by Jeremy Narby
Quartz is a crystal, which means it has an extremely regular arrangement of atoms that vibrate at a very stable frequency. These characteristics make it an excellent receptor and emitter of electromagnetic waves, which is why quartz is abundantly used in radios, watches, and most electronic technologies.
Quartz crystals are also used in shamanism around the world. As Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff writes: “Quartz crystals, or translucent rock crystals, have played a major role in shamanic beliefs and practices at many times in history and in many parts of the world. They have frequently been found in prehistoric contexts; they are mentioned in many early sources; they were prominent in Old World alchemy, witchcraft, and magic, and they are still in use in many traditional societies. American Indian shamans and healers use rock crystals for curing, scrying, and many other purposes, and their ancient use in the Americas is known from archaeological reports.”31
Amazonian shamans, in particular, consider that spirits can materialize and become visible in quartz crystals. Some sheripiári even feed tobacco juice to their stones daily.32
What if these spirits were none other than the biophotons emitted by all the cells of the world and were picked up, amplified, and transmitted by shamans’ quartz crystals, Gurvich’s quartz screens, and the quartz containers of biophoton researchers? This would mean that spirits are beings of pure light—as has always been claimed.
DNA IS ALSO A CRYSTAL, as molecular biologist Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii explains: “The base pairs in it are arranged as in a crystal. This is, however, a linear, one-dimensional crystal, with each base pair flanked by only two neighbors. The DNA crystal is aperiodic, since the sequence of base pairs is as irregular as the sequence of letters in a coherent printed text.... Thus, it came as no surprise that the one-dimensional DNA crystal, a crystal of an entirely new type, had very much intrigued physicists.”33
The four DNA bases are hexagonal (like quartz crystals), but they each have a slightly different shape.34 As they stack up on top of each other, forming the rungs of the twisted ladder, they line up in the order dictated by the genetic text. Therefore, the DNA double helix has a slightly irregular, or aperiodic, structure. However, this is not the case for the repeat sequences that make up a full third of the genome, such as ACACACACACACAC. In these sequences, DNA becomes a regular arrangement of atoms, a periodic crystal—which could, by analogy with quartz, pick up as many photons as it emits. The variation in the length of the repeat sequences (some of which contain up to 300 bases) would help pick up different frequencies and could thereby constitute a possible and new function for a part of “junk” DNA.35
I suggest this because my hypothesis requires a receptor as much as an emitter. For the moment, the reception of biophotons has not been studied.36
Even DNA’s emission of photons remains mysterious, and no one has been able to establish its mechanism directly. Naked DNA, extracted from the cell’s nucleus, emits photons so weakly as to escape measurement.37
Despite these uncertainties, I wish to develop my hypothesis further by proposing the following idea: What if DNA, stimulated by nicotine or dimethyltryptamine, activates not only its emission of photons (which inundate our consciousness in the form of hallucinations), but also its capacity to pick up the photons emitted by the global network of DNA-based life? This would mean that the biosphere itself, which can be considered “as a more or less fully interlinked unit,”38 is the source of the images.
Chapter 10
BIOLOGY’S BLIND SPOT
I began my investigation with the enigma of “plant communication.” I went on to accept the idea that hallucinations could be a source of verifiable information. And I ended up with a hypothesis suggesting that a human mind can communicate in defocalized consciousness with the global network of DNA-based life. All this contradicts principles of Western knowledge.
Nevertheless, my hypothesis is testable. A test would consist of seeing whether institutionally respected biologists could find biomolecular information in the hallucinatory world of ayahuasqueros. However, this hypothesis is currently not receivable by institutional biology, because it impinges on the discipline’s presuppositions.
Biology has a blind spot of historical origin.
MY HYPOTHESIS SUGGESTS that what scientists call DNA corresponds to the animate essences that shamans say communicate with them and animate all life forms. Modern biology, however, is founded on the notion that nature is not animated by an intelligence and therefore cannot communicate.
This presupposition comes from the materialist tradition established by the naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In those days, it took courage to question the explanations about life afforded by a literal reading of the Bible. By adopting a scientific method based on direct observation and the classification of species, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace audaciously concluded that the different species had evolved over time—and had not been created in fixed form six thousand years previously in the Garden of Eden.
Wallace and Darwin simultaneously proposed a material mechanism to explain the evolution of species. According to their theory of natural selection, organisms presented slight variations from one generation to the next, which were either retained or eliminated in the struggle for survival. This idea rested on a circular argument: Those who survive are the most able to survive. But it seemed to explain both the variation of species and the astonishing perfection of the natural world, as it retained only the improvements. Above all, it took God out of the picture and enabled biologists to study nature without having to worry about a divine plan within.
For almost a century, the theory of natural selection was contested. Vitalists, like Bergson, rejected its stubborn materialism, pointing out that it lacked a mechanism to explain the origin of the variations. It wasn’t until the 1950s and the discovery of the role of DNA that the theory of natural selection became generally accepted among scientists. The DNA molecule seemed to demonstrate the materiality of heredity and to provide the missing mechanism. As DNA is self-duplicating and transmits its information to proteins, biologists concluded that information could not flow back from proteins to DNA; therefore, genetic variation could only come from errors in the duplication process. Francis Crick termed this the “central dogma” of the young discipline called molecular biology. “Chance is the only true source of novelty,” he wrote.1
The discovery of DNA’s role and the formulation in molecular terms of the theory of natural selection gave a new impetus to materialist philosophy. It became possible to contend on a scientific basis that life was a purely material phenomenon. Francis Crick wrote: “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry” (original italics). François Jacob, another Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, wrote: “The processes which occur in living beings at the microscopic level of molecules are in no way different from those analyzed by physics and chemistry in inert systems.”2
The materialist approach in molecular biology went from strength to strength—but it rested on the unprovable presupposition that chance is the only source of novelty in nature, and that nature is devoid of any goal, intention, or consciousness. Jacques Monod, also a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, expressed this idea clearly in his famous essay Chance and necessity: “The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be reached by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes—that is to say, of ‘purpose’. ... This pure postulate is impossible to demonstrate, for it is obviously impossible to imagine an experiment proving the nonexistence anywhere in nature of a purpose, or a pursued end. But the postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science, and has guided the whole of its prodigious development for three centuries. It is impossible to escape it, even provisionally or in a limited area, without departing from the domain of science itself”3 (original italics).
Bi
ologists thought they had found the truth, and they did not hesitate to call it “dogma.” Strangely, their newfound conviction was hardly troubled by the discovery in the 1960s of a genetic code that is the same for all living beings and that bears striking similarities to human coding systems, or languages. To transmit information, the genetic code uses elements (A, G, C, and T) that are meaningless individually, but that form units of significance when combined, in the same way that letters make up words. The genetic code contains 64 three-letter “words,” all of which have meaning, including two punctuation marks.
As linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out, such coding systems were considered up until the discovery of the genetic code as “exclusively human phenomena”4—that is, phenomena that require the presence of an intelligence to exist.
WHEN I STARTED READING the literature of molecular biology, I was stunned by certain descriptions. Admittedly, I was on the lookout for anything unusual, as my investigation had led me to consider that DNA and its cellular machinery truly were an extremely sophisticated technology of cosmic origin. But as I pored over thousands of pages of biological texts, I discovered a world of science fiction that seemed to confirm my hypothesis. Proteins and enzymes were described as “miniature robots,” ribosomes were “molecular computers,” cells were “factories,” DNA itself was a “text,” a “program,” a “language,” or “data.” One only had to do a literal reading of contemporary biology to reach shattering conclusions; yet most authors display a total lack of astonishment and seem to consider that life is merely “a normal physicochemical phenomenon.”5
One of the facts that troubled me most was the astronomical length of the DNA contained in a human body: 125 billion miles. There, I thought, is the Ashaninca’s sky-rope: It is inside us and is certainly long enough to connect earth and heaven. What did biologists make of this cosmic number? Most of them did not even mention it, and those who did talked of a “useless but amusing fact.”
I was also troubled by the certitude exhibited by most biologists in the face of the profoundly mysterious reality they were describing. After all, the spectacular accomplishments of molecular biology during the second half of the twentieth century had led to more questions than answers. This is an old problem: Knowledge calls for more knowledge, or, as Jean Piaget wrote, “The most developed science remains a continual becoming.”6 Yet few biological texts discuss the unknown.
Take proteins, for instance. These long chains of amino acids, strung together in the order specified by DNA, accomplish almost all the essential tasks in cells. They catch molecules and build them into cellular structures or take them apart to extract their energy. They carry atoms to precise places inside or outside the cell. They act as pumps or motors. They form receptors that trap highly specific molecules or antennae that conduct electrical charges. Like versatile marionettes, or jacks-of-all-trades, they twist, fold, and stretch into the shape their task requires. What is known, precisely, about these “self-assembling machines”? According to Alwyn Scott, a mathematician with an interest in molecular biology: “Biologists’ understanding of how proteins function is a lot like your and my understanding of how a car works. We know you put in gas, and the gas is burned to make things turn, but the details are all pretty vague.”7
Enzymes are large proteins that accelerate cellular activities. They act with disarming speed and selectivity. One enzyme in human blood, carbonic anhydrase, can assemble single-handedly over a half million molecules of carbonic acid per second. The enzymes which both repair the double helix in case of damage and correct any errors in the DNA replication process make only one mistake every ten billion letters. Enzymes read the DNA text, transcribe it into RNA, edit out the non-coding passages, splice together the final message, construct the machines that read the instructions and build . . . other enzymes. What is known, precisely, about these “molecular automata”? According to biologists Chris Calladine and Horace Drew: “These enzymes are extremely efficient in doing their job, yet no one knows exactly how they work.”8
Shamans say the correct way to talk about spirits is in metaphors. Biologists confirm this notion by using a precise array of anthropocentric and technological metaphors to describe DNA, proteins, and enzymes. DNA is a text, or a program, or data, containing information, which is read and transcribed into messenger -RNAs. The latter feed into ribosomes, which are molecular computers that translate the instructions according to the genetic code. They build the rest of the cell’s machinery, namely the proteins and enzymes, which are miniaturized robots that construct and maintain the cell.
Over the course of my readings, I constantly wondered how nature could be devoid of intention if it truly corresponded to the descriptions biologists made of it.
One only had to consider the “dance of the chromosomes” to see DNA move in a deliberate way. During cell division, chromosomes double themselves and assemble by pairs. The two sets of chromosomes then line up along the middle of the cell and migrate toward their respective pole, each member of each pair always going in the direction opposite to its companion’s. How could this “amazing, stately pavane”9 occur without some form of intention?
In biology, this question is simply not asked. DNA is “just a chemical,”10 deoxyribonucleic acid, to be precise. Biologists describe it as both a molecule and a language, making it the informational substance of life, but they do not consider it to be conscious, or alive, because chemicals are inert by definition.
How, I wondered, could biology presuppose that DNA is not conscious, if it does not even understand the human brain, which is the seat of our own consciousness and which is built according to the instructions in our DNA? How could nature not be conscious if our own consciousness is produced by nature?11
As I patrolled the texts of biology, I discovered that the natural world was teeming with examples of behaviors that seem to require forethought. Some crows manufacture tools with standardized hooks and toothed probes to help in their search for insects hidden in holes. Some chimpanzees, when infected with intestinal parasites, eat bitter, foul-tasting plants, which they otherwise avoid and which contain biologically active compounds that kill intestinal parasites. Some species of ants, with brains the size of a grain of sugar, raise herds of aphids which they milk for their sweet secretions and which they keep in barns. Other ants have been cultivating mushrooms as their exclusive food for fifty million years.12 It is difficult to understand how these insects could do this without a form of consciousness. Yet scientific observers deny them this faculty, like Jacques Monod, who considers the behavior of bees to be “automatic”: “We know the hive is ‘artificial’ in so far as it represents the product of the activity of the bees. But we have good reasons for thinking that this activity is strictly automatic—immediate, but not consciously planned.”13
Indeed, the “postulate of objectivity” prevents its practitioners from recognizing any intentionality in nature or, rather, it nullifies their claim to science if they do so.
DURING THIS INVESTIGATION, I became familiar with certain limits of the rational gaze: It tends to fragment reality and to exclude complementarity and the association of contraries from its field of vision. I also discovered one of its more pernicious effects: The rational approach tends to minimize what it does not understand.
Anthropology is an ideal training ground for learning this. The first anthropologists went out beyond the limits of the rational world and saw primitives and inferior societies. When they met shamans, they thought they were mentally ill.
The rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.
The molecular biology that considers that 97 percent of the DNA in our body is “junk” reveals not only its degree of ignorance, but the extent to which it is prepared to belittle the unknown. Some recent hypotheses suggest that “junk DNA” might have certain
functions after all.14 But this does not hide the pejorative reflex: We don’t understand, so we shoot first, then ask questions. This is cowboy science, and it is not as objective as it claims. Neutrality, or simple honesty, would have consisted in saying “for the moment, we do not know.” It would have been just as easy to call it mystery DNA, for instance.
The problem is not having presuppositions, but failing to make them explicit. If biology said about the intentionality that nature seems to manifest at all levels, “we see it sometimes, but cannot discuss it without ceasing to do science according to our own criteria,” things would at least be clear. But biology tends to project its presuppositions onto the reality it observes, claiming that nature itself is devoid of intention.
This is perhaps one of the most important things I learned during this investigation: We see what we believe, and not just the contrary; and to change what we see, it is sometimes necessary to change what we believe.
AT FIRST I THOUGHT I was the only one to realize that biology had limits similar to those of scientific anthropology and that it, too, was a “self-flattering imposture,” which treats the living as if it were inert. Then I discovered that there were all sorts of people within the scientific community who were already discussing biology’s fundamental contradictions.
During the 1980s, it became possible to determine the exact sequence of amino acids in given proteins. This revealed a new level of complexity in living beings. A single nicotinic receptor, forming a highly specific lock coupled to an equally selective channel, is made of five juxtaposed protein chains that contain a total of 2,500 amino acids lined up in the right order. Despite the improbability of the chance emergence of such a structure, even nematodes, which are among the most simple multicellular invertebrates, have nicotinic receptors.15
