the time -- Laissez-faire economics, cutthroat capitalism -- and it seemed to justify the rampant inequalities of the age. The rich were rich because they were more fit; the poor were genetically inferior. The same line of thought led eventually to fears of "weakening of the gene pool" and then to forced sterilization programs in the U.S. and the Holocaust under Hitler, but that's another story. Today the scientific insufficiencies of Neodarwinism are increasingly apparent, but this understanding will take time to filter down into the ranks of applied researchers, the medical schools, and the popular consciousness. Indeed, the enormously expensive human genome project is largely motivated by the genetic blueprint theory of the self.
I would like to expand the definition of the self to include all of our companion organisms. I propose that any definition of the self that fails to include our inner ecology is an incomplete definition, and therefore not compatible with wholeness; not compatible, that is, with health. In other words, we are defining ourselves as less than we really are. Our intestinal flora and other companions are not just beneficial others, they are an integral part of the self without which we are not and cannot be whole.
It is important to recognize that Neodarwinism is not just an isolated theory that might be replaced by something else purely on scientific merits, because this account is necessary to make the Newtonian World Machine work. It is an essential part of that whole worldview. It is therefore no coincidence that the Richard Dawkins, an eminent Neodarwinist, said, " The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." That is Newtonian physics. In fact that is basically all the physics up until the 20th century. And it is still the basis of most research and applied science, for example medicine. There is a good reason for this: assumptions of determinism and objectivity which are built into Newton's laws (and Maxwell's, and in a certain sense Einstein's) are also the foundation of the Scientific Method and its medical incarnation, the double-blind study. In other words, there are basic conceptions about the methodology of research that are based on obsolete science.
Let's look at some real-life examples of cooperation in evolution and nature. In fact let's start with our cells, which in addition to nuclear DNA are also inhabited by mitochondria, which have their own DNA. These bits of protoplasm are parts of our selves (and of all other animals) that are not "coded for" by our nuclear DNA. Yet without them we'd be dead, for they are the power plants of our cells, providing at least 90% of their energy. It is now widely accepted that the mitochondria were originally aerobic bacteria -- separate organisms -- that were hosted by the primitive precursors to single-celled animals and eventually merged with them. They cooperated: the aerobic cell providing energy in exchange for essential resources and protection. The same thing happened in plants when cyanobacteria merged with archeobacteria to become chloroplasts. And that's not all. There is also evidence that the microtubules in many of our cells, most notably neurons, came originally from another class of bacteria, the spirochetes! So you have all these bacteria merging together and eventually losing their original identity to form a whole much greater than the sum of their parts.
Another example of cooperation in nature which casts doubt on the standard definition of an organism is the relationship between plants and their pollinators. Many plants depend on a single pollinating insect, which in turn completely depends on that plant. You could take a seed to another planet, but even if that planet were like earth in all other respects, that species would not survive without its pollinating partner. These relationships between plants and insects, plants and fungi, plants and bacteria, bacteria and fungi can be very very complex. Whole groups of species from different kingdoms of life depend on each other not only for reproduction but, very often, for mere survival. Just as a mammal cannot survive without a heart or lungs, which justifies including these organs as part of "self", so also are these plants, insects, and so forth unable to survive without their symbiotic partners. It makes more sense, then, to consider the combination of, say, fig tree and pollinating wasp to be the organism, for that is the minimum unit which is reproductively viable.
But of course, both fig tree and wasp, fungi and bacteria, plant and insect all depend on the health of the ecosystem in which they live. Moreover, each ecosystem depends also on other, distant ecosystems. And all higher life forms depend on the bacteria which maintain a life-supporting atmosphere. While life on earth can sustain the loss of some species, each species depends on the whole. None can exist in isolation on a bare and lifeless planet. We may thus also consider the only viable unit of life to be the entirety of all life, as well as certain inorganic processes relating to the water cycle and carbon cycle. This, the entirety of all life which is itself a homeostatic organism, we call Gaia. The Earth.
The co-originator of Gaia theory, Lynn Margulis, had this to say: "Evolution is the emergence of individuality from the interblending of once-independent organisms."
Thus while we can arbitrarily define the biological "self" in terms of nuclear DNA or some related concept, it is clear that in terms of independent viability, such definitions are imperfect. Our DNA is alive, our cells are alive, our organs are alive, our bodies are alive, our ecosystems are alive, our planet is alive. And on all levels, life is a collective. There are no well-defined boundaries. The standard biological definition of self imposes a rigid self/not-self distinction where none actually exists. It excludes things that are essential to our well-being. Internally, it excludes our intestinal flora and the other denizens of our mucosa and skin. Externally, it excludes all the other life forms, including each other, on which we depend.
Having set up an adversarial relationship with other life forms which are actually parts of ourselves, we should not be surprised when this adversarial relationship manifests in our bodies. Autoimmune disease is literally self-rejection. And the solution is to end the self-rejection by opening up to a broader conception of self. A broader conception of self, in biological terms, means inviting other life forms into our bodies. No! Not quite. If I put it that way it reinforces the assumption that these "other" life forms are indeed other. Let us say instead, to expand the diversity of the ecosystem that is ourselves. What is the best way to restore an ecosystem? Introducing species is only a small part of it. Unless the habitat is made suitable, they will quickly die out. Conversely, habitat destruction and environmental poisoning is the greatest cause of extinction, not hunting. You see, even after many courses of broad-spectrum antibiotics, the original bacteria are probably not completely dead. There are probably a few hiding away in some dormant state, waiting for the right conditions. Here is a nice parallel brought to my attention by the herbalist Stephen Buhner. In places where exotic species have completely taken over from the native flora, if you start pulling up the invaders, native species that haven't been seen in the area for 20 or 30 years will begin to reappear. Many kinds of seeds and roots, for example dandelion roots, can remain dormant for years and years under, say, a parking lot, and as soon as we stop paving it over, stop maintaining it in an artificial state, then eventually the pavement will crack and the seeds will sprout. I'm not saying probiotics are useless, just that they need the appropriate environment. We are swimming in a sea of bacteria. I think that when we "open to life" with our diet and our thoughts, the right bacteria will find a way into our guts.
Fermentation is one such way of opening ourselves to life. When we eat fermented foods we literally invite other life forms into our bodies. Now there is some question as to whether lactobacilli and other beneficial bacteria (and beneficial yeasts such as aspergillus) are able to survive the gastric juices in the stomach. I have not been able to discover any studies proving the matter one way or the other. Consider, though, the situation when bacteria enter the stomach in an acidic, liquid medium -- my homemade soda, for example, or sauerkraut juice, or kefir. Fermented foods in general have a low Ph, which inhibits HCl secretion in the stomach. In the case of lactofermented soda, the bacteria don't have to spend too long in there anyway because they are quickly squirted through the pyloric valve into the duodenum. And because they are in a liquid medium, the HCl concentration takes a while to build up. So it is plausible that at least some of them make it through.
This is not the whole story, however. Even if they bacteria themselves do not survive, many of their components surely do -- enzymes and other proteins, as well as polypeptide fragments. The small intestine is home to patches of lymphatic follicles called Peyer's patches as well as special lymphatic capillaries called lacteals. Moreover, the appendix is thick with lymphatic nodules. The standard explanation for all this lymph tissue is that it is there to destroy bacteria so they do not breach the intestinal wall. An adversarial relationship. Another function mentioned in physiology textbooks is a sensing function -- to generate memory lymphocytes for long-term immunity. Again, though, this assumes that the bacteria are the enemy. What if these very sensitive lymphatic tissues are able to recognize friends as well as enemies? Our relationship with our intestinal flora is millions of years old, easily long enough for coevolution to have occurred. Even in standard Neodarwinian genetics there has been ample time for recognition of friendly bacteria to be encoded in our DNA. This immunological sensing might play a role in creating conditions conducive to colonization of the gut by beneficial microorganisms.
In conventional medicine, a cure for candida would be, say, a drug that eliminates all funguses without harmful side effects. But clearly a healthy body ecology is more than just encouraging the good guys, such as acidophilous, and suppressing the bad guys, such as candida. We see candida as a cause of many health problems -- I would also like you to consider the possibility that it is not just a cause, but a symptom as well. In fact, candida might even be doing us a favor! As I explain why, please observe how we can through the body ecology concept transcend the fixing-and-controlling, engineering mentality toward human health.
Candida albicans is present in a healthy person, but just as a minor species. Just as any species in any ecology, it has its own niche and function. There is no redundancy in nature. Then when conditions change, for example through a high-carb diet and destruction of other species, the candida opportunistically fills the empty niches and thrives. All kinds of health problems result. But what would happen if the same diet and microflora destruction happened, but candida were not allowed to thrive either? This is precisely the experiment that is occurring through the use of various anti-fungal drugs. Maybe the results would be even worse. Maybe the candida is serving a positive function in the sense of choosing bad over worse. Perhaps it serves a purpose in digesting gummy deposits on the intestines; others have suggested a role in binding mercury atoms. We just don't know.
If after years of chemical agriculture our field becomes overgrown with thistles, dandelions, and burdock, is the solution now to kill these "weeds" with even more powerful herbicides? Perhaps these plants are part of the land's healing response. (They are liver medicines, after all.) When there are especially many locusts this year, does that mean nature has become incompetent? or is there some reason for that which we may not know? Similarly, perhaps the best way to heal our bodies is to open them to life instead of to search for yet another enemy. We can see candida, then, as a symptom of ecological disruption, and when the candida diminishes we can see that as a sign the inner ecology is coming back into balance; but it would be a mistake to see the candida itself as the enemy.
I would like to mention that the same might apply to other parasites. For example there is evidence that human beings are supposed to have certain species of intestinal worms in our GI tract! They have coevolved with us over millions of years and play a role in modulating the immune system and in maintaining bowel health.
I remember one time an iridologist told me I have all kinds of parasites, including brain parasites. That freaked me out for a couple days, until I thought, "Well maybe they are not parasites at all. Maybe," I thought, "they are the physical manifestation of all the things that are 'preying on my mind,' and if I somehow eliminated the physical 'parasites' without the mental worries, there would be nothing to metabolize that energy on a physical level and I would get sick."
As an aside, there is something a little fishy about health & diet philosophies that emphasize cleansing and purifying the body -- food hygiene and some raw foods and fasting advocates come to mind. It harks to the notion that parts of us are good and other parts bad; it is based on the conviction that we are impure to begin with, and it sets up a civil war, a fight pitting the pure will against the impure body. On some level it represents an imbalance of male and female energies. It is anti-life.
Compare the body to soil. Like a human body, soil is not an inert carrier of life, it is life. It is not whole without its living organisms. The same is true of our bodies. We are a cooperative effort. What would you think of someone who said they could improve soil health by eliminating all those earthworms that are devouring the soil's nutrients?
That is oversimplistic, because everyone understands the importance of earthworms (or so we would hope -- actually chemical-intensive agriculture ends up killing the earthworms. Oh, no matter -- we'll just replace their function with more technology.) But here's a real-life example courtesy of Fukuoka. Chloropicrin is used to kill soft rot in Chinese cabbage, and it works. But two years later the soft rot comes back with a vengeance - much worse. Why? Because the chloropicrin also kills other bacteria that moderate the effects of the rot. It also affects fungi that have a symbiotic relationship with the root system, soil chemistry, and so on.
So far I have talked mostly about the biological misdefinition of self. Now I would like to talk about how this confusion is echoed in our spiritual, psychological, and social definitions of self, because these too are engines of disease, and in an important way are even more fundamental. Well, let's not say more. Each level contains all the others. As above, so below. The biological misdefinition would not exist without the social and spiritual misdefinition. They are all part of a pattern. And it is not a healthy pattern. As healers we need to offer people another pattern, starting in whatever realm they are open to. If you are a healer, your job is to offer people another pattern.
Let's start socially. Basically, in the social realm we have done the same thing that we have done in the biological: we have cut ourselves off from the rest of life. In biology, we live under the illusion that technology is making us increasingly independent of nature. Depleted soil? No matter, we don't need soil, we'll do hydroponics. Poisoned air? We'll engineer our own atmosphere. Death? Someday we'll download our consciousness onto a computer. This independence from nature is an illusion. A delusion. What we really have is not independence, but disconnection. Our dependence is just less apparent. Instead of depending on people who know and care about us, we depend on strangers. In the social realm, the same delusion of independence exists and it is based on money. Consider the term "financially independent." Money, it would seem, makes us independent because we don't need other people any more -- we can just pay someone to do it. For the first time in human history, we can move to a completely new location, where we don't know anyone, and as long as we have money we can get along just fine. Total strangers will give us food, shelter, clothing, and every other necessity and luxury of life as long as we give them money. We do not depend on these people as people, but rather as placeholders, functionaries in the economy.
Observe that our economic system is essentially based, again, on competition -- the same basis as Neodarwinist biology -- and justified by a Darwinian tenet that competition is the engine of evolution, of moving forward. The result is also the same: it isolates us in a partial version of self in which we can never feel whole. You see, we are not meant to be independent of other people. In fact, most human societies that have existed on earth were based more on cooperation than competition. If I had another 10,000 words for this article I would tell you some beautiful examples from our hunter-gatherer and primitive agrarian past. For now, suffice it to say that we are one of the loneliest societies ever to live on this planet. Our social interactions are necessarily superficial because we really don't need each other, not as individual people, for anything: not for food, not for shelter, not for entertainment. Not even, these days, for parenting -- many preschool children spend far more of their waking hours in the care of strangers than with their parents. So when we do get together with friends, what else is there to do but pass the time in superficial entertainment and chatter? We don't build barns together or even play music together very much anymore.
Now let us apply this to food. The disastrous state of the American diet stems largely from the fact that it is anonymous. Distant strangers grow, process, ship, package, sell, and increasingly, cook our food. This opens the door to factory-type production and necessitates standardization, long shelf-life, and so forth -- all consequences of the profit motive replacing personal caring. Anyone who becomes seriously interested in nutrition eventually realizes that it is impossible to become healthy simply by changing brands or shopping habits. Mass industrial processing by its very nature destroys food. It infuses food with the energy of anonymity and profit. Yes, it helps to use butter instead of margarine and to look at package ingredients to avoid certain additives, but at some point you have to begin reclaiming food production from anonymous strangers. It is not just that the food companies need to be educated in more healthy production practices. The very nature of mass production in the money economy makes it impossible for such food to be much healthier than it is. At some point we begin to cook more for ourselves, to grow our own food or get it from farmers we know.
Fermentation is a key part of this process, for a couple reasons. First, it doesn't really lend itself to mass production and distribution (see The Economics of Fermentation, Spring 2003). Second, it helps us loosen the hold of experts -- paid anonymous specialists. In other words, fermentation is easy and it is best done on a small scale.
How easy is it? You can hardly stop it from happening. Crush salt into shredded cabbage, wait a few days, and fermentation happens. Put some fruit juice out at room temperature, and fermentation happens. The only way it doesn't happen is if you prevent it from happening, for example with chemicals or refrigeration. Otherwise food spoils. Fermentation is, quite literally, opening to life. Fermentation started with wild cultures. You make your mash and say a prayer over it, and the spirit of fermentation enters. You put flour and water out in a bowl (maybe with a cloth over top to keep out fruit flies), and it starts to bubble. It becomes alive! The natural tendency of the universe it toward life.
Now of course, not all fermentation is edible. Fortunately nature has equipped us with a sense of smell that can tell us what "rotten" foods are poisonous, and our ancestors have conferred on us culinary traditions that guide us towards wise ways of "opening to life." Traditional "cultures" -- both the belief systems that enacted a more open, more fluid definition of self, and the symbiotic communities of bacteria and yeasts used to ferment foods -- give us the knowledge and means to establish the thriving, robust ecosystem that comprises a complete human being.
The words "complete human being" lead us to another aspect of opening to life, the psychological or spiritual. The whole crusade to achieve perfect control over the microbial environment, the idea that we should maintain our bodily integrity by shutting out the world of life, keeping free of dirt and free of germs, not letting the wild into ourselves -- that parallels a psychology in which we only allow the safe, predictable, in-control aspects of self to exist. Anything else, we shut out.
Let me say a little more about the mentality of control, the engineering mentality. Whether in terms of thoughts or agriculture or bacteria in the body, the idea is, we will kill the bad ones and encourage the good ones. We will engineer the soil, manage the forest for the proper mix of trees. We will plan out the best composition of microflora. Nature is incomplete and we can do better. We can engineer better weather. Better plants. Better genes. Better bodies. We can improve on nature. Similarly we can improve on life. We can eliminate the unpleasant thoughts and feelings and experience only the good ones. We can steer away from dangerous thoughts, dangerous feelings that threaten to disrupt our control and take life in an unpredictable direction. We can shut out the thoughts and feelings which we see as wrong, sinful, or irresponsible so that we can believe ourselves good. We thereby only accept and experience a part of our selves.
Basically what it comes down to is to settle for a self that is less and a life that is less. Just as when we kill off our native bacteria, we are not fully being ourselves. To be fully ourselves means to be both more and less. More, because you let it all in. Less because none of it is really yours in the same way as before. You don't control it anymore. You let go. You surrender to a power beyond your contrivance.
Let's make this metaphor more concrete. People in our culture often do their best to avoid feeling certain emotions or thinking about certain things. Ever heard the phrase, "I don't want to go there"? We seek to avoid feeling painful emotions, or even inconvenient emotions -- inconvenient because they disrupt the life that is familiar to us. This is especially true when feeling certain things might call into question a relationship or a career. So we have all kinds of ways to not think about certain things, not face up to certain realities, to not experience negative emotions. We can seek out entertainment, we can fall into addiction, we can fantasize that things are not the way they are, we can chemically suppress negative emotions with SSRIs, or we can simply use willpower to be cheerful and NOT think about it.
How similar this is to aborting a disease process on the physical level. Why should we suffer? Remember, in the Newtonian paradigm there is no higher purpose to things, so we might as well engineer and manage life to minimize pain and maximize pleasure -- Why not? Thus the emphasis on alleviating symptoms in modern medicine.
The alternative is to open to the full spectrum of thoughts and feelings that will naturally come to inhabit the heart and mind. It does not necessarily mean to act on them or to be a slave to impulse, but simply to experience them, to feel them, to know them. It is to trust that the mix of species in our mental-emotional ecology is perfect for our current state of being, and will naturally change as our souls evolve. When the overall climate shifts, once-dominant species, such as anger, might retreat to a minor niche as love becomes the new keystone species. This will happen naturally, without willful suppression, without imposing on the ecosystem our own, human understanding of what species belongs where in denial of the divine wisdom that accords to each creature, biological or psychological, its perfect role and function. We can open ourselves to a "ferment" of ideas and emotions that will interact in a symbiotic dance beyond human contrivance to produce, eventually, a ripened human soul.
Invariably, a psychospiritual shutting out life goes along with a depleted body ecology. All the ways in which we deny our totality, whether biological, social, or spiritual, each depend on and indeed contain the others. (But that doesn't mean to blame the victim. Body ecology destruction is something that happens to anyone growing up in this culture. Similarly, society as we know it could not exist if it didn't force us into lesser versions, partial versions of ourselves. Otherwise, who would put up with the tedious, humiliating, offensive, dispiriting tasks offered us as "jobs"?)
As healers it is our job to offer people an opening, a means to repair the partiality. It is to take them to a door, open it, and invite them to step through. You can offer an opening to life, whether through biological, social, or spiritual means. Probably, because all these are related, their lives will eventually change in all these ways. Would it really be "healing" if the wholeness were limited to one dimension?
Nonetheless, healing must start somewhere. That is why healers can be effective in any modality. From one dimension, the full healing will unfold step by step, and each step will afford a glimpse of the totality of healing that is to come.