Seeder’s Note

This site is a free and open-source repository for exploring the human gut microbiome. "Exploring" includes learning about the basic organs, inhabitants, chemistry, and relationship to other bodily functions, just as it includes frontier research on specialised parts of the whole set of relationships which together constitute a human gut.

Ideally, this is the visual, interactive bridge between the leading edge of human research into such relationships, and their broad understanding and application for ordinary people who are interested in what they consume.

This is not a neutral project. I have a specific perspective on, and interest in, this world. It begins with the fairly uncontroversial view that gut health is critical to overall health, and plays a bigger role in everything from the immune system to psychology and subjective emotional experience of the world than previously thought.

Human understanding of the players, mechanisms, biological and genetic pathways through which this occurs continues to grow daily. That is what this site reveals to any curious reader, and helps any advanced researcher track. However, I want to go a step further so that my motivation in seeding this work is clear.

Eating and drinking are the ultimate rituals of continuity. Every time you put something in your mouth, you implicitly agree to go on living. And it comes at an enormous cost, for life must feed of life to go on living (yes, even vegans and Jains do this!). You are invited to meet Kirtimukha every time you sit down, recite your gratitude, and begin to consume other living beings.

Adyashanti puts this beautifully for modern people interested in travelling even further than this evidence-based site will take you. Elsewhere, he writes:

"The awakening of the gut is no-self at its most fundamental level. Ego/self has a foundation that is the fear of non-existence, of death. The awakening of the gut is end of the fear of non-existence. With this end of the fear, the ego/self ends too. That’s all ego/self is - fear of non-existence.

Within the gut is where the final duality exists: subject and object; me and the world. As this duality falls away and the “me” comes to an end with the awakening of the gut, all that remains is everything, except “me”.

People often begin to approach awakening on the level of the gut when they begin to discover immense fear or horror, usually in meditation. It is as if they are before a vast abyss, void, or emptiness, which seems to be calling them into it.

On a very deep level, one knows that in that void, one’s idea of themselves (ego) can no longer exist. And so the fear arises as a defense mechanism.

However, that doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t approach this fearful state in meditation at all. Instead, one should continue to sit with it, to feel it and to get to know it. Eventually, often suddenly, though in some cases perhaps gradually, there will just be a simple release and it will feel as if the floor has been pulled out from under one’s feet.

With the awakening of the gut, one finds themselves in eternal free fall of non-existence of ego. Falling is scary, until one realizes that there’s no ground to ever land on. Then this eternal free fall becomes extremely spacious and liberating. Upon the awakening of the gut, one has merged their individual existence with the whole; the drop has merged with the ocean.

Just as the drop might fear its death as it falls into the ocean, upon its meeting of the surface, it is relieved as it discovers that it is now the entirety of the ocean.