Fanaticism and equanimity

Last June the Government of Libya announced that Mokhtar Belmokhtar, founder of the Islamist group Al-Mourabitoun and brain of the attack to a gas plant in In Amenas, Algeria, had been killed with other six terrorists. The assault on the gas plant, which occurred more than two years ago, led to the death of 38 foreigners, among them my son Carlos, who worked there or were visiting the facilities. Was I soothed when I learned about the fall of the evil terrorist? No, I was not.

The death of Belmokhtar could not be confirmed and, right from the beginning, Al Qaeda denied the report. Recognition tests failed to identify his body. The search for the murderer is still active and it appears that he is still transgressing. Did it make me mad the denying of the initial news? Neither.

The pain in my son's disappearance is immeasurable and will accompany me to the end of my days. My indifference about the fate of this criminal, however, does not allow me to brag of equanimity; the elimination or the evasion of this bandit do not alter in any way my sorrow though, of course, it is important that there be justice. My greatest frustration is not associated with an occasional ungrateful name but with the sinister and continued stupidity of the fanaticism of any kind, whether religious, political or racial. The atrocities of fanatics never stop generating ruthless suffering to millions of human beings.

There is no much difference between the violence brought about by religious creeds, political dogmas or racial segregation. Horror of horrors when the three things come together! In all cases, terrorist actions and violations of the most elementary rights soon become permissible tactics for the groundless cause. And, when fanatical leaders are the power holders in a society, tragedies reach absurd excesses.

The extremists of the Muslim religion, the regrettable example of the moment, want to impose their metaphysical beliefs at any cost, in a way similar to what was attempted by many Christians and Catholics regimes until not long ago. This trend is intrinsic to all faiths. Even the wise teachings of the Buddha, when his followers make out of them a religious sect or a political party, lead to the persecution and discrimination that are now suffering the Rohingya Muslims in Western Myanmar and the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

The well-intentioned social justice of the socialist left led to the Chinese and Soviet horrors as well as to the countless acts of terrorism that have occurred and keep repeating thanks to the populism promoted by corrupt demagogues and egomaniacal leaders, only interested in enriching themselves and imposing social models, well-recognized as ineffective and disastrous. And the supposed superiority of the 'Aryan' race, a macabre example of tragedy, led to the Nazi atrocities.

The believers of a religion, the followers of a political doctrine or the supremacists of a racial group are commonly proud of their positions, illusory and irrational as they are. Still the majority of these characters see themselves as objective: "I'm an unbiased individual with much respect for other people’s opinions". Would these ‘tolerance models’ seriously consider the possibility that their religion may not be true, their doctrine may be wrong, or that their race is not genetically superior? Whoever fails to open the mind to the eventual fallacy of his or her biased thinking, bears seeds of violence. Unfortunately, when it comes to supporting a cause that its followers consider 'fair' and 'true', many of these ominous seeds will eventually germinate.

Well said Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize in Physics 1979: "With or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Or political beliefs, or assumptions of racial supremacy, I add.

No, neither the disappearance of Mokhtar Belmokhtar diminishes my sorrow of father nor his survival increases my grief. Instead, the continuing presence of fanaticism in any of its multiple expressions, murdering innocents in the name of ethereal or absurd causes, does make my pain more acute. When somebody remains uncompromising against fanaticism, as this columnist, is it possible for this person to maintain equanimity? I am not so sure whether we can be fanatics of anti-fanaticism. Each individual should answer such question.

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

Consciousness: The Primary Mystery

Despite the countless laws of physics, chemistry and biology that mankind has discovered and the extraordinary progress that has been achieved through the practical application of such laws, researchers are nowhere near falling short of enigmas to solve. We do not yet know whether there are other universes, as string theory suggests; neither can we imagine the structure of the first molecule that replicated by itself to open the door to life three billion years ago; nor we know what dark matter or dark energy are, phantasmagoric substances these that together account for ninety-five per cent of the content in the known universe.

Without downplaying such remote unknowns, the primary mystery, however, is very near our eyes, more precisely behind them. How do neurons create consciousness in our brain? How does the sense of identity arise, grow in early childhood, stabilize after a few years, decline with old age and extinguish when the body expire?

Consciousness provides us an overwhelming and intimate conviction of an 'I' that draws limits and sets us apart from other people. Like all the characteristics of human life, consciousness and all the links and organic functions associated with its functioning are the result of evolution by natural selection in sequential processes that took millions of years. Nevertheless, we know little beyond this description.

The emergence of the sense of identity is the reward of evolution to the genetic memorizing of events that benefited the survival of our primitive ancestors. The stabilization of favorable mutations gradually formed the genetic coding of consciousness, though we don't know yet what genes are involved or how they generate the brain messages that make us feel unique and know that we are such.

Detailed explanations of the emergence of consciousness in our remote ancestors are just somewhat a bit less unknown than in 1858 when the naturalist Charles Darwin and anthropologist Alfred Wallace first postulated, publicly and for the first time, the theory of evolution of species by natural selection.

Wallace was a spiritualist that spent his last years trying to communicate with the dead. Within such metaphysical framework, he came to question his great 'materialistic' intuition (in his time the words 'neuron', 'gene' or 'byte' did not exist) and at some point expressed that natural selection was insufficient to explain the evolution of consciousness. "I hope that you have not murdered too completely your own and my child," wrote to him with concern Darwin. Fortunately for science, this did not happen.

The initial lack of explanations for consciousness seems to be moving toward the other end in recent years. Now the abundance of hypothesis could create confusion before reaching a final theory, and the awarding of the corresponding Nobel, be it in physics, chemistry or medicine, could take several decades.

Here are three examples that are making scientific noise. Bernard Baars, neuroscientist of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, likens consciousness to the memory of a computer that preserves data from experiences after having lived them through. According to this theory, thinking, planning and perception are generated by biological adaptive algorithms.

The integrated information theory of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin in +Madison maintains that consciousness must do two things; one, it must be able to store and process huge amounts of data, as computers can do, and two, it must be able to integrate such data into a unified whole of information that cannot divided into its components. 

Cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the other hand, suggests that consciousness is a state of matter, and arises from a particular set of mathematical conditions. According to Dr. Tegmark, there are varying degrees of consciousness, as there are different states for water (steam, liquid or ice).

Consciousness is the primary mystery and not only because everybody experiences it. For a problem to be recognized as such there must be someone who identifies it and wants it solved. If nobody had consciousness, that is, if there were no human beings, aware and curious, there would be neither explorers nor areas to explore. And no phenomenon would be enigmatic at all if there were nobody who would like to solve it. It is because we have the privilege of possessing consciousness, even if we do not understand it, that all the other mysteries exist.

Gustavo Estrada

Author of ‘Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation’

www.harmonypresent.com

Wonders and Obsessions of Technology

In spite their obliviousness, smart phones are... well, smart. The added value of their predecessors, the original cell phones, was mostly their mobility but their skills soon started to grow in many directions and to invade the territory of laptops, by acting as 'clients' in Internet, as computers commonly did. Smart phones are now overshadowing, when not displacing all kind of gadgets as calculators, sound recorders, cameras, GPS navigation devices, watches and chronometers.

Linked to other electronic tools, smart phones are getting into everything. For example, there are applications, already in operation or under development, that collect and manipulate data about physical and mental conditions for both research studies and health screening. Who would have dreamed of this! Let's look at two cases.

The Stanford University School of Medicine completed recently an application for both cardiac health surveillance and the collection of information to help improve the understanding of the functioning of the heart. The software, which operates on an Apple platform, uses the motion sensors of the phone. The program not only records the physical activity of the owners and the associated risk factors but also generates, believe it or not, personalized recommendations. The day the initial study was announced ten thousand people signed up.

On the mental health side, the School of Engineering at the University of Connecticut is designing a similar application that correlates variables such as energy level and social interaction to estimate people’s mood variation. This software will collect data on variables associated with physical activity and voice tone through the sensors and microphones in the phones. For example, the built-in GPS provides guidelines to calculate the frequency with which the user is getting out of her house while the microphones generate ‘measurements’ of her mood, according to the pitch of the voice. These and other pieces of information will provide bases to assess and compare levels of depression.

In the past, the transfer of new technologies to less developed countries could take up to decades; now the globalization of new developments happens much faster. Advances with so many potential benefits, as the two just described, will soon spread all over the planet. The kind of things that can be done through software applications and modern cell phones is only going to be limited by imagination.

Not everything is rosy, however. Cartoons that ridicule the growing dependency and the obsessive behaviors that smart phones are creating in their users abound in Internet. There is real concern among scholars of social sciences about the possible harmful consequences of this trend. Are smart phones diminishing personal contact? Are text messages replacing verbal communications? Are people becoming more introverted? The answers to these and many other questions are neither easy nor predictable.

However, for their impressive success, nobody argues the intelligence of modern cell phones, acknowledging that such gadgets are totally ignorant of what they are doing. Some of the fans of this wonderful enchantment walk with caution. A phrase I heard recently sums up the mixture of admiration and fear around the topic: "Current phones are so exceptionally smart they are taking control of their owners." And, furthermore, they could soon be writing prescriptions for them to follow

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

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.