(draft)

I was taking a class based on (I think) Body Mind Centering® and Contact Improvisation. The teacher said something like this:

"Science has shown that one cell has more intelligence than your entire brain."

Holy crap.

It took me a while to wrap my head around what someone would actually have to believe in order to say something like that. This is quite different than, say, belief in ESP or subtle energy or any of that - this statement implies that one cell could be "more intelligent" than a collection of about 100 billion cells. How could someone think something like that? And why was I the only person in the room that seemed to have such a reaction of shock and disbelief?

Well, I have no idea about any particular person, but I've witnessed a number of common themes. The most seemingly central factor is that it's really easy to have an experience of someting just by thinking about it. It may be even easier to experience something that someone else suggests - particularly after going through a set of nice relaxation techniques or meditation or the like. This is very much the kind of thing that we were guided to do in this class - we were instructed to send our consciousness to a single cell (which we were assured was certainly possible). And I'm sure lots of people did have that experience. I went along and had such an experience myself. But the crucial thing is that in the end, I did not believe that I'd actually visited a real cell in my body - but rather that I'd imagined such a journey.

This problem is not restricted to hippies in dance studios. For whatever reason, it seems far more natural for people to listen to what they are told rather than checking for themselves. People can even learn to disregard their own experience in favor of what authority tells them. This dance teacher is not terribly different than, say, Rush Limbaugh. I'm sure my dance teacher wouldn't get along with a conservative talk radio host - but both are simply telling people "facts" that get accepted without critical consideration.

There are very real limits on our abilities to sense, understand and affect our world and ourselves. This is far from a bad thing. If there were no limits, some kook could just decide he wanted to vaporize us all with a thought! The structures imposed by reality give us a framework for interacting in interesting ways, finding ways around constraints and generally being creative.