Anxiety, Stress and Suffering

Redundant is what is in excess; essential is that which is non discretionary. There is no sharp line between essential and redundant, and there are always many things in between that, depending upon who is judging, alternate between inadequate, neutral, or desirable. So it is with human behavior: Between the essential self, that guides our lives on the right path, and the redundant ego, which can take control of our behavior without us even noticing, there are tons of routines and data in a 'working memory', a notion that I have omitted to mention in my notes, aiming at conceptual simplicity.                        

My omission proved inappropriate. Dr. Luis H. Ripoll, a New York psychiatrist and Professor of Mount Sinai Medical Center, expressed his disagreement with this simplification in a detailed review of one of my recent columns. "I believe it is both impossible to rid oneself of this so-called 'redundant' ego and to live purely from one's 'essential' self", writes Dr. Ripoll. His review makes necessary the reference to the 'neutral' working memory that, in the terminology of the subject, I was originally reluctant to use.

This working memory contains all the instructions and data for everyday life that, though useful, are neither essential nor superfluous. Let us clarify this matter a bit with our use of language. The ability to speak and communicate is a crucial function of the essential self; the bad habit of telling lies that some people develop is part of the redundant ego; the languages we speak are in the working memory. The list of what is in this working memory includes general or specific skills, the records of everything we know, our personal history... and a myriad of data and procedures.

The essential self for someone who grows up with her parents would be similar to the one that would act in the same person if they had given her up for adoption when newborn. The working memory and the redundant ego, on the other hand, would contain completely different data, depending on the course that took the life of that person.

The Buddha denominates mental formations to the conditionings, routines and data we acquire either on purpose or involuntarily. Mental formations can be harmful or wholesome; the harmful mental formations - cravings, aversions and biased views - are the conditionings that make up our redundant ego and we must eliminate. Wholesome mental formations, such as healthy food preferences and favorable habits, which we must preserve, are part of the working memory.

Doctor Ripoll also says rightly that “the ego is not equivalent to the self". The ‘ego’ most often relates to the opinion someone has of him or herself while ‘self’ is the character that makes a person different from other people. The word 'ego' has a connotation of size (as in 'he has enough ego for doing that) and that is why the redundant ego has variable magnitude. The elimination of this redundant ego allows the essential self to take over the direction of our life.

Other thinkers, with no connection with Buddhism, have expressed ideas that suggest the existence in each person of an essential self and a ‘corrupted’ redundant ego, without any reference to such expressions. According to the best known quote by Franco-Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, "We are good by nature but corrupted by society." In another dissertation the same author writes: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains... He was good by nature, but he is damaged by the pernicious influence of society and human institutions." The natural goodness of man may be assimilated to his essential self; the corruption that society adds on him is equivalent to the redundant ego.

Rousseau is quite pessimistic. At the beginning of his well-known 'Emile, or On Education', notes the philosopher that "Everything degenerates in the hands of man." The Buddha, in contrast, is more optimistic and in the third truth of Buddhism he declares: "With the extinction of cravings, aversions and biased views, that is, with the extinction of the redundant ego, suffering ceases." The Buddha's suffering, in the contemporary world, is best known as anxiety and stress, glitches these that we all want removed from our lives.

Gustavo Estrada
Author of ‘Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation
www.harmonypresent.com

Bernini, Statues and Intuition

The beauty of nature is... natural and we enjoy it without having to rely on to logic. A waterfall that colors its own rainbow in a sunny forest is beautiful by itself and all its charm is 'owned' by anyone who wants to appreciate it. The beauty of the arts, on the other hand, has patterns and rules that make it less spontaneous. For this reason there are 'connoisseurs'. A painting's signature or the proof of its authenticity increase its price but adds nothing to its beauty. The fame of the artist is critical for the work to be acquired by collectors and museums. Although beauty should be beyond comparison and analysis, reality is different.                

Recently, for the second time in my life, I had the immense aesthetic pleasure of wandering around the Piazza Navona in Rome, a magnificent focal point of sculptures, piles and buildings. Its great attraction is the Fountain of the Four Rivers, a spectacular work by Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), the creator of Baroque art in sculpture. The four statues of this masterly work represent the four major rivers of the world (Nile, Ganges, Danube and Rio de la Plata) at the time of the construction (1659).

Visitors do not get tired of walking around the fountain and there are no words to convey the awe inspired by this man-made inspiring scenery. In the first visit, my ignorance was unaware of who Bernini was and, for all purposes, any explanation, including the reference to the four rivers, becomes unnecessary.

The visibility of the Fountain in a famous square makes it of public domain and any calculation of its monetary value lacks any sense. What happens with the works that need authentication to estimate their price? Here analysis and intuition come into competition.

The Introduction to "Blink: Intuitive Intelligence", the excellent book by Malcolm Gladwell, shows with a real-life case the importance of intuition in the recognition of art. In 1983, the Canadian author relates, someone offered to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a 6th century BC Greek statue of the variety known as kouros. After fourteen months of tests and examinations, the Museum’s experts and record trackers endorsed the legitimacy of the statue and authorized its acquisition. Towards the end of 1986, the statue was exhibited with much fanfare.

The kouros was false. Other art connoisseurs, when looking at it for the first time, felt immediately what one of them called 'intuitive repulsion'. These unsuspicious experts could not explain in rational terms what was the abnormal 'something' in the work. "It was 'fresh'," said one. "I felt like as though there was a glass between me and the statue," said another. "It didn't look right", said a third. Those initial moments, where only intuition plays, is what Malcolm Gladwell calls 'intuitive blink'. The following verifications with other Greek experts proved them right.

From my side, on the opposite bank of rejection, it is 'intuitive wonder' what I experienced in front of the Fountain of the Four Rivers. Something similar must feel the thousands of people who visit the Piazza Navona, even if they are unfamiliar with the century of Bernini or the geographical location of the Four Rivers.

Last March, the same Getty Museum received a new call, this time from someone offering a bust of Pope Paulo V, sculpted in 1621, by the same Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the trail of which had been lost in a chain of private collections. Timothy Potts, the big boss of the Getty, not the same person of the previous story, when he received the phone call, flew immediately to London to acquire such treasure. "Bernini was the master of the ‘speaking likeness'. He found a way of breathing life into marble," he said.

As I guess it goes for 99.9% of the transactions of art that the Getty completes (the 1983 statue is in the remaining 0.1%), the bust of Paulo V was authentic. Through both knowledge and intuition, Mr. Potts knew what he was getting. On June 18, the bust was placed on display, with a fanfare similar to that displayed at the exhibition of the kouros twenty nine years ago.

Gustavo Estrada
Author of 'Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation'
www.harmonypresent.com

Personality and Essential Self

Our 'self' -our sense of identity- is the combination of several aggregates (body, sensory signals, perceptions...) that generates us the certainty that we exist and that manifests as continuity and consistency in our behavior. Redundant ego is the sum of the mental conditionings that result from cravings, aversions and biased views. The essential self is what is left of the 'enlarged self' after those conditionings are silenced (if we were able to do so). In other words, the essential self is the remnant of the inflated 'self' when we remove the redundant ego.          

In our behavior, the redundant ego is what makes us very different from one another; each individual distorts his or her mind with the conditionings imposed by his or her upbringing, education, friends, culture... If by some magic we could cut the redundant ego to a group of people, would each of them behave in the same ‘decontaminated’ way as if they were now pure metal to which the slag has been removed?          

Although the conditionings that drive us are real (if we look inwards carefully we will find them) and their elimination is feasible (we all have eradicated at least one addiction), the notions of essential self and redundant ego are hypothesis that science is not yet able to verify or deny. Neurologists have not identified the brain circuits or the areas of the prefrontal cortex where the essential self and the redundant ego are encoded. While the instructions of the former originate in our genes, those of the latter come from the outside world (family circle, friends, teachers, advertising, media...). Our essential self is our personality, authentic and 'hypothetically' pure. Needless to say, 'decontaminated' individuals, free from harmful influences, are rare and they do not boast of their mind development.          

There are numerous questionnaires to identify our personality type. The model of the five large factors is one of the most recognized by the scholars of human behavior. On the other hand, there is no categorization approach of any kind for types of essential selves.

The big five model proposes the definition of personality based on five factors, each of them estimated between two extremes: (1) sociability (extraversion versus introversion), (2) openness to experience (recklessness versus caution), (3) level of responsibility (conscientious versus negligence), (4) interest in social harmony (friendliness versus suspicion), and (5) emotional level (stability vs 'neuroticism').          

Several studies of identical twins have found that genetic and environmental influences in our personality are roughly equivalent for each of the five factors. The factor where genes have strongest influence is in openness to experience (57-61% is the range of the three studies reviewed for this note) while the dimension with the largest impact of the cultural environment is in the emotional level (52-59%).          

When we remove our redundant ego, the essential self takes over our lives. Then, effortlessly, without any kind of struggle to complete specific goals or reach any particular destination, we will flow spontaneously with our existence, in the direction that our genetic preferences suggest to our personality. "The Natural Order does nothing and yet leaves nothing undone. When life is simple, the affectations disappear and our essential self shines. When there are no cravings, everything is in harmony", wrote the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu twenty-five centuries ago.          

The essential self influences our personality to the extent that opens the doors for us to move in an adequate direction, which is not standard or universal, and does not imply or need qualifying labels. The essential self results from the removal of acquired conditionings; the genetic remnant is different for each person. Consequently, the answer to the question at the beginning of this note is negative, and the behavior of our essential self is unique and different for each individual.          

And when our actions are free from unnecessary conditionings, the 'best' of us is expressed and the likelihood of marching in the 'right path' is optimal. On the other hand, when our pilot is the redundant ego, our personality is distorted, and external factors and the media are the rulers of our existence.          

Gustavo Estrada
Author of 'Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation'
www.harmonypresent.com

Gothenburg, July 3, 2015

For how long should we meditate?

The remarkable benefits of mindfulness meditation in physical, mental and emotional health, a routine subject in the media these days, seem to convince only a small fraction of people. Reasons for not meditating are numerous: "I cannot concentrate, sittings are too long, I have no time or... I do not need to meditate because my concentration is excellent". For how long should we meditate and how often? Long sessions, every day. Fortunately, with determination and perseverance, meditation becomes a pleasant and indispensable habit.

The main purpose of the mindfulness meditation is not the elimination of addictions, phobias, headaches, bad temper, bigotry... These are just the by-products of the practice; the central aim is the development of our faculty to be constantly alert, in present time, that is, the ability to remain aware of our body, our feelings and our mental states.

For some special individuals, such as J. Krishnamurti, the philosopher of India, mindfulness seems to be a natural quality, and, therefore, they consider meditation is pointless and superfluous. Krishnamurti, consistent with his innate virtue, is sharply critical of meditation techniques, in general, and of the exercises that demand the focusing of attention on mental devices, such as mantras, chants, prayers, or figures, in particular.

Everyone should practice mindfulness meditation, however. In the modern world, the problem of lack of concentration is worsening with the volume of information with which the media overfeed us. Advertising is always aiming at convincing us to wanting things we do not need or changing us into someone else. And it is getting it.

The privileged ‘attentive', unaware of what a volatile mind is, cannot understand the difficulty to concentrate of the other ‘common’ humans. For this quasi-unanimous majority, mindfulness can only become easy and spontaneous after hundreds of hours of practice. How many are these many hours? There is no single answer and there is no 'personal dose' of meditation; the 'requirements' and 'resources' of time vary from person to person and each one must set priorities. We prefer then searching for help on a comparison that each one can use to make his or her own numbers.

Imagine that your mind is like your home, with all the conveniences that it has, and in which there are thousands of unwanted, uncomfortable and mischievous thoughts that arise as mosquitoes that disturb your life at all times. If insects do not annoy you and you do not care about the diseases they carry, then you do not need to do anything.

Otherwise, that is, you do recognize a problem, mindfulness meditation is the 'benevolent insecticide' you require, and every meditation session is an application of the ingredient. The overall effectiveness of the procedure depends on both the frequency of the sessions (the number of treatments) and the duration thereof (the applied amount).

Only you can acknowledge the fluttering in your head. Do you want to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem? Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and observe your breath for ten minutes. If you have time, do so now and rate your experience.

Do you have real and dramatic difficulty to focus on the flow of air, going in and out through your nose, not even for a few seconds? Are you really slow to realize you lost track of the exercise and got distracted? Did you give up after a couple minutes? If the answers are all ‘yes’, your home is infected and needs high and frequent doses of meditation, perhaps two daily sessions, forty five minutes long each. An initial intensive treatment, as a ten-day retreat with some well referenced group might prove very helpful.

Does your mind wander every moment but rather soon you notice your distraction and bring  your attention back to the breath? Daily doses, 30-45 minutes long, are recommended. (If you can spend only two hours a week, then start there; running is a better exercise than walking but walking is better than no exercise.)

Finally, your situation is not any of the above because you your concentration was perfect during the test and mental volatility is not your problem.  You are positive you do not need any 'insecticide' for holding attention on your breath all the time. Right? Mmmm... One of two things: Either you never realize you are distracted or congratulations! you could well be a 'reincarnation' of Krishnamurti.

 

Intelligence and Consciousness

Intelligence and consciousness are two outstanding and intrinsic characteristics of human nature. Science has made remarkable progress in the field of artificial intelligence (the simulation of intelligence in computers), but it is unlikely that we will ever build artificial consciousness.            

Intelligence is the ability to learn, understand and handle unexpected situations; there is little ambiguity in the meaning of such an important human characteristic. When the SETI acronym (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was coined in the sixties and the project started, participants knew quite well what kind of quality they were trying to find elsewhere in the cosmos. Leaving aside its usefulness and accuracy, the existing approaches for estimating the intelligence of a person are another clear indication of the unambiguous sense of the word.            

Not so with the term 'consciousness'. Consciousness has more to do with sentience - the ability to feel, see, hear, smell or taste that we humans possess- than with the logic and math of the physical world. By the dimension of its mystery, definitions of consciousness fall back on what is being defined. "Consciousness is the condition of being conscious," says the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. "Consciousness is the knowledge of the self", writes the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. It is not possible to measure the degree of consciousness of another person and, as the English psychologist Nicholas Humphrey points out, scientists would not know where to start if they wanted to undertake a SETC project to search for 'extraterrestrial consciousness'.          

Recent developments of artificial intelligence in the field of video games are contributing to the demarcation between intelligence and consciousness. We can build machines with intelligence but we cannot create, or at least not yet, objects with consciousness.

There already exist computerized algorithms that 'learn' to play video games by themselves, as those developed by DeepMind, a London company, now owned by Google. This software, which incorporates 'routines' or characteristics known to exist in the human brain, learned to play numerous classic games from Atari and after a few hours, half of them reached performance levels well above those of professional players.          

The spectacular progresses, as those achieved with these self-learning programs, are of concern to more than one brilliant mind. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” physicist Stephen Hawking warns. “Perhaps these learning algorithms are the dark clouds on humanity’s horizon; perhaps they will be our final invention," says neuroscientist Christof Koch. This columnist, on the other hand, considers that the distinction between intelligence and consciousness, despite sharing the same brain and billions neural connections, give us the assurance that no powerful set of computers will ever take over the Earth on their own initiative.          

Consciousness is the greatest of mysteries in human existence. We know that consciousness occurs in the brain but, beyond feeling and perceiving it, and having the certainty that ‘we exist’, there is very little that we know for sure about how consciousness works. The understanding provided indirectly by machines that learn faster than intelligent people produces some peace: Being intelligent does not mean being conscious.          

“I think therefore I am”, Descartes famous statement, now appears to be incomplete. The machines that science has developed can learn, understand and manage games unknown to them; there is no doubt, such machines can think but such computers do not know they exist today but are going to disappear tomorrow. Perhaps if the French mathematician and philosopher had been born four centuries later, besides being a computer geek and a child prodigy, surely would have written instead: "I think and feel, therefore I am."

Gustavo Estrada
Author of ‘Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Mediation’
www.harmonypresent.com

Extra Sensorial and Interplanetary Communications

The possibility of communication with unknown entities, whether they are incarnations from our previous lives, imaginary beings from beyond the material world, or actual yet unidentified creatures beyond the stratosphere, has always fascinated us. To talk with ghosts and spirits, naive people resort on mediums or psychics who use gadgets such as Ouija boards, aromatic incense or glasses of water. To connect with aliens, seekers make use of sophisticated technologies such as electronic ‘boards’, huge radio antennas or electromagnetic radiation monitors.

While some ghosts supposedly utter incomprehensible gibberish, most spirits are multilingual or speak the language of the medium. About the galactic people that interest us we do not even know whether they speak, like us, through the generation of sound waves. Do intelligent aliens exist? I do think so. Will we communicate with them someday? A two-way exchange, my guess, will never take place.

The Milky Way, our Galaxy (one among billions), has about one hundred billion stars, and most likely a similar number of planets. If one tenth of these is habitable, there might be ten billion planets in the Galaxy that might harbor life. If chemistry and biology evolved, as they did here on Earth, in one out of every million planets, there should be intelligent life in some ten thousand worlds.

Conjectures similar to these led to two interesting projects. The first is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI); the second is the Kepler Space Observatory, launched by NASA in 2009, in order to search for habitable planets.

SETI, more than a single project, is a wide range of activities to find intelligent life beyond Earth, following strict scientific methods. There are hundreds of SETI organizations and projects (Harvard and Berkeley, for example, are two of the prestigious universities that have been involved), and thousands of volunteers participate in a diversity of tasks associated with the core objective. There are active and passive SETI tasks. Active SETIers send signals into space hoping that some alien civilization will recognize them, and respond. Passive SETIers monitor electromagnetic radiation for clues of some intelligent transmission from somewhere in the universe.

So far the Kepler Observatory has located more than one thousand planets in the Milky Way. While there is the possibility of forms of life different to those on Earth, current efforts have focused on Earth-like planets (size, temperature, water availability...). We already know that there exists some kind of life on Earth and the lengthy development process might have repeated somewhere else if the conditions are similar. Dr. Andrew Knoll, Professor of Planetary Sciences at Harvard, says that "any life we can contemplate will follow the laws of physics and chemistry." As a scale of the similitude of any space object to our planet, researchers use the Earth Similarity Index (ESI), which is calculated from the differences between the properties of the object and those of our Earth. ESI is 1.0 for our planet. Six planets of those identified up to September 2014, had an ESI greater than 0.8. By comparison, Mars’s ESI is 0.64 and Venus’s is 0.444.

Despite the extraordinary effort involved in SETI, I think that we will never succeed in exchanging messages with aliens. The odds that they exist in many places are essentially one hundred percent but, unfortunately, they are too far away. The civilization transmitting a signal that we detect might have disappeared by the time we discern what is about. “More than searching for extraterrestrial intelligence”, physicist Freeman Dyson wrote half a century ago, "we are looking for evidence of technology".

Planet Kepler 62-e (its ESI is 0.83), that orbits a star called Kepler 62 in the constellation of Lyra, is one of the best candidates identified so far for hosting life. Kepler 62-e is 1200 light-years away from us. Such length of time (1200 years) will take the electromagnetic signals cast from Earth to reach that land (and vice versa).

The aliens over there, will they have a level of technology similar to ours? Will they receive our signals? Will they understand our message? Will they answer? Will there be ‘Earth’ when the answer returns? Will our grand-grand-grand…grand-children understand what the received packet is about? Answers are either strong negatives or raise big question marks, which together are sufficient to conclude that we will never be able to communicate with the residents of Kepler 62e or with anyone out there. (Unless someone in SETI decides to hire mediums or psychics to replace technology. As SETIers are science oriented people, I am sure no one would try such nonsense.)

Gustavo Estrada
Author of 'Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation'
Atlanta, June 14, 2015

Longevity and the strength of our handshaking

The many positive factors favoring (or the negative ones that deteriorate) our life expectancy may be condensed into three categories: genes, diet and lifestyle. We have very little control over the first group, our genetic 'karma', the most critical and influential of the three sets. The average age of our two parents at death is the best predictor of how long we might live. And sex (male or female, not frequency), gives to women a seven years advantage from the very moment of fertilization when we are only one cell. Nature, right there, discriminates us, men, and there is no interest group protesting. To whom shall we complain?

It is in the quality of our food and the style of our life where the possible opportunities to add calendars to our vital parable appear. In both areas, the number of published books, seminars and consultants that sell 'eternal youth' is outrageous and growing. And it is in the lifestyle area, which include "the strength of our handshaking” where this note fits.

Recent research has concluded that there is a strong relationship between the strength of people’s grip of and their expected remaining life: The weaker the grip, the higher the risk of dying soon, mainly from cardiovascular problems. The study was carried out by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, under the direction of Dr. Darryl P Leong.

Given the broad coverage of this work (140,000 people between 35 and 70 years, in seventeen countries), the reliability of this conclusion must be quite high. Researchers tracked each of the volunteers for about four years, recording deaths as they occurred and the associated causes.

The strength of the hand grips was obtained with portable devices, specially designed for the study, and the overall average of all measurements was equivalent to the force needed to hold a weight of thirty kilograms. In the analysis of the results, each reduction of five kilograms in the 'weight' represented a 17% increase in the risk of death close. (We write 'kilograms' for simplicity; ‘force’ is actually measured in 'newtons'. Do you remember your physics lessons?)

"Grip strength could be an easy and inexpensive test to assess an individual's risk of death and cardiovascular disease," says Dr. Leong. And the magazine 'The Economist' magazine comments that "a flaccid handshake may be a warning that all is not well."

Of course the formality of encounters and farewells are just one of the many activities in which we need to hand grips. McMaster University's study says that further research is needed to determine whether physical exercising to strengthen the muscles of the arm would increase life expectancy, as it happens when we improve eating habits, we start going to the gym five times a week, or we practice meditation daily. If such studies confirm that a strong fist and, consequently, a firm handshake indeed stretch our years on Earth, almost immediately hundreds of books, courses and speakers will appear, wanting to sell methods for "The Way of Greeting to Reach a Long Life."

As hand shaking has no science behind and requires no measuring, while such things happen, we have nothing to lose in greeting with more energy, when we meet old acquaintances or we are introduced to new people, from today on. Perhaps this habit is not going to lengthen the years that our genes have already scheduled for us but, at least, those to whom we said goodbye with a firm handshake will not have the chance to taunt, behind our back, saying after we leave the group:  "This weakling fool will not get to next year".

Gustavo Estrada
Author of ‘Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation’
Atlanta, June 8, 2015