Disability, Spirituality, and the Mapping of the Human Genome.

In late June, 2000, the press announced that the conjoint public-private sector project to map the human genome is completed. Two days later Diane Sawyer interviewed the two major team leaders, one from the private sector and one from the public sector. She began with questions about using the new information and technology to cure diseases. Then she turned to the matter of dealing with insurance carrier refusals to insure anyone with a known risk for genetic disease and whether it would be possible to keep such information away from them. Growing bolder, she brought up widely expressed concerns that scientists will try to engineer "designer babies" for paying customers who have very definite ideas about what kind of offspring they want. Finally, she asked her BIG question of each man. "Do you believe in God?"

Both interviewees were happily confident in projecting the wonderful outcomes of their work in preventing and curing many of the diseases that plague humankind today. Both men expressed nervousness about the insurance industry. While they would like to know whatever there was to know about any genetic risks they might carry; they surely did not want their insurance companies to know anything about it! The "designer babies" issue was laughed off in unison. Mostly what people want is offspring who are good looking, smart, talented in one way or another, and easy to get along with. The day when such complexities could be managed is not just a long way off, it will probably never arrive for a simple reason. Genes are not alone in determining such characteristics; the same genes in a different environment will yield a different personality. Regarding God, the government man gave a definite yes, citing work afoot that will show us how faith and science can be comfortably reconciled. The scientist-entrepreneur smiled inscrutably at this, and went so far as to acknowledge that science has unearthed a number of "imponderables."

As I always do in such situations, I gave Diane my own answers. After the first set of questions about knowing one's own risks, on which I agreed with the interviewees without qualification, my answers began to diverge from theirs. While they dawdled along the branching path of myriad difficulties that will arise with respect to shielding risk information from potential insurers, I was already at the end of the road. It seemed immediately obvious to me that most of the private health insurance industry must go. We have socialized (i.e., tax supported) fire and police protection in this country for everyone, not just those who can pay premiums or who are employed or disabled or old. People with higher than average risks for fires or criminal attack are neither denied service nor must they pay privately for the protections provided.

We've needed comparably egalitarian protection for our health for a long time; this new issue only makes it a bit more obvious. Not that it's been hidden from observers with their eyes open. A couple of years ago Mouth magazine published a list of the annual bonuses received by a sampling of insurance company CEOs. I only remember those at the top and bottom of the list. Prudential's guy got 36 million in 1997. Cigna's guy got 28 million the same year. Both companies find it necessary to deny a very large number of claims from people with severe disabilities (as well as those without) each year in order to maintain what they consider a decent margin of profitability. It seems so clear to me that the insurance industry has gone mad and needs to be put down before it bites another innocent victim. I am constantly perplexed by the fact that the dismantling hasn't quite yet begun. Maybe the implications of the mapping of the human genome will finally trigger the revolution.

[Incidentally, it is my fond hope that said revolution will encompass the "managed care" problem as well. Managed care, you will recall, was the solution to the "greedy-doc" problem. A small proportion of physicians ripped off third party payers by ordering unnecessary tests, performing unnecessary procedures, and filing fraudulent claims. Thanks to the solution, our health care dollar no longer supports the doctor and his or her family. It now supports them AND several layers of administrators AND provides big profits for shareholders. What was once considered a sacred calling has become the nation's number one growth industry. If you ever feel the need for a good cry, subscribe to the Medigap Onelist designed for information sharing and mutual assistance among SSI and SSDI recipients plus other people with disabilities who are poor. The horrors they endure, just trying to get such essentials as orthopedic shoes, will either depress you or put you into a dangerous rage. In my opinion, more people in a dangerous rage is exactly what the med biz needs these days. If you think such a sentence doesn't belong in an essay devoted to spirituality, think "divine wrath" and all the term conjures until I discuss the folly of allowing evil to go unchecked in a later section.]

As for designer babies, I simply said "Ha! After science figures out how to factor in all the environmental variables as well as the genetic ones you STILL won't be able to predict how the product will turn out. Despite science's confident claims, heredity and environment are NOT the only controlling influences with which we must reckon." Perhaps most importantly, there are residues of previous lifetime experiences that are carried in the soul, not the DNA, and the soul lies beyond modern science's realm of competency. It can't observe there, it can't measure there, and consequently it can't predict there. It's a good thing I was responding in the privacy of my own home. If I'd been in the studio with the others--the one who believes in God and the one who couldn't say so no matter how politically preferable it might have been-I'll bet they would have despaired equally over such foolishness as a soul that incarnates repeatedly. What the modern science model can't study, its practitioners tend to declare nonexistent.

My answer to "Do you believe in God?" was immediate. "Sure! As long as I get to define what `God' means!" The Jewish God and the Christian God are two totally different Guys and Islam's God is not to be personified ever. And those three religions are supposed to exist along a single continuum of thought, sometimes referred to as the JCI line. The Gods of Hinduism, Buddhism, Paganism, esoteric branches of JCI religions, American Indians and other indigenous peoples all over the planet are different still. Without definitions, I have no idea what the government man believes or what the entrepreneur doesn't. Their answers gave zero information about that, but they may have given other kinds of clues. For example, I suspect the entrepreneur has an issue with integrity--a hang-up I greatly admire. The government man may have followed the lead of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and read Ken Wilber's book The Marriage of Sense and Soul (1998). Wilbur is considered by many to be today's foremost spokesman on the topic of reconciling science with spirituality. "Marriage" is his only attempt so far to carry his ideas beyond the community of philosophers of science to the general reading public.

I have no idea what kind of a picture Diane Sawyer had in her mind when she asked the men whether they believe in God. On a forced-choice test, I'd bet it came closer to the traditional CEO in the Sky image than to any of the definitions I've come up with since I started actually thinking about the stuff grownups told me when I was a kid. The one that occurred to me when she asked the question came straight out of a book on chaos theory. Roger Lewin (1992) and Stuart Kaufman (1995), for example refer to an inherent tendency of complex adaptive systems to attune themselves to a narrow band of viability that exists on the edge of chaos-between a degree of order that would freeze them, and a degree of chaos that would blow them apart. Naturally, this was not offered as a definition of God but simply as a major operating principle of complexity theory. But when I first read it, I had a veritable epiphany that "This is what we call `God'!" We sense, or, more accurately, intuit, that such as this is what gives us the opportunity for life and keeps us alive as long as it can ... and we end up worshipping it. And a law or principle of existence with such overarching applicability is truly awesome and worthy of worship and gratitude for those inclined. For me, it doesn't need to have a personality; although it's nice at times to personify it-just because it seems odd to be saying fervent "thank yous" to an abstraction.

Abstraction, and comfort with it, comprises a basic difference between western and eastern religions. I once heard Joseph Campbell say that the JCI religions, which originated in the Levant, were concrete, moral, and social; as compared with the religions arising in the Orient, which are abstract rather than concrete, metaphysical rather than moral, and psychological rather than social. The religions of the Levant were designed to hold nomadic peoples together and manage their behavior. They changed after people settled into less mobile agricultural lifestyles, but were not as different as new religions, designed afresh for settled people, might have been. The metaphysical/ psychological functions were largely separated from the religions and came to be "housed", as it were, in academic schools of philosophy. By contrast, the religions of the Orient tended to separate the moral/social precepts and house them in such non-religious philosophies as Confucianism.

I believe many westerners consider only the Levant religions as "religions" whereas the belief systems from the Orient seem more like "philosophies" when they lack someone to worship. I've referred to Buddhism as an "atheistic religion"-a term for it I did not invent-only to be greeted with guffaws and the expostulation "How can you have an atheistic religion? That makes no sense!" Resonating comparisons have been made between religion and spirituality, and between religious experience and religious doctrine. Regarding the first, I've heard versions from so many sources I have no idea to whom the idea should be officially attributed, but here it is. The purpose of religion is to inculcate in people certain precepts that will help to ensure that their behavior meets community moral standards. By contrast, the purpose of spiritual disciplines is to provide people with the guidance they need to reach into their own inner wisdom and arrive at their own best moral standards. As for the religious experience versus doctrine comparison, that was a Joseph Campbell bon mot. He defined religious doctrine as `a defense against religious experience.' If seeing visions of wheels within wheels or hearing the Lord of the Universe thunder in your ear is too scary for you, immerse yourself in doctrines, especially arguments about doctrines, and you'll never have to worry about having direct experiences of the Great Unknown ever again.

Before proceeding, I should return for a moment to Ken Wilber. His gift to the world is not originality, but an ability to synthesize the ideas of others, ancient and contemporary, and make startling sense of complex inter-relationships that still swarm in a cloud of confusion for most of us. He has demarcated several distinct stages of development that characterize humanity's individual, societal, and cultural evolutionary histories (Wilbe, 1996). These stages encompass everything that happens on planet earth, from the mental sets that determine how we interpret our experiences to the technological advancements that define cultural epochs. Of relevance here, he defines the early phase of a developmental stage as a time when about half of us are still operating at the level of the passing stage and about a quarter are still stuck at the stage before that. Only the leading-edge quarter has begun operating pretty consistently on the incoming level. Clearly, what we are talking about here is shifting paradigms. Next I'm going to cite several critical episodes that have pushed our collective consciousness toward a new developmental phase.

The context in which these critical episodes have happened is, in my opinion, the Gotterdammerung of the age of materialistic science. It took nearly 300 years for the working assumptions of the modern science model to be misunderstood as statements of fact by most of us, despite their imperviousness to verification. The model has been so enormously successful in its efforts to predict and control events on the physical plane and therefore to produce delightful technology that makes our lives easier, more fun, et cetera, that it has eclipsed just about everything else in existence. Most of us have come to believe that what you see is what you get. We may go to church on Sundays, but if we worry that abortion will kill the only chance an unborn child will ever get at life, then we don't really believe in the immortality of the soul. Our cultural obsessions with physical fitness and beauty and the accumulation of wealth make a clear statement. If the physical plane is all there is, get everything you can out of it. That's the present context. Now let's look back a few years.

We've had about 70 years to get used to the peculiar ideas forced on us by quantum physics. Hardly any of us understand them even yet, but we're getting used to them anyway. Comfort with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Schrodinger's simultaneously dead and living cat, and Jeans' cosmos that's more like a thought than a mechanism seem to have engendered increased comfort with "God" as an awesome set of abstract operating principles rather than a humanoid mythic image. I think this is largely responsible for the interest of western people in eastern religions which has been steadily growing since the 1930s and 1940s when writers like Christopher Isherwood, Somerset Maughm, and Aldous Huxley began to place eastern religious ideas before western readers. Needs for a "personal" God can be equally well met by them for quite a number of people--just as gravity can be experienced as very personal when your equilibrium is challenged. Perhaps because consciousness as a causal factor entered the thinking of physicists at about the time John B. Watson tried to eliminate it from psychology, modern physicists began identifying "spirit" with "consciousness" a bit sooner, by and large, than psychologists.

In 1945, three paradigm-rattling events took place. Everyone knows about two of them. They were both bombs, the ones we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was only 10 years old at the time but I got it right away that war was on its way out as a solution to differences of opinion. Barely five years later I was horrified to realize that no one else got it-we were already doing another war, which we called a "police action," in Korea. The third consciousness-altering event of 1945 was the discovery of ancient manuscripts (codices) that were hidden from sight for most of two millennia near Nag Hammadi (Robinson, 1981). Known as "the Gnostic Gospels," they reveal a very different early Christian belief system from that reflected in the scriptures selected by the founding church fathers as worthy of inclusion in the official canon. Theologian Elaine Pagels (1979) concluded that two fatal flaws rendered the suppressed texts unacceptable to the founding fathers. They either made explicit the assumption that we incarnate repeatedly; or they innocently referred to God as our "Mother" or "Mother/Father" as well as our "Father." Pagels observed that the first allows people to look forward to another chance--not nearly as effective a means of behavioral control as fear of eternal damnation. I doubt that anyone needs an explanation of the second flaw. In 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed near Qumram (Barnstone, 1984). These were hidden by the Essenes, a Jewish sect with beliefs quite similar to those of the Gnostic Christians. Both groups hid their scriptures for the same reason. There was no such idea as "freedom of religion" in those days; they wanted to go on living; and they wanted their belief systems to go on living too, even if they had to hope for someone in an unknown future to chance upon the written records. Thus, virtually concurrently, events happened that (should have) told us war has become obsolete, and the religion that's dominated the world for 1600 years was seriously tampered with at an early date.

I don't think that was pure coincidence. I think cosmic cycles of various forces pull certain kinds of events into swarms -- the stuff of which synchronicity is made. I suspect there may be intelligence behind these phenomena, with something like what we experience as intentions or purposes and maybe even an ability to know when creatures like us are ready for something. However smart they are, I am in awe of such intelligent spiraling/cycling forces and feel grateful for them--ecstatically so on rare occasions.

Development into a new stage is never easy or without its periods of backsliding. It's hard to say when the Vietnam war began, but the seeds had been sowed and watered within a decade after the Korean conflict was over. People in the "leading-edge" quarter of the population are usually misfits simply because their mindset is too far ahead of its time. The young males in this group burned their draft cards and ran off to Canada if they lacked the scholastic status or influential contacts needed to avoid the draft in ways used by contemporary politicians from both parties. Wilber's "fifty percent" group, good boys who did as they were told by societal elders whom they respected and sought to serve courageously, went to Vietnam--where many of them learned by horrible experience what the "new-paradigm" boys had immediately intuited. Now, after years of controversy and violence between the two contingents, society as a whole has withdrawn into the old, familiar mindset. We built the Vietnam Memorial which triggered demands for a Korean war memorial. Once that was built, the demands for a World War II memorial began. We forced Jane Fonda to apologize for insulting the boys who had only done as they were told. Most of us have repressed any inklings we once had that the draft dodgers might have been onto something. And lambasting political candidates who avoided the Vietnam draft continues to be a serviceable tool in electioneering.

Our attention was drawn away from the war--very briefly it seemed to me--in 1969 when we saw a movie with great power to change our perspectives and therefore our consciousness. It was a plotless flick of Earth rising over the moonscape. Except for disenchanted minorities who view anything claimed by government representatives as lies, we knew "we" had set foot on the moon. And we were different because of it, more different, I suspect, than our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were after hearing "what hath God wrought" on the radio.

Societal changes in knowledge and technology shift our personal paradigms whether we want them shifted or not, and whether we have a clue as to how they've changed after it's happened. I'm convinced that unlocking the secrets of DNA, the mapping of the human genome, is as critical as the other episodes I've mentioned here, as a consciousness-altering event. How much and how soon one is affected by it depends on which of Wilber's three developmental groups one is in. For the 50 percent whose consciousness is pretty much lodged in the outgoing paradigm--that of scientific materialism--it may depend on age. How many years do they have left to observe and experience and reinterpret and so forth? The 25 percent still stuck at the stage before that is just now falling into the thrall of scientism. Think of the Skeptics Society. Founded by solid 50-percent-group scientists, most members are intelligent people who do something else for a living, but they want to identify with scientists, to think of themselves as highly rigorous thinkers. They're not. They accept any debunking offered by Randi the Magician without worrying about the vested interest of a person who makes his living faking what others might be able to do for real. Using their standard logic, they would conclude that if an orgasm can be faked, then the genuine article doesn't exist--if they were equally driven to deny the reality of orgasms.

Do you think the juxtaposition in time of the new millennium and the unveiling of the biggest physical-plane mystery of all-the mechanism of our genetic inheritance-is plain coincidence? Forget all the quibbling about whether the new millennium starts in 2000 or 2001. Psychologically, which is what matters here, the change from writing 20 instead of 19 is the "biggie," even if the new millennium doesn't really start until 2059 ... or whatever date happens to jibe with your favorite exotic calendar. Of course you know by now that I don't think it's pure coincidence for one minute, but you probably don't know why.

I think the new millennium, roughly the first half of the age of aquarius, will be a time of individuals getting back in touch with their own interiors, their own subjective selves, which were ignored at best and denied at worst during the halcyon days of positivistic rational empiricism. Paul Foster Case, founder of a JudeoGraecoChristian mystery school, put it this way: "the Aquarian Age will supplant the pitifully inadequate "civilization" of the Piscean Age, with its fierce competitions, its fear-born wars, and its racial and national discrimination and hatred." Now, with the big physical-plane mystery solved, we can turn to other mysteries, such as those referred to by the esoteric "mystery schools" that prefer not to call themselves "churches." The mysteries of the non-physical, non-visible planes have been with us all along, influencing us while we steadfastly denied their existence, and influencing us in ways not attributable to either "heredity" or "environment."

Actually, we had better turn our attention to retrieving our inner wisdom if we want to survive what those still stuck in the modern science mindset might want to do with their new knowledge about genetics. I heard from someone who attended a recent conference on the mapping of the human genome that a single presentation on ethics was virtually unattended while sessions on profitable uses of the information had audiences spilling out into the halls. In an effort to get the ethics messages across to at least a few people, the session was piped into the closed circuit television in the lounge area. It was clicked off when someone shouted, "Turn that thing off. I can't hear the conversation!" Remember my earlier reference to the folly of allowing evil to go unchecked? To avoid this, we may want to keep our attention focused on developments here.

But in our free time we can go "inside" to study what modern science defined as "fringe" phenomena, such as intuition, near-death experiences, telepathy, clairvoyance, channeling, etc. The pre-modern tools for exploring consciousness--notably astrology, alchemy, Tarot, and Qabala--seem worthy of investigation too. They may have heretofore unacknowledged validity that accounts for their endurance and uncanny predictive ability despite three centuries of being dismissed as foolishness by true believers in the dominant paradigm. The investigations will include but will also transcend the methods of the modern science model. Once again, Ken Wilber can help clarify.

Wilber invented a diagram, a grid that encompasses virtually all of human experience. Its defining parameters are: the individual and the collective to which the individual belongs, and the objective and subjective viewpoints from which either may be observed. Wilber's grid displays the individual versus the collective as the upper and lower halves of the diagram; and shows the objective versus subjective viewpoints as the right- and left-hand halves. Thus this grid creates four quadrants of human experience to investigate. The individual-subjective quadrant contains our immediate experiences of our own consciousness. This quadrant must be studied using meditative-contemplative or introspective methods. The individual-objective quadrant is the realm of biology and behaviorism. In this quadrant someone else operationally defines an occult, hidden, or invisible variable (e.g., intelligence) and makes inferences about what goes on inside us by observing solely from the outside. The collective-objective quadrant contains the societal artifacts, technological and institutional, that can be seen and measured by "objective" observers. These two objective quadrants are the natural home of the modern science model. Finally, the collective-subjective quadrant contains the shared cultural values, beliefs, etc. that must be measured by talking with research subjects and interpreting what is said. The two subjective quadrants have been excused from scientific consideration by a model that couldn't access them. Recent forays into "qualitative" research are an early effort to resuscitate interest in the subjective-collective quadrant and develop workable methods. Wilber believes science can work just as effectively in the individual-subjective quadrant, which has been left to the church since the great turf divide in the 17th century. He sees contemplative research as no different from empirical research in one very important sense. Only highly trained observers can do either kind of investigation. Members of each group can talk only with similarly-trained colleagues about their observations because others lack the requisite knowledge and experience to understand language that is necessarily arcane, and thence, to grasp what is being reported. Most to the point, skilled contemplatives can replicate each other's findings as reliably as can empirical scientists if they carefully follow the injunctions spelled out in their methods manuals or oral teachings.

[One thing, Wilber didn't realize is that he had re-invented the wheel of the Zodiac, giving scientifically acceptable new names to the four quadrants of the astrology chart, which is created by the same two defining parameters. That's good, by the way, because no one would have paid any attention to him if he had used the tainted names. It's only by chance that a modern-science trained psychologist interested in detecting incipient theoretical structures inherent in ancient to medieval psycho-spiritual doctrines received tutoring from an astrologer with a compatible bent. Every astrologer knows about the "self" versus "others" dichotomy, but most of them, and most books about astrology, ignore the lateral subjective-objective distinction. My tutor discussed this dichotomy as a basic feature of the chart, but when asked for a reference, she had to look long and hard to find one (out of print) book in which it was mentioned (Moore and Douglas, 1971). I saw this as one of many reasons why astrology deserves part of its bad reputation. I hate it when stewards of ancient wisdom attend more closely to elements that entice customers than those that enthuse theoreticians.]

I truly believe that the rampant materialism we see all around us right now reflects the last-ditch death clutches of a passing developmental stage. I predict that we will be noticeably more concerned with the subjective half of life--the development of our inner beings, not just our bodies and economic comfort--within a mere 20 years. But I have questions about what is going to happen as a result of the successful mapping of the human genome. Are we going to engineer disabling illnesses out of existence? I don't think so. Readers familiar with my philosophy know that I think I chose my disability before I came into this life for distinct experiential learning purposes. Since it has taught me to develop trust, patience, tolerance for dependency and frustration, laser-like attention, and clear, sharp memory images, I have to wonder if such were among my soul's intentions. If vulnerability to poliovirus had been engineered out of existence, would I have experienced a spinal cord injury--yielding paralysis plus disrupted sensory and autonomic functioning--to accomplish them? Has anyone else noticed that the medical advances enabling spinal-cord-injured people to live and the (near-) elimination of polio happened within a few years of each other? Does that tickle anyone else's cosmic curiosity?

If, as I think, disability is one of the many less-than-welcomed mechanisms made available to us for experiencing what we need to in our various incarnations--as we advance, lifetime by lifetime, toward ever-greater consciousness--I really don't think the disability rate will plummet here on planet Earth. I think it will just change in character. We might end up wishing we had our familiar old genetic disabilities back again. And we might wish we had put more emphasis on learning to support each other through our instructive adversities, rather than trying vainly to eliminate them.

References

Barnstone, Willis, 1984, The Other Bible. Harper Collins: New York.

Kaufmann, Stuart, 1995, At Home in the Universe. Oxford: New York.

Lewin, Roger, 1992, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. Collier/MacMilliam: New York.

Moore, Marcia and Douglas, Mark, 1971, Astrology, The Divine Science. Arcane: York Harbor.

Pagels, Elaine, 1979, The Gnostic Gospels. Random House: New York.

Robinson, James, ed., 1981, The Nag Hammadi Library. Harper and Row: San Francisco.

Wilber, Ken, 1996, A Brief History of Everything. Shambala: Boston.

Wilber, Ken, 1998, The Marriage of Sense and Soul. Random House: New York.

Suggested Readings

The Joseph Campbell and Paul Foster Case citations came from lectures that are not commercially available in print or on tape. In lieu of references then, I suggest that readers examine the following books.

Campbell, Joseph, 1986, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. Alfred Van Der Marck: New York.

This little book is Campbell's "swan song" volume, containing his most progressed ideas.

Case, Paul Foster, 1985, The True and Invisible Rosicrucian Order. Weiser: York Beach.

This will be a tough read for people without some background in the language used by western mystery schools. I suggest reading past unfamiliar terms in hopes of capturing a general sense of the way of thinking. Anyone who actively resists esoteric (psychospiritual) interpretations of material that is typically interpreted in exoteric (social/historical) ways should just skip this volume.

Carolyn L. Vash, Ph.D., 35 East Las Flores Drive, Altadena, CA 91001-4835. Email: [e-mail]