No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” —Edmund Burke, 1756.

Strangely enough, the science they are trusting in is about three hundred years behind the times. If their science conforms with what their senses tell them, they are subscribing to Newtonian views developed during the seventeenth century. This mechanistic science leads us to view humans as machines that respond to internal and external stimuli, each living in a separate corner of a larger machine: the physical universe. Such a view leads us to believe that we are completely separate, self-animating beings. Our bodies house brains, but our thoughts are only side products of our physical machines; consciousness, free will, divine purpose, and Essence are superfluous at best. The mechanistic view has led us to try and predict and control nature rather than harmonize with it. We strive rather than surrender.

Lao Tsu in his Tao Te Ching shares an invaluable piece of wisdom: “The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.

“I wondered, years later, if my mother knew what would happen, in the way that only mothers know about their children. I don’t mean that she knew what would happen, exactly. My parents, such as they were, what knowledge they had about the world, could never imagine it. How the world would consume me, how perfect strangers would treat my body like a science experiment. They had no idea that whatever was going on with me was a “medical issue” to the outside world, or that what should have been my private business would be used to continue a public conversation about gender and biological sex that the world had been having for thousands of years.

We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body - King Lear.