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Scientific studies show that women who are choked have more psychological problems and changes in brain connectivity I strongly recommend not to practice choking. This article is part of a series intended to show that choking is unsafe, may cause brain damage, and is potentially lethal. Health problems in women who have been choked during sex Even serious brain injury can go undetected because the brain is very good at hiding it. Hence, there have been studies aiming to determine if women who had been choked showed signs of brain injury. Women who had been choked during sex more than five times in the last month were more likely to feel sad, lonely, anxious and depressed than women who had never been choked (Herbenick et al., 2022). “Women with a history of being choked more than five times during sex within the past 30 days were 2.19 times as likely to endorse experiencing overwhelming anxiety, 2.16 times more likely to report feeling very sad, 1.59 times more likely to report being very lonely, and 1.77 times more likely to feel ‘so depressed that it was difficult to function’ than women who had never been choked.” (Huibregtse et al., 2022). Women who had been choked during intimate partner violence There are also detailed studies of psychological and cognitive problems in women who had been choked during intimate partner violence. One of them (Valera et al., 2022) found that these women showed deficits in long-term memory, had higher levels of depression and presented symptoms of posttraumatic stress. However, some of these problems may derive from the psychological trauma produced by the assault and not from the strangulation itself. A review of 30 papers about strangulation during domestic and sexual violence (Bichard et al., 2022) showed that the victims presented the following problems: Pathological: tears in the arterial wall and stroke. Neurological: loss of consciousness, seizures, motor and speech disorders and paralysis. Psychological: posttraumatic stress, depression, suicidal ideation and dissociation. Cognitive: memory loss. Behavioral: aggression, compliance with the aggressor and lack of help-seeking. Obviously, strangulation during violence is much more severe than that occurring during consensual sex and BDSM. Still, its consequences show what can happen if choking is taken too far. In particular, loss of consciousness should be considered a sign that choking is extreme enough to produce brain injury. Brain imaging studies in women who had been choked during sex But, is there evidence that choking during sex produces brain damage? I found two studies that did this using brain imaging (fMRI) and tests of brain function. One study (Hou et al., 2022) compared 21 women who had never been choked with 20 women who had been choked four times or more during the last month, using fMRI to measure the functioning of the cortex and brain connectivity. The paper reports that women who had been choked showed an imbalance in neural activation between the brain hemispheres. They also showed higher than normal connectivity between the angular gyrus and brain regions involved in motor control, emotion and consciousness. The angular gyrus is involved in comprehension while reading, number processing, spatial cognition, memory retrieval and attention. It is hard to tell what these increases in connectivity mean, or even if they are caused by the choking. Another study (Huibregtse et al., 2022) used a similar sample: 20 women who had been choked at least four times during the last month and 20 women who had never been choked. Their brains were imaged using fMRI while they did verbal and visual tasks to measure their working memory. Both groups of women performed equally well in these tasks. However, the fMRI revealed that, during the verbal memory task, women in the choked group showing increased activation of their corpus callosum, left posterior thalamic radiation, left caudate nucleus and left insula. The corpus callosum is the bundle of fivers that connect the brain hemispheres. The thalamus is the sensory relay in the middle of the brain. The caudate nucleus is part of the striatum and reward system, and is involved in motor control and learning. The insula processes the emotions associated with pain and pleasure, and other emotions. During the visual memory task, women in the choked group showed more activation of the superior and right middle frontal gyri. As the difficulty of the task increased, the choked group showed less activation of the middle and the right inferior frontal gyri. The frontal gyri are involved in involved in self-awareness, decision-making and impulse control. They are also critical for working memory. The authors of the study concluded that, although the women who had been choked did not show a decreased ability in the working memory tasks, they had to allocate increased resources to the parts of their brain involved in performing these tasks. This could indicate hypoxic or ischemic damage or reperfusion injury produced by the repeated choking. Or there could be a remodeling of brain networks. These two studies show that there are definite differences between the brains of choked women and women who had never been choked. These differences appear minor, but they could signal a build-up of brain trauma. Keep in mind that the women in these studies were young college students. Older brains might show more problems after choking. Is choking worth the risks? I don’t think choking for fun is worth the risks. There many other ways to have fun with sex and BDSM that are much safer. I consider choking unsafe and I advise against doing it. If you put together everything I wrote in this series of articles, you will realize that there are no safe ways to practice choking safely. The analyses of cases of death from choking show that there is a low but significant risk of death that cannot be mitigated by any amount of knowledge and safety precautions. Recoveries from cardiac arrest are much rarer than what movies make us think they are. Even if nobody dies, repetitive choking can induce cumulative brain damage. Especially if choking induces loss of consciousness. This article presents evidence that cognitive and psychological deficits occur in people who are frequently choked. Some people may just like to put a hand on the throat and do some pretend choking. As long as there is no blockade of blood flow to the brain or air entry to the lungs, this is fine. But you should not call it choking, because that normalizes choking for other people. The safety of choking is still hotly debated in the BDSM community. However, most BDSM organizations and clubs do not allow choking in their facilities. Sex adviser Dan Savage advises against it in The Savage Lovecast, where he has interviewed professor Debbie Herbenick, the author of many of the papers I have cited here. In the end, whether to choke or not is a risk that should be assumed by the individuals involved, with full consent and plenty of information. However, as we have seen, both things are often lacking when it comes to choking. To be fully informed on this matter requires some in-depth knowledge of physiology and neuroscience. Weighing pleasure, on the one hand, against a real possibility of brain damage and death, on the other, the decision seems quite obvious to me. But I also think it’s important that we continue having a conversation about this issue. If people are going to do it, we need to continue to evaluate its risks and disseminate information about the safest way to do it. References Bichard H, Byrne C, Saville CWN, Coetzer R (2022) The neuropsychological outcomes of non-fatal strangulation in domestic and sexual violence: A systematic review. Neuropsychol Rehabil 32:1164-1192. Herbenick D, Fu TC, Kawata K, Eastman-Mueller H, Guerra-Reyes L, Rosenberg M, Valdivia DS (2022) Non-Fatal Strangulation/Choking During Sex and Its Associations with Mental Health: Findings from an Undergraduate Probability Survey. J Sex Marital Ther 48:238-250. Hou J, Huibregtse ME, Alexander IL, Klemsz LM, Fu TC, Fortenberry JD, Herbenick D, Kawata K (2022) Association of frequent sexual choking/strangulation with neurophysiological responses: a pilot resting-state fMRI study. J Neurotrauma 40:1339-1351. Huibregtse ME, Alexander IL, Klemsz LM, Fu TC, Fortenberry JD, Herbenick D, Kawata K (2022) Frequent and Recent Non-fatal Strangulation/Choking During Sex and Its Association With fMRI Activation During Working Memory Tasks. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 16:881678. Valera EM, Daugherty JC, Scott OC, Berenbaum H (2022) Strangulation as an Acquired Brain Injury in Intimate-Partner Violence and Its Relationship to Cognitive and Psychological Functioning: A Preliminary Study. J Head Trauma Rehabil 37:15-23. Copyright 2023 Hermes Solenzol.

When I look at the amazing description of the Universe created by science, I find that it is all full of meaning I would define “meaning” as something larger than ourselves that gives a sense of purpose and direction to our lives. Having meaning in life is one of the key ingredients of happiness, because for most people a life worth living needs to have purpose in a larger context. Meaning and ethics Meaning is also important as a foundation for ethics. Systems of values can be reduced to a few fundamental premises from which codes of ethics can be developed rationally. However, those premises themselves are arbitrary unless they can be referred to some other knowledge, like an understanding of what it means to be human, or a description of the world. For example, Christianity and Islam base their ethics on the will of God. This is based on the belief that God created the Universe and His will takes priority over anything else. However, this system of ethics falls apart when we question the belief in God, or the morality of submitting to the will of a God that allows suffering. In Utilitarianism, ethics are based on maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering. This is based on the belief that being happy and avoiding suffering is the ultimate objective of our lives. Similarly, Buddhism makes its ultimate goal the overcoming of suffering by understanding our innermost nature. However, being happy and overcoming suffering look like rather short-sighted goals. We are left wondering: isn’t there anything more to life? Nihilism The belief that life is devoid of meaning is called nihilism. According to this view, being happy and avoiding suffering are spurious goals that are themselves devoid of meaning. Therefore, establishing any foundation for ethics on them is also futile. Many people reject nihilism because it leads to a cynical outlook on life in which nothing that we do ultimately makes sense. It leads to its own kind of suffering: the existential angst of believing that our life has no purpose. A humorous example of the nihilistic and cynical outlook that some people derive from science can be found in The Universe Song, by Monty Python, featured in their movie The Meaning of Life. Existentialism Existentialism says that the only place we can find meaning is in our own lives and in human enterprises. That is, meaning is to be found inside, not outside ourselves. Today this is has become the common belief of most people who reject religion and adopt a value system based on science and rationality. Our cooperative nature, empathy and sense of solidarity make it meaningful for us to strive to improve the lot of our fellow humans. In politics, socialism makes the attaining of an egalitarian and free society a goal that provides meaning to our lives. Indeed, a utopian society is a goal larger than ourselves, so it can provide purpose and direction to our lives. Problems with existentialism However, there are some problems with defining all ethics exclusively on the basis of human happiness and suffering. Take environmentalism, for example. It can be argued that a good environment is good for humans, so we should strive to improve it. Nevertheless, humans could be perfectly happy if an obscure species of insect or plant goes extinct. And yet our intuition tells us that extinguishing species is wrong and should be avoided, even at a relatively high cost. Environmental laws in the USA and most developed countries are based on that principle. Another example is science. It is common to argue that scientific research is valuable because it will bring cures for diseases and new devices that would make us happier. But if this was true, then we should stop expending enormous amounts of money sending probes to explore the Solar System and beyond, or doing research on particle physics, because those enterprises don’t do much to cure our suffering or to make us happy. Every scientist secretly knows that we do science primarily for the sake of knowledge itself, not for its application. In fact, scientific knowledge often brings good and bad things: nuclear power and atomic bombs; pharmaceuticals and environmental poisons; the internet and its ability to control our minds; gene therapy and genetic manipulation. For every blessing there is a curse. No wonder that some people feel that we should retreat to a simple, agrarian society without science and technology, or even to being the hunter-gatherers that we were before the Agrarian Revolution. Some even think the world would be better off without any humans at all. What I am going to argue here is that meaning can be found not just inside us, but also outside in the Universe. Furthermore, this idea is based on scientific knowledge and not on religious belief. The evolution of everything If we take a step back and look at what science has shown, we see that the Universe is not a series of random processes. It has been evolving since the Big Bang in a definite direction: an increase in complexity and organization. And this can even be formalized scientifically: the amount of information that we need to describe the Universe has increased over time. In the beginning, there were just basic particles: photons, electrons, protons, neutrinos, etc. When the Universe cooled enough, electrons and protons got organized into hydrogen atoms. Stars got formed by gravity, and hydrogen turned into helium inside them. Then, as the star aged, hydrogen turned into carbon and the other light atoms of the Periodic Table. Stars exploded into novas and supernovas and collapsed into neutron stars, given birth to the heavier atoms. This stardust floating in space forming nebulae eventually gives to new stars, which now had planets where this new zoo of atoms is collected. On Earth, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and a few other atoms organized themselves into living beings. Evolution started, creating more and more life forms. While it is true that evolution does not proceed in any particular direction, it is also true that the algorithm of genetic mutation plus natural selection acts to fill every ecological niche by creating beings of every possible size and shape (Stuart Kaufman, At Home in the Universe). This generates simple life forms, but also large, complex animals. One of them is the human being. Human’s ace-in-the-hole to win the natural selection game is having a large brain that allows cooperative behavior based on the transfer of information, not only in the present by also across time, from generation to generation. Just like life once appeared, culture shows up as something entirely new. One form of culture is science, with all its wonderful tools to extract and organize information about everything. We become the eyes by which the Universe sees itself. Among other things, we now know that the Sun is not unique in having planets capable of evolving life. Hence, the same process of evolution: random search for new forms and the eventual appearance of intelligence could have happened elsewhere. Everywhere! Billions of stars playing at the roulette of life and intelligence. How many winners? Probably a lot. The hierarchy of being When we look at this whole process we realize that it is organized in the form of a nested hierarchy. By that, I mean that there are several discrete levels of complexity, each one built upon the lower one: physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology. We have a different science to study each level. This is not by caprice, but because each level has its own rules that have to be studied separately and cannot be deduced from the rules of the lower level (Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology). This is called emergence: the fact that new laws appear at a certain point in time, which coexist with the laws of the lower level but constitute entirely new phenomena. Thus, the laws of chemistry add novelty to the laws of particle physics. And when life appears, it follows laws that are quite different from the laws of chemistry. And on and on to the laws that govern nervous systems and those that rule human interactions. What causes emergence? In one view, evolution and other processes that create complexity and self-organization are algorithms: information processing events that follow certain rules of computation to generate an outcome from original conditions (Charles Seife, Decoding the Universe; Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe). For example, the algorithm of evolution is: generate mutations in the DNA; output them in the phenotype; test phenotype against the environment; IF death, discard the mutation; IF survival, amplify the mutation by reproducing; Go to step 1 while producing offspring. This algorithm explores a landscape of all possible shapes of living beings, while natural selection eliminates shapes that are not fit for the environment (Stuart Kaufman, At Home in the Universe, Investigations). In fact, the algorithm is itself the product of early evolution and natural selection. Mutation is not random, as previously suspected, but perfected by natural selection so that some parts to the DNA are more susceptible for mutation than others and there are specific mechanisms to generate genetic variation (Lynn Helena Caporale, Darwin in the Genome). A meaningful Universe? What does all this have to do with finding meaning in our lives? Well, we intuitively value the complexity and self-organization that we see in living beings. We have the same admiration for intelligence and culture, which we see as one step above mere life. The fact that the Universe has steadily moved to create life and then ourselves indicates that we are part of a process much larger than ourselves, something truly awe-inspiring. So it is not just that we are working for the good of Humanity while Humanity in itself has no meaning. Humanity does have meaning because it is part of a larger process encompassing the whole history of the Universe. Will this process continue in the future, beyond Humanity? Here it is tempting to fall into the heresy of teleology, which is saying that evolution has a particular goal, like producing human beings, or that the Universe has a goal, like producing consciousness or intelligence. This idea has been condemned because goals are something that humans have, not inanimate matter. However, as I argue in another article, agency (doing something to achieve a particular outcome) could be considered a property of living beings. And, looking at the past, it is unavoidable to conclude that the Universe has evolved in the direction of increasing complexity and self-organization and that this has led to the appearance of information-rich organisms and intelligence. Transhumanism Indeed, what we are doing right now is creating computers that store all our cultural information and also generate information in increasingly larger amounts. Is that the next step of the universal evolution? Are we going to continue to be part of the process, or will we be left behind? Transhumanism is a modern philosophy that, based on this view of the Cosmos, proposes that we can find meaning in the future development of the human race. It hopes that we will walk hand-in-hand with computers instead of being replaced by them (Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology). We may be able to do that by linking our brains directly to a computer, perhaps eventually migrating our entire consciousness into a computer. Conclusions It is not that the Universe has meaning in itself. Is that we are able to find meaning when we contemplate how the Universe has been evolving to give rise to consciousness, intelligence and culture. We humans are the ones who can assign value and beauty to things outside ourselves. We look at a crashing wave, at a snow-crested mountain, at a dolphin, and find those things beautiful. Likewise, we consider how stars smash atoms together, how planets are created from clouds of interstellar gas, how life arises and evolves, how consciousness emerges from complex nervous systems, and we are filled with awe. We do not exist independently of the Cosmos, we are stardust that has gained consciousness. What we do in our lives, the destiny of Humanity, matters because it is part of this amazing cosmic play. We do not know where the Universe will go from here, but somehow we suspect it will very much be worth the ride.

Different patterns of dopamine release in the reward pathway mediate motivation and addiction The dopamine myths There is much confusion these days about what dopamine does in the brain. The logic goes like this: Drugs produce addiction by releasing dopamine in the brain. Pleasurable activities release dopamine in the same brain region. Therefore, pleasurable activities must also produce addiction. Yes, the logic is not entirely sound. The devil, as always, is in the details. After all, dopamine is constantly being released inside the brain. When you block dopamine release in mice, they lack motivation for doing anything and die of thirst and starvation (Wise and Jordan, 2021). Some people even take it a step further (Lembke, 2021). They reason that too much pleasure must deplete the brain of dopamine, leading to an unhealthy state of lack of motivation. Therefore, we must try to conserve dopamine by avoiding too much pleasure. Especially masturbating or watching porn. These ideas are everywhere nowadays. They are key to the NoFab anti-masturbation movement. Its ideas have been absorbed by the manosphere, which seeks to make men more manly, powerful and less dependent on sex. But they are also supported by radical feminists, who have been campaigning against porn since the 70s. And, of course, religious conservatives are always happy to find arguments against porn, masturbation, sex and anything pleasurable. Here are a few examples of these dopamine beliefs: Porn and masturbation are addictive. Video games are addictive. Social media, and smartphones in general, are addictive. You can become addicted to loving a person. Too much pleasure depletes the brain of dopamine, leading to a state of pain, lack of motivation and weak willpower. Dopamine fasting - avoiding the addictive drug or behavior for 30 days - can be used to stop an addiction. Are behaviors addictive? These beliefs are defended in the book Dopamine Nation, by Anna Lembke, M.D (see critical reviews here). It makes three main claims: That behaviors like masturbation, watching porn, reading romance novels, gaming, social media, and using your cell phone, are as addictive as drugs like cocaine and heroin; That pleasure and pain need to be maintained in balance - if you experience too much pleasure, you will pay with pain; That drugs and behaviors like those listed above require a 30-day dopamine fast to get out of addiction. These beliefs about dopamine are also featured in some episodes of the podcast of Andrew Huberman, particularly the one of August 16, 2021, where he interviews Dr. Lembke, and the one of March 27, 2023, “Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort.” I generally like the Huberman Podcast. It provides good information about neuroscience and good life advice. However, sometimes (as in the case of dopamine) it lacks enough scientific rigor and critical thinking. The book The Compass of Pleasure, by Dr. David Linden, also defends the idea that we can become addicted to sex and love. However, it does so as an afterthought. Its main goal is to explain the involvement of the dopamine reward pathway in pleasure. It is worrisome that these prestigious neuroscientists defend the idea that behaviors can be addictive. This article focuses on examining this issue by diving into the details of dopamine release in the reward pathway of the brain. To keep it short, I will leave other claims related to dopamine for another occasion. This is a contentious issue with important social and political ramifications. If left unchallenged, this trend of demonizing sex and pleasure as addictive can start a new era of puritanism and repression. Hence, it is important to treat it with the necessary scientific rigor. Besides having a 40-year research career on the neuroscience of pain and opioids, I have researched this issue extensively to find peer-reviewed articles to support what I say. The reward pathway In 1953, James Olds and Peter Milner were postdoctoral fellows at McGill University in Montreal. By being a bit clumsy, they made a discovery of great consequence (Olds and Milner, 1954; Olds, 1958; Linden, 2012). They worked in the lab of neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, famous for hypothesizing the mechanisms of memory by saying “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Olds and Milner were investigating the reticular system, an area in the midbrain that control sleeping and waking. But the electrodes they implanted in one particular rat were a bit off and landed in the septum instead of the reticular formation. When the rat recovered from surgery, they placed it in a large rectangular box. Every time that the rat was in a particular corner, Olds stimulated its brain by passing current through the electrode. The rat soon learned to return to that corner. Apparently, it liked its brain being stimulated in the septum. In this, it behaved differently than rats that had electrodes placed in the reticular system. Olds and Milner soon learned just how much rats enjoyed having their brains stimulated in the septum. They used a set-up called a Skinner box, in which rats could press a lever to deliver the electrical stimulus to their brain. When implanted with electrodes in this brain region, the rats would press the lever several thousand times per hour. Given the choice between water or food, on the one hand, or pressing the lever, on the other hand, the rats always chose to press the lever. Male rats would rather press the lever than mate with female rats in heat. Female rats abandoned their pups to go and press the lever. It was tempting to call this neuronal path the pleasure pathway. They called it the reward pathway, instead, or by the more technical name of mesolimbic pathway. By systematically placing electrodes in different parts of the brain of rats, scientists mapped this reward pathway. It runs in the middle of the bottom of the brain, back to front, from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens. It also sends dopamine-containing axons to the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, the thalamus and the hypothalamus. The VTA, together with the substantia nigra, contains many of the dopamine neurons of the brain. VTA neurons also send dopamine-releasing (dopaminergic) axons to the prefrontal cortex (volition), the anterior cingulate cortex (decision-making and planning), the amygdala (involved in fear and anxiety) and the hypothalamus (control of body functions). This is important, because dopamine maintains the function of these areas of the brain over long periods of time. For example, effects of dopamine on the anterior cingulate cortex and the prefrontal cortex are essential for flow (Kotler et al., 2022), a mental state of effortless effort, focused attention and creativity. What does it feel like to have your reward pathway stimulated? Inevitably, electrodes were placed in the reward pathway of humans to see what they felt when it was stimulated. Just like the rats, when humans were given the opportunity to stimulate the own reward pathway by pressing a lever, they did so non-stop. But what did they feel? In his book The Compass of Pleasure, neuroscientist David Linden says that they experienced euphoria, a state of well-being and excitation, but he doesn’t give any references to support this. Is the reward pathway really a pleasure pathway? Let’s start with orgasm. Indeed, the VTA and the nucleus accumbens are activated during orgasm (Wise et al., 2017). However, several other brain regions are also activated during orgasm: the insula, operculum, anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, right angular gyrus, paracentral lobule, cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus and dorsal raphe. In particular, the insula and its nearby operculum mediate the emotions associated with body sensations, so they may be key for the pleasure produced by the orgasm. The anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex may mediate the desire to continue sexual stimulation. The hypothalamus mediates the release of oxytocin that produces bonding during sex. What about other kinds of pleasure? The linking reaction to sweets is mediated by a “hedonic hotspot” in the shell of the nucleus accumbens (Mitchell et al., 2018). The pleasure produced by music is associated with dopamine release in the striatum, which includes the nucleus accumbens (Salimpoor et al., 2011). This study used positron emission tomography (PET) to get images of the brain as dopamine displaces [11C]raclopride from dopamine receptors. Dopamine release occurred when arousal by music reached its peak, as reported by the subjects and measured by the activation of their autonomic system. Viewing pictures of a person who you love decreases pain by activating the nucleus accumbens, the amygdala and the frontal cortex (Younger et al., 2010). Some dopaminergic neurons in the reward pathway respond to aversive stimuli: things that we dislike, like pain and distress. The activation of some neurons in the nucleus accumbens with dopamine receptors was correlated with the emotional quality of pain (Scott et al., 2006). The front (rostral) part of the shell of the nucleus accumbens reacts to things that we like, while its back (caudal) part reacts to aversive stimuli (Hurley et al., 2017). A review paper (Salamone and Correa, 2012) objected to the name of reward pathway. They said that it is really a motivation pathway because it mediates sustained effort to achieve a goal. Another review (Paredes and Agmo, 2004) argued that dopamine is not important for sexual motivation or sexual reward. Even though this issue remains controversial, I would say that there is strong evidence that the reward pathway is involved in both pleasure and pain. However, scientists use the more precise terms reward for pleasure and aversion for pain. Dopamine receptors There are five receptors for dopamine, D1 through D5 (Seeman and Van Tol, 1994). They are the proteins in the membrane of neurons to which dopamine binds to deliver its signal. The five receptors are divided into two groups: D1-like receptors include D1 and D5 receptors, while D2-like receptors are D2, D3 and D4. The dopamine receptors most important in the reward pathway are D1 and D2 (Wise and Robble, 2020). About half of the neurons of the nucleus accumbens have D1 receptors, which have low affinity for dopamine. This means that their full activation requires high concentrations of dopamine. The other half of these neurons have D2 receptors, which have high affinity for dopamine. This means that relatively low concentrations of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens are able to activate most of the D2 receptors. Dopamine release The key to distinguish the effect of addictive drugs on dopamine from the effect of behaviors like masturbating, watching porn or playing video games resides on somewhat obscure concepts: tonic and phasic release of dopamine. Dopamine, like other neurotransmitters, is released when action potentials in the axon of the dopamine neuron reach a presynaptic terminal. This is a swelling separated by a small gap from the postsynaptic terminal containing the dopamine receptors. In the presynaptic terminal, dopamine is loaded into synaptic vesicles. When an action potential reaches the presynaptic terminals, some of these vesicles fuse with the membrane, releasing dopamine that then crosses the synapse and binds to the dopamine receptors in the postsynaptic terminals. Dopamine does not hang around the synapse for long. There are proteins called dopamine transporters (or reuptake systems) that take dopamine out of the synaptic space and put it back into the presynaptic terminal. Then dopamine gets quickly loaded back into the synaptic vesicles. Tonic dopamine release Neurons fire action potentials in different patterns. Tonic firing is the simplest pattern. It consists of single action potentials separated by time intervals of 150 to 500 milliseconds (ms). A ms is a thousandth of a second, so 500 ms is half a second. Tonic firing releases small amounts of dopamine that binds to D2 receptors, which present not only in the synapse, but all over the postsynaptic neuron. Tonic release of dopamine is not triggered by sensory stimuli from the environment, but controlled by stress and hormones related to feeding, like leptin, insulin and ghrelin (Wise and Robble, 2020). Tonic dopamine release controls the motivational state of the individual, its willingness to exert an effort to achieve a goal. A sustained rate of tonic release keeps basal dopamine levels high, so that D2 receptors are activated. This leads to a state of contentment and satisfaction. When tonic firing is low, dopamine falls below the levels at which it activates the D2 receptors. This creates a state of uneasy that drives the individual to seek something to relieve it. Based on previous learning, the person gets motivated to find a reward (food, sex, a work goal) that would increase tonic dopamine release again. For example, feeding hormones may cause a drop in tonic dopamine release, motivating the individual to seek food. Phasic dopamine release Burst firing of action potentials is more complex. It consists of several groups (bursts) of action potentials at high frequency - up to 100 Hz, which means one action potential every 10 ms. Burst firing changes synapses by the process of synaptic plasticity, which is how the brain stores memories. Synaptic plasticity is composed of two opposing mechanisms: long-term potentiation (LTP), which increases the efficacy of neurotransmission, and long-term depression (LTD), which decreases it. Burst firing of dopaminergic neurons induces phasic dopamine release. Phasic means intermittent: a lot of dopamine is released very quickly during each burst of action potentials. This increases dopamine concentrations at the synapse so much that the D1 receptors get fully activated. Together with the burst of action potentials, they induce LTP in these synapses, recording the memory of the rewarding stimulus. Some of these synapses are in the prefrontal cortex or the anterior cingulate cortex, where they drive future decisions. Some of this dopamine spills out of the synapse and activates D2 receptors. If the D2 receptors are in the bodies of the neurons, this dampens craving. But when the D2 receptors are in nearby synapses, the lower concentrations of spillover dopamine induce LTD in them. These synapses are less efficacious in the future. This sets a signal/noise contrast between the synapses activated by a rewarding stimulus and those unrelated to it, increasing learning. Phasic dopamine release is driven by sensory stimuli related to rewards (pleasure) or aversion (pain). They are delivered to the VTA-accumbens pathway from brain regions that assign a positive or negative emotional value to sensory signals. For example, the amygdala may assign fear to a perception, or the insula may assign pleasure to another one. How dopamine mediates addiction to cocaine and amphetamines This may seem very technical, but the difference between tonic and phasic dopamine is essential to explain why drugs are addictive and behaviors like watching porn or masturbating are not. Let’s start with cocaine. It acts by blocking the reuptake of dopamine: the proteins that transport dopamine back into the synaptic terminals to end its effect. When neurons cannot capture back dopamine, its spillover to D2 receptors outside the synapse during phasic dopamine release increases considerably. Even tonic dopamine release causes higher levels of dopamine around the neurons. Cocaine increases 3 to 5 folds basal level of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens (Wise and Robble, 2020). But equally important is that these high levels of dopamine are present for long periods of time, for as long as we feel the effect of cocaine. Exposed to too much dopamine for long periods of time, the D2 receptors are downregulated: taken out of the membrane and degraded. So now there are less D2 receptors to signal satisfaction, leading to a state of craving. At the same time, the pleasure produced by cocaine sends a signal through D1 receptors that creates an association of cocaine with reward. This, together with the state of craving induced by the downregulation of the D2 receptors, is what drives the compulsive seeking of the drug that constitutes addiction. Amphetamine and methamphetamine acts in a similar way as cocaine, except that they not just inhibit the dopamine transporter, they reverse it! They also release dopamine from the synaptic vesicles. This results in increases in extrasynaptic dopamine even larger than those produced by cocaine. Notice that the increases in dopamine produced by cocaine and amphetamines are not mediated by changes in either tonic or phasic dopamine release. They are not related to behavioral rewards or aversions. It is an unnatural interference that completely messes up the reward pathway. How dopamine mediates addiction to opioids Opioids like heroin, morphine, fentanyl and oxycodone (the infamous OxyContin that caused the opioid epidemic in the USA) act by a different mechanism. Neurons that release the neurotransmitter GABA are the main brake system in the brain. GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that reduces action potential firing in other neurons. There are GABA-releasing (GABAergic) neurons that make synapses with the dopamine neurons of the reward pathway, providing a negative feedback. When there is too much release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, GABAergic neurons that go to the VTA get activated, decreasing their firing and thus dopamine release. These GABAergic neurons contain mu-opioid receptors, which are the site of action for the opioid drugs that I listed above. When these opioid receptors are activated, GABA release is decreased. This relieves dopamine release from its inhibition, increasing it - a phenomenon called disinhibition. That is how opioids increase dopamine release in the reward pathway (Johnson and North, 1992; Saigusa et al., 2017, 2021). As in the case of cocaine and amphetamines, the resulting increases in dopamine are sustained and lead to the downregulation of D2 receptors, setting a state of craving. In addition, the abnormal activation of the mu-opioid receptors by the opioid drugs seems to induce long-term changes in the GABAergic neurons that reduce their ability to keep dopamine release in check. This may explain why opioids are even more addictive than cocaine. Curiously, endorphins - the peptides that naturally activate opioid receptors - do not produce addiction (Stoeber et al., 2018). The reason for this is complicated. Endorphins are quickly degraded by enzymes called peptidases (Song and Marvizon, 2003), and this limits the amount of time that they have to activate the opioid receptors. Another reason is that opioid receptors send different signals to the inside of the cell depending on whether they are activated by endorphins or by drugs. The intracellular signals sent by endorphins end the action of the mu-opioid receptors by internalizing them to the inside of the cell, while morphine and other drugs do not produce mu-opioid receptor internalization (Keith et al., 1996; Stoeber et al., 2018). This is important because it means that natural stimuli that release endorphins - like sex and exercise - do not produce addiction, even though endorphins activate mu-opioid receptors just like morphine and heroin. Cannabis Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) are two amongst over a hundred psychoactive compounds found in marihuana. They act on CB1, CB2 and GPR55 receptors (Lauckner et al., 2008; Pertwee, 2008). The natural ligands of CB1 and CB2 receptors are the endocannabinoids anandamide and 2-arachinodylglycerol (2-AG). They are called retrograde neurotransmitters because they signal the opposite way than regular neurotransmitters: they are synthesized in the postsynaptic terminals and diffuse to the presynaptic terminal, where they inhibit neurotransmitter release. Like opioids, cannabinoids inhibit GABA release onto dopamine neurons in the reward pathway, increasing dopamine release by disinhibition (Szabo et al., 2002). However, cannabis is much less addictive than opioids and does not produce withdrawal (Wise and Robble, 2020). Several things may explain this. CB1 receptors also inhibit glutamate release onto the dopamine neurons, which increases dopamine release. So, in this case, cannabinoids inhibit dopamine release, moderating their effect on the GABAergic neurons. Cannabinoids increase phasic dopamine release (Wise and Robble, 2020), rather than its tonic release. They also interact with endorphins to increase “liking” instead of “wanting” (Mitchell et al., 2018). CBD, acting on CB2 receptors, decreases addiction to cocaine (Galaj et al., 2020). Other addictive drugs Other addictive drugs have their own mechanisms (Wise and Robble, 2020). Alcohol is addictive when taken regularly in large amounts. Unlike other drugs, its effects on the brain are not mediated by a particular neurotransmitter receptor, but by its interaction with many receptors. These include glycine receptors, serotonin 5-HT3 receptors and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Alcohol produces only small increases in basal dopamine levels, but seems to increase phasic dopamine release. Still, alcoholics show a downregulation of D2 dopamine receptors similar to that produced by cocaine, amphetamines and opioids. Nicotine - the psychoactive substance of tobacco - is an agonist of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, some of which are in dopaminergic neurons of the VTA. Nicotine increases dopamine release from these neurons. In the long term, it downregulates D2 dopamine receptors. Benzodiazepines (Valium) and barbiturates (pentobarbital) act by modulating GABA-A receptors, increasing the inhibitory effects of GABA. They seem to disinhibit dopamine release, like the opioids. Why natural stimuli induce dopamine release, but not addiction Let’s now examine how some behaviors considered addictive impact the VTA-nucleus accumbens dopamine pathway. These things include (Potenza, 2006, 2014): food: eating sweets and other tasty foods (Lindgren et al., 2018); sex: masturbating, watching porn, reading romance and erotica, fetishism, kink; playing: video games, gambling; social interactions: social media, anxious attachment, obsessive love (Burkett and Young, 2012); shopping and shop-lifting; self-harm, like cutting; exercise: any sport done in excess; work: workaholics. These are all natural activities. Although video games and social media depend on the invention of the computer and the internet, playing, gossip and social interactions have always been human activities. The same can be said about sex. People have masturbated, had sex, and watch others have sex since the dawn of humanity. Living today is much less dangerous and scary that in ancient times. It’s only that sensory stimulation has been increased by tastier foods, more appealing sexual images, more exciting games, etc. Strong sensory stimuli engage the reward pathway. However, they still do that by inducing phasic dopamine release. This is completely different from the prolonged elevations of basal dopamine levels produced by psychostimulants like cocaine and amphetamines. Neither does it mess with GABAergic inhibition of dopamine release, like opioids do. Natural stimuli also fine-tune tonic dopamine release to drive our motivations as we cycle through desire and satisfaction. Therefore, the stimuli provided by modern technology are not qualitatively different, in terms of dopamine release, from the old rewards with which we evolved. There is no reason to think that these activities would produce the enormous craving and withdrawal syndromes that addictive drugs produce. Still, it is true that some people develop strong compulsions to gamble, eat in excess or watch porn. However, this is better explained as an excessive tuning of the dopamine system towards one specific reward - gambling, tasty foods, exciting sex, etc. - and not an abnormal hijacking of the reward pathway, as drugs of addiction do. Is sex addictive? Unfortunately, science was often used in the past to justify puritanism and sexual repression. Even today, excessive sexual desire is considered a disease, termed Don Juanism and satyriasis in men and nymphomania in women. And let’s not forget that, for the longest time, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. Some contemporary papers (Blum et al., 2015) continue this tradition by assuming that departures from culturally approved sexual norms are “maladaptive” and need to be cured. Thus, Bloom et al. define sexual addiction as “any compulsive sexual behavior that interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on the family, friends, loved ones, and one's work environment.” However, the severe stress may be due to family, friends and co-workers refusing to accept unconventional forms of sexuality, as it still happens with homosexuality. The problem, then, is not with the sexual behavior in itself, but with the bigoted attitudes of society. Indeed, in their review of the literature, Bloom et al. found no evidence that hypersexuality produces any withdrawal symptoms when the sexual activity is stopped. They state that “the prevalence rates of sexual addiction-related disorders range from 3% to 6%”, but these include “excessive masturbation, cybersex, pornography use, aberrant sexual behavior with consenting adults, telephone sex, strip club visitation, and other addictive behaviors.” However, these are behaviors accepted as normal by most people in Western societies. Calling these behaviors addictive is based more on their puritanical assumptions than on scientific evidence. Other scientists align better with modern sex-positive views by showing that hypersexual behavior is just one extreme of the normal range of sexual desire (Steele et al., 2013; Prause et al., 2017). Indeed, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DMS-5) rejected the concept of sexual addiction (Potenza, 2014). Addiction or compulsions? Whether some behaviors are addictive continues to be hotly debated in the scientific community (Potenza, 2006, 2014). An emerging view is that compulsive behaviors like excessive eating, gambling, gaming and watching porn are not addictions but reflect an underlying deficit in the reward pathway that causes these individuals to be always craving something. This underlying disorder in the reward pathway may be genetic, produced by a disease, or derived from trauma. Only by addressing its true cause can these persons be freed of their basic craving. Then, curing them of one “addiction” only serves to switch their compulsion to another behavior. For example, when “sex addicts” do not have access to sex, they start smoking or eating in excess. Trying to cure these people of one compulsive behavior has the danger of switching them to consuming addictive drugs, a situation much worse than the original problem. Closing thoughts There is much more to the brain than the VTA-nucleus accumbens reward pathway. Like any other system in the brain, it doesn’t work in isolation. Its function is deeply connected to sensory systems that weigh the importance of incoming information, and to cortical systems that plan actions. Trying to view human behavior through the narrow window of addiction is incredibly short-sighted. Yes, there are many things in the modern world that strive to capture our attention, but they don’t have the hold on our will that drugs have over addicts. Of course, obsessively seeking pleasure can be a problem. But so is shackling ourselves to the repression of sex and other pleasures of life. Too much self-discipline, guilt and shame can cause much suffering by propelling us on an ego-driven chase of success, money and fame. Puritanism has been in the collective minds of Americans since the start of this nation. It gave birth to the Prohibition and to the War on Drugs, misguided attempts to address alcoholism and drug addiction through criminalization. One reason why books like Dopamine Nation are so successful is because the narrative of sin and redemption — which underlies the cycles of abuse and sobriety of many addicts — is so deeply imbedded in the American psyche. In fact, calling porn and video games addictive undermines the importance that we should give to the tragic problem of drug addiction. The current opioid epidemic in the United States was started in 1996 by Purdue Pharma, ran the Sackler family, with its aggressive marketing of OxyContin to American doctors. It was not caused by people chasing pleasure. Its toll is over 300,000 deaths. Nobody has died from watching too much porn or playing video-games. Saying that porn, masturbation, gaming and cell phones are problems similar to drug addiction is simply ridiculous. It is a slap in the face of the millions of people who have lost loved ones to real addictions. 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The beauty of dating an amputee I have to confess that the first time I saw her stump I felt a bit disgusted. The skin was loose and wrinkled, full of scars. It was kind of soft to the touch and it had a peculiar smell, maybe because of all that time inside the rubber envelop of her orthopedic leg. We made love, anyway. Erin, despite having her left leg amputated just below the knee, is a beautiful and sexy woman. She has the willowy body of a teenager, well-defined muscles in her arms, shoulders and back, a flat belly, small delicious breasts and an exquisite ass - as can be seen in this picture I took while she was sleeping. Soon enough, I became aware that Erin is an expert in the erotic arts. Her desire gets easily turned on and then she gives herself entirely to you, to everything you want to do to her, opening her body with a fiery enthusiasm, without fears or traumas. We rolled in bed testing every position, every perversion, our naked bodies covered by a sheen of sweat, not knowing if it was hers or mine. As a prerequisite for our relationship, I required of her the most rigorous honesty: I can’t stand lies, and I hold secrets only when strictly necessary. So the following day I didn’t want to hide what I had felt. “I had some trouble with your stump”, I confessed. Her answer was totally unexpected: “And you think I don’t? It’s been more than twenty years since I lost my leg and I still haven’t gotten used to it”. That moved me. If I didn’t like her stump I always had the option of leaving her. But she didn’t. She always would have to make love putting just one foot up in the air, trying not to look at her stump, hoping that the lover of the occasion wasn’t bothered too much by her incomplete body. I think it was then when I started falling in love with Erin. Little by little, in subsequent dates, Erin told me her story. When she was a teenager she loved to run. She would spend hours jogging between the houses of Burbank, just at the foot of the steep San Gabriel mountains that mark the horizon of Los Angeles. She ran marathons and even won a few medals. She had beautiful legs, strong and slender. Once, when she needed money, she signed up to show them off in a strip-tease show, and they were a big hit. She was twenty five when disaster stroke. At sunset, on a fine September day, a friend asked her to take her home in her scooter. A car appeared out of nowhere, making an illegal left turn, and slammed into them. Erin found herself lying on the street with her left foot torn apart, spitting her teeth on the asphalt. Her friend came out of the accident unscathed. Erin spent several months in the hospital, until Christmas. The doctors did everything they could to save her foot, but to no avail. Erin told her mother that she’d rather die than to let them cut away her leg. She couldn’t live without being able to run. In the end, it was the stench of the gangrene that changed her mind: an odor indescribably foul that was with her night and day. She thought she was going crazy, particularly knowing that it came from her own body. One day the doctor came into her room and looked at her without saying anything. “It has to go, doesn’t it?”, said Erin. The doctor nodded. But that was not the end of it. Even after the amputation, the gangrene continued to spread. The doctors had to cut her leg over and over again, every time a bit higher, getting closer to the knee. Her fibula had to be completely extirpated and only a little piece remained of her tibia. To cover her stump, they had to remove skin from the front of her thighs, leaving two rectangular patches of whitish skin that resemble the mended pants of a beggar. One day, joking, I told her that she looked like a scarecrow. For a while, she signed her e-mails “scarecrow”. Erin had no money to buy an orthopedic leg, so she made herself a wooden leg, like a pirate’s leg, that she tied to her stump with leather straps. Her workmates gave her stickers and tags that she placed over the wooden leg until it was completely covered. Now she has a nice orthopedic leg that allows her to walk normally. One day we went to the beach and I convinced her to run with me at the edge of the surf. Yes, Erin can still run, but she doesn’t do it unless necessary because the repeated impact can crack the plastic of her orthopedic leg, and she doesn’t have enough money to replace it. I never thought that I would end up with a lover with a broken body. I never thought I would come to like her so much. What is beauty, in the end? There is a beauty that is easy to see, the one that they instill in you in movies, magazines and advertisement. The soft, unblemished skin. The symmetrical body. The shapely muscles with that thin layer of fat that soften the corners of the female body. That type of beauty is just an animal reflex; in the end everything comes to attraction to whatever reveals health and revulsion to whatever indicates disease. But there is another type of beauty that is exclusively human: the beauty of acting the right way, of living an ethical life. The beauty of a story that touches something deep inside you. That’s what I see in the mutilated body of Erin: her story, the courage that she summoned to face never been able to run again, having to spend the rest of her life dragging a leg made of plastic and steel. Now, when we make love I kiss her scars, I caress her stump. She tells me it’s quite sensitive, because all the nerves that used to ran all the way to her feet had to end there. Yes, Erin is beautiful, and not only because of her slender body, her flat belly and her exquisite ass. She is beautiful because of her missing leg, the rectangular patches of whitish skin in her thighs and her scars. Those things speak of her story, her suffering and her ability to overcome it. They show that her good mood and her easy smiles are her conquests, her triumph over bad luck. They show that she has more strength that most of us will ever have. I wrote this article in 2013, while I was dating Erin. She loved it and showed it to all her friends. She left me in June that year. Soon afterwards, in November, she took her life. It seems that what she told her mother was true: it was too painful for her to live without her leg.

My early encounters with sea creatures, sexual abuse and death [TW: Child sexual abuse] I woke up early. Thin sunbeams filtered through the cracks in the blinds, announcing a beautiful summer day. I slid down from my top bunk bed and, not wanting to wake up my brothers, I grabbed my swimsuit, a T-shirt and my beach slippers and put them on quietly. I was thirteen. The sun was still low over the pine trees above the house. The bay was calm, an incipient breeze changing its color from silver to deep blue. It was going to be a hot day. Nobody was up yet, so I decided to go for a walk. I wandered through fields of cabbage and corn until I came to the rocks by the water's edge. Not far offshore, in his wooden boat brightly painted white, brown and blue, was the octopus fisherman. Octopus is a delicacy in Galicia, the national dish. It is served on a thick wood plate, seasoned with olive oil, coarse salt and spicy paprika. I loved to eat it, but I was also fascinated by the animal itself. I had just learned to catch it. With my mask, snorkel and fins, I would swim over the sandy bottom looking for odd objects: a rubber boot, a pot, a tire. Then I would dive and check inside for octopus. More often than not, I would find one. Then I would wrestle it to the shore, kill it and proudly present it to my mother to cook. The old fisherman used entirely different techniques to catch octopus. He would never get in the water. Like most Galician fishermen, he didn’t even know how to swim. He carried long poles with a hook at the end. When he spotted an octopus on the bottom, he would quickly get one on his poles, hook the octopus and haul it into his boat. Sometimes the octopus would get into a crack in the rocks and stubbornly hold to it with all the considerable strength of its tentacles and suction cups. Then a fight would ensue, the fisherman pulling with his pole this way and that and the octopus holding on for dear life. * * * One day I witnessed one of these struggles while lying lazily on a towel on the beach. The fisherman fought for over half an hour and still couldn’t get the octopus. I grabbed my mask, snorkel and fins and got in the water, wanting to take a closer look at the struggle. There was a large rock on the bottom. The hook of the fisherman’s long pole was digging under it. There must be an octopus under there, I thought. I asked him if he needed help, but he just muttered something incomprehensible in Galician. But the octopus was giving no sign of giving up. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I took a deep breath and dove toward the rock. Bracing with my knees on the bottom, it wasn’t hard to overturn the rock. The octopus came out and took off swimming at full speed, opening and closing its tentacles looking like a little ghost. I went back to the surface for air. “Look what I have done!” I thought, “I have lost this poor fisherman his catch.” Desperately, I swam on the surface following the octopus, which was heading for deep water. I dove again. If the octopus was as smart as some people think it is, it would have just keep on swimming and I would have never been able to catch it. Instead, it opened its tentacles on the bottom and waited for me. I grabbed it and head back to the surface. It was a big one. It wrapped its tentacles around my arm all the way to my neck, pulling hard to slide between my fingers. I knew it just wanted to get away, but I started to get scared. Then I looked up and saw the fisherman in his boat. He grabbed the octopus and peeled it off me. “I’m glad I could get you that octopus,” I told him after I climbed into his boat. “That’s your octopus now,” he said. “Take it home to your mom.” * * * I used to ride with the octopus fisherman in his boat, watching him peek into the water to find an octopus where I could see just rocks. Another way he had to catch his prey was to drag a line to which he had attached a small rock with a crab and hooks on top. The octopus would try to get the crab and get hooked. He taught me the names of all the beaches in the bay and a lot of things about the sea. At the end of the morning, he would pull his boat to the beach and the beachgoers would gather around and bid for his catch. So when that morning he rowed his boat backwards to the rocks to let me in, I didn’t think twice. I climbed on board and sat on the prow as he rowed back out on the bay. I tried to start a conversation about fishing, but he didn’t seem in the mood for it. Then something really weird happened. He pulled in the oars and came to where I was. He started touching me over my skimpy swimsuit. I couldn’t believe what was happening. “What are you doing?” I said. “Whoa, you have a big one!” he said. That was completely ridiculous. I haven’t reached puberty yet. I had the penis of a child. It didn’t even care if it was big or small. “Do you want to touch mine?” I couldn’t imagine anything more repulsive than to touch that old man’s cock. “No! Stop! Leave me alone!” “Do you want to go to shore?” he said in Galician. Go to shore and do what? Go to a hiding place so he could continue touching me? As it was, anybody looking out from the beach could see us. But there was nobody there. “Stop! Stop, or I’ll jump in the water!” He took a step back, as if to consider what I had said. Then he started again. I quickly took off my T-shirt and my slippers and dove headfirst into the sea. The water was cold. I come to the surface and looked at him. He could row his boat much faster than I could swim. Would he fish me out of the water as if I were an octopus? But he just stood there, looking at me with apparent indifference. I swam in a perfect crawl straight to the beach. I wanted to slip quietly back into my room and change, but my mother saw me walking in, barefoot and wet. “You have been swimming already?” “Yeah, the water is nice,” I muttered, and went upstairs. * * * What was that old man thinking? How could he dare? He was just a poor man. My father was a local authority. If I told, I could get him into a lot of trouble. He would probably wind up in jail. But I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing that free spirit in jail. For me, he symbolized the freedom and the wildness of the sea. Even what he had done to me represented that careless freedom. Those were still the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. I didn’t know anything about sex, nobody had told me. Obscure desires had started to awaken inside me. I didn’t understand any of that. It scared me. The priests told us a few things, but they were always unclear, shrouded in secrecy and sin. Perhaps the old fisherman could explain it to me, the same way that he had explained the way of the octopus. But not if he was going to touch me like that again. It slowly dawned on me that I could never ride in the old fisherman’s boat again. * * * Later on that day, I saw the fisherman pulling his boat on the beach. He had a system to pull his heavy wooden boat out over the tide line. He lay the oars on the sand and put a round log across them. Then he rolled the boat over the oars, using the round log as a wheel. He repeated the process several times until the boat was on the white dry sand, out of the reach of the high tide. Some beachgoers often helped him, but he was perfectly capable of doing it on his own. While the bid over the catch started, I surreptitiously grabbed my slippers and T-shirt from the boat and walked away. * * * He must have done other boys. One day I was walking on a cove that could only be reached by hiking through thorny gorse and blackberry bushes. There I saw him walking out of a shack with a teenage boy. I pretended that I didn’t see them. The locals never said much about him. He had no wife, no children, no family that I knew of. He seemed content and self-sufficient. He looked as old as the world, with his short white hair and his wrinkly face, but there was no way to know how old he really was. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. I saw him once dancing at a local fiesta, alone. He jumped and pranced with a vitality and abandon that I envied. * * * I was already attending college when I heard that the octopus fisherman was dying. Stomach cancer, they said. I made discreet inquiries and found the way to his place. It was an old stone house surrounded by an unkempt garden, but there were peach trees and fig trees and plum trees, the fruit still green in the early days of summer. I knocked on the door, called, then walked in. The inside of the house was just a large single room, with a high ceiling, a wooden floor and walls of naked granite blocks. There was a large bed in the middle. The old fisherman was laying on it, his belly swollen. Other than that, he looked as he always did. I sat on a chair by him and asked him how he was. He knew he was dying. I asked him if he was afraid of death. He said he was afraid of the pain. I asked him if he believed in an afterlife, in God. I had abandoned Christianity a few years back, when I was fifteen, and now I was exploring yoga and Eastern mysticism. But he didn’t seem to care about religious belief, he just wanted the pain to be over. I didn’t mention the incident on the boat. I still didn’t have the words to talk about sex, much less sexual abuse. A few days later, my father told me that the octopus fisherman had died. He asked me if I wanted to go to his funeral. I said no. I had already said my goodbyes to the old man.

How I left Catholicism while attending an elite school ran by Opus Dei Moving to Madrid My childhood in the Spanish town of Santiago the Compostela ended when I was 15, when my parents, my seven siblings and I moved to Madrid. That heralded a momentous change in my life. It was not just that I was in the middle of puberty. The intellectual changes that had been brewing inside of me came to a head. We had a nice apartment in Santiago, in professor housing in the middle of the campus, surrounded by gardens and sport facilities. But our new home in Madrid was downright luxurious: a huge flat facing the Park of Berlin, in a modern part of the city. It had so many bedrooms that I got to have a room of my own. My Opus Dei High School My father had been telling my brothers and me that we would go to the Instituto Ramiro Maeztu, a public school walking distance from our new home. However, when we arrived in Madrid, we found that plans had been changed without our knowledge. We were enrolled in the school of El Prado, ran by the private organization Fomento de Centros de Enseñanza, controlled by the Opus Dei. It was a boys-only school. My sisters would go to Montealto, a girls-only school run by the same organization. As I described in the Part 1 of this series, Opus Dei is a conservative Catholic organization that controlled politics and wealth in Spain during the last part of the Franco dictatorship. My siblings and I had been groomed by this organization since childhood. However, the school we attended in Santiago de Compostela, although also private and boys-only, was not run by Opus Dei. Now, we would have Opus Dei in our family, at school and in our social circle. We were invited to join Club Jara, a boys' club similar to the Club Senra that I frequented in Santiago. El Prado school was in Mirasierra, a wealthy colony in the outskirts of the north of Madrid. It was far from home and not easily accessible. Most students got there by school bus. However, one of the perks of my father’s new government position was an official car, complete with uniformed chauffeur, flag and government license plates. Everybody would recognize it when we stepped out. I was embarrassed. However, I soon find out that we were not the only ones being driven to school in an official car. Some of my classmates also were the sons of government officials, military and entrepreneurs. I was in an elite school. The academic year had already started at the school. We were late because of the move. I joined in the middle of class. I had grown a beard during the summer, so my new classmates thought that I was a new teacher sitting the class. When they found out that I was the new kid in town, they were fascinated. I feared that I was not going to be able to catch up with the curriculum of such an elite school. I was used to being the first of my class in Santiago. Now, I found the mathematics class incomprehensible. The Literature teacher was an aggressive priest prone to telling vaguely sexual anecdotes. Physics was challenging. And I found religion class to be the most upsetting. It consisted of going over the dogmas of Catholicism, which made me feel the whole oppressive weight of that religion. However, I soon found out that my classmates felt pretty much the same weight. Nobody understood the math teacher. He was just awful. Suddenly, he changed from algebra to calculus and I found myself in familiar territory. I had a great math teacher in Santiago, and I loved calculus. Soon, I was explaining it to my peers, which made me quite popular. I also got into the habit of picking arguments with the philosophy teacher. My classmates loved these confrontations and cheered me along. I had the good taste of conceding the point before things got ugly, and that earned me the favor of the teacher as well. The first round of exams came. I got good grades. I was on! Growing doubts My discussions with the philosophy teacher were not as frivolous as they seemed, however. They reflected a deep philosophical struggle inside of me. I had always been a good boy: obedient, a good student, always eager to please my demanding father. Being religious was part and parcel of that. That’s why I went to all those retreats of the Opus Dei my father sent me to. I prayed, went to mass and confessed regularly. I didn’t chase girls or masturbate. In fact, I lived in deep sexual repression despite an emergent libido. I had a penchant for mysticism. I loved sitting silently in prayer, gathering my thoughts while I talked to God. I did half an hour of prayer every evening. But I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t feel any devotion to the Virgin or the saints, and was not even impressed by Jesus. I saw no reason why I couldn’t talk directly to the Big Boss. The problem was that my insatiable curiosity had propelled me to learn a lot about science. It provided a coherent, enormously appealing view of the world that increasingly collided with the dogmas of Catholicism. But it was not just that. I had started reading about yoga, Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism, and they seemed more attractive as religions than Christianity. I reasoned that being a Christian was a mere accident of my birth. That random occurrence could not determine the truth of a religion. If I had been born in India, I would have been a Hindu. If I had been born in Egypt, I would be a Muslim. And so on. So, the rational thing to do was to examine all religions and then decide which one made more sense. If any. I had tried that the previous summer, while I was at an Opus Dei retreat in Vigo, a port city of Galicia not far from where my parents had a beach house. I decided that I was going to stop being a Christian, to see what it felt like. I even told a priest in confession. He was horrified, but could not provide any satisfactory response to my problem of being a Christian by accident of birth. Or any other of my objections. Another disturbing thing that happened during that summer retreat was that the participants we were invited, as a group, to discuss a philosophical or political subject. However, there was an important caveat: it couldn’t be anything about which the Church had a doctrine. I successively proposed discussing communism, socialism, anarchism, Eastern religions, feminism, only to always came against the same answer. These were things condemned by the Church, so they could not be discussed. I was furious. I had the feeling that Catholicism was a huge intellectual jail in which I could not learn what I wanted and grow intellectually. However, the prospect of staying outside the Church was too scary, so I went back to being a Catholic. If I wandered outside of religion, how was I going to maintain my self-discipline? Wouldn’t I end up becoming a pervert, a communist, a drug addict, like so many youngsters of my generation? I meet a real-life saint During the Holy Week of 1972, I was invited to travel to Rome with the Opus Dei, see the Pope and meet the Father, Monseñor Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of the Opus Dei. After his death, he was canonized by the Church. So I was about to meet a real saint. I was not impressed by him. He made us wait a long time. Then he told us a silly story about a rich man that gave a lot of his wealth to charity, and a poor man that only had one spoon but was so attached to it that he growled at anybody that looked at it. The moral of the story was that what matters is not how much money you have, but how attached you are to it. It made sense, sort of. But I think Jesus says the opposite in the Gospel. Something about camels and the eye of a needle. Whatever. Escrivá de Balaguer would die three years later, on June 26, 1975. Five months before the death of dictator Franco. But I loved being in Rome. I had been born there, and I lived in that magical city until I was 5. I could still remember some of the places of my childhood. I could speak Italian. Too bad they didn’t let me wander on my own. October 1972: the agony of making a decision Attending those religion classes in the school of El Prado, I couldn’t keep my eyes closed anymore. Cognitive dissonance became too strong. The dogmas of Catholicism rained on my head like blows of a hammer. I could clearly see how they conflicted with my scientific view of the world. Humans were the product of evolution. The mind was just the brain at work. Miracles seemed doubtful, and besides, all religions had them. Looking deeper, religion started to seem like a mental trap. Its arguments were circular. From inside Christianity, it was hard to object to the beliefs, mostly because believing was considered a good thing, and unbelief was a sin. But if you dared to place your point of view outside of religion, it all fell apart. It made no more sense than believing in the ancient Greek gods, or in reincarnation, or that Krishna was the avatar of Vishnu, or that Muhammed was the prophet of Allah. By the time October rolled around, I was in deep distress. I had to decide. I could renounce my heretical views based on science and Eastern mysticism and fully embrace Christianity. Or I could leave Christianity and follow my own spiritual path. The decision seems obvious when I look back at it. But I was 15, barely a child. I had nobody to help me. My parents were in the Opus Dei. My teachers were in the Opus Dei. The whole damned country was a Catholic dictatorship where expressing the wrong opinion (and I had lots of those) could land you in jail. Every evening before dinner, I locked myself in my room for my daily prayer, and cried, torn by my inner struggle. Then I dried my tears and pretended that nothing was happening. I did ask a couple of priests for advice. But our conversations turned confrontational. I even wrote to don Aurelio. His answer came too late. He said that he had always feared that the extremism of Opus Dei was going to turn me away from Christ. But, for me, Opus Dei represented the true face of Catholicism. I couldn’t live like that, so I gave myself a deadline: by the end of October, I would decide. A few things started to come clear. I wasn’t going to stop being a Christian to give free rein to my last and go chasing girls. In fact, I would not abandon any part of my self-discipline. I would continue my daily prayer, studying hard and restraining from masturbation. My reasons for leaving Christianity were purely intellectual. Halloween was unknown in Spain at the time. On that suspicious date, I stopped being a Christian for good. Out of the mental jail The feeling was one of complete freedom. An enormous weight was lifted off me. I felt like I could finally breathe. I could read what I wanted, think what I wanted. Choose my beliefs along the way; discard them when they no longer made sense. There was no feeling of urgency anymore. I was young. I had my whole life in front of me. I could take my time to choose my ideas and my values. Non-believer in the closet However, there was still a lot of fear. How would I tell my parents? Would I dare tell my teachers in that Opus Dei school? Now that I could speak more freely to my classmates, I realized that they were divided into two camps: those who agreed with Opus Dei, and those who opposed it. I had been so careful in hiding my inner conflict that nobody knew on whose side I was on. That made me realize that my new ideas entailed some obligations. I had to help those who thought like me. My discussions with my philosophy teacher took a new edge. And so did my questions to my other teachers. I would carefully choose an idea and put it out there as a question. But it was bait; if you followed it to its conclusion, you would find yourself questioning a dogma. My classmates were not stupid. They soon realized what I was up to. My popularity increased. I found myself in a role that I didn’t know existed: the cool intellectual kid who got the highest grades and thus could not be harassed by the teachers. And so did Opus Dei. And probably my parents. However, much to my surprise, nobody dared to confront me openly. They seemed as afraid of me as I was afraid of them. I was like they knew that my change of heart was so honest, so deeply rooted in well-thought ideas, that confronting it could end up challenging their own convictions. But I was flattering myself. What really happened is that the whole country of Spain was undergoing the same change as me, as the national-catholic dictatorship of Franco slowly fell apart. My guardian angel One strategy of Opus Dei is to place one of their members near you to keep tabs on you and inform his superiors in the organization. That person would become your best friend so that you would confide in them your most intimate thoughts Ironically enough, the name of my guardian angel was Ángel, a common name in Spain. Ángel was my classmate. He got good grades, but regularly seek my help with math and physics. Although he never said, he was a numerary member of Opus Dei. I know now that Opus Dei starts recruiting members when they are 14. In fact, they had tried to recruit me at that age, while I was at that retreat in Vigo. But I was in the midst of my first “crisis of faith”, so it didn’t work out. Ángel and I were both members of Club Jara. That winter, I had fallen in love with skiing, a sport that could be practiced in the Sierra of Guadarrama, barely an hour's drive north of Madrid. Club Jara fleeted a bus every weekend to the sierra, which was my main reasons not to cut ties with that Opus Dei club. I even kept attending their Friday night's prayers, just because I enjoyed singing the Pange Lingua in Latin. If my parents insisted, I went to Sunday mass with them. And they saw me locking myself in my room every evening for prayer, which, in my head, I had started calling meditation. Yeah, I know: I was devious. But it worked quite well. It kept everybody trying to second-guess me. And I really enjoyed the skiing. It was May when Ángel invited me to go on a long bike ride with him. On one of our rest, he started pestering about praying the rosary. Or maybe going to another of those Opus Dei retreats. I could hold it no more. I told I was no longer Catholic, or even Christian. I didn’t expect him to get as surprised as he did. I thought he had already figured it out. He told me I was going to Hell and blah, blah, blah. I just shook my head and laughed. He realized it was hopeless trying to convince me. We just got on our bikes and rode back to Madrid. I knew he would tell Opus Dei, who would tell my parents. I didn’t care. I had left behind my fears. That was the final step of leaving the mental jail in which I had spent my childhood. Preparing for college That was my last year of High School, so I only attended El Prado for one year. The following year was a bridge year in which we were supposed to prepare for college. I was sent to an academy also run by Opus Dei. Despite of that, it was mixed gender. For the first time in my life, I had girls as classmates. I had become good friends with Carlos, a former classmate of El Prado who joined me at the academy. Carlos told me that he had been a member of Opus Dei but had left the organization, becoming a non-believer, like me. We bonded by our common interests in science, ideas and mountaineering. I was reading ferociously: Hindu philosophers like Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda, Teilhard de Chardin, Zen, Alan Watts, Erich Fromm, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov (the science-fiction and the popular science)… Well, it may have taken me a few more years to work through all these authors. But that should give you an idea of where my mind was heading. Unlike what is common in the USA, students in Spain didn’t get to choose their university. I was assigned to go to the Complutense University of Madrid. But I wanted to get out from the influence of Opus Dei, so I thought that the newer university, called Autonoma, would be better. Besides, it had a great program in biochemistry, which was what I wanted to major on. With some help from my father, I managed to switch. Ángel and I meet again Strangely enough, Ángel emailed a few years ago. It wasn’t hard to find me on the internet, I guess. Why did he contact me? To check if he could bring me back to Catholicism? Was he still trying to be my guardian angel? I told him straight that I was more atheistic than ever. I had cycled through several religions and Christianity was the one I liked the least. He said that it didn’t matter. He was just thinking about me and wanted to see how I was. He was a successful film producer. Sometimes, he even came to LA. Yes, he was still a member of Opus Dei. Imagine that! Being celibate since we were both teenagers. To have none of the wonderful sexual experiences I had. To never have fallen in love. To never had seen your child grow up. “Was it worth it?” I wanted to ask. But I never did. I already knew the answer. We met for lunch a couple times I was in Madrid. He had changed a lot. So, I guess, had I. We didn’t talk about religion - much as I wanted to. But I feared that I couldn’t do that without the conversation turning confrontational. My father’s last years had taught me that it was cruel to challenge somebody’s beliefs. Especially that late in life. The last time we saw each other, he took me to his home and his office. He lived in a house that he shared with several other members of Opus Dei. The main room on the first floor was a beautiful chapel. There was a common kitchen and living room. His bedroom was tiny. It was nice to have a look at modern-day Opus Dei. I guess that’s what he wanted me to do. I ended up telling him my pen name, Hermes Solenzol. I told him to go ahead and read my first novel, warning him that in contained a description of my falling out of faith, a strong criticism of Catholicism, and plenty of sex scenes. He went ahead and read it, anyway. I asked him if he thought that my portrayal of Opus Dei was fair. He said that it mostly was, except for one little detail: my protagonist, Cecilia, would not have confessed to the priest face-to-face, but using a confessionary. In his first emails, Ángel sent me PDF files of the letters I send him from college. I was surprised by the Om signs and all the Hindu mysticism. I was going through the phase that I will describe in the next article of this series. This part of my life is fictionalized in the first part of my novel Games of Love and Kink.

Sometimes privilege and oppression combine in strange ways My father dragged me kicking and screaming to the Opus Dei When I was seven years old, my father dragged me kicking and screaming, up seven flights of stairs, to a children’s club run by the Opus Dei. It was as if my current progressive persona had possessed my younger self and resisted going there. In reality, what happened was that I had overheard my parents say that Opus Die would turn me into a good boy, and I was having none of that. My temper tantrum stopped the moment they opened the door and I came face to face with Elías, a popular guy in my class who had become my best friend. I was short of friends, having moved to the town of Santiago de Compostela in the Celtic country of Galicia (northwestern Spain) just a couple of years before. So I stopped crying, played it cool and checked the place out. That was the only time I saw Elías in that Opus Dei club, the Club Senra. I guess his parents were not as conservative as mine. The Opus Dei My father knew perfectly well what Opus Dei was: a Catholic conservative organization that had become a political powerhouse inside the fascist regime of General Francisco Franco. My uncle José Luís, my father’s youngest brother, was a numerary member of Opus Dei, living in the organization headquarters in Rome. Numerary members have to live in full chastity (meaning that they are not allowed to marry or have sex), poverty (they give their earnings to the organization) and obedience (they follow the instructions of the organization conveyed through their spiritual director). However, they do this as a contract with the Opus Dei and not as vows, as monks do. My father was a super-numerary member of Opus Dei, a category created for married people. They live in chastity “inside their marriage”, pay tithes to the organization, and obey their spiritual director (with more leeway than numerary members do). Oh, and they had to offer in sacrifice their eldest son. Which, in this case, would be me. I am only half-joking. What really happens is that they are asked to put their children in clubs like the Senra, where they are carefully groomed and indoctrinated. Then, when they turn 14, they would be asked to join Opus Dei. My younger siblings would not escape that fate. My two brothers would soon join me at the Club Senra. My sister would follow a different path, since men and women are kept strictly separated in the Opus Dei. She eventually became a numerary member, but she did not last long inside the organization. . My father’s career Being a member of the Opus Dei worked very well for my father. He was a Professor of Roman Law at the University of Santiago. Around the time he took me to Club Senra, in 1964, he became the Dean of the Law School. In 1968, the student demonstrations that started with the May 68 troubles in Paris and elsewhere in Europe were rocking Santiago de Compostela, a small town full of college students. Its main lifeline, other than its famous cathedral, was the university. A group of students had locked themselves inside the President’s Office at the University and refused to come out unless their demands were met. Franco decided that the current Rector (President) of the university was too soft. A strongman needed to be put in his place. That strongman was my Dad. Recently, my Dad told me that his way to deal with that problem was not to send in the police, as Franco expected him to do, but to offer the students a place to meet in the Burgo de las Naciones, a set of barracks that had been built to lodge the pilgrims during that Holy Year. I was eleven. Being the son of the president of the university put me in squarely in the high class in that provincial town. Before moving to Santiago, we had lived quite humbly, first in Rome and then in La Laguna, a college town on the island of Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands off Africa. But now we lived rent-free in a luxurious apartment on campus, surrounded by gardens and a short walk from the pine and oak forests outside of town. The Club Senra Ironically, being part of Club Senra was one of my biggest privileges. Ostensibly, the club was created so that children could to participate in hobbies and activities, which included making model airplanes, photography, mountaineering, chemistry, drawing and electronics. Classes were imparted by college students and even one of my school teachers. I really enjoyed making the airplanes and go out to fly them. Eventually, I participated in all these activities. As I grew older, I was invited to go there every day after school to study and do my homework. These daily study sessions were interrupted by a half-hour of meditation, which consisted of reading “points” of Camino (The Way) with long silent pauses between point and point. Camino is a book written by Monseñor Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei and now a saint. It consists of 999 “points”, or short paragraphs. The most controversial (points 387-400) encourage members to practice “saintly intransigence” (an exhortation to dogmatism), “saintly coercion” (“using force […] to save the Life of those who idiotically persist in committing suicide of the soul”) and “saintly shamelessness” (to be able to boldly declare that one is a religious Catholic). This gives you an idea of the militant nature of the organization. In fact, Camino seems oddly similar to Mao’s Little Red Book, with its 427 points. Once a week, I was called to a session of counseling with my spiritual director. This person was a member of Opus Dei, but not a priest. Confession with a priest was a separate activity. While confession has to be kept strictly in secret, the spiritual director was free to communicate what I told him to the Opus Dei hierarchy. But the study room was great! I loved the discipline and the strictly enforced silence. I was surrounded by college students to whom I could ask for help on any subject. Math, chemistry, physics… no matter what, I always had an expert at hand. My grades, which had already been quite good, skyrocketed. School and trouble in the streets I had only one rival for first-of-the-class (yes, we were ranked by grades): my friend Elías. He was the cool guy: smart, wise, athletic and just rebellious enough. I was the nerdy epitome of the privilege of the ruling class. Everybody was rooting for Elías. I didn’t care. I just didn’t get it. Something was going on all around me that I could not fathom. My classmates talked in code about political things that escaped my comprehension. Sometimes they did so in Galician, the local language, similar to Portuguese. College students were fighting the police on the streets. Red flags appeared on trees overnight and were quickly taken down. Likewise, graffiti with obscure political slogans were quickly painted over. And my Dad was on the phone every night, shouting orders about how to keep the students under control. Some of my classmates despised me, others suck up to me, but they all feared me because of my father. Even my teachers did. My classmates were regularly spanked and disciplined, but nobody dared to touch me. I lived in a fantasy world, reading science-fiction nonstop and falling in love with science. At 13, they started calling me the scientist at school. I improvised a chemistry lab in the attic where I made stink bombs and some real explosives. I was knowledgeable enough and foolish enough to be a real danger. Fortunately, nothing happened. Groomed by Opus Dei But the real danger, unbeknown to me, was the Opus Dei. As I approached 14, my spiritual director started to slowly tighten the screws on me. I was warned to watch what books I read. That set offs all kinds of alarms. I loved my reading, which had expanded from novels (Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, E. R. Burroughs, Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov) to non-fiction about science and some esoteric stuff. I was also invited to participate in religious retreats. I was never told how much they cost; my father paid for them behind my back. I went to one in Portugal, a summer one in a school in Vigo (a port city in Galicia), and to a trip to Rome to meet Monseñor Escrivá de Balaguer, The Father. The retreats involved long hours of prayer, but also hiking, swimming and other activities. Silent prayer agreed with my introverted nature, and I started to do it daily on my own accord. I was also drawn to mysticism. However, I could never connect with the Catholic’s love for the Virgin and the saints. I found liturgy incomprehensible and unattractive. The Rosary bored me to tears. Then again, I was Catholic through and through: born in Rome, my father promptly had me baptized at Saint Peter in the Vatican. And now I was living in Santiago de Compostela, the legendary burial place of Apostle Saint James (San Jaime, San Diego, Jacobo, San Yago and Santiago all turn up to be the same guy) and the second most important Catholic pilgrimage destination in the world, after Rome. Don Aurelio, my non-Opus Dei confessor Four things prepared my exit from the tutelage of Opus Dei. The first was don Aurelio, a priest who gave religion classes at my school. I once overheard Elías say that he gave confession and advice to students at his apartment, even sharing with them a glass of mass wine. I thought that it sounded really cool, so I gave it a try. I really liked don Aurelio, so I decided to make him my regular confessor. At Opus Dei, they had advised me to have a regular confessor, but they were not pleased when I told them that I had chosen don Aurelio. However, since he was a Catholic priest, they could not really object. Secretly, my decision was based on wanting to have an advisor who was not connected to my father and Opus Dei. I was starting puberty and, not surprisingly, had a lot of trouble with sex. I was in an all-boys school, so I had little contact with girls. My sister and her friends seem to live in a separate reality. Sex scared the hell out of me, not just because I lived in a deeply repressive society, but also because I had sadomasochistic fantasies that I found deeply disturbing. Talking about them to the Opus Dei crowd, whose religious practices included self-flagellation and the use of the cilice, was a no-go. Don Aurelio didn’t know much about sadomasochism, but he explained lots of other things about sex, and told me not to worry. He was a progressive priest who celebrated mass accompanied by percussion and electric guitars. He encouraged me to start dating girls - he even introduced me to one! He also pointed out a few things to watch out for in Opus Dei, like the way they used jobs and other perks to manipulate people. The Morning of the Magicians The second thing that pulled me away was reading the book The Morning of the Magicians, translated to Spanish as El retorno de los brujos. Again, it was my friend Elías who recommended it. It was the first non-fiction book I read. It awakened my interest in aliens, ancient astronauts, alchemy, magic and all kinds of esoteric stuff that later would fall under the label of New Age. But what really captured my imagination was the possibility of having mystical experiences that could unlock hidden knowledge about the Universe. That lead to my interest in Yoga and Buddhism, creating an outlet for my mysticism that competed with Catholicism. Apostolate backfires The third thing that drove me away from Christianity was triggered by the Opus Dei itself. As I progressed in my religious practice, they started encouraging me to do apostolate, that is, to try to convert to their conservative branch of Christianity some of my classmates. But it couldn’t be just anybody. The strategy of Opus Dei is to target only successful people, people who are smart, wealthy, well-connected and good-looking. Preferably, all four. So they sent me after some of my most smart and sophisticated classmates. That totally backfired. When I told my classmate Ramón that I wanted to talk to him about important stuff, he was thrilled. I didn’t realize that he was well read in philosophy and politics, matters in which I had gaping holes. But I had read enough to become deeply interested in what he had to say. We spent an evening walking round and round the garden of La Herradura (The Horseshoe) in the damp Galician weather, deeply immersed in conversation. The seeds that he planted in my mind were slow to sprout. But, eventually, they did. My cool new neighbors The fourth thing that influenced me was that we moved to a new apartment, also on campus, and we got new neighbors. Gabriel was one year older than me and José, one year younger, but the two brothers merged well with my two younger brothers and I. We were into science, chess, aquariums and roaming in the forests. They introduced me to music, playing The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel when we were together. Their father was a chemistry professor at the university and Gabriel was as fascinated by science as I was. He would eventually come to some Opus Dei retreats with me, and he was supposedly a target of my apostolate, but the influence went mostly the other way around. Moving to Madrid Then something happened that would mark the end of my careless childhood years in Santiago. My father got promoted. Ostensibly, he got a position as Director-General in the Ministry of Education, but that was just in preparation for a larger goal. He was to become the founding president of a new university that would encompass the whole territory of Spain: a university by mail modeled after the British Open University. Today, the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED), founded by my father, is the largest university in Spain. I had to say goodbye to my new friends Gabriel and José, my on-and-off advisor Elías, and the wise guidance of don Aurelio. I faced new challenges in the big city of Madrid. Unbeknown to me, I would also have to confront the growing cognitive dissonance between the conservative teachings of Opus Dei and my new ideas about science and mysticism.

Death means losing everything, but it is also the liberation from suffering. My father’s death I wrote this article the day after my father died, in 2021. He was in Spain and I was in California, thousands of miles away. Because of the travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, I had made up my mind that I would never see him again. I don’t feel sorry for him. He was 92. I am the oldest of his 9 children. He was president of one university and the founding president of the largest university in Spain. He was elected to the Spanish Parliament. He became a worldwide authority in his academic field, and many of his students also had successful careers. We should all be that lucky! But death comes to all of us, and my father was always afraid of death. I remember one time that I had dinner with him at a restaurant in Madrid, Los Borrachos de Velazquez. He had a rocky relationship with his children after he divorced my mother, but I had been trying to build bridges with him. This time, he was genuinely interested in my views on religion. When I was 15, I abandoned the Catholicism in which he’d raised me. That created a big cleft between us that only got larger as I developed my progressive ideas. But he had also changed his political ideas, evolving from being a Francoist during the dictatorship to becoming one of the new converts to democracy, albeit still conservative. At that time, I was in the midst of my Zen phase. I meditated regularly, went to sesshins (retreats) and had officially become a Zen Buddhist. He finally came to the key question he wanted to ask me: what happens after death, according to my newly acquired Buddhist religion? I told him that many Buddhists believe in reincarnation, but I did not. For me, death was the end, my complete extinction. I just hoped that Buddhism would provide a way for me to come to terms with that idea. A way to let go of my self so that I could live in peace. He didn’t like that answer at all. We parted. As came closer to death, he became more of a devout Catholic. In his last years, while he was able to do so, he would attend Mass daily. We drifted apart again. I felt that he feared that I would challenge his faith, and he didn’t want to talk about that anymore. My mother died mindfully My mother was also a devout Catholic, although her faith was weakened by events outside her control. She dedicated her life to her marriage and her eight children. To put it mildly, my father didn’t treat her well. He cheated on her and, when she found out, they divorced. Not contented with that, my father used his political connections with the Catholic Church to have the marriage annulled. After 22 years and eight children, in the eyes of the Church, it had never happened. The corruption in the Church that led to the Protestant Reformation still goes on. My mother always obeyed the commandments of the Church. She never used birth control and had one child after another. And now the Church had betrayed her, taking away from her the most valuable thing in her life. Why did my father annul the marriage? In his own words, to be able to marry his third wife in the Church. That way, he could have sex with her without committing a sin. That’s how twisted Catholicism has become in this day and age. My mother died in 2014. During her last years, she recapitulated her life and left it written in a book for her children and grandchildren to read. I can’t think of a better way to prepare to die: to go over your life, reflecting about everything that happened, looking at what you have done, who you were, who you are. That is dying mindfully. I flew to Spain to visit my mother at the hospital a couple of weeks before her death. We spend long hours reminiscing. She told me that the happiest days of her life were when we lived in Rome, when I was an infant. I still had many memories of Rome. I had always called her mamma, in Italian, instead of the Spanish mamá. I played in my iPod old Italian songs from that time. Breath is the last thing you have left In his song How We’re Blessed, Daniel Cainer tells us that breath is the first gift we get when we are born, and it is the last thing we have left when we die. When I meditate, I focus on my breath, the link between my mind and my body. Breathing is one thing that we do consciously and unconsciously. When I free-dive, I hold my breath. That feels peaceful and liberating, until the air-hunger calls me back to the surface. ‘I can’t breathe’ was the theme of 2020. That’s what George Floyd said as he was being killed by the police, echoing the words of Eric Garner, Javier Ambler, Manuel Ellis, Elijah McClain and many others choked by the police. ‘I can’t breathe’ is also what you feel when you die from Covid-19, as the coronavirus finishes destroying your lungs. It’s what millions of people felt when they were confined inside their houses because of the pandemic. Death is the loss of everything When I die, I will lose my breath and my heartbeat. I will lose the consciousness that followed my breath in meditation. Consciousness is so fragile that it goes away every night when I sleep, so how can it possibly survive the destruction of my brain? And when consciousness is gone, everything is gone. Your spouse, your children, your relatives, your friends. Your car, your house, your bank accounts, all your worldly possessions. Gone, forever! It is said the the Universe disappears with every person that dies. No wonder death is so terrifying. Especially in our culture, where we define ourselves by our possessions. We spend our lives trying to accumulate things. Not just objects, but also things of the mind: an education, knowledge, self-control, the right attitude, virtue, wonderful experiences. And yet, even the things inside our minds will be gone when we die. How can we, at the end of our lives, reverse what we have been doing all our lives, and let go instead of accumulating? Death is the ultimate liberation Erin was my polyamorous lover during 2012 and 2013. We met in Fetlife.com and she agreed to be my submissive… This might be nice material for another article, but let’s leave at that. She was missing her left leg, which had been amputated below the knee after a motorcycle accident when she was 24. She had been a runner before, so losing her leg was an enormous blow to her. It took me a while to understand how much that had affected her. One day, well into our relationship, I had the idea of watching with her the movie Mar Adentro (Out at Sea, mistranslated to English as The Sea Inside). The movie was shot in Galicia, the country in the northwest of Spain where I grew up. Erin had an Irish ancestry, and I wanted to show her the Celtic culture of Galicia. Instead, Erin was profoundly moved by the story about assisted suicide. Based on actual events, it tells the struggle of Ramon Sampedro (played by Javier Bardem) to be allowed to die. Ramon had become quadriplegic after breaking his neck diving into shallow water, and would rather die than live like that. Soon afterwards, Erin told me that she had wanted to die ever since she’d lost her leg. I was shocked. I was in love with her and the idea that she would kill herself terrified me. I also saw it as a personal failure, because the idea behind me being her dominant was to coach her so she could put her life together. She had survived a 3-month long kidnapping, had been in jail and was unemployed. It wasn’t just her lost leg. Erin lived in a state of constant physical and mental pain, which she concealed below a cheerful façade. After we had several fights, Erin managed to communicate to me how, for her, death was a liberation. Yes, there were things in life that made her happy, but there was so much suffering that the overall balance, for her, was that life was not worth living. In June 2013, Erin left me for another man who could give her what I could not: a monogamous relationship. He was a jealous man and proceeded to isolate her from me and from all her friends. At the end of November, one of them texted me that Erin had committed suicide. She had left me a precious parting gift. Deep in my bones, I now understood that death is the ultimate liberation. No more worries, no more toiling, no more fear. No more suffering. Death is nothing Religious people pity atheists because we don’t have the consolation of an afterlife, a place where we will meet our loved ones and live with them forever. I think that it is they who should be pitied for their wishful thinking, for their lack of courage to confront the truth. When the brain disintegrates, our mind disappears. Perhaps one day we will have the technology to upload our mind into a computer, as depicted in the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. But would we be ourselves when we don’t have a body? When we become software, will be drift away from our human nature? I think that, as Buddhism teaches, we don’t have an immutable Self, something that remains unchanged in the midst of the flow of changes in the world. We are not the child, the teenager, or the young adult that we once were. We have been changing all our lives. Death is just the ultimate change. The price that Christians pay for believing in Heaven is believing in Hell. They spend their life terrorized by the question of whether they are headed for an eternity of bliss or an eternity of suffering. Wouldn’t it be much better to believe that we will just cease to exist? This life is all we have, so we should make the best out of it. And then there are those grim images of being buried in a claustrophobic casket, as if somehow we still would be locked in our dead body, having to suffer the indignities of being eaten by worms and our slow decomposition. How did we come to believe that? Those morbid images cause us a lot of suffering when we anticipate our death. Instead, try to imagine how it was before you were born. What do you see? How do you feel? There is nothing there. That’s what death is. Nothing. No coldness, no regrets, no missing loving ones, no lamentations for might-have-been. Nobody left to struggle. Nobody left to suffer. It is not difficult to come to this realization. The ancient philosophers, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Cynics, already understood it. “Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death, and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.” Epicurus. Science confirmed that. We are our brains. Whatever happens to our brain, happens to us. If we drink, we become inebriated. If we take a drug, we get high. If the brain sleeps, we sleep. If the brain is in a coma, we feel nothing. If the brain falls apart and dies, we are nothing.

The war started in 2016, and we are losing it, but we will probably win in the end As if the risk of slowly cooking our planet by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere was not enough, now we risk frying the Earth in a nuclear holocaust. I am usually optimistic, but it doesn’t mean I’m blind. Is this the end of The Long Peace? The source of my optimism is the wonderful book The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. The book convincingly argues that we live in the best of time - what Pinker calls The Long Peace. In the last 40 years, violence has decreased and prosperity has increased around the globe. While there have been wars and genocide, they have been on a much lesser scale than in the first half of the 20th century, and any time before that. Alas! That may be about to end. “‘Long Peace’ is a term for the unprecedented historical period following the end of World War II in 1945 to 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.” Wikipedia The Russian-Ukrainian War that just started signals a significant threat to peace. One of the largest, nuclear-armed potencies of the world has just launched a full-scale invasion of another large, sovereign country. If Putin succeeds at conquering and subjugating Ukraine, he may be encouraged to follow up by attacking a neighboring country belonging to NATO. Then all NATO countries will be obliged to enter the war. It would be extremely difficult to keep such a war for escalating to a nuclear conflict. Worse still, China may be encouraged by a Russian success to invade Taiwan. Then we would have a true World War III, with Russia and China allied against the Western countries. They may be able to pull North Korea, Venezuela and Iran to their side. Capitalism vs. capitalism turns out to be worse than capitalism vs. communism How did we get to this point? I remember the collective sigh of relief at the end of the 80s, when the Eastern European countries previously known as the Warsaw Pact became democratic, and Germany was re-unified. Shortly thereafter, in 1991, the USSR ceased to exist, fragmenting into Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and a series of hard-to-pronounce ‘stans’ in central Asia. We all thought that the Cold War was an ideological conflict between two incompatible economic models: capitalism and communism. Now, with all the previous members of the USSR embracing capitalism, conflict was no longer necessary. Nuclear weapons could be dismantled. We could all live in peace in a utopia of free-trade and stock market investments. Even China, while remaining nominally communist, was now a capitalist powerhouse. The only communist hold-outs were North Korea and Cuba, but they were small enough to be safely ignored. So, what happened? Neoliberalism happened. Here I will cite my other favorite book: The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. It explains how the Chicago School of Economics moved around the world during the 70s, 80s and 90s, fucking things up by promoting neoliberalism, dismantling social protection programs, and opening countries to the rapacious control of international corporations accountable to nobody. They launched the murderous dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and other South American countries. They taught the Chinese and Russian oligarchies how they could become immensely rich by adopting the neoliberal system. This triggered the coup in Russia that put Boris Yeltsin in power. Vladimir Putin is just a much more effective successor of the same regime. So what we have now is a series of economic oligarchies vying to control the natural resources of the world. Corporations in democratic countries fighting against state-supported corporations in Russia and China. And a few magnates increasingly attracted to the idea that democracy and freedom are just obstacles to doing business. The war really started in 2016 We are slowly starting to realize that the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not an isolated episode, but just another step in a carefully planned strategy to defeat the USA, NATO, the European Union (EU), and everything they represent: individual freedom, democracy, state-controlled capitalism, and a social safety net. The hot war in Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg. What should really worry us is the secret war of disinformation, social division, and sabotaging of our democratic institutions that Russia has been waging against us for at least 6 years. We are, indeed, in the midst of a war, a cyberwar waged by Russia. And we have already suffered two major defeats in that war: the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Both events happened in 2016. There is mounting evidence that cyber warfare from Russia waged by internet bots drove both campaigns. Brexit has damaged substantially the economy of the United Kingdom (UK) and, to a much lesser extent, that of the EU. It has undermined the cohesion of NATO by sowing distrust between the UK and the EU. It has also complicated the long-term project of the EU for building a unified army. We know full well the devastating effects that the Trump presidency had on American unity. Trump benefited from Russian aid to win the 2016 election, which has been the target of investigations continuously sabotaged by the Republican Party. He never hid his sympathies for Putin, right up to the Ukrainian invasion. Trump tried to undermine NATO. He has never failed to play into Putin’s hands. Neither did Fox News, or large swaths of the Republican Party. Chickens come home to roost American actions during the 21st century are partly to blame for creating precedents for the invasion of Ukraine. The Long Peace is largely supported by the idea that the national makeup and the borders of the world after World War II should not be changed unless it is done by mutual agreement. Countries should not try to conquer other countries. This put an end to 500 years of colonial mentality, in which European nations saw the rest world as wilderness to be conquered and plundered. The World Wars of the first half of the 20th century were largely about European nations (and Japan) fighting each other over how to divide their colonial empires. With the end of World War II came the realization that colonialism was intrinsically unethical and that all the people of the world deserved to have their own independent countries. This “do not invade” principle was violated during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. However, these proxy wars of the Cold War were justified as protecting these countries from the infiltration of the “evil” communist ideology. The invasion of Iraq by the USA in 2003 was an entirely different story. We went there to fight Iraq because of illusory past and future aggressions. We wanted “regime change”, which is what Putin says that he wants in Ukraine. If we are honest with ourselves, we will see no difference between the lies of George W. Bush in 2003 and the lies of Vladimir Putin in 2022. And then, of course, there was the long war in Afghanistan. Reasons for hope - will Putin fail? In fact, our best hope is that Putin will fail in Ukraine just like we failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do not forget that the Russians were kicked out of Afghanistan before us. Ukraine is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a much larger country, with a sizable army (albeit smaller than the Russian), an educated population, a strong national identity, and few internal divisions. This last factor is important. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are culturally heterogeneous, which powerful internal divisions that can be exploited by an invader. The Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq can hardly live at peace which each other. Likewise, Afghanistan has Sunnis and Shiites, multiple languages, and complex ethnical divisions. From the start, Putin tried to play the divisions between Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine, but this hasn’t worked out very well. Given the choice between a Russian-installed dictatorship or an European-style democracy, even the Russians in Ukraine know what they want. And the invasion seems to have made a lot of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians even more fond of their Ukrainian-speaking neighbors. As of today - February 26, 2022 - the Russian invasion doesn’t seem to be going so well. The Ukrainians are unified and fighting back bravely. It seems like Putin has opted to attack on many fronts and to spearhead an attack on Kyiv. I am no military, but this doesn’t seem like great ideas to me. The Ukrainians are in their country, and therefore more able to fight on multiple fronts. And urban warfare is the worst for an invading army. Every single Ukrainian, even women and children, is a potential enemy. We saw that in Vietnam. Invading soldiers have to choose between killing civilians - and be accused of crimes against humanity - or be killed by the most innocent-looking person. Even if the Russians conquer Kyiv, the Ukrainian government would just move to another city and keep fighting. And the Russians will face the task of feeding and controlling the millions of inhabitants of the city. We know how well that worked in Iraq. Even with 190,000 soldiers, armored vehicles and tanks, Ukraine is an enormous country to control in its entirety. The Ukrainians just have to disperse their army and keep harassing the Russians. Time is on their side. Every day that Russia has to keep its army in Ukraine means a huge loss of money and Russian blood. Puppet regimes do not work Puppet regimes do not work, especially in culturally homogeneous countries with strong national identity. Just take a look at history. During the Napoleonic Wars, the French installed a puppet government in Spain. The Spanish people rebelled and handed Napoleon his first defeat in the Battle of Bailen. During World War II, the puppet regime of Vichy in France could not contain the French Resistance, even with the brutal methods of the Nazis. The puppet regime in Saigon during the Vietnam War was hugely unpopular and fell to the Vietcong soon after the Americans left. The puppet regime in Afghanistan could not survive without the Americans. Anybody who forms a government with Russian support in Ukraine will be seen as a traitor and risk being killed in guerrilla attacks. Especially if there is still a democratic government ensconced in some part of Ukraine. How long can the Russian sustain an invasion of Ukraine? How long before the deaths of Russian soldiers galvanize the opposition to Putin? How long can they survive an economy crippled by sanctions? Russian society is not a healthy one. Depression, demoralization and alcoholism are rampant. Population growth has been negative for years. This is not a country that can sustain a war for years against a huge country armed from abroad. Preparing for the worst - will there be an attack on NATO? But therein lies the biggest danger. If arms and supplies are flowing into Ukraine from Poland, Hungary and Romania, how long will it be before Putin call them his enemies? The general fear is that Putin will attack the Baltic States next. However, the southern flank of NATO is much more vulnerable. Europeans would be outraged by a Russian attack on Latvia or Lithuania. But an attack on the Hungary of Viktor Orban? Maybe not so much. Besides, Orban is a would-be dictator that may be enticed by Russian support. Just like Lukashenko in Belarus. Would NATO defend Hungary from a Russian invasion if its government invites the Russians in? The other weak NATO member is Turkey, which not doing so well, politically, economically and socially. Turkey is considering blocking the entrance of Russian warships to the Black Sea through the Bosporus. What if Russia considers this an act of war? How willing is NATO to defend the Turkey of Erdogan? I have always been a pacifist. However, I think it’s time for Europe to start making tanks and preparing for a land war. And hope that it doesn’t turn into nuclear war. The war is already at home - what can you do? Unfortunately, we have bigger problems than a hypothetical invasion of Hungary or Turkey. Our problems are at home. A victory of the Republican Party in this year’s midterm elections would undermine any opposition to Russia and prepare a victory for Trump in 2024. And then Trump will roll over and let Putin do whatever he wants in Ukraine, Europe and the rest of the world. "So Putin is now saying, 'It's independent,' a large section of Ukraine. I said, 'How smart is that?' And he's going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That's the strongest peace force," Trump said. "We could use that on our southern border. That's the strongest peace force I've ever seen. ... Here's a guy who's very savvy. ... I know him very well. Very, very well." CNN. Putin would have won a war with America without firing a single shot. [Putin] is “pretty smart,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a Florida fund-raiser, assessing the impending invasion like a real estate deal. “He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” he said, “taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.” The New York Times. It’s time to act. We are the soldiers now, you and me. We need to win the election this year. And the one in 2024. Do whatever you can to support President Biden and the Democratic Party. Inform yourself. Write. Campaign. Donate to candidates. At the very least, vote Democrat. The message we need to spread is quite simple: TRUMP = PUTIN REPUBLICAN = RUSSIAN And let the Republicans prove us wrong. Copyright 2022 Hermes Solenzol

A book about the intersection od BDSM and mysticism I have to confess that, at times, I have felt a little bit jaded about the whole scene thing. You know, the old “being there, done that” feeling. So reading this book was like a breath of fresh air: it showed me how much I have to learn, and how much further I can go in the world of BDSM. It’s titled “Radical Ecstasy” and its authors are two hardcore, old-time players, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy. It’s published by Greenery Press, a company that has put out there a bunch of books on kink and sexuality. The “radical” in the title doesn’t mean that Dossie and Janet are to revolutionaries like Che Guevara. Nor does it means that they propose something outrageously out of the ordinary – although that is closer to the truth. Radical stand for “root”, the root of life at the base of the spine, where we have our genitals and our anus. The first chackra. The chakras, according to the mythology of Yoga and Tantra, are seven centers of energy aligned along the axis of the body, from the crotch to the top of the head. Kundalini, the mythological energy serpent, lies asleep in the first chackra. When it is awakened, it travels upwards, lighting up the chakras in bouts of mystical experiences. Do I believe in all that stuff? Well, yes and no. You see, I’m as rational, scientific and skeptical as anybody can be. I don’t believe in souls, astral bodies, reincarnation, life after death… you name it! Nor I believe that there is some kind of mystical energy, “prana” or “qi”, that we can use to do magical things. Having said that, I do know that we can experience altered sates of consciousness that can bring a lot of meaning to our lives. I said I “know it” because I have experienced them myself. The fact that they are real, and important, doesn’t mean that they are otherworldly or “paranormal”. They are just states of our brain that do not contradict in any way the laws of physics, chemistry or biology. After all, when Einstein came out with the theory of relativity, that was “just” a state of his brain, wasn’t it? You may be growing impatient at this point… What does all this have to do with BDSM? Well, the central message I the book is that in the scene may be another path to achieve these mystical or spiritual states of consciousness. To make this point, Dossie and Janet draw on their vast experience with BDSM, on the one hand, and with yoga and Tantra, on the other. They explain all this in a very down-to-earth way, with an intimate tone. They talk about their troubles in life, their suffering, and how they found a way to confront it by opening up, letting go, “peeling away the skin” – in Janet’s metaphor. And they do this by whipping themselves silly, by dominating and submitting, by having orgasms. By far the best part of the book is the account of their scenes. In many of them Dossie and Janet play together, but they also play with others. The intensity and sophistication that they describe is just amazing. It’s also very comforting that these are not two young gals – Dossie must be well into her sixties. So there is still time to play for those of us that have crossed the half-century line. Yes, even for women that have said goodbye to their last egg! Well enough for today’s blog. I’m quite sure that I will return to the things I learned from Dossie and Janet in future postings. For now, I leave you with an inspiring phrase from their book: “We want you to make yourself a promise. A sacred vow that you will take care of yourself, be kind to yourself and listen to yourself with compassion. Do that now, and then you may continue.”

How to cultivate a healthy masculinity Masculinity is anchored in biological sex differences Our biological sex - being male or female - is an integral part of our humanity. Trying to ignore it would betray our most intimate nature. Gender may be a social construct, but it is not arbitrary but intimately linked to our sex. Therefore, telling men that being masculine is wrong is every bit as heartless as telling gays to stop liking people of the same sex. Saying that masculinity is wrong and has to be eliminated is hateful and sexist. What we need are guidelines to develop a healthy masculinity. In my previous article The Different Minds of Men and Women, I presented evidence that there are psychological differences between men and women driven by the sex hormones. The most important are: Anger is stronger in men and more likely to lead to aggression. Men are more prone to risk-taking and less sensitive to fear. Men have higher pain thresholds and pain tolerance. Men prefer things while women prefer people. Men have better spatial abilities and mechanical reasoning, whereas women have better verbal abilities. These characteristics of men appear in childhood and are driven by testosterone. While it is true that masculinity is a cultural construct, it is anchored in these biological differences. There are different ways to be masculine, but they all relate to these basic properties of maleness. Uncontrolled maleness is dangerous because of the propensity of men towards aggression, risk-taking and valuing things over people. Hence, there has to be a healthy culture of masculinity that channels these male characteristics toward their beneficial side and teaches men to control their negative impulses. But women have these virtues, too! Talking about the positive side of masculinity is venturing into a minefield of political correctness. Saying anything positive about femininity - like women are more nurturing, empathetic, emotionally intelligent, have better verbal skills, etc. - is fine. However, when we try to do the same about masculinity, this is automatically taken as sexist. Because, if men are better at something, this necessarily means that women are inferior at that. And we can’t have that, can we? So we have another form of “me too”: if I say that something is a masculine virtue, women would immediately raise their hand and say “I have that virtue, too!” We could call this “the women inferiority trap”. To avoid falling into it, we should consider the following: The only way for men to avoid falling prey to the dangers of maleness (aggression, risk-taking, social isolation) is to cultivate compensatory virtues. Women do not have that need. Because of biological sex differences, men gravitate more towards certain values than women. This is okay. Not everybody has to be the same. The same virtue - for example, self-sacrifice and playfulness - may manifest in different forms in men and women. Masculinity is not exclusive to men. Just as men can be feminine (nurturing, empathetic, communicative), women can have masculine virtues. It’s up to everyone to find their right balance of masculinity and femininity, yin and yang. Here are eight virtues that I think embody healthy masculinity. 1) Integrity “Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values.” (Wikipedia). In my experience, men tend to be moral absolutists, developing a moral code and then adhering to it, whereas women tend to be moral relativists, changing their judgement according to the situation and the people involved. In other words, men tend to be idealists and women tend to be realists. This is probably because ideals and values are more like things and moral codes have an internal mechanism, which are things that appeal to the masculine mind. During the formative years of their youth, good men develop a moral code to which they will adhere during their adult life. Values related to integrity are honor - having a reputation for being reliable and adhering to one’s own standards - and honesty - speaking the truth and acting in a way consistent with it. An important part of my moral code is intellectual honesty: valuing truth and being able to change my beliefs when presented with facts and logic. The dark side A moral code may become too rigid, making men behave like zealots and vigilantes. Men are more prone to enforce their moral values on others due to an evolved mechanism called altruistic punishment, which is enhanced by testosterone. 2) Courage I would define courage as acting according to our moral values in the face of fear. “Courage (also called bravery or valour) is the choice and willingness to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty, or intimidation.” (Wikipedia) The problem with this definition in Wikipedia is that it dissociates courage from ethics. This is a problem for men because we are naturally risk-prone and pain-tolerant, so we may put themselves in danger when there is no reason to do it - the foolhardy behavior often seen in young men. Men have a complicated relationship with fear. They may avoid it or seek it because it leads to a state of joyful excitement: the adrenaline rush. Still, taking unnecessary risks can be justified, because courage needs to be developed by confronting our fears in a controlled situation. Was Alex Honnold being foolhardy when he climbed El Capitan without a rope? I think it would be a shame to dismiss what is one of the biggest athletic feats of all times. At a much more modest scale, I rock-climb and practice other dangerous sports like skiing and free-diving. The rewards of these sports are not just having fun, but also confronting my fear, learning about myself and training my emotional control. We cannot just wait to be confronted with a dangerous ethical quandary and expect that we will then do the right thing. If we don’t confront our fear on a regular basis and train our courage, it will not be there when we need it. Courage as a virtue has an ethical dimension: it’s doing the right thing even when is dangerous. This has also been called “moral courage” defined by Wikipedia as “the ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition, shame, scandal, discouragement, or personal loss.” Here, courage connects with integrity. We need to avoid doing wrong but also do right as dictated by our values. And that often requires courage. The dark side Apart from the foolhardy behavior that I mentioned above, a dark side of courage is when we try to impose it on others. The accusation of cowardly is one of the most shameful that can be leveraged to a man. Many boys and teenagers have been wounded when they get it from their fathers or their peers. This problem is being denounced these days as toxic masculinity. However, we risk falling to the opposite problem: denying the value of courage altogether. I think the key is to have the freedom to confront our fear and develop our courage the way we want, not the way others tell us we should do it. 3) Stoicism and resilience Stoicism means being impervious to pain. Men are prone to stoicism because they have higher pain thresholds than women. A deeper form of stoicism is to be able to carry on doing something despite it causing us pain. For example, many sports require a certain degree of pain endurance. I refer here to stoicism with lowercase ‘s’. Stoicism with capital ‘S’ is an ancient philosophy of Greece and Rome that taught to develop Virtue by cultivating logic, emotion control, and working for the good of society. Resilience is the ability to recover after an injury, trauma or setback. It is closely related to stoicism but different from it because it consists of the ability to go back to our normal state and to resume our effort after a trauma, instead of enduring pain. Stoicism has a bad reputation these days, being considered part of toxic masculinity. However, it is necessary for integrity and courage because most worthwhile endeavors require effort and thus a certain amount of pain. “A colossal swindle of the ‘New Age’ movement is the notion that gaining a state of effortless being and doing requires no effort. In fact, great conscious effort, discipline, and patience are normally required to enter the ‘flow zone’ where previous frightening challenges start taking on an aspect of relaxed ease.” - John Long, climber. Unfortunately, our current culture of victimism sees weakness and vulnerability as virtues. This grew out of the tendency of Western culture to see pain as something that must be avoided. But pain is an inevitable part of human activities. Warrior cultures taught that pain must be understood and endured. “Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It is the path of great artists, great religious leaders, and great social reformers.” Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. The dark side of stoicism Stoicism can be harmful when it is not based on understanding and accepting pain, but on ignoring and repressing it. This is particularly true when it comes to emotional pain. 4) Self-sacrifice Masculine self-sacrifice is a healthy counterpart of the aggression and social isolation to which men are prone. It works together with integrity, courage and stoicism to impel men to act for the common good. History is full of examples of men that went to extreme self-sacrifice to defend their values. I am not just talking about first-responders and soldiers here, but also of men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Dedicating one’s life to cultivate wisdom and virtue is a more subtle form of self-sacrifice, as done by sages like the Buddha, Lao-Tzu or the Stoics. Women have their own form of self-sacrifice: the abnegation with which they engage in nurturing and care-taking. The dark side of self-sacrifice Sociobiology argues that males are expendable because once they have deposited their sperm into the females, they are no longer needed for the survival of the offspring. This is true for some species, but completely wrong for others in which both parents are need to take care of the offspring. In the case of humans, not only the parents but a whole tribe is necessary for children to survive for 15 years until their reproductive age. Men are not expendable, but throughout history they have been treated as such. They are the hunters, the warriors, the workers and the soldiers that put their lives at risk. And, since risk acceptance is part of the male biology, self-sacrifice is deeply embedded in most cultures. For example, we see it in the “women and children first” code to rescue people from dangerous situations. Or in the dangerous working conditions imposed on miners, construction workers, firemen, policemen and other dangerous jobs during the Industrial Revolution. Self-sacrifice is responsible for the fact that men do not respond to the men-hatred that often passes as feminism these days. Instinctively, a man reacts to it with thoughts like “there may be something right about this”; “I am strong enough to take this criticism and use it to improve myself”, or “I cannot allow others to be hurt by my response.” Unfortunately, in doing so, they tolerate hatred - betraying their values - and sacrifice not only themselves but also other men. 5) Self-reliance For many men, it’s important to be able to solve problems by themselves, to have confidence in one’s skills. There are several reasons for that. Personal autonomy: if I not depend on others, then I am free to follow my own path on my own schedule. Self-reliance means that I am responsible for my failures and successes, and therefore able to correct my course of action. Hierarchy is important for men, and being self-sufficient means that I don’t have to place myself under the influence or owe favors to other people. I cultivate my self-reliance when I paddle out into the Pacific Ocean in my kayak to scuba-dive; when I go hiking in the mountains; when I write on my computer; when I self-publish and market my books. Other activities, like rock-climbing and skiing, I do with friends, but my skills and self-reliance provide safety for both me and them. Self-reliance ties into integrity because it enables me to follow my own values. Having my own skills and resources increases my courage and my resilience. The dark side of self-reliance Too much emphasis on self-reliance can lead to social isolation and not cooperating with others, which are constant temptations for men, particularly when they are introverted. 6) Self-restraint Since rage and risk-taking are such powerful forces in men, it is important that we restrain our impulses. To control anger, we need to have mindfulness in order to recognize it in its early stages and nip it in the bud. We also need to develop patience, because impatience and annoyance are the seeds of anger. Distinguishing between foolish risk-taking and true courage takes a special kind of wisdom. It should be anchored in integrity: when we know our values and are deeply committed to them, then we would know when to act and how to do it more effectively. The dark side of sel-restraint Too much self-control can inhibit our spontaneity and creativity. 7) Playfulness Playfulness is a forgotten quality of masculinity, even though men are most attractive when they are playful and uninhibited. Masculine playfulness is rambunctious, joyful, energetic, humorous and not self-conscious. It is different from women’s playfulness in that it is less focused on bonding and communication, and tends to be centered more around physical activity, contact with nature and using objects. This grows out of the orientation of men towards risk, moving in space, and using things. Men love their toys: tools, musical instruments, weapons, sport gear, bicycles, cars, boats, planes… They like to play with their things, tuning them to make them better, perfecting their skills at their use. The roughhousing and mock fighting that we see in boys is driven by vasopressin, the other social neuropeptide together with oxytocin. While oxytocin promotes social bonding in females, vasopressin plays a similar role in males, but also drives territoriality and a form of play consisting in mock fighting and trying to grab the opponent by the back of the neck. The dark side of playfulness: competition Playfulness loses its joy and becomes a source of stress when is turned into competition. We live in a society that encourages it in almost all aspects of life. It’s gotten to the point in which we cannot conceive sports without competition. Even activities like rock-climbing and free-diving, which are primarily about getting in touch with nature and with our bodies and emotions, have been turned into competitions to see who can climb the hardest routes or dive to the deepest depths. We compete at work in our “careers” - a synonym of “race” -, in our relationships - to see who can get the most desirable mate -, and even in our spiritual life - to see who is more mindful and enlightened. 8) Humbleness - letting go of the Ego Humility has been used throughout the ages as a way to control men, to harness their aggression so that, instead of using it to rebel against exploitation, it’s put at the service of the powerful and their wars. We were told that being humble is to let go of our ideas and values, and just accept those of the dominant culture and the powerful. That way, the virtue of humility is used to enslave us. Even the Mafia uses the word omerta (humility) to mean loyalty to the capos. True humbleness, however, is about freedom and not slavery. It’s about freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the Ego. The Ego is formed when we interiorize shame from our failures and pride from our successes into a driving force to achieve more things that will earn us praise and to avoid being shamed. Since our focus is on external validation - or the rewards that we have internalized - this takes us away from our natural playfulness and joy and from our values. Since the Ego is made of automatic reactions driven from the opinions of other people, it prevents us from upholding our values - integrity - and makes us less resilient and self-reliant. Conclusions For men, masculinity is an essential part of our humanity. The idea that we can shed our masculinity is a dangerous contemporary myth that only leads to the raise of uncontrolled maleness. Instead, men should cultivate masculine virtues in accordance with their inner essence and their values. Copyright 2021 Hermes Solenzol

How to take control of your life What is personal power? Personal power is to have the psychological fortitude to live a meaningful and happy life. It means being full of energy, motivated, ethical, honest, reliable, self-sufficient, efficacious, joyful, resistant to trauma, resilient and generous. Personal power does not mean acquiring power at the expense of others. It is not being manipulative, selfish and exploitative. There is a psychological energy that we can acquire by living the right way. When we have that energy, that power, we are able to transmit it naturally to others. When we have plenty of it, being generous becomes natural because our power overflows and spills to others. Throughout my life, I have been studying different spiritual traditions to learn how to live the right way. They include Yoga, Siloism, Zen and the Way of the Warrior. But I have always used critical thinking and scientific knowledge to steer me away from the false gurus and to carefully choose among the things that I was taught. What I learned is that there are no superpowers, no magical shortcuts to happiness, no sudden enlightenment. There is only plowing along our ordinary lives, slowly improving ourselves through hard work, honesty and commitment. Only through effort you can reach a state in which living well feels natural. And then the world will throw a new challenge at you in the form of an accident, a disease or other kinds of misfortune. You have to be prepared and weather the storm as well as you can. Ultimately, you are going to lose. We will all die one day. You have to learn to make peace with that. Practice self-compassion Hunting for personal power may sound like a selfish and arrogant thing to do. However, it is not selfish because only by having energy we can give it to others. Only by finding meaning we can illumine the life of others. Only by being happy ourselves we can make others happy. It is not arrogant because personal power needs to be built on an honest assessment of our capabilities and shortcomings. Compassion is the ability to feel the suffering of others, which motivates us to do something to stop that suffering. Self-compassion is the ability to be aware of our own suffering, which motivates us to find ways to be happier. Instead, we try to blunt our own pain. To deny it by distracting ourselves with myriads of things that take our awareness away from the pain. But we fool ourselves when we are not able to stare at our own suffering in the face, believing that we can quench it by craving things that we do not need. Self-compassion is different from self-pity, which consists of blaming our suffering on things out of our control. It leads to resignation and hope: the belief that only changes in the external world can rescue us from our suffering. This is utterly disempowering. Neuroscience has shown that suffering produced by things that we cannot control induces learned helplessness, which forms the basis of psychological trauma (Maier and Seligman, 2016). Therefore, we need to wrestle as much control from our environment as we can, and become aware of that control. To cultivate self-compassion, we need to be aware of the mechanisms behind our suffering. Which means knowing ourselves. Know yourself through meditation and mindfulness Good ways of knowing ourselves are meditation and mindfulness. For me, meditation is not searching for an altered state of consciousness, nirvana, illumination, or an esoteric revelation about the nature of consciousness. Is simply sitting silently while I look at how my mind works. Perceptions, thoughts and emotions emerge out of my unconscious into awareness and disappear back into unconsciousness. Any barrier between the unconscious and the conscious is an illusion. Although this flow of the mind is myself, there are subtle ways in which the flow can direct itself, in which the part of the flow that is my cognitive executive function can gently steer the flow in the direction that makes more rational sense. Likewise, mindfulness is paying attention to the flow of the mind as we move in the world. Without judging, we become aware of how sensations, memories and thoughts enter and leave consciousness. Meditation and mindfulness serve to create meta-attention. It is a mental habit that consists of being aware of what we are paying attention to. By softening the mind, it gently extends the reach of consciousness into the unconscious. We will need that ability to control our emotions and rescue ourselves out of destructive loops of thought, ruminating and catastrophizing. However, there is a place in our life for mind wandering and daydreaming. Especially when it is suffused with meta-attention. Sometimes, we just need to let our mind be what it is; to put forth what it wants. Otherwise, our will becomes our jail. We clip our wings by destroying our imagination. We need to release our horses. Only then we can be creative. Cultivate flow Lately I have been reading about flow, and I am coming to realize that it is even better than meditation to promote mental health and inner power. Flow is a mental state defined in the 1970s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best”. He gave flow the following 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. Others have defined flow as effortless effort. Flow is typically found when doing skill-intensive sports like rock-climbing, skiing or martial arts; or in arts like playing music, dancing, painting or writing. However, flow is not just letting go, or using muscle memory to perform an action with little effort. It is only achieved after arduous training in a particular sport, art or skill. In every particular session, there is usually an initial period of struggle until the performer is able to enter flow. An excellent review of the neurophysiology of flow (Kotler et al., 2022) explores the difference between flow and trauma produced by a risky, scary event. They conclude that flow is induced by engaging with the challenging event in a pro-active way, which recruits the fight response of stress brain circuits. Conversely, emotional trauma set is when we try to avoid the challenging event. This initiates the freeze response to stress. While repeated emotional trauma caused by stress in the absence of control leads to learned helplessness, repeated flow induces a resilience to trauma that Kotler et al. called learned empowerment. Reading this, I concluded that by systematically cultivating the state of flow in my mind, I could create the habit of entering it. This would lead to learned empowerment, which is the same as personal power. Plug power drains Another way to increase personal power is to avoid losing it. This can be done by identifying things in our life that drain us of power and leave us feeling depleted. The obvious things are those that negatively impact our health: smoking, alcohol, abusing drugs, unhealthy eating, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, lack of sex, lack of love, social isolation. Less obvious are mental habits that deplete our mental energy. Mind wandering is often cited but, as a said above, this is not unhealthy by itself. With a sufficient background of meta-attention to collect its fruits of imagination and creativity, it is actually necessary for a healthy mind. What is unhealthy are mindless activities in which we let emotions take control of our mind and our behavior. For example, I noticed how often I engage in mindless talk, unaware of the effect of my words. Worse still is rumination: when our mind obsesses about something that happened in our life, typically a negative social interaction. We cannot let it go, constantly rehearsing what we said, what we should have said, and some improbable action that we are going to take in the future. Rumination is caused by a loss of control in the past, in a futile attempt to regain that control in our imagination. It is driven primarily by anger, but also by fear, jealousy and shame. There is also catastrophizing: imagining something terrible that is going to happen to us. Uncontrolled fear makes our imagination run wild, feeding the fear with scenes of horrible events in an endless loop. Underneath all this, there is the belief that we have lost control over our environment and our life. This belief is the consequence of learned helplessness. Rumination and catastrophizing quickly become mental habits. However, it is possible to steer away from them by using meta-attention to become aware of what is happening, label it, and provide positive images and high level cognitive input. That way, we will be able to break those mental habits. Avoid negative emotions It has become fashionable these days to say that negative emotions are just fine; that we should that let them be. That is bullshit. It’s the result of a poor understanding of the mind by a psychology built on poor evidence and ideology. As I pointed above, hard evidence from neuroscience shows the negative consequences of letting negative states like learned helplessness and rumination take possession of our mind. Ancient philosophical traditions like Stoicism and Buddhism also advise us to avoid negative emotions. It’s impossible to live an ethical life without harnessing negative emotions. If you let anger loose, you will inevitably hurt others. Anger has a way to blind you, warping your worldview and leading you to irrational actions. The same can be said of jealousy, the unrecognized cause of violence against women (Puente and Cohen, 2003; Pichon et al., 2020). As for fear, it will often prevent you from doing the right thing. Of course, all emotions have evolved for a reason. Unfortunately, humans evolved in an environment in which we lived in tribes of hunter-gatherers, which is very different from modern society. As a result, many of our emotional responses are non-adaptive. The main emotions to watch are anger and fear. Shame and guilt are social emotions that can become quite harmful (Lester, 1997; Lee et al., 2001). Sadness, envy and jealousy can also be problematic. Anger, fear and shame are worse when they become chronic, a constant background of our mental state. Chronic anger is felt as constant annoyance, frustration and irascibility that may quickly escalate to full-blown rage, like in road-rage and marital fights. However, when coupled with a sense of powerlessness, it may simmer for years, slowly destroying our body and our mind. One of the signs that this is happening is rumination. Chronic fear is anxiety, an ill-defined feeling that something is wrong, that something terrible is about to happen. It may manifest as catastrophizing. Chronic shame becomes low self-esteem, an immobilizing feeling of paralysis, especially in social interactions. It evokes social anxiety and drives rumination and catastrophizing. The best way to fight negative emotions is to nip them in the bud. Meta-attention can alert us of the emotion growing out of its seed. For example, anger often begins as frustration and annoyance. We should counter them by invoking patience and focus on the task at hand. A habit of entering flow can help a lot, because flow is accompanied by positive emotions like joy and curiosity, and incompatible with negative emotions like anger and fear. If anger has become established in your mind, the best thing to do is to prevent it from taking control of your behavior. For me, reading is a calming activity that will take me out of anger. Other people may want to take a walk, practice a sport, listen to music or watch a movie. It is important to use mindfulness to watch what anger is doing to your mind. Face your fears Fear is a difficult emotion to handle. Sometimes, fear appears because of a real danger. However, there are two possible responses to fear. One is to take action to prevent the danger form causing us harm, taking as much control of the situation as we can. If we manage to feel in control, this would lead to learned empowerment. The second set of responses to danger involves loss of control. We may become immobilized in a freezing response. Or we may act out of control in panic. In both cases, the feeling of loss of control leads to learned helplessness (Maier and Seligman, 2016; Kotler et al., 2022). This creates a trauma scar that lives on as chronic anxiety. In my experience, it is good to train our responses to fear by regularly exposing ourselves to scary situations in ways that minimizes real danger and lets us take control. For example, I practice rock-climbing, a sport in which freezing and panic responses are pretty obvious. Other sports in which to face fear include skiing, surfing and martial arts. For those less adventurous, roller-coasters and horror movies may get them in touch with their fears. However, it is hard to feel in control in those situations. Another thing that helps is to voice out our fears with our friends or in therapy. Emphasize ways in which you can gain control over them. Take responsibility for your actions As you see, taking control of what is happening in your life is a common theme here. Of course, there are many things that escape our control. It would be foolish to pretend that we have superpowers and are able to impose our will on the world. The key here is not the actual control that we have, but feeling in control. This means taking whatever action we can take. Being pro-active instead of passive. An important teaching from spiritual traditions is that we need to detach ourselves from the results of our actions. We do the best we can, and accept the fact that we are not always going to win. Excessive desire for a particular outcome produces an unhealthy craving. It also takes our focus away from performing our task as best as we can. Thus, in a state of flow we are completely focused on what we are doing while forgetting ourselves. In flow, attention is on what we are doing in the present, and the goal is only factored in as one more parameter to direct the action. Rushing to the end of what we are doing takes us out of flow. Taking responsibility for our actions, then, is a mixture of two things: to avoid craving a particular result, and to accept the final outcome with equanimity. This means not beating ourselves up if we failed, but also not taking too much pride if we succeed. Taking responsibility for our actions is not blaming and shaming ourselves. Of course, if we did something unethical, we need to take the appropriate measures for it not to happen again. Do not see yourself as a victim Another aspect of taking responsibility for our actions is not to look for excuses for what we did in external circumstances. Of course, there are numerous factors out of our control that impact the outcome of our actions. It would be foolish not to recognize that. However, “finding excuses” means to take the focus away from the control that we have to dwell in things out of our power. This is a drain of energy because, by definition, we cannot change things that are out of our control. Focusing on whatever control we have is much more effective. Today, we live in a culture of victimism, especially in progressive circles. This is how I think this happened… Postmodern ideology sees the world as a power struggle between the oppressed (Blacks, women, homosexuals, transgender, workers, poor countries, etc.) and the oppressors (Whites, men, heterosexuals, cisgender, capitalists, Western countries, etc.). Politics, then, is the fight to empower the oppressed and eliminate the oppressors. Therefore, if you can identify yourself with one of the oppressed groups, you feel that you belong in the group of the “good people” and can benefit from the privileges given to them. Otherwise, you are an oppressor and targeted as the enemy. Then, everybody tries to show that they, too, are a victim. Lately, even conservatives are adopting this strategy. And so men and incels are the victims of feminism. Whites are the victims of affirmative action, cancel culture and wokeism. And so forth. Leaving aside political ideologies, my point is that seeing yourself as a victim is psychologically unhealthy. It is the opposite of taking responsibility for your actions. Being a victim puts the focus on your disempowerment, blaming the world for your situation. It may be true that you belong to an oppressed group, but victimism is not helping anybody. If you want privileges because you are a victim, how is that not selfish? How about centering your political fight in helping others? That would emphasize the measure of control that you have. That will be empowering. Don’t let anybody blame or shame you We also live in a culture in which blaming and shaming are used as blunt political weapons. To some extent, this is legitimate. If somebody behaves in an unethical way by exploiting and oppressing others, that person deserves to be blamed and shamed. What is not ethical is to blame and shame people because they belong to a certain group that has been labeled as the oppressors. Because they are White, or Jewish, or men, or live in a rich country. This negates individual agency and freedom. People are responsible for what they do, not for who they are. Blaming and shaming are so widespread that they have become a reflex. Total strangers will come up to you and blame you and shame for things that have nothing to do with your doings. Especially online. You should treat these people as toxic. Put as much distance between you and them as you can. Block them online. Do not have them as friends. Steer clear of them as co-workers. They are out to steal your personal power. However, if a close friend or somebody who knows you well, offers you advice and criticizes your actions, listen to them. Remember, knowledge is power, and self-knowledge doubly so. And you cannot see yourself well from the inside. Taking responsibility for your action and equanimity should be your guide in this case. Follow a path with a heart In the big picture, you need to live a meaningful life. Each one of us should find what that means for themselves. It probably involves a combination of having experiences that make you happy, achieving personal growth, and contributing to the betterment of society and the world. A path with a heart is one that makes you feel happy and fulfilled as you follow it. Every step along the path increases your personal power. Just being in the path should be enough because all paths lead to nowhere. We all travel from birth to death. If your life is empty and miserable. If you find no meaning and no purpose, your path doesn’t have a heart. You need to find a better one. Personal power propels you along the path with a heart that is your life. References Kotler S, Mannino M, Kelso S, Huskey R (2022) First few seconds for flow: A comprehensive proposal of the neurobiology and neurodynamics of state onset. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 143:104956. Lee DA, Scragg P, Turner S (2001) The role of shame and guilt in traumatic events: a clinical model of shame-based and guilt-based PTSD. Br J Med Psychol 74:451-466. 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. Pichon M, Treves-Kagan S, Stern E, Kyegombe N, Stöckl H, Buller AM (2020) A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review: Infidelity, Romantic Jealousy and Intimate Partner Violence against Women. International journal of environmental research and public health 17. Puente S, Cohen D (2003) Jealousy and the meaning (or nonmeaning) of violence. Personality & social psychology bulletin 29:449-460.