What is Pathological Altruism?

According to a 2013 paper on altruism bias, you can define pathological altruism as an attempt to promote the well-being of others that results in harm. The key aspect is that the harm from pathological altruism is reasonably foreseeable from the perspective of an outside observer.

The harm of pathological altruism can occur to the recipient of the altruistic act or the person acting in an altruistic way. The aforementioned paper cites an example of a mother refusing to vaccinate her child in the belief that she’s protecting her child, only for this lack of vaccination to cause a local outbreak of a dangerous childhood infection that results in an infant death.

Selfish Altruism: When Being Selfish Benefits Others

I’ve always considered myself as being somewhat selfish because I don’t seek out traditional altruistic endeavors. I don’t volunteer with a charity or a local animal shelter. I don’t donate much to charity. I rarely put money in the cups of people begging on the streets. Maybe you are the same, maybe not.

The word cerebrotonic, which I named this blog after, has two meanings from my perspective. One is the literal meaning of introverted or introspective people who think deeply about the world, about big ideas, and about their own lives.

The other meaning of cerebrotonic is that some of the articles here are meant to act as a ‘tonic’ for people who are too cerebral—too much in their own heads to the detriment of engaging with the world. This is how I feel my selfishness mostly manifests; I focus a lot on what I can do to better myself rather than bettering the world.

I don’t post about this selfishness lightly. I consider it a personal character flaw and it’s something I have made attempts to address. The above altruistic efforts that I lack are no doubt commendable.

However, I started to think deeper about the topic and how my own seemingly self-serving decisions have benefited other people. The picture became a little less clear cut and somewhat paradoxical.

For example, when I make efforts to eat more healthy food, I notice that the people around me can’t help but to eat better, or at least eliminate crap from their diets. This is something that initially seems like a self-serving decision but it ends up improving the lives of people close to me.

Another example was my recent decision to learn piano at 29 years of age. Six months after buying a digital piano, I can play the main Don’t Stop Believin’ melody, Let It Be by The Beatles, and Lean On Me by Bill Withers.

I often switch on the piano when other people are present in the room, including my 18-month old daughter. She instantly smiles and begins dancing. My apparently self-serving act of learning to play piano brings joy to my child’s life.

I think the message is relatively clear, albeit paradoxical: if you consider yourself selfish, think deeper about your actions. You might be surprised how your selfish interests end up promoting the well-being of others. This is what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed healthy selfishness in an unpublished paper. You can read the paper in Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow.

The other lens through which to view this topic is that you can consider traditional altruism can be somewhat selfish. After all, many people report “feeling good” when donating their time to volunteering or other worthy causes. Is this personal “feeling good” the primary motivator in some instances of altruism? I think it would be naive to suggest otherwise.

Closing Thoughts

There are clearly complex psychological forces at play when it comes to selfishness and altruism. And I don’t pretend to understand the full picture. For an in-depth perspective on healthy selfishness, read the recently published 2020 paper: Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism: Measuring Two Paradoxical Forms of Selfishness. It’s co-authored by Scott Barry Kaufman and Emanuel Jauk.

The overarching aim of this blog post was to address this topic from a personal perspective. I wanted to reach out to people similar to myself, who give themselves a hard time for being too selfish. If you go deeper into your behavior, you’ll often find some surprisingly positive ripple effects of what you thought were selfishly motivated acts. And hopefully, you’ll go a little bit easier on yourself, as I am trying to do.

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Metaphors About Life

Just to refresh and clarify, a metaphor is a comparison or statement of the relation between two things that you wouldn’t normally associate with each other.  Metaphors simply state the comparisons, while similes use “like” or “as” to compare things. The technical distinction here isn’t important—the comparisons themselves are where the insight lies.

Alan Watts: The Universe ‘Peoples’

Much of our anxiety in life stems from seeing ourselves as individual islands of isolation, completely separate from the rest of the world. We look up at the night sky in awe, and most of us feel even more isolated and alone, seeing the vastness of things that aren’t us. We appreciate the beauty, but we feel apart from it.

In one of his most popular metaphors, Watts tries to help us overcome our feeling of separateness by comparing our arising as conscious beings out of this universe similar to how apples come from apple trees. He cleverly turns the collective “people” into a verb; trying to get across this idea that we aren’t separate from the universe at all. We are a process of the universe.

Logically, the metaphor makes sense. We are all composed of atoms that didn’t come from anywhere else but the very universe we inhabit. The beauty of the metaphor is that it conveys this profound and hopeful truth in such simple language.

Michael Pollan: The Mind is a Snow-Covered Hill

Michael Pollan discusses this metaphor in his excellent book, How to Change Your Mind (which features on my list of favorite books on psychedelics). As he admits in the book, it wasn’t Pollan himself who came up with the metaphor, but I’m crediting him for bringing it to my attention.

The essence of the idea is that the mind is a snow-covered hill, and the thoughts we have are sleds going down that hill. Certain thought patterns become habitual over time, and they lead to grooves in the snow hill of mind. When certain thought patterns become ingrained in the snow, we can’t seem to think without going into those grooves; those habitual thought patterns.

We can become stuck in rigid ways of thinking, whether about the world around us, our relationships, our selves. What psychedelics do, according to the metaphor, is they add fresh snow to the hill. It is for this reason that psychedelics can so profoundly change the way we think. Pollan discusses the metaphor in this clip with Joe Rogan.

Lao Tze: The Ego is Muddy Water

The full quote, which comes from the founder of the Ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, is as follows:

“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”

In this quote, the sage, Lao Tze, is saying our conditioned, egotistic patterns of thought are essentially muddy water. The path to peace and inner stillness from mental suffering comes when we wait for the muddy water of ego to clear. Many Eastern traditions emphasize the importance of sitting meditation as a path to help end our suffering.

Terence McKenna: Western Civilization is a Loaded Gun

McKenna had a tendency to delve into quackery at times, but a lot of what he said was intelligent and insightful. In this metaphor, the full quote is that “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at itself.” This metaphor relates to the constant anxiety of living in a world dominated by individualism, consumerism, selfishness, and access to nuclear weapons.

Anyone who takes a moment to read the latest news headlines can inevitably see the truth of this statement. It constantly feels like the world is on the cusp of something utterly disastrous to humanity; some existential risk caused by our own idiocy or carelessness. Much of this anxiety stems from Western powers trying to assert their dominance over the rest of the world and over each other.

Yes, there hasn’t been an outbreak of humanity-threatening violence in a long time, but it always feels just around the corner, especially with people like Trump getting voted into power and populist mass movements like Brexit surging across the Western world.

Mooji: The Fire of Self-Discovery

Mooji is one of my favorite spiritual teachers. I know ‘spiritual’ is a loaded word for the modern thinking person who approaches life with the thinking approach of a scientist, but the truth is I am agnostic to spiritual ideas, particularly those that delve into the nature of self and consciousness. Mooji is a master of communicating about the ego and its false identity as who we really are.

The full quote is:

“Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.”

The metaphor communicates to us that discovering the true nature of the self is to step into a fire. But the fire of this discovery is nothing to be feared; it won’t harm who we really are at our core. I think this is a powerful and profound metaphor because people, myself included, often resonate with self-inquiry;  that there is something deeper to be found by looking within, but we find ourselves afraid to go that deep, lest we lose ourselves in the process.

Alan Watts: Be the Falling Cat That Lets Go of Itself

I can’t find the exact YouTube video in which I heard this Alan Watts quote, but its profundity always stuck in my mind as a cool metaphor. The fact I love cats also helps! Watts was discussing a Taoist approach to life and he used the way cats fall as a metaphor for how to live life in such a way as to be free of anxiety and in accordance with the Tao.

The reason cats can fall from quite impressive heights and not hurt themselves is that they completely relax their bodies on the way down. Watts advocated approaching life in that way. Resistance creates pain in life. If the cat clenches or resists when it falls, it hurts itself. If we resist the natural spontaneous flow of life and try to cling to it, pain in the form of mental suffering is inevitable.

That tops off my favorite metaphors about life. I really enjoyed writing this article and I will add to it over time as I remember more metaphors and become exposed to new ones, whether in literature or when going down a YouTube rabbit hole.

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The philosophy of minimalism can be defined as a way of living in which you identify the essential things in your life and eliminate the rest. It is the antithesis of the modern Western-influenced consumerist lifestyle of accumulating as much stuff as possible and being constantly stimulated by digital clutter.

Personally, I practice minimalism in some ways, and I think it’s a way of living everyone can benefit from.

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Does Modern Society Ruin Mental Health?

My personal interest in minimalism stems not from any particularly bad spending habits, but from a nagging disillusionment with some aspects of modern society. I think the constant titillation of our senses can be detrimental to mental health; certainly to mine. Consumerism sells us better versions of ourselves to keep us buying things we don’t really need.

Of course, it’s also helpful to recognize that modern society is the safest, most prosperous, and least hunger-afflicted society in human history. That doesn’t mean it’s idyllic though. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness are rife.

The British philosopher Alan Watts called out the problems with modern society as far back as the 1960s. Bearing in mind that the Internet didn’t exist back then and television broadcasts were mostly transmitted in black and white, Watts was a man well ahead of his time. Here’s a quote from his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, which could’ve been written yesterday and it would be equally valid:

“When belief in the eternal becomes impossible, men seek happiness in the joys of time. However much they try to bury it in their minds, they are aware these joys are uncertain and brief. Consequently, our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to “dope”.

We must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This dope we call our high standard of living; a violent and complex stimulation of the senses…a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations.”

Books About Minimalism

Here are my select favourite books about minimalism. Read the descriptions and opt to buy the books that sound like they would best suit you. If you prefe listening versus reading, I recommend signing up to Audible, which you can do by clicking the below button. You’ll get two free audiobooks and a 30-day free trial. All of the books in this article are available on Audible.

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Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is probably the type of minimalism that most resonates with me because I spend too much time reading shit online that doesn’t impact my life. The entire ethos of the book is to reevaluate our relationship with technology and only keep the technologies that add genuine value to our lives.

Newport describes how few of us actually want to spend so much time online reading shit we don’t care about, but that the tools we use online, such as social media, cultivate behavioral addictions. They keep us coming back for more. Every link clicked is like a pull of a slot machine handle. I’ve often had upward of 30 tabs open at once on a single Chrome window, so I know the pull of this online slot machine all too well.

Below is a screenshot of a Chrome window of mine from as recently as a few days ago:

The author recommends a digital declutter period in which we abstain for 30 days from any optional apps or websites that are meant to entertain, inform, or connect us. Newport adds that the idea that we need to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is an invention of the last decade.

He’s on to something there. The average twentysomething back in the 1990s wouldn’t have ever cared much what former work colleagues or ex-classmates were getting up to in life. Now, we’re exposed to the lives of dozens or even 100s of people whom we don’t actually care about, truth be told.

After the declutter, if you still want to consume attention-grabbing technologies like social media or news websites, Newport recommends having set periods for these rather than mindlessly browsing throughout the day. Personally, I only now visit news websites on Saturdays for two hours and I don’t bother with any social media other than Reddit. I feel much less stressed as a result of minimalizing my digital life.

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The Joy of Less by Francine Jay

The Joy of Less is about traditional minimalism. Getting rid of physical clutter that often clogs up space in our homes and in our minds too. What I really enjoyed about this book was the middle part, which is a detailed ten-step plan to declutter your house.

Towards the end of the book, Francine Jay delivers some powerful moral messages about how decluttering has wider positive ramifications for the planet. The overarching message is to become more mindful of our immediate environment in terms of the possessions we store.

We should only keep things that we need, use, or bring us joy. Far too many of us accumulate things that don’t meet those criteria. This book serves as a nice guide to minimalism, although it gets a tad repetitive and preachy in parts.

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

Written by a Japanese cleaning consultant, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up attempts to help us clear clutter in our homes by designating items into categories rather than taking a room-by-room approach. Its usefulness is in how the author helps the reader organize their living space with intention. Our possessions should essentially reflect who we are and what we get joy from.

In fact, Kondo believes we should focus the decision to keep something on whether it “sparks joy”. That’s where I disagree. I don’t feel joy about the 200 aspirin I have in my medicine cabinet, but I won’t be throwing them out because they are useful. I think if you follow Kondo’s advice and replace the word “joy” with usefulness”, you’ll probably get a lot out of this book. It does get a bit woo-woo at times, though.

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The Power of Less by Leo Babauta

The Power of Less is a well-written, succinct book about dealing with the plethora of distractions that vie for our attention in modern life. It doesn’t only approach the topic of minimalism in terms of physical possessions: Babauta also talks about the importance of minimalism in terms of our attention. When we do one thing at once and do it with intentionality, we end up being more efficient than when we multi-task.

Here are some quotes from the book that particularly resonated with me:

Principle 1: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential. So in everything you do, learn to set limitations. Principle 2: By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources. Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.

The Power of Less is an easy read with actionable advice. In other words, it’s the epitome of what all books about minimalism should aspire to be. No drivel, no padding of words, just practicality.

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Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Published as far back as 1854, Walden is a classic book on living the simple life. Thoreau espoused the virtues of living in harmony with nature, and he felt that even the Western consumerist lifestyle of the 19th century was not conducive to this harmony.

Many of the concepts Thoreau described are relevant to the current discourse on minimalism. In fact, quite a few leading proponents of minimalism undoubtedly draw inspiration from this book and other writings by Thoreau.

Among his ideas about simple living are fixing up old clothes instead of buying new ones, minimizing purchases, and renouncing the desire for external progress, which is the driving force behind much of our unnecessary spending. When we think external success will bring us happiness, we end up buying expensive cars when a cheap one will suffice, we buy houses that are too big for us, and we buy the latest smartphones even though our current one is fine.

Walden is a short read and is one of the main books about minimalism that caused me to reevaluate how I live my life. Check it out for sure.

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Closing Thoughts

Minimalism is one of those self-development or self-improvement tropes that can become a bit tedious due to the oversaturation of content about it. YouTube is filled with minimalists such as Matt D’avella and the Internet is chock-full of minimalist blogs. That said, minimalism, whether digital or physical, is a way of life with a number of virtues that I believe everyone can benefit from in some ways.

Digital minimalism played an important role in my own battle to reduce my neuroticism.

The books about minimalism that I’ve recommended here contain the essence of pretty much anything you need to know about minimalism. If I had to read just one of these books, Digital Minimalism was the most useful for me so I’d pick that. As mentioned before, but in case you missed it, you can also listen to all of these books by signing up to Audible for a free 30-day trial below: ↓↓↓ 

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The risks of AI have been spoken about by a number of philosophers, but such concerns don’t seem as prevalent as all the hype. It’s a rare example of something attracting media attention for positivity rather than its negative sides. This article explores the most extreme risk of artificial general intelligence—its capability to wipe out humanity.

What Is an Existential Threat?

In his amazing book The Precipice, from which much of this article draws its inspiration, Toby Ord describes an existential threat as a risk that has the capacity to destroy humanity and all its future potential. According to Ord, there are two broad types of existential threats to humanity:

• Natural threats—risks arising from natural forces, such as asteroids and supervolcanoes.
• Anthropogenic threats—risks arising from human activity, such as nuclear winters, engineered pandemics, and general purpose AI.

What really reinforces the potentially devastating impact of an existential threat being realized is Ord’s focus on the wiping out of humanity’s potential. This is something most of us don’t consider too strongly when we imagine what the world would be like with no more humans in it.

Ord draws an analogy to humanity’s potential by imagining a human living just 2000 years ago. Such a human would have been almost completely ignorant of anything accurate about how the universe works. Such a human’s mind would be utterly boggled by the idea of air travel, Internet, air conditioning, central heating, and many countless relatively recent inventions.

Barring natural catastrophes, The Earth will remain habitable to humans for at least the next 1 billion years. That’s a lot of fucking time to do stuff. The modern human has only been roving around this ball of rock for 200,000 years. That’s 1⁄500 of our potential remaining time here. , and think of how far we’ve come.

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What is General Purpose AI?

General purpose AI is the ability of a machine to perform any task a human can or understand any concept that we can. It is the emulation of human intelligence in machines.

Early AI research was aimed at achieving general intelligence but it was mostly abandoned. Research was repurposed into specialization at the tasks AI excels at, such as chess and, in modern times, classification.

But the more recent AI advances represent a move towards that initial lofty goal of general purpose AI. Modern AI is all about machines learning how to do things without explicit programming by humans. Huge datasets and cost-efficient high-performance computing have driven much of the recent advances in the fields of machine learning and neural networks, which are responsible for the media headlines referenced at the beginning of this article.

The problem with AGI is that machines can often learn to do things much better and more efficiently than we can. Some algorithms can become grandmaster chess players in shockingly rapid time. So, if a system was developed that was the equal of any human at any task, it’s not a stretch to say that the same system could beat us in nearly every domain.

Leading machine learning researchers have estimated the probability of reaching general artificial intelligence as 50% within the next 40 years.

How Could AI Destroy Humanity?

In short, AI systems with general intelligence could develop the goal of ensuring their survival and/or unalterability at all costs. This is because AI systems learn to maximize rewards, and being switched off is a disincentive to maximizing rewards.

Think of how easy it is for humans to ensure something digital, such as a cherished photograph stored on your computer, doesn’t “die off”. All you have to do is access the Internet, upload it to several different websites or cloud storage systems, and the image will persist independent of the computer you access it on.

It’s not a stretch to say that a nefarious and sufficiently smart AI system could access the Internet and back itself up millions of times on cloud storage systems around the world. This alone would render it almost impossible to destroy the harmful AI system.

But how would the AI pose an existential threat? Well, here’s where it becomes speculative (yet entirely plausible). The AI system would need to escalate its powers and its intelligence, both of which could be achieved by acquiring more computing power.

With a nefarious system that is now much smarter than humans and impossible to destroy, we could see new weapons created that are deadlier than ever; we could see the AI system controlling humans and using the weapons on each other until humanity is wiped out.

I like the analogy I stumbled across when researching this topic further. In much the same way as the gorilla’s continued existence depends on the goodwill of human beings; a smarter species, the continued existence of our species would depend on the will of a machine or system with superintelligence.

Wrapping Up

The eventuality of general purpose AI wiping out humanity is not guaranteed, but the risk is much higher than you’d likely think. Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, philosopher, and a leading researcher in existential risk, puts the threat of human extinction due to unaligned artificial general intelligence as 1 in 10 over the next century. I’d be surprised if that figure wasn’t a lot higher than most people expected.

The Precipice is an amazing, intriguing book that I’d recommend to anyone interested in the future of humanity. You can listen to or read the book in the following ways:

• Buy a physical copy of The Precipice on Amazon:

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• Listen to The Precipice by signing up to Audible and trying two free audiobooks:

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Consciousness and Spirituality

I like Thomas Nagel’s succinct definition of consciousness as “what it is like to be something”.  That you can sum up consciousness with such simplicity of language juxtaposes the mind-bending quest to understand where consciousness comes from or what it actually is. No scientist has given a satisfactory answer as to why matter gives rise to consciousness. It’s arguably the biggest and most important unsolved scientific mystery.

An opinion that states consciousness pervades the universe, which you’re likely to hear in several spiritual traditions, is still just as plausible as saying that consciousness is merely what happens when billions of neurons fire together in an organized system (the brain). The latter is a hypothesis many scientists would agree with. It says that consciousness is merely an emergent property of matter.

Whatever the underlying characteristics of consciousness and its origins, reading about consciousness and spirituality has always been a fascinating topic for me. I’m a sucker for different perspectives! So, without further ado, let’s get onto my favourite books on spirituality and consciousness.

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Who Am I? by Sri Ramana Maharishi

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Ramana Maharishi was a Hindu sage who spent the majority of his 70 years on Earth in a state of seeming bliss and peacefulness. People came from far and wide to listen to him. After an intense fear of death experience in his adolescence, he claimed to have got in touch with the non-personal, all-inclusive awareness that he believed was the ultimate reality of consciousness.

Maharishi’s face is eminently recognizable—you’ve likely encountered a photo of his wonderful smile and all-knowing eyes if you are in any way spiritually inclined. Maharishi’s main teaching was the method of self-enquiry, in which he instructs us to keep asking ourselves who we actually are.

The book itself is derived from a series of Q&A sessions that Maharishi participated in with a philosophy scholar in 1901. At its heart, the book keeps trying to get us to come back to where our thoughts originate from. It’s an interesting read that warrants deep contemplation.

The Nature of Consciousness by Rupert Spira

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Continuing the trend of Hindu philosophy and self-inquiry, I would like to direct you to The Nature of Consciousness by Rupert Spira. Similar to how I found out about Alan Watts, I first stumbled upon Rupert Spira’s teachings while going down a YouTube rabbit-hole that probably began with a search for an apple crumble recipe.

Rupert follows the Advaita Vedanta tradition, which teaches that the nature of the self is the same as the nature of the metaphysical reality of the universe. This is equivalent to saying that consciousness pervades the universe and that we are, deep down at our core, this very all-pervading indivisible consciousness.

What I really like about this book is that its central argument is logically well-structured and well-reasoned in much the same way as any scientific argument should be. Spira argues that consciousness is primal and he does so in such a way as to make it a credible and sensible ontological idea.

He persuades is to use experience as a guide to what consciousness is, which aligns with that provocative Oriental allure of prioritizing experiential knowledge as much as intellectual knowledge. Overall, The Nature of Consciousness is a mind-expanding book that is well worth reading.

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

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The Doors of Perception also features on my list of books about psychedelics but its importance as a book transcends different domains of knowledge. Huxley combines some wild experiences on mescaline with his linguistic prowess to give an extremely interesting hypothesis on what consciousness is and how it interacts with the brain.

According to Huxley, the brain is kind of like a radio antenna that filters information from “Mind at Large”. This filtering mechanism is an evolutionarily beneficial function that prevents us all from being overwhelmed during normal waking states of experience.

Under the influence of a psychedelic (with your consciousness altered), a cup of tea can become a point of contemplation about the meaning of life and the nature of the universe. From Huxley’s perspective, and from a rational standpoint, if we were all overwhelmed so easily by seemingly mundane things, we’d never get anything done and we’d probably have died off as a species by now.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tze

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The Tao Te Ching is a classic Chinese text that formed the basis of the philosophical and spiritual teachings of Taoism. It’s a profoundly insightful book, full of gems of wisdom and it warrants several return readings. For example, the book’s advice on comparing ourselves with others is perennially relevant; arguably even more so now in the age of social media:

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.”

In terms of its perspective on consciousness, the Tao Te Ching teaches that a life force (termed the Tao) pervades the entire cosmos. We can experience the Tao everywhere, but we cannot grasp it and cannot name it. The whole point of Taoism is to teach us to live in harmony with the Tao rather than speculate about it or try to put it into words.

The Tao Te Ching is a book I’d recommend pretty much everyone read, regardless of whether you’re interested in books on spirituality and consciousness. It’s that important.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

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The Power of Now was really the first book I read that exposed me to a different way of thinking about who I am fundamentally, beyond that angsty, neurotic ego. I listened to the audio version of the book on Audible and it immediately struck a chord with me. Tolle’s voice is incredibly soothing and I enjoyed the Q&A format that the book takes on as it develops.

In terms of its views on consciousness, The Power of Now says that all our problems in life arise from identification with the mind. Tolle invites the readers to focus solely on the present moment wherein we’ll find ourselves in touch with the inner stillness and peacefulness that is always there.

The Power of Now has its critics—some regard it as a sort of New Age re-hashing of ideas that one would find in Zen teachings and other traditions like Christian Mysticism. However, what makes The Power of Now stand out for me is its accessibility and its simplicity of language. I really recommend seeking out the audio version if you can.

Waking Up by Sam Harris

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Sam Harris is someone I really admire. He identifies as an atheist, so it might seem strange to see his work recommended on books about spirituality and consciousness. The Guardian referred to him in a 2019 interview as an atheist with a spiritual side, and I drew a similar conclusion after reading Waking Up.

His book, Waking Up, is essentially an essay about Harris’s own journey to understand consciousness. He was lucky enough to spend much of his 20s in India and Nepal, meditating and being exposed to traditions such as Dzogchen. His ability to live that way was the product of an upper-middle-class background, but I don’t think that detracts from his experiences.

His openness to spiritual teachings can be summed up in the following quote from the book:

“Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences.”

And

“How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out.”

Harris’s views on consciousness, based on experience, are that the ego is merely a habitual thought pattern and that we all can access the same underlying awareness if we just pay attention. He goes no further than that, but the book is worth reading for the intrigue of his own journey.

Closing Thoughts

That just about concludes my list of six favourite books on spirituality and consciousness. If you have a Kindle, you can read all of these books by signing up for a Kindle Unlimited membership, which I really recommend:

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I welcome any contributions you might have to add to this list. Please comment below the article if you got something of value here. Thank you.

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(Disclaimer #1: This blog post contains affiliate links. Disclaimer #2: Psychedelic substances are powerful and not legal in many countries. This blog post does not condone or recommend their use.)

The Value of Reading Books About Psychedelics

Before taking psychedelics, it’s wise to do your research and know what you’re getting into. These are powerful substances, after all. Given that this blog is aimed at introspective/introverted people who get as much stimulation from books as extroverts get from parties, I have a feeling that a list of books about psychedelics will be well-received Even if you don’t actually plan on taking psychedelics any time soon (or possibly ever), they are an undeniably fascinating topic and well worth exploring intellectually.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Straussman

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I could think of no better place to start from than with one of the most fascinating research experiments in history on psychedelics. Between 1990 and 1995, Dr. Rick Straussman, a clinical psychiatrist, conducted psychedelic research on 60 healthy volunteers at the University of New Mexico. He injected the 60 study participants with DMT, which is one of the strongest psychedelic substances known, and he recorded their experiences.

The intensity of DMT is such that within moments of exposure to a powerful enough dose, you are blasted from your body into an entirely alien dimension. You can meet dancing jesters and geometric patterns made of love, as Joe Rogan once said on the JRE podcast. The fact that Dr. Straussman managed to get approval for such an experiment during a period in which psychedelics were regarded with disdain and fear in the scientific community was incredible.

Using the patient experiences as a guide, Straussman explores whether DMT is a spirit molecule that “may lead us to an acceptance of the coexistence of opposites, such as life and death, good and evil; a knowledge that consciousness continues after death; a deep understanding of the basic unity of all phenomena.”

The body produces DMT—it’s known as an endogenous monoamine. My only advice is to read this book and come to your own conclusion about whether DMT is inextricably linked to the nature of consciousness. Whatever your conclusion, DMT: The Spirit Molecule is a fascinating read.

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

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Michael Pollan is an award-winning journalist who is best known for his books on food and agriculture, such as Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He writes with an invigorating clarity of language, a scientific approach, and a refreshingly open mind. When I heard Pollan was writing a book about psychedelics, I took note and bought it as soon as it was released.

How To Change Your Mind is a fascinating read. Pollan researches the history of psychedelics and investigates their current therapeutic use. He takes hefty doses of psilocybin mushrooms and 5-Meo-DMT during his journey and documents his thoughts. His first-hand psychedelic experiences and investigative research result in some diamond quotes, such as:

“Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.”

and

“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.”

If you are at all interested in psychedelic exploration from the point of view of a brilliant writer who takes a totally agnostic, open-minded approach to the topic, I cannot recommend How to Change Your Mind enough.

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

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Any list of the best books about psychedelics could not be taken seriously if it didn’t include this absolute classic by one of my favourite authors, Aldous Huxley. The genius of Huxley is that he was able to express his linguistic prowess equally well in both fiction and non-fiction formats. In the book, which is more like an extended essay, he details his own experiences with the psychedelic drug mescaline, which naturally occurs and is found in various cacti, such as the peyote cactus and the San Pedro cactus.

The Doors of Perception is regarded as an influential book that helped spark the 1960s counterculture movement. Huxley’s perspective was that the brain acts as a reducing valve for consciousness, filtering out tons of sensory data that would be overwhelming and incompatible with our need to survive if we were exposed to it all the time. Huxley believed that taking mescaline and other psychedelics toned down the brain’s function as a reducing valve and opened the doors to perception.

You might walk away from The Doors of Perception thinking Huxley was an idealist who used flowery language to mask pseudoscientific ideas. Or, you might wake away with a different perspective on what life means. Either way, it’s an excellent read.

The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide by James Fadiman

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The reason I include The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide on my list of best books about psychedelics is less to do with its insights and quality of writing and more to do with its practical utility. If you are sincere about exploring psychedelics not just intellectually—but experientially, you shouldn’t do so before reading this book.

The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide goes into detail on the importance of having a guide or trip-sitter. There are also sections on set and setting that are must-reads. Overall, it’s an essential book for the safe exploration of psychedelic substances.

The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts

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I discovered Alan Watts by accident one day on YouTube, and I was quickly hooked. I remember wandering around second-hand book stores in northern Thailand a few years ago, and a book named The Joyous Cosmology by Watts caught my eye.

At the time, I had read The Wisdom of Insecurity and The Book (both written by Watts). I enjoyed them thoroughly but I never realized he had a whole host of other publications to his name. The Joyous Cosmology is pretty much the Alan Watts equivalent of The Doors of Perception.

In the book, Watts details his experiences on LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. He also discusses these topics with the type of open-mindedness and intelligence characteristic of his exposure to Oriental traditions. Some quotes:

“Whether it is organic or inorganic, we are learning to see matter as patterns of energy—not of energy as if energy were a stuff, but as energetic pattern, moving order, active intelligence.”

And

“Is this, perhaps, an inner view of the organizing process which, when the eyes are open, makes sense of the world even at points where it appears to be supremely messy?”

True Hallucinations by Terence Mckenna

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Terence Mckenna was a fascinating character and a brilliant public speaker. He was also a bit outlandish in his ideas and had a tendency to veer on the side of quackery. However, his book, True Hallucinations, makes it onto my list of the best books about psychedelics completely on merit.

True Hallucinations is like no other book about psychedelics. It’s mesmerizing and bizarre in equal measure. The book details the adventures of Terence and his brother Denis through the Amazon Basin as the two of them seek out shamanic rituals and hallucinogens.

If you take a biological reductionist approach to the idea of psychedelics, you’ll probably dislike this book, but the same could be said for this entire list. On the other hand, if you are open-minded and agnostic about what psychedelics can teach us, True Hallucinations is a fascinating book.

The post 6 Of The Best Books About Psychedelics appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

There used to be a widely held belief in psychology that personality traits remain stable over one’s lifetime. However, it’s now known that life experiences and therapeutic interventions can lead to meaningful changes in personality traits.

While it’s unlikely you’ll go from high neuroticism to not being neurotic at all, you can absolutely lower your neurotic thoughts and feelings. This article defines neuroticism and explains some ways to become less neurotic.

(Disclaimer: the advice in this article does not constitute medical advice and should not be taken as such. Please visit your doctor if you are seeking mental health treatment.)

What is neuroticism?

Neuroticism is a Big-Five personality trait that predisposes people to experience more negative emotions, higher anxiety, lower self-worth, and greater levels of depression than average.

One of the most detrimental impacts of high levels of neuroticism is that it often prevents people from living life in line with what they value. Avoidance behaviors are characteristic of neurotic people. A neurotic person afraid of making a show of themselves in public might never join a martial arts class even if it was something they really wanted to try.

Neurotic people easily dismiss any positive aspects about themselves and focus on the negatives. Rumination about the past and fear of the future are common to highly neurotic people. Engaging with the present moment fully is something neurotic people aren’t well-versed in.

Psychologists or psychiatrists don’t tend to diagnose people as neurotic these days. Instead, they focus on specific manifestations of neuroticism, such as anxiety disorders, dysthymia, or depression. However, neuroticism is unequivocally a dominant aspect in the personality of anyone suffering excessively from negative thoughts and emotions.

Highly neurotic people often consume more alcohol and cannabis than normal because these chemicals can provide relief from neurotic ways of thinking and feeling. Alcohol can allow neurotic people to do things they normally avoid, such as engaging in social interaction. Both can provide a break from one’s constant stream of neurotic thoughts.

Unfortunately, overconsumption of alcohol in particular quickly becomes detrimental and can end up making neurotic people feel, well, even more neurotic. Any naturally anxious person who has got shitfaced drunk and experienced ‘hangxiety’ the next day can attest to this.

I have always been quite a neurotic person. In fact, running a blog like this is one of my personal coping mechanisms to distract myself from neurotic thoughts and feelings.

For most of my life, I thought that being highly neurotic was something that would grasp me in its clutches until I die. I felt resigned to the fact that I would avoid doing many things I valued, simply because my personality was shaped a certain way by a combination of genetics and childhood experiences.

One day, I decided to question whether I really should be letting this personality trait dictate how I live so much. I sought out science-backed answers on whether it’s possible to shift neuroticism downward and how to do it. I researched the shit out of it and found that it is indeed quite possible to become less neurotic and reduce the control that neuroticism has over your life. The fruits of my research culminated in the tips and suggestions I’m about to share.

How to Become Less Neurotic

The ideas below on how to become less neurotic range from the seemingly innocuous, such as getting your heart rate up, to areas in which you need to tread lightly, such as exploring psychedelics.

Meditate

Meditation is one of my favorite areas of intellectual and spiritual curiosity. Thanks to people like Alan Watts and Sam Harris, I developed this curiosity and began learning about Eastern teachings, such as Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Dzogchen. Common to all of these teachings is some form of meditation.

There are different types of meditation, but the underlying aims of most meditative practices are to gain a better understanding of the mind, engage more with life as it unfolds in the present, and attach less to your thoughts. Regular meditation practice leads to scientifically proven positive changes in the brain^[1].

A simple Google search for “meditation studies” provides you with a plethora of interesting papers. One paper in particular, from 2011^[2], is of particular interest in the context of this article. The main finding was that sustained levels of mindfulness meditation practice can protect against the negative effects of neuroticism.

The authors of the paper suggest that the increased ability to label one’s experience without attaching to particular thoughts or emotions is the mechanism by which meditation protects against neuroticism. The fact that meditation requires little more than the ability to sit down and be present for 15 to 30 minutes makes it a no-brainer for me in terms of practices that can reduce neuroticism.

Get Your Heart Rate Up

Exercise and improved mental health are an excellent match. Study after study has shown impressive reductions in depression and anxiety when people work out regularly. If a pharmacological company could create the benefits of exercise in pill form, it’d earn billions.

In terms of how exercise curbs neurotic symptoms, the most interesting study was from 1989 when a diagnosis of neurotic was still commonplace. The paper, entitled “Exercise Intensity and Reduction in Neurotic Symptoms. A Controlled Follow-Up Study”^[3] found that people who exercised with higher intensity (jogging vs walking, for example) experienced lower anxiety levels after a six-month follow-up.

Anecdotally, exercise intensity matters for a reduction in my own neuroticism. A 30-minute walk perks me up a little bit, however, an equivalent length jogging or jump rope session makes me feel much better. This might be due to higher endorphin release.

Either way, I think getting your heart rate up via exercise is a crucial tool for reducing neurotic thoughts and feelings. It’s best to do a form of intense exercise that you actually enjoy, whether that’s jump rope, jogging, swimming, or cycling.

Practice Gratitude

Practicing gratitude to reduce neuroticism is my own personal contribution to this article rather than something with specific science-backed research to it. There are scientific papers on gratitude—a paper from 2010^[4] reports on an existing body of research that says there’s an association between gratitude practice and increased well-being.

Gratitude means appreciating the good things in your life. I can already hear your inner neurotic protest that there isn’t much to be grateful for in your life. However, speaking from experience, the reason it’s initially difficult to practice gratitude is that it’s a skill you need to learn.

One of the best purchases I’ve made in recent times was a dedicated daily gratitude journal from Amazon entitled “Start With Gratitude.” The beauty of this journal is that it helps you improve at practicing gratitude. It features tons of prompts and ideas that help you think of things to be grateful for. For the neurotic whose mind tends to veer towards pessimism and negativity, I can’t recommend a journal like this enough.

Try SSRIs

The most prevalent hypothesis for why depression occurs is that serotonin deficiency is the cause. The result of this hypothesis has been the development of SSRI medications. SSRIs like Prozac increase the levels of serotonin in the brain, and they are also prescribed for anxiety disorders.

In our post-truth world, some skeptics and conspiracy theorists like to spread the idea that Big Pharma only wants to exploit people and that SSRIs don’t actually do much. Most meta-analyses have found that SSRIs^[5] do statistically work better than placebo.

I am no expert in neurochemistry or neurophysiology, but suffice to say that I think the brain is so complex that we don’t actually know precisely how SSRIs work. We just know that they seem to work quite well for many people.

One very interesting paper from 2008^[6] postulated that the change in depression or anxiety from taking SSRIs is due to a reduction in neuroticism. The study followed 93 outpatients suffering from major depressive episodes. The conclusion was that “any treatment effect of SSRIs occurs through neuroticism reduction.”

Whether you want to take SSRIs is a personal decision. I am just presenting some findings from my own interest in this topic. I believe they’re worth a six-week trial run to see whether you notice any reduction in the severity and frequency of your neurotic thoughts and feelings. Always discuss these matters with your doctor, though.

Explore Psychedelics

Psychedelics are fascinating chemicals. Tons of research on their therapeutic capabilities was conducted in the 1950s and 1960s until they were outlawed and disregarded in scientific circles for 40 years. In the last 5 to 10 years, psychedelic research has experienced a rebirth, with institutions such as The Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit leading the way.

A study published in 2016 on psilocybin mushrooms given to cancer patients^[7] found substantial reductions in depressed moods and feelings of anxiety. I don’t know about you, but receiving a diagnosis of cancer sounds like a recipe for anybody to become more neurotic.

A relatively recent 2018 paper examined the effects of psilocybin on personality structure^[8]. The results were that people who took psilocybin became less neurotic and more outgoing.

Is the solution for reducing neuroticism to go out and take psychedelic chemicals that remain illegal in many parts of the world? I’m not sure. Set and setting are both incredibly important when experimenting with what are some powerful, reality-altering chemicals. Used safely, in a clinical setting, I think the answer is an unequivocal yes. But that likely involves registering for a clinical trial.

I couldn’t possibly recommend psychedelics in anything but a clinical setting, so I don’t advise anyone whether neurotic or not to take these substances outside a professional environment.

Personally, psychedelic exploration for the purpose of understanding myself deeper and getting to the heart of my neuroticism is something I am passionate about. If you want to further research psychedelics, I’ve picked out my favourite six best books on psychedelics.

Therapy

A really interesting meta-analysis of psychotherapy in 2017 found strong evidence that therapeutic interventions such as CBT or exposure therapy can alter personality traits^[9]. The authors of the paper specifically mention neurotic traits as susceptible to being reduced by therapy.

The type of therapy doesn’t seem to matter as much as engaging with the therapy and completing a full-course, which is typically 12 weeks in the case of CBT.

Is There an Upside to Neuroticism?

With all of the negative impacts of neuroticism in mind, it’s natural to wonder why this trait exists at all. Is there any upside to one’s neuroticism?

Pursuing a scientific line of thought, it’s clear there must be an evolutionary benefit to neuroticism. People who are neurotic tend to fear the worst outcomes and have high situational awareness. It’s easy to see how this can be beneficial—think wearing a seatbelt all the time when in a car or taking care of a toddler and ensuring they don’t put anything small in their mouths that they can choke on.

Because neurotic people see danger everywhere, they are likelier to take steps to prevent that danger. Aside from the examples above, a person with high neuroticism is probably likelier than average to build up a decent pension pot so they can avoid the danger of not having money to eat during retirement.

So, neuroticism can absolutely be a positive thing. My opinion is that it’s about balance. People like myself who score highly in neuroticism need to intervene and reduce that neuroticism using methods that have science-backed evidence behind them.

I hope any neurotic person reading this article has gained something of value from it. Please comment below if you have any thoughts. Thanks for reading.

Resources/citations

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471247/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3191267/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2816466/

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3010965/

[5] https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-016-1173-2

[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18384882/

[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5367557/

[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6220878/

[9] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-00079-001

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When taken at face value, it’s no major surprise that we’re so dismissive of religion, particularly those of the Abrahamic variety. The apparent existence of some all-powerful deity that will either save us and let us into paradise/heaven or send us to hell when we die doesn’t exactly seem plausible.

Therefore, it seems folly to live our lives in accordance with some shaky doctrine that sets our moral codes. Nor does it seem comprehensible to a rational educated mind that people have waged and continue to wage wars over these beliefs.

The Perennial Philosophy

With that said, an overlooked aspect of religion is its use as a set of symbols for realizing greater truths about the nature of existence. In his exquisite 1946 book, The Perennial Philosophy, English writer Aldous Huxley elucidated what he felt was the common truth behind every religion.

According to Huxley, the perennial philosophy—the single metaphysical truth that ties together religions as disparate as Taoism and Islam—is nothing other than the realization of man’s true nature as equivalent to the nature of divine Reality. You can substitute divine Reality for Tao, nature, Brahman, God, Logos, or whatever term you deem suitable.

Huxley goes as far as saying that the ultimate reason for human existence is to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Coming to this realization, however, is no mean feat. We, humans, have a proclivity towards ego-centered desires that is incredibly hard to shake. As the Buddha said in his Four Noble Truths, the cause of suffering is selfish craving.

The people who have grasped the truth of the perennial philosophy have been so few in number that they’ve taken on the mantle of certain titles, whether that be Buddha (awakened one), sage, prophet, or saint.

According to Huxley, knowledge of the truth pointed at by many religions can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the “thou” from the “That”. (In reference to that old Sanskrit phrase, Tat Tvam Asi: thou art that.)

In fact, exponents of the perennial philosophy, when forming some of the teachings of the world’s religions, have insisted that man’s obsession with being a separate self is the most formidable obstacle in knowing God.

My Thoughts on the Perennial Philosophy

As an agnostic, The Perennial Philosophy was a profound book that definitely caused me to view religion in a different light. My agnosticism tends to veer towards taking materialism as the ultimate truth, but I’ve always had a nagging feeling that this might not be the case. Hence my openness to ideas such as those espoused in Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and other non-scientific pursuits of truth.

As an aside, if something is non-scientific, that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid or real. Science is only concerned with systematically studying phenomena in the physical world through observation and experiment. What can science ever truly know about abstract, subjective feelings that arise within consciousness like love and empathy? You might come up with an incredibly detailed set of metrics to measure how much love someone feels, but the metrics and their measurements aren’t the same things as the feeling of love.

This is why we all need to become scientists of our own minds and consciousness if we are to really get the full picture about the nature of who we are and how we relate to the universe. Self-inquiry and meditation, both ancient methods arising from a time before the Scientific Revolution, essentially ask us to conduct experiments on our own consciousness.

I think it’s easy to shit on most religions when we take their teachings at face value (perhaps with the exceptions of some Oriental religions). We forget that words are symbols and that many religious teachings were meant to be taken as analogies rather than literal truths. Sadly, the priests, rabbis, popes, bishops, imams etc all forget the analogical nature of religion too.

With regards to me attaining the realization of my own being as equivalent to the divine or the Tao, well, I have a strong sense of identity as a separate self and I’m very attached to all the egoic manifestations of that separate self: my love of football, my anxiety, my enjoyment of spicy food, hell, even my enjoyment of books about the nature of reality!

I feel like realizing the type of mysticism Huxley talks about in his book is something quite beyond me at this point in time.

The intellectual and spiritual appeal of this perennial philosophy is undeniably strong, though. How beautiful it would be if this feeling of separation from other beings and from the universe itself was ultimately an illusion. How nice it would be to let go of the fear of death in the knowledge that dying is simply walking home, to paraphrase Ram Dass.

Meditation and Psychedelia as Ego-Tamers

The chasm between the appeal of this perennial philosophy and my own identity as a separate self is too large right now but I am open to the possibility of it narrowing. I am too absorbed in the details and problems of my ego-driven existence to even want to part with that identity, despite the suffering it often causes. It’s like I want to realize this perennial truth, but I don’t want to let go of who I think I am.

Even a self-centered Average Joe like me has had glimpses of that transcendental selflessness that is hinted at by the perennial philosophy. While meditating deeply, I’ve sporadically had experiences in which there was no “me” as a separate self at all. There was just consciousness.

I have never taken psychedelics, but I have researched them extensively. And if I’ve learned anything from my research, it’s that a high enough dose of the right psychedelic is like strapping yourself to a rocket that launches you away from your ego identity, whether you want to be launched or not.

Ultimately, I believe Huxley himself felt similar to me. He was a smart and open-minded person and he was attracted by the perennial philosophy but perhaps too stuck to his identity as a giant of the world of literature.

This ego attachment was, I would hazard a guess, a large part of what Huxley tried to overcome when he took mescaline and detailed his experiences with such vividness, clarity, and poetry in the Doors of Perception.

I fully intend one day to take a large enough dose of psychedelics so as to temporarily abandon my identity as a separate self and see where it takes me; whether I can glimpse the perennial philosophy.

Even a glimpse of truth is better than never seeing things as they really are.

The post Does The Perennial Philosophy Reveal the True Purpose of Religion? appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

Dear reader,

I don’t know what year it’ll be when you read this letter, but I hope it’s at a point in which the COVID-19 ‘s destructive effects have been quelled.

Before going on to the body of this letter, if there’s anything good to come from the global coronavirus outbreak, I hope it’s the society-wide recognition that science is paramount.

If this virus eventually succumbs to its human hosts, it will have done so thanks to science. I ardently hope that populist conspiracy theories about 5G don’t gain any more traction than they currently are at the time of writing.

With that said, what was it like to live during the coronavirus pandemic? I will proceed with the rest of this letter by highlighting some of the lessons I believe we’ve all learned.

Lesson #1: Technology is a Blessing

Technology has been getting a bad rep lately in productivity circuits. We’re constantly reminded about the dangers of social media and the problems of too much screen time. These are valid concerns, but technology does not deserve its bad rep.

The first truth you should know about this pandemic is that it served as a great reminder of how much of a blessing technology is in our lives.

Whether reading Buddhism books on a Kindle to deal with stress, playing video games, watching Netflix, browsing the news headlines online, or having a Zoom video call with friends, many of the most accessible ways to keep ourselves occupied during these worrying times have been enabled by technological progress.

Lesson #2: We Need to Love Nature, Not Conquer It

No, this is not some hippy-dippy flowery crap inspired by taking psychedelics. The truth is that mankind’s modern religion of Inevitable Progress leads us to attempt to conquer nature in the pursuit of achieving ill-considered, temporal ends.

We eat animals that shouldn’t be eaten and we keep very different beings confined in small enclosures, ready for consumption because of our greed.

Ancient wisdom, from the Greeks to the Taoists, regarded nature as something to live in accordance with rather than bend to our will.

The Greeks believed that a hubristic lack of respect towards Logos, or nature, would be punished by an avenging nemesis. We certainly got our nemesis with COVID-19.

Lesson #3: Boredom is Valuable

With all the available forms of entertainment during this pandemic, powered mostly by technology, there’s still been plenty of boredom. Not as much boredom as there would’ve been if this happened 50 years ago, but still.

I feel like boredom is something that is underappreciated. The value of boredom is that it causes us to take stock of our lives and our values and adjust things accordingly.

Great insights and creativity can come from boredom as can the pursuit of new hobbies. Career changes are made possible by boredom too.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the daily grind of life that we don’t take a moment to question what we’re doing and where we are going. I hope more people give themselves the space to be bored after this pandemic because I think it’s essential in life.

Lesson #4: Humans Are Remarkably Resilient

I am, by nature, quite an anxious person who worries a lot about future events and ruminates about past mistakes. If you told me 6 months ago that a global pandemic would wreak havoc upon society within the next few months, I probably would’ve had a panic attack.

A strange thing happens though when you actually live through this type of situation: you get used to it. Despite the huge shift in how we live our lives, I’ve noticed my anxiety has paradoxically lessened.

Observing people around me, I’ve been both impressed and surprised with the resilience we’re all showing. Having to stay at home and keep contact with others to a minimum is hardly wartime, but it’s still a huge and rapid shift in how we live. We’ve (mostly) coped admirably.

Lesson #5: The Present Moment is Paramount

When people like Alan Watts or Ram Dass spoke about the present moment and its importance, I tend to intellectually agree with what they were saying rather than experientially knowing it.

However, I believe we’ve all learned just how fragile and delicate the balance of life is during this pandemic. And correspondingly, we can all see the reality of how important the present moment is. I delved further in another post on how coronavirus helps us deal with our mortality.

The present is where life happens. And life can be taken from us in a flash, so it makes no sense not to try and pay attention to life as it happens.

Whether you’re watching television, brushing your teeth, learning a song on the guitar, or playing with your child, own every moment and be there for it.

That’s what I can muster up at the moment, as I sit here reflecting about these strange times. I hope some of these lessons will stick.

Yours sincerely,

Ronan

The post A Letter to Future Generations About Living During the Coronvavirus Pandemic appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

Literal and Symbolic Immortality

According to Ernest Becker, all human activity is driven largely by unconscious efforts to deny and transcend mortality. He set this idea out in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. I’ve written about this book in another post on how the coronavirus pandemic gives us the chance to make peace with death.

Elaborating on Becker’s idea, the authors of the 2015 book,  The Worm At The Core, say that humans try to achieve immortality in two main ways:

1. Literal immortality—any efforts to beliefs that we can physically overcome our annihilation through scientific efforts to stop ageing and prevent death or religious beliefs in an eternal soul that doesn’t die with the body.
2. Symbolic immortality—efforts to leave an enduring mark on the world that persists long after our own physical death.

It is with the second of these attempts to transcend mortality that this post concerns itself. Having kids enables us to continue living through our offspring symbolically. This symbolic immortality plays a huge role in every single person’s choice to have children.

Of course, not all children are born in circumstances in which there was a conscious decision made to have kids. But for those that make the choice in advance of conceiving a child, transcending death is probably the most significant and largely unconscious factor in doing so.

The most obvious way we continue living through our children is that their DNA is 50% ours. We can better come to peace with the finality of our own lives when we know that a part of us will continue physically by their very existence.

A more subtle yet equally powerful means of achieving symbolic immortality is that our kids live on through taking on our mannerisms, behavioral quirks, and personality attributes. Dads feel proud as punch when they note their kids have a particular affinity for football, not just because of the shared enjoyment. They also feel all warm inside because they see concrete evidence that a part of who they define themselves to be will live on through their offspring.

Is Having Kids Selfish?

Given the influence of our own mortal fears on having kids, the old debate inevitably arises as to whether having kids is selfish or not. Viewed through the lens of an attempt to achieve symbolic immortality, then yes, having kids is a selfish decision. You can’t come to any other conclusion if you’re honest with yourself. And I say that as someone who has a one-year-old daughter.

However, while the decision to have kids might ultimately be a selfish one, it takes enormous selflessness to raise a kid. Conceiving and delivering a child does not make a good parent. (Although I doff my imaginary cap to all mothers who go through the process of childbirth.)

It takes huge self-sacrifice for both mother and father to properly nurture their child so that they flourish and develop into independent, well-mannered, educated adults. Hectic social lives are not possible unless you’re privileged enough to afford childcare, hobbies are halted or dramatically reduced; career progression is stymied for one parent; usually the mother but not always.

To say that having kids is selfish is not to say that having kids is immoral. This distinction comes down to accepting selfishness in the face of mortal fear as an intrinsic part of the human psyche. The desire to beat death is inside all of us, and it doesn’t make us bad people that we want ourselves to continue in some way after our death.

What makes bad people is having kids and then being a shitty parent to them or not helping to raise them at all.

Human Selfishness and Context

Philosophy, from Plato’s Republic to John Locke, has argued that human beings have an inherent capacity for selfishness. As you can probably see from the above discussion, context is key. It’s typically a self-serving decision to have children, albeit one influenced heavily by the mortal fears everyone faces. But it’s a selfless act to raise your kids properly.

Not everyone has kids, of course. Many people don’t ever want to have children. Some are unable to conceive. In one way or another, though, everyone tries to achieve symbolic immortality.

Whether through military or political action, economic or scientific achievements, athletic feats, or artistic prowess, history is littered with examples of people searching for symbolic immortality in ways other than having kids.

Most of us harbour dreams growing up of becoming famous actors, musicians, football players. Modern examples of ordinary people seeking fame through YouTube channels, going viral online, and reality television shows are so plentiful, they need no further elaboration other than to say, the desire to become famous is itself a manifestation of a desire for immortality. For people to know who we are and speak about us after our deaths.

Ultimately, all humans are selfish in the context of contemplating our own deaths. But selfishness in that context is completely understandable. If the big decisions we make in life are ultimately motivated by selfishness, we can still imbue the execution of those decisions with altruism. Our scientific achievements benefit humanity, our athletic prowess entertains people, our books thrill and delight, our kids learn from us how to conduct themselves in the world.

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