Originally published on www.sayerji.substack.com
"One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star."- Francis Thompson
In three essays now I have circled the same luminous object from different sides. In "Genetic Dark Matter and the Return of the Goddess" I argued that the non-coding 98.5% of the genome -- once dismissed as junk -- is in fact an open-access communication infrastructure, and that cross-kingdom microRNAs make Lovelock and Margulis's Gaia not a metaphor but a mechanism. In "Turmeric: The Return of the Divine Mother" I suggested that the ancient Sanskrit naming of the rhizome as Gauri("she whose face is light") and Kanchani ("the Golden Goddess") was not poetic excess but a pre-scientific recognition of a substance that beneficially modulates an astounding 980+ health conditions -- a botanical embodiment of compassion. And in "The Royal Code" I showed that bee products are not dense nutrient packets but signaling systems -- exosomal vesicles that speak to human stem cells in a shared vesicular language, validating a biosemiotic model in which the quality of biological information, not the quantity of matter, is primary.
What I want to do here is name the thread that runs through all three and pull it taut. The thread is this: compassion is not a sentiment we project onto biology. It is the operating logic of biology itself -- and the Goddess is its proper name.
Let me make the case more completely than I have before, because the science has caught up further, and because the word "compassion" deserves to be taken with the full weight of its meaning.
I. Compassion, Literally
Compassion is from the Latin com- ("with") and pati ("to suffer") -- to suffer with (etymology via Stand to Reason; Merriam-Webster defines it as "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it"). I touched this in the original Goddess essay. But I treated it there as a half-formed intuition -- "An intelligence? A compassion?" -- and then moved on. I want to return to it now and argue that the etymology is not a pretty footnote. It is a literal description of how cells and organisms are wired to each other.
To suffer with requires three things: a channel through which one being can register the state of another; a substrate sensitive enough that the registered state actually changes the receiver; and a disposition to respond rather than to ignore or to consume. Modern biology has now, almost despite itself, supplied all three -- and it has supplied them in precisely the maternal, matter-side, "feminine" register that the Goddess has always governed.
This is the move the old paradigm could not make. Neo-Darwinism could model competition -- the selfish gene, the war of all against all. What it had no mechanism for was suffering with: no way for the state of one organism to lawfully and beneficially become the state of another across the membrane that supposedly sealed each self off from every other. The dark-matter genome, the exosome, the milk vesicle, and the microchimeric cell are that missing mechanism. They are the molecular hardware of com-passion.
II. The First Channel: We Are Spoken Into Being by Another's Body
Begin where every human life begins -- not with a sequence, but with a transfusion of information from one body to another.
In the original essay I noted that the mother passes down the mitochondria and, in utero, the founding microbiome. But the science is now far more radical than uniparental inheritance. The maternal body literally instructs the architecture of the offspring's brain using her own living cells.
During pregnancy, cells cross the placenta in both directions. Maternal cells that enter the fetus are called maternal microchimeric cells (MMc), and a landmark 2022 study in Nature Communications showed that in the developing brain these maternal cells control microglia homeostasis, prevent excessive synaptic pruning, and help entrain the prefrontal-hippocampal circuits -- concluding they are "not a mere placental leak out, but rather a functional mechanism that shapes optimal conditions for healthy brain function later in life.
Read that again. The mother's cells help wire the child's capacity to feel, regulate, and connect. The neural substrate of the child's future compassion is itself seeded by the mother's body.
And the traffic runs the other way, too. Fetal cells migrate into the mother and persist for decades -- found in maternal blood as long as 27 years postpartum, seeded into her heart, liver, thyroid, and brain (Stem Cells, 2005; Obstetric Medicine, 2019). When the maternal heart is injured, fetal cells migrate to it and differentiate into functioning heart cells to help repair the damage (Scientific American; Circulation Research, 2012).
Here is the staggering implication, and it extends the thesis precisely where the original essay stopped. I wrote then that the female's contribution is "dominant, asymmetrical." The microchimerism literature shows it is more than asymmetrical -- it is mutually constitutive and bodily.
A mother who has carried children is, at the cellular level, a chimera of those children, and of her own mother. The boundary between self and beloved-other is not philosophical. It has been dissolved in the literal flesh.
This is "suffer with" written into tissue. The mother does not merely empathize with the child as an external object. She contains the child, and is contained. Compassion here is not a feeling about another. It is the ontological condition of being made of one another.
And if we widen the lens past the mother-child dyad, the sealed self dissolves further still. As I argued in "How the Microbiome Undermines the Ego, Vaccine Policy, and Patriarchy," the human being is not a single organism at all but a holobiont -- a collective. Strip away the trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi we carry, and only about 1% of the genetic material that keeps us alive remains as "ours" -- and even that 1% is at least 8% retroviral in origin. The ego imagines itself the sovereign occupant of the body. In genetic fact it is a minority shareholder, a 1% voice in a parliament of strangers it has learned to call self.
This is the same dethronement, one layer down. Microchimerism dissolves the boundary between mother and child; the microbiome dissolves the boundary between "me" and "not-me" altogether. The very germs that germ theory taught us to fight as other turn out to constitute the overwhelming majority of what we are -- and, crucially, the founding colony of that inner ecology is maternal in origin, seeded in utero and through the birth canal and the milk. The self was never sealed, never singular, and never self-made. It was composed, hospitably, out of others -- and mothered into being.
III. The Second Channel: Milk as Software, Not Just Food
The transmission does not stop at birth. It continues through the most ordinary and most overlooked act of the Divine Mother: nursing.
Human breast milk is dense with exosomes carrying microRNAs -- and not random ones. Deep sequencing identified 602 unique miRNAs in human milk exosomes, with the immune-related miRNAs strikingly enriched: 59 of 87 well-characterized immune-related precursors were present and concentrated, far beyond chance (International Journal of Biological Sciences, 2012). Critically, these milk miRNAs are unusually resistant to digestion, survive the infant gut, enter circulation, and appear to "play a critical role in the development of the infant immune system" and even drive pancreatic β-cell maturation during the birth-to-weaning window (review on milk exosomal miRNAs; Frontiers on milk EVs and immune programming). This is also why I consider synthetic infant formula a complete disaster: Formula for Disaster: The Clinically Confirmed Dangers of Breastmilk 'Alternatives'
This is the exact mechanism I described in "The Royal Code" -- exosome-like vesicles from the nurse bee's hypopharyngeal glands directing the fate of the recipient -- operating in the human nursing dyad. Royal jelly turns a genetically identical larva into a queen. Mother's milk, by the same biosemiotic grammar, helps turn a genetically finished infant into an immunologically competent, microbially seeded, metabolically tuned human being. The hive and the household run on the same code. The nurse bee and the nursing mother are performing the same act: regenerative instruction by vesicular message.
So when ancient cultures called honey ambrosia, "food of the gods," and when they understood mother's milk as sacred, they were not being sentimental. They were registering, in the only vocabulary they had, that these substances are not inert calories but meaningful information -- encoded compassion, delivered cell-to-cell. The biosemiotic model I have argued for is not an exotic claim at the frontier. It is the literal biology of the first meal any of us ever received.
IV. The Third Channel: The Body's Compassion Organ
If the first two channels are about how compassion is transmitted between bodies, the third is about how a single body is built to enact it -- and here, too, the architecture is the calm, receptive, caregiving register the Goddess has always symbolized.
The mammalian capacity to suffer with and then to soothe runs through a specific, identifiable circuit: the hormone oxytocin, and the myelinated ventral vagus nerve of the parasympathetic "calm-and-connect" system. As one Frontiers review puts it, "the evolution of mammalian caregiving involving hormones, such as oxytocin... and the myelinated vagal nerve as part of the ventral parasympathetic system, enables humans to connect, co-regulate each other's emotions and create prosociality" (Frontiers, on heart-rate variability and compassion). Experimental work finds that the felt experience of compassion is accompanied by increased vagal activation.. Oxytocin, in the current framework, works by tuning the salience of another's distress -- heightening our attention to the one who suffers so that we are moved to act (Biology, 2023, "From Oxytocin to Compassion").
Notice the elegance of this for the thesis. The very same physiological system that mediates birth, lactation, and maternal bonding -- oxytocin and the vagal complex -- is the system that, in adults of every kind, mediates compassion for strangers. The "Divine Mother" is not a metaphor bolted onto unrelated adult kindness. Adult compassion is mechanistically the maternal-care system, generalized. When we suffer with a stranger and move to relieve them, we are running the mother's own circuitry. The Goddess does not merely return in the genome and the hive. She returns in the nervous system of anyone who has ever been moved by another's pain.
This also redeems something I said in the apoptosis discussions -- that healing is often the "death of the medical ego," an awakening of the patient's own healing power through the clinician's compassionate attention. The placebo, rightly understood, is not deception; it is biosemiotic medicine -- symbolic communication that recruits the patient's own oxytocin-vagal regenerative state (on biosemiotic medicines and placebo, J. Education and Health Promotion, 2024). Compassion, delivered as meaning, is itself a regenerative signal.
V. Why It Had to Be the Goddess
Now I can say more precisely than before why this whole constellation arrives under the sign of the feminine, and why that is a claim about reality and not about politics.
Across the great traditions, the feminine principle is consistently named as the intelligence of matter itself -- not matter as dead stuff, but matter as creative, active, self-organizing power:
In Hindu thought, Shakti is "the active, dynamic and creative principle," and Prakriti is nature, "the original producer of the material world" -- grammatically and essentially feminine, "the energizing principle of the universe" without which the masculine Purusha/Shiva is inert (Shakti, Wikipedia, summarizing the Devi Mahatmya and Tantric nonduality; Adishakti.org on prakrti/sakti/maya). Vandana Shiva draws the ecological conclusion directly: the modern violence against nature is the linguistic and conceptual demotion of "Prakriti" to mere "natural resources," of "Mater" (mother) to inert "matter" (Vandana Shiva on Prakriti as the feminine principle).
In the Gnostic tradition, Sophia is divine Wisdom who "enters matter" and "knows limitation from the inside" -- wisdom that is not detached and clean but earned through descent into the material world (on Gnostic Sophia; Sophia, Wikipedia).
In the Buddhist image of Indra's Net -- which I invoked in the original essay as "Indira's pearls" -- every jewel reflects every other, so that "every individual phenomenon contains and is contained by every other phenomenon," and the explicit ethical fruit of perceiving this interpenetration is gratitude and compassion for all that is (Reflections in the Jeweled Net of Indra, Huayen).
And in the modern scientific myth, Gaia -- named by Lovelock and Margulis for the Greek Earth goddess -- is the self-regulating biosphere. Margulis's deeper contribution, symbiogenesis, holds that major evolutionary novelty arises not from competition but from "the intimacy of strangers," organisms merging and cooperating (Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis; The Symbiotic Planet).
Lay these four next to the biology and the convergence is total. Shakti/Prakriti says matter is active, creative intelligence. Microchimerism and milk-borne miRNA say matter is active, creative intelligence -- the mother's matter literally builds and instructs the child's. Sophia says wisdom is earned by descending into the flesh and suffering its limits. The exosome says exactly this: healing wisdom is delivered as material messengers that descend into the recipient cell and reprogram it from within. Indra's Net says all things interpenetrate and the perception of this is compassion. Cross-kingdom microRNA says all kingdoms interpenetrate through shared genetic messengers. Gaia and symbiogenesis say the engine of life is cooperation, the intimacy of strangers.
The patriarchal paradigm I critiqued in the original essay located the essence of life in the sealed nucleus -- the digital sequence, the command-and-control center, the "hardware." It was, as Erich Fromm would say, a kind of womb envy projected onto the cell: the fantasy that life is dictated from a central, masculine, informational throne. The new biology dethrones that nucleus. Life's real genius turns out to live in the between -- in the milk, the vesicle, the placental traffic, the gut, the non-coding "dark matter," the open-access mesh. The between is the Goddess's domain. It always was. She is the relationship itself.
VI. An Onto-Ethics of Compassion
In the original essay I sketched an "onto-ethics" -- the idea that right and wrong are embedded in the things themselves and their relationships, not imposed as external judgment. Since then I have given the framework a more formal name and shape. As I put it in "The Fold": ontology asks what is real; ethics asks how we shall live; onto-ethics asks: if reality has structure, what forms of action align with it, and what forms violate it? It is, as I wrote in "A Benevolent Superfluity", "not a set of rules imposed from outside... but the recognition that at the root of our humanity is a divine calling" -- an onto-ethics written into flesh, ontological before it is aesthetic, ethical before it is decorative. Here I can complete that argument, because compassion supplies its missing keystone.
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If the boundary between self and other is genuinely permeable -- if I am partly made of my mother and my children, if the food I eat reprograms a third of my genome, if the bee's secretion and the plant's exosome speak directly to my stem cells, if my nervous system runs the mother's care-circuit whenever I am moved by a stranger -- then to harm another is, with literal accuracy, to harm a part of oneself, and to heal another is to participate in one's own regeneration. Compassion is not an ideal we ought to live up to against the grain of a selfish nature. It is the recognition of what is already biologically the case. "Suffer with" is not an aspiration; it is a description of a body that is already, constitutively, entangled with other bodies.
This is why the violations I named -- biocides like Roundup, faux foods, the severing of the maternal-infant exosomal channel through formula and unnecessary cesarean and the antibiotic erasure of the founding microbiome -- are not merely unhealthy. They are onto-ethical violations: ruptures in the communication channels of compassion. They cut the threads of Indra's Net. They are, in the precise sense, uncompassionate acts -- acts that sever the suffering-with that holds the web of life together. And the consequence is not divine punishment from outside but karma in its original meaning: cause and effect, the lawful unraveling that follows when you cut the threads that were carrying the messages of repair.
Conversely, the regenerative path I have argued for throughout my work -- raw local honey, turmeric the Golden Goddess, breastfeeding, soil-borne microbial diversity, whole foods carrying intact exosomal information -- is not a list of "remedies." It is the restoration of the body's native channels of compassion: re-opening the lines through which one living thing lawfully suffers with, and heals, another.
This is the deepest reason an onto-ethics needs no external enforcer. As I argued in "The Fold," systems misaligned with the structure of reality do not need to be punished -- they collapse. A body cut off from its channels of compassion, a food stripped of its exosomal information, an agriculture at war with its own soil: these unravel not because a judge condemns them, but because they have stepped outside the relations that sustain them. Onto-ethics, then, is finally not a morality at all in the old sense of commandment and prohibition. It is the discipline of living in alignment with what is -- and what is, the new biology now tells us, is a fabric of mutual constitution whose proper name is compassion. To live ethically is simply to stop cutting the threads.
VII. The Return, Completed
I ended the original essay by saying we are, in this moment of history, "experiencing the return of the Goddess," and that science (logos) was beginning to confirm the mythos. I want to end this one by saying what I think the return actually is.
It is not the swing of a pendulum from a masculine paradigm to a feminine one. That would just be another power grab, another reversal of the kind I warned against. The return of the Goddess is the recovery of a single, devastating, and consoling fact that the patriarchal phase of science had to forget in order to function: that matter is not dead, that information is meaningful, that bodies are porous, and that the fundamental relation between living things is not competition but compassion -- the capacity, built into the molecular fabric of life, to suffer with and to heal one another.
The mother's cells in the child's brain. The child's cells in the mother's heart, repairing it for the rest of her life. The milk that programs an immune system. The royal jelly that crowns a queen and migrates human stem cells toward a wound. The turmeric the ancients called the face of light. The microRNA that lets a plant counsel an animal across the chasm of a kingdom. Indra's net, in which a tug on one thread moves every star. These are not separate marvels. They are one marvel, seen from seven sides. They are the Goddess, and her name -- the most ancient name, and now the most rigorously scientific one -- is Compassion.
"The salt of the sea is in our blood; the calcium of the rocks is in our bones; the genes of ten thousand generations of stalwart progenitors are in our cells. The sun shines and we smile... Earth is our long home." -- Stewart W. Holmes
She was never a metaphor. We are only now learning to translate the message.
Photo Credit: Kyle Kesterson, 2017 (Deep Playa, Burning Man). Dr. Tia Kansara.
Sources & further reading
- Maternal microchimeric cells shape the offspring brain -- Nature Communications, 2022
- Fetal cells persist in the maternal body for decades, repair injured tissue -- Stem Cells, 2005; Circulation Research, 2012; Obstetric Medicine, 2019; Scientific American
- Fetal microchimerism, maternal brain, and attachment -- BioEssays, 2015; iScience, 2021
- Immune-related microRNAs enriched in breast-milk exosomes -- Int. J. Biological Sciences, 2012
- Oxytocin, the ventral vagus, and compassion -- Biology, 2023; Frontiers, HRV & compassion
- Biosemiotic medicines & placebo as meaning -- J. Education & Health Promotion, 2024
- Compassion etymology (com-pati, "to suffer with") -- Stand to Reason; Merriam-Webster
- Shakti / Prakriti as the creative intelligence of matter -- Wikipedia: Shakti; Adishakti.org; Vandana Shiva
- Gnostic Sophia, wisdom that enters matter -- Gnosticism Explained; Wikipedia: Sophia
- Indra's Net and interpenetration -- Reflections in the Jeweled Net of Indra (Huayen)
- Gaia, symbiogenesis, "the intimacy of strangers"
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