Wisdom at the Edge: What Can We Learn From Membranes?

Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems, Part 2: Discerning what to keep, and what to let go of. Can I learn to read the subtle signals in my body, and in the world around me?

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Join me for a mini-workshop to discuss these ideas on Saturday, March 7th at 4 PM EST.

While giving an interview in 2020, I suddenly saw the whole Earth system working together through the lens of intelligence and discernment, as nested layers. My last article gave an overview of some of these layers, and how we have interfered with them. This post looks at one of the most foundational layers of intelligence: the boundary between cells and their environment. It’s the layer where life began, and it’s also where intelligence, learning, and evolution continually come together.

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Forget you have a brain for a few moments. Forget you have eyes. Forget that you have ears. Forget that you can read the nutritional labels on food, talk to your health care provider, ask AI for nutritional advice, or listen to your favorite natural health podcast. Instead, imagine that you are a tiny little blob moving through a liquid world with no arms or legs, and in order to stay alive, you have to sense what you need—what is toxic and what is nourishing—simply by being in contact and communion with the conditions of your inner and outer world.

You have to sense how much sugar you can deal with right now, and how much will overwhelm you. You have to sense how much salt is in the water you are floating in, versus in your body, and whether taking in some of it would be a good idea. You have to sense if today is a day you need some iron, or lithium, or if one of them is accumulating dangerously.

Cell membranes do just this: they sort out what is needed for life versus what’s damaging for life—what to allow in, and what to keep out; and how much, when, and in what order. They do this by reading signals both from the interior environment and the exterior environment.

Given what’s going on now inside me and around me, how much do I need? What should I take wholeheartedly into my life, and what must I let go of to survive?

This form of intelligence, sensing, sifting, and whole-body deciding—let’s call it discernment—is critical, not just at the cellular level, but throughout life on Earth. Many of the other layers of intelligence that I wrote about last week—from grazing to neural pruning during sleep, to collective decision making about how we deal with political developments—are iterations of what happens at the microscopic layer, literally at the edge of life.

Why I need to understand this

I can tell you right now, that my body, my life, my refrigerator, and my email inbox all have dysfunctional “membranes.” Nowhere near enough pairs of my deceased father’s old blue jeans have been allowed to leave my house, even though they don’t fit me. Too few dinner guests have been allowed in.

Three summers ago, during intense flooding, I believed someone who convinced me to accept too many puppies at exactly the wrong time. Yesterday I bought an entire maple cake at a church auction, despite the fact that my ankles are swollen. And I’ve held onto so many jars of sauerkraut that there is no room in my refrigerator for a fresh cabbage.

Membranes are our elders

Cell membranes exist in all life forms on Earth, and existed as the only interface between life and the environment (as single-celled bacteria and archaea) for 2 billion years before more “complex” life came along. In other words, half of the history of life on Earth happened with cell membranes (not brains or nervous systems) making all the decisions about what was needed to sustain life. And they figured it out, over and over and over again, under all kinds of wild conditions.

They figured it out while churning in hot lava, and they figured it out while floating through the sky. They learned to turn air and water into food when there was way too much CO2, and they learned to get together and breathe when things were starting to spontaneously combust from so much oxygen.¹

We are descended from single cells that all made wise decisions and created conditions for survival. We should be able to figure this out.

They are our elders. And two billion extra years of successful decision making is a lot of accumulated wisdom.

Cell membranes were the layer of intelligence that defined the beginnings of life. God knows how it really happened, but it goes something like this: at the slimy edge of an ocean, the primordial soup bubbled miraculously into a round, oily thing, sort of like a cell, that eventually organized its structures into phospholipid bilayers studded with proteins²—marvelous boundaries of doubled-up doorways—tiny little intelligent skins, complex edges that created tiny interior spaces for all kinds of alive and intelligent and curious beings to be, and evolve. These were single cells that could learn and pass knowledge down through generations, and grow more life through DNA and RNA.

And eventually, a few billion years later, they got together and decided to become hedgehogs, and weeping willows, and kangaroos, with bazillions of tiny membranes all working together to decide when to hop and where.

(and some became dogs that pretend to be kangaroos, dreaming about hopping, in the tiny little cells in their brains)

They are not just bags

People used to see cell membranes as filtration bags around intelligent life. But that’s not accurate at all. Newer science has shown that the membrane itself (not the nucleus) is the “brain” of the cell, sensing inner and outer conditions, making decisions, and then altering the DNA in response.

In an interview about the research in which he first realized that the membrane’s decisions affect DNA, rather than the other way around,³ Dr. Bruce Lipton says:

Genes are not self-actualizing. They do not make any decisions at all. The control of genes is not due to any inherent activity in the DNA itself. The change of genetic activity is due to the interaction of the cell with environmental signals.

When I put my cells in the tissue culture, the fate of the cells was not determined by the genes. They all had the same genes. The fate of the cell was determined by the information in the environment.

So, what is reading that information? The answer is, “Not the genes directly.” It is the cell membrane through receptors picking up the signals and translating them into biology, which then sends signals into the nucleus, which then controls the genetic activity. This is the essence of what the new science of epigenetics is all about. Genes do not make decisions. So then the question is this: “If they are not making decisions, where are our decisions being made?” That takes us back to the cell membrane, which is the first organelle to evolve in the evolution of cells.

If there was no membrane, of course, there is no cell. As the interface between what is outside the cell and inside the cell, the membrane reads both environments. In this position, the membrane reads the external environment and then adjusts the functions of the internal environment to keep the cell alive. The idea of genes controlling biology is totally false. I understood this in 1964 when I did my first enucleation experiments. If you remove the brain from any living organism, the necessary consequence is death. So, if the nucleus is the brain of the cell, then the process called enucleation, which is removing the nucleus using a micropipette, should lead to the death of the cell.

Guess what? You can enucleate a cell. The cell will survive for months without any genes in it. It is not just sitting there; it’s doing every function it had before. It is moving around. It is ingesting food. It is breathing. It is defecating. It is communicating with other cells. All of this is happening without genes. Well then, obviously something must be coordinating the behavior of the cell and there are no genes in it. Where the heck is the control coming from? The answer is what led me to the cell membrane. The cell membrane is the interface of control. Genes are just responsive elements farther down the line.

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Why my own family needs to evolve

If you’ve read my first book you know that my father and his mother were both experimentally irradiated by my great-grandfather, destroying their thyroids and giving them cancer.

If you’ve read my brother Luke Dittrich’s book “Patient HM”, you know that my mother’s mother was tortured in the mental health system of the 1950s. These and many other experiences in earlier generations set me up genetically to fail, physically and emotionally. And then my own life happened, which wasn’t exactly a piece of cake, either. So I’m scared. I’m sensitive. Sometimes I’m a spaced-out wreck.

But your and my genetics are not entirely fixed: they can change in response to new environments, starting at the cellular level, and our healing can get passed down to our future generations as strengths. This is epigenetics. But it only works if we learn to make good decisions.

As a society, we have become incredibly bad at making good decisions.

As we approach the world around us—snacks, ideas, policies, the news, relationships—we need to take a cue from cell membranes and learn to read the subtle signals inside our bodies, and in the world around us. Is this good for me? How much do I need of this? When is just a tiny experience of it useful, when is it too much?

Which jars of sauerkraut should I toss so I can fit this cabbage in the refrigerator? Are the eight pairs of my father’s blue jeans in the cellar (that still smell like him even after multiple washings) making me sad or making me happy? Should I delete emails from my ex, or hold onto them for just a little longer?

And most importantly for the long-term survival of my people: how many puppies can I keep?

We can do this

Our bodies are communities of human cells and non-human cells, forming a supra intelligence that should be able to act in ways that protect the integrity and intelligence of all life. In the same way, the communities in the oceans, forest, and sky work to regulate temperature, cloud formation and rain formation.

The food I eat has to pass by my senses, and through my mouth, before it gets into my inner world and hits the communities of individual cells in my gut microbiome. It has to get past my gut membrane, through my bloodstream, be filtered by my kidneys. I try to make choices about what goes into my mouth. I really do. But the conditions of my past, that have not yet been healed, fool me. So do the conditions created by flavorings, addictions, advertising, and the general thrashings about of those unhealed beings who play the role of the ruling elite.

Unlike my puppies who had travelled by car from the deep south and were riddled with worms, we humans in the global north are starving for strange reasons. We shove food, information, caffeine, and short videos into our senses without stopping to ask is this what I need? Our data centers and agricultural practices that feed these addictions suck so much water from the ancient aquifers and soil sponge that it is changing the global water balance.

You all, as part of my larger community, are trying hard to create better conditions in the world. (I know you are. I see you.) Now we need to work as a community to relearn how to read signals in our inner and outer environments, discern what’s important, and reliably take direction from the deeper realms.

Most of us have become somewhat numb to all this and are utterly unprepared to take this on with our current levels of chaos and addiction. But…fortunately or unfortunately, we are still the best ones suited for the job.

Let’s keep talking about this.

Join me—and the one I kept—for a discussion on Saturday, March 7, at 4 PM Eastern US time. (That’s Sunday morning for those Down Under). Learn more about the workshop, and sign up to join us live or watch the recording.

1. Starhawk’s recent ode to the late and beloved Dr. Elaine Ingham tells a particularly marvelous version of the story of evolution. Walter Jehne has also been an inspiring bard about the history of life moving onto land.

2. The Cell. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9928/#:~:text=The%20structure%20and%20function%20of,Membrane%20Lipids

3. Gustafson C. Bruce Lipton, PhD: The Jump From Cell Culture to Consciousness. Integr Med (Encinitas). 2017 Dec;16(6):44-50. PMID: 30936816; PMCID: PMC6438088.