Isolation (Existence Conflict)

In the context of the Germanic New Medicine, isolation is the experience of a threat to existence: the moment one imagines oneself separated from the source of one's existence. It is the most fundamental biological conflict, the origin of biological conflict itself, and the core of every other biological conflict. And it occurs in the psyche: it is not a perception of actual isolation, it is the experience of a sense of isolation.

Like every biological conflict, isolation is not an external event or circumstance but a meaning made in the psyche. Here the meaning is the most primal one possible: the source of my existence is absent.

Isolation is therefore not:

• a physical threat to existence (the present form may, separately, be at risk, but that is not this),
• loneliness or disconnection from other people or beings,
• any literal, physical, or situational isolation.

It is, rather, a meaning made — often about one of those things, but never identical to it. Existential isolation can occur while one is surrounded by others; in our modern population it often arises precisely because of conflict with others and the absence of healthy "aloneness."

In framework terms, isolation is the first split: consciousness dividing from itself in order to experience itself as separate — the original duality from which the whole multiplicity of "negative" experience (the MindTree) unfolds. Every other biological conflict is a variant of (and evolved from) this first one.

Four ways of seeing it (but it's just one conflict). "Existential threat" (such as a diagnosis shock), "abandonment," "refugee," "isolation" are all slightly different ways of experiencing the same single meaning: my source of existence is absent. Whether the story is being abandoned, being displaced, facing a threat, or simply being cut off from source (or "safety"), there is one judgment being made in the psyche, and the biology that follows is the same.

The biology of isolation: becoming a seed again. Isolation (the existence conflict) relays through the centre of the brainstem to the kidney collecting tubules — ancient digestive tissue, which is why this is the deepest morsel conflict of all, and the primary conflict of all biological conflicts. In the conflict-active phase, the organism conserves rather than releases: it reabsorbs water instead of excreting it (retaining fluid, gaining weight) and conserves and recycles protein (registered as rising creatinine and urea). Both carry one biological meaning. Holding water is holding onto the ocean until the next wave comes to carry one home; recycling protein is feeding oneself from within when nothing arrives from outside. Together they are a single ancient gesture: the organism becomes, once more, a seed or an egg — self-contained potential, conserving everything, waiting in stillness for conditions to change so that life can resume.

The reduction to "morsels." When consciousness opens this rift, in the psyche, between itself and its source, it stops experiencing reality as the living whole it belongs to and begins experiencing reality as a field of separate "things" to be acquired, defended, or eliminated: morsels. This is the origin of material determinism — a reality emptied of meaning and reduced to mechanism. Yet the entire event happens within consciousness. The split is not, in fact, a catastrophe (though one feels that it is); it is the very move by which consciousness sets up an expansion of itself. To evolve, it must first split from its source, contact what now appears as "other," and make new meaning of it. Isolation is the seed of that whole process: the deepest morsel conflict, from which all other morsel conflicts — and so every biological conflict — descend.

Why it is everywhere. In the instant of any DHS, the individual makes this same root judgment in its psyche — that a desired condition does not exist, and that its absence is proof of separation from source. That is why a sense of isolation from the source of existence is central to every DHS, and why every biological conflict is, at bottom, an attempt to change ourselves in order to secure that source once again. It is, unfortunately, core cultural dogma that the source of our existence is not life, natural law, or God but civilization itself — the good graces of those of higher social status, and so on. For this reason the vast majority of people carry a sense of isolation almost all the time, beginning at increasingly early ages.