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Sometimes cheating is just the best amongst several bad options Shutterstock Photo ID: 345126524, by beeboys. The problem of adultery Although statistics about the prevalence of infidelity vary wildly (between 25% and 60% over the duration of a marriage), everybody seems to agree that it is on the increase on Western societies. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Or is it just one more symptom of the disintegration of the monogamous norm? Many polyamorous people, while critiquing sexual exclusivity, are quite judgmental when it comes to cheating. In agreement with people of a more puritanical persuasion, they tend to view infidelity as the betrayal of a sacred oath. According to them, if a person is sexually unsatisfied in her or his current relationship, there are only three morally acceptable options: 1) continue to live sexually deprived, 2) negotiate an open relationship, 3) leave the relationship. The 4th option, of course, is cheating. I believe that sometimes it is ethically justified for the following reasons. Sexual morality is based don personal autonomy I believe that the basic issue underlying the ethics of sex is personal autonomy. This means that my body is mine and I should be able to use it as I see fit, as long as it doesn’t impinge in the personal autonomy of somebody else. This has two implications, one negative and one positive. The negative implication is that nobody should use my body (or my mind) against my desires, which means that rape, sexual abuse, psychological abuse and other forms of non-consensual sex, are immoral. The positive implication is that I have a right to my own sexual satisfaction (again, as long as it doesn’t violate the personal autonomy of somebody else). This implies that sexual repression also violates personal autonomy and should be considered a form of abuse. Therefore, contrary to what some people argue , cheating is not a violation of consent because it does not violate the autonomy of the partner being cheated. What it does violate is a personal contract in which two people have agreed to mutual sexual exclusivity. However, breaking an agreement is a much less serious offense than violating personal autonomy (as in rape and sexual abuse). It is important to note that the sexual exclusivity agreement does involve relinquishing a large segment of personal autonomy. Before the agreement, I was able to have sex with whoever wanted to have sex with me, now I’m restricted to just one person. Because of that, any form of coercion in establishing this agreement should be considered quite seriously. Monogamy is coercive We cannot forget that we live in a society that strongly enforces monogamy. In fact, there many places in the world today where non-monogamy is punished with death. But even the more enlighten Western societies exert considerable pressure in favor of monogamy, using different forms of legal, economic, cultural and social sanctions. Very often these are unfairly directed more toward women than toward men. Because of that, we cannot consider the agreement of sexual exclusivity involved in marriage as one freely made, but one made under the pressure of a coercive environment. In practice, this means that we are given the option between a monogamous relationship or no relationship at all. Almost nobody is given the option between an open relationship or a sexually exclusive one: it is monogamy by default. Let’s remember that an agreement made under duress is not morally binding. The three choices when faced with sexual insatisfaction Let’s now consider the three options (other than cheating) offered to a person who is sexually dissatisfied in a relationship. The first one is to just put up with the sexual deprivation. In the old, sexually-repressive culture, this went unquestioned. Sex was considered something superfluous, unnecessary for the happiness of a decent person (especially if it was a woman). The new sex-positive culture has changed that perspective, stating that it is unacceptable for a person to live sexually deprived. This not only applies to having sex in general, but also to enjoy alternative sexualities like BDSM. If I’m kinky and my partner is not, I’m entitled to do something to fulfill my kinky needs. The most extreme case, which is quite common, is the dead bedroom . One of the partners in a monogamous relationship no longer wants to have sex. This condemns the other partner to chastity.   Therefore, sexual insatisfaction is no longer an acceptable option for a lot of people. The second option is to negotiate an open relationship. This is considerably difficult, often impossible. Let’s not forget that open and polyamorous relationships are vanishingly few. Realistically, proposing an open agreement to a partner entrenched in the monogamous mentality is not only futile, it is foolish. The only thing that it would accomplish is to make us instant suspects of cheating, or wanting to cheat. The third option is breaking the relationship. I am quite surprise at the enthusiasm with which so many people propose this option… Like breaking-up was easy and entailed no suffering at all! Quite the opposite, most of the time it is the least desirable option, and often an impossible one. This is because we live in a society that wraps a lot of power in the institution of marriage, in the form of economic power (share savings, mortgage, etc.) and restrictions of individual freedom (the house where I live, the job that I have, childcare, etc.). Then, breaking-up is not a simple matter of stopping a sexual and emotional relationship, but something that throws our life in a complete turmoil, most likely ending up by lowering significantly our standard of living. Divorce is easy when you are rich, ruinous when you are poor. And then there are the children, who probably wouldn’t suffer much if a parent occasionally cheats, but would be devastated by a divorce. Decreasing the drama of adultery Cheating is not a black-and-white issue, but one of great complexity. If one thing is clear, is that we would all gain a lot by de-dramatizing it. Contrary to what we read in novels and see on television, it’s not worth killing anybody over it. It’s not even worth leaving our loved one over it. Sex is just sex, let’s not blow it out of proportion by attaching all sorts of mystical meanings to it. Yes, in some cases cheating is a dastardly thing to do, involving breaking of trust, dishonesty and betrayal. But in other cases it is just the least bad of a set of bad options. Like the case of the woman who has become economically dependent of her husband by leaving her career to have children, and now finds that he no longer wants to have sex with her. Adultery as an act of rebellion From the point of view of a non-monogamous, sex-positive culture, we should be able to appreciate the element of rebellion against the established order that is implicit in cheating. Yes, the person being cheated suffers, but the monogamous norm is partly to blame for that suffering. It is that culture that has convinced them that being cheated is, oh, such an awful thing to go through! Let’s not forget that this cultural norm of sexual exclusivity creates an unbalance of power, empowering the sexually repressive member of a couple to the disadvantage of the one that yearns for sexual freedom. Ideally, we should all be able to be polyamorous or ethically non-monogamous if we wanted, but in reality the ability to do that is reserved to a precious few. We should not be judgmental of people who have to resort to other, more unpalatable options.

Would it mean an European Army or NATO without the USA? A map with NATO members in blue. From Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NATO_members_(blue).svg . We are just a few days into the second presidency of Donald Trump, and it looks like it’s going to be as bad as we feared. After disowning it during his campaign, Trump is following the 2025 Project playbook. He is firing thousands of federal employees in regulatory positions, probably in preparation to replacing them with loyalist. He has paralyzed the NIH, the largest scientific organization in the world, by not allowing it to carry the meetings (Study Sections) that it needs to adjudicate billions of dollars in research grants. Without this money, all American universities will have to stop their most important missions.  He has sent his minions at ICE to business, churches and hospitals, detaining immigrants and USA citizens alike. However, it’s in the international arena where he is probably doing the most harmful and long-term damage. He wants the USA to take over Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal. This proposition is so extreme that nobody can take it seriously. Why? Because it threatens the most basic principles of international order and the most important alliance of the USA, NATO. If Trump were to make good on his threat, the international policy of the USA will completely disintegrate. The Long Peace In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature , Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker writes about the Long Peace , an unprecedented period without major wars that extends from the end of World War Two to the present. Although it includes the Cold War, with its attaining regional wars in Korea, Vietnam and Nicaragua, the number of war deaths during it were substantially smaller than in any previous historical period, at least as a percentage of the world population. “Overall, the number of international wars decreased from a rate of six per year in the 1950s to one per year in the 2000s, and the number of fatalities decreased from 240 reported deaths per million to less than 10 reported deaths per million.” Long Peace , Wikipedia. After the Cold War ended, world peace increased even more in what has been called the New Peace. Its most important threat is the current war between Russia and Ukraine. The threat of nuclear war Several factors contributed to the Long Peace, including the globalization of the economy, the increase in democratic countries, the awareness of human rights, and the unpopularity of war. Perhaps the main one was the threat of nuclear war, which forced a de-escalation of any conflict between the major world powers, the USA, the Soviet Union and China. Studies on Nuclear Winter done by Carl Sagan and other scientists in the 1970s showed that no nation could hope to win a full-scale nuclear war. Even if the USA could completely devastate the USSR and avoid retaliation, the amount of gases, dust and debris injected into de atmosphere would make life in America no longer possible. Worldwide, temperatures would plummet, harvests will be lost and everybody would freeze and starve to death. Borders must be respected Another factor was that the colonial era that ended with World War Two was followed by the establishment of nation-states all over the world. The rejection of the colonial system created the principle that no nation should violate the borders of another. The borders of the world were fixed in place. There were some border changes at the end of the Cold War, but they took place because states like the USSR and Yugoslavia split into smaller nations, not because one nation invaded another. Still, the breaking up of Yugoslavia started regional wars in the 1990s. The few invasions that occurred didn’t end well for the invader. Russia invaded Afghanistan in the 80s and had to retreat, like the USA in recent times. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, started a bloody war that ended without changes in their borders. And when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, the international response was swift and stern. At the end of the Cold War, NATO emerged as the unquestioned military superpower. Nobody dared mess with it. It grew ever larger, swallowing all the countries of the former Pact of Warsaw, including some that were part of the Soviet Union itself. Putin’s folly All this shows Putin’s folly when he invaded Ukraine. He broke the principles of not invading another country and not changing existing borders. He indirectly challenged NATO. If Russia didn’t have nuclear weapons, the response of Western countries would have been devastating. But he did have them, so the West had to tip-toe around the possibility of nuclear war to support and arm Ukraine. As things stand, it is clear in the mind of many Western leaders that Russia must not be allowed to prevail. If the principle of not invading another nation is fragrantly broken, the next thing that will happen is that China will invade Taiwan. All around the world, powerful countries will start invading weaker ones to steal their natural resources. The international order would crumble. War will become the norm instead of the exception. Trump’s folly Trump’s folly is even worse than Putin’s. Just before being inaugurated as President, Trump repeatedly stated that he wanted to annex Greenland, take possession of the Panama Canal and incorporate Canada in the United States. The Panama Canal  was given to the Panamanian government in 1999, by the Torrijos-Carter Treaties  of 1977. Going back on it would bring back tensions between Panama and the USA that existed since even before the opening of the canal in 1914. They culminated in an uprising in January 9, 1963, in which 20 Panamanian students were killed and 500 injured. Since then, January 9 is a national holiday in Panama. Instability in Panama would threaten ship transit through the canal, with dire consequences for international commerce. A significant American military force would need to be based permanently in Panama to avoid these problems. China and many other countries will look with suspicion at the USA controlling the Panama Canal. Nicaragua and Venezuela, who are hostile to the USA, are neighbors of Panama. But this would be minor compared with the consequences of trying to annex Greenland and Canada. Denmark, who controls Greenland, and Canada are members of NATO, and therefore close allies of the USA. Any military action against either country would go directly against the foundational principle of mutual defense of NATO. Signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty commit themselves to defend any participatory country that is attacked. What happens, then, when a NATO country invades another? NATO would not be able to survive this flagrant violation of its foundational principle. The consequences Of course, Trump already threatened to undermine NATO in his first term. However, that was just a bluff to decrease or withdraw economic support in order to entice other members to increase their military spending. In view of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, that may not have been a bad thing, after all. Germany and other European nations are enlarging their armies in view of the Russian menace. Attacking other NATO members is an entirely different kettle of fish. Trump is following Putin’s playbook, disregarding the commitment not to invade other countries that is at the core of the Long Peace. If he follows through, then the USA would be no different from Russia. Just another bully of a country, using its military might to rob weaker countries. The response of other NATO members would be to start considering America as a threat. If you add to that Trump’s philosophy of America First in the economic arena, there would be absolutely no advantages for any nation to remain in NATO or to support the goals of the USA. An European Army? Perhaps it was long overdue. When the European Union (EU) was established, its defense was delegated to NATO. Never mind that some EU members, like Austria, Ireland and, until recently, Sweden and Finland, were not members of NATO. It was sort of understood that NATO and the American nuclear umbrella protected the entirety of Europe. If NATO were to be dissolved, the obvious thing to do would be to create an European Army as the military arm of the EU. The increasing aggressiveness of Russia and the new confrontational attitude of Trumpian America makes it not just a necessity, but a priority. There will be a number of hurdles ahead, though. What would EU members that are not NATO members (Ireland, Austria) do? What about NATO members that are not EU members (the UK, Norway, Canada, Iceland, Turkey)? What should be done with pro-Russian EU members (Hungary, Slovakia)? France is the only EU member with nuclear weapons. Should they be used to protect the rest of the EU? Unfortunately, we may see something happening similar to what happened with the euro adoption: some countries will take part in an European Army, while others won’t. But a common army is much more serious than a common currency. Nations that do not participate in the European Army may see it as a threat. Or, at the very least, feel pushed around by not having the same leverage on international relations. Speaking of which, a common army implies a common foreign policy. Otherwise, it would never be clear who is an enemy and who is a friend. A common army and common foreign policy would require that the EU would become more integrated, acting more like a nation and less like an economic union. The problem is that there is strong popular opposition already to a more integrated EU. We may expect a lot more strong-arming of politicians like Orban, who befriend the enemy of other EU nations. In turn, these politicians will fear that an European Army may be used against them. I predict that a disintegration of NATO will cause the richest European countries to develop their own nuclear weapons in record time. After all, they already have the technology. Germany will get nukes. Poland will probably beat Germany to it. Sweden, Finland, Italy and Spain will probably follow suit. Ultimately, the fundamental problem with creating an European Army is that there is no European government to direct it. The EU has a parliament, but no real governing body. Every decision the EU takes has to be negotiated amongst its 27 members. This is no way to have a common foreign policy, never mind running an army. However, there is an increasing popular opposition to further developing the EU into a federal or confederal state. European countries have strong national identities. Their citizens are increasingly attached to them, and have failed to develop a common European identity. Perhaps globalization has made them more aware of the fragility of their national cultures.  NATO without the USA? The problems with creating an European army make the option of maintaining NATO more palatable. NATO has been there for three quarters of a century and has functioned well. Maintaining it does not require opening the can of worms of an European government, or tackle the difficult problem of which countries would join an European army. However, if the USA starts threatening NATO countries, it cannot be part of NATO. Who is going to kick the USA out of NATO, then? It may not be necessary. Next time Trump bluffs about leaving NATO, European nations could just say “go right ahead.” Which may take the form of a carefully orchestrated political crisis that forces Trump to make good on his bluff. A NATO without the USA would have the additional advantage of keeping Canada in it. Which would be good for the Canadians because it would keep its southern neighbor from crossing its borders. Lacking the protection of the American nuclear umbrella, Europe would still have to develop nuclear weapons. However, if this is done as a NATO project, it would look much better than if Germany or Poland would develop nuclear weapons on their own.   The international isolation of the USA would follow There have been talk about a multipolar world. We never thought that Europe would be one of the poles, detached from the interest of the USA. In the long run, the USA would lose with this arrangement. Europe would form bonds with Latin-American and Canada, countries with which it has strong linguistic (Spanish, Portuguese, French) and cultural bonds. There is a deep resentment in Latin-America against the USA because of its engineering of coups and support of dictatorships during the 20th century. This will marginalize the USA in its own neighborhood. Europe is also geographically close to Israel, North Africa and the Middle East. Its policy in these regions may also veer away from American interests.  If Russia is defeated in its war with Ukraine, the EU will promptly absorb Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. In the long run, maybe even Russia itself. Then the USA will face a giant even larger than itself. There are better alternatives I am a citizen of both the USA and the EU. I have an American passport and a Spanish passport. I vote in both countries. However, my birth country was not Spain but Italy, where I spent my first five years. I lived in France on two occasions, for a total of a year and a half. Therefore, my identity is pan-European. And also American. I’ll hate it if I had to choose between these two identities, because I love both Europe and America. I say all this so you understand that I take no pleasure in seeing the United States lose at the international game. My strongest preference would be that the USA and Europe remain united as the bulwark of Western civilization, democratic, secular, scientific and, yes, capitalist. I don’t want NATO to fall apart. Or to exclude the USA. So I hope that some adult in the room talks Trump out of starting an expansionist policy that the USA never had.

Flow as the core of a spiritual practice The author rock-climbing in Texas Canyon, California, demonstrating flow. What is flow? Flow is a mental state of focused attention in which we are productive and creative without apparent effort. It can happen when engaging in an intellectual activity, like writing, or while doing a sport, like rock-climbing. I mention these because these are two occupations that are often given as examples of flow. They also happen to be my favorite activities. Flow was named by the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi, who gave it these six characteristics: Focused attention on a task. Merging of action and awareness. Decreased self-awareness. Altered perception of time, which either speeds up or slows down. Feeling of complete control. Positive emotions like joy, pleasure, euphoria, meaning and purpose. Flow is a healthy mental state In another article, The Neuroscience of Flow , I explain the key characteristics of flow and describe the brain neuronal circuits that mediate it. I will not give scientific references for what I say in this article. You can find it in that one. Flow turns off the default mode network, which is active when we don’t focus on anything in particular; when we daydream, reminisce the past or fantasize about the future. It is also active in some negative mental states, like rumination. The default mode network includes the medial prefrontal cortex, which mediates the feeling of the self. Therefore, it is a mental state that brings up the ego. In contrast, flow turns on the executive attention network, which deactivates the medial prefrontal cortex. It activates the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, increasing focus and performance, and the orbitofrontal cortex, reducing impulsivity. This led me to think that flow is a healthy mental state that not only lets us do things in a joyful, productive and creative way, but also promotes a better way of living in general. Because it increases mental energy, it can push away depression. By turning off the ego , flow can ward off anxiety and craving . Like many things in life, mental states become habits. By spending a lot of time in a given state, you develop a groove that makes it easier to return to that state. If you spend a lot of time in the default mode network, it becomes hard to step out of it to stop daydreaming and following your ego. If, on the contrary, you spend a lot of time in flow, it becomes progressively easier to enter it. Then, you are able to do a lot of things in this state of apparent effortless. We spend most of our life working. Most people find work meaningless and exhausting. We feel that we are wasting our life away by having to work to make a living. However, if we were able to do a substantial part of our work in a state of flow, we will waste less energy and would feel more joyful doing it. Mindfulness or flow? Developing joyful and meaningful mental states is the basis of many spiritual practices. We practice meditation to cultivate a mental state in which we are more aware of our emotions and thoughts, and therefore can direct them in a healthier direction, away from rumination, anger, anxiety, shame and other negative emotions, and towards joy, curiosity and compassion. Mindfulness is a mental state that consists of opening the mind to all sensations, thoughts and emotions, without rejecting or attaching ourselves to any of them. We just let them pass, like clouds in the sky. An important directive in mindfulness is not to judge any of our mental contents. We don’t push away those that we consider bad or dwell on those that we consider good. Since judging is one of the main activities of the ego, mindfulness diminishes the ego. Flow also diminishes the ego by decreasing self-awareness, turning our attention towards our task instead of toward our self. We are not able to enter flow until we stop judging ourselves and engage playfully with our task, so that the energy that is wasted judging is directed towards the action. That is one of the reasons why flow feels so effortless. However, mindfulness and flow are different mental states. Mindfulness also turns off the default mode network, but it does not engage the executive attention network. While all mental contents are allowed in mindfulness, flow requires a strict filter to only allows sensations and thoughts related to our task. Practicing mindfulness requires us to take time away from our daily activities, because we cannot be in an open-minded, non-judgmental state while we work or do chores. However, we can train ourselves to enter flow to perform any task, even the most menial. When I attended sesshins — multiple-day Zen retreats — one of the daily activities was samu: some banal work like sweeping the floor, cut vegetables for cooking or cleaning the toilets, which had to be done with absolute focus. Even eating meals was done following an elaborated ritual. When done right, samu led to flow. While being different, flow and mindfulness support each, because both of them require the same soft control over the mind. By soft control, I mean that we cannot enter these mental states by exerting willpower: our conscious mind forcing the rest of our mind to do its will. Instead, the entirety of our mind, conscious and unconscious, has to slide into those states. By alternating mindfulness and flow, your mind learns to gently enter these states in an integrated way, without the inner conflict of one part of the mind trying to control the other. No confrontation means no wasted energy, so we don’t experience the loss of willpower that comes when we force ourselves to do things. Choose the right challenge So, how do we enter flow? Flow requires balancing skill and challenge. Skill means that we have to train to do things. When we are learning a new activity, like skiing, we need to exert a lot of conscious control to translate the things that we learn in theory — keep your skis parallel, use your edges, flex your knees — into the right muscular actions. Until these actions become automatic, we cannot release conscious control. Because consciousness is the slowest thing that happens in the brain, our movements are clumsy. Consciousness also requires a lot of mental energy, so we soon feel exhausted.  However, once we learn the skill to do something, we may fall on the opposite problem: doing things automatically, using muscle memory . In our example, our skiing may become lazy, doing the ample turns that we feel comfortable with instead of continuing learning new skills. To enter flow, we need to take our task to the edge of our ability, so we can do it well, but it’s hard enough to require all our focus. A couple of hours ago, I was bouldering at the climbing gym. I started doing some easy problems, V0 and V1, then moved to V2, then challenged myself to V3. I failed to complete some of the V3 moves, so I knew I was at edge of my skills. When I became too gripped, I moved back to V2 problems to restore my flow. I keep a playful mindset, laughing at my failures and knowing I was doing great, regardless. The struggle period: generating sustained attention and effort It is not possible to enter flow right away. There is always a period of struggle in which we gradually focus our mind on our task. There may be some internal whining. We may be tempted by distractions. During this struggle period is when we require self-discipline. Entering flow involves commitment. We have decided to perform this activity, so we leave anything else to the side. In the struggle period is when we focus our attention on our task, with unbendable intent. Flow requires passion. You must love the task that you are about to perform. Some anxiety and mixed feelings are okay, but if you hate what you are about to do, if it has no heart, you need to wonder why are you trying to do it in the first place. What is the origin of your internal resistance? Can you find a way to recognize and honor the parts of yourself that do not like the task, and re-establish your internal unity? When I rock-climb, there is a part of me that gets really scared. It’s a child-like part of my mind, but it’s also the part that prevents me from taking too much risk. I call it the survival ego . It is opposed by the daring ego . I need to listen to both of them, negotiate with them. Sometimes, I will bring down the challenge to decrease the risk. If possible, create an environment free of distractions. These days, I have the luxury of having a study at home in which I can close the door to write. If you don’t have that luxury, another option is to become habituated to a busy environment, so you are able to focus no matter what goes on around you. Many writers work in coffee shops and similar public places. During the hardest part of my scientific career, I didn’t have an office, just a desk in my lab. My postdocs worked around me, handling rats and equipment, and I was barely aware of them. I wrote some of my best papers and grant proposals during that time. Abandon the comfort zone Writing scientific papers and grant proposals are high-anxiety activities. Both will be harshly criticized by other scientists. Most papers are rejected on first submission — you are lucky if they let you resubmit with corrections. To get a grant funded, you are competing for limited research funds with the best minds in your field. I was on soft money , meaning that all the funds for my lab, including my own salary, came from grants. If I didn’t get a grant, I would lose my job. Often, we enter flow fighting anxiety and fear. In rock-climbing, fear is ever-present in the vertiginous void behind your butt. The first thing you learn when you start climbing is how to turn that fear into sharp focus, into flow. Perhaps what allowed me to survive my high anxiety scientific career was this ability to overcome fear that I learned climbing. Other scientists, however, face similar challenges and they are not climbers. One of the great things about flow is that fear fades away once you are in it. Of course, one does not always have to face fear to enter flow. People write, paint, dance and play music without facing consequences, good or bad. However, the fact that you are challenging yourself to do something hard entails a certain amount of anxiety. To experience flow, we have to abandon the comfort zone in which things feel easy. We have to venture into the unknown, experiment with things we haven’t done before. We come face to face with the randomness of the world. Novelty and unpredictability are essential to flow. You don’t know what is going to happen; you can only do your best as things come at you. That’s when flow awakens the insight and creativity within us. Plugging power drains Flow has a certain inertia, but there is no guarantee that you will stay in it once you have entered it. If you lose it, you’ll be back to square one, having to go through the struggle period all over again. There are many things that can take you out of flow. They are called power drains because they increase the energy that we need to stay in flow, or to perform our task without flow. Some power drains a pretty obvious. Do not try to multitask. The brain doesn’t work that way. What our mind does is to switch attention from one task to the other, so that our attention never fully focuses on one activity and we never enter flow. Do not take scheduled breaks. It’s likely that when the time comes to take the break is right when you are deep into flow, so you will ruin it. Then you’ll have to go through the struggle period again. Instead, wait for a natural breaking point in your task or until you feel tired. But the biggest, meanest enemy of flow is the ego. When the medial prefrontal cortex enters the game, it brings us back into the default mode network. One way the ego sabotages flow is perfectionism. Flow is a mental state of playfulness and experimentation. It involves a lot of trial and error. Being in flow doesn’t mean that we are going to do things flawlessly. In fact, if we make no errors, it means that we are not learning, that we are not challenging ourselves to leave the comfort zone. Perfectionism is when the ego butts in to tolerate no mistakes. The ego rides on that awful emotion, shame, to make us feel bad for doing something wrong. All the playfulness and joy is gone. We are wasting energy on an inner conflict, instead of investing it into the activity to which we have committed. An even more subtle way the ego raises its head is when we start wondering if we are in flow. Ironically, you will never get into flow by trying to get into flow. You’ll be back in the mind-trying-to-control-the-mind game. So forget about flow. Set the conditions, commit to your task with unbendable intent, and go! Focus on the process and not the destination Yet another way the ego interferes with flow is by focusing on the reward we will get from our task. That reward can be simply that pat in the back we give ourselves for having accomplished something hard. Or the bragging rights in front of our friends: “Man, I red-pointed a 5.10d climbing route yesterday!” Other times, it’s a financial reward, public recognition, or fame. Most tasks have a goal, and that’s okay. I write this article to publish in my blog and in Medium, attracting more readers and making a small amount of money. But we need to forget about the goal while performing the task. Of course, the activity should fit the objective that we have set for ourselves; we need to pay attention to that. But that is different from anticipating the reward we are going to get or, even worse, our disgrace in case we fail. That is a huge distraction and a power drain. Detachment from our goals is emphasized in many spiritual traditions. In Zen, mushotoku  consists of doing something with detachment from any reward we are going to get. The whole Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text of Hinduism, is devoted to explaining the benefit of acting without attachment to the outcome of the action. Flow with menial tasks If flow requires engaging in an activity that is challenging enough to match our skills, then is it possible to achieve flow doing menial tasks? After all, that’s what I claimed before when I spoke of doing samu in Zen sesshins. The literature on the neuroscience of flow assumes that it is only achieved through challenging activities. However, what constitutes a challenge is up to you. In Zen’s samu, the challenge is to engage in a menial task with absolute concentration. This complete focus is a carry-over for the long periods of meditation and from the environment of the sesshin. Any small task can be transformed into a challenge. If you are chopping a cucumber, can you do it slices of even thickness, very fast? I have watched sushi chefs do that and tried to emulate them at home. Cooking, sweeping the floor, doing dishes or washing your car can be done mindlessly or in flow. It’s up to you to decide. When you do things in flow, the smallest task can bring unexpected joy. That’s one of the best things I learned in Zen sesshins. I am not saying that you should try to live your entire life in flow. That is not possible and can easily become an ego trap . Ideally, we should balance a mixture of mental states during the day: mindfulness, flow, daydreaming, reminiscing and sleep. In reality, what happens is that our attention is captured by TV shows and social media when we are not working. We do not devote as much time as our ancestors to daydreaming, fantasizing and remembering past experiences. I suspect that our lives are less rich because of that. Flow as part of a spiritual path I am an atheist. I don’t believe in an afterlife. And yet, all my life I have followed a spiritual path. I have practiced yoga, Zen and learned from a variety of other mystical schools. My spiritual path consists of attaining my full potential as a human being. These days, I call that hunting personal power , following the philosophy of the Way of the Warrior . Personal power is not power over people and things, but attaining a state of self-knowledge, inner integration and soft control over my mind that decreases suffering and brings happiness. For many years, practicing meditation and seeking altered states of consciousness was the goal of my spiritual path. Since I discovered this idea when I was 13, achieving some sort of Nirvana or illumination was one important goal in my life. However, after many years of practicing meditation in its many forms, I reached an impasse. It was not bringing the mental clarity that I had hoped to achieve, much less an illumination. Zen teachings defined satori or illumination in confusing ways. So I stopped doing meditation. I started writing instead. This was something I loved and, much to my surprised, brought the insights about myself that I had sought through mediation. Perhaps is that my long years of meditation gave their fruit that way. However, I realize that it was the state of flow that I achieved while writing, professionally as a scientist or as a hobby, what brought me this joy. So, lately, my inner work centers on cultivating flow and other elements of the Way of the Warrior, of which I will write in future articles.

Each ego, from the wounded to the spiritual, defines our interaction with the world Looking down Wipeout Chute, Mammoth Mountain, California. Photo by the author. I subscribe to the view that the ego is the part of our mind that directs our behavior, based on our self-conscious emotions of shame, pride and guilt (Lester, 1997; Bastin et al., 2016). The ego is formed by the internalization of the instruction that we receive from our parents and educators. In a path of self-discovery and self-transformation, it is crucial to understand the role that our ego plays in our lives. While doing this, I came to realize that there may be different types of egos. This is my attempt to classify them. Survival ego In the first years of life, children learn that they are something different from their environment. They realize that they have needs: for drink, for food, for sleep, for warmth, for skin contact, for words of affection. On the negative side, they experience pain, fear and distress. All of these experiences are related to their bodies, to their selves. This is how the most basic ego is formed, what I call the survival ego. It drives us to meet our basic needs and to self-preservation. It is concerned with keeping us safe, warm and fed. Therefore, it responds to the basic emotions of thirst, hunger, pain, pleasure and fear. We cannot ignore this basic ego. It drives us to take care of our basic needs and keeps us from reckless behavior. In some mental diseases, this ego is weakened, causing patients to stop taking care of themselves. They do not wash or groom, eat irregularly and do not sleep well. However, when this ego gets too strong, our needs get exaggerated. We fall into a scarcity mentality, eating and resting in excess. Our instinct of self-preservation gets exaggerated, our fears overblown. It keeps us from abandoning our comfort zone, which is necessary for learning. Haunted by images of how things can go wrong, we may fall into catastrophizing. Daring ego A developing child also needs to explore. Healthy development involves a cycle of seeking adventure and retreating into a safe base. The safe base is a mother figure who provides comfort. The challenges are provided by a father figure. Daring behavior consists of doing something despite fear. When we do this successfully, we experience the emotion of thrill, which is essential to build anti-fragility. People who fail to build anti-fragility during their childhood and teen years are more prone to anxiety disorders as adults (Haidt, 2024). They have not learned how to process fear, so every challenge in life becomes an unsurmountable barrier. The daring ego balances the survival ego. In life, they act together to guide us between challenging ourselves and seeking self-preservation. They represent an internalization of the father and the mother, respectively. The daring ego may become too strong, especially in young men, who may build their self-image around the ideal of being brave. The adrenaline high of experiencing thrill becomes compulsive, leading to increasing risky behavior. On the positive side, a strong daring ego drives athletes to face fear. On the negative side, it produces criminals who have lost the fear of the punishment of the law. Caring ego When they become mothers, women often experience an urge to care for their child so powerful that it becomes the center of their lives. However, love and taking care of others can also happen in fathers or outside parenting. The caring ego is built around the idea of love and giving. People in a romantic relationship may love each other so much that mutual care becomes paramount. Some professions, like nursing and therapy, greatly benefit from a caring ego. Some religious people focus on selfless giving to people in need. Obviously, this is one of the healthiest egos to have. However, it is still an ego, so it may lead to delusions and unhealthy states of mind. One danger in emotional blackmail, in which the giving is not as generous as it seems, but done to create a psychological debt and dependency. Another danger is overprotection. Just as the survival ego can create an overblown need for self-protection, the caring ego may live in fear of something bad happening to our loved one. When it is a child, this may keep him from engaging in challenges and experiencing thrill, leading to an anxious personality in adulthood. Self-controlling ego This ego centers on the idea of success, particularly professional achievement. It is strong in people with careers — a job involving constant self-improvement and competition. Parents and educators reward us with praise when we succeed and punish us with shame when we fail. This gets internalized in our psyche, becoming an internal drive. The ego becomes our main source of motivation, driving us to make sacrifices to achieve our goals, sometimes to the detriment of our health. The self-controlling ego pushes away the survival ego, depriving us of enough sleep, leisure time, and healthy eating. The dopamine reward system in the basal striatum of the brain is mistakenly blamed for making us seek pleasure. However, it is not a pleasure center, but what provides the motivation for the self-sacrifices of the ego (Wise and Robble, 2020). That pat in the back that we give ourselves for a job well done is a surge of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. That’s why it is called the reward system. The self-controlling ego also plays a role in making us act ethically. It makes us chase our image as good people: hard working, faithful spouse, caring parent, dependable friend, outstanding community member. If we don’t perform to our high standards in these things, the ego punishes us with shame. Clearly, a strong self-controlling ego is necessary to live a good life. Behind every successful person, there is a strong self-controlling ego. And yet, the self-controlling ego causes us a lot of suffering. What we call burnout. The ego is an insatiable master. It doesn’t tolerate the slightest imperfection, making us become perfectionists. No achievement is good enough for the ego. It immediately points to the next goal, a higher peak to climb. Success is expected, so we are not allowed to celebrate it. Failure makes the ego bring out the whip of shame. At some point in our life, the veil may fall from our eyes. We may realize that all of our struggles were for nothing. We have been running on a treadmill, chasing ghost carrots. Behind the most amazing professional success, there is a basic dissatisfaction. Victory hides an emotional void. In the worst-case scenario, the clash against this void can make the ego collapse, leading to depression, even to suicide (Lester, 1997). Possessive ego Like the self-controlling ego, the possessive ego is obsessed with control but, instead of controlling himself, it wants to control its environment. This ego is what makes us accumulate money and possessions. It also wants to control the people dear to us. The possessive ego may be a degeneration of the survival ego. Meeting your basic needs is no longer enough; you need to ensure that everything around you is ready to provide for you at an instant notice. Therefore, you accumulate stuff. You surround yourself with people who would satisfy your slightest whim. The most obvious way to achieve this is to have lots of money, which would allow you to buy things and services. The possessive ego is what makes you greedy. If money is hard to come by, then you resort to devious ways to manipulate people. You scare them, blackmail them, gaslight them, or make them dependent on you. The possessive ego is at the core of many abusers. The person with a possessive ego thinks that everything is at their service. If they don’t get the absolute best, they take it as a personal affront. They want to be the first in line, get the best seat in the theater, the best service, the biggest slice of the cake.   Jealousy is a symptom of having a possessive ego — you want to own the person you love, so you are afraid that somebody else would steal her from you. Envy and schadenfreude are other symptoms. Wounded ego We associate the idea of the ego with something that drives us to become more powerful. However, some types of egos make people weak. The wounded ego develops after psychological trauma or repeated experiences of defeat. Experiments in rodents show that social defeat can lead to great damage to the mind and the body: decreased learning, susceptibility to stress, inhibited behavior and immune suppression (Reyes et al., 2015; Wood et al., 2015). It is a state called learned helplessness (Maier and Seligman, 2016), brought about by experiencing unescapable distress: no matter what we do, we get pain. So we learn to do nothing. In humans, it can be trauma like abuse during childhood, abandonment, or the dead of a caretaker, but also experiences of social rejection or continued failure at everything we do. The main concern of the wounded ego is to avoid more suffering. People with a wounded ego it shelter themselves from danger, hiding and withdrawing. They engage in daily routines that they feel are safe. Novelty is bad. They avoid too much social contact, particularly meeting strangers. The wounded ego sees any new social interaction as a threat, so it retreats into itself. The good news is that having a wounded ego is often a temporary situation. Eventually, these people may find ways to empower themselves and develop other types of ego. Victim ego However, wokeness trap people in their wounded egos by encouraging a victim mentality. The victim ego is based on the belief that the struggle between oppressors and victims is at the core of society. Since being an oppressor is unacceptable for our self-image, we need to find a way to be considered a victim. Unless you are a super-rich man, there is always a way to cast yourself as a victim.   It may be race. Are you Black, Hispanic, Arabic or Asian? Or it could be gender. If you belong to the female half of humanity, you’ve got it. Are you trans? Non-binary? Even better! If you are a man, perhaps you are gay, or at least bisexual? No? Were you abused as a child? Not even that? Then go for identifying as poor or exploited. That should do it. Once you have determined that you are a victim, you are entitled to ask for redress. The world owes you. They should make things easy for you, since you have suffered so much. And, if that doesn’t happen, well, that makes you even more a victim! The problem with having a victim ego is that you give up agency. Bad things have been done to you. Something external needs to happen to make it right. This takes away your motivation to take charge of your own life. I won’t deny that many people (most people, in fact) have been victimized. However, when we construct our core identity around that victimization, we surrender our power. Because then our identity is defined by what happened to us. Even worse, we seek the remedy for our suffering in the external world, instead of inside ourselves. Grandiose ego The grandiose ego is built around the belief that you are destined to do some great thing in life. You will be rich, famous, a powerful politician, a great artist, a genial scientist. The grandiose ego could develop from the self-controlling ego after continuous success makes us overestimate our abilities. It is common in narcissists, but you don’t need to be one to have a grandiose ego. Of course, grandiose egos are often in a collision course with reality. Only a few can become truly successful. When that happens, the grandiose ego undergoes a curious transformation. You are really as great as you thought; the problem is that nobody understands you. You are the politician who refused to sell out. Your art is too pure for the masses. Your scientific ideas are too advanced to be understood at this time. Spiritual ego The spiritual ego is a type of grandiose ego that we often find in religious or spiritual people. It develops when we come to believe that our goal in life is to be saints. Or, if we gravitate to Hinduism or Buddhism instead of Christianity, the goal may be to become enlightened. Even atheists can fall into this trap by wanting to become virtuous, as preached by Stoicism or another ancient philosophy. In my own spiritual search, I met one Catholic saint, a Hindu guru, and several Zen teachers. I was disappointed when I caught a glimpse of their oversized egos. Spiritual gurus feel the need to cultivate a public image of being better than anybody else. They need it to manipulate people, using their money and their effort to build their temples, ashrams or communities. They are not free from the ego. They only have a more devious one. You don’t need to be a guru to have a spiritual ego. It is a common mistake when striving for self-realization. For me, a spiritual path should lead to inner freedom and finding meaning. An ego of any kind traps us in a meaningless struggle, chasing goals that are defined externally instead of responding to our profound aspirations. A spiritual ego wants us to be morally superior. It drives us to be generous and helpful… as long as everybody is looking. We flaunt our spiritual practice or our religiosity. However, there is an unresolved internal conflict between our spiritual goals and our ‘base passions’, like food, drink and sex. When we fall into temptation, we hide it carefully, lest it tarnish our image of pure beings. Inevitably, this leads to hypocrisy. Some spiritual experiences erase the ego. However, this is just temporary. The ego comes back when we feel proud of having that experience. Some religious beliefs hide the ego by calling it consciousness. In my experience, transformative experiences integrate the mind by merging the conscious and the unconscious. Because we perceive our unconscious as the other, this diminishes the ego. Living with our ego This classification of the ego was done on the spur of the moment, so it may be flawed. Perhaps I missed some important type of ego, I don’t know. It seems likely that a person would have an ego combining some of these different types. Everybody has a survival ego. The self-controlling, grandiose and spiritual egos seem apt to combine. So are the wounded and victim egos. I don’t think that our goal should be to get rid of the ego. We need it to live our lives, particularly the survival ego. Other types of ego have many beneficial aspects, too.  The key may be to accept the ego as one more part of our mind instead of letting it take control. In other articles, I will share my thoughts and experiences in bringing the ego to its appropriate place in our lives. References Bastin C, Harrison BJ, Davey CG, Moll J, Whittle S (2016) Feelings of shame, embarrassment and guilt and their neural correlates: A systematic review. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 71:455-471. Haidt J (2024) The anxious generation : how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. In, p 1 online resource. New York: Penguin Press,. Lester D (1997) The role of shame in suicide. Suicide Life Threat Behav 27:352-361. Maier SF, Seligman ME (2016) Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychol Rev 123:349-367. Reyes BA, Zitnik G, Foster C, Van Bockstaele EJ, Valentino RJ (2015) Social Stress Engages Neurochemically-Distinct Afferents to the Rat Locus Coeruleus Depending on Coping Strategy. eNeuro 2. Wise RA, Robble MA (2020) Dopamine and Addiction. Annu Rev Psychol 71:79-106. Wood SK, Wood CS, Lombard CM, Lee CS, Zhang XY, Finnell JE, Valentino RJ (2015) Inflammatory Factors Mediate Vulnerability to a Social Stress-Induced Depressive-like Phenotype in Passive Coping Rats. Biological psychiatry 78:38-48.

The seven practices of obedience, surrender, service, discipline, punishment, demeanor and mind-fucking Photography by Marcus J. Ranum , CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons As most people know by now, the acronym BDSM stands for Bondage, Dominance/Submission, and Sado-Masochism. Everybody knows that bondage consists of tying people up in erotic positions and that sadomasochism is the erotization of pain, but very few people have a clear idea of what happens in Dominance/Submission  (commonly abbreviated D/S). There is a vague notion that the dominant gives orders and the submissive obeys, but it is actually more complicated than that. In this article, I explore D/S is detail in terms of seven practices things that most often are used in it. D/S and sadomasochism often overlap and a lot of people practice them together. However, some D/S relationships do not use pain and thus have no elements of sadomasochism. Why do people engage in D/S? You may be puzzled as to why would anybody give away their freedom to become a submissive or, conversely, how can anybody be so full of themselves as to want to dominate others. A lot of people practice D/S following a deep, spontaneous desire to submit or to dominate, as strong as sexual desire and often (but not always) mixed with it. Others are converted to D/S when wanting to please a lover and end up liking it. Being a dominant or a submissive in a D/S relationship has nothing to do with behaving that way in normal life. Often, the opposite is true: people in leadership roles become submissives as a way to relieve the stress produced by having to make important decisions. I have explored the motives behind the desire for dominance or submission in another article: The Origins of Dominance-Submission . The ethics of D/S: safe, sane and consensual D/S is a sharp departure from the principles that guide normal relationships, such as equality, personal autonomy, independence and respect. These values are still present in a D/S relationship but are changed by the fact that the submissive surrenders a great deal of power to the dominant, so the relationship becomes inherently unequal.  D/S relationships should be safe (no physical damage or adverse health effects), sane (no emotional damage) and consensual (all persons involved have given informed consent to all the activities). This is abbreviated as SSC. Sanity is a particular concern in D/S because these practices can easily lapse into psychological abuse. We need to be watchful for anything that harms the self-esteem of the submissive or that creates psychological dependence. SSC is ensured by a previous negotiation , establishing limits and the use of a safeword . SSC establishes the boundaries between an ethical D/S relationship and abuse, which I explored in a previous article, How to Recognize Abuse in BDSM Relationships . Dominance-submission and gender D/S can happen in any combination of genders . However, it has unique characteristics depending on each particular combination of gender and role (dominant or submissive). For example, Femdom (women dominating men) emphasizes the worshipping of the dominatrix, is quite strict, and often includes chastity or sexual control. In contrast, male domination over women focus on the body of the submissive and tends to be more caring. Gay D/S can be harsh and extreme. Lesbian D/S can take a wide range of styles. For the sake of simplicity, here I will refer to the dominant as a man and the submissive as a woman, occasionally explaining some differences in Femdom. Otherwise, what I say can apply to any gender assignation of the dominant and submissive roles. Dominance-submission can be done in scenes or as ongoing relationships There are many forms of dominance-submission: Master-slave , Daddy-little girl , brat-disciplinarian , domestic discipline , and others. For this discussion, I want to emphasize that there are two levels of commitment or time arrangements in D/S. In the first, D/S is done for a limited time, usually a few hours, in what is called a ‘ scene’ . This theatrical name is apt because this is a sort of pretend game in which the participants take on the roles of dominant and submissive temporarily to weave a common fantasy. They may not be in a relationship but meet casually to play. There are people (called ‘ switches’ ) who are dominants in some scenes and submissives in others. In the second, called 24/7, D/S is ongoing and may be an essential part of a relationship. Some people who practice D/S this way object to their D/S being called a game. For them, it is real. They feel that being a dominant or a submissive is an essential part of who they are. These relationships usually develop slowly over long periods of time. There also can be in-between arrangements in which a couple has established roles as dominant and submissive, but only adopt them in certain situations, like when having sex. I have experience in both types of D/S interactions. None is better than the other. However, I would advise any newbies to experiment with D/S in scenes before entering an ongoing D/S arrangement. 1 - Obedience Obedience is, obviously, following the orders of the dominant. In D/S scenes , the orders usually consist of submitting to a sexual act, but they may also be about something trivial (“make me coffee”) or about a particular fetish (“clean my shoes”). Some opportunists see this as a chance to get “free blow-jobs” or having sex without having to satisfy their partner. These posers are quickly exposed because an experienced dominant works hard to create a situation in which the submissive finds satisfaction in obeying. Giving orders is an art. The dominant has to work inside the fantasy of the submissive and never break her limits. If the submissives find that they cannot follow an order, must argue against it, or use their safeword, their trust in the dominant will be undermined. In 24/7 D/S relationships , obedience is more complicated. Here the orders are not just about sex. In domestic discipline, the dominant enforces rules about how to do chores and keep the house in order. Daddies treat their adult submissives like little girls that have to eat their vegetables, do their homework and have a bedtime. A good dominant chooses carefully which orders to give, taking into account the needs of the submissives, their limits, and the nature of the relationship. A good strategy is to delimit an area of the submissive’s life that will be under the control of the dominant; the most obvious being their sexuality. It is generally a bad idea to try to control the professional life or the relationships of the submissive. It is not ethical to bring into the D/S dynamic third persons who have not consented to participate in it, so it is problematic to order a submissive to treat their friends and family in unusual ways. 2 - Surrender Surrender goes beyond mere obedience. In it, submissives expose themselves physically and mentally to the dominant. A lot of people come to D/S following their fantasies of sexual surrender. In a D/S scene , dominants treat the submissives as their sexual plaything, touching them however they please, placing them in embarrassing positions, and fucking them in full control. Male dominants control the orgasms of their female submissives, who need to ask permission to cum. The submissive is made aware of the difference between making love and being fucked, and prefers the latter. In Femdom, the submissive is often made to pleasure the dominatrix without cumming, and can only touch her with her permission. In 24/7 relationships, the sexual surrender becomes more extensive. A common agreement is that the submissive must be sexually available to the dominant at all times. Women are made to wear dresses or skirts without panties to make them aware of their accessibility. In Femdom, men are deprived of masturbation, sometimes by locking their penises in cages, so that they can produce an erection of demand. But surrender goes beyond the realm of the physical: submissives gradually reveal their secret fantasies, fears and desires to the dominant, deepening the intimacy and vulnerability of their submission. Here, the dominants must tread carefully and not judge the submissives when they open up to them. Shame and guilt are powerful emotions that can damage the self-esteem. If submissives make themselves vulnerable and then feel that their confidences are being used against them, they will withdraw and put up barriers. 3 - Service Service is the active counterpart to obedience. The submissives work to please and satisfy the desires of the dominants by spontaneously doing things for them. It goes beyond obedience: the submissive needs to anticipate the desires of the dominant. On their part, the dominants must be mindful not to inhibit the creativity of submissives by being over-controlling. In some cases, the submissive would need to ask permission before performing the service or should meekly suggest it. Having a submissive well trained in service allows the dominant to relax and enjoy the D/S relationship without having to be continuously alert to decide what to do next. 4 - Discipline Discipline consists of activities used by the dominants to assert their control over the body and the mind of the submissive. In a scene, D/S is often combined with sadomasochism to give the submissives pain and pleasure until they become pliable. Both pain and pleasure impose themselves on consciousness, forcing us to pay attention, so they provide a gateway to the mind of the submissive. If pain is out of the picture, the dominant can order the submissives to disrobe and adopt some exposed positions to get them into the right frame of mind. In 24/7 relationships, discipline is the training by which the submissive becomes more accomplished at surrendering and servicing the dominant. Dominants may give submissives a series of tasks and exercises to do. These can include, for example, sexual exercises like timed masturbation, Kegel pulls or wearing a butt-plug. Non-sexual discipline may include physical exercise, reading assignments, bedtime and wake-up time, diet modifications, writing a diary, etc. For male submissives, chastity and sexual control are widely practiced forms of discipline. Although some discipline exercises can be unpleasant, they are not done for punishment but to help develop a submissive frame of mind and attitude. 5 - Punishment Punishment is a controversial part of D/S.  While some reject it, it is a key activity in brat-disciplinarian, domestic discipline, and other forms of D/S. A lot of people have what I call a “punishment fetish”: they find the idea of being punished or punishing others deeply erotic. However, this applies to an infantilized view of punishment as spankings and other forms of physical punishment, and not to the long jail time that our society uses to deter crime. In any case, since D/S is based on obedience, service and discipline,   there should be consequences  if the submissive disobeys or does not perform as expected. The problem is that, if submissives enjoy the mere idea of being punished, how can punishment be used to effectively correct their behavior? Wouldn’t they misbehave so that they can enjoy their punishment? Well, it is more complicated than that. People with a punishment fetish enjoys the whole process, not just the spanking (or whatever the punishment is): having to recognize that they have done something wrong, the humiliation of suffering a punishment, the forgiveness after the punishment, and their commitment to not misbehave again. All this is done with utmost sincerity and involves a big emotional turmoil. The punishment fetish may come from the release from guilt and shame. By delegating the punishment to the dominant, submissives frees themselves from psychological self-punishment. Then, paradoxically, the chastisement is experienced as relief. To help with this, the meaning of punishment has to be carefully explored, emphasizing its healing value as catharsis and atonement. Submissives should be explicitly prohibited from punishing themselves. It is also important that the punishment ends with aftercare, in which the forgiveness of the dominant encourages self-forgiveness. The submissive has accepted her weaknesses, witnessed the power of the dominant, and hopefully has become a stronger person and a better submissive. 6 - Demeanor Demeanor  is the way in which submissives dress, carries themselves and behave  in order to express a submissive attitude. If you see a couple when they are in-role as dominant and submissive, you will notice a peculiar vibe. In a BDSM party, the dominant may be attired in leather with metal studs or a power suit, while the submissive may be partially or fully naked, wearing cuffs and anklets or erotic clothes like stockings, garter belts or lace bras and panties. One of the most powerful signs to convey submission is the collar, which often is made of leather and resembles a dog collar. It can also be made of metal or even be a jewelry piece. Certain types of D/S relationships, like domestic discipline, reject fetish clothing, but you can tell their roles by the way they talk and move: the submissive will be serving, while the dominant gives orders in a way that would normally be considered rude. Not all submissives have the same demeanor; each one expresses in a different way what submission means to them. Some submissives are meek and subservient, looking down, walking behind the dominant, and speaking only when asked. Other submissives may be bratty, proudly lifting their chin, challenging the dominant, and freely speaking their mind. The appropriate demeanor emerges from the personality of the submissive and is polished through training to produce a poise that conveys the depth and beauty of the D/S relationship. Different demeanors are equally valid. They simply represent different styles of surrender, service and discipline. 7 - Mind-fucking Mind-fucking is the most difficult element of D/S. It consists of   mind games that dominants play with submissives to weave a collective fantasy   and bring them to a state of defeat and surrender. It may be as simple as teasing the submissive about their desires. It may also consist of pretend anger. Genuine anger is an emotion that is difficult to control, so the dominant should not engage in a D/S interaction while he is angry. Other instances of mind-fucking involve some elaborate mind games that are the culmination of the six other D/S activities. They require superb creativity on the part of the dominant. However, without the willful collaboration of the submissive, the process would fail. Mind-fucking is not so much something that the dominant does to the submissive as something that they create together. No matter how skillful the dominant, it is impossible for him to mind-fuck submissives if they don’t surrender or if they lack the discipline to cooperate. Here are some examples of mind-fucking: Attention games : Doing something that requires skill and concentration, like serving tea following a precise ritual. The submissives will earn praise if they succeed or be chastised if they fail. Impossible tasks : Similar to the attention game, but the task is so difficult that the submissive is doomed to failure. Alternatively, there is a particular twist that they don’t know that would make them fail. Submission is demonstrated by attempting the task even when knowing it is impossible and by accepting failure with grace. Embarrassing tasks : Doing something that requires overcoming shame or shyness. Predicament : the submissive has to choose between two punishments or two unpleasant disciplines. Sometimes there is a trick and one of the choices is better than the other. Or the choice that appears to be the better one turns out to be the worse. Trust games : The submissive is asked to do something scary or embarrassing that requires the dominant to protect her. Pretend danger : Submissives are put in a situation that makes them feel vulnerable, but they are not in real danger because the dominant is controlling the situation. There are no recipes for mind-fucking. It needs to be tailored to the personality of the submissives. A good strategy is to find their points of resistance, their inner conflicts, and making them face them. Needless to say, a great deal of caution  and skill are necessary. Dominants need to give the submissives their full attention, focusing completely on reading their reactions. If successful, this can produce a spark of self-discovery, even self-transformation. The reward: sub-space Submission is a path that starts with a vague desire to surrender. At its end, there is a jewel that satisfies this desire: a coveted mental state called “sub-space”. There are altered states of consciousness  that receive that name. Some of these arise in response to pain during sadomasochistic activities. Properly speaking, sub-space is the one attained by submitting. It is a state of bliss, devotion and profound emotional connection with the dominant. It is normally attained after a good scene, but it can also become the background of a satisfying D/S relationship. Like with many other things in life, what matters is the journey and not the destination.

The science and safety of using ginger in BDSM Who enjoys figging? Figging  has nothing to do with figs. It’s a sadomasochistic game that consists of inserting ginger root in the anus and, less often, in the vagina. Although figging has a reputation for being quite painful, the sensation it produces is generally tolerable. It varies from a pleasant warmth to a burning pain. Some masochists find this sensation erotic for several reasons: its warmth, the fact that it’s experienced in an intimate place, and because of the feeling of vulnerability in evokes.   Responses to the chemicals in ginger root vary considerably from person to person, just like some people love spicy food and others hate it. To enjoy figging , you should be completely comfortable with anal play and be able to wear butt-plugs without problem. You should also be familiar with pain, for example, to the point of being able to enjoy a hard spanking. Experimenting with figging is not risky because the sensation decreases quickly the moment the ginger root is taken out of the anus. Therefore, it is possible to insert it for short periods of time to get familiar with it. In another article , I explained how chili peppers can be used to increase the afterglow of a spanking. What is normally a feeling of warmth in the buttocks is increased by the capsaicin of the peppers to a burning sensation and a hypersensitivity to touch so strong that you cannot wear pants or panties or sit down. Ginger is milder. Besides, the capsaicin of chili peppers gets readily absorbed into the skin and it is almost impossible to wash out, while the active compounds in ginger need to be constantly released from the root to maintain their effect. The science of ginger There are several compounds in ginger that give it its strong flavor and pungency. They have exotic names like zingerone, shogaol and gingerol. I will refer to them with the generic name of gingerols . They make up 1-3% of the weight of fresh ginger. Thermal sensations like heat, coolness and cold are produced by a family of proteins known as TRP channels, which are present in the sensory nerves terminals in the skin. TRP stands for “ transient receptor potential ” (whatever that means). They form channels that, when open, let sodium and calcium ions into the sensory neurons. This depolarizes these neurons, causing them to fire action potentials that send a signal to the spinal cord, and from there to the brain. For example, TRPV1 is the receptor for heat because high temperatures open its channel. It is present in sensory nerves that sense heat. TRPV1 is also activated (the channel is opened) by capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers. That is why our mouth feels hot when we eat these peppers. It’s not that our mouth gets actually hot, but that our sensory nerves tell us that is hot. The heat is an illusion produced by capsaicin tricking our nerves. However, when TRPV1 channels get repeatedly activated, they can trigger an inflammation that will actually warm up the skin. TRPM8 does the opposite: it is the receptor for cold. It is activated by menthol. That’s why menthol feels cool in our mouth and in our skin. Gingerols activate another TRP channel: TRPA1 . You may have noticed that spices like mustard, horseradish and wasabi have a pungency different from that of hot peppers: it is not hot and it gets into your nose. This sensation is mediated by TRPA1. Gingerols activate TRPA1 and TRPC5 , another member of the TRP family. Unlike TRPV1, the TRPA1 channel produces a cool sensation. Then why does ginger feel hot in the anus? As it turns out, gingerols are also able to activate TRPV1 , the heat receptor, although in a different way than capsaicin . This explains why ginger produces a less intense heat sensation than hot peppers. Also, sometimes the TRPA1 protein binds to the TRPV1 protein, so that they mutually modulate their effect. Figging produces two sensations: an initial coolness due to TRPA1 activation and a prolonged heat mediated by TRPV1. Safety Ginger is consumed as food, so is quite safe. Gingerols not only are non-toxic, but have a variety of healing effects. Ginger is commonly used to treat nausea. Recent research shows that gingerols can be effective as anticancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, neuroprotective and gastroprotective medication . The burning produced by ginger is milder and short lasting compared to that produced by capsaicin (hot peppers). Besides, while capsaicin is not water soluble, and hence impossible to wash away, gingerols are easier to eliminate. For most people, taking the ginger root out of the anus eliminates the worse part of the sensation. Keeping ginger inside the anus for a long time triggers a mild inflammation that leaves the anus sensitive. If it becomes too strong, it may lead to hemorrhoids. However, hemorrhoids may be caused by the roughness of the ginger root and not by the gingerols, so using a good amount of lubricant when inserting it may prevent them. It is also a good idea to dilate the anus first with a dildo or a butt-plug, So it is already relaxed when the ginger root is inserted. Keep these things in mind and don’t go overboard. Some people may be allergic to ginger, but they can find out by eating ginger first. Ginger may also “ interact with some medication , including the anticoagulant drug warfarin  and the cardiovascular drug nifedipine .” How to do figging Buy a piece of ginger root at the supermarket, selecting carefully the shape more suited for this purpose. It’s better if it is fairly straight and has a large knob or branch at one end to act like the base of a butt-plug. This will prevent the piece of ginger from getting lost in the rectum, which could mean an embarrassing visit to the ER. The girth is also important, but a root that is too wide can be trimmed down with a knife. Using a knife, strip the skin of the root in all the length that you are planning to insert. Leave the skin in the part that will act as the base, so ginger juice does not get into your hand. Cut away any irregularities and smooth out the end of the finger of ginger. Be careful not to leave any flakes attached to the root, because they may stay in the anus and prolong the sensation when you take the root out. Also, watch out for weaknesses that make cause the ginger to break and get lost inside. Cover the ginger with lube before inserting it in the anus. The lube may prevent some of the gingerols from getting into the skin, but this may actually be good for a novice. Not putting lube on the ginger will produce some abrasion in the anus's mucosa when it is inserted, leading to a stronger irritation. Some of the games that I propose below require the recipient to move around with the ginger inserted. Obviously, the ginger root will not stay inside by itself. Tight pants or underwear may help. You can also use a leather harness with straps going over the anus to keep in place. Or you can make a harness with rope. A small towel between the strap or rope and the piece of ginger will help to keep it in place. In women, the ginger can be inserted into the vagina instead of the anus. You can also cut a small piece of ginger and insert it between the labia  or put it on the clit. Experiment carefully and find what you like. What does figging feels like? Initially, you will feel a cool sensation, which is quite pleasant. After a few minutes, the coolness turns into warmth, which increases progressively until it becomes a burning sensation. Knowing that the burning is an illusion and that nothing bad is actually happening to your ass may help at this point. Contracting the anus will increase the burning until it is hardly bearable. Keeping your sphincters relaxed will make it tolerable. Since one tends to contract the anus involuntarily, this soon becomes a devilish torment that keeps your attention focused on your butt.   If the sensation becomes unbearable, taking out the ginger will get rid of the worse of it. Otherwise, the burning sensation will peak in 15-30 minutes, then slowly fade away. It can be brought back to full intensity by taking out the ginger root and shaving its outer layers with a knife. This will cause the ginger to leak out more gingerols. If a long piece of ginger is used, the hot sensation can be felt deep inside the rectum. In my experience, ginger has very little effect on the gland of the penis or on the nipples. Mind-fucking games with figging In BDSM, mind-fucking is a series of games that the top plays to put the bottom in a state of defeat, vulnerability, loss of control, uncertainty and submission. It is a difficult art to master. The top takes the bottom on a mental trip by manipulating pain and pleasure, and also powerful emotions like fear, surprise, shame and surrender. Like in a movie or a roller-coaster ride, the emotions should be strong but not overwhelming. Two things about figging can serve to assert power over a submissive. The first is that it produces a strong burning sensation in a very intimate part of the body. The second is that this sensation increases considerably when the sphincters are is contracted. Contracting the anus is an involuntary response to both pleasure and pain. Hence, any pain given to the bottoms leads to an additional pain in their anus, while trying not to contract the anus makes them more vulnerable to the pain. Conversely, pleasuring the bottoms puts them in a predicament between enjoying themselves and having to withstand the pain in the anus, or focusing on not contracting the anus and not being distracted from the pleasure. Here are some mind-fucks that can be done with figging: Caning with figging.  After each cane stroke, the pain will make the bottom contract the anus, which will increase the burning sensation of figging. Alternatively, if the bottoms focus on not contracting the anus, that makes them lower their guard to the pain of the cane stroke. Either way, they lose. A vibrator or receiving oral sex while figged.  The submissive will find herself caught in the predicament between enjoying the pleasure or staying alert to not contract the anus. Doing chores while figged.  A complicated task is given to the submissive, with the admonition that the ginger will not come out until it is completed to the satisfaction of the dominant. The bottom gets torn between rushing to finish the task, paying attention to do it right, and the constant distraction in their anus. Giving oral sex while being figged.  The burning in the anus will be a powerful distraction, but a good submissive should provide excellent service, regardless. Otherwise, the ginger may need to stay in a bit longer, wouldn’t it? Fucking while being figged.  A male bottom is made to fuck his mistress with a piece of ginger up his ass. The fucking is for her pleasure. He’d better keep that in mind and not squeeze his ass, or he would play an instant price. Also, he may find his orgasm spoiled since ejaculation is accompanied by strong anal contractions. Being fucked while being figged.  The ginger root creates a nice double-penetration. At the same time, the bottom is torn between the conflicting pleasure and pain. Her orgasm will be interesting. Anal sex after figging.  Figging sensitizes the anus, so getting fucked there awakens new sensations and vulnerability. Chastity by figging the clitoris.  Women may find that, after having a piece of ginger on their clit, it becomes so sensitive that masturbating becomes unpleasant or even impossible for a while. At the same time, they become acutely aware of the presence of their clit. The dominant may choose to apply the ginger at intervals short enough to keep her horny and unsatisfied.

by inventing and marketing wokeness As American progressives, we are all in shock that Trump won the last election, garnishing not just the Electoral College but also the popular vote. The Republican Party also got control of the House and the Senate. When a narcissistic felon gets more votes than you, the problem is not with the narcissistic felon. The problem is with you. But, when you stop to think about it, it was a long time coming. The Democratic Party lost its natural constituency, the workers, a long time ago. The urban elites that form its voting core are not numerous enough to win election. At the problem is not limited to the USA. All over Europe, and even in South American countries like Argentina, the Left is backsliding. Populists are winning elections by getting votes from the working class. How could this happen? In this article, I recapitulate the history of the Left in Western countries, and then analyze how it lost its way as the 20th century turns into the 21st. The Left has roots in Humanism We can trace back the birth of the Left to the humanist ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when the well-being of humans replaced worshipping God as our main concern. In Christianity and Islam, religion served to buttress a feudal system in which society was divided between the nobility, who owned everything, and the serfs, who owned nothing and, indeed, were considered property themselves. The Pope, bishops and other princes of the Church were just part of the aristocracy, supported by a legion of priests, monks and nuns who made a tough deal to escape serfdom. As the Middle Ages ended, the aristocracy was being replaced by a new class formed by artisans and merchants: the incipient bourgeoisie. In the 16th century, colonialism sped up these changes by bringing into Europe the wealth resulting from the conquest of the Americas, Australia and large parts of Africa and Asia. To accelerate the exploitation of America, slavery took the serfdom of the Middle Ages to horrible extremes. The Left appeared to fight wealth inequality and exploitation In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution drastically accelerated this change. Part of the bourgeoisie surpassed the aristocrats in wealth and became the new masters of society: the capitalists. Thinking that they could become part of the bourgeoisie and attain freedom, the serfs moved from the country to the cities to work in the new factories, only to find new forms of exploitation. The existence of slavery in the Americas was a clear reminder of the extremes to which capitalists would go to make more money. Capitalism obeys a perverse mechanism. If you have money, you can invest it to generate more money. But, if the only money you have is your wage, you need to spend it all to survive, so you are never able to make it grow. Over time, this causes money to accumulate on the top, into the hands of the rich, whereas the poor are forever condemned to work just to stay alive. Owning land and property, the nobles were able to enter this game with money to invest, although some were not savvy enough and ended up wasting their riches. Capitalists became the new nobility, passing their wealth down the generations. The churches owned land and wealth too, so they promptly sided with the wealthy industrialists, forming an alliance of religious ideas and capitalism that persist to these days. We call it conservatism. The workers challenge capitalism However, being crammed into factories and poor neighborhood, the workers were able to talk among themselves and organize. Additionally, there was also a group of idealists who saw the injustice of the system. They were the new intellectual class of scientists and technocrats that had become indispensable to advance the Industrial Revolution. They were educated in the new, growing universities. A few of them talked to the workers, educating them on how to improve their lot. A few solutions came to mind. Workers could organize into unions. Using strikes as a weapon, they could force the factory owners to give them a better deal. However, the capitalists could use force — the police, paid squads and even the army — to break the strikes. Scabs could also be brought to replace the striking workers. It seemed that workers could never succeed unless they could take the power of the State away from the hands of the capitalists. Since the workers were more numerous than the capitalists, this should be feasible. The working class could garnish the monopoly of violence of the State to protect their rights. Socialism was born. Revolution or democracy?  Two routes presented themselves to the workers to capture the power of the State. The first was to strengthen democracy and vote the capitalists out of power. This should be possible, since the workers were more numerous than the rich. The second was to have a revolution, using violence to seize the power of the State away from the capitalists. As the 19th century approached its end, the second route — revolution — seemed more promising than the first, for a variety of reasons. The democratic system was being corrupted by the rich, who bought votes, miscounted them, overwhelm the people with propaganda or cheated outright. In many countries, voting was a joke, and everybody knew it. Even if workers' representatives were elected, they could be corrupted by the temptation of wealth. On the other hand, the American Revolution  (1765-1783) and the  French Revolution  (1789-1799) offered enticing examples of how the political system of a country could be changed by force. Since the workers were going into the trouble and bloodshed of having a revolution, why stop at the objective of having a State more sympathetic to the workers? It would be possible to abolish capitalism altogether and create a new system in which the workers had all the power and wealth. Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels  (1820-1895) developed the ideology known as Marxism or Communism. It proposed the overthrown of capitalism by a class struggle in which the proletariat (workers) would seize power from the bourgeoisie to produce a society in which the State would control the means of production in a class-less society. In his book, Das Kapital  Marx embedded his political ideas in a complex philosophical formulation. In 1848, Marx and Engels published a pamphlet titled The Communist Manifesto , more suitable to reach the masses.   Communism was born. The Left splits into anarchism, socialism and communism The First International , or International Workingmen's Association (IWA), was a socialist organization created in meetings in London (1864) and Geneva (1866). In these meeting there was an increasing tension because many of the early socialists — the followers of Owen and Proudhon — refused to accept Marxism, denouncing it as authoritarian and for giving too much power to the State. In 1868, a further polarization was brought into the First International by Mikhail Bakunin and his followers, the anarchists. They proposed achieving socialism through direct economical struggle again capitalism, without participating in democracy. At the time, the Marxists proposed achieving power mostly through elections instead of revolution, leading to gradual reform of the laws and political institutions. The confrontation between anarchists and Marxists came to a head in 1872, at the Hague Congress of the IWA, in which the First International split into two separate organizations, socialist and anarchist. The First International was finally closed in 1877. In 1889, the socialists decided to exclude the anarchists and formed a Second International  in Paris. However, in 1919 a new split happened, this time between revolutionary socialism and reformist socialism . The first formed the Communist International  (Comintern), while the second founded the Labour and Socialist International  (LSI) in 1923. Since then, socialism and communism have been separate movements, with their own political parties and agendas. While communism created awful dictatorships in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, socialism alternated in power with conservatism to give rise to the modern democratic states of Western Europe, the most egalitarian and free societies in the world. So don’t believe anybody who tells you socialism and communism are the same thing. That is just capitalist propaganda. They have been different ideologies for a hundred years. A brief political history of the 20th century The triumph of the communists in the Russian Revolution in 1917 sent shivers through the spine of the capitalists. It showed that their alliance with the aristocrats and religion could be driven from power. At the same time, socialist parties have started to win elections in Europe, while unions were able to hold a large sway over the economy. The German Social Democratic Party and German unions played a large role in ending World War I. Anarchists were much less successful. Prevented by their ideology from participating in elections, soon became a violent and unpopular fringe. The wealthy elites reacted by realizing that they, too, needed to seize the power of the State to achieve their goals. They fed the masses a mixture of nationalist and racist propaganda and created their own extremist parties. They blamed the socialist parties that were in power for all the ills in the country. In particular, the German Social Democratic Party was blamed for the grievous terms of surrender imposed on Germany after World War I. Fascism and Nazism were born as copycats of socialism, even stealing that name. In Spain, a murderous civil war started in 1936 after a failed coup against the Frente Popular , an alliance of communists and socialists that had won the last election. Supported by troops and weapons from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, as well as donations from American capitalists, the Fascists of general Franco won the war in April 1939, starting a 40 year long dictatorship. Five months later, in September 1939, World War II started. Capitalists in the UK and the USA hoped that the German Nazis and the Soviet communists would destroy each other. Instead, the war became a struggle between the democratic and fascist versions of capitalism, as well as an attempt from Japan, Italy and Germany to seize the empires created by colonialism. World War II transitioned into the Cold War. Communist totalitarianism took advantage of World War II to seize half of Europe. Soon afterwards, communism triumphed in China and threatened to extend itself into Southeast Asia and Central and South America. As the new leader of the free world, the USA fought proxy wars against communism in Korea and Vietnam. It established puppet dictatorships throughout South America (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil…) and Europe (Spain, Portugal, Greece) to maintain its power. These totalitarian regimes were a new version of Fascism, the unholy alliance of capitalism with a repressive State. A new hope at the end of the 20th century The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 was unexpected and fortuitous. American conservatives credit Ronald Reagan for its fall but, in reality, his corrupt and ineffective government ( Iran-Contra affair ) had little to do with it. I credit the political genius of Mikhail  Gorbachev  for this turn of events. Unfortunately, his project to transform the USSR into a democratic socialist society was thwarted by a coup. The subversion of Gorbachev’s new socialist ideas into neoliberalism and kleptocracy in Russia is explained in the book The Shock Doctrine , by Naomi Klein. During the 90s, all the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe, as well as some that had been part of the USSR (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) quickly transitioned to democracies. Germany was reunified. For a while, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus seemed on the path to democracy as well. Most other former dictatorships in Europe had ended before, together with most dictatorships in South America. The world seemed on a firm path towards democracy. The golden formula of social democracy The prosperous, egalitarian countries of Western Europe showed the path: a mixture of mild capitalism with socialism in which the State acted to contain the excesses of capital, to distribute wealth through taxation, and to establish a safety net in which everybody had access to education, health and safety. Health was ensured by a public health system of doctors and hospitals paid by the state. Education was ensured by a system of public schools and universities also run by the state, supplemented by private ones. Safety was ensured by a fair system of laws, justice, police and prisons over which the State had absolute authority. The division between administrative, legislative and judicial powers contained corruption and established a system of checks and balances. Working conditions were improved with a shorter work week and longer vacations, which forced the employers to hire more people, decreasing unemployment. The book The Better Angels of Our Nature , by Canadian psychologist and Harvard professor  Steven Pinker , documents this quick raise in human well-being at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. He attributes it to the policies enacted by modern states. Alas, poverty, inequality and exploitation persisted! However, the social democratic parties of Europe, inheritors of 19th century socialism, had the formula to combat it. Tax the rich and use the money to help the poor with unemployment benefits, free healthcare, free education and other perks. The rich, however, strongly objected. They had other plans. The subversion of the Left Right when it should have been successful, the plan started to fall apart. A few misguided French philosophers, disillusioned with the failure of communist, invented post-modernism. According to them, the agenda of the social democracy was not good enough. It was time to move past it. But they never propose anything to replace it. The idea jumped across the Atlantic into the USA. Some people started to ponder: if communism had failed, what was going to take its place as the ideology of the Left? The obvious answer was socialism, or social democracy, which had been hugely successful in Western Europe. The problem was that conservatives have successful convinced their fellow Americans that socialism was the same as communism, a hundred years of political history be damned! Following the steps of the postmodernists, many on the Left started saying that the whole progressive agenda had been a failure. Nothing was good enough. Claiming success in any issue was tantamount to treason. Some even doubted that any progress was made at all. What about the oppression of women? The Patriarchy was still there! What about the persistent racism against Blacks? The Civil Rights Movement was not enough! What about colonialism? Many countries were still in abject poverty! The rich were listening carefully. From history, they knew that the danger lied in the alliance between the working class and the intellectuals. That’s how socialism got started. They knew that the intellectuals were key to any social change. History had showed that workers needed the direction of brilliant minds to achieve their objectives. But what if a wedge could be driven between the intellectuals and the working class? What if the crazy ideas of some intellectuals could be encouraged, so they would collide with the common sense of the masses? How the universities were taken over The key was the universities. That’s where intellectuals could be bought. Luckily for the rich, American universities were already in their pockets. Most European universities are run democratically by the faculty, students and staff. Elections are held regularly to elect the deans and the president. I took part in such elections when I was a professor of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid  from 1989 to 1991. Besides, most European universities are public and financed by the government through a transparent process. The salaries of the professors are fixed by law. In contrast, American universities are de facto dictatorships run by the regents, which are a few individuals chosen from wealthy and politically powerful elites and accountable to nobody. Deans and presidents are appointed by the reagents, not elected. The salaries of the professors are negotiated individually when they are hired and kept secret. “ To bring more transparency to this, California Senate Bill 1162 (SB 1162) was passed. It requires public universities in California to report the salaries of their faculty and staff. However, other states do not have such requirement. The reagents hold the purse strings. For example, when a research grant is awarded to a university by federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF), the grant money is divided into direct costs, which go to the scientists who submitted the grant to fun their research, and indirect costs, which go to the university top administrators to spend as they please. Indirect costs range from 40% to 120% of direct costs. I know. For 20 years, I supported my research at UCLA with grants from the NIH and the Veterans Administration (VA). I have been a reviewer of grants for the NIH and the VA for a dozen years.  Scientists in STEM departments fund their research, and a large part of their salaries, from grants from the government and industry. In contrast, Humanity departments are funded directly by the university. This gives university administrators, who are hired and controlled by the regents, a way to decide which departments get the money and which ones are left at the side of the road. The book The Fall of the Faculty , by Benjamin Ginsberg , a political scientist and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University, documents how control over the universities was taken out of the faculty and handed over to a growing body of administrators with political agendas. Universities became less democratic and more driven towards politically correct dogmatism. Quietly, top university administrators started defunding political studies departments that could spread socialist ideas dangerous for the rich. Instead, they funded departments that specialized in gender, racial, LGTB and colonial issues. These departments started spinning new ideologies. The key was to deemphasize class differences and wealth inequality. These issues were dangerous to the rich, because their obvious solution was to tax the rich more and channel the money to the poor. All that talk about the one percent, unions, workers' rights, public health and public education was definitely bad. However, talk about the Patriarchy, LGTB rights, racial oppression and colonialism was okay, because it would never lead to social changes that would challenge the power of the wealthy. In fact, these issues would piss off the workers. Many of them were socially conservative, after all. The new politically correct lingo coming out of the universities reeked of intellectual elitism, which the workers instinctively despised. On top of that, workers' issues had been dismissed by the same Democratic Party that had promised to defend them. It worked. The chasm between the Left and the workers grew and grew and grew. The icing of the cake was that the wealthy came out looking like political saints. Long gone was the image of the ruthless, exploitative Scrooge, with his pockets lined with money and politicians at his fingertips. Instead, now the rich were philanthropists who donated large sums of money to the universities, erected buildings with their names on it, and funded worthy political causes. Like, you know, the Sackler family that killed hundreds of thousands by marketing OxyContin, a supposedly non addictive opioid (read Empire of Pain , by Patrick Radden Keefe). Wokeness, Identity Politics, whatever… So clever was the plot that the new ideology into which the Left had degenerated remained nameless for the longest time. It was, simply, the Left. Never mind that it has long since lost the working class and stopped advocating for the poor.  In his book The Identity Trap , Yascha Mounk calls it the Identity Synthesis. However, this name and its similar one, Identity Politics, failed to catch on. Most people call it wokeness, while others vigorously point to the golden past of this word to signal racist danger among Blacks. It doesn’t matter, as long as we know what we are talking about. ‘Wokeness’ seems to be the word chosen by both conservatives and numerous progressives to name this subversion of the Left. So we should forget the old meaning of ‘woke’ and go with the new one. The Identity Trap  is a brilliant expose of the interlinked ideas that form the fabric of Identity Politics: critical race theory, feminism, intersectionality, antiracism and anti-colonialism. The underlying idea has been called pan-oppression : that all oppression systems form a whole, so you cannot fight one without fighting the others. This divides the world between victims and oppressors. Much to their chagrin, the male, White workers that still form the core of the American working class find themselves in the camp of the oppressors, even though they are still being exploited and impoverished. Many Hispanic men see themselves heading the same way. Compelled speech Mounk also documents how the Identity Politics ideology was successfully marketed from the universities to society. The PR departments of colleges and corporations took wokeness over as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies. The ugliest side of DEI is the suppression of free speech and forced indoctrination. For example, the picture above shows a screenshot from a mandatory online class about wokeness imposed on faculty and staff by UCLA. Note how pretty innocuous statements like “You are transgender? Really? I couldn’t tell” are microaggressions that you have to apologize for. Even though the existence of microaggressions is still a controversial idea, this class forces you to accept it, together with implicit bias and intersectionality, other beliefs of wokeness. The next picture shows how the class forces you to accept as fact a controversial statement by Derald Wing Sue , one of the inventors of the idea of microaggressions. This is called ‘compelled speech’: not only you are not allowed to give your opinion, you are forced to give an opinion that you may not share as a requirement to pass this mandatory course. Nowhere in this online course there is an option for employees to disagree. Your intentions don’t matter — one of the core beliefs of wokeness. Universities should be arenas for the free debate of ideas. Compelled speech and political indoctrination are contrary to the mission of the universities. No wonder so many people are angry at wokeness. Forging a progressive future When we examine the history of the Left, as I have done in this article, the path to follow should be clear. The main political issue has always been economic inequality. When the Left abandoned it to pursue obscure ideological goals, it lost its natural supporters: the workers and the poor. Since they form the majority of the population, with their support it would be easy to win elections. Without it, the Left gets relegated to a minority urban elite hypocritically claiming to support the oppressed while protecting their privileges. We need to focus on the issues of the workers and the poor: Redistributive taxation that takes money from the rich and gives it to the poor. To compensate for the natural tendency of capitalism to concentrate more and more wealth in the hands of the rich. Free healthcare for all.  Because the right not to die from diseases and to live a healthy life is a basic human right that should not depend on how much money you have. Free education for all. Because democracy is impossible without a well-educated populace. In a world of ever-expanding knowledge, education is the most empowering tool. Universities that the poor cannot afford feed contempt for the educated elites. A fair system of justice and police that does not over-punish the poor and forgive the rich.  Nobody should get a get-out-of-jail card by hiring powerful lawyers. Nobody should be sent to jail for being too poor to make bail and pay a lawyer. Free-speech. Which should have never been abandoned by the Left. No more political correctness and elitist new words and grammar. No more canceling people who dare challenge the political dogmas. No more political indoctrination at the universities. Make diversity of ideas and expression the most important diversity of all. Sexual freedom for everybody.  Let’s start making reproductive rights the rights of everybody, and not just women. Freedom of contraception and abortion, but also freedom of men not to support children that they didn’t want to produce. How about large public subsidies for parents raising children? It’s true that the workers and the rural poor may not be completely onboard with some of the socially progressive ideas of the educated middle class, but I think that they will come around if we engage them in honest conversation. After all, most Americans these days support abortion rights, gay marriage and drug legalization, as we have seen in single-issue votes in Red states. In any case, the dismissal of wokeness and a new political program that prioritizes the interests of the workers and economic equality seems to be the only path to defeat populists like Trump. Note: The hyperlinks in this article are not affiliated links. Whenever possible, they point to non-commercial sources like Wikipedia. Copyright 2024 Hermes Solenzol.

How mindfulness and flow diminish the ego Escaping the tyranny of the ego According to a recent psychological theory, the ego is an internalization of the instructions that we received in our childhood from our parents, teachers and peers. Driven by the powerful social emotions of shame, pride and guilt, it compels us to achieve things in life. The ego is scared of failure and attached to success. It creates an unhealthy dynamic in our lives that makes us unhappy. According to Buddhism, craving is the source of suffering. However, contrary to most common interpretations, craving is not the pursuit of pleasure. Craving is caused by the ego . What do you crave in life? Is it food, sex, friends and a good rest (pleasure)? Or is it money, fame and success (ego)? The simple pleasures of life produce little attachment. We can enjoy them and let them go. What drives us crazy with anxiety are things like money and success, which originate in the ego. Our education has instilled in us the desire to achieve socially valuable goals in life. We have become so obsessed with them that we have forgotten to question whether they make us happy. We have forgotten to take care of ourselves. We have forgotten who we really are. We are not our ego. It is impossible, and undesirable, to live without the ego. It serves useful purposes, like keeping us out of danger, not letting ourselves be controlled by others, motivating us to achieve our goals. The problem is that the ego has taken possession of our minds so completely that it makes us unhappy with its constant demands for success. With its continuous berating when we fail to achieve its goals. Everything that we do, everything that happens to us, is interpreted by our ego in terms of its goals. The tar giant There is an old Buddhist tale about the young Buddha making his way home through a forest after learning martial arts. In the forest, he encountered a giant who blocked his pass. After failing to convince the giant to let him continue his way, the Buddha attacked him with his bow and arrows, then with his spear. But his weapons just stick to the giant, without harming him. Then he struck the giant with his hands and feet. But then the young Buddha realized that the giant is made of tar, so he becomes stuck to him. The more he fought the giant, the more trapped the Buddha became. The tar man appears in many tales and legends. It represents the ego. We cannot fight the ego because every success that we would achieve in doing so would be a success of the ego, and therefore, would make the ego stronger. Even the desire to defeat the ego comes from the ego, so it turns against us. Like the tar giant, everything sticks to the ego. The more we fight it, the more attached we become to it. We cannot abandon the ego just by trying to abandon the ego. It doesn’t work that way. The way to decrease the hold of the ego over our mind is to practice states of mind that turn off the ego. Like mindfulness and flow. Mindfulness Mindfulness is a practice in which we open our minds to everything, without judging. Mostly, we open our awareness to all our senses, without emphasizing anything in particular. But we also open our mind to thoughts and memories, without trying to push them away, but not encouraging them, either. Mindfulness is letting everything course through our mind unimpeded, like clouds in the sky. This creates a relaxed and expanded state of consciousness. Because the ego is constantly trying to judge everything, the non-judgmental state of mindfulness turns it off. However, the ego will constantly try to intrude, patting us in the back when we are being good at being mindful and chastising us when we get distracted. The only way to deal with this patting in the back (pride) and chastising (shame) is to treat them just like any other emotion: don’t push them away, don’t let them take over. Say “Hello, ego!”, wave and smile. Flow Flow consists of engaging on a task  — a sport, playing an instrument, dancing, writing, drawing — with absolute focus, so that everything else disappears. The task has to be something that we have learned to perform well, but that still challenges us to the limit of our ability. After an initial period of struggle, we enter a state in which we no longer feel the effort. Time passes without us realizing it. And we really enjoy what we are doing. That state is flow. In another article, I explored the neuroscience of flow . One of its remarkable properties is that the ego is turned off during flow. The sensation of the self is mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the default mode neuronal network. During flow, the default mode network is turned off, while the saliency network, first, and the executive network, second, takes its place. The middle prefrontal cortex gets inhibited during flow, making us “forget ourselves”, so there is no ego. Perfectionism While there is no judging in mindfulness, is a certain level of judging is necessary in flow to let us know if we are doing things right. However, this judging is about whether our task is going in the right direction or not. It is centered in the process, not on the goal. The ego is concerned with goals, success or failure, and not so much in the process. However, there is one way in which the ego can ruin flow: perfectionism. It consists of an intolerance of making errors. The ego demand that everything we do, we do it perfectly. Otherwise, it feels like we have failed. Making mistakes negates the exalted self-image that the ego has of itself. However, experimenting, making mistakes, and correcting them are essential parts of the creative process involved in flow.  Flow has been described as venturing into the unknown. If we are in known territory, then we are not facing our challenge to the limit of our abilities. This is essential for flow. When we venture into the unknown, it is impossible not to make mistakes. Therefore, if we let the ego surface in the form of perfectionism, we stop being in flow. The difference between flow and mindfulness Flow is different from mindfulness. While in mindfulness we let every sensation, emotion and idea into our mind, in flow we select only those mental contents related to our task. In flow, we screen out distractions, while in mindfulness nothing can be a distraction. Mindfulness is Yin, feminine. It is passive and receptive. Flow is Yang, masculine. It is active and discriminating. However, when we practice mindfulness and flow, at different times, these states support each other because our mind becomes disciplined in staying in one state of mind. Both mindfulness and flow require a good measure of mental control. Daydreaming However, we should refrain from wanting to always be in mindfulness or flow. That can be exhausting and counterproductive. There is a time for everything. Wanting to be in mindfulness or flow can become a goal of the ego. We fall into the trap of one part of our mind wanting to control our entire mind. This runs contrary to self-love and inner peace. Daydreaming is a state of mind in which we let the default mode network do its thing. We fantasize. We reminisce about the past. We hope about the future. This is all about ourselves. During daydreaming, the middle prefrontal cortex gets activated as part of the default mode network, but that’s okay. There should be a time when we remember ourselves, too. There has to be a time when we let everything that is inside our mind come up and be enjoyed. That is also part of the creative process. The best artistic ideas do not come up in flow, but when we let our mind be truly free. That’s where the seeds are found. When you hear spiritual people talk about the “monkey mind”, it’s their ego talking. There is nothing wrong with letting the little monkey come out and play, once in a while. Maybe even break a thing or two. Who wants to control the monkey? The ego. A new way of life Thus, if we practice mindfulness and flow often enough, we erode the tyranny of the ego by creating egoless states of mind. Since states of consciousness become habits, the more we practice mindfulness and flow, the easier it becomes to enter these states. We don’t need to fight the ego, which is useless. We just need to have habitual states of mind in which the ego is absent. From these states of mind, we can envision a life that is not directed by the ego. Since the ego embodies societal norms, this empowers us to direct our lives according to our true selves and not the dictates of society. By entering flow, we can achieve the creativity that we need to succeed in our professional life without the anxiety-provoking prodding of the ego. We can turn our work into play. Wanting money, fame and success are goals of the ego. When we get used to viewing our lives through a different lens, we can start focusing on the process and not on the goals. Enjoying what we do instead of worrying about our success is a way to prevent anxiety.

Craving is not caused by seeking pleasure, but by the ego Craving causes suffering We all want to stop suffering. The reality of suffering is the first of the Four Noble Truth of Buddhism. The second Noble Truth is that suffering is produced by craving. The third and fourth Noble Truths are that there is an ending to suffering and the teachings of Buddhism are a path to end suffering. Let’s put those aside to avoid getting entangled in the religious beliefs of Buddhism. It is obvious that suffering exists. It also makes sense that craving causes a lot of suffering, although perhaps not all of it. We struggle to achieve a lot of things in life and, when we don’t get them, we suffer. Buddhism goes further by saying that any suffering, like being sick, losing a limb, losing our sanity or losing a loved one, is caused by craving because we are unduly attached to our body, our mind or to our loved ones. It is questionable that living without any attachment is possible or even desirable. Zen and other schools of Mahayana Buddhism teach that suffering is caused by ignorance, which in turn cause craving. But ignorance of what? What is the wisdom that would free us from craving and suffering? In any case, avoiding craving would greatly diminish our suffering. Drug addiction and craving Thanks to neuroscience research on addiction, we have learned a few things about the neurophysiological mechanism of craving. As it turns out, craving is independent of pleasure. When somebody starts taking an addictive drug, it gets hooked on the pleasurable experience produced by it. As the drug gets consumed over and over again, three things happen: The pleasure produced by the drug decreases. Not taking the drug produces a state of dysphoria and physical pain: withdrawal. There is a craving for the drug distinct from seeking the pleasure produced by the drug. Eventually, avoiding withdrawal and the intrinsic craving produced by the drugs become the sole motivation for taking it. Neuroscience has also revealed that addictive drugs like opioids (morphine, heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone), psychostimulants (cocaine, methamphetamine) and tranquilizers (Valium, pentobarbital) produce craving by hijacking the reward pathway , which is a neuronal pathway connecting the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens that uses the neurotransmitter dopamine. The VTA and the nucleus accumbens are located in the basal striatum, an area in the middle of the brain. Are seeking pleasure and drug addiction the same thing? This is the idea proposed by the book Dopamine Nation , by Anna Lembke. It proclaims that all pleasure is addictive, including some innocuous, or even positive, things like reading romantic novels, cold showers, working and the mental state of flow. Lembke justifies this idea in that pleasure produces dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. She thinks that this leads to addiction the same way that opioid drugs and cocaine produce addiction. This idea has entered modern pop psychology, leading to fads like NoFap  (an anti-masturbation movement), porn detox, and dopamine fasting  (avoiding any pleasure to “replenish dopamine stores”). This is just an attempt to provide a scientific basis for the old philosophical belief that pleasure produces craving. When we feel pleasure, it makes us want to repeat it, so we start craving it. We seek pleasure, we get it, but this only makes us want more. Let’s examine these claims in detail. Craving is not caused by seeking pleasure Let’s start with neuroscience. It’s not true that pleasure releases dopamine in the accumbens. It’s much more complicated than that. In another article, I describe the mechanisms of dopamine release in the reward pathway and explain how addictive drugs produce an anomalous dopamine release that is entirely different from the one produced by normal mental states, including pleasure. https://www.hermessolenzol.com/en/post/dopamine-why-heroin-is-addictive-but-porn-is-not It is called the reward pathway  for a reason. What triggers dopamine release is not pleasure, but the anticipation of reward. Rewards do not have to be pleasurable, just something that the brain has been trained to consider a goal. Reward is not the expectation of pleasure, but anything that motivates us. The things that we really crave Think about it. What are the rewards that we pursue in life? They rarely are pleasure. Money. Fame. Professional success. Love — which is code for getting a good romantic relationship. These are the things we crave. They ultimately may translate into pleasure — good food, good sex, a relaxing vacation. But the truth is that we get so involved in chasing these things that we forgo the more mundane pleasures for their sake. We eat junk food to get back to work. We have sex while worrying about our career. Our vacations are sort and loaded with worry. We even let love for our partner languish because we don’t dedicate enough time to keep our relationship alive. Why do we pursue these things? We rarely enjoy the pleasures of life We rarely seek pleasure for its own sake. Truly enjoying pleasure would be an exercise in mindfulness. When eating, we would pay complete attention to the taste, smell and texture of our food, putting aside judgement and extraneous thoughts. When we have sex, we would stay fully focused on touching the skin, feeling the shape of the body of our partner, looking in her/his eyes for the pleasure we evoke, enjoying the pleasure arising from our body. Non-judgmental focusing on sensations is the core of mindfulness. We can practice mindful eating, mindful sex and mindful sports. Mindful pleasure would not induce craving for two reasons. First, it would satisfy our natural needs, so we would wait until we are hungry, horny, etc., before we seek it again. Second, like any mindfulness exercise, mindful pleasure takes a lot of energy, so we may get tired and depleted if we do it too often. What is the ego? The reason why we crave money, fame and success is explained by something we could call the ego hypothesis . It posits that the ego is a part of the mind that originates as an internalization of the admonitions of our parents and teachers. Human sociability is controlled by some powerful emotions, like guilt, indignation, pride and shame. Guilt makes us feel bad when we do something morally wrong. Indignation makes us angry when somebody else does something morally wrong. Pride is feeling good when we succeed in a difficult task. Shame is feeling bad when we fail or don’t measure to societal standards. As children develop, these emotions make them very sensitive to praise, chastising and shaming by their educators. By the time they become teenagers, the goals to succeed instilled in them by their educators have become solidified into their own internal critic — the ego. The ego craves praise. It fears guilt and shame. It is also critical of other people, judging them through the emotion of indignation when we think that they have done something wrong. Achieving success and avoiding failure are not the only things that the ego wants. It is also in charge of self-preservation, driving our fears and anxieties. In this, it can be useful. However, it gets in the way when fear paralyzes us and gets in the way of focusing on what we are doing. I am not saying that the ego is bad. It is necessary for us to behave appropriately in society. People who are impervious to the control of guilt and shame are sociopaths. That’s why saying that somebody is shameless is an insult. The drive of the ego to succeed is also necessary for us to succeed in our career, in sports, in relationships… in any endeavor that we take in life. It provides the energy for us to work hard and improve ourselves. The ego is at the core of craving The ego hypothesis explains how the ego is at the core of the cravings that make us miserable: money, fame, success, love, etc. Since the ego is based on learned rewards, it engages the dopaminergic reward pathway. This is the true function of the reward pathway, not to make us seek pleasure, but to provide the push on anything that motivates us in life. And our primary motivations, as human beings, are learned socially early in life. That pat in the back we give ourselves when we accomplish something hard — it involves dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. Paradoxically, the shame of failure also involves dopamine release, but this happens in other parts of the reward pathway that are associated with unpleasant feelings. Modern society encourages oversized egos Modern society encourages the development of the ego with its emphasis on competition and possession. For men, their value as human beings is based on success in their profession, making money, sports and having a relationship with a high-value woman (sexy, loving, smart and fun). For women, their value is traditionally associated with body image (being beautiful and sexy) and getting a relationship with a high-value man (good provider, high social status, handsome, faithful and caring). For some time, this has been changing by giving women the same professional and financial goals as men. For many women, this means getting caught in the double demand of being beautiful and professionally successful. At the same time, modern society decreases the value of friendship and kin relationships. This takes us away from unconditional love, so our self-esteem becomes solely anchored in our ego. Ego and pleasure We seem to pursue pleasure. However, but we do not seek it for its own sake but because our ego sees it as a reward, as something that we are entitled to. This is what generates the fear of missing out (FOMO). It makes us become envious when other people experience pleasures that we do not. We even get jealous when our loved one experiences sexual pleasure without us. We want the biggest slice of the pie, not because we want to eat more, but as a sign that we deserve more than others. Because we are better than others. We want to seduce the hottest person in the room, not because we are attracted to her/him, but to signal our social status. We want the best hotel room, the fastest car, cutting ahead to the front of the line. It’s all ego. It drives craving because the ego wants more, more, more. Ego and morality But even if we forgo pleasure to live a moral life, we are still in the hands of the ego. Since one of the main things that we internalize during our education is moral rules, the ego plays an important role as the enforcer of morality. Again, this is necessary. We need to become well-behaved persons that play nicely with others. Failing to do so would turn us into abusers and criminals. However, just like we need to shed the excessive drive of the ego to succeed to avoid craving and suffering, to be truly free we need to break the excessive hold that morality has on us. Viewing it from a different angle, the morality that we learned forces us to put our self-esteem in the hands of external judgement by others. This is hard to avoid because we have little control over guilt and shame. These emotions evolved to be controlled by our social environment. It’s hard to avoid feeling bad when faced with social disapproval. Shame is so powerful that leads some people to suicide, especially emotionally vulnerable teenagers. This is why being criticized in social media has such a devastating effect on young people. This drives us to conform to existing social values, instead of being able to confront them and establish a more rational system of morality. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can train ourselves to shift our moral focus from externally driven societal values to internally created values. We can draw our own moral code and stick to it. People who espouse values at variance with the dominant moral code had to do that: gays, atheists, free-thinkers, skeptics, non-monogamous people. The importance of the emotions of pride and shame is shown by how they need to focus on pride to build a shield against societal judgement and rejection. It also helps to gather in groups of like-minded people, so that they can rely on their mutual approval. Religions tell us to avoid pride and hubris by being humble. However, by that they mean is to give up our agency and put ourselves in the hands of priests, gurus and religious beliefs. What I propose here is the opposite: a self-empowering practice that refuses to conform to traditional morality. What I am talking about is freeing ourselves by breaking the chains of traditional morality and irrational beliefs. The problem with unquestioned Virtue We start to see what a project of inner liberation would look. To avoid craving that leads to suffering, we need to dethrone the ego from its place of exclusive driver of our motivation. We need to develop a form of soft self-control that based on joy, curiosity, mindfulness and happiness, instead of craving and possessiveness. But we also need to free ourselves from the shackle of unreflective morality, which is chosen by society and not by us. These moral reins are also in the hands of the ego. We need to change our values from externally determined to internally driven. The Virtue proposed by Stoicism needs to be examined carefully. It just assumes that things valued by society, like temperance, generosity and courage, are good on principle. This is not what a rationally examined moral code looks like. The key problem, however, is that placing Virtue at the center of the project of spiritual growth leads us to what I call the trap of the ego . We want to see ourselves as virtuous, to get that pat in back, to see ourselves as great, as better than others. Which is pure ego. https://www.hermessolenzol.com/en/post/the-traps-of-the-ego Therefore, pursuing Virtue creates its own craving. We suffer when we fail to measure up to our standards. We judge ourselves harshly. Our mind gets divided between the controller and the controlled, the rational part that sets lofty goals and the emotional, animal part who drags us down to failure and sin. Ignorance leads to craving when we operate under the wrong model of the mind. One that thinks that reason is good and that emotions are bad and need to be controlled. Or that sees sexual desire as an animal impulse that deserves utter contempt. Such a divided mind is at war with itself. It sets itself up for failure. Most of its energy is spent in fighting with itself, so there is nothing else left for true creativity. Flow is egoless action Flow is a mental state that is achieved when we face a challenge that engages our skills but requires a complete focus to accomplish. It is characterized by feelings of effortlessness, focus, creativity, energy, timelessness, selflessness and joy. I explored the neuroscience of flow in this article: https://www.hermessolenzol.com/en/post/the-neuroscience-of-flow It presents evidence that flow involves the deactivation of the default mode neuronal network — which is engaged while we daydream or don’t do anything in particular — and the activation of the executive attention network — which mediates internally directed attention. A key detail is that the default mode network includes de medial prefrontal cortex, which creates the sense of self. In contrast, the executive attention network turns off the medial prefrontal cortex while activating other parts of the prefrontal cortex in charge of directing attention: the rostral-lateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In practice, this translates into that we forget ourselves during flow. We become so completely focused on what we are doing that we turn off the ego so it doesn’t get in the way. We forget the goal and focus on the process. This agrees with the spiritual teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. In the Bhagavad Gita , the god Krishna instructs king Arjuna about becoming detached from the benefits of his actions. Likewise, the practice of mushotoku  in Zen consists of acting without seeking personal benefit from the action. These may sound like lofty goals, difficult to attain in practice. However, they become feasible when we train ourselves to enter flow. By training our mind to enter flow more and more often, we can develop a way of being that is independent of the ego. Our life becomes focused on creativity, on the process instead of on the goals. This dampens the influence of the ego and reduces craving. A practice that avoids craving by decreasing the importance of the ego How can we use all this to direct a philosophy of life or a spiritual practice? Here are some of the things that I incorporate into my own practice: Develop a form of soft self-control based on a deep understanding of my feelings and motivations. Integrate my unconscious and my emotions to resolve my inner contradictions. Engage in activities that lead to flow, like writing, rock-climbing and skiing. Do the best that I can and then let go of the outcome. Practice mindful pleasure by focusing my attention and avoiding distraction while eating, doing sports or having sex. Do not see myself as deserving better treatment than other people — do not be entitled. Pay attention to thoughts and emotions based on self-importance, like envy, jealousy and FOMO. Take responsibility for my actions and my decisions about my future. Do not consider myself a victim. Stop judging my past and who I think I am. Let go of trauma and regrets. Follow a path with a heart by doing things that satisfy the entirety of my being, not just the things that I think I should do or I am being told to do. Consider finding the goal of my life as an essential part of the practice, not a closed question.

Challenging the belief that there are no biological differences between men and women in emotions and cognition There is a lot of scientific evidence for the idea that men and women differ not just in their bodies but also in their minds. These differences are biological, meaning that they are determined by X and Y sex chromosomes and driven by the sex hormones - testosterone in men and estrogen and progesterone in women. However, this does not mean that these differences are unchangeable. They can be reversed by hormone treatment in trans people. The position I defend here has been dismissed with the term neurosexism . I consider this a political dogma that arose in reaction to the sexist belief that men are more intelligent than women. Today it is clear that there are no differences in intelligence between the sexes. However, this should not blind us to the fact that there are important sex differences in emotions, motivation, mental diseases and specific forms of cognition. These differences are important when addressing health issues. In fact, it is mandatory for any grant proposal submitted to the National Institutes of Health  to specifically address sex differences  in whatever issue it studies, regardless of whether it is physical or mental, in animals or humans. Sex differences are also highly relevant for the current debates about male violence, transsexuality and masculinity. How I researched mental sex differences I am well aware of the neuroscience of sex differences because it was key for my research work on the neurophysiology of pain for the last 25 years. To write this article, I gathered scientific papers on sex differences by searching PubMed - a gigantic database run by the USA government of every scientific paper on biomedical research. Of the 48 papers I found, I choose for discussion one published recently by John Archer (Archer, 2019) because it offers a most comprehensive and rigorous overview of this topic. It responds to an earlier review (Hyde, 2005) that concluded that psychological differences between men and women are minimal. I also include here references that complement the information in the paper by Archer. The paper by Archer is a review of meta-analyses. Research papers present data from work done in the lab, in clinical studies, surveys, etc. Meta-analyses compile data from many research papers and do statistics with them to get overall results. Reviews are articles that collect the most important papers on a particular topic and try to extract general conclusions. Therefore, a review of meta-analyses is the best way to summarize the main findings on the issue of sex differences. This one by Archer analyzed 127 meta-analyses, 85 surveys and 4 mixed papers. Archer summarized his findings in a table that ranks sex differences in four effect sizes , 0 to 4, to denote if they are zero, small, medium, large or very large. Another measure, the summary value , ranges from negative (larger in women) to positive (larger in men). I give these values in parentheses: (2, -0,57) means that 2 is the effect size and -0.57  is the summary value. For brevity, I do not discuss sexual orientation or differences in sexual behavior. Neither do I dwell into the evolutionary origin of the sex differences, atopic to which Archer gives a lot of attention but that I find a bit speculative. I do briefly discuss the issue of transsexuality.  Cognitive differences Let’s start by tackling the thorny subject of cognitive differences. As I said above, men and women do not differ in general intelligence. They have similar capacities for memory (0, 0.09) and mathematics (0, 0.09). Women do slightly better is academic achievement (1, -0.25) while men show small advantages in abstract reasoning (1, 0.15) and spatial working memory (1, 0.26). However, there are some differences in specific cognitive abilities. Women do better in all language-related cognitive abilities, with medium differences in language ability (2, -0.37), reading (2, -0.36) and writing (2, -0.57), and a small difference in verbal reasoning (1, -0.15). They also are better at emotional intelligence (2, -0.47) and face recognition (2, -0.36). In turn, men are better at spatial abilities (2, 0.48), particularly mental rotation (3, 0.66), understanding how machines work (4, 1.21) and mechanical reasoning (3, 0.98). They also show a slightly better understanding of science (1, 0.28). Men do not perform worse in all social tasks. They score slightly better than women at talkativeness (1, 0.24), influencing others (1, 0.26) and leadership in projects (2, 0.41). Although men score higher at interrupting (1, 0.15), this is too small to justify it being the main evidence for the existence of mansplaining. The fact that women are better in language and men are better at mentally manipulating objects seems to be based on deeper preference for people in women and for objects in men. Men are more interested in things (3, 0.97) and engineering (4, 1.11) Women are more interested in people (3, -0.93) and social activities (3, -0.68). Sex differences in emotions There are six basic emotions that can be identified by facial expressions is mammals: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness and joy. Sex differences were found in fear, anger and sadness. Women are more fearful than men, as revealed in fear questionnaires (2, -0.41). These differences are very large when they pertain to fear in real-world situations (4, -1.16). Women are more prone to anxiety (2, -0.59) and social anxiety (2, -0.36). They are also slightly more prone to sadness (1, -0.23) and depression (1, -0.27). Women have better memory for emotional events than men (Canli et al., 2002). The lesser fearfulness in men may explain their tendency to risk-taking (2, 0.49), based on seeking sensations (2, 0.39) and excitement (1, 0.29). It seems that not only are men less fearful, but they also have a more positive reaction to fear. It can be a source of joy and excitement. Men also have higher pain thresholds (2, 0.51) and much higher pain tolerance (4, 1.17). Therefore, the stoicism of men - which is considered part of toxic masculinity - is anchored in a biological difference. If men have less fear of pain and are able to tolerate in better, this may contribute to their higher risk-taking. Regarding mental problems, men score slightly higher for narcissism (1, 0.26). Women have a slightly higher tendency to neuroticism (1, -0.31) and susceptibility to guilt (1, -0.27) and shame (1, -0.29). They also have nightmares more frequency (1, -0.26), which may be explained by their better vividness of visual imagining (1, -0.16) and dream recall (1, -0.24). There are no sex differences in negative emotions (0, 0.03), and attachment style - anxious (0, -0.04) or avoidant (0, 0.02). When it comes to anger, things get a bit weird. Women get angry as frequently as men (0, -0.003), show the same amount of indirect aggression (0, -0.02), and only slightly less verbal aggression (1, 0.30). However, physical aggression is more frequent in men (2, 0.59). Differences skyrocket when we look at weapon use (3, 0.88), violent crime (4, 1.11), homicide (4, 2.54), intimate partner homicide (4, 1.06), using violent computer games (4, 1.41), sexual aggression (2, 0.62) and rape (4, 2.32). Why are men more violent? So, if men get angry as frequently as women, why are they more violent? There are several possible explanations. Anger is stronger in men, so it is more difficult to control. Anger is more strongly coupled with physical aggression in men because they are physically stronger. Men are worse at self-control than women, both when it comes to effortful control - doing something that is hard (4, -1.01) - and inhibitory control - stopping oneself from doing something (2, -0.41). Because men are less fearful and more prone to risk-taking, they are less sensitive to threats of punishment. Men are also less sensitive to rewards (2, -0.63). Men are more prone to revenge (3, 0.83), while women are slightly more forgiving (1, -0.28). This is probably related to the higher inclination of men to deliver altruistic punishment (Zheng et al., 2017), as measured in the ultimatum game (Burnham, 2007; Zak et al., 2009; Dreher et al., 2016). There are forms of aggression that are independent of anger. When a predator hunts, it is in an aroused state, but not angry (Popova et al., 1993; Haller, 2018). Human are predators. Everybody who has gone hunting or fishing can attest to how pleasurable this state is. The calculated, trained aggression of soldiers and warriors is cold, devoid of anger. It is voluntary, and much more dangerous than enraged aggression. However, since women can also be hunters, soldiers and warriors, this form of violence is not exclusive to men.  This information is important to address violence against women. We will not solve these problems unless we recognize that men are biologically different. We also need to stop the “all emotions are okay” nonsense. No, not all emotions are okay. In men, anger and risk-taking need to be carefully managed. Teenage men need to receive a specific education about managing their anger and aggression. Most cultures have specific rituals and training for that. Instead, we encourage men them to express their emotions freely. Then, when their emotions get the best of them, we punish them without mercy. Sex differences are biological, not cultural It could be argued that all these differences are social constructs, not natural. Therefore, we can make them go away by changing our beliefs. However, most of these sex differences are found across different cultures and in early childhood, when cultural influences have not taken root. There is ample evidence that the male hormone testosterone regulates emotions and increases aggression (Archer, 2019): Testosterone modulates the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, which is key to the modulation of aggression. This effect is present since childhood. High doses of testosterone given to women increased their engagement with angry faces: increased eye contact, increased cardiac rate and lesser avoidance. Testosterone levels are linked to dominance in men and competitiveness in women. Testosterone levels are associated with increased risk-taking. Testosterone given to young women decreased their sensitivity to punishment and fear to angry faces. It increased their performance in spatial manipulation tasks.   Testosterone has a fear-reducing effect in mammals. Absence of timidity in newborn boys (6-18 months) correlated with testosterone levels in blood from the umbilical cord. Girls with lower testosterone had higher empathy and connected better with other girls. Testosterone in newborns of 1-3 months was negatively correlated with their language skills at 16-30 months. Verbal fluency declined in female-to-male transsexuals after giving them testosterone for 3 months. Testosterone increased both punishment and gratitude in the ultimatum game, showing that it mediates status-enhancing and pro-social behaviors in men (Dreher et al., 2016). Women’s emotions change during the menstrual cycle What about the effect of female hormones? These are not as easy to track as the effect of testosterone because there are two types of female hormones - estrogen and progesterone - and because their levels change during the menstrual cycle. Besides, the menstrual cycle does not extend throughout a woman’s life - it starts with puberty, ends with menopause, and it’s interrupted during pregnancy. Hence, the emotional state of women should be different in each of these phases of their lives. This has long been recognized in popular cultures, but the modern everything-is-a-social-construct  dogma has challenged this notion. There is evidence showing that women’s emotions change during the menstrual cycle: Women in the follicular phase perceived angry and sad faces more accurately than men or women in other phases, while women in the follicular and ovulatory phases perceived fearful faces better than men (Guapo et al., 2009). Estrogen levels correlated negatively with the perception of anger. A recent study (Dan et al., 2019) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity and connectivity during the experience of negative and positive emotions. Negative emotions produced more activity in men’s right hippocampus compared to women in the follicular phase, and in men’s right cerebellum compared to women in the luteal phase. Amusement - a positive emotion - reduced the connectivity between the putamen and the prefrontal cortex in women in the luteal phase, compared to men. Women in the luteal phase were more prone to sadness and less inclined to amusement, suggesting that during this phase of the menstrual cycle there is reduced pleasure and reward. Sex hormones have effects at the molecular level It has been known for some time that the steroid sex hormones testosterone, estrogen and progesterone have effects on the cells of the nervous system, neurons and glia. Steroids present in the central nervous system have been called neurosteroids   and are able to bind to GABAA receptors . These are proteins that bind the neurotransmitter gamma-amino-butyric acid (GABA), as well as several important drugs like the benzodiazepines (Valium, Rohypnol) and the barbiturates (pentobarbital). GABAA receptors decrease neuronal activity - GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. They play a major role in decreasing anxiety. Steroids - including testosterone, estradiol and progesterone - also have specific receptors  in neurons, some located at the cell membrane and others in the nucleus. Steroid receptors regulate gene expression in neurons. But what about trans people? That sex differences are biological does not mean that they are unchangeable. The scientific evidence that I presented here shows that they are mediated by sex hormones. Therefore, the sex hormone treatments that transsexual people undergo during their transition change their brains, just like they change their bodies. Indeed, trans people experience profound changes in their emotions as they transition. Their minds change to match their desired sexual identity in ways that mere changes in behavior and appearance cannot possibly match. This supports the idea that men and women do have different minds. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. In their bodies and their minds. Biologically and socially. Some important implications I have presented scientific evidence that men and women are different not just in their bodies but also in their minds. The much maligned book   Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus  was right in the basics, although perhaps not in all the details. The differences between men and women may be the largest inside the human species, far surpassing the differences between races. This is known in biology as sexual dimorphism . It is low in some species, but so high in others that males and females look like completely different animals. Think about peacocks, Siamese fighter fish, guppies, mallard ducks, hens and roosters. Sexual dimorphism is high in all ape species . Male gorillas are much larger and far more aggressive than the females. The same can be said, to a lesser extent, about chimps. Male orangutans have huge face plates and are more solitary than the females. In fact, humans are the ape species with less sexual dimorphism, but this doesn’t mean it is completely gone. The specter of male superiority is dispelled when you look at the list of sex differences. In all important cognitive attributes, women score the same as men. The higher emotional and verbal intelligence of women more than balance the higher spatial intelligence of men. If anything, men come out looking worse than women due to their propensity for violence. However, there is a positive side to aggression, since it can be sublimated into the qualities of assertiveness and intensity. This article is not an argument for female supremacy, either. The different emotional stiles of men and women are highly relevant for the current debate on male aggression, gender and masculinity. Some food for thought Masculinity and femininity are based on biology and are not social constructs. Therefore, bashing masculinity is an attack on personal characteristics that are as basic as sexual orientation. It should be considered a form of bigotry. Many of the attributes listed under “toxic masculinity” - like stoicism, lesser sociability, lesser empathy, dominance and aggression - are, in fact, intrinsic of being male. They need to be treated with the same understanding as the biological disadvantages of women - such as lower pain tolerance and higher fear and anxiety. The biological propensity of men to violence need to be recognized and addressed. Young men need to be educated since puberty in how to control their anger and aggression, instead of being told that “all emotions are natural”. We all need to learn about the different emotional and cognitive styles of the opposite sex and use that knowledge to improve our relationships with friends, coworkers and intimate partners. Gender may be a social construct, but it is built upon a solid biological sex binary. Attempts to deconstruct gender disregarding the biological reality of sex differences risk fighting against some of the basic things that make us human. References Archer J (2019) The reality and evolutionary significance of human psychological sex differences. Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 94:1381-1415. Burnham TC (2007) High-testosterone men reject low ultimatum game offers. Proceedings Biological sciences 274:2327-2330. Canli T, Desmond JE, Zhao Z, Gabrieli JD (2002) Sex differences in the neural basis of emotional memories. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 99:10789-10794. Dan R, Canetti L, Keadan T, Segman R, Weinstock M, Bonne O, Reuveni I, Goelman G (2019) Sex differences during emotion processing are dependent on the menstrual cycle phase. Psychoneuroendocrinology 100:85-95. Dreher JC, Dunne S, Pazderska A, Frodl T, Nolan JJ, O'Doherty JP (2016) Testosterone causes both prosocial and antisocial status-enhancing behaviors in human males. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113:11633-11638. Guapo VG, Graeff FG, Zani AC, Labate CM, dos Reis RM, Del-Ben CM (2009) Effects of sex hormonal levels and phases of the menstrual cycle in the processing of emotional faces. Psychoneuroendocrinology 34:1087-1094. Haller J (2018) The role of central and medial amygdala in normal and abnormal aggression: A review of classical approaches. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 85:34-43. Hyde JS (2005) The gender similarities hypothesis. The American psychologist 60:581-592. Popova NK, Nikulina EM, Kulikov AV (1993) Genetic analysis of different kinds of aggressive behavior. Behavior genetics 23:491-497. Zak PJ, Kurzban R, Ahmadi S, Swerdloff RS, Park J, Efremidze L, Redwine K, Morgan K, Matzner W (2009) Testosterone administration decreases generosity in the ultimatum game. PLoS One 4:e8330. Zheng L, Ning R, Li L, Wei C, Cheng X, Zhou C, Guo X (2017) Gender Differences in Behavioral and Neural Responses to Unfairness Under Social Pressure. Scientific reports 7:13498.

How to plug the power drains that hinder flow Flow If you are devoted to activities that require creativity and self-improvement, you may have heard about flow and want to achieve it. Flow was defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best” (Kotler et al., 2022). Perhaps a better definition of flow is as a mental state  of focused attention on a task—which can be an art, a mental activity or a sport—without apparent effort (“effortless effort”). Csikszentmihalyi gave flow these six characteristics: Focused attention on a task. Merging of action and awareness. Decreased self-awareness. Altered perception of time, which either speeds up or slows down. Feeling of complete control. Positive emotions like joy, pleasure, euphoria, meaning and purpose. In another article, I explored the neuronal circuits in the brain activated during flow. The Neuroscience of Flow  ( Medium , Substack , Sex, Science & Spirit ).   This article gives some practical advice about how to maintain flow. I found this valuable information in the book The Rock Warrior’s Way , by Arno Ilgner. The book is about how to achieve the optimal mental state for rock climbing, which is a sport often cited as an example of flow. However, this advice can be easily translated into any activity that improves with flow, like sports, writing, playing music, dancing or any art. The advice also applies to living in general. Arno Ilgner based his book on a life philosophy called the Way of the Warrior. I have written about it in another article: The Way of the Warrior: A Philosophy of Life Based on Egoless Action ( Medium , Sex, Science & Spirit ). Acting impeccably In the Way of the Warrior, achieving flow is called acting impeccably . This should not be confused with perfectionism. Impeccable action is not flawless, but acting in a way in which we are completely focused on what we are doing. We do not hold back, but became totally committed to our endeavor . Perfectionism, on the other hand, seeks perfection and leads to internal criticism when the inevitable mistakes are made . It is goal-oriented. Our ego wants to be rewarded with pride for achieving our goal. It fears the shame that comes with failure. If we don’t get the gold medal, if there are flaws in the final result, the ego will not be satisfied. Impeccable action centers on the process, not on the final result. Complete focus on a task involves experimenting and creativity, which may lead to some failures. This is not bad, because trial and error increases our learning and keeps us focused on our engagement with the world, not on our ego. “Decreased self-awareness” is characteristic number 3 of flow, and it is driven by the deactivation of the medial prefrontal cortex, which mediates self-awareness. Personal power When we repeatedly enter flow it becomes a mental habit, so it is easier to achieve. The neuronal circuits that mediate flow becomes strengthened by repetition, so our brain switches them on more readily. In the parlance of the Way of the Warrior, this is called collecting personal power . This power is not power over others or over the world. Is a form of soft control over ourselves that allows us to do things with the entirety of our being, with less apparent effort. It is the habit of entering flow. What are power drains? Power drains are things that make us lose personal power, taking us back to ego-centered behavior. In other words, power drains are the things that take us out of flow. Flow is not muscle memory. It is not doing something that we have done so many times that it has become easy for us. We achieve flow when we engage in a challenging task that we can only do by giving it our best. Challenges are inherently frustrating. We may try and fail. We may fall while climbing or skiing. We may write something and realize that it is not very good and requires a lot of editing, if not a full rewrite. We may have to paint over what we have already painted. When we let that frustration take us out of flow, we are facing a power drain. Power drains are emotional reactions that take our focus away from the task into ego-centered thoughts. The ego tries to defend itself from the shame of failure by putting the focus on something that is not us. Three examples of power drains are blaming, wishing and hoping. This may sound surprising because these are things that are encouraged by our culture. Sadly, even more so by the culture of political correctness that today is associated with the Left. No blaming A couple of weeks ago, I was climbing a difficult crack in Yosemite—rated 5.10d on a scale from 5.0 to 5.15 , with lowercase letters indicating further subdivisions in difficulty . My climbing limit is 5.10a, so I was pushing myself. The fact that a nine-year-old boy had just completed the route was no balm for my ego. I was managing to get good grips by inserting my fingertips in the thin crack, by my feet found no purchase and kept slipping. I kept falling and dangling from the rope, which ran through carabiners at the top of the route and then into the hands of the climber belaying me . “The soles of your shoes are no good,” said my belayer, trying to encourage me. “Yeah, I should have resoled those shoes,” I thought, “they are not as good as the shoes of the other climbers.” Fortunately, I identified that thought as a power drain. I was blaming my shoes, instead of focusing on working with what I had and giving that route my best. It was a great opportunity to learn how to climb thin cracks and take my game to the next level. I managed to finish the route with some falls. Often, what we blame is not other people, but some less-than-perfect condition that supposedly explains why we are not performing as well as our ego expects. You can see how perfectionism sneaks itself in here: we won’t perform our task unless conditions are perfect. I needed perfect soles in my shoes to climb that route. The trick is to always blame something external, something that is not us. Blaming is finding excuses. Of course, we may blame other people, too. For example, when we are part of a team. Creating a habit of personal accountability is a good way to keep away our tendency to blame . However, this should not lead us to beat upon ourselves. Self-shaming comes from the ego and is just another power drain. Blaming is not an ethical issue. It is not morally wrong. It could be in some instances, but that is not the issue here. The issue is that it breaks our focus by distracting us and sapping the emotional strength that we need to perform our task. No wishing “If you wish upon a star…” It’s funny how Disney and other elements of our culture have glamorized wishing. They have implanted in us the superstition that if we wish for something strongly enough, it will come true. This could be rationalized as the idea that wishing increases our motivation, and that makes us work harder towards achieving our goal. The problem with this reasoning is that when we focus on the goal and not on the action, we become less effective. The neuroscience of flow shows that achieving it requires turning off the ego—the medial frontal cortex—, while wishing is inherently ego-based. Of course, this is also connected to a religion that teaches us that we can achieve things by praying. When you stop to think about it, a God that acts like a dispensing machine is a rather odd idea: “Insert prayer here, get your wish over there.” Who is serving whom? Another form of wishing works hand-in-hand with blaming. Climbing that crack in Yosemite, I thought that the footholds should be better. It wasn’t fair that the crack was so demanding on my upper body and didn’t offer more support for my feet. But rocks are not fair. They are what they are. They are created by natural phenomena, not so we could climb them easier. Likewise, the entire world is not fair. It doesn’t fold to our wishes. Wishing that things were differently lead us nowhere. It just makes us leak power, the focus that we should devote to what we are doing. “By wishing, you try to decrease your discomfort by escaping into a fantasy.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way . No hoping Hope is another religious idea. It’s one of the three theological virtues  in Catholicism: faith, hope and charity. “Hope is a combination of the desire for something and expectation of receiving it. The Christian virtue is hoping specifically for Divine union and so eternal happiness. While faith is a function of the intellect, hope is an act of the will.” Hope, Wikipedia . Therefore, hope is linked to wishing: we wish something and we expect to receive it. It has an element of superstition. We believe that, somehow, the world will bend to our wishes and give us what we want. If we are religious, we hope that God will step in and save us from our problems. Unfortunately, this magical thinking has seeped into our psyche and made us weak. Which may be the hidden agenda of religion: to make us dependent on the Church or whatever priestly class any particular religion has, instead of being able to find our own power. In any case, we find it shocking that hope could be a bad thing. At least, I did, perhaps due to my Catholic upbringing. The secular rationalization of hope is that believing in a better future makes us happy and incentivizes us to fight for a better world. There is some true in that. “According to Snyder , psychological hope consists of three fundamental components: goals, pathways, and agency. This implies that hope necessitates, firstly, an individual having a goal that is deemed desirable, feasible, yet not currently fulfilled (belief); secondly, envisioning a pathway to attain that goal; and thirdly, possessing the capability to act on that pathway toward the defined goal. A lack of agency results in mere ‘wishful hope,’ whereas elevated levels of conviction or commitment lead to an ‘aspirational hope.’” Act of Hope, Wikipedia . The key is to realize that a better world will not happen automatically, but only if we work hard to achieve it. Hoping that the world will become better because of the work of others is inherently exploitative. It’s a free-rider mentality. How does hope become a power drain during flow? “If you hope a situation will turn out the way you want, you’re passively waiting for external influences to determine the outcome. You aren’t thinking actively about what you need to do to achieve what you want.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way . By hoping, you place the source of control outside yourself. You hope that the world will change according to your wishes, that somebody else will do the work that you need to do. This is disempowering. You need all your mental resources to respond to the challenge by acting impeccably—by staying in the state of flow. Instead, you waste them by engaging in fantasies that distract you and take you out of flow . Unbendable intention When we refuse to engage in blaming, wishing and hoping and stay focused on the task, we achieve the first two characteristics of flow: focused attention and merging of action and awareness. This leads to a feeling of control, because the outcome depends on what we are doing and not some random events in the world. This ability to avoid distractions and fantasies and stay on task is called unbendable intention . We are driven by our determination to focus on what we are doing. This intention is unbendable because it won’t be derailed by distractions and daydreaming about how the difficulty of what we are doing will change magically. Personal power versus willpower We have been taught the wrong way to do hard stuff. It’s based on a model of the mind in which one part of the mind—the will—controls the other parts. The will has to be strong to avoid being overpowered by the weaker parts of the mind, which are intrinsically lazy, driven by instinct, and inclined to seek pleasure and instant rewards. Therefore, the will has to be strong: we need to have willpower. The neuroscience of flow contradicts this model of the mind. When we enter flow, all parts of the mind work harmoniously to complete our task. There is no sense that one part of the mind controls the others. Instead of a feeling of internal struggle, we experience the ‘effortless effort’ characteristic of flow. And all this is accompanied by feelings of joy, euphoria and pleasure (characteristic number 6 of flow). We do not need to seek pleasure. We already have it. Willpower is driven by the ego. It shows the basic characteristics of ego-based action: it is goal oriented, scared of failure, and driven by pride. In contrast, flow erases the self by turning off the medial prefrontal cortex, which drives concerns about the self. Without a self that tries to achieve something for itself, all the energy goes into acting impeccably. Acting with detachment to the profits of our action is central in many Eastern mystical traditions. It forms the core of the teachings that the god avatar Krishna gives king Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita . In Zen Buddhism is expressed by the ideal of mushotoku : “In Zen, the concept of Mushotoku represents a state of mind where the spirit does not seek to obtain anything.” What is Mushotoku? Not wanting to achieve anything for one-self is key to the practice of zazen, or Zen meditation. It is also essential to practice mindfulness. If we keep wondering if we are doing mindfulness correctly or what benefits are we going to get from it, this would be antithetical to being non-judgmental, which is essential for mindfulness. Therefore, the Way of the Warrior is based on a form of soft self-control that is more effective and happiness-inducing than the willpower of Christianity and Western philosophies.

Stop othering your unconscious to develop an integrated mind The conscious and the unconscious I have come to the realization that we are framing the main problems about the mind—the problem of consciousness and the problem of free will—the wrong way. We think that our subjective experience is all there is in the human mind when, in fact, it is only a small part of what goes on in the mind. One of the silly things we hear said about consciousness is that it is an illusion. It is not; consciousness is real. What is an illusion is to consider it something separated from the rest of the mind, which is unconscious. When you look at the evidence, you realize that there is a fuzzy boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. One flows into the other continuously. As Daniel Dennett  argued in his book Consciousness Explained , whether you consider something that happens in your mind is conscious or unconscious depends on whether you are experiencing it now or trying to remember it later. Something that is clearly conscious now may seem unconscious later because you have forgotten about it. In other words, we are conscious of things that are present in working memory—the desktop space in our mind where we manipulate sensations, ideas, memories and emotions. However, we tend to forget most of the things that were in working memory a moment ago. Then, how do we know that we were conscious of them? The false conflict between the conscious and the unconscious The key issue is, who do we think we are? People automatically think that they are only the conscious part of their minds. Then, everything done by their unconscious seems like is done by somebody else. When they become aware of the strong influence that the unconscious has on them, they feel out of control. It’s like somebody else is running their minds. Then they, inevitably, conclude that we do not have free will. In fact, we are both our conscious and our unconscious, because there is no separation between them. When we realize that we are the totality of our mind, conscious and unconscious, we understand that we really are able to make decisions, which always arise from the unconscious. This sheds a new light on the problem of free will. How the mind works Putting together everything I know about neuroscience, this is how I think our mind works. Our brain is constantly bombarded by a barrage of sensations: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, tastes, pain, itch and inner sensations. These sensations need to be prioritized according to their value for survival and their relevance to what we are doing at the moment. The brain does that by assigning an emotion to each sensation. Sensations that arise strong emotions—for example, pain—are given a higher priority, which is called salience . Other sensations are given priority because they are relevant to what we are doing. For example, if I am rock-climbing, the tactile sensation of the holds in my hands becomes salient. Salient sensations are assembled together in a representation of the world constructed in a working space  in our mind, where it is used to make decisions about what to do next. In my rock-climbing example, the visual representation of the rock wall is put together with the sensations from my hands and feet and the inner sensations about the position of my body and the tension in my muscles. This allows me to make the decision about the next move: I can let go of my right hand without falling and grab that hold that I see within my reach. I am only conscious of what is in the working space at each moment. Consciousness and working space are pretty much the same thing. However, this is only part of the story. The working space works because there are a series of incoming sensations being lined up to enter it in the unconscious part of the mind. Once sensations stop being relevant, they lose salience and are relegated back to the unconscious. The unconscious flow into the conscious and back to the unconscious. If consciousness is a waterfall, the unconscious is the river. The river flows into a waterfall and back into a river. There is no waterfall without the river. How decisions are made But this doesn’t mean that decisions are made by consciousness. During rock-climbing, the assembling of movements to reach the next hold happens unconsciously in the motor cortex and the cerebellum. Even the “go” command to start the action of the next move is given by the unconscious and presented to consciousness after the fact. This is because it takes a relatively long time for a representation to be built in working space—in consciousness—so everything has to happen beforehand. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio summarized this idea by saying “we are always late for consciousness.” Therefore, if I believe that the only decisions that count as having free will are decisions made by consciousness, then I don’t have free will, because every decision is assembled and made by the unconscious. That doesn’t mean that I don’t decide, because that “I” is my unconscious and conscious working together. There is simply no separation between the unconscious and the conscious. That is not how the mind works. Emotions Starting with the famous case of Phineas Gage , and continuing with many experiments done in humans by Antonio Damasio  and his wife Hanna Damasio , there is abundant evidence that emotions are an essential part of decision-making. Every decision involves assigning value to each of the options we have. That value is an emotion, the same way that emotions set the saliency of sensations that determines whether they become conscious or not. Therefore, the old division between the rational and the emotional parts of the mind doesn’t really exist. We reason with our emotions and each reasoning thought is loaded with emotions. We simply do not recognize some of the emotions involved in reasoning because they are not the usual ones—like anger, sadness of fear—but more obscure ones like curiosity, interest, surprise (‘this is unexpected’), discovery (‘aha!’), veracity (‘this is right’) and falsity (‘this is wrong’). Next time you read a bullshit article, pay attention to the strong emotions that arise when you realize that the author is wrong in his reasoning or is making things up. Intuition There is a large unconscious component to reasoning and intelligence because a lot of the information being processed in the mind is too large to be represented in consciousness. Therefore, our unconscious may reach conclusions that, to our conscious mind, seem to appear out of nowhere. That is what we call intuition. Intuition is not magical. It doesn’t come out of our gut. It’s simply unconscious reasoning. While doing science, I often had hunches and sudden inspirations. Although they are accompanied by the strong feeling that they are true, I need to examine then rationality, step by step, to check if they make sense. Intuitions are a dime a dozen. We cannot always trust them; they are often wrong. However, other times my reasoning through them is just reconstructing something that my unconscious has done already. Another kind of intuition is about knowing what other people are feeling and thinking. This is called theory-of-mind and is a unique human faculty. We unconsciously process a lot of information about face expression, tone of voice, body position and sentence construction, which we integrate as an internal representation of the other person’s mind. We feel what they are feeling. We empathize. The ego The ego—or what psychoanalysts call the super-ego—is a part of our unconscious mind that chides us when we do something wrong and takes credit when we succeed. It is based on the opposing emotions of pride and shame. We internalize the admonitions of our parents and teachers and create an internal figure that directs us in our lives. It is particularly strong in successful people and can make them miserable. This could be the origin of the stereotypical depressed winner. There are several problems with the ego. It can become an internal dictator that tries to control everything that happens in our mind. Since it is based on external affirmation, it creates goals that are in disagreement with what we really want, the things that make us happy. It is fixated on goals, not on the process, which prevents us from entering the mental state of flow. When it tries to control other parts of our unconscious, it hinders their activity and stops creativity. Like everything else in the mind, the ego has its place. However, in our over-competitive society, we tend to develop oversized egos that make our lives miserable. The puritanical ethos, religions and certain philosophies encourage growing unhealthy egos and prevent us from seeing the damage they cause. Is there a repressed unconscious? The idea of the subconscious  arose in the 19th century and became the center of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud  realized that we do things for motives different from what we think, usually having to do with sex or childhood trauma. For him, the unconscious exists because we are unable to confront those hidden motives. The repressed unconscious is different from the idea of the unconscious that I explained above. The unconscious is there, not because of repressed ideas and motivations, but because this is the way the brain works. Still, it may be true that some ideas may have enough emotional charge to enter consciousness, but they create such an inner conflict in the mind that some protective mechanism keeps it in the unconscious. However, this is an anomaly and not how the mind usually works. Carl Gustav Jung , another of the fathers of psychoanalysis, proposed the idea of the collective unconscious . It consists of a series of myths and archetypes that we absorb from our culture because they resonate deeply with our psychological needs. The idea of the collective unconscious has been useful to understand literature and art. For example, Joseph Campbell  used it to found the common myths that form part of different cultures and that appear, time and time again, in novels and movies: the Path of the Hero. Expanding consciousness The unconscious is the largest part of our mind, because only a tiny fraction of what we experience at every moment has enough salience to enter consciousness. If it was otherwise, our mental working space would become so crowded that we would not be able to do anything. However, consciousness can work in many modes. It can be hyper-focused in a small set of sensations, ideas and emotions. Or it can be diffused, open to many of the things we experience. It’s like one of those camera objectives that can go from wide angle to telephoto. Many of the things that we do in modern life tend to put our consciousness in a highly focused state. Thus, when we watch a movie we exclude everything except what is on the screen. Something similar happens when we read a book, study or listen to a lecture. This creates a habit of being in a focused state of consciousness. At the extreme, we fall into tunnel vision. Strong emotions make our consciousness become so focused on some idea that it becomes obsessive and we cannot get it out of our mind. In contrast, the hunter-gatherers of our evolutionary environment had to live in a widespread state of consciousness, to be aware of small changes in their environment that could signal the presence of a predator or a social change in their tribe. Mindfulness and some forms of meditation counteract our focused consciousness habits by deliberately pay attention to as many sensations as possible. At the same time, we tune down our emotions by being non-judgmental, so no emotion becomes strong enough to give saliency to any mental content in particular. Drugs like cannabis and psychodelics (psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, etc.) increase the saliency our sensations and scramble the whole process of presenting mental contents to consciousness. That way, a part of the unconscious mind of which we are not usually aware becomes conscious, revealing hidden aspects of ourselves. This is how mindfulness and psychedelics truly expand our consciousness: they widen our range of experience by giving us access to the unconscious. They make consciousness expand into the unconscious. There is no ‘pure consciousness’ There are some mystical ideas about consciousness that are attempts to bring back the religious concept of an immortal soul. Wishful thinking makes us resist that idea that one day we will die: our mind, conscious and conscious, will simply cease to exist. That’s why we are attracted to the idea that our consciousness is a magical thing, impossible to explain, that exists independently of the rest of our mind. That way, we hope that it can somehow detach from our brain when we die and go live somewhere else. People who should know better, like Sam Harris , believe that they can experience pure consciousness . They say that, when they meditate, they experience a state in which there is only consciousness, without any sensations, ideas or emotions to fill that consciousness. Like San Harris, I have done a lot of meditation myself. I have never experienced such a state of pure consciousness. I regarded it as something meditation beginners would say when they experience states of inner silence that they had never experienced before. The inner dialog and constant music that normally plays in our mind go away. It may seem that there are no ideas, no memories, no sensations. Therefore, there is only consciousness. However, this is just an illusion. If there was only consciousness, then we would not be able to remember the experience, because the recording of the experience would be something that fills consciousness. The meditator is telling himself, “I am experiencing pure consciousness,” which is something that is filling their consciousness. Therefore, they are not experiencing pure consciousness. In fact, EEG recordings of experienced Zen monks during meditation show that they become more sensitive to external stimuli, not less (Tomio Hirai, Zen Meditation and Psychotherapy ). Learning to live with your unconscious I center my current spiritual practice in trying to integrate my mind by opening my consciousness to my unconscious. I also try to dispel the illusion that I am my consciousness. Both things can be accomplished by practicing mindfulness to develop meta-attention : the ability to be aware of what we are paying attention to, and how we direct our attention. By doing that, I realize how my mental contents flow in and out of consciousness. By cultivating flow , I experience mental states of selflessness and creativity. In fact, flow means an unimpeded streaming of contents from the unconscious to the conscious. By abandoning the illusion of conscious control over the unconscious mind, we are able to unleash the full creative potential of our mind. Most of the time, I move through life like an unconscious zombie, and that’s okay. When I drive, an unconscious part of my mind is at the wheel. When I ski, my body flows automatically into every turn and, if I try to over-control them, I mess up. When I rock-climb, my conscious mind falters at a seemingly impossible move, but then my body goes and does it, anyway. This doesn’t mean that I go through my life out of control. In fact, people who know me marvel at my self-discipline. I exercise regularly, do not overeat, write for hours every day, and have no bad habits or compulsions. It is not that I have a strong will, but rather that I have reached a good agreement with every part of myself about what ‘we’ want to do. Mental habits The best way to develop self-discipline is to cultivate good habits. Then, the unconscious does what it needs to be done and there is no need for pushing myself and nasty self-lectures. It’s like showering and brushing your teeth: you do it over and over again until there is no question about doing it. The most important habits to cultivate are emotional habits. If you allow yourself to be angry, fearful or sad, you develop an inertia for having those emotions. Conversely, if you cultivate patience, courage and joy, they will have staying power. Likewise, states of consciousness are habit-forming. If you enter flow every day, flow will come naturally to you. If you work at mindfulness, you will have the necessary meta-attention to discover your negative states of mind and correct them. But if you live surrounded by confusion, confrontation and negativity, they would seep into your consciousness as well. The DJ Another thing I do is to become familiar with the different parts of my unconscious mind. I befriend them, instead of trying to control them. For example, there is the DJ. You probably have it, too. It’s the part of your mind in charge of constantly playing songs and music in the background. We all have had the experience of our DJ getting stuck in a sticky song. When that happens, perhaps the DJ is trying to alert you that you are in a low energy state of mind or falling into some negative emotions. The DJ is a nice guy, although sometimes he’s a bit dumb. Talk nicely to him. Tell him: “Hey, DJ, enough of that! How about the song that goes…” Then play a song in your mind for him. More often than not, he will latch on to it. If not, suggest another song. He’s better than Spotify, I tell you! Inner dialog There is also the inner dialog. I have it in two languages, English and Spanish. It’s useful to keep track of what language I speak to myself because I have different personalities in each language. Spanish is the older, emotional and child-like part of me, while English is newer, rational and serious. There is an annoying part of my unconscious that would say nasty things (always in Spanish) when I feel fearful or ashamed. For the longest time, I tried to push it away. Now I have come to realize that it’s a child-like part of me that needs to be reassured and comforted. It lets me know that thing are not as okay as I think; that I need to be more careful about what I am doing. Managing inner dialog is key to many things we do in life. In The Rock Warrior’s Way , Arlo Ilgner explains how inner dialog can be used to direct focus while rock-climbing. This is essential to achieve the famous flow of the climber. Likewise, flow during writing consists of evoking an inner dialog of what we are about to write. The most amazing thing is when I write fiction. I have created several characters that are so fully developed that they speak with their own voice inside my head. I just have to type what I hear them saying. That is, in fact, what happens with inner dialog: we have no choice but to listen to it. However, it can be directed. How to do that involves a subtle negotiation inside yourself, some gentle pushing here and there. Achieving an integrated mind Some parts of your unconscious are childish. They are easily affected by your emotions and often need to be comforted and reassured. Other parts are unexpectedly wise, like an old guru sitting inside your brain. The ego tries to control the other parts, often without much success. Inner dialog and the DJ increase the noise inside your head. Yes, there is a conscious ‘you’ that seems to make decisions and direct the other parts of your mind. The forebrain and the anterior cingulate cortex work together to make decisions. But even large parts of their work remain hidden behind the curtains. A healthy mind is a mind in which all the parts work together, instead of being in conflict with each other. You have to learn to make peace with your unconscious. Only then you will truly integrate your mind. And only an integrated mind is a healthy mind. You cannot integrate your mind if you are othering you unconscious, if you consider it something that is not you. This is perhaps the most difficult task. To let go of the illusion that you are only what you are able to see inside your mind. We need to accept that there are invisible parts of our being that are as much ‘I’ as our consciousness.