Superhumans are really coming - unpacking 'Junk' DNA

 Superhumans are really coming. Remember where you read this first.

Like pieces of a jigsaw, advances in the understanding of the human genome, chronicled in two recent books: The Gene and Junk DNA are rapidly giving a clearer picture of how illness and aging can be tracked back to genetic malfunctioning.

This does tend to suggest that if the malfunctioning was not there, then illness and aging need not be the inevitable facts of life that we currently assume them to be.

Although, the likes of CRISPR gene-editing would suggest that it will be as a result of break-throughs in medical technologies that will move us along the path to an illness-free youthful old-age, what has been discounted is the evolutionary free-pass to such a state that Nature herself may be trying to hand out.

In his book, the Gene, Siddhartha Mukerjee, using his own family history as a framing device, traces the development of the science of genetics ; touching along the way , ideas about the perfectibility of human beings that surfaced in Eugenics, a field permanently tainted by it's many negative associations.

Nessa Carey, in her book, Junk DNA looks at the DNA that make up our genes. She shows that human biological complexity is not down to the superior number of genes that we have compared to lower animals, since we share roughly the same number of genes as them. But rather our difference rests on the much higher percentage of DNA in our genes  that apparently do no useful work, compared to the DNA which code for protein and are thus the building blocks of our bodies. The ratio is 98%: 2% . That 98% is what is to referred to as 'Junk' DNA.

Professor Carey then goes on to explain how this non-coding Junk DNA in fact has a regulatory function ; telomeres being one example. The function of telomeres has been implicated in cell senescence and therefore has a direct connection to the human aging process.

So from these two books we get the possibility of the perfectibility of human beings via the genes and that the place from which this is likely to come is the 'dark matter' of our genes, the junk DNA.

If Nature built us with a certain biological potential, visible within the genes, then, like the process of fetal development or the development of a rose bud into a rose , Nature must have a device in situ for realising that potential. No human  intervention required.

That in situ device, knowledge of which has been gained from the pursuit of a science of another sort, is called the kundalini.

The sanskrit meaning of kundalini is 'a coil' , which by association with 'snake' is suggestive of a potential energy that can convert into a kinetic force.

The kundalini is said to reside at the base of the spine in the sacrum* (latin for 'sacred') in three and a half coils - a detail carrying some mathematical significance.

When 'She' ('kundalini' is a feminine noun in sanskrit) is 'awakened', in a manner similar to the spontaneous germination of a seed, She travels up a central channel corresponding to the spinal column and 'pierces' the bone at the top of the skull, through the fontanelle* (latin for 'little fountain').
 
The feeling a lot of people immediately get when this happens is of a cool breeze (pnuema ) above the head - a kind of subtle 'baptism'.

That this process is linked to curing, health, wellness and rejuvenation is hinted at (or hidden in plain view) in the familiar symbol on the side of medical emergency vehicles or ambulances in some countries. That symbol is the Rod of Asclepius (Greek god of healing and medicine) showing a snake entwined on a rod:

Published medical research on Sahaja Yoga Meditation, which is based on kundalini awakening, shows it's positive effect on:

• Depression
• ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)
• Drug addiction
• Epilepsy
• Asthma
• Menopause
• Anxiety

 And this could be just the beginning of the noticeable effects of  kundalini.
 
Here are two quotes from two separate texts in the yoga tradition that refer to the anti-aging and rejuvenating effect of kundalini . The first is about 400 years old and the second could be over a thousand years old.

"..fragrance in the Prana enters the central (Sushumna) nerve along with the Kundalini. Then the spiritual nectar situated at the crown of the head spills into the mouth of the Kundalini and then gets absorbed throughout the body including the ten Pranas. (6:246-248).

Body gets rejuvenated The skin which covers the lustre of this nectar and is brightened by it is shed and all the organs show their bright aura. (6:250, 252-253). Now even Death is afraid of it (the body) and the aging process gets reversed and the yogi gets back his bygone childhood and he looks like a boy."

- Gyaneshwar

* 106 * Sudha sarabhi varshini - She who makes nectar flow in all our nerves from sahasrara i.e. she who gives the very pleasant experience of the ultimate

* 745 * Jaradwanthara viprabha - She who is the suns rays that swallows the darkness of old age

- Shri Lalita Sahasranama

So since aging and illness are in the genes , the kundalini appears to be using the Junk DNA as her box of tricks to pull out hitherto unknown human potential and capability.

The following is an excerpt of the transcription of an audio recording from January 30th 1982, where the founder of sahaja yoga, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi(1923 - 2011) was live translating a 2000 year old sanskrit text about the future of humanity. 


"...that will be the state of human beings. Their old age will disappear, their body will remain as it is and they will have a body which is divine. What a promise! So don’t worry too much about your bodily comforts. All right? Then maybe some of you, if you want, you can fly in the air also, with that, with that body. Also they can become subtle and can enter into the body(of others to cure them)"

It's time to unpack that Junk DNA.
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 In his wonderfully ambitious book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, geneticist, Adam Rutherford, in dismissing a future possibility of human unaided flight, says:....click here to read 'I Believe I Can Fly'

   * See Gray's Anatomy





 

The 100-Year Life.

If the prospect of hang-gliding in your 60s, dating in your 70s or acing a term paper in your 80s, grabs you, then there's some solid academic backing for the idea in the form of a recent book, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, by Lynda Gratton (co-author: Andrew Scott), Professor of Management Practice at London Business School.

Citing evidence that we are not only living longer but also remaining in better health as we do so, Professor Gratton goes on to argue that as a result of this youthful old-age, we, as a society, need to rethink our 3-stage life playbook of  education-work-retirement.

That may be the difficult part. Life is so fast-paced and everything has become so short-termism that it's the rare individual who manages to live their life based on a 5-year plan, never mind a 10, 20 or 30-year one. We live as chance and opportunity dictate.

Inevitably, then the only real actionable ideas offered in this thesis is around the familiar subject of financial planning. Think Pensions. Mckinsey carry an interview with Professor Gratton about her book here.

Ultimately, perhaps, the books main success may be in lending legitimacy to two current fringe  debates(depending on where you stand).

The first is anti-aging and the possibility of real biological youthful old age, suggested by the work of people such as Aubrey de Grey, who is mentioned in the book. The second is the possibility of a peaceful and adaptive change to the social order. An example being the advocacy for a Universal Basic Income - not mentioned in the book (See the result of the  recent Swiss referendum on UBI - Wall Street Journal 05 June 2016).


All this goes to show that, given a sufficient passage of time and accumulation of collective experience, even the most initially laughably farfetched ideas gain acceptance. This has been particularly noted in the realm of the advancement of scientific knowledge.

In an NIH published essay entitled: "Paths to acceptance. The advancement of scientific knowledge is an uphill struggle against 'accepted wisdom' " , author, Howard Wolinsky notes:

Unfortunately, scientists do not always follow a path of pure logic, as the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) once observed, “[a] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

That this holds true outside of science is shown by even the journey of the idea of UBI. In a recent FT article, Money for Nothing, the origin of the concept of a basic income is traced to 15th century Humanist Scholar , Thomas More. And the title of his book? Utopia: a word that has come to carry a ring of ridicule about it.

Thomas More could have just as well described his idea of a perfect social order using any of the dictionary synonyms for Utopia, such as 'Shangri-La' , 'Nirvana', 'Heaven on Earth'. But by the measure of his 7th century South Indian antecedent, Shri Kaka Bhujandar, who had ideas along similar lines, Thomas More's version would have been lacking in both conviction and visionary imagination. Why?

Whereas Thomas More confined his fantasy to a social, political and legal restructuring and couldn't have believed it would come true, Kaka Bhujandar makes the biological potential of human beings central to his projection into an ideal social structure (envision Aubrey de Grey championing UBI). And, as a practioner of a reputedly highly accurate form of ancient Indian astrology, believed it would come true.

Here's a translation, including some commentary (by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi) of part of the writing of Kaka Bhujandar on an end to illness and old age and the coming about of  an ideal society:

"Then all your diseases will disappear so fast with this Yoga that you won’t need anything like a hospital. In the beginning, these great yogis, you people also, only by touching people, you can cure people. It’s a fact. Like the Ardhanari Nateshwara is the Shiva that will be the state of human beings. Their old age will disappear, their body will remain as it is and they will have a body which is divine. What a promise! So don’t worry too much about your bodily comforts. All right?"

“In the new Yoga system, when it will manifest in the different countries, in the new age, the administration will be governed by people who have their own powers of Yoga. Depending on how far you are in your Yoga, and their qualities as Yogis, that will be the determining fact. They will be able to create a society, which will completely fulfill their desires and their necessities and people won’t need to have money accumulated with them. The poverty and sickness will be completely finished and in their absence the country, the samada, the society will be healthy and restful and without any anger."

 (The extended 20 minute 1982 audio recording of this live translation is here )

Reasons for anchoring these predictions in the present times are based on a short extrapolation of current trends such as UBI, technological-enablement(Robotics & AI), anti-aging & longevity, meditation/mindfulness, sahaja yoga and China geo-politics. Yes, China. Apparently the bright sunshine of a happy human future may be temporarily obscured by China geo-politics and one can't help but cast the mind to present territorial disputes in The South China Sea which are simmering away in the background at the moment but could burst on to centre stage. Let's hope not.

A few explanations of terms may make the above excerpted passage clearer.

The term 'Yoga' does not refer to the physical exercises commonly associated with the word yoga. It refers to a changed state of human awareness ie an evolutionary refinement of CNS (human central nervous system).

The clue to this is to be found in the original source book of yoga, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, wherein, yoga is definitively described thus:

योग: चित्त-वृत्ति निरोध:
yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ

— Yoga Sutras 1.2

That is : ' The cessation of the flactuations of the mind generated by thinking activity is yoga'.

In Sahaja Yoga, this non-thinking awareness comes about by the spontaneous working of an innate but initially dormant energy of kundalini. This energy is understood to reside at the base of the human spine in the sacrum and emerges, on awakening, at the fontanelle at the crown of the head.

The reference to 'new Yoga system' indicates a prior version that perhaps may not have been fit for mass evolutionary purpose. And indeed in the secretive, historical practice of kundalini yoga it was just a few people who were able to achieve it's goal. Two notables were , Dnyeshwar , a Marathi mystic poet and  Baba Shri Chanda, the son of the founder of sikhism. ( See letter to Atul Gawande : The Future of Aging - prevention, reversal and palliative care).

Sahaja Yoga, on the other hand, could be an example of Nature doing a massive-scale parallel processing computing problem in evolutionary terms to scale-up a local solution (unique incidences of realisation of kundalini potential ) to global level ie en-masse kundalini awakening. (See: Cool Breeze above the head ).

"Ardhanari Nateshwara is the Shiva" refers to the iconic representation of the idealised individual having perfect balance and integration  of the gentle (feminine) and strong (male) characteristics also represented in the symbol of yin-yang.

"Then all your diseases will disappear so fast with this Yoga that you won’t need anything like a hospital" ( See Sahaja Yoga medical research: here )

Reclaim your attention and discover yourself.

Have you ever tried to view a full-body reflection of yourself in a shattered mirror? The answer is likely to be no for most people. However, we're all doing the equivalent of this daily with our attention. Perhaps, the most under-rated and frittered away of our mental assets.

Imagine your unsullied human attention as a clear and polished mirror. Then take a hammer to it and smash it. You then  have some semblance of  what has happened and continues to happen to the mass of human attention as we try to stay on top of an increasingly fast-paced and technology-driven daily existence.

If our sense of self ( full-body reflection) is intimately bound up with our attention, then there could be a population-wide epidemic of sub-clinical identity crises, as we increasingly find that the  freedom of directing our attention is usurped by the artificial exigencies of keeping up with all that's happening around us.  

This is the theme of the book by Matthew Crawford, a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, The World Beyond Your Head.

However, while Matthew Crawford focuses on the problem as a socio-cultural one and therefore likely intractable; except at perhaps the level of the individual; from the point of  view of sahaja yoga the shattered attention is an evolutionary epiphenomenon and has a mass solution.

The solution is this.

The shattered attention is epiphenomenol because it is secondary effect of a deeper malaise. A malaise that has increased the incidence of stress as a medical condition and all the health implications of that . The evolutionary imperative is 'adapt or succumb'. People are adapting by taking up meditation in increasingly larger numbers.

Meditation serves as attention- training. Meditation helps, but unless a spark is added to the process the full potential of a reconstituted attention is not realised. That spark is 'kundalini awakening'.

The result is an 'enlightened attention' (see: Superhuman Awareness), which has the capacity of action in it.

To take the first steps to self-discovery do this : Achieving a lot with a very little.

A new kind of corporate exec is coming to an office near you and why you'll want to go work with them.

In a 2014 article by Rob Asghar in the Leadership section of Forbes Magazine, entitled: "What Millennials Want In The Workplace (And Why You Should Start Giving It To Them), the  demand list produced, shows that amongst other things, 64% of  your new or prospective hire won't be as motivated by the starting salary as they will by what your company is doing to make the world a better place and the part they'll play in that.

Many organisations may feel they are addressing this aspiration in their millennials by pointing at various corporate social responsibility projects they are engaged in.

However, while corporate social responsibility may have been a hot-button issue in the boardroom some years ago, the mention of it may be slightly muted now. The reason for that is that corporate social responsibility, on the whole, has failed according to former CEO of BP, John Brown, in his new book, "Connect: How companies succeed by engaging radically with society".

The solution, according to John Brown, backed by his co-author Robin Nuttall, a Mckinsey principal, is what they call : IEE - Integrated External Engagement.


All sounds fine and dandy. But the devil is in the execution. How does a steer given to an organisation with regard it's relationship with external (and for that matter, internal) stakeholders percolate down to the level of an individual exec.

If IEE is not to be merely a CSR 2.0 and fail for the same reason that CSR failed then the focus needs to turn to the individual exec.

Which is precisely what an innovative study on CSR carried out at INSEAD did. The study was called the Response project, led by INSEAD Academic Director , Professor Maurizio Zollo(profile shown below) and the goal of the project was "understanding and responding to societal demands on corporate responsibility".

In one of the key findings, the following is reported:

"5. Part 2 of this report focuses on one important way to bridge the gap between managers’ and
stakeholders’ understanding and behaviour: training/coaching programs. The results of the
first field experiments on CSR training effectiveness ever attempted, reported in Ch. 9, show
that:

The standard executive education approach based on engaged discussions and case
analyses fails to facilitate managers to shift towards higher probabilities to make
socially responsible decisions.

On the other hand, coaching programs based on introspection and meditation
techniques, without any discussion about CSR topics, exhibit a significant impact on
both the probability to act in a socially responsible way and on the factors that
influence the probability to behave that way."

In other words, executive training/coaching  programs may hugely benefit an organisation by including meditation. In this way, it could make much more effective CSR/IEE, thus realising a win-win for the organisation and stakeholders.

If a millennial was looking for a boss they could run with then this may be such boss: tuned-in leadership that has genuine engagement with and understanding of the needs of both external and internal stakeholders and can engineer that towards all-round organisational excellence.

In the 'War for Talent', it's those forward thinking organisations that are able to attract these socially-conscious millennials that may be able to replicate the success of the Facebooks and the Googles.


The form of meditation used in the corporate training for the study was based on 'Sahaja Yoga' which entails awakening of 'kundalini energy'. It's interesting to note that in a recently published scientific paper sahaja yoga meditation is shown to keep the brain young and enhance cognitive ability:



​"Maurizio Zollo is the Dean's Professor in Strategic Management of the Sustainable Enterprise, in the Strategy Institute, at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and the director of the Center for Research in Organization and Management (CROMA). Zollo holds PhD and MSc degrees in managerial science and applied economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Laurea degree in economics from Bocconi. Zollo previously had appointments in strategic management at INSEAD, Fountainbleau, France, the Wharton School, and the Advanced Institute of Management in the United Kingdom, and was visiting professor/scholar at MIT for the 2012-14 academic years. Best known for work in the field of strategic management on mergers and acquisitions, dynamic capabilities, and organizational learning, Zollo has in more recent years turned his attention to how organizations learn to change in a responsible way. He headed up a European-Union-funded project called RESPONSE, and currently directs an innovative global research initiative called GOLDEN, the Global Organizational Learning and Development Network for Sustainability, which brings together people from around the world to study how companies make the transition to sustainability successfully. Editor of the European Management Review, and former president of the European Academy of Management, Zollo has published nearly thirty articles in prestigious academic journals, ten managerial publications, and two books, as an academic, and previously was a management consultant at McKinsey & Co., a major consulting firm, an associate for Kidder Peabody Italia, and a financial analyst for Merrill Lynch Capital Markets."  -from the book Intellectual Shamans by Sandra Waddock