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

Does God need us?

For the consideration of both believers and unbelievers alike, my most recent post raised a personal question - do you have need of God? - that sparked an interesting exchange of views on the subject in a newspaper where it was also published. Although there were many fair comments on both 'sides', 30% of the religious people and 25% of the atheist ones used scathing phrases to refer to their 'opponents'.

"Any hybrid blend can come out from a hypocritical man who claims to believe in a God simply because he lacks any level of self-confidence," wrote a non believer. Faithful to Jesus ("He who is not with me is against me" Luke 11:23), various religious readers labeled this writer as atheist. "So much nonsense that you write now will soon be history ... While God will live forever," said a fervent reader.

The reciprocal question comes to my mind now, as a complementary subject: Does God need us? To answer this we must turn to the sacred texts that, by definition, are divinely inspired: The Torah, the Gospels and the Koran clearly describe a Higher Being that demands allegiance and exclusivity of their faithful, that is, He seems to need us.

“I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God,” says the Lord in Exodus 20. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind," Jesus commands in Matthew 22:37. “Truly it is only associating others with Allah in His divinity that Allah does not forgive; he who associates others with Allah has certainly gone far astray”, establishes Sura An-Nisa 4:116.

For Judaism, the Torah contains the divine revelation to the people of Israel; for Catholicism, "Sacred Scripture is the word of God as it is put down in writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit" (Paul VI); for Islam, the Quran is the word of Allah revealed to Muhammad through Archangel Gabriel.

Unlike the sacred books of monotheistic religions, the teachings of the Buddha are not of heavenly origin. The discourses of the Sage were preserved by oral transmission through thousands of monks over four centuries, with a reasonable degree of reliability, until when they were first written in monasteries of what is now Sri Lanka.

There are no gods in the teachings. References to deities who appear in the original discourses are allegories 'borrowed' from Hinduism. In his purpose to eliminating anxiety and stress, the only goal of his doctrine, the Buddha was agnostic millennia before that word was coined. The thought of the Buddha has been the 'inspiration' of my agnosticism.

We, agnostics, do not know whether the omnipresence and eternity of an Almighty Being are true or not; God may well exist or not exist, depending on how you define the word. Despite such duality, my answer to the question of this note is negative. The God that the sacred texts of the monotheistic religions describe, a God who punishes and rewards, and that demands worship and homage, is meaningless for any unbiased mind, whether religious or not; since such a god does not exist, there is no entity to need us.

An alternate approximation - God as the Supreme principle of which all laws depend on - has a growing acceptance in the contemporary world. The yet unfinished theory of everything, whose math I doubt scientific geniuses will ever be able to complete, is the preamble of this different 'unmythological' interpretation.

The super-theory of everything - the eternal and omnipresent Principle that, according to Einstein, "does not play dice" - must contain all the math (most likely unreachable to the human brain) that would explain the hundred billion galaxies, the Milky Way, the Solar System, Earth, life, the evolution of species and consciousness. Of course, this 'God', the permanent macro and micro ruler of everything, does not demand devotion or allegiance or adherence... And this principle, the silent doer and ruler of all law, obviously does not need us. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to marvel at 'Him'.

Gustavo Estrada
Author of ‘Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation’
www.harmonypresent.com
Atlanta, May 29, 2015

Do you Have Need for God?

Many years ago I met in Budapest a bright socialist young man with whom I interacted for only six days. His vast culture, unaltered balance and impeccable Spanish opened up space for pleasant conversations. This lucky encounter occurred during the Christian Holy Week, so the dialogue with such special character inevitably had to go through the intricacies of faith and disbelief.

-Do you believe in God? –I asked him when the opportunity arose.
-Your curiosity about 'my beliefs' is misconceived - he calmly replied. The proper question should address 'my need'.
-Do you have need for God? - I insisted then, adjusting my question to his format.
-No, I do not - my ephemeral friend responded displaying an equanimity that I have rarely seen in devout believers answering similar questions. 

Do we have need for God? The answer would be ‘yes’ for the vast majority of devotees, and negative for all the non-affiliated people. Although smaller than the huge mass of believers, the non-affiliated group, around one billion people, is large enough to assert that religious inclination is a discretionary feature in humans with no genetic roots whatsoever.

For our inquisitive nature, we, humans, invariably demand answers, and we often accept them even when they are not reasonable enough. 'God' is the simplest explanation for all incomprehensible phenomena. Divine intervention will always be easier to 'understand' than the big bang theory, the workings of genetic selection, or the initial formation of the basic cells in complex organisms (eukaryotes) that occurred about two billion years ago.

Unlike religiousness, the quality of being religious, which is personal, religion is cultural. As physical traits are transmitted by genes, behaviors are passed by memes, a word coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins to refer to the 'genes' of social groups. Like genes, although in a different way, memes also 'struggle' for survival and rely to propagate on human predispositions and conditionings with much help from the media and advertising. The influence of memes in a group is as powerful as the genes in an individual. This is particularly true in the propagation and maintenance of the memes of religion. According to American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, "religions themselves are extremely well designed cultural phenomena that have evolved to survive”.

Many scholars argue that, with the growing understanding of matter, life and the universe, religions are in the way to extinction. They are wrong. Religious participation in most countries remains very high, Western Europe being the major geographic exception, and Muslim and Christian countries, as well as India, the strongest confirmations of the trend.
Neither government actions, whether scorn, prohibition or persecution, nor do the developments of science and technology seem to alter religious fervor. Long periods of ‘spiritual abstinence' enforced by totalitarian regimes, as it happened in Communist societies under the tutelage of Moscow, have failed to put out the flames of faith. In the community of nations, United States is simultaneously the leading country in application of technology (with the consequent material progress) and the second in religious participation.

According to the 'Pew Research Center', a think tank based in Washington, by 2050 there will be 2,920 million Christians, 2,760 million Muslims, and 1,380 million adherents to Hinduism, with respective growths of 34.6%, 72.5% and 34.0% compared to 2010. Non-affiliates will reach by the middle of the century 1,230 million people with a modest increase of 25.2% over the same period.

Consequently, the question at the beginning of this note shall remain appropriate for many decades. Which group do you belong to, dear reader? To the overwhelming religious majority that faithfully believes in God, Allah or Brahman? Or, do you follow the dissidents of that majority who, due to scientific logic, defiance or indifference, do not believe in metaphysical entities? Or, perhaps, are you part of the 'huge' minority which, with no much time for faith or reason, as my friend from Budapest, has no need for God at all?

Gustavo Estrada
Author of 'INNER HARMONY through MINDFULNESS MEDITATION'www.harmonypresent.com 
gustrada1@gmail.com

Why do we want enduring remembrance?

According to American psychologist Abraham Maslow, humans seek the satisfaction of their needs according to a hierarchy whose four first levels are known as deficiency needs. For example, we eat food to meet physiological demands, we seek roof for safety reasons, we have friends to satisfy our need of belonging, and we excel in our activities to meet the need for esteem.

Why do we want enduring remembrance for some of our actions? The need for esteem, the fourth in the scale, is the need to find us comfortable with our existence, from both our perspective (self esteem: how do I see myself?) and from the others’ perception (recognition: How do others see me?) Self-esteem depends from us and will disappear with us. The curious desire to be remembered postmortem is an irregular extrapolation of the normal need of recognition while we are still alive. Thinking that our works are enduring generates an imaginary sense of eternity as if we were to exist for ever.

We certainly know we are going to die but we cannot imagine ourselves extinct; the sentence 'I am dead' cannot be told in its literal sense. Some poets, who often penetrate into the human mind with more understanding than psychologists, are at odds with such artificial eternity and even scoff at the need to be remembered; their life and their works are sufficient for them. Here follow some literary quotes on the subject, the first one with an attached story.

In 1957, Colombian writer Gonzalo Arango founded an extreme nonconformist movement he called ‘nothing-ism’ (nadaísmo). According to its initial manifesto, the group aimed to "not let any faith intact or any idol on its place”. The rebellious ‘nadaistas’ perpetrated all sorts of irreverence, from incineration of books to sacrilege of sacred wafers, which got them big headlines that would ensure lasting memory to Arango. In 1970 something changed in the head of the poet and he abandoned his own movement; the radical atheist became then an unrecognizable spiritualist.

In the very same year, writer Orlando Restrepo Jaramillo published “Beyond the Words", a collection of his poems which he sent to Gonzalo Arango. He replied with a warm note that Orlando recently shared with this columnist. From this letter I copy the following line of detachment to memories: "Living is no more than walking into oblivion carrying a lot of shattered dreams and broken baggage".

Jorge Luis Borges could well have signed such touching line; his own verses on forgetting and detachment abound. In his poem 'We are oblivion’ the great Argentinean poet writes: "We are already the oblivion we will become... We are already, start and end, the two dates in the tomb... I am not the fool that clings to the magic sound of a name..."  In ‘I am', the poet describes himself as "I am the one who is nobody, who was not a sword in battle. I am echo, oblivion, nothing." And 'Limits' ends with "At dawn I seem to hear the busy sound of crowds that move away; they are those who loved me and me they have forgotten; space and time and Borges, are now leaving me behind."

Twenty five hundred years earlier, the Buddha states, with crystal clarity, that we are transitory beings and that nothing of us will remain after death. The denial of our impermanence and our fear to disappear create the illusion that something intangible will survive us. In his poem 'Chess', Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), Persian astronomer and philosopher, shares the Buddha’s thought:  "Life is a chessboard with nights and days, where Destiny plays with us, Men, as pieces; here and there, moves us, and mates, and slays, to finally throw us, one by one, into the box of Nothingness."

So, let us keep up to date our earthly affairs, the now. As for eternity, we are to forget of imperishable memories, not even the universe is permanent, and we would rather accept the reality of death and, if relaxed enough, have a laugh at the grim reaper while we recite another poem by Omar Khayyám: "Be happy today, as you don't know what tomorrow will bring. Take some wine, sit down in the light of the moon, and say to yourself that tomorrow the moon might look for you in vain."

So, let us keep up to date our earthly affairs, the now. As for eternity, we are to forget of imperishable memories, not even the universe is permanent. We would rather accept the reality of death, and make fun of the grim reaper while we recite another poem by Omar Khayyám: "Be happy today, as you don't know what tomorrow will bring. Take some wine, sit down in the light of the moon, and say to yourself that tomorrow the moon might look for you in vain."

Gustavo Estrada
Author of 'Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation'