Do Cosmic Cycles Drive Some Biological Processes?

Category: Health Yourself Sunday, 07 October 2012 Views: 1985

David R. Hamilton PhD

Have you ever heard of the word, ‘Chronobiology?’

It is basically the science that describes how biological processes adapt to solar and lunar cycles. It’s why you sleep and wake and even why you get jet lag. It even covers photosynthesis and why some animals hibernate.

As the earth spins, the sun moves across the sky. Most people think that the sun is actually moving across the sky but it is really the earth that is spinning. But this periodic transit of the sun activates and deactivates the CLOCK gene (short for Circadian Locomotor Output Cycles Kaput), leading to secretion of the hormone ‘melatonin’ from the pineal gland.

You’d be forgiven for thinking, ‘so what?’ Well, melatonin is the hormone that is responsible for you sleeping and waking. As melatonin rises you get sleepy. As it falls you find yourself more awake. It goes up and down like clockwork, and is ultimately synched with the rotation of the earth.

If you fly to another time zone, your melatonin rhythm is out of synch with your natural rhythm, which is tuned to where you live. For instance, you might arrive at 4pm local-time after a 10-hour flight but your body clock thinks it’s midnight. Your melatonin levels are higher than everyone else’s, so while they’re all wide-awake, you’re feeling pretty tired.

It takes a few days for your levels to entrain (or fall in synch) with where you have travelled to and that’s when you’re officially over your let jag.

Enough of the earth and sun for now! What about the moon? There’s strong symbolism connecting the moon to women. Carol P. Christ, a writer on women’s spirituality and feminist theology, wrote,

“Our great symbol for the Goddess is the moon, whose three aspects reflect the three stages in women’s lives and whose cycles of waxing and waning coincide with women’s menstrual cycles.”

Indeed, there’s now strong evidence that the period of the moon is also synched with women’s menstrual cycles. Around 28% of women have been found to have their periods around the 4 days either side of a new moon, as compared with 14% at any other time slice in the month.

I find all this kind of information really fascinating. I have always enjoyed astronomy. One of my favourite things to do is lie on the grass on a clear night and look up at the stars. I have even wondered about astrology, whether heavenly movements can in some way be related to our lives. I know most scientists are very skeptical about the subject. I personally don’t think we should be so quick to judge.

It’s not actually possible to disentangle human biology from the movements of the sun and moon and the rotation of the earth. These, in turn, are affected by, or are at least in synch with, larger rhythms and cycles. I don’t profess to know that much about astrology, nor how it works, but I personally don’t think anyone should dismiss the subject without a thorough understanding of these larger cycles.

I did have a go at calculating my own chart….a long process and would have been a lot easier had I just used a computer rather than an ephemeris, but then again I do like to know what is being calculated. To me, it’s a map of the heavens according to my time of birth and the coordinates of where I was born. Could that map in some way have a bearing on some of the body’s rhythms? I don’t think anyone has actually researched it like that. I’d be curious to see what they’d come up with.

But coming back to why I wrote this blog entry. I wanted to really just point out that the spinning of the earth, the orbit of the moon, and even the movement of the earth around the sun, can be thought of as forces of destiny, in that we can predict these cosmic movements with astonishing accuracy from the moment a person is born for the rest of their lives.

So in this way, it is possible to predict some of a person’s biology at any date in the future. All you would need to know is their coordinates so you can work out the position of the sun in the sky.

I find that kind of cool.

I covered the subject of chronobiology in chapter 1 of my book, ‘Is Your Life Mapped Out?’. Please forgive the blatant promotion of the book – I’ve never been one for promoting my own stuff (sound of publisher rapping my knuckles) – but I’m just so absolutely fascinated with the whole subject of destiny, free will, consciousness, the meaning of life, and how our thoughts create our reality, and want to shout about it from the highest mountaintops.

Please feel free to help me get the subject out.

While writing his first book, David taught chemistry and ecology at James Watt College of Further and Higher Education and tutored chemistry at Glasgow University.

Now a bestselling author of 6 books published by Hay House, he offers talks and workshops that fuse science, the mind, and spiritual wisdom. David writes a regular blog for the Huffington Post.

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