in pursuit of a unified field theory

Seems like all these posts, thoughts, ideas - pretty much everything I've ever written or read or talked about has something to do with trying to find the underlying pattern, the key, the link, the rosetta stone, the magic decoder ring...

The problem with all these attempts at understanding is that I can't understand it with my brain. That's the basic fallacy, the fatal flaw behind the failure of most 'therapy' or what have you to achieve any long-term, lasting, sustainable change: The change needs to come from the system, not the individual. When the system changes, the individual's experience will change; her sense of being supported by the system will change; and suddenly, voila - she no longer needs to change.

The problem was never with her in the first place. The problem was (and continues to be) that she does not get what she needs from her environment.

A friend once passed along this anecdote about how cells work. He'd been under the impression that cells are designed to sort of 'hunt' after certain chemicals in their environment. That is, that a cell that is meant to 'capture' (layperson language) some substance from its environment - say, sodium, for example - sort of motors around its universe until it 'finds' some sodium and then munches it up, kind of like a very tiny PacMan.

But the reality, according to this friend's friend (a more science-y type), is that the cell evolved, and is designed to exist, in an environment that naturally provides a certain amount of sodium.

So it's not so much that the cell 'hunts' for what it needs - it's designed, by nature, to be 'receptive' to the thing it evolved to need. In other words, it's a sort of symbiotic relationship: The environment has a bunch of sodium, so a cell in this environment gradually adapts to having a lot of sodium in its environment. In fact, it comes to expect (at a biological level) that there will be a certain amount of sodium in its environment.

The cell doesn't have to go hunting, at all - it just sort of sits there and 'waits' til some sodium bumps into it, and then absorbs it right up. Yum! Happy cell! :-)

I think damn near every 'problem' humans have can essentially be likened to an inadequate supply of sodium in their environment.

Now, you can say, But humans are smart, and mobile, and we can go and find what we need. We don't have to just sit there and wait!

True. But I contend that that ability to hunt for what we need arose in times of environmental stress - that our organisms evolved in times of plenty, and that the 'adaptations' such as nomadic behavior, were later add-ons to cope with our resources suddenly drying up.

The problem is, once we're out of the 'drought' period, we continue to use those same adaptations as if they were still necessary. The organism doesn't seem to naturally 'reset' itself - it seems to get 'stuck' in whatever mode current conditions demand, regardless of whether conditions revert to 'normal' (meaning, the environment in which the organism evolved its current characteristics).