An open response to Matt Sena…

In response to Matt’s “All Healing is Self Healing”.

Hi, Matt. David here.

Like you when talking about the technologies you have discovered, I tend to get defensive and in a lecturing mode when I talk about science. But in this email I will try to put that defensiveness aside, and treat you as a friend or son with whom I wish to share a bit of what I’ve learned in school and in life. I’ve lived for 75 years, so I may have learned a thing or two that can be of help to others.

I’m going to start with earthworms. You probably believe in the existence of earthworms (as opposed to viruses), because you see them come up out of the ground after it rains.

Well, it turns out that inside earthworms (as well as inside our own digestive system) is a separate ecology or environment filled with tiny creatures, none of which are visible to the naked eye, such as amoebas, paramecia, rotifers, and hundreds of other species of tiny animals. How can you possibly believe that such invisible animals can exist?

One way to answer this question is to see for yourself. For that, you will have to buy or borrow a microscope, or visit a science museum that has microscopes set up already (this is unlikely these days, since visitors prefer seeing light shows or much more flashy and interesting exhibits).

For example, while I haven’t used a microscope to look inside an earthworm myself (ugh), I have examined a drop of my semen under my binocular (stereoscopic) microscope. I saw tiny little wriggling creatures, which I know to be sperm. You cannot see individual sperm cells, with their whip-like flagella that propel them so quickly, using your bare eye. But use a microscope, and there they are. You might theorize that the microscope contains an animated and fake movie of imaginary sperm, but you can take the microscope apart and see that no such movie exists. Or you can simply reason that no battery to power the calculation and projection of such a movie could possibly last since the 1950s, when my microscope was manufactured.

So tiny, microscopic creatures really exist. I have seen them. When I was a child I owned a microscope and saw various shapes of microscopic animals, various “species”, they are called, in pond water.

But another way to acquire such knowledge is through science and education. This saves you the expense and trouble of doing the research yourself (research like buying and using a microscope).

But what about the fact that science and education are often misused?

Research into fission, the automatic splitting of very heavy atoms through neutron radiation, was used by the U.S. military to bomb two Japanese cities to force Japan to surrender its part in World War II. The total number killed were between 129,000 and 226,000, almost all civilians. Scientists working on the research and the bombs had submitted a petition to President Truman asking that Japan be warned first, or that a unoccupied target be chosen, but our military ensured that Truman never saw the petition. Besides, Truman’s stated position was clearly in favor of the bombing, so the petition would not likely have had any effect.

As for education, consider that history is frequently written by the victors of wars. Until only very recently, U.S. education failed to present a true picture of how Native Americans were treated by white European colonists: the forcible education of Native American children to eliminate knowledge and practice of their traditions and languages, forced marches of death to relocate Native American tribes into isolated reservations, and so forth.

Yes, such errors in science and education have and still do occur. But what is the point of throwing out the baby with the bath water? Preferring ignorance to learning just because learning is sometimes tainted makes no sense. What does make sense in a democracy like ours is speaking out and influencing scientists and educators to have a higher standard of ethics and truthfulness.

Today, the processes of correcting big errors in science and education/history have been going on for several centuries, with increasing effectiveness, so that much of science and education today is trustworthy. There will never be an end to the knowledge of how nature works or what nature has created, but it is good to start somewhere that is a bit better than total ignorance of the knowledge that is now available.

We really have much basic knowledge from science that is reliable. Part of that knowledge concerns viruses.

Viruses, like other microscopic animals, actually exist, too. However, they are much tinier, and therefore cannot be seen using microscopes. You have to use special high-magnification microscopes that don’t use light (electron microscopes) to see viruses, but then you actually can see them. Pictures of viruses using electron microscopes are published in many places, so you can see what they actually look like.

A virus basically consists of a container made of protein (similar to the protein making up the outer skin of an ant), which is filled with the virus’s genetic material, DNA. In a particular species of virus called a bacteriophage, there is an injection assembly, made of pieces of several kinds of protein assembled together, that enables the virus to power-inject its genetic material into a much larger bacterium (such as a paramecium). This apparatus, like the injection apparatus of a mosquito, operates automatically; neither viruses nor mosquitoes have true brains, just instinctive and automatic behaviors.

Once the genetic material of a bacteriophage is injected into a much larger bacterium, it takes over the genetic mechanism of the bacterium, making it generate the protein parts of the bacteriophage virus. These parts self-assemble into complete viruses, which accumulate inside the dying bacterium until finally the outer skin of the bacterium bursts and the contents, now mostly bacteriophages, are released to the environment, where they float at random and continue landing on bacteria and infecting them in the same way. Thus, a single bacteriophage can multiply and infect and destroy a large number of far larger bacteria. It is this destructive behavior of viruses that makes them so dangerous, not only to their primary prey, bacteria, but to larger creatures made of cells, such as humans.

I’m not saying to take historical or scientific statements as all true, but please give them the benefit of the doubt. Start with real science and real history, then look around the Web and decide for yourself how much of it to trust. Just be careful, because there are lots of false theories in the marketplace of ideas, throughout the world. Phrenology (meanings attributed to bumps on the head) may now have been discredited, but belief in astrology, copper bracelets, magnetic bracelets, alien creation of crop circles, finding underground water using a branch held in the hands (dowsing), and thousands of other false theories are believed in by vast numbers of people who swallow lies and fairy tales in their earnest search for truth.

I hate to see you counted among these, because it is clear that you are intelligent, and probably even attended chemistry and biology and history classes in high school, perhaps in college. You have already been exposed to much of the truth that humans, out of curiosity, have discovered. Please don’t throw away all that truth for the sake of flashy theories that have no actual proof or evidence to support them, only fancy talking by fancy so-called authorities whose credentials are mostly the number of people who believe them.

Here I’ll end my lecture, as my fingers are tingling from all the typing, and I need to do other things now. I hope that this feedback is what you requested. I’m sure it is not exactly the form you were hoping for, but it is sincere, and comes from a highly educated person who has tested that education extensively in various ways and found it reliable.

Yours in support of truth,

David Spector
retired software engineer
meditation teacher
Portland, Maine