Evoguía: Mind Over Matter

Throughout history, Man has sought to improve himself. One of the few animals on Earth to use tools, and the only animal to use tools in non-survival activities, Man has often dedicated himself to the improvement of himself, and of the species.

But tools aren't the only thing Man has used to this end. Over the years, individuals have used the power of their own minds to influence their bodies. Through methods of meditation, Yogis and Medicine Men have taught their bodies to alter, and even stop, their heartbeat, and essentially put themselves into suspended animation. Often their methods included mind-altering drugs which, when combined with meditation, created a hypnotic state that allowed them to ignore pain, and even to suppress the body's reactions to pain (its reflex and autonomic damage repair systems).

Regular practice has also taken a hand in allowing individuals to control their bodies in unusual ways. In the South Pacific, island divers have learned through regular practice to suppress the automatic reflex that forces the body to breathe when starved of oxygen. Through suppression of this reflex, divers can stay submerged for more than 5 minutes as they harvest pearls and other objects from the ocean.

These are all documented facts, and they demonstrate the amazing capabiity of the human body to expand its abilities past the theoretical limits of human performance and control. In the past, the world was content to acknowledge these unique individuals and their abilities, knowing that they would be the exception, not the rule, in human abiity.

However, today scientists are studying gene therapy... the process of altering the DNA in the human body in such a way as to cure diseases, improve mental and physical ability, improve longetivity, and even to alter appearance. Cloning, the process of duplicating an organism at the DNA level, is making legitimate strides, and has been demonstrated with animals. Suddenly, the possibiity of purposely altering the body to a particular feature or ability seems more likely to be the rule, and not the exception, in the future.

One of today's modern tools for accessing the mind is Biofeedback. Using monitors that record brain waves in real time, scientists can use that data to determine which parts of the brain are active during certain tasks. Police lie-detector tests are biofeedback machines that measure the body's physical responses to questions, to determine when a person is concealing the truth. An interesting side-effect of biofeedback equipment is the fact that subjects can often learn how to consciously alter the readings in a deliberate way.

Evoguía is the story of a scientist that has studied the more traditional methods of meditation, hypnosis and training to improve the body, and tries to combine those with modern biofeedback techniques, to more easily create the mind-body connection that allows an individual to influence the behavior of their own bodies. Although the biofeedback equipment in the story is slightly ahead of our present technology (I make reference to sophisticated 3-D monitors), everything else involved in the process I outline is based on documented processes of hypnosis, meditation and mental exercises, as well as the demonstrated capabilities of the human mind and body to influence and retrain itself.

My main intent, in writing Evoguía, was to point out that mucking around with DNA isn't necessarily the only way to improve the species. In fact, as complex as DNA is, I believe we may be better off looking into some of the methods I describe in Evoguía to improve the mind and body. In the novel, four volunteer subjects try her method and show marked success at augmenting their physiologies. Of course, in the novel this turns out to be a springboard for some very unexpected developments, which ultimately have worldwide, generation-spanning consequences. But what would you expect from such a ground-breaking achievement?

Which brings me to my secondary intent in writing this story: That sometimes it isn't the achievement, but the reaction to it, that dictates how good or bad it is.

This is one of the few stories I've written in which the race of some of the characters actually means something in the context of the story. I do not purposely set out to create characters that would be, specifically, African, Latino, Indian, Asian, etc, in my novels (although many of them do have African-Americans as leads)... and in most cases, my stories do not have strong racial undertones, making the characters' race or nationality a purely decorative part of the story.

However, once I had originally chosen the main characters for Evoguía, I saw the parallels between the conflicts in the story, and racial issues common to the U.S., and I had to take advantage of them. This does not mean that the story is racially charged or dominated, but that the subject of rascism is an acknowledged undertone of the story, and is addressed by the characters.

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