RELATION SHIPS
Our drive to bond
It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms. —Lewis Thomas
by Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D.
IF YOU’RE A SURVIVOR of multiple failed relationships, you may wonder why you keep trying. I can assure you that you don’t persist just for the (sometimes short-lived) good times. And you don’t persist because of TV ads featuring loving couples on tropical islands. You persist, despite your track record and despite dismal divorce statistics, because you are designed to bond. Human beings are not meant to live alone.
44 APRIL 2015
There is a fundamental biological
imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms. Whether you’re thinking about it consciously or not, your biology is pushing you to bond. In fact, the coming together of individuals in community (starting with two) is a principle force that drives biological evolution, a phenomenon I call spontaneous evolution, which I cover in depth in the book of the same name. There are, of course, additional
biological imperatives designed to ensure individual and species survival: the drive for food, for sex, for growth, for protection, and the ferocious, inexplicable drive to fight for life.
We don’t know where or how the will to live is programmed into cells, but it is a fact that no organism will readily give up its life.
Try to kill the most primitive of
organisms and that bacterium doesn’t say, “Okay, I’ll wait until you kill me.” Instead, it will take every evasive manoeuvre in its power to sustain its survival. When our biological drives are not being
fulfilled, when our survival is threatened, we get a feeling in the pit of our stomach that something is wrong even before our conscious minds comprehend the danger. That gut feeling is being felt globally right now—many of us are feeling that pit in our stomach as we ponder the survivability of our environmentally damaged planet and of the human beings who have damaged it. The social nature of harmonious animal
societies can provide fundamental insights directly applicable to human civilisation. One great example is an ant, which, like a human being, is a multicellular social organism; when you take an ant out of its community it will die. In fact, an individual ant is really a suborganism; the true organism is actually represented by the ant colony. Lewis
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