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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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18 Jul 2024
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A philosopher’s 350-year-old trick to get people to change their minds is now backed up by psychologists

 

The 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal is perhaps best known for Pascal’s Wager which, in the first formal use of decision theory, argued that believing in God is the most pragmatic decision. But it seems the French thinker also had a knack for psychology. As Brain Pickings points out, Pascal set out the most effective way to get someone to change their mind, centuries before experimental psychologists began to formally study persuasion:

 

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

 

Put simply, Pascal suggests that before disagreeing with someone, first point out the ways in which they’re right. And to effectively persuade someone to change their mind, lead them to discover a counter-point of their own accord. Arthur Markman, psychology professor at The University of Texas at Austin, says both these points hold true.

“One of the first things you have to do to give someone permission to change their mind is to lower their defenses and prevent them from digging their heels in to the position they already staked out,” he says. “If I immediately start to tell you all the ways in which you’re wrong, there’s no incentive for you to co-operate. But if I start by saying, ‘Ah yeah, you made a couple of really good points here, I think these are important issues,’ now you’re giving the other party a reason to want to co-operate as part of the exchange. And that gives you a chance to give voice your own concerns about their position in a way that allows co-operation.”

Markman also supports Pascal’s second persuasive suggestion. “If I have an idea myself, I feel I can claim ownership over that idea, as opposed to having to take your idea, which means I have to explicitly say, ‘I’m going to defer to you as the authority on this.’ Not everybody wants to do that,” he adds.

In other words, if it wasn’t enough that Pascal is recognized as a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, it seems he was also an early psychologist.

 

 

Original article here

12 Jul 2024
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Everyday Philosophy: Is it better to forget your past or keep revisiting it?

 

I have conflicting thoughts about letting go of the past and repressing negative feelings. Does documenting our bad experiences in personal writing, a diary, or poetry actually help us in the long run?

~ Dee, US

 

 

 

 

Immanuel Kant had a manservant named Martin Lampe, whom he cared deeply about. Kant was a strict and austere man, but he committed to his relationships with the resolve of a man whose entire philosophy was based on doing the right thing. For forty years, the two wedded their lives together. The peculiar Kant and his dutiful servant. But then, one day, things turned sour. History is unclear on the details—it might have been drunkenness or theft—but Kant had to let Lampe go. Kant was devastated. Living hand in glove with another human for 40 years is a kind of love, and this was a kind of divorce. And so he pinned a note above his desk saying, “Forget Lampe.” Every day he would not forget to forget Lampe.

Of course, this is ridiculous. You cannot easily force yourself to forget something or someone. In fact, the more you try, the harder it becomes. But you can stop yourself from reliving those memories. This is what lies at the heart of this week’s question. When something bad happens to you — something traumatic, even — how far should we try to move on and how far should we try to unpack our past? I do not have a psychology degree, and I am not a psychotherapist, so I will approach this from a philosophical point of view and ask: How important is our past to our future? Should Kant try to forget Lampe or carry his memory as part of him? Should Dee let go of the past or dig it up and face it down?

To answer that question, we will look at two radically different answers. The first comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, who says that, sometimes, forgetting is an act of self-creation. The second, Edmund Burke, offers a curious, and possibly controversial, opinion: Sometimes reliving our past is a beautiful experience and worthy of that alone.

Nietzsche: Live like the beasts

Philosophers have a curious relationship with animals. Some, like John Stuart Mill, see them as a source of pity. When he wrote, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” he was arguing that human intelligence and higher faculties are what allow us to be supremely happy. But, roughly around the same time as Mill, Nietzsche was arguing the complete opposite. He wrote:

 

Observe the herd, which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today are. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness.

 

There is an innate in-the-momentness to being a beast. They are unworried by the past. They do not care about their past mistakes and wrong turns; they just keep moving forward. The beast is not bowed low by the “invisible and dark burden” of their memory, but rather they live what Nietzsche calls “unhistorically.” Of course, no one can meaningfully live without remembering things to at least some degree. Cows might enjoy chomping on grass all day long, but I am not a cow. I cannot change that. Nietzsche’s answer is a kind of mental realignment and a useful self-help strategy: View the past as a resource to be mined.

You have a whole library of memories. Some are traumatic, and some are happy. Some are pointless, and some are deeply important. For Nietzsche, we should “appropriate or forcibly take from the past” what we can. We use the past and bring it into ourselves like an elixir. But if that past is poison and weakens us, then forget it. Move on.

So, Dee, Nietzsche would ask this: Does your diarizing about your hard past make you better, stronger, and fuller? If yes, go on and do it. Breathe it in and “transform it into blood.” But if it leaves you broken, scared, or worse, forget it.

Burke: The beauty of trauma

 

Writing a century or so before Nietzsche, the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke offers an interesting take on this: What if there’s an aesthetic benefit from remembering our trauma? For Burke, the “sublime” is an aesthetic experience that is “capable of producing delight — not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror — which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all passions. Its object is the sublime.” The sublime is when we stand at the foot of a huge, crashing waterfall or in the middle of a flashing thunderstorm. It’s the booming chant of a stadium in song, and you’re staring at the enormity of the night’s sky. It’s appreciating the terrible from a safe position.

Traumatic experiences and a broken past are terrible. They are life-wrenching and often life-breaking. But they are in the past. They are no longer, in and of themselves, a threat to us. So, when we dig up and stare at these experiences, we encounter a moment of the sublime. We are pulled to the terrible beauty of the darkness inside of us. We pick at scabs and relive past trauma because we enjoy the aesthetic experience of the matter. The masochistic pleasure we get from digging up our past is not new wisdom — it’s found in ancient philosophy and in Freud — but Burke’s spin is interesting. It treats our past as a kind of artifact to appraise — an item in a museum to enjoy, safely behind the rope.

Dig it up or bury it deep?

As is almost always the case in these kinds of dilemmas, so much depends on what we do not know. We do not know exactly what “bad experiences” Dee is talking about, and we do not know what’s going on in her mind when she relives them.

Ultimately, I think Nietzsche’s advice is sound. It amounts to the saying, “If you’re better off forgetting, do so” and, “If it makes you stronger, remember.” This is true for everyday acts like keeping a diary and talking with friends. It also applies to therapy. Anecdotally, it therapy seems to work. Almost everyone I know who is in or has come through therapy says the experience is a good and healthy one. But the Nietzsche test ought to apply here as well. After six months, a year, or whatever, it’s useful to ask, “Am I a better person after talking about all this?” If not, then perhaps it’s time to try something else. Perhaps it’s time to forget instead.

 

 

Original article here

09 Jun 2024
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The Story Of Parasitic Worms In The Web Of Life

 

I remember the German toilets. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why they manufactured them the way they did. From the toilets in the trains to the toilets in the older houses to the toilets in many of the older/cheaper hotels I stayed in in the 1970s and 1980s, the toilets were absolutely weird.

Instead of sitting over a bowl filled with water, into which one would poop, thus instantly dropping the stuff into water where it couldn’t again be smelled, when you sat on a German toilet you sat about 8 to 10 inches above a porcelain platform that was totally dry. At the very rear of the toilet was about a three-inch-diameter water drain.

When you pooped, your excrement would lay flat on the platform. You could smell it throughout the room. You could poke it with a stick or carefully examine it, if you were so inclined, or even scoop it out of the toilet if, for example, your doctor needed to examine it. Or heavens knows what else.

When you pulled the flush lever (or chain attached to the tank high up on the wall), the water would flush in from the front and wash the stuff off the platform, into the little water hole in the back, and down the drain. But until you pulled that lever or chain, there it was for the world to see.

And, over time, I noticed all those toilets vanishing. I lived in Germany for a year in the late 80s, and by then they were mostly gone; now you only find them in the oldest of buildings, and even there usually they’ve been replaced with systems that we’d recognize here.

That was when I learned why the Germans (and many other European countries) had these platform style toilets dating all the way back to Thomas Crapper’s popularization of the flush toilet in the late 1800s.

We All Have Intestinal Worms

It turns out that most mammals — including humans — typically have all sorts of intestinal parasites. The smallest and most helpful are the famous Acidophilus bacteria that help our gut digest food and absorb nutrients, but they’re invisible. The largest and most obnoxious are the various worms, the larger and more obvious ones being the hookworm and the tapeworm.

Up until the mid-20th century, there weren’t many drugs that would kill intestinal parasites in people without pretty severe (and sometimes even fatal) side effects, and food sanitation was such that even if a person did kill off all their intestinal parasites, they’d just get re-infected.

On the other hand, there were a number of well-known ways to hold down the number of parasites, to reduce the intensity and effect of their residence in one’s gut. Mainly these were referred to as purges, mostly harsh laxatives like the herb senna, combined with a sharp bitter (black walnut hull and wormwood were most common) that would cause the worms to let-go from the intestinal wall, and thus be flushed out with everything else as the laxative did its job.

So, the “lay and display” or “continental shelf” toilets actually had a purpose. People would take a look at their poop, and if they saw a visible mass of hookworms, roundworms, etc., or a lot of the rice-like segments indicating a tapeworm infection, they’d do a purge that week, which would hold down the worm population for a few months.

Now that our food supply is clean of these parasites, and we have a pretty good number of antibiotic-class drugs that are also anti-parasitic, worms in the gut are rare, and the need to examine one’s stool has vanished.

But, We May Have Traded One Problem For Another 

The main story of modern, literate, technological culture, regardless of where it is in the world, the color of the people, or the language spoken, is that humans are a species apart.

Every culture has a story about it. We were uniquely created separate from all other animals, as in the Jewish and Christian stories of a creator who made us from the soil. We were brought here from Sirius, the Dog Star, according to the Dogon tribe in Africa. We descended from the sun, we are fallen gods, we sprung full-formed from the bud of a sacred lotus.

In virtually every creation story, humans are not part of nature. We’re separate, apart, unique, different, and not bound by the rules of nature. We wear clean clothes, pride ourselves on clean homes and offices, keep dirt (nature) away from our bodies, out of our food, and away from our homes. Because, of course, we are not part of nature — we’re separate from it.

This mentality is killing us off at levels from the most macro — global climate change that may render our planet uninhabitable — to the micro — our individual bodies. The best estimates from a variety of scientists and scientific bodies is that for somewhere between 20 and 100 years our population load on the planet has been so great that it’s unsustainable, and destroying the biosphere that supports us. But during that same time, odd things have been happening with our individual bodies.

Three generations ago, only one in 10,000 people had inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), Crohn’s disease was rare, and multiple sclerosis was virtually unknown to most people. Today 1 in 250 people has IBS, Chron’s Disease is widespread, and most people know somebody who has or is related to somebody who has MS. Ditto for psoriasis. Why? We see similar numbers with asthma, lupus, and a whole host of other autoimmune disorders.

Turns out it may all have to do with parasites: bugs, dirt, and — most amazing — worms.

Could Worms Be The Cure For our IBS, Crohn’s and MS Epidemics? 

Back in the 1990s, gastroenterologist Dr. Joel Weinstock was editing a book on parasitic worms, also known as helminths. As Moises Valasquez-Mahoff documented in The New York Times Magazine in the June 29, 2008 issue, Dr. Weinstock noticed that as humans have become more and more successful at ridding themselves of parasites — particularly intestinal worms — we developed a whole host of conditions that seemed to be associated with inflammation (particularly of the bowel).

Noting, “We’re part of our environment; we’re not separate from it,” he wondered if reintroducing some of the less pathogenic parasites humans evolved coexisting with into people’s guts could resolve some of these conditions.

Using Trichuris suis, a worm endemic to pigs — and commonly infecting, without complications, pig farmers — Dr. Weinstock and others conducted a number of studies over several years, infecting people experiencing a wide variety of diseases with Tricuris.

The results were nothing short of startling. As Velasquez-Manoff reported in the Times Magazine:

 

After ingesting 2500 microscopic T. suis eggs at 3-week intervals for 24 weeks, 23 of 29 Crohn’s patients responded positively. Twenty-one went into complete remission. In the second study, 13 of 30 ulcerative colitis patients improved compared with 4 in a 24- person placebo group. … Trials using T. suis eggs on patients with multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s and hay fever are beginning in the United States, Australia, and Denmark, respectively. In Germany, scientists are planning studies on asthma and food allergies. Other European scientists, meanwhile, plan to replicate many of these experiments with Necator americanus, a human hookworm.”

 

Meanwhile, a British scientist — Dr. David Pritchard of the University of Nottingham — working in Papuea New Guinea in the 1980s, noticed that people there were commonly infected with a bit larger and more commonly considered a gross parasite, the Necator americanus, or common hookworm.

This is a worm that can enter the body through food, but more commonly does through the skin — people often get it from bathing in infected water or walking barefoot on dirt infected with the worm’s larvae. The larvae burrow through the skin, get into the bloodstream, migrate to the lungs where they get coughed up and swallowed. When they hit the small intestine, they turn into full-blown worms that attach themselves to the wall of the small intestine.

It was one of the more common parasites that people had up until the past few generations, with a severe hookworm infection causing anemia and even death.

Hookworms’ Unique Ability To Modulate The Human Immune System

But, Dr. Pritchard noticed, the people infected with it had virtually none of the autoimmune diseases like asthma and hay fever that had come to plague England since that nation went on a sanitation binge after World War II. Apparently, the worms produced a substance that modulated the human immune system, toning it down enough to keep our bodies from attacking the worms, but in the process also keeping our bodies from attacking our own cells and organs (the definition of an auto-immune disease).

So, as Elizabeth Svoboda documented in the July 1, 2008, New York Times:

 

In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would infiltrate his system.

The itch when they cross through your skin is indescribable,’ he said. ‘My wife was a bit nervous about the whole thing.’”

 

After infecting himself to demonstrate the relative safety of the parasites, he got a grant from the British health service to do a double-blind placebo-controlled trial on allergy-suffering volunteers who were either given capsules containing worms or containing sugar. The results were startling. As Svoboda wrote in the Times:

 

Trial participants raved about their allergy symptoms disappearing. Word about the study soon appeared online among chronic allergy sufferers, and a Yahoo group on ‘helminthic therapy’ sprung up.

‘Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them,’ Dr. Pritchard said.”

 

Svoboda notes that, as the result of the publicity surrounding Pritchard’s successful 2006 clinical trials, there are even clinics springing up in third-world countries to cater to Americans and Europeans who want to get cured of their asthma, hay fever, psoriasis, or other autoimmune diseases by being infected with hookworms.

The fact is that we are not a species apart from all others on planet Earth. There’s ten times as much bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic DNA in your body as there is DNA from your own cells. We evolved on this planet along with every other form of life, and are designed to be a seamless part of the whole, a thread in the delicate web of life.

When we remove ourselves from that web of life, we do so at our own peril.

 

 

Original article here

31 May 2024
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Once Upon A Place In Today’s Mythic Stories

 

Two ideas feature at the core of all quest stories: these are the Abyss and the World Journey.

The Abyss is one of humanity’s oldest and most tenacious ideas that has been used for millennia to describe a place that is deep, inaccessible, extremely dangerous, and somehow at the core of understanding. In some ancient texts, it is synonymous with the deep ocean and is often portrayed as the sea in films today. But its broader meaning encompasses all the dark, deep places we go when we embark on an adventure to find answers. It’s where the obstacles lie and the challenges are found, often in the form of a beast or monster that must be overcome. The Abyss shapes the idea of what a challenge means.

The World Journey is a much newer term, adapted from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. You may be familiar with the storyline, or plot, of the Hero’s Journey, as it was coined by the Sarah Lawrence College professor of literature in the twentieth century. In it, the hero goes through a sequence of experiences designed to help them face and overcome the many challenges of life, often in the context of a quest or adventure. Campbell presented a structure for this process, and it has become a reliable plot outline for the stages of character development in modern film and stories, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or George Lucas’s Star Wars. Campbell’s process leads toward self-actualization with deliberate stages that create a plot which leads a man (or sometimes a woman) through each step in specific order to experience certain hardships and, ultimately, achieve epiphany or personal growth.

The Abyss and the World Journey — where the heroes go and what they experience — embody the very nature of human change, though many stories can be overlooked as simple child’s play, especially in fairy tales. Heroic knights fighting dragons or a girl carrying a basket to her grandmother? Many could dismiss these as bedtime tales. But while these stories may seem soft, they likely began as images directed squarely at those about to experience a profound life change, such as puberty. These tales and their enchanting symbols have influenced not only our idea of what a hero’s adventure should be, but also of what success looks like and how personal achievement is earned.

Originally etched into stone slabs and scribbled on papyrus, many of these stories and children’s fairy tales have become Disney blockbusters, printed best-sellers, and on-screen hits. The symbol of the Abyss perennially renews itself, showing up at movie theaters every month with its deep-rooted ideas of descent and resurrection, and films inspired by the World Journey, such as Jurassic Park and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? are enjoyed by people of all ages.

Why do they endure? Why are World Journey stories some of the most popular stories shared again and again in cultures around the world? Because we can relate to a situation where a person falls (or is pushed) into a terrifying cave and must survive. We understand what it means to find oneself in a frightening “wilderness” with no support, no skills, no training, no hand to hold. We’ve been there ourselves through adversities such as the loss of a loved one, by being orphaned, being the new kid at school, or failing in a business or relationship. Or as simply as missing a chance, forgetting an idea, or failing to live up to our own (or others’) expectations.

Today’s audiences love the same images that captivated people hundreds of years ago: water, darkness, dragons, beasts, labyrinths, forests, and caverns. These symbols endure because they don’t speak about money or politics. They don’t appeal to our wallets or even, in a direct sense, to our minds. Instead, they speak to our innermost fears and desires, to the obstacles we all face and the meaningful purpose we feel when we overcome them.

The story of a person who falls into the Abyss and is never seen again is not an inspiring story. It teaches nothing except to watch where you walk. But the story of a woman who braves the face of a lion to pluck its whisker, or of a desperate man who crosses the deep water in a small boat from the shore thousands of miles from his home, or of a scientist who plumbs the ocean’s depths in search of meaning and returns home as a much stronger person — that is an intriguing story and one that implies self-fulfillment and maturity.

In other words, Newton’s gravitational notion of “what goes up must come down” is not nearly as old or as relevant as “what goes down must come up.” Such a story inspires and motivates, and it even implies heroism, which is what most of these stories are mistaken for on the surface (and how Campbell named them). But the reason these stories have survived centuries, and in some cases millennia, is not because they celebrate heroism but because they teach that these traits of survival and fulfillment are attainable by everyone, even the most mortal of us. Even the silliest, poorest, most confused, and frightened of us can make changes in our lives to experience not only enlightenment but epiphany. Recognizing this when we have screens in every room, distractions at every turn, and challenges in every aspect of our lives is essential; the quest is not only for the hero, but it is for each of us.

The Value Of A Challenge

The ideas of adversity, hardship, and conflict are not concepts we are naturally drawn to. Parents and caregivers generally try to shield their children from hardship in an attempt to safeguard them from the hurtful obstacles of life and keep them safe. But the process of maturing means facing difficulties head-on rather than avoiding them. While it includes terrible adversity, the purpose of the World Journey is not to scare or punish us, but rather to support our growth, and to do that we must look in the face of that which frightens us the most.

Unfortunately, many of today’s stories of princesses and dragons are sugary and fluffy, diluted shades of what used to be quite powerful symbols. Modern adaptations of fairy tales would have us believe that success is easy  — that if we only wish upon a star or wrinkle our noses our dreams will come true. The original versions, however, showed that change is far more difficult. Original fairy tales guide us down a darker path with frightening beasts and scary forests that no seeker truly wants to walk into.

And I would argue that while those original stories, especially those collected and recorded hundreds of years ago by Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, were indeed dark, frightening, and often overtly violent or callous, they should not be sugared over simply because they are scary, depressing, or harsh. They served a much needed purpose by symbolically painting a reality that most people experienced and still do experience in their lives: namely, challenging situations that push us to our limits and are, in fact, our very best opportunities for change and growth. Those storytellers and parents long ago knew that persistence allows us to become strong and resilient adults. That facing our fears can make us compassionate, forgiving, and joyful. That making difficult decisions instills in us a feeling of accomplishment and maturity. And, that experiences of confusion and uncertainty can open our minds to new ideas and creative expression that allow us as individuals, and as societies, to flourish.

World Journey stories teach us to overcome adversity, but more importantly, they teach us how to experience adversity in the first place. Successful myths, religious texts, and fairy tales — and modern screenplay and film — do not skirt the issue of hardship and conflict, nor do they encourage us to finish the hard work as quickly as possible. The characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter do not face obstacles and beasts simply to advance the plot, but to develop the inner courage and tenacity needed to grow as individuals within society. Mythic stories put us squarely in the middle of the hardest tasks we can imagine, and they force us to work hard, to guess, to take leaps of faith, and to test ourselves to the limit.

They also teach us that it’s worth it to “dive deep” and to experience a change so drastic that it is profound. In fact, though they seem superficial now in the age of animated princesses, the early stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White are popular precisely because they show these challenges, as do the Bible story of Jonah and the Mesopotamian poem of Gilgamesh, which is perhaps the oldest story we’ve ever found. Written more than 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh was an amazingly influential and well-loved character whose journey taught scores of generations of children the meaning of perseverance, curiosity, and spiritual growth. His tale depicts a hero in terribly dire circumstances who does not shrug off hardship but instead plows right through it, diving deep (literally and symbolically) to work through his fear of death. Only after completing difficult tasks and overcoming obstacles does he mature as a person. Of course, he fails to find immortality, but that’s the point.

It’s important to recognize that exploring and understanding these concepts is not only for the experts. In fact, it’s for every person to engage in these questions and to open their minds to the possibilities that exist within human nature and within the self, to explore stories and symbols and push into growth. Curiosity is what drives human transformation, and I invite us all to be curious. To be open and willing to see the metaphor in these stories as chances for personal growth is an opportunity for taking the symbols of storycraft and digging deeper into reflections of self-growth, core purpose, and even epiphany.

 

 

 

Original article here

19 May 2024
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What We Get Wrong About Manifesting

 

 

For years, I allowed my environment to dictate the terms of my life, and I didn’t believe I could produce any meaningful change. This is so often the case when we experience trauma: the pain and shock of the experience take on an exaggerated authority in our minds that is difficult to challenge and frightening to confront. This pain is powerful enough to alter not only our own genes, but, as researchers in the field of epigenetics have discovered, the genes of subsequent generations.

Our minds and bodies organize around preparations to prevent a similar trauma from happening in the future, and in the process, our consciousness becomes caught in reacting to a frightening and unreliable external world, rather than envisioning the changes we can make. In the process, we give away the energy, attention, and focus we ourselves possess to make a real difference in our own lives; we are distracted away from our own power. And without knowing it, we trade our innate self-agency for magical thinking.

It’s a raw deal. And there is oftentimes no one to blame. The good news is that we now have insights into how powerful our mind is and most importantly through neuroscience how we can create the life we want. Fundamentally, we are claiming our self-agency and recognizing the power of neuroplasticity. In lay terms, we are manifesting.

The world can indeed be starkly unfair, and this unfairness can shatter a person’s dreams. And as unfair as I once perceived the world to be, I know today that countless other human beings in this world are treated with greater injustice, on both the individual and systemic levels. The societies they live in have created structural roadblocks to their ability to manifest, whether due to their race, social class, religion, sexual orientation, gender expression, or other arbitrary criteria. Manifesting is not a cure or a fix for all suffering. Like all human activity, it is often limited by countless factors beyond our control and reality, regardless of our intention.

Thus, I see manifesting as, at its heart, a practice of well-being, engagement with the world and living a good life. By practicing it, we cultivate “dispositional optimism,” defined as a generalized tendency to expect good outcomes across important life domains. Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.

Where some may believe that the only measure of a successful manifestation is the material results it delivers, I consider this view to be misguided. The true gift of visualizing our intention again and again is to go through life with a buoyant sense that things will work out for us which liberates us to be both responsive and resilient no matter what our external circumstances bring.

For years, manifesting has long been confined to the same New Age territory as astrology, visions of angels, and reincarnation, full of pseudoscience and platitudes. But, in fact, the practice of manifestation dates back thousands of years. Much of what we associate today with manifesting derives from the Vedic scriptures of the Hindu tradition. In the Mundaka Upanishad, for example, it states, “Whatever world a man of pure understanding envisages in his mind and whatever desires he cherishes, that world he conquers and those desires he obtains” (3.1.10). The Buddha similarly commented on the powerful ability of thoughts to shape our experience of the world when he said, “Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.”

Until recently, it was not possible to scientifically study the concrete processes by which the brain turns intention into reality. But significant developments in brain imaging have revolutionized our ability to watch the brain transform on a cellular, genetic, and even molecular level. We can now speak about manifestation in terms of cognitive neuroscience and the function of large-scale brain networks. This has allowed us to demonstrate that manifesting is neither a get-rich-quick scheme nor a misguided wish-fulfillment system, but part of the brain’s extraordinary ability to change, heal, and remake itself known as “neuroplasticity.”

Neuroplasticity is the general umbrella term for the brain’s ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience. This superpower, molded by experience, repetition, and intention, enables the brain to form new circuits, and to prune away old ones which no longer serve us. By redirecting our attention, we can literally change our brains, creating more gray matter in the very areas that help us learn, perform, and make our dreams come true. As the brain adapts, it makes alterations which can produce dramatic and positive effects on everything from Parkinson’s disease, to chronic pain, to ADHD. And the same neuroplasticity is the engine by which we change our minds and brains through the power of our intention to manifest the reality we envision through practice.

Manifesting is essentially the process of intentionally embedding the thoughts and images of the life we desire into our subconscious allowing various cognitive brain networks to be activated and work in sync. We are all manifesting the intentions stored within our minds in some form already in an untrained and uninformed way and the results are often haphazard, vague, and unfocused at best. To manifest consciously, we must reclaim our inner power to direct our attention. In the process, we must also learn how to harness that power by understanding how it involves us as a species, the physiological mechanisms that allow us to do so as well as the obstacles and false beliefs that limit our power. When we consciously direct our attention towards our desired goals, the images we evoke become important to the brain. The way the images get installed is through a process called “value tagging,” the brain’s way of deciding what is significant enough to be imprinted at the deepest levels of the subconscious.

When we practice visualization, we conjure powerful positive emotions, and these cue the “selective attention” system like a filing clerk to tag the images we desire as highly valuable and associate them with our reward system. Visualization works because, amazingly, the brain does not distinguish between an actual physical experience and one that is intensely imagined.

Once the images are installed in our subconscious, our brain works like a bloodhound to seek opportunities to bring them about in reality, putting the full force of our conscious and subconscious minds behind the search. As the opportunities arise, we notice them and respond, taking the necessary action to further our goal. We repeat this process many, many times and then, we let go of the attachment to the outcome and let things take their natural course.

 

 

 

Original article here

28 Apr 2024
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There’s Power In How We Think About Things

 

When you walk or drive down a city street, what you are seeing all around you are manifestations of thoughts. Every building began as an idea in somebody’s mind.

Someone acquired the land. Someone designed the house. Someone had the idea to organize people together to build the house, either to make money or to live in it. The trees you see were planted for shade in the yard, on the sidewalk, along the street. The pavement that we accept as a natural part of our landscape was conceptualized, designed, engineered, installed, and is maintained via thought.

Thoughts create our physical reality, and they also create our larger reality. During ancient times, when there was an electrical storm, people perceived the thunder and lightning as the voice of a powerful deity.

If somebody got hit by lightning, that proved to others that the person had committed some crime or displeased the deity. When the thunder rumbled loudly nearby, people knelt to the ground and cried out their prayers.

They knew, when they saw the awesome streaks of light across the sky, that they were seeing the finger of their god writing messages or expressing an opinion. Today thunder and lightning are seen and heard as the discharge of electrical energy between ions in the air and the oppositely charged ground.

If somebody is struck by lightning, it is either due to their own stupidity (standing on the golf course with a club in the air) or just bad luck. If the storm is severe, we take cover out of fear of a dangerous natural phenomenon, rather than a wrathful god.

The same event creates a completely different feeling, thought, and behavior in the people who observe it today. The point is, the experience of reality is different, and what makes it different is thought.

A few years ago, I spoke at a conference sponsored by Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After the presentation, my wife, Louise, and I went for a walk through the Old City, down through the Arab Quarter where most of the tourist shops are.

It was a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, but not being Islamic, we doubted this would affect our sightseeing and shopping. It being a very hot May day, Louise was wearing a comfortable pair of walking shorts. As we moved through the streets, one shopkeeper came out of his store and started shouting at Louise, calling her a “Western pig,” a “whore,” and a “blasphemer.” “Don’t you know it’s a holy day, you bitch?” he screamed. “You have no right to show your legs!”

I mention this culture clash because the shopkeeper’s reality was that a woman (who, in Islam, has a different social status than women in most Western cultures) was flagrantly breaking the law.

Louise’s reality held that it was a hot day in a tourist center and she was dressed comfortably in conservative shorts, according to Western standards, and being harassed for it.

My reality told me that a man was displaying bad manners and disrespect for my culture and religion, for women in general, and for another human being in particular, by shouting instead of quietly coming up to us and presenting his case.

We were all correct.

And so now all of humanity is presented with a dizzying set of conflicting realities. What we choose to do about them will determine our future as a species. Consider these various ideas different people might have about life:

  • “We need electricity to be comfortable and maintain our way of life,” or “Producing electricity with fossil fuel is pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to global warming and extremely destructive weather patterns.”
  • “Being able to drive where and when we want to at a low cost is freedom,” or “Americans’  driving habits are feeding the destruction of the planet.”
  • “All of nature is here to serve the needs of humankind,” or “Humans are no more or less important to the planet than any other life-form.”

These ideas are grounded in the stories — the myths of our culture, our paradigms, our beliefs — that form the core of what we tell ourselves is “reality.” Stories, in this context, are anything we add to our original experience that alters what we think is going on, or changes how we think about things.

Since so much of what we call reality is subjective, there are few right or wrong stories; instead, there are useful and not useful stories. This is dependent upon what culture you belong to, your status in your culture, and your relationship to the natural world and vision of the future.

Increasingly, the stories we’ve been telling ourselves for centuries are now moving from the useful to the not useful category. An example of such a story is the biblical order to have as many children as possible. In the days of Noah and Abraham, the tribe with the largest number of young men to create an army was usually the tribe that survived.

“Be fruitful and multiply” was a formula for cultural survival, even though in nearly all cases it then led to “and when you run out of resources and living space, kill off your neighbor and take theirs.”

We’ve rationalized this over the years by saying that this conquering and dominating lifestyle has brought us so many good things: television, visiting the moon, modern appliances, the eradication of many diseases.

Back when the planet had only a few million people on it (the world hit a population of 1 billion during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson), a person could probably have built a case for the value of huge families, growing populations, and the conquest of nearby (or distant) lands. It might have been of questionable morality, but it could have been defended by the norms of a culture that had survival and growth as its primary goals and had not yet hit the limits of nature. Now, however, such stories imperil the very culture from which they’re derived.

The ancient Greeks changed the world and established the foundations of Western Civilization with the idea of integrating democracy and the ownership of enslaved people. In fact, every time a culture has been transformed, since or before then and for better or worse, it’s been because of an idea, an insight, a new understanding of how things are, and of what is possible.

Ideas preceded every revolution, every war, every transformation, and every invention.

So, the good news is that if we re-define our cultural norms, re-tell the stories that make up the reality we follow, then humanity’s behaviors actually can change to conform to the new stories. It starts with us!

 

 

Original article here

23 Apr 2024
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How Did Consciousness Evolve? An Illustrated Guide

 

What is consciousness, and who (or what) is conscious — humans, nonhumans, nonliving beings? Which varieties of consciousness do we recognize? In their book “Picturing the Mind,” Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, two leading voices in evolutionary consciousness science, pursue these and other questions through a series of “vistas” — over 65 brief, engaging texts, presenting some of the views of poets, philosophers, psychologists, and biologists, accompanied by Anna Zeligowski’s lively illustrations.

Each picture and text serves as a starting point for discussion. In the texts that follow, excerpted from the vista “How Did Consciousness Evolve?” the authors offer a primer on evolutionary theory, consider our evolutionary transition from nonsentient to sentient organisms, explore the torturous relation between learning studies and consciousness research, and ponder the origins and evolution of suffering and the imagination.

Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary theory is a deceptively simple theory, which is why many people who have only a cursory acquaintance with it are nevertheless convinced that they fully understand it. Its basic assumptions are indeed simple. The first assumption, which was systematically explored first by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and then by Charles Darwin, is that there was a single ancestor, or very few ancestors, of all living organisms. This is the principle of Descent with modification: all organisms are descended, with modifications, from ancestors that lived long ago.

The second principle, which is central to Darwin’s theory, is the principle of Natural selection: organisms with hereditary variations that render them better adapted to their local environment than others in their population leave behind more offspring. Darwin showed that this simple process, when applied recursively, can account for the evolution of complex organs like the eye, and, with the addition of some plausible auxiliary hypotheses, can explain the diversity of living species and their geographic distribution. In the last paragraph of “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” Darwin summarized his ideas:

 

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less- improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

 

Once he put forward his ideas, various scientists tried to crystallize and summarize Darwin’s view. For example, in the twentieth century, John Maynard Smith suggested that four basic processes underlie evolution by natural selection:

(i) Multiplication: an entity gives rise to two or more others.

(ii) Variation: not all entities are identical.

(iii) Heredity: like usually begets like. Variant X usually begets offspring X, but infrequently begets offspring Y.

(iv) Competition: some heritable variations affect the success of entities in persisting and multiplying more than others.

Although it sounds simple, when we unpack these processes, we appreciate how complex evolutionary theory actually is. There are multiple ways in which reproduction occurs and there are different types of inherited variations. Maynard Smith, like most 20th-century biologists, focused on DNA- based genetic variability, but since the early 2000s, the idea that variations in DNA drive all evolutionary change has been abandoned; it is now recognized that heritable variations in DNA, in patterns of gene expression, in behavior, and in culture are all important. Variation in these hereditary units can arise randomly or can be partially directed because heredity and development can be coupled. For example, stressful conditions during development can induce changes in gene expression that can be transmitted to the next generation. It has also been accepted that there are multiple targets and levels of selection within individuals, between individuals and between lineages, and that organisms have fuzzy boundaries. (Are the symbiotic bacteria in your gut part of you?) Crucially, organisms are not passive subjects of natural selection — they actively construct the environment in which they are selected and bequeath these ecological legacies to their offspring.

 

As evolutionary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard put it: “Genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution.”

 

How, then, should evolutionary analysis proceed? We could start by tracing evolutionary change at the molecular-genetic, physiological-developmental, behavioral, or cultural levels. However, since organisms adjust to changing conditions in the external world and in their own genome by altering their behavior and physiology, cultural and behavioral adaptations frequently precede genetic changes and shape the conditions in which variations are selected. Genetic changes that stabilize or fine-tune the behavioral or developmental changes follow. As evolutionary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard put it: “Genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution.”

In the 21st century, this integrative approach to evolutionary reasoning, which incorporates the effects of variations in DNA, development, behavior, and culture is being embraced by a growing number of biologists, including us.

 

 

 

Evolutionary Transitions

How should we think about the evolutionary transition from non-sentient to sentient organisms? There are several useful ways of carving up the living world and thinking about evolutionary transitions between forms and ways of life. Ecologists distinguish between modes of living such as terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial modes, and study the transitions from water to land or from land to air. In contrast, evolutionary biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have described major evolutionary transitions in terms of qualitative changes in the way information is stored, processed, and transmitted. Examples of such transitions include the transition from single cells to multicellular organisms, and the transition from nonlinguistic communication to communication through symbolic language.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests another way of thinking about broad patterns of life. He distinguishes four progressively sophisticated, hierarchically nested types of selection, which underlie what he calls a “generate-and- test- tower.” Organisms such as bacteria, sponges, and plants, which can adapt evolutionarily through natural selection, dwell on the first floor; the second floor is inhabited by organisms such as snails, fish, and mice, which, in addition to selection during evolutionary history, learn through trial-and-error and selective reinforcement during their lifetime. Organisms that can also select among imagined actions and scenarios, like elephants, dolphins, and great apes, live on the third floor, while human beings, with the extra capacity to select among symbolically represented possibilities and who are subject to cultural selection, live on the fourth.

None of these classifications explicitly mentions sentience. Sentience is, however, central to the view of Aristotle, which we described in the first vista. Aristotle distinguished between three goal-directed and hierarchically nested types of “soul,” or modes of living organization: the “nutritive-reproductive” soul of non-sentient organisms like plants, the goals of which are survival and reproduction; the “sensitive” soul of sentient organisms, whose goals are the fulfillment of desires and appetites; and the “rational” soul of humans, whose goal is to satisfy abstract symbolic values such as justice and beauty. In our book “The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul,” we reframed Aristotle’s hierarchy within the framework of evolutionary theory, and offered a unifying scheme for explaining the evolutionary transitions to life, sentience, and reflectivity.

An Evolutionary-Transition Approach to Consciousness

How can we develop an evolutionary theory of consciousness when there is so much disagreement over what consciousness is and which organisms are conscious? Our way of approaching this question takes as its inspiration the way the Hungarian chemist Tibor Gánti tackled a similar problem, the problem of how life (another elusive notion) originated. Gánti started by compiling a list of capacities that, in spite of the different views about the nature of life, are generally deemed jointly sufficient for the simplest, “minimal” life. He then built a theoretical model of a minimal living system that implements all these capacities.

Following Gánti’s methodology, our first task is to identify a list of capacities that, when all are present, most consciousness researchers would regard as sufficient for an organism to be deemed minimally conscious. Such an organism would be able to perceive, feel, and think, from its own private point of view.

A consensus list of consciousness capacities is a step forward, but identifying each and every capacity may be difficult, and a list does not tell us how they interact to form a conscious being. If we could find a single system-property — an evolutionary marker of consciousness — that indicates that the organism has evolved all the capacities in the consensus list, we would be in a much better position. Finding such a single, diagnostic transition marker would make it possible to identify the simplest evolved conscious being, reconstruct the processes and structures that underlie it, and figure out how they interact. If we can follow the evolution of the marker and therefore the evolution of consciousness, we can discover when and how the conscious mode of being originated.

As we will see, evolutionary transition markers to the living, the living conscious, and (tentatively) the living-conscious-rational modes of being (the three Aristotelian “souls”) have been suggested. Each of these evolutionary transition markers entails a consensus list of capacities that are sufficient to allow us to ascribe the corresponding mode of being to an entity.

Learning and Consciousness: An Unlikely Relation?

Is there a single, tangible property that when present in an entity means that all the characteristics of consciousness are in place — an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness? We believe that we have identified such a marker. Our marker is a form of open-ended associative learning, which we call unlimited associative learning (UAL).

Before we describe this marker and argue our case, we must say a few words about learning and about the torturous relation between learning studies and consciousness research in the 20th century.

Learning, an experience-dependent change in behavior, requires (i) that a sensory stimulus leads to a change in the internal state of the system; (ii) that a memory trace of the internal change is stored through a process that involves positive or negative reinforcement; and (iii) that later exposures to the same or a similar stimulus are manifest as changes to the threshold of the behavioral response. Characterizing these processes, the relations between them, and the mechanisms underlying them in living organisms is a complex endeavor. Just as with evolutionary processes, where the nature of reproduction, variation production, and selection have to be qualified, the study of learning requires that we consider the kinds of stimuli that are attended to, the mechanisms of storage and of recall, the relevant rewards and punishments and the ways the organism responds.

 

Nineteenth-century biologists thought that being able to learn by making new behavioral adjustments or modifying old ones was a criterion of consciousness.

 

Nineteenth-century biologists thought that being able to learn by making new behavioral adjustments or modifying old ones was a criterion of consciousness. This way of thinking changed dramatically with the advent of behaviorism, a strand of experimental psychology that dominated the English-speaking world from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1970s. Behaviorists redefined psychology as the study of learned behavior, scornfully objecting to any mention of terms like consciousness or mind. An influential psychology textbook from 1953 explained that notions like “mind” and “ideas” “are being invented on the spot for the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations. . . . Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them” (B. F. Skinner, “Science and Human Behavior”).

 

 

The behaviorists focused on two types of associative learning. In the first, classical or Pavlovian conditioning (named after the physiologist Ivan Pavlov), an animal learns that something it perceives, which is of no relevance to it (a “neutral stimulus” in the behaviorists’ jargon), predicts a stimulus that invariably accompanies a reward or a punishment such as food or pain, to which it reflexively responds. For example, the smell of food that accompanies the reward (food) elicits the salivation reflex in a hungry dog. The sound of a buzzer (or bell), on the other hand, normally does not elicit salivation — it is “neutral” with respect to salivation. However, it will eventually elicit salivation, even when there is no smell of food, if the buzz repeatedly occurs before the smell. Pavlov measured the internal state of the dog by counting the number of drops of saliva at different stages of learning.

In the second type of associative learning, Skinnerian conditioning (named after the psychologist B. F. Skinner), an animal learns what to do in order get a reward or avoid a punishment (known in behaviorist jargon as positive or negative reinforcement). For example, a hungry rat can learn to press a lever in its cage if this action is followed by the delivery of food. In general, actions that are followed by a positive (or negative) outcome will be more (or less) likely to occur in the future, under similar circumstances.

Skinner’s experiments, like those of Pavlov, were conducted in drastically impoverished and artificial conditions, totally different from those in which animals live in the real world. Nevertheless, Skinner suggested that complex behavior, including the “verbal behavior” of humans (this was his term for language comprehension and production), is the result of a sequence of reinforcements.

 

Skinner’s experiments, like those of Pavlov, were conducted in drastically impoverished and artificial conditions, totally different from those in which animals live in the real world.

 

The increasing tensions between the obvious limitations and the grandiose pretensions of behaviorism eventually led to its demise. However, the ongoing study of associative learning led to new insights. For example, it was discovered that learning depends on how surprising, how unexpected, the predictive neutral stimulus or action is of the reinforcement. A totally predictable stimulus requires no learning, whereas one that does not match expectations is newsworthy. Learning in animals, on which machine- learning algorithms are patterned, involves the updating and minimization of mismatched expectations.

The study of associative learning today includes the investigation of the underlying cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms in ecologically relevant conditions such as the social conditions in which animals learn from each other. It is a rich and productive research program, which is no longer constrained by the behaviorists’ maxims. There is an irony in our (qualified) return to the 19th-century suggestion that open-ended associative learning is an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness, the very term that behaviorists tried to purge from psychology.

 

Of course I do as I’m told.

Hunger and shock are great reinforcers

Push lever and

Obey the rule

And NEVER

Show my inner soul

~ Jane Monet

 

Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) Is the Evolutionary Transition Marker of Consciousness

What is the evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness? Following Gánti’s methodology we started by compiling a consensus list of consciousness characteristics based on the work of psychologists, philosophers, and neurobiologists:

  • Binding/unification: seeing the apple as a composite whole (red, round, smooth) yet with discernable features
  • Global accessibility and broadcast: back and forth interactions among specialized brain modules allowing comparisons, discriminations, generalizations, and evaluations that inform decision-making
  • Selective attention and active exclusion: excluding or amplifying signals according to past and present context
  • Intentionality (aboutness; representation): the mapping (representations) of body, world, action, and their relations
  • Integration through time: Holding on to incoming information long enough for it to be integrated and evaluated, so the present can be said to have duration
  • Flexible evaluative system and goals: evaluating perceptions and actions as rewarding or punishing according to context
  • Agency and embodiment: inherent spontaneous activity and goal-directed behavior
  • A sense of self: registration of self/other and a stable perspective

On the basis of this list, we suggest that the evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness, which is the within-lifetime analog of unlimited heredity in evolutionary time, is Unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL is the within-lifetime analog of unlimited heredity in evolutionary time. An organism with a capacity for UAL can, during its own lifetime, go on learning from experience about the world and about itself in a practically unrestricted way.

 (i) It can distinguish between novel complex patterns of stimuli and actions. For example, it can learn to navigate in a new terrain — to discriminate between different types of animals, between different routes leading to food and shelter. The learned patterns are genuinely novel: they are not reflex-eliciting patterns, nor have they been learned in the past.

(ii) It manifests second-order learning: Once it learns a new complex image or a new pattern of action, these patterns can themselves become associated with new compound patterns, allowing the organism to build up chains of associative links.

(iii) It can learn even if there is a time gap between the “neutral” complex stimulus and the reinforcement (the reward or punishment). Such “trace conditioning” requires that the memory of the neutral predictive stimulus is stored even when the reinforcing stimulus is transiently unperceived.

(iv) The value of a learned pattern can be readily changed: the reward or punishment value of a particular stimulus or a particular action is not fixed. It can change when the conditions change. Something that once predicted punishment (e.g., danger) can predict reward (safety) when conditions alter.

If an animal shows unlimited associative learning (that is, practically unrestricted learning) it means that all the capacities of consciousness are in place. Unification and differentiation are needed to construct compound stimuli (an apple is perceived as both red and round); global accessibility is needed to enable integration of information from multiple systems (e.g., the visual, olfactory, memory and evaluative systems — the red apple has a specific fragrance and following past experience is expected to be rewarding); selective attention is needed to pick these stimuli out from the background (e.g., ignore green or badly smelling apples and pick only the red fragrant ones); intentionality is needed, since the system maps or represents stimuli and the relations between them (e.g., the animal has a cognitive map of its environment); integration over time is needed for being able to learn even when there is a time gap between the neutral and rewarding stimulus; a flexible evaluation system is needed to make context-dependent learning possible (e.g., alter the value of a stimulus from punishing to rewarding); embodied agency is needed for exploring the world and for learning associations between actions; a “self,” entailing a stable point of view, is needed to compare stimuli and actions from the same perspective, and self/world distinction is needed so that the organism will not confuse stimuli generated by its own actions with stimuli generated by the external world. An animal with UAL is able to exhibit many complex behaviors, and can attain many different goals. Moreover, there is evidence that an animal can manifest UAL only when it is conscious. UAL is therefore a good transition marker for consciousness.

The Origins of Suffering

Ecclesiastes said: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Knowledge and suffering are also entangled in the myth of original sin, in Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon,” and in the myth of the eternally suffering Prometheus who blessed humans with the civilizing power of fire. What was the price of the knowledge-through-feelings that UAL inflicted on animals?

Like all great innovations, UAL opened a Pandora’s box of new challenges and problems. We believe that the greatest problem stemmed from overlearning: since parts of a sensory image can have different values (neutral, beneficial, life-threatening) in different conditions, false alarms are very likely. For example, for a fish, a particular pattern of vibrations combined with a particular pattern of colors can indicate a dangerous predator, while the color pattern alone and the vibration pattern alone may sometimes be associated with a nonthreatening passing animal. But since the rapid flight that the vibration or color pattern elicits is less costly than deathly injury, flight is preferable even if the vibration or color patterns turns out to be nonthreatening on most occasions. It is surely better to err on the side of caution. Randolph Nesse called the adaptive logic of erring on the side of caution the “smoke detector principle.”

 

Chronic anxiety and stress are costly, leading not only to a waste of time and energy but also to a greater propensity for painful diseases.

 

The price of overreacting includes, however, anxiety, paranoia, neuroses. Chronic anxiety and stress are costly, leading not only to a waste of time and energy but also to a greater propensity for painful diseases. Nevertheless, the cost-benefit balance is on the side of knowledge — a wise, suffering animal is better off than a nonsuffering, doomed fool.

Animals that could mitigate the high costs of UAL without giving up its benefits would have a great advantage. The evolutionary elaboration of the ubiquitous stress response and the evolution of active forgetting are some of the ameliorating mechanisms that we expect to find in all associatively learning animals, and in particular, in UAL animals. Suffering was not eliminated, but it became more controlled.

In the last paragraph of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin wrote: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” It was in the Cambrian, we suggest, that the great war of nature began to involve suffering — the subjective experiencing of the anguish and pain that is entangled with knowledge.

The Evolution of Imagination

The first conscious animals explored and learned about their world and the effects of their actions by seeking the satisfactions of food, sex, and social bonding and avoiding the pains and fears imposed by predators, deprivation, and disease. Their explorations were guided by what they learned in the past, which, in turn, led to further learning and exploration.

Driven by learning, consciousness and cognition evolved further. In some lineages, selection for increased learning capacity led to the gradual evolution of imaginative, dreaming animals. They did not just learn about aspects of their world; they also learned about how events unfolded in time. They recalled past events— they could recall when and where a particular event happened, and they planned ahead by recombining aspects of their recollections and evaluating the planned, imagined event. These animals, which inhabit the third floor in Dennett’s generate-and-test tower, could imagine different scenarios and choose between them.

 

 

Here is a famous example: Western scrub jays cache (in many locations) different types of foodstuff, such as tasty worms that rot within a short time, and less-favored peanuts that stay edible for much longer. They later remember not only where they cached the different foods, but also when: they recover worms soon after caching, and peanuts when they return to feed long after caching. Interestingly, they are aware of the possibility of theft by other jays. They re- cache food if they were watched while caching, but only if they themselves are thieves!

There are many examples of imaginative planning by birds and mammals, and there are more limited examples of the imaginative ability of some fish, bees, and cuttlefish. It is likely that imagination evolved gradually and to different degrees in different species. Curiously, most imaginative animals are social. Are their social sensibilities related to their imaginative capacities? Whatever the answer and however striking animal imagination is, it remains in the private domain. The ability to communicate about what one imagines is peculiar to humans.

 

 

 

Original article here

30 Mar 2024
Comments: 0

Herb Power

 

They’re the Yorkshire Terriers of the vegetable world. Herbs may be small, but they make a lot of noise, nutritionally speaking. Indeed, if you want to do one thing to your diet to improve it fast, adding a handful of herbs to meals could really make a difference.

The reason is herbs are packed full of so-called volatiles, essential oils with antioxidant, disease-fighting properties. While we’ve all heard about blueberries and antioxidant power, a study published in the Journal of Nutrition, found that some herbs are actually higher in antioxidants than fruit, including berries and other vegetables. You can tell this by just rubbing a lettuce leaf between your fingers. It goes sticky. Do this to a leaf of basil and you can smell the precious oil on your fingers.

These volatile oils have seen herbs prized for their medicinal properties for centuries. The Romans first discovered coriander and used it as a preservative. Parsley is an anti-bacterial. Mint tea is a digestive, common all across the Middle East to this day. Dill, another digestive, has long been used in gripe water for babies.

Modern science is catching up. Research increasingly backs the use of herbs in protecting us against disease and easing some symptoms. For example, a recent study by the University of Adelaide demonstrated the effectiveness of mint in reducing the symptoms of IBS. Researchers found that mint activates anti-pain channels in the colon and reduces inflammation.

So, how do you use herbs to turbo charge your health? The first thing to say is those ancient jars of dried herbs that you may have at the back of a kitchen cupboard, the ones that smell (and taste) like dust, probably aren’t going to do it. In the same way that fruits and vegetables lose their vitamins with storage, so too herbs are most powerful at their freshest.

Drying herbs reduces their vitamin and mineral content considerably, with water-soluble vitamins such as B and C especially affected. Alternatives include freeze dried, frozen, fresh cut and fresh potted. Freeze-dried and frozen are convenient, but for the best nutritional bang for your buck, go for fresh cut or potted.

Potted Or Bagged Herbs?

To decide between potted or bagged, it can help to consider which family they come from. The carrot family includes parsley, dill and tricky coriander. None of these are likely to regrow once you have removed the leaves, so you may have to bin them. Buying ready cut, sold in bunches or bags, may therefore be a better option.

The mint family includes mint, basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme and sage. These are tougher and will continue to grow if you avoid cutting whole branches off from the base and instead pinch off leaves higher up. Potted versions will last best if you don’t employ a nuclear winter approach and strip them of all leaves. Keep enough leaves for the plant to generate energy to keep growing.

Chives, from the onion family, and tarragon from the lettuce family will work potted or cut.

How Keep Potted Herbs Alive

There is an obvious problem with fresh herbs, often bought from a supermarket; they tend to die on you. That lush bush of basil or coriander you put in your basket turns into a sad, wilted mess of limp yellowing or blackened leaves. James Seymour from The Fresh Herb Company is sympathetic. “Coriander in particular is very temperamental,” he admits.

According to Seymour, the most common mistake we all make when buying and storing fresh herbs are over-watering and not keeping them warm enough. Basil or rosemary come from countries with a Mediterranean climate. Sticking either plant in a saucer of water on a drafty windowsill is a quick way to kill them. Rule one: keep the soil relatively dry. Rule two: keep them above 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

To extend the life of cut herbs, treat them like cut flowers. “Stick them in a mug of water on the fridge door next to the milk,” suggests Seymour.

HERB POWER: THE TOP FIVE

 

Parsley has more vitamin C in it, gram for gram, than most citrus fruits. It is therefore a fantastic immune booster. Two tablespoons of fresh, chopped parsley also contains 150% of your RDA of vitamin K, which is important for bone health. It is a source of both vitamin A and folate. The latter is especially important for pregnant women or those trying to conceive a baby, as this has been shown to reduce the incidence of spina bifida in babies. Parsley is a diuretic, which means it helps you get rid of unwanted water, so could help with bloating. It is known to be an anti-inflammatory and is a traditional remedy for symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.

How to use it: Parsley tea can taste a bit grassy, so the fresh herb is best added to soups and sauces. Chopped into bulgar wheat, it is the dominant flavor in Middle Eastern tabouleh.

 

Basil is packed full of flavonoids, which have been shown to protect cells from chromosomal damage. The two key flavonoids in basil are orientin and vicenin, and both have been shown to reduce cell damage from radiation, aka sunlight, so they protect the skin from photo aging. With its high vitamin C content as well, basil is therefore a good anti-ager for those who like the sun. Basil also contains iron, for energy and healthy blood, and magnesium, which is a muscle relaxant, often called nature’s tranquilizer. Traditionally, basil has been used to treat colds and fevers, stomach pains (because of its anti-spasmodic effect) and flatulence.

How to use it: Basil can be used in savory dishes such as soups and sauces, as well as famously chopped into fresh pesto. Also works really well torn and sprinkled over fresh strawberries.

 

Coriander contains a huge range of vitamins and minerals, including B vitamins thiamine, riboflavin, and folate, which help give us energy. Add in iron, which makes hemoglobin to carry oxygen round the body in red blood cells, and you have a general tonic effect. Coriander is also believed to reduce both cholesterol and blood pressure, but is most well-known for its anti-bacterial and anti-fungal effect. If you have a queasy tummy from a foreign trip or food poisoning, it could help. Coriander is known to have anti-histamine and anti-inflammatory actions, meaning it reduces symptoms of allergy from eczema or hay fever.

How to use it: Most commonly seen in Asian cuisines, coriander makes a great addition to a thai stir-fry or stirred into an Indian curry right at the end.

 

Mint is traditionally used as a digestive, as it helps break down fat and improve digestion. Chewing on the leaves or making a tea also releases menthol, which is a decongestant, so a natural remedy for a stuffy nose. It could also help relieve nausea and headaches. Mint is high in vitamin C, which is important for good brain function and healthy skin, as well as vitamin A, a potent antioxidant, and manganese. This helps fat and protein metabolism, another reason mint is a good digestive.

How to use it: Make a tea by steeping the leaves in boiling water, chop and stir into fresh peas or salad. Mix into yogurt and chopped cucumber to make Indian riaita.

 

Rosemary is not only potent in taste, but has also been shown to reduce the risk of breast cancer by blocking some of the unhealthy effects of estrogen in the body. This makes it particularly useful for those with a family history of female cancer or who have had a scare themselves. Rosemary contains a long list of vitamins and minerals, including vitamin E, which is important for skin healing, and two phenolics, caffeic acid and rosemarinic acid. These are anti-inflammatory, so may help inflammatory conditions such as arthritis. Rosemary has an anti-bacterial effect that has made rosemary tea a traditional remedy for a sore throat.

How to use it: Rosemary goes really well with meat, especially with lamb, where it has a semi-preservative effect. The natural oils also help you digest the saturated fats.

 

 

Original article here

25 Mar 2024
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Explaining The Akashic Mystery

 

 

A desire to seek spiritual wisdom and a reassuring connection to the creator is evident throughout history in most cultures and traditions. Humans have tried to understand the origin of life and the source of their own being since the beginning of recorded time. Akasha is an ancient Sanskrit word for “source,” referring to the essence of the creator’s source, characterized by many traditions as the essence of love.

When we direct our minds, emotional and spirit to self-love, we accept a natural, loving, healing presence in our lives; this is when miracles happen. They aren’t really miracles outside of nature, but Illness, disease and loss are often a call from our soul to redirect our lives. When we are living our lives connected to our source in love, that natural way of living brings us back to health and a sense of well-being. It feels like a miracle to live from our source in love.

Agape or akashic spiritual love is about our connection to our spirit, our soul and the creator (infinite intelligence, love and light). This is a reciprocal relationship. This love speaks to a constant influx of spiritual energy that sustains our etheric, emotional, mental and physical bodies, which combine to create our self in this life. This love is the basis of the mystical essence of all religions, but in itself is not a religious belief system. This is the quantum field or the akashic essence of creation, where all potential exists and all creation is born from.

While we are mostly unconscious of this flow, we are created to exercise free will concerning how we direct and conduct our life. We can become conscious of this flow and learn to direct it as a loving, healthy, and sustaining current in our life. We are given the choice to connect or not to connect to this spiritual love and the guidance it contains. Our self-awareness and our ability to recognize our needs and care for ourselves is in direct proportion to our capacity to allow this akashic spiritual energy to sustain and elevate our lives.

The akashic energy, like a universal ether, fills the world — every being and even the very air we breathe. The akashic energy resides within your body, activated and used by your spirit throughout your life. You can choose to consciously access and develop this energy as you gain a higher awareness of your spiritual nature.

Within the akashic energy field is a receptive intelligence that embeds all experiences and events into an energetic library of information — the wisdom of all creation. Encoded vibrationally into the fabric of space, some have likened the mechanism as similar to how holograms are created. I see the records as energetic packages of information.

The records containing the macrocosm and microcosm of your life — the big picture of your soul’s plan and purpose, and the very personal information of the details of your daily life — are all retained in this akashic field. This includes every thought, word, feeling and action throughout your entire lifetime, and even before this incarnation. Accessing this information is done in small bytes of information, which you can benefit from by learning about and developing a more complete sense of yourself. What are the patterns you repeat over and over in this lifetime, and perhaps in a previous lifetime that need healing? Chin up, you have been given all the time and experience you need to learn, grow, and refine the sheen of your human presence here on Earth. Now is a good time to roll up your sleeves and access your akashic records.  When you access the knowledge and creative energy in your records, you learn how to heal yourself and become a creator of positive outcomes in your own life.

You have the tools and potential within your consciousness to access your personal history and soul records within the akashic field. With this access, you gain understanding about the wounded places where your soul has disconnected from its source of love through trauma or misunderstood experiences in this life or past lives. You can reclaim and heal these wounded parts of self as you access the akashic field of infinite intelligence and love.

Accessing the healing capacity within this realm requires a flow of exchange between you and the akashic energy done with deep respect and humility. The entrance fee for stepping onto this healing path is taking ownership of your thoughts and choices with clear intentions to raise your vibration above blame, shame, victimization and guilt. These sorts of excuses will only keep you attached to your pain and prevent your healing. Honesty, forgiveness, curiosity and a willingness to open to spirit will elevate your vibration, and thus your access to akashic intelligence and all its healing, nurturing love, leading you right back home.

 

 

 

Original article here

28 Nov 2023
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Modern Medicine Has Its Scientific Roots In The Middle Ages − How The Logic Of Vulture Brain Remedies And Bloodletting Lives On Today

 

 

Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. The “Saturday Night Live” sketch Medieval Barber Theodoric of York says it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.

Though the skit relies on dubious stereotypes, it’s true that many cures from the Middle Ages sound utterly ridiculous – consider a list written around 800 C.E. of remedies derived from a decapitated vulture. Mixing its brain with oil and inserting that into the nose was thought to cure head pain, and wrapping its heart in wolf skin served as an amulet against demonic possession.

“Dark Age medicine” is a useful narrative when it comes to ingrained beliefs about medical progress. It is a period that stands as the abyss from which more enlightened thinkers freed themselves. But recent research pushes back against the depiction of the early Middle Ages as ignorant and superstitious, arguing that there is a consistency and rationality to healing practices at that time.

As a historian of the early Middle Ages, roughly 400 to 1000 C.E., I make sense of how the societies that produced vulture medicine envisioned it as one component of a much broader array of legitimate therapies. In order to recognize “progress” in Dark Age medicine, it is essential to see the broader patterns that led a medieval scribe to copy out a set of recipes using vulture organs.

The major innovation of the age was the articulation of a medical philosophy that validated manipulating the physical world because it was a religious duty to rationally guard the body’s health.

Reason And Religion 

The names of classical medical innovators like Hippocrates and Galen were well known in the early Middle Ages, but few of their texts were in circulation prior to the 13th century. Most intellectual activities in northern Europe were taking place within monasteries, where the majority of surviving medical writings from that time were written, read, discussed and likely put into practice. Scholars have assumed that religious superstition overwhelmed scientific impulse and the church dictated what constituted legitimate healing – namely, prayer, anointing with holy oil, miracles of the saints and penance for sin.

However, “human medicine” – a term affirming human agency in discovering remedies from nature – emerged in the Dark Ages. It appears again and again in a text monks at the monastery of Lorsch, Germany, wrote around the year 800 to defend ancient Greek medical learning. It insists that Hippocratic medicine was mandated by God and that doctors act as divine agents in promoting health. I argue in my recent book, “Embodying the Soul: Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe,” that a major innovation of that time was the creative synthesis of Christian orthodoxy with a growing belief in the importance of preventing disease.

Establishing an intellectual framework for medical study was an accomplishment of early medieval scholars. Doctors faced the risk of being lumped together with those who dealt in sorcery and pagan folklore, a real possibility given that the men who composed the Greek medical canon were pagans themselves. The early medieval scribes responsible for producing the medical books of their age crafted powerful arguments about the respectability and piety of the doctor. Their arguments manifest in illustrations that sanctified the human doctor by setting him parallel to Christ.

This sanctification was a crucial step in including medicine as its own advanced degree program at the first universities that were established around 1200 in Europe. Thus began the licensing of healers: the elite “phisici” – the root of the English word “physician” – trained at the university, along with empirical practitioners like surgeons, herbalists and female healers who claimed a unique authority to treat gynecological illnesses.

Today, religious dogmatism is often equated with vaccine hesitancy and resistance to basic scientific truths like evolution. But deeply religious thinkers of the past often saw rational medicine as an expression of faith, not something endangering it. Herbal remedies were scribbled into the margins of early medieval works on theology, history, church sacraments and more. This suggests that book owners valued such knowledge, and people of all classes were actively exchanging recipes and cures by word of mouth before writing the most useful ones down.

The Body In Nature

Though the Dark Ages is a period from which no case histories survive, we can still form a picture of an average healing encounter. Texts from that period emphasize the need for the doctor to be highly learned, including being well read in philosophy, logic, arithmetic and astronomy. Such knowledge enabled healers to situate their observations of sick bodies within the rules that governed the constant transformations of nature.

There was no way to perceive the internal state of the body via technology – instead, healers had to be excellent listeners and observers. They sought to match the patient’s description of suffering with signs that manifested externally on the body. The inside of the flesh could not be seen, but the fluids the body excreted – sweat, urine, menstrual blood, mucus, vomit and feces – carried messages about that invisible realm to the outside. The doctor’s diagnosis and prognosis relied on reading these “excreta” in addition to sensing subtle changes in the pulse.

Medieval people were detailed investigators of the natural world and believed the same forces that shaped the landscape and the stars operated inside bodies formed from the same four elements of earth, water, air and fire. Thus, as the moon’s waxing and waning moved the ocean tides, so did it cause humors inside the body to grow and decrease.

The way the seasons withered crops or provoked tree sap to flow might manifest in the body as yellow bile surging in the summer, and cold, wet phlegm dripping in the winter. Just as fruit and meats left untouched began to rot and putrefy, so did dregs and undigested material inside the body turn poisonous if not expelled. Standing water in ponds or lakes generated slime and smell, and so were liquids sitting stagnant in the body’s vessels seen as breeding grounds for corrupt vapors.

In this sense, the menstrual cycle was representative of all bodies, undergoing internal transformations according to seasonal cycles and periodically purged in order to release pent-up fluids.

According to this logic, health depended above all on maintaining the body’s relationship to the physical environment and ensuring that substances were passing through their proper transformations, whether it was food turning into humors, blood disseminating throughout the body, or excess fluids and wastes leaving the body. Bloodletting was a rational therapy because it could help rebalance the fluids and remove toxins. It was visible and tangible to the patient, and, to the extent that we now better understand the placebo effect, it may well have offered some kind of relief.

Fasting, purging, tonics and, above all, monthly dietary regimens were also prominent tools healers used to prevent and relieve sickness. Several medical books, for instance, specified that consuming drinks with cinnamon in November and pennyroyal in August could recalibrate the body’s temperature in winter and summer because one drink was warming while the other was cooling.

Some medieval remedies – such as one produced from wine, cow bile, garlic and onion to heal eye infections – were later proven to be likely effective in treating sickness. But whether these remedies worked isn’t the point. For medieval doctors, vulture brains and cow bile operated according to the same logic that continues to inform research today: Nature operates in mysterious ways, but rational deduction can unlock the hidden mechanisms of disease. The M.D. has direct roots in the Dark Age elevation of “human medicine.”

Before mocking medieval doctors, consider how popular juice cleanses and detox regimens are in the 21st century. Are we really so far from humoral medicine today?