The Mystery of Anesthesia and Disease

Why is it that there are substances we can take, that change the way we feel, or organisms in the world that can for all intents and purposes change who we are?

Today I scrubbed a virus off a workstation, that had interrupted DNS services on the machine. It was an "enhancement" to the browser that an end user had installed. So, if you think of the body as like a kind of program executing code, virus code re-writes part of it, running within the body in a similiar, parasitic manner to virus code on workstations. It was really interesting that the uninstall for this virus was on another machine. If our lives are like loops, this is kind of like saying to get over someone you would need to rebound first. Which is, in other words, a way of saying that the virus is set up not to be removed. Any software you want to get rid of, that will let you get rid of it - will have an uninstall. Its easier to develop and test. Like people you think are fake, alarm systems go off when something that should be easy to do sounds too complicated - and you start evolving. Evolution is an ongoing process at all levels.

Alcohol gives you a euphoric high because you're starving the brain of oxy level and its just a form of dizziness, really. The key thing to partying isn't that you can get some substance to make you feel different, but rather that there are people who can use the substances as a placebo effect for expressing their personalities, attitudes and play patterns that would induce euphoria.

So I guess what I'm driving at is that disease seems to exist as a function of the work viruses and bacteria can do on us, but isn't it like alcohol to some extent - ? We seem to be willing to let our guard down every now and then. If I was a teetotaller I really wouldn't be able to write or understand what is going on; by that token, if we were completely antiseptic - wouldn't we have a harder time to mutate + have less defense systems in place? I remember.. or half remember.. drinking an entire half bottle of rum straight. It was an experience. I was 15. And the world beneath my feet was a two year old pitching a temper tantrum.

Suppose there was a change in my blood - let's say my blood didn't flow right. Then - by only either what I can metabolize now, or by some kind of artifically induced state - the chemicals that keep my blood flowing, would either remain in homeostasis, or they would change. This covers my bases. You know, when you're writing to be careful about what you're saying, you try to exhaust all possible alternatives. - So looking to the epigenome, you would find a sense within me for a defense or a blood chem alteration that lets me adapt and react. The new chemical state is kind of an induced state of being. And it may be one that relies on reagents in the outside world - to catalyze that state of being.

Now, we don't actually voluntarily take in virus' as part of our day to day routine, but they get to us. With alcohol - heroin, coke, acid, 3,4 Methyldimethamphetime, or lebanese blond hashish/ it may be voluntarily (except maybe rohypnol) and an induced state of being. Some people will say "Wow, that lebanese blond hash we just smoked did nothing but give me a headache". Then, as I am sure you know, there are others who after smoking the same amount, will hop on top of a volkswagen and surf it down the street.

Jim Morrison once was in a hotel room, getting high with his friends. He turned to them and said he was going to kill himself. So he walked over to the window and jumped out. His friends freaked. They went to the window and found him holding onto the sill with his fingers. Laughing at them.

The receptors are already there. Jim Morrison had to have clarity to be able to turn midair, and catch the edge of the sill. Candace Pert did a lot of the early work on this. She's written an article called "the physics of emotion". In the end, it will all turn to math eventually. Its ok. It doesn't mean we're cold, it just means that you can come home and things still work the same as they did when you were out there. Physicists are just people who find that every other way of understanding the entire universe is too complicated for them.

I guess maybe the reason why we let this kind of stuff go on, with anesthesia and also letting our dna get cut up during virus attacks (we could stop it, but we don't - thats why there are so many sequences in our dna that seemingly do nothing.. the virus' cut and splice them into place..)... is that maybe even our own chessgame with death itself, isn't really a zero sum game.

I think intutively we know that life isn't a zero sum game. That it doesn't end completely , with death. We glimpse the forever, sometimes. Other times, we just dance. Either way its still fun to realize that part of the mystery of why parties and , yes disease - really affects us , is because we're living life just a little bit incomplete and there are things the outside world can still do to us.

Not always obvious. Sometimes its kind of like a horse rearing up on its hind legs and throwing its hoof down in your pocket. It pays to be able to keep your head, when things are going crazy.