Today’s article in the Los Angeles Times about how many microorganisms call our bodies their home (100 trillion!) shows us yet another way we’re interconnected with the rest of our environment. I already knew that colonies of flora do much of my digestion for me, but this research shows that bacteria, viruses, yeasts and amoebas do so much more for us that they’re calling them a “second genome”.
In Zen we like to use the word “intimate” to describe how closely connected we are with the rest of our world, but this new research makes even that word seem inadequate. Maybe a techie word like “interleaved” would be better. Ultimately we might have to use a word like “indistinguishable” – when we’re suffused with so many beings, how can you say where “you” begin and “outside you” ends? We think of each bacterium as a separate creature, but it can’t live without us and we can’t live without it. The article says it’s difficult to grow many of these organisms outside a human body, so while they move around on their own volition, there isn’t far they can go. Ultimately they’re as much a part of your body as your eyes and ears.
We like to think there is a “me” in charge. A ghost in the machine. Now we see the boundaries between inside and outside that machine dissolving away, that up to 6 pounds worth of that machine is composed of living microbes all working together with “our own” tissues and organs to make up what we like to call our body. It’s actually a community. So then, what about the “ghost” driving the machine? How solid are its boundaries? Is it also a community like the body?
Zen Mindfulness 
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