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A quick review of the receptors that mediate the effects of cannabinoids Cannabis or marihuana is one of the oldest known drugs. Its use goes back to the dawn of time. The cannabis plant has more than a hundred psychoactive compounds besides delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the most potent of them. Another important cannabinoids are cannabidiol (CBD), cannabinol (CBN) and cannabigerol (CBG) (Pertwee, 2008). Cannabinoid receptors Cannabinoids bind to three receptors that mediate their effects: CB1, CB2 and GPR55. All three are G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). G proteins are proteins that serve to carry signals inside the cells. They are formed by three subunits, α, β and γ. Normally, the G protein is attached to the GPCR in the inside of the cell membrane. When the GPCR binds its neurotransmitter, the G protein dissociates, with the α and the βγ subunits going separate ways to carry signals inside the cell. There are different G proteins. They have the same βγ subunits but different α subunits. Each α subunit activates a different second messenger system. Like the opioid receptors, CB1 and CB2 act through the inhibitory αi G proteins, which decrease the synthesis of the second messenger cyclic AMP (cAMP). In neurons, this leads to a decrease in the firing of action potentials and a decrease in neurotransmitter release. CB1 receptors mediate most of the psychoactive effects of THC: analgesia, euphoria and sometimes paranoia. It is the most abundant GPCR in the brain, being found in most brain regions. CB2 receptors were initially thought to exist only in non-brain tissues, like immune cells. However, more recently it was found in the brain, where it modulates the actions of CB1. They have important functions in the immune system and other organs of the body. GPR55 was an ‘orphan’ receptor, that is, a receptor whose gene was found first, before its ligand was known (Lauckner et al., 2008). GPR stands for ‘G protein-coupled receptor’. It signals through Gq and G12 proteins, releasing calcium from intracellular stores and inhibiting M current potassium channels (Lauckner et al., 2008). All that means that it excites neurons, instead of inhibiting them like CB1 and CB2 receptors. GPR119 and GPR18 are other orphan receptors that may also be cannabinoid receptors. TRPV1 (the capsaicin receptor), TRPV2 and TRPV3 are other receptors that can be activated by cannabinoids and endocannabinoids (Santha et al., 2010). They act as heat sensors in the skin, with TRPV1 detecting burning temperatures and TRPV2 and TRPV3 detecting milder temperatures. But they are also present in neurons in the central nervous system, playing roles still not well understood. CB1 and CB2 agonists There are many synthetic compounds that are agonists of CB1 and CB2 receptors (Patel and Hillard, 2006; Bow and Rimoldi, 2016). WIN 55,212-2 is one of the oldest of these compounds. It is an agonist of both CB1 and CB2 receptors. Arachidonyl-2'-chloroethylamide (ACEA) is a selective agonist of CB1 receptors. CB 65, HU 308 and JWH 133 are selective agonists of CB2 receptors. Abnormal-cannabidiol, ML 184 and O-1602 are selective agonists of GPR55 (Ross, 2009). These compounds are important tools for discriminating the effects of these three receptors. Constitutive activity of CB1 and CB2 receptors Like the µ-opioid receptor, CB1 and CB2 receptors have constitutive activity. This means that they have a little bit of activity, even when they do not bind an agonist, activating their associated G proteins to a certain extent. Therefore, there are compounds that act as inverse agonists of these receptors, that is, not only they inhibit the effect of the agonists, but are also able to inhibit the constitutive activity. Most of the substances identified as CB1 receptors antagonist, like rimonabant (or SR 141716A), AM 251 and AM 281, are in fact inverse agonists. AM 630 and GP 1a are inverse agonists of CB2 receptors. What is important about these compounds is that scientists have the ability to selectively block each one of the three cannabinoid receptors in order to determine how they contribute to the effects of THC, CBD and the endocannabinoids. However, since these compounds are inverse agonists, they would also block the constitutive activity that CB1 and CB2 receptors may have in the absence of any agonist. References Bow EW, Rimoldi JM (2016) The Structure-Function Relationships of Classical Cannabinoids: CB1/CB2 Modulation. Perspect Medicin Chem 8:17-39. Lauckner JE, Jensen JB, Chen HY, Lu HC, Hille B, Mackie K (2008) GPR55 is a cannabinoid receptor that increases intracellular calcium and inhibits M current. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 105:2699-2704. Patel S, Hillard CJ (2006) Pharmacological evaluation of cannabinoid receptor ligands in a mouse model of anxiety: further evidence for an anxiolytic role for endogenous cannabinoid signaling. J Pharmacol Exp Ther 318:304-311. Pertwee RG (2008) The diverse CB1 and CB2 receptor pharmacology of three plant cannabinoids: delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol, cannabidiol and delta9-tetrahydrocannabivarin. Br J Pharmacol 153:199-215. Ross RA (2009) The enigmatic pharmacology of GPR55. Trends Pharmacol Sci 30:156-163. Santha P, Jenes A, Somogyi C, Nagy I (2010) The endogenous cannabinoid anandamide inhibits transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 receptor-mediated currents in rat cultured primary sensory neurons. Acta Physiol Hung 97:149-158.

Market forces induce the over-exploitation of common resources The basic problems of capitalism This is the second in a series of articles about the fundamental problems of capitalism. These problems are intrinsic to the nature of capitalism. They cannot be solved by market forces. These problems are: Perverse incentives. The tragedy of the commons. Unequal wealth distribution. Exploitation of workers. Exploitation of consumers. The merging of corporations leading to monopolies. The political influence of the corporations. Conservatives and libertarians argue that these problems can be solved by the raw market forces of capitalism: the invisible hand. I want to analyze these problems, one by one, to see if this is true. Sheep pastures A small village of shepherds has pastures in common. Since the shepherds are highly individualistic and greedy, they all try to raise more sheep than their neighbors. As the result, the pastures are overgrazed and the sheep starve. The shepherds are ruined. This actually happened in the Sierra Nevada of California. Big flocks of sheep were brought in to graze on the rich meadows of the sierras. They promptly destroyed them, causing the native bighorn sheep and deer to starve and wreaking havoc on the entire ecosystem. The shepherds just moved the sheep to other meadows, extending the damage. The government banned grazing sheep in the mountains, but the shepherds knew the intricate geography of these high mountains and refused to leave. Ultimately, the army had to be brought in to dislodge them. But, by then, irreparable damage was done to this fragile ecosystem. One of the shepherds was John Muir. Witnessing the damage done by the sheep started his environmental activism. [Source: The High Sierra: Peaks - Passes - Trails, by RJ Secor.] These are textbook examples of an economic problem called the tragedy of the commons. When a certain resource is held as a community property, greed and competition drive individuals to disregard the common good and use as much of the resource as they can. Whoever wants to take care of the common good makes less profit, while cheaters benefit. Over time, competition drives those that try to take care of the common good out of business, in favor of the exploiters. The cod fishery of the North Atlantic Here is another example. There used to be an enormous cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic. Fishermen from Spain, France and Portugal discovered it and sailed across the Atlantic to get the fish. To keep the fish from rotting during the long traverse back, they salted it. To this day, salted cod is a traditional dish in Spain and Portugal. Salted cod kept so well that it was used to feed the armies during the endless European wars. The North Atlantic cod fishery lasted until the 20th century, when it collapsed. A similar threat exists for fish in international waters, where fisheries cannot be regulated. Even the coastal fisheries of poor countries get poached by factory fishing boats from rich countries. Planet Earth Ultimately, there is one resource common to all Humanity: planet Earth. The current climate crisis shows that the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism will exploit it until its destruction. When it comes to the health of the planet, nations have to join forces to create laws to regulate the exploitation of oceans, the composition of the atmosphere, and other key systems for the well-being of the planet. An international system able to enforce these laws against pariah states is necessary. Conclusion There is no way that market forces can self-regulate to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Consumers are too uninformed, powerless and poorly organized to do anything about it. Any corporation that tries to take care of the commons will lose money. Eventually, it will be taken over by corporations dedicated to mindless exploitation. As in the example with the shepherds, the ultimate disappearance of the common resource will mean the ruin of the corporations. Unfortunately, modern corporations have a limited time outlook. It’s years, even months. Plans for the future are limited by the human lifespan. Few people care to do something when they will not live long enough to see the outcome of their efforts. And those idealistic few are certainly not the CEOs of big corporations. Unfortunately, changes in the environment occur over very long timeframes. A hundred years is an eye blink. Changes in global weather patterns usually take tens of thousands of years. We are forcing a global climate change on Earth in barely a hundred years. It’s way too fast for the biosphere of our planet to manage it. And yet, few of us will live long enough to see its full consequences. As it happened with the sheep in the California sierras, the only solution for the tragedy of the commons is for the State to use its power to regulate the use of common resources.

Breath play, sexual predators, mental conditions, switching, domestic discipline, and other topics debated in the BDSM community. Controversies and debates are good. That’s how we learn from each other and reach a consensus on the important matters. Most of today’s BDSM culture arose from past debates. However, there are still some unresolved issues. I list here 12 of them, trying to present both sides fairly and to withhold my own position. Each one of these issues deserves an article for itself. However, I think that is nice to have them all in one place to decide on their relative importance. I put those that I think are more controversial towards the top of the list. 1) How to fight predators in the BDSM community I put this one at the top because it is so controversial that is tearing some BDSM communities apart. Fetlife.com, the gathering site of millions of kinksters around the world, is routinely accused of not being tough enough on sex predators. Of enabling them. Of silencing victims. Is this a Trojan Horse used by radical feminists to keep attacking BDSM, after being defeated in the Feminist Sex Wars? Or are there conspiracies to protect some powerful people so that they can continue to prey on unsuspecting victims? Have some people been falsely accused of breaking consent and being predators? Or is the BDSM community too soft on sexual predators? 2) Is breath play safe? Proponents of breath play say that it is perfectly safe when done the right way. It induces an altered state of consciousness that is very pleasurable and different from that produced by drugs. Asphyxiation also increases enormously the intensity of orgasm. Opponents say that breath play is the most life-threatening BDSM activity, by far. There is no really safe way to do it because it is impossible to predict how the cardiovascular system is going to react. Repeated asphyxia may cause hidden brain damage. The pleasure it provides can be reached by other means, and it is certainly not worth the risk. 3) SSC or RACK? SSC - safe, sane and consensual - is the old standard, created in 1983 to define the limits between ethical BDSM and abuse. It is defended as the clearer and safer standard. These are the best criteria to present to the vanilla society. If things go wrong in a scene, do you want to tell a judge and jury that you were practicing “safe, sane and consensual” or “risk-aware consensual kink”? RACK - risk-aware consensual kink - was proposed later (1990s?) by people who thought that BDSM could never be totally safe or sane. ‘Safe and sane’ provided an excuse to be judgmental about some of the more extreme BDSM practices. It is up to the participants to inform themselves and decide what risks they are will to take, i.e., be “risk-aware”. Informed consent should be the main, and perhaps the only, concern. 4) Should people with mental problems practice BDSM? What do we exactly mean by ‘sane’ in SSC? It is usually understood as being aware of the potential psychological trauma that can be caused by BDSM. But there are people who are more psychologically vulnerable. And there are those who argue that they should not play in the bottom or submissive roles, because this would be inherently unsafe for them. At the very least, they should disclose their mental problems to their scene partners. And aren’t people with mental problems disqualified to play as tops or dominants? On the other hand, isn’t excluding neurodivergent people from the BDSM community discriminatory and ableist? It is the prerogative of each person to decide what is safe for them. Besides, there are a multitude of mental diseases. If we started judging people because of that, we may end up excluding those that are aware of them and taking care of themselves with medication or therapy, while accepting those in denial about their mental problems. 5) Is BDSM therapeutic? A lot of neurodivergent people who practice BDSM will tell you that, in fact, BDSM is good for them and helps them deal with their problems. BDSM can also help with chronic pain by teaching people emotionally healthy ways to deal with pain. However, other bristle at the idea that BDSM can be therapeutic. ‘BDSM is not therapy!’ they say. Shouldn’t therapy be left to qualified psychologists? Should tops walk into a minefield of hidden traumas in their bottoms? 6) Drug use in BDSM There is a consensus that people should not be on drugs during a BDSM scene. Dominants cannot make safe decisions if they are high. Submissives cannot give full consent or use a safeword if they are on drugs. However, I suspect that there is a bit of hypocrisy in this. That, in reality, there are people who use drugs in BDSM scenes. Shouldn’t this be just another decision that people are allowed to make after informing themselves? We are just awakening from a lot of misinformation spread by the government during the War on Drugs. President Nixon imposed a classification of drug risks based on his political ideas, because he didn’t like “those hippies”. In doing that, he destroyed the therapeutic potential of cannabis and psychotropic substances, which was being investigated in the 60s and is back into consideration today. Not all drugs are the same. On the one hand, the USA has been having an opioid epidemic for two decades that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. However, it was not started by “those hippies”, but by the greed of Purdue Pharma and the wrongdoing of many American doctors that prescribed their product, OxyContin, without checking is addictive potential. The danger of opioid abuse in the BDSM community is very small. On the other hand, the legalization of cannabis in most of the USA has made us aware that it is not as dangerous as we were told. Famous podcaster Dan Savage often recommends cannabis to deal with sexual problems. It is certainly healthier than the long-held tradition of getting drunk to ease sexual inhibitions during sex. The argument that submissives shouldn't take drugs because it prevents them from consenting and using the safeword is weakened by the fact that endorphins released during a BDSM scene are just as potent as any opiate. When they enter the sub space, submissives become just as unable to make decisions and use a safeword as if they were high. Taking a little cannabis to relax and overcome inhibitions produces a much less altered state of mind. Today, many people take micro-doses of cannabis and psychotropics like Psilocybe mushrooms and LSD in their daily life. Then again, drugs can incapacitate you from entering the submission space. Or create unpredictable problems by interacting with it. Maybe is time to have an honest conversation about this? 7) Is BDSM a sexual orientation? The politically correct belief is that homosexuality is from birth and unchangeable. People are attracted to people of the same gender because they are born that way. But people who like spankings, bondage or submission, somehow, picked those sexual tastes later in life. Never mind that a lot of BDSMers had kinky fantasies early in their childhood. We cannot even suggest that children can be sexual, let alone be perverts! Maybe the problem is that ‘sexual orientation’ are words that convey a lot of political privilege these days. If BDSM was a sexual orientation, then we would have the same right not to be discriminated against that gays and lesbians have. And they would have to stop criminalizing BDSM, as still happens in many countries where gay sex has been legal for a long, long time. 8) Is domestic discipline part of BDSM? Most people who practice domestic discipline see themselves as different from BDSMers. They dislike the fetish clothes, the special furniture, the implements and the attitude of BDSM. They wear normal clothes and don’t go to kinky parties. They just have a person who is in charge, some rules that need to be followed, and punishments when those rules are broken. In particular, people who practice Christian domestic discipline are very adamant that they are not like ‘those perverts’. They are just following the will of God, clearly explained in the Bible, that a wife must obey and be disciplined by her husband. People into BDSM just shrug and say: “You have similar fantasies than us, just a different style. The basics are the same: submission and spankings. But it’s okay if you want to feel special. Everybody does.” 9) Are switches authentic dominants and submissives? Switches, in case you didn’t know, are people who like to change roles between dominant and submissive, or between top and bottom. They are BDSM sluts who want to have their cake and eat it, too. They don’t care if they are tops or bottoms, as long as somebody gets spanked. There always has been an anti-switch attitude in the BDSM community. Some people think that being dominant or submissive is something essential to their personality, so that they could never be in the opposite role. Which is fine. The unspoken corollary, however, is that switches do not have that essence, so when they are dominants or submissives, they are faking it. On the other hand, there are those who say that experiencing BDSM from both sides makes it possible to truly empathize with your partner. You know exactly how they feel. And, to truly master an implement like a cane or a whip, you need to know what it feels like. 10) Is BDSM a game or a lifestyle? This is an old debate of the 90s that seems to have largely died off. However, some of its undercurrents still persist. Lifestylers look down on ‘gamers’ as unauthentic. They feel that being dominant or submissive is something essential to their personalities, not an outfit that they put on and take off. BDSM is something that completely permeates their life, an attitude that is always present. They don’t have ‘roles’. They do not ‘play’. They do not have ‘scenes’. Most of us see BDSM as a game. Scenes that we play for a time, and then we go back to our egalitarian roles. Being dominant or submissive may be something that we feel deeply, but it is a role that we only adopt in appropriate times. And there is nothing wrong with that. 11) Is kink different from BDSM? It seems that all BDSM is kink, but not all kink is BDSM. However, it is not clear what are those kinky activities beside BDSM. Some people say that anal sex and even oral sex are kink. Others say that just wearing sexy clothes like leather or rubber is kinky. Have BDSM looks, like wearing a collar, come into fashion to the detriment of authentic BDSM? 12) Who is really in control, the submissive or the dominant? Some people say that the submissive is the one really in control in a BDSM scene, because negotiations, limits, and having a safeword determine that the scene really plays to their fantasies. Other people say that the dominant is, and should be, in control. He starts with the fantasies and desires of the submissive and gradually folds them to his/her will. Yet other people say that both the dominant and the submissive are in service to the scene, which is something beautiful that they create together and ends up enveloping them.

A fundamental problem of Capitalism that cannot be solved by market forces Has the Left lost its way? The workers and the farmers that used to form the core of the Left are increasingly voting conservative. In the United States, they support Donald Trump and his acolytes in the Republican Party. In Europe, they vote for the National Rally in France, Vox in Spain and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy. We cannot afford to lose any more elections. There is too much at stake. Perhaps the solution is for progressives to stop emphasizing identity politics, which are divisive and turn off a large part of the voters. We need to go back to the core issues that concern the poor and the middle class. The main issues are capitalism and wealth inequality. Modern thinkers like Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari argue that capitalism and democracy are intrinsically linked. To a certain extent, I think they are correct. Owning property, choosing your job and creating enterprises are important aspects of individual freedom. However, capitalism has a number of fundamental problems that cause it to work against the common interests of society. This is the first in a series of articles listing these fundamental problems. I will show that these problems are intrinsic to the nature of capitalism, so they cannot be solved by market forces alone. These problems are: Perverse incentives. The tragedy of the commons. Unequal wealth distribution. Exploitation of workers. Exploitation of consumers. The merging of corporations leading to monopolies. The political influence of the corporations. In the final articles, I will argue that solving these problems needs the intervention of the State, which should be democratically controlled, independent of the wealthy and strong enough to reign in the corporations. I will also present historic evidence that European-style socialism is the best formula to achieve this. Perverse Incentives A perverse incentive is when a company can make money by doing something that is against the common good. Wikipedia gives some great examples of perverse incentives: The British government in colonial India offered a reward for death cobras in Delhi. Some enterprising people started breeding cobras to sell them to the government. Similarly, in Hanoi, Vietnam, a reward was offered for rat tails to eliminate these pests. People cut the tails of rats and released them into the sewers to make sure that they had more rats to continue their business. However, most of the perverse incentives listed by Wikipedia involve well-intended government rules backfiring one way But not all perverse incentives are created by governments making stupid decisions. The Opioid Epidemic in the United States Purdue Pharma rewarded its sales people when they convinced doctors to prescribe their new pain medication, OxyContin. OxyContin is a pill that releases the potent opioid oxycodone slowly to lengthen its analgesic effects. Although OxyContin was advertised as a non-addictive alternative to morphine, it is, in fact, highly addictive. Moreover, opioids taken regularly increase chronic pain, a phenomenon known as opioid-induced hyperalgesia. The result was that hundreds of thousands of Americans got addicted to opioids by following their doctor’s prescriptions. Soon, they started to die. Driven by their endless pain and their addiction, they overdosed on OxyContin or turned to street drugs like heroin or fentanyl when their doctor refused to prescribe them more opioids. This is known as the Opioid Epidemic in the United States, which started in the 1990s and is still ongoing. The Sackler family, owner of Purdue Pharma, made millions of dollars selling OxyContin. Protected by an army of lawyers, they were able to avoid jail and kept most of their fortune. [Source: Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe.] Looking for alternatives to opioids to cure chronic pain To solve this problem, the National Institutes of Health created the HEAL Initiative, which provides funding for researchers who look for alternatives to opioids as analgesics. I participated in the HEAL Initiative as a grant reviewer. Also, my work as a scientist was directed towards finding alternatives to opioids to alleviate pain. My ambitious goal was to find a cure for chronic pain. I dreamed about a pill that, once taken, would make chronic pain go away, so that people with this disease wouldn’t need to take any drugs anymore. Of course, my small lab would not be able to achieve this hefty objective, but it would be possible with the joint work of pain neuroscientists like me. In my last two papers, we identified two classes of compounds that show promise in an animal model of chronic pain: neurokinin 1 receptor antagonists (Chen and Marvizon, 2020a, BioRxiv) and Src kinase inhibitors (Chen and Marvizon, 2020b, BioRxiv). Unfortunately, I had trouble getting grants to continue this project. Then Covid-19 hit, and I had to close my lab and retire. The perverse incentive not to find cures for chronic pain But also came to the realization that, even if scientists achieved the goal of finding a cure for chronic pain, it would not be passed on to patients. Because of a perverse incentive. The only way to get new medication to the public is to have a pharmaceutical company develop it, test it in animals, and take it through expensive clinical trials. But pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars selling analgesic drugs to people with chronic pain. Not just opioids like OxyContin and Tramadol, and opioid combinations like Vicodin, but also NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory) like ibuprofen and calcium channel blockers like pregabalin and gabapentin. If somebody were to develop a medicament to cure chronic pain, it would wipe out this immense profit. No matter how high a price you put on that cure, it couldn’t possibly make up for lost revenue on pain palliatives. Since pharmaceutical companies control the development of any new drug, they can easily prevent these cures from being found, just by doing nothing. I wrote a more in-depth explanation of this problem in my article Big Pharma Will Not Cure Your Pain. Cures for other chronic diseases are also compromised It’s not just pain. The same thing can be said about other chronic diseases like anxiety and depression. They generate millions of dollars in palliatives that patients have to take every day, for the rest of their lives. Curing these diseases would represent a tremendous financial loss for big pharmaceutical corporations. As the scandal with Purdue Pharma and the American opioid epidemic shows, turning the development of new medication to for-profit pharmaceutical companies could prove to be a gigantic mistake. Perhaps drug development should be entrusted to the government and non-profit organizations, instead. Conclusion Perverse incentives are not limited to case in which government enacts the wrong kind of reward without considering unwanted consequences. They are embedded in many of the problems faced by society, like developing safe and efficacious new medication. The market forces of supply and demand often work contrary to the common good. For example, selling medicaments that get people addicted increases demand. And so is selling medication that alleviate the symptoms of a disease instead of curing it. In fact, cures are not good for business because they eliminate customers by turning patients into healthy people. The market operate in a Darwinian way. Suppose that a pharmaceutical company wants to do the right thing and develop a cure for a disease, even when it is not profitable. That company would make less profit than other companies that are guided solely by their self-interest. It would be outcompeted and eventually swallowed by the other companies. The problem is not bad companies like Purdue Pharma. The problem is the capitalist system itself because it is based on greed and not the common good. Only public vigilance and the strict control by the State can ensure that corporations work for the common good.

Prostitution is a service work that requires both empathy and strong emotional boundaries Do prostitutes hate their job? The belief that trading sex for money is degrading implies that the prostitute has to feel bad about it. Here the ideologue is trying to invade the prostitute’s mind to implant extraneous feelings into it. He believes that she has to violate some innate instinct to do this kind of work. He negates her agency by implying that she is not able to freely choose to do sex work. However, the testimony of many prostitutes is that they actually enjoy their work. Others have the same kind mix-feelings about their job that most workers have about employment that has nothing to do with sex. There are good parts and bad parts; good days and bad days. Even the most rewarding and prestigious jobs - like scientific research, in my case - involve endless hours of drudgery, fighting red tape, bureaucracy and mindless repetition. In fact, the most rewarding jobs are the ones that involve human contact. And you can’t deny that there is a lot of that in prostitution. Prostitution is a service job Like other service jobs, prostitution mainly involves a lot of human contact, not only physical but also emotional. There is much good in that. Far from it being perceived as a violation, it is rewarding to give something to others that makes them a bit happier. We humans are social animals. We thrive by helping and pleasuring others. Of course, a prostitute has to develop emotional mechanisms to protect herself from the psychological baggage of her clients. But, in that, hers is not different from other professions that expose you to human suffering, like being a medical doctor or a therapist. Here is how an escort describes her experience: “Escorting was a new environment with new social dynamics and incentives, and thus I found a new character emerge. I was there to please, and so my character compartmentalized my own preferences. I didn’t lay there actively hating the experience; I simply became someone who enjoyed it. If the experience was too hard to enjoy, I became someone who didn’t mind enduring it. I didn’t force myself to be authentic, but I actively looked for ways to express authenticity if I could without disrupting the character I was inhabiting. For many clients this was easy - I would often lay there feeling myself love them. Sometimes I cried with them. I let my heart move. To this day I feel like pieces of my soul lie with a few clients I’ve seen, and I’m happy for them to have it.” Escorting Was Good For Me, Aella, escort and blogger. If prostitutes feel bad, it’s not about actually doing their job, but because of the slut-shaming and marginalization that society heaps on them. However, modern sex-positive culture has given them the tools to identify these instruments of oppression and free themselves from them. Consequently, there are more and more sex workers that have come to appreciate their jobs and even speak highly of it. The myth that prostitutes secretly hate their clients Since prostitutes feel degraded and exploited by their work - argue the prohibitionists - they must hate their clients. They see sex is an intimate act that must be done with somebody you love. So, surely, doing it with somebody you have no intimacy with must lead to resentment. Therefore, while externally being all sugar and spice, internally the prostitute hates her clients. The other side of that coin is that the client deludes himself into believing that he has some kind of intimacy or connection with the prostitute, while in fact she despises him. Johns are dupes looking for love in all the wrong places. They are victims of their own desires. But none of this is true. Prostitutes have a whole range of feelings towards their job and their clients. Many have a professional relationship with their clients, similar to the provider-client relationship of other jobs that require intimacy, like psychotherapists or couple counselors. These professionals have to connect with their clients at an emotional level, but they also have to develop defense mechanisms to keep that connection from spilling over to their own emotional lives. Other jobs, like masseuse, physical therapist or sport trainer, require physical contact with the clients, which is often experienced as intimate. In all these professions, some kind of internal psychological barrier has to be developed between the emotions of the client and the emotional life of the professional. We can see that in the quote from Aella above. A psychotherapist cannot avoid interacting with his client as a human being, being empathetic to his emotions. On the other hand, it would not be healthy for him to take on the emotions of the client. He has to develop internal boundaries between his mental life and that of his clients. The same happens with prostitution. The prostitute knows how to get intimate with the client during her time with him. But she also knows how to let this intimacy walk out the door with the client when he leaves. “The structure of escorting protected this for me. I had to maintain really clear boundaries - I left on time, I didn’t make any special exceptions even for people I really genuinely liked, I didn’t give discounts. Blurring any boundaries would have triggered that anxiety, suddenly made it personal, and destroyed my ability to enjoy the experience with them.” Escorting Was Good For Me, Aella, escort and blogger. Sex work provides emotional support to the client Good prostitutes do not provide just sex. They listen and provide emotional support and validation. “Because ours, like it or not, is a very personal and tremendously human work. Sex may or may not be part of a service. But what takes place, in a very high percentage of cases, is an intimate and personal conversation. Customers usually want similar things, there are no differences in what human beings need. We are talking about affection, deference, attention, tenderness, respect and consideration.” Paula VIP, sex worker (translated from Spanish). Sometimes, the client does not even want sex. He may want to chat and have physical contact. This is especially true for clients who develop ongoing relationships with prostitutes, sometimes lasting many years. One type of relationship that is becoming more frequent these days is the Sugar Daddy, where the man provides ongoing financial support to the woman in exchange for regular sex and time together. The relationship may, or may not, be exclusive. It is not uncommon for the Sugar Daddy and the woman to fall in love with each other. How is this different from marrying for money? Copyright 2022 Hermes Solenzol.

The idea that prostitution degrades women is based in the belief that sex is sacred and money is bad Consent and personal autonomy Prostitution is trading sex for money in a consensual way. If it were non-consensual, then it would be sexual slavery, not prostitution. Radical feminists and anti-prostitution politicians secretly hate the word “consent”, because what they want is to impose their morality on other people. Which, of course, is non-consensual. The underlying ethical value here is personal autonomy. My body is mine to do with it what I want. However, this is not an absolute ethical principle. There are some occasions in which the State can impose certain things on me for the protection of the community. Like paying taxes or getting vaccinated. So, in the case of prostitution, is there a reason for the State to prohibit it? What is involved is the personal autonomy of two people: the prostitute and her client, who want to consensually engage in sex in exchange for money. This is a private, indeed intimate, transaction that should not concern the State. Just like any other instance in which two people choose to engage in consensual sex. The best way to fight exploitation In the previous article in this series, I have addressed the argument that the State should prohibit prostitution to avoid human trafficking. I argued that prostitution and human trafficking are entirely different things. Trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation could be fought more effectively if prostitution was legal, just like any other instance of labor exploitation. Non-exploited workers would be the first to point out the cases of sexual slavery because it represents a double threat to them: unfair competition and the danger that they could become sex slaves. Unions of prostitutes - like OTRAS in Spain - would be a place where sexually exploited women could seek help. Does prostitution degrade the prostitute? This would be for the prostitute to decide, just like we decide whether any other sex act is degrading. Chances are that, if the prostitute has freely decided this kind of work, that she doesn’t find that it detracts from her self-esteem. For many sex workers, converting sex into a professional activity comes after a personal quest about what sex means for them. Saying that prostitution degrades the prostitute is slut-shaming her. It’s an act of psychological violence not different from shaming gays, trans people or promiscuous women. It’s emotional violence done with the specific purpose of curtailing the sexual freedom of a person. Is prostitution degrading for all women? The reasoning gets more ideological when the degradation supposedly produced by prostitution is extended to all women. Saying this assumes that there is something sacred about sex that gets soiled when sex is not done in a socially approved way. Moreover, this soiling produced by sex somehow gets magically transmitted even to women that do not engage in prostitution. This is basically a purity argument, similar to what has been used by religions like Christianity or Islam (by most religions, indeed) to justify sexual repression. Defenders of the specialness of sex may argue that sex is only legitimate when done between people who love each other. In other words, sex is only ethically admissible when done to fulfill the higher goals of fulfilling the obligations or marriage or establishing emotional intimacy. However, as I argued in a my previous article Is Sex Sacred?, this would make masturbation and casual sex unethical. However, most people in the Western world are past that repressive stage. Or, at least, past the stage in which they accept that the State dictates what happens in our bedroom. Another argument is that it is money, when traded for sex, what sullies the woman. This is a favorite of anti-capitalist radical feminists, who like to view prostitution as another sin of capitalism. However, money is good when we get it as pay for our labor, or when we sell things, or when we inherit it. Why is it suddenly bad when one gets it in exchange for sex? Sex is not bad, even when it’s casual. Money is not bad. There is no logical reason why trading sex for money should be bad. What makes it so it’s just the remains of religious dogmas that were widely used to repress women and keep them disempowered and poor. Does prostitution maintain the patriarchy? This is an argument often used by radical feminists. It goes like this: women have been sexually exploited by men through the centuries, so any sexual act between men and women has to be examined for signs of this exploitation. The examiners should not be the people having sex, but the radical feminists themselves, or the State acting in their name. But, by doing so, the radical feminists or the State breach the consent, the right to intimacy, and the personal autonomy of the people having sex. This is an injustice similar to prohibiting sodomy, gay sex or any other consensual sex act. Why should exchanging sex for money be an act of exploitation? How is this different from any other transaction of service for money? The only argument to justify this would have to resort to sex being special or sacred. Sex cannot be exchanged for money, they argue. Why? Because there is something about sex that makes it different from other human activity. Unlike anything else we do, it cannot be done to earn a wage. So we are back to the “sex is sacred” argument. The patriarchal system in which women are always the providers of sex and, therefore, the sex workers, is starting to break down. As women become empowered, men are increasingly performing sex work as strippers, as porn models and even as gigolos or male prostitutes. In fact, the idea that sex can soil women, but not men, is at the core of the patriarchy. In a sex-positive culture in which sex is divested of its magical qualities as guarantor of personal purity, sex work is just one more manifestation of our increased personal freedom. Prohibiting any consensual sex act should be seen as an intrusion of the State in our intimate lives. Copyright 2022 Hermes Solenzol.

How to live a life worth living through action instead of contemplation. The archetype of the warrior Please, don’t be put off by the word warrior. Although it suggests war and aggression, the warrior is an archetype found in most cultures. In the psychology of Carl Jung, archetypes are mythical characters present in the collective subconscious. Other archetypes are the Wizard, the Witch, the Joker, the Mother, the Goddess, the Wise Old Man, the Demon and Death. The archetype of the warrior appears frequently in popular culture. For example, the Jedi of Star Wars are warriors. Before that, it could be found in the 70s television series Kung Fu, where Kwai Chang Caine, a Buddhist monk trained in the Shaolin Monastery, wanders through the old West using his martial arts to face challenges. There are also women warriors, like Princess Leia of Star Wars, Yu Shu Lien of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Wonder Woman, and Ripley in the Alien movie series. The Way of the Warrior is related to the Bushido: the moral code of the samurai of Japan. It is also reminiscent of the medieval knights. A warrior is different from a soldier. A soldier follows orders as part of an army. A warrior follows his own path according to his own goals and moral code. A warrior does not seek war but peace. He fights evil because it causes suffering. The monks of the Shaolin Monastery were spiritual warriors who invented martial arts to defend themselves from marauders that tried to rob them. However, as Buddhist monks, their core practice was enlightenment and compassion. Carlos Castaneda I first heard about the Way of the Warrior when I was in college and read the books by Carlos Castaneda. He was an anthropology student at UCLA who decided to do a doctoral thesis about the sorcerers in Mexico. He found a Yaqui shaman, don Juan Matus, who initiated him in the use of peyote, Psilocybe mushrooms and Datura to access an alternate reality populated by powerful entities who could guide him. But to properly use the knowledge gained by using these drugs, a wizard has to follow a disciplined way of life: the Way of the Warrior. There was a wisdom in that philosophy of life that appealed much more to me than taking psychedelics. Carlos Castaneda turned his doctoral thesis at UCLA into a book that became a worldwide bestseller: The Teachings of Don Juan. I read it several times, and then the whole series of books that Castaneda wrote after that. Eventually, I became convinced that he was making up all that stuff about the occult traditions of Mexican wizards. The books were entertaining, but nothing more. Still, it is undeniable that Castaneda was a masterful weaver of mythology and philosophy of life. It is possible that he drew from the Bushido, Zen, Stoicism and other ancient traditions to create his own version of the Way of the Warrior. If so, he was truly brilliant in this synthesis. He also seems to have followed the Way of the Warrior in his own life. Zen I turned to other sources of wisdom in my spiritual quest. I learned yoga, studied with the Siloists, and finally settled for Zen Buddhism, which I practiced for 10 years, first with the disciples of Taisen Deshimaru, later with Eido Shimano Roshi and Maezumi Roshi. Eventually, I became disenchanted with Buddhism because of its beliefs in supernatural things like reincarnation and Nirvana, and its denial of the pleasures of life. I needed a philosophy of life that was more down to earth, that taught how to live my life balancing a quest for happiness and working for the common good. That accepted the fact that death means my complete disappearance, and show me how to deal with that. Rock climbing What brought my attention back to the Way of the Warrior was my passion for rock climbing. My rock-climbing buddies recommended the book The Rock Warrior’s Way, by Arno Ilgner. It teaches the right mental attitude for rock-climbing: a way to overcome fear, maximize performance and enjoy climbing. As I was reading it, I realized that it is about much more than just rock-climbing. It taught a way of life that was both disciplined and joyful. And the best part was that my beloved sport of rock climbing provided a simple way to train my mind to follow it. That philosophy of life was a distillation of the Way of the Warrior of the books by Castaneda, mixed up with a bit of Stoic philosophy and Zen Buddhism, as recognized by Arlo Ilgner himself. All this truly speaks to me. I found a way to integrate the best aspects of many things that I had learned in life. The Way is the Tao The word Way has a profound meaning: is the Tao, the flowing energy that shapes the world, according to Taoism. The Way has no destination; it exists on itself. The Tao flows by balancing the Yin and the Yang, the masculine and the feminine. From a personal point of view, the Way is a path of inner discovery and transformation. A warrior’s quest is one of constant improving, learning and letting go of the Ego. From the societal point of view, we should realize that we have inherited a wonderful civilization created by the warriors of the past: warrior scientists, warrior philosophers, warrior artists, warrior leaders of social movements. Now, we have the duty to continue improving the world to pass it to future generations. The Way of the Warrior reaches its cusp when the personal path of the warrior gets in harmony with the Way in which the world flows. Mindfulness versus active attention Mindfulness is a practice consisting of directing our attention to our senses in a relaxed, non-judgmental way, turning off our internal dialogue. The best benefit of mindfulness practice is the development of meta-attention: being aware of the state of our attention. When meta-attention becomes a habit, we become aware of how our emotions drive our consciousness, and thus develop the ability to subtly direct our emotions toward a state of mental calmness and control. The Way of the Warrior uses the challenges placed on us by risky situations to practice a particular form of mindfulness based on action instead of contemplation. This discipline arose from the demands placed on warriors like the samurai, who may confront each other in deadly duels. “[The warrior] must perform with absolute mastery and calm in the face of horrendous mortal danger. […] If he clings too dearly to his own life, or is ruled by his Ego, he will seek escape; his attention will waver; he will be destroyed. Paradoxically, if he adopts a stance of embracing the risk and accepting the consequences, he is far more likely to survive.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way. The danger doesn’t need to be extreme. It just needs to evoke enough fear to challenge the mechanisms of our attention. That’s why climbing and martial arts are perfect ways to train us to become warriors. These sports put us in challenging situations in which the risk is real, but less than it appears. The demand to perform well physically in the face of fear exposes defense mechanisms of our mind that weaken us and drive bad emotional habits. However, one doesn’t need to practice martial arts or risky sports to be a warrior. We can find our own Way of the Warrior in writing, scientific research, art, political activism and other worthwhile pursuits. “It is the warrior’s way to follow the paths of both the sword and the brush (pen).” Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings. We are our worst enemy. Our Ego, which is our self-image, controls much of our behavior, leading us to focus on our achievements instead of the task at hand. Only by letting go of the Ego we can get into a flow zone of unrestricted attention that we need to perform masterfully. But what really matters is not our performance, but the mental state that leads to it. While regular mindfulness is a passive state of letting perceptions flow unimpeded into our consciousness, attention in the Warrior’s Way is directed towards action. “In warrior-speak, the active form of awareness is called attention. Attention is awareness heightened and focused, the intentional directing of awareness.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way. What we do, how we feel, is deeply affected by the unconscious parts of our mind. The Way of the Warrior does not fight the unconscious. Instead, it seeks to merge the conscious and the unconscious through impeccable actions. Impeccability Impeccability consists of using attention in order to perform flawlessly. We don’t perform flawlessly to feed our Ego, but as a way to verify that we have achieved a good mental state in which we are not controlled by our emotions or our Ego. This has an ethical component. The warrior chooses his own moral code, but then he has to follow it by practicing the virtue of integrity. He answers to himself, taking full responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Motivation is the key. We need to learn to move from a motivation based on fear, shame and pride to one based on love and joy. “The courage a warrior must cultivate is not just for overcoming personal fears, but the courage to live life at its fullest, which entails taking chances. Following the path of the warrior is the most difficult of the spiritual ways and requires courage to practice since you must also live life in your own terms. This means one must fight through the everyday worry, fear, sadness, anxiety, and depression to live with vitality and vigor.” Stephan H. Verstappen in A Master’s Guide to The Way of the Warrior. A path with a heart The Way of the Warrior is a happy way, a path with a heart. We need to change our core motivation from being based on fear, shame and pride to one based on joy and love. This is not an easy process. It consists of using our intuition to polish our moral code, our system of values, so that in brings meaning to our life. This is not a lonely task. We develop our love by giving to others, helping them grow as we grow. “This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.” Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan. By finding the things that bring us joy when we do them, the values that we cherish, the people that we love, we follow a path with a heart. The journey of a meaningful life. "For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly." Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan. Personal power Personal power is a concept found in the books of Carlos Castaneda that can be easily misunderstood. We normally associate power with wealth, political influence and dominion over others. Hence, acquiring power sounds selfish. However, in the Way of the Warrior, personal power means self-knowledge, self-control and the ability to generate sustained attention and effort. It means controlling ourselves in a quest for self-knowledge, impeccable action and, ultimately, finding meaning in life. “Power manifest itself as clarity of thought and decisiveness in action. It is the totality of the resources you bring to a given situation with special emphasis on the mental aspect.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way. According to Arno Ilgner, gathering personal power entails: letting go of the Ego, focusing on the process and not the destination, cultivating our love of life, encouraging our curiosity, plugging power drains, not wasting energy on unimportant things, training our attention, keeping our body healthy. Personal power consists of a mixture of emotional strength, stoicism, resilience, wisdom, good habits and learned knowledge. Paradoxically, power consists of giving, not taking. You are powerful when you can give your full energy and attention to what you are doing. If, instead, you focus on the reward that you will receive if you succeed or on the consequences of failure, you are falling into the trap of the Ego. Your attention is leaking away from focusing on what you are doing, producing a mental state that leads to faulty action. You fumble. You curse. You seek excuses. You cling to hope. You blame others. You feel ashamed of yourself. Death as our advisor Being aware of our mortality helps us focus on what is really important in life. Normally, death terrifies and paralyzes us. However, being aware of the certainty of dying lets us know that there is no time to waste. We need to focus on what brings meaning to our life. This sharpens our motivation. Do we want to live a life full of fear or a life full of love and joy? A path with a heart leads to nowhere. To death and oblivion. Its value resides in having a heart. Abandoning self-importance In the books by Carlos Castaneda, to survive an encounter with the powerful entities of the world of the sorcerers, the apprentice has to abandon his self-importance. Likewise, according to Arno Ilgner, to ‘send’ a difficult climb one has to abandon the Ego and completely focus the attention on executing each move impeccably. “You can feel pretty worthless at times because reward and punishment have molded you. When you did something that was considered good by your caregivers, you were rewarded, and when you did something that was considered bad, you were punished. Your caregivers associated your worth with your performance - your behavior. Then, as you grew older, your caregivers’ expectations became embodied in the Ego, which took over the job of rewarding and punishing. Your caregivers’ expectations were supplemented or replaced by the expectations of a peer group, or the expectations established by a set of beliefs you adopted with little critical thought. Regardless of the source of the Ego’s expectations, the result is the same: we are slaves to externally driven influences, rather than being the masters of our internal, mental environment.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way. I conceive the Ego as a part of our mind that arises during childhood by internalizing the instructions of our parents and teachers, all the while driven by pride and shame. Pride and shame are two powerful emotions that evolved to enable social control and to motivate cooperation. As Ilgner explains, their joined effect during childhood creates the Ego. When our actions are driven by the Ego, they become just blind pursuits for validation. We try to earn praise and to avoid shame. That makes us dependent on external influences and vulnerable to societal pressure. The Ego constantly chases approval and fears shame. It is goal-oriented. When driven by the Ego, our inner chatter is all about the reward we are going to get if we succeed and how awful failure is going to feel. Only when we abandon our self-importance we can completely focus on executing our action impeccably. Letting go of the Ego leads to the state of flow: a playful, carefree state of physical and intellectual flexibility in which we seem to accomplish things effortlessly. According to Ilgner, a warrior lets go of the Ego and nurtures his Higher Self instead: “The Higher Self isn’t competitive, defensive, or conniving, as the Ego. It sees through such petty ploys. The Higher Self derives self-worth not from comparison with others, but from an internal focus that is based on valuing growth and learning.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way. The humbleness of the warrior does not consist of dwelling on his weaknesses or affecting a false modesty, but of a constant struggle to cultivate inner motivation and personal power. “The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn't permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor to anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him.” Carlos Castaneda. Erasing our personal history According to Castaneda, erasing our personal history is another facet of the Way of the Warrior. This is because our inner talk reminds us constantly of who we are, especially of our weaknesses. It may say ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I got this’, but both messages have an undertone of self-doubt. In the state of flow, we forget who we are to focus completely on what we are doing. Impeccable action has no self-doubt, because there is no self in it. Conclusion The Way of the Warrior is a philosophy of life more in accordance with the demands of modern culture than contemplative traditions like Buddhism or Taoism. It focuses our attention on our actions, so everything we do at work, at home and in our social life becomes a path of self-discovery and self-transformation. The demands and stresses of life, instead of draining our energy, become a source of inner power. However, the Way of the Warrior is an empty path. It is up to ourselves to fill it with what we learn along the way. The warrior chooses his own values and goals. These are not cast in stone, but evolve as he learns. Ultimately, the Way of the Warrior is a quest for the meaning of life. Books about the Way of the Warrior The Rock Warrior’s Way, by Arno Ilgner. Amazon. Goodreads. The Craft of the Warrior, by Robert L. Spencer. Amazon. Goodreads. Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman. Amazon. Goodreads. Wikipedia. A Masters Guide to The Way of the Warrior, by Stefan H. Verstappen. Amazon. Goodreads. The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda. Amazon. Goodreads. Wikipedia.

Thinking that we deserve the best, and chasing happiness and virtue, feed the ego. What is the ego? The ego is not who you are. The ego is not your self. It is not ‘the thinker of thoughts’, that illusory being that we believe does things around inside our mind. Who we really are is the totality of your being, conscious and unconscious. The ego is not that, either. Of course, there are many opinions about what is the ego. Here I am going to explain what I think it is, which I found particularly useful to understand myself and to help me live a happier life. Please bear with me. You may find it useful, too. This conception of the ego is the one used in the Way of the Warrior, a philosophy of life that I have embraced lately. It is similar to the concept of the super-ego in psychoanalysis. Shame and pride are two powerful social emotions that direct human behavior. They seem to have evolved to facilitate cooperation and discourage cheating in the tribes in which we used to live during most of the history of our species. Since early in our childhood, they provide a latch to allow our parents and teachers to educate us. Pride rewards us when we are successful and shame punishes us when we fail or when we engage in antisocial behavior. These emotions likely interact with the dopamine neural pathway linking the ventral tegmental area (VTA) with the nucleus accumbens, an ancient system that motivates our behavior. We soon internalize the instructions of our parents and teachers, so that shame and pride are driven by an inner judge instead of them. That inner judge is the ego. Fear is another emotion that takes part in the building of the ego. When something threatens our physical or emotional integrity, the ego sounds an alarm. The ego is not bad. It is there to ensure that we are safe and that we play fair with others. It provides the motivation that drives us to succeed and to avoid failure. Self-driven people have strong egos. Even without external stimuli, they are able to gather a great amount of energy to keep going at work for long periods of time. It is difficult to have a good professional career without that an ego. However, we pay a price for it in unhappiness. When the ego takes over our lives, we forget how to be joyful and loving. We cannot make ourselves vulnerable because the ego doesn’t tolerate anything that threatens its self-image. We even start believing that we are our ego. Then, we perceive emotions that hurt the ego, like shame and guilt, as existential threats. We feel that, if the ego were to disappear, we would die. But this is not true because we are not our ego. We are the entirety of our mind. Is it possible to get rid of the ego? We do not want to get rid of our ego. It fulfills an important function. It keeps us safe, doing good deeds and avoiding bad behavior. It provides the energy to keep working hard in our careers. However, we need to put the ego in its place, so we don’t become its slaves. Inner freedom means to learn to control our ego, instead of it controlling us. There is also a way to act that is not based on the automatisms of the ego. This egoless action is what leads to the state of flow, in which we are creative without apparent effort. But the effortless of flow is an illusion because we need to do a lot of training before we can achieve it. The key is to realize that the ego is made of emotions: pride, shame, guilt and fear. We cannot control our emotions directly, because emotions direct the flow of our consciousness. But this happens in passive states of consciousness. There are active states of consciousness in which we direct and focus our attention, like we do during meditation, mindfulness, sports and creative work. This ability to direct our attention allows us to control our emotions indirectly: by selecting our ideas and mental images. For example, we can gradually turn off our anger by directing our attention away from the ideas and images that feed it. When we keep having the same emotion over and over again, it creates an emotional habit. It carves a groove that our mind tends to follow. Therefore, a spiritual practice consists of cultivating healthy emotional habits while gradually undoing the unhealthy ones. The ego can be conceived as a set of emotional habits based on pride, shame and fear. By practicing egoless actions, we can unlearn those emotional habits and built a healthier ego, one that does not control us. The traps of the ego The problem is that most of our present action is driven by the ego so, even when we decide to follow a spiritual practice, it is our ego directing us to do so. At every step, the ego would feed on what we are doing, interpreting it through its glasses of pride and shame. The ‘patting on the back’ that we give ourselves when we experience a good meditative state comes from that. It is pride. And that ‘patting on the back’ destroys the good meditative state by taking our focus away. And yet, we know that egoless states are possible. Flow is one of them. One possible path is to practice sports like rock climbing or martial arts that make easier to achieve flow, because the attention is directed to physical acts and, when we lose focus, we get immediate feedback. Another path is art or writing. Right now, as I type these words, I try to maintain a state of flow. I try to avoid the prideful ‘patting on the back’ that would take me back to my ego. Or the self-doubts that paralyze my writing. Today I want to write about the traps of the ego. These are beliefs inculcated in us by society that feed our bad emotional habits. By avoiding them, we can develop healthier and happier mental state. “You deserve the best” When I was a teenager, my family became wealthier. My father a university professor, was named president of the University of Santiago de Compostela. Then he was called by the government to be the founding president of a larger university. We moved to Madrid, and my father enrolled me and my brothers in a posh school for rich kids. Under their influence, we developed an attitude that we were special. We were smarter than anybody. Common rules did not apply to us. That was the privileged attitude of the upper class in the last years of the Franco dictatorship. Fortunately, I only spent one year in that private High School for wealthy kids. Then I went to college, read extensively, and became friends with people with progressive ideas. Still, that idea of being somebody special was implanted in me. I am not alone in feeling this way, I guess. Although, for some, it may be the opposite: they feel permanently undeserving. Either way, it’s all ego. The message that we deserve the best is constantly conveyed by our consumerist culture. That’s what advertisement is about, isn’t it? “Buy our product. It’s the best, and you deserve the best.” Do you see the ego in that message? Behind that feeling of being special, there is pride. We compare ourselves to others and decide that we are better than them. Therefore, we deserve the best. That’s the foundation of greed. My point is not that greed is unethical. Instead, look at what that greedy attitude does to your mind. It makes you constantly anxious to make sure you get the absolute best. Even in the simplest things: the best parking space, the best dish in the menu, the best vacation, the best job. This craving attitude can totally ruin your life. I’m not saying that you should not enjoy the good things in life. If you find a good parking spot, by all means, grab it. But you are not going to enjoy anything if you are focused on getting the next best thing. Perhaps a good practice would be giving up things on purpose. Let somebody take that good parking spot. And feel good about it. “You should be happy” Since antiquity, many sages have reflected on the paradox of happiness: the more you chase it, the less happy you are. The desire to be happy makes you unhappy. Their response has been to reject happiness altogether. Epicureans, Stoics, Buddhist, Christians and other philosophies and religions tell you that you should give up trying to be happy. You should strive to reach ataraxia, instead: a calm, peaceful state where there is no more striving. Or wait to be happy until you go to Heaven. Or until you achieve Nirvana. “The best that you can hope for is to avoid suffering,” say the Buddhists. “Not even,” say the Stoics. “Suffering is unavoidable. The best you can hope for is to deal with suffering gracefully.” I beg to disagree. I think it is possible to be happy. The problem is not with happiness, but with craving happiness. When happiness is a goal, instead of something that happens right now, it’s not happiness anymore. On the other hand, consumerist culture constantly sends us the message that we should be happy. We live in a wonderful civilization where all our basic needs are met. Where we can access wonderful pleasures: food, drinks, music, movies, books, travel… There are so many things to enjoy that what we lack is the time to sample them all. If we are not happy with all of that, surely something is wrong with us. We should see a therapist who will fix our unhappiness. Or take medication that will ‘restore the chemical imbalance in our brain’. The quest for happiness become a trap of the ego when happiness is seen as something that we can possess. The ego wants it because it can feel proud when it determines that we are happy. However, happiness is not something that you can possess. Happy is something that you are. Therefore, a quest to possess happiness makes you unhappy because, while you chase happiness, you are not happy. We also fall prey to confusing happiness with joy, love and other positive emotions. It is impossible to always feel joyful or loving, because living means feeling a bunch of different things. Emotions guide our thoughts, behavior and motivation. We need them all. We can be happy while feeling sad, angry, disgusted or scared. Negative emotions are okay, as long as they don’t become destructive. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t gently guide your emotions by cultivating healthy emotional habits. After all, freeing ourselves from our ego is just that: escaping from the stranglehold that pride and shame have on us. What this means is that being happy should not become another obligation. Letting go of the craving for happiness in order to be happy is paradoxical and hard to understand. “Be virtuous!” The same thing happens with the imperative to be good. It can be another trap of the ego. The Epicureans, the Stoics, and other Greco-Roman philosophers taught that the pursuit of virtue was the highest goal in life. Again, I beg to disagree. I think that virtue should be a means, but not a goal. A means to what? A means to live a meaningful life. Here is the problem. The ego is the program we carry inside since childhood that makes us feel proud of ourselves when we do something good, and ashamed of ourselves when we do something bad. When we pursue virtue, we are falling into the same game. The more virtuous we are, the more we inflate our ego. In our striving to be virtuous, our ego becomes the little dictator inside ready to sacrifice our needs in its endless race to feel pride. More so if we believe in a religion or a philosophy that tells us that happiness is something we shouldn’t have. That we will pay a price in suffering for every time we feel happy. That’s how asceticism is born. We are so good, so much better than anybody else, that we are willing to deprive ourselves of the pleasures of life in this blind pursuit of the invisible medals of virtue. Our ego constantly judges ourselves in the race for virtue, punishing us with shame when we fail to act up to par. Once the fall into the habit of judging, we extended it to others. They are certainly not measuring up to our standards. And this pleases our ego, because it means that we are better than them. And if we manage to get them to admit this, even better. We get full of pride about how good we are, and this feeds our ego, making it bigger, more powerful. And, therefore, more able to oppress us. That’s the process that creates gurus and cult leaders. People who are supposedly saints but, in fact, are just narcissists with hypertrophied egos. Beware of their false modesty! They know well how to hide behind fake humbleness so that their game is not exposed. So, what is the solution? Following the Way of Warrior is like walking a knife edge. The ego uses anything we do to feed itself. Every little victory can be tallied for his pride. Even calling ourselves a warrior is nothing more than ego-building. We need to start by accepting that this will happen. The ego will be there and will feed on our deeds. There will be pride when we succeed, and shame when we fail. We shouldn’t make much of that. Just follow our way, unperturbed. We should laugh at our ego. Humor deflates it, decreasing our self-importance. We should engage in activities that bring a state of flow, where we leave the ego aside by focusing completely on what we are doing. When we recognize the inner dialog of the ego, made of self-praise and self-doubt, we can label for what it really is: a distraction and an energy leak. Then we can gradually learn to replace it with an inner dialogue focused on acting with impeccability: performing at the top of our ability, focusing all our energy on doing and learning. Instead of chasing virtue, we should have a moral code consisting of not harming others, working for the common good, and following a path with a heart. Not harming should be based on compassion: an acute awareness of the ubiquitous presence of suffering and a commitment to decrease it however we can. We suffer, and therefore, we feel the suffering of others. Working for the common good should be based on our personal power. We generate so much energy that giving becomes natural, because we have energy to spare. We take pleasure in giving because we thrive on the happiness of others. Just like their suffering is our own suffering, their happiness is our own happiness. Following a path with a heart means finding meaning in life. Doing things that bring us joy, fulfillment and deep understanding. Creating art, science, knowledge, and social work. Mushotoku is a Zen word that means acting without attaching ourselves to the consequences of our actions. In the context of the ego, it means detaching ourselves from the pride and shame that may result from our action. There is a surprising shamelessness in true wise people that is different from the shamelessness of the sociopath. The wise is full of mirth and compassion, whereas the sociopath is creepy and selfish. When we follow a path with a heart, happiness just happens. No need to chase it. We may meet joy and sorrow, but they are still meaningful when there is a heart beneath them. It’s the deep happiness that comes from living a life full of meaning.

Writing as a path to improve the world and yourself Two books point to the Way of the Warrior I am finishing reading The Rock’s Warrior Way, by Arno Ilgner, a wonderful book recommended by my rock-climbing buddies. It teaches the right mental attitude for rock-climbing: a way to overcome fear, maximize performance and enjoy climbing. As I was reading it, I realized that it is about more than just rock-climbing. It teaches a better way to live. Arlo Ilgner says that he is inspired by Stoic philosophy and by the books of Carlos Castaneda. I devoured Castaneda’s books when I was in college and I still have them in my library. However, after my initial infatuation with them, I decided that he was making up all that stuff about the occult traditions of Mexican wizards. However, the passages in which he mentions the Way of the Warrior still resonate with me. Wanting to learn more about the Way of the Warrior, I went on an internet search. I found that the Way of the Warrior can mean a number of different things, most of which don’t appeal to me at all. Finally, I bought A Master’s Guide to The Way of the Warrior, by Stephan H. Verstappen. The author is a martial arts teacher who has explored the roots of the Way of the Warrior in Eastern traditions, particularly in Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Although I have never done martial arts, I practiced Zen for 10 years and have adopted its philosophy, so the book seems right for me. What is the Way of the Warrior? If you are a pacifist like me, you may be put off by the word warrior. According to Verstappen, a warrior is very different from a soldier. While a soldier is part of an army and follows orders without questioning, a warrior acts alone following his own moral code. Think medieval knights, the samurai of Japan, or the Jedi of Star Wars. The warrior is an archetype found in all cultures. It speaks to something ancestral inside all of us. A warrior realizes that there is a constant struggle between good and evil forces, and dedicates himself to fight for the good. But his quest is both external and internal. At the same time that he tries to chance the world, he struggles to improve himself, to become the best man that he can be. Or the best woman. Although the Warrior’s Way is full of masculine values, women can be warriors, too. In fact, contemporary movies are stock-full of women warriors, like Wonder Woman, Yu Shu Lien of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Princess Leia of Star Wars, or Ripley of the Alien movies. If Tao is the Way, then it flows by balancing the Yin and the Yang, the masculine and the feminine. “Literature, philosophy, poetry, and culture in general have a feminine side, and Budo, the military art, is masculine. There must be a harmony between the two.” Taisen Deshimaru in The Zen Way to Martial Arts. The word Way also has a profound meaning: is the Tao, the flowing energy that shapes the world. The Way has no destination, it exists on itself. From a personal point of view, the Way is the path of inner discovery and transformation followed by a warrior. A warrior’s quest is one of constant improving, learning and letting go of the Ego. The Way of the Warrior reaches its cusp when these two ways merge: the personal way of the warrior gets in harmony with the Way in which the world flows. Writing as a Warrior’s Way Reading Ilgner’s book, I realized that what he teaches could be applied to my writing. Climbing and writing I feel the same things. A similar anxiety before I start a route or an article. A similar state of flow when I am doing things right. A similar temptation to focus on finishing, instead of focusing on what I am doing at the moment. A similar Ego-driven judging and negative self-talk. Verstappen’s book confirmed my hunch. The warriors of old China and Japan did not just practice martial arts, but were versed in many creative skills. Primary amongst those was writing. Writing is one of the main endeavors of a warrior. “It is the warrior’s way to follow the paths of both the sword and the brush (pen).” Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings. We have inherited a wonderful civilization created by the warriors of the past. Warrior scientists, warrior philosophers, warrior artists, warrior leaders of social movements. And, prominent among them, warrior writers. With their stories and essays, they changed the consciousness of the society around them. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker remarks the importance of novels in making their readers empathize with people different from them, and how that led to the defeat of many kinds of bigotry. Now, we have the duty to continue improving the world to pass it to future generations. However, many people have only enough resources to take care of themselves and their loved ones. Others don’t feel the need to give back. Not everybody hears the call to be a warrior. I decided to become a Warrior Writer Since a young age, I felt the call to be a warrior. For me, it was wanting to be a scientist. To learn the amazing description of the world created by science and to make my own small contribution to it. It also took the form of a spiritual quest. Practicing yoga, meditation and other techniques, I strived to change myself, to overcome my limitations and gain wisdom. At the beginning of 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting, I retired from my scientific work and closed my lab. I had been writing novels and articles as a hobby, and early retirement gave me an opportunity to dedicate myself fully to writing. My life experience has taught a lot of valuable things, and I want to give them back to the world. I hope that putting together my knowledge of science with my worldview I can contribute in some way to make the world a better place. I don’t need to write to make a living. I don’t think I will become famous by doing it, either. Writing is something I do because there are stories and ideas inside of me wanting to come out. These stories and ideas are things I want to give to the world in return for everything I have received. By writing them I also learn who I am, I clarify the meaning of the world and of my own life. “All true art is nothing but an attempt to transmit the sensation of ecstasy. And only the man who finds in it this state of ecstasy will understand and feel art.” P. D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way. Reading the books by Ilgner and Verstappen made me realize that writing can be a spiritual path, something that needs to be done with the same detachment and intention for transformation as yoga or meditation. This requires cultivating a series of values as I write. I wrote a list of them below, to help me develop my path as a Writing Warrior. 1) Intellectual Honesty For me, this is the most important value of a Writing Warrior, so it belongs at the top of the list. “The term ‘warrior’ is often associated with images of power, confidence, accomplishment, chivalry, honor and integrity.” Stephan H. Verstappen in A Master’s Guide to The Way of the Warrior. Integrity is one of the virtues of a warrior. For the Warrior Writer, integrity means intellectual honesty. The climate crisis, the Trump presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic have made us acutely aware of how misinformation can cause many deaths and destroy our society. Hence, the primary mission of a Warrior Writer is to counter this epidemic of disinformation by writing about the truth. However, this requires a firm commitment to finding the truth in an unbiased way. This means that the warrior has to be a reader as much as a writer. His path should be, first and foremost, about learning. He should learn how to write better and also educate himself in the things he writes about. This doesn’t stop at reading, though. Every living experience should be a learning opportunity. The warrior must be comfortable living in a state of creative doubt. He must reject dogmas, no matter where they come from. He must hold no sacred cows, no matter how dear they are to him. His path entails honing his skills of critical thinking and having a good understanding of fallacies and faulty logic. He must have the habit to do the research to support what he writes. I explored the meaning of intellectual honesty is this other article: How to be intellectually honest. 2) Self-reliance Since the warrior is in a quest for truth, he must not accept any dogmas. He must question authority, both the authority of the experts and that of conventional beliefs. “A warrior’s primary resource is himself. Depending on others is always a risky gambit since most people don’t have the skills and wherewithal to fulfill their own promises and objectives.” Stephan H. Verstappen in A Master’s Guide to The Way of the Warrior. Here, like in other things, the warrior walks a knife edge. At the same time that he searches for the truth and uses his critical thinking, he must have the humility to respect the expertise of others. True wisdom is to recognize the enormous scope of all knowledge and the incapacity of a single human mind to absorb it. The only way we can understand the world is by sharing on the knowledge of others. Therefore, a warrior’s wisdom consists of distinguishing those he can trust from those he cannot believe. The corollary of this is that the Writing Warrior must make himself trustworthy. He must build his reputation by proving his intellectual honesty. He must accept being judged by his writing and have the humility to recognize and rectify his mistakes. A warrior knows that he is not the only warrior in a quest for truth. He must respect the quest of the others and join forces with them if he can. In ancient traditions, warriors are not self-made but are trained by a master. Just like Master Yoda trains Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. However, finding a worthy master is difficult. Sometimes the best thing to do is to learn from different masters, each of which will teach you a different skill. I had good teachers in both science and Zen. They taught me a lot, but in the end they were all fallible human beings, with their virtues and their vices. The main thing I learned was to reject the Myth of the Guru. 3) Humbleness — letting go of the Ego “You can feel pretty worthless at times because reward and punishment have molded you. When you did something that was considered good by your caregivers, you were rewarded, and when you did something that was considered bad, you were punished. Your caregivers associated your worth with your performance — your behavior. Then, as you grew older, your caregivers’ expectations became embodied in the Ego, which took over the job of rewarding and punishing. Your caregivers’ expectations were supplemented or replaced by the expectations of a peer group, or the expectations established by a set of beliefs you adopted with little critical thought. Regardless of the source of the Ego’s expectations, they result is the same: we are slaves to externally driven influences, rather than being the masters of our internal, mental environment.” Arno Ilgner in The Rock Warrior’s Way. Pride and shame are two powerful emotions that evolved to enable social control and to motivate cooperation. As Ilgner explains, their joined effect during childhood creates the Ego. When our actions are driven by the Ego, they become just blind pursuits for validation. We try to earn praise and to avoid shame — carrots and sticks. That makes us dependent of external influences and vulnerable to societal pressure. Obviously, this less than ideal for a truth-seeker and a challenger of conventional beliefs. When we write, the Ego drives that inner critic that continuously judge what we say, sapping our creativity. Ultimately, this can lead to total paralysis, creating the infamous writer’s block. The fear that what we write is not be good stops the flow of thoughts from our mind to the page. Letting go of the Ego, instead, establishes a playful, carefree state of mind of intellectual flexibility, which leads to flow. This is also promoted when we forget about the destination: the reward we expect to get in the form of praise and money. We need to focus on the process, on the task of writing and how we love putting words of the page. According to Ilgner, a warrior lets go of the Ego and nurtures his Higher Self instead: “The Higher Self isn’t competitive, defensive, or conniving, as the Ego. It sees through such petty ploys. The Higher Self derives self-worth not from comparison with others, but from an internal focus that is based on valuing growth and learning.” Arno Ilgner in The Rock Warrior’s Way. Therefore, the humbleness of the warrior does not consist of dwelling on his weaknesses or cultivating false modesty, but of a constant struggle to let go of the Ego and cultivate a Higher Self based on inner motivation and personal power. “The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn’t permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor to anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him.” Carlos Castaneda 4) Personal power Personal power is a concept found in the books of Carlos Castaneda. It can be easily misunderstood. Power is a word with negative connotations because we normally associate it with wealth, political influence or dominion over others. So making power personal sounds like selfishness. However, for Arlo Ilgner and Carlos Castaneda, personal power means self-knowledge, self-control and the ability to generate sustained attention and effort. “Becoming Conscious is a process that improves awareness, develops an empowering self-image, increases self-confidence, and builds personal power. You accomplish this not by striving directly for an empowering self-image or self-confidence, as goals, but simply by shifting attention inward. Your goal is to gain awareness — to learn — and thus to gain access to deeper and more powerful sources of motivation.” Arno Ilgner in The Rock Warrior’s Way. We need to write from a center of gravity inside ourselves created from our unbendable intention to seek the truth and speak the truth. A Warrior Writer must be no slouch. He must work hard, putting forth long hours of focused, productive writing. This requires enormous amounts of energy. This energy cannot be simply willed into existence. Raw willpower without strong psychological roots will eventually lead to burnout. Procrastination and writer’s block loom threatening in the horizon. The key to a sustained effort that doesn’t end up in burnout is a solid motivation. We need to develop a writing practice that increases motivation instead of eroding it. Several things can help: letting go of the Ego, focusing on the process and not the destination, cultivating our love for writing, encouraging our curiosity, plugging power drains, not wasting energy in unimportant things, training our attention, and keeping our body healthy. All this is what the expression gathering personal power means. Personal power consist of a mixture of emotional strength, stoicism, resilience, wisdom, good habits, and learned knowledge. 5) Courage It is a given that a warrior must be brave. When a Writing Warrior sets up to heal the world and to improve himself, he knows that he will face opposition. The world is not a friendly place, but a jungle full of dangers and enemies. People will attack you on the web. Corporations and the state will censor what you write. Changing the world by seeking the truth and speaking the truth will get you enemies from all parts of the political spectrum. Difficult issues must be addressed to bring about significant change. You will be confronting political correctness, traditional values and conventional beliefs. You can mitigate the blowback by writing with gentleness, fairness and honesty. But when you challenge somebody’s core beliefs, they will respond with ferocity. Having courage means knowing that you will be attacked and not letting that dissuade you from speaking out. “The courage a warrior must cultivate is not just for overcoming personal fears, but the courage to live life at its fullest, which entails taking chances. Following the path of the warrior is the most difficult of the spiritual ways and requires courage to practice since you must also live life in your own terms. This means one must fight through the everyday worry, fear, sadness, anxiety, and depression to live with vitality and vigor.” Stephan H. Verstappen in A Master’s Guide to The Way of the Warrior 6) Self-restraint Being brave is not the same as being foolish. A rock-climber carefully chooses the route he is going to climb, being fully aware of the risks and whether he can match them with his abilities. Likewise, a writer picks his battles. He minimizes the risks and evaluates what is to be gained by writing something, not for himself, but for his cause. He engages the risk being fully conscious of his personal power and resilience. Another component of self-restraint is an awareness of our capacity to hurt others. If it is true that the pen is as powerful as the sword, then we must wield it with care. The stronger we are, the more we learn, the more personal power we gather — the more we become able to hurt with our words. People like to gather behind individuals who they perceive as strong, so when we attack somebody we may cause a dogpile on that person. A warrior takes no allies who are unworthy, and therefore he calls off bad behavior even from those who side with him. We must be aware of the person behind the opinion. We must recognize the things on which we agree, praise his insights, and leave an escape route for him to retreat with dignity. 7) Stoicism Stoicism means being impervious to pain. Some people actually feels less pain because they have high pain thresholds, either naturally or by training. Other people feel the pain but are able to carry on despite of it. Stoicism has been given a bad reputation by our current culture of victimism that sees weakness and vulnerability as virtues. This feeds on the tendency of modern culture of seeing pain as something that must always be avoided. However, pain is an inevitable part of life and most 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. Everyone who practices sports knows that pain and hardship are part of them, and learn to welcome them. A certain amount of stoicism is part of your personal power. The kind of emotional stoicism that a Warrior Writer needs is grounded in understanding and managing his emotions. This creates a strong center of gravity, meaning that his emotions are not easily changed by external influences. He does not take on the anger, fear, guilt or shame that others throw at him. Letting go of the Ego helps him avoid emotional fragility. Since he is not invested in external praise, he has the freedom to be the arbiter of his actions. That doesn’t mean that he does not listen, but he does it on his own terms, with detachment and rationality. 8) Resilience Resilience is the ability to recover after an injury or a setback. It is different from stoicism because it is not to endure pain, but the ability to go back to our normal state and to resume our effort. For a Writing Warrior, stoicism and resilience mean having the emotional stability to withstand criticism and to recover from the damage that people who disagree with us try to inflict on us. A warrior accepts that arguments and disagreement are an essential part of intellectual discourse. Just like a good chess player is able to fight his opponent without taking it personally, a warrior sees intellectual confrontation a an opportunity to hone his skills and gather personal power. He enjoins intellectual battle with the same detachment as a samurai, brandishing the pen instead of a sword. 9) Compassion Compassion means feeling the suffering of others and fighting to end it. Compassion is different from empathy, which is automatically absorbing the emotions of those around you. Instead, compassion is a deliberate intention to feel the suffering of others and to work to end it. A warrior does not seek war but peace. He fights evil because evil is what causes suffering. The monks of the Shaolin Monastery that invented martial arts and perfected the Eastern Way of Warrior were Buddhists. They developed martial arts to defend themselves from marauders who tried to rob them, and from tyrannical rulers. However, their true mission as Buddhists was to end suffering. Their core practice was enlightenment and compassion. Compassion should be the goal of a warrior, but it should also be present in his means. It should imbue whatever he does. A Warrior Writer who studies diligently, hones his writing skills, and gathers personal power runs the risk of becoming an intellectual bully. Just like a samurai and a Kung-Fu warrior use their skills with extreme restrain and try not inflict unnecessary harm, a Writing Warrior treats others with respect and compassion. He argues against an idea without attacking the person who defends it. He takes the most charitable interpretation of the arguments of his opponent. He thanks an opponent that concedes a point, and does not gloat. The true enemy of a Writing Warrior is not the people who disagree with him, but his own Ego. He never loses sight of that. 10) Following a path with a heart Stoicism and resilience must be balanced with self-compassion. A warrior loves himself and loves live. He is never self-destructive. He is keenly aware of the difference between pain and suffering — enduring the first does not mean subjecting yourself to the latter. The Way of the Warrior is a happy way, a path with a heart. “This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.” Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan I write because I love writing. Writing is the way I express the fact that I am alive. Writing is my path with a heart. Disclaimer: Links in this article are not affiliated links. I get no commission from the books cited.

Find out what are dendrites, axons, ion channels and action potentials. Neurons Every tissue of the body is formed by specialized cells. For example, muscles are formed by muscle fibers or myocytes, which are able to contract, generating force and movement. The liver has hepatocytes, cells specialized in processing and storing food. The kidney has brush border cells and other types of cells. And so forth. The nervous system has two main types of specialized cells: neurons and glia. Neurons are the most specialized cells in the body. Their main property is their ability to transmit signals as electrical waves in their membranes. The only other cells able to do this are the myocytes of the muscles. Neurons make contact with other neurons called synapses, where the information carried by the electrical waves is conveyed by special substances: the neurotransmitters. Neurons have a distinct shape that looks like a tree. The branches of the tree are called dendrites (which, indeed, comes from the Greek word for branch). The dendrites converge in the body of the neurons, or soma. From it emerges the trunk of the tree called the axon. Typically, neurons have only one axon, but it may divide into several down the way. Most axons are enveloped by thick layers of a fatty substance called myelin, in short stretches that leave small spaces between them, the nodes of Ranvier. Axons ends in synapses that connect the neuron with the dendrites of other neurons. Information flows in a neuron from the synapses to the dendrites, converging in the body and then flowing out to the axon. In some cases, the information travels backwards: from the axon to the body or from the body to the dendrites and the synapses. However, this is just to aid the normal flow of information. In the axon, information travels in the form of electrical waves called action potentials. You may think that electricity flows along the axon like it does on an electric cable: back and forth. Or that it forms electric pulses, like information is sent in the cable of your speakers or headphones. However, what happens is quite different: the electric current flows perpendicularly to the axon, and not along it, forming an electric wave, the action potential. It is that wave what moves down the axon. But to explain the action potential, I first need to explain what are ion channels. Ion channels Ion channels are pretty much what this name indicates: proteins that sit across the cell membrane with a tiny tube in their core. That tube opens sometimes, lettings some particular ions flow across the membrane, either from the outside to the inside of the cell, or the other way around. But what are ions? Table salt is sodium chloride, a molecule formed by positively charged sodium ions, Na+, and negatively charged chloride ions, Cl-. Positively charged ions are called cations, and negatively charged ions are called anions. Negative charges and positive charges attract each other so, in a salt crystal, the sodium and chloride ions sit next to each other forming a network. However, when you dissolve salt in water, the sodium and chloride ions get separated and enveloped by molecules of water. Just like in sea water, there is a lot of sodium chloride in our blood and in the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes nerve tissue. There is also a smaller amount of calcium chloride. Whereas sodium, Na+, has only one positive charge, calcium , Ca2+, has two positive charges. This is very important for cells, which use calcium to carry signals in their interior. The other important ion for cell function is potassium, K+. Like sodium, potassium only has one positive charge, but it is larger in size. This difference in size between sodium and potassium allows ion channels to differentiate between these cations. Therefore, there are sodium channels and potassium channels. There are also calcium channels, which use the two charges of Ca2+ to distinguish them from the other cations. Ion channels are normally closed. They open for very short times, measured in milliseconds (a thousandth of a second). There is an arm of the protein that swivels into the channel, stopping the flow of ions and out of the way when the channel open. Since ion channels are molecules, their opening and closing are quantum events that follow the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. Ions channels are classified according to what opens them: Ligand-gated ion channels open when a neurotransmitter binds to them, acting like a key that opens the door of the channel. Voltage-gated ion channels open when there is a change in the membrane potential. A part of the protein that forms the channel acts as a sensor that moves when there is a change in the voltage, opening the channel. There are ten voltage-dependent sodium channels, termed Nav1.1 through Nav1.10. Nav1.7 channels are important for pain; people born without them do not experience pain. Voltage-gated calcium channels were initially classified as L, N, P/Q, R and T, but now they have been renamed Cav1.1 - Cav1.4 (L), Cav2.2 (N), Cav 2.1 (P/Q), Cav2.3 (R) and Cav3.1 - Cav3.3 (T). L-Type calcium channels are important in muscles and the heart. N-Type calcium channels are important for neurotransmitter release in synapses. Ion channels gated by sensory signals, like temperature or pressure, include proteins like the capsaicin receptor (TRPV1), the menthol receptor (TRPM8), and TRPA1, the receptor responsible for the spiciness of horseradish and wasabi. They are all channels permeable to Na+ and Ca2+. TRP channels are present in nerve terminals in our skin, where they act as temperature sensors. Other ion channels are sensitive to pressure. They that are responsible for initiating sensations of pain, itch and tact. Some venoms and drugs produce their effects by binding inside ions channels, plugging them. They are called channel blockers. For example, tetrodotoxin (TTX) is one of the most potent known venoms, responsible for the deadly bite the blue-ringed octopus and the toxicity of puffer fish (fugu). It is a blocker of voltage-dependent sodium channels. So is saxitoxin, produced by dinoflagellates, a type of plankton that is responsible for seafood poisoning. Local anesthetics, like the lidocaine and bupivacaine used by your dentist to block sensation in your mouth, are also blockers of voltage-dependent sodium channels. They are not poisonous as tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin because they are much less potent. Conotoxins are a variety of neurotoxins used by marine snails of the genus Conus to kill fish with their harpoons. Omega (ω) conotoxins are blockers of voltage-dependent calcium channels. One of them, ω-conotoxin MVIIA, has been developed as a potent pain inhibitor: zinocotide. There are many blockers of potassium channels, including the scorpion toxins iberiotoxin and charybdotoxin, some conotoxins, and many medications. The membrane potential All cells in the body have an asymmetrical distribution of ions across their membrane. There is about 50 times more sodium on the outside, and 50 times more potassium on the inside. There is also more chloride on the outside, although this chloride gradient is reversed in some anomalous conditions. The gradient of calcium is much more dramatic: there is 10,000 times more calcium on the outside than in the inside of the cell. This asymmetrical distribution of ions across the cell membrane creates an electrical voltage across it, called the membrane potential. You may think of the cell membrane as a battery with poles on the outside and the inside of the cell. The positive pole is outside the cell and the negative pole inside. The value of the membrane potential in neurons is around -70 millivolts (mV). This is not much, considering that the electrical outlets in your house have an electrical potential of 110 volts (1,500 times higher). However, this is a lot of energy for the tiny axons, which are just 0.1 to 10 micrometers thick (a micrometer is a millionth of a meter). Just like a battery, the membrane potential is used to store energy by all cells. However, neurons also use it to send signals and process information. When a cell dies, its membrane potential goes down to zero. Conversely, a collapse of the membrane potential causes the cell to die. We can know if a cell is dead or alive by measuring its membrane potential. This is done using a technique called patch-clamp electrophysiology, in which tiny glass pipettes containing electrodes are attached tightly to the membrane using suction. The same technique is used to measure the opening and closing of single ion channels. Ion pumps If the membrane potential stores energy, that energy has to be put there somehow. This is done by proteins called ion pumps. They use metabolic energy in the form of ATP molecules to move ions from one side to the other of the membrane. The most important ion pump is the sodium/potassium pump (Na+/K+-ATPase), which moves 3 Na+ ions out and 2 K+ ions in across the membrane. In the process, it spends (cleaves into ADP and phosphate) one molecule of ATP. This keeps sodium ions out of the cell and potassium ions inside. It also results in the net movement of one positive charge to the outside of the cell, building up the membrane potential. There are also calcium pumps that keep the calcium gradient. Action potentials Action potentials are waves of electrical current caused by the opening of ion channels. The electrical current is across the membrane, and can also be understood as a change in the membrane potential. A depolarization is a decrease in the membrane potential. Voltage-gated sodium channels in the axon open when they sense a depolarization, letting sodium ions, Na+, into the axon. Since they have a positive charge, when Na+ ions travel to the inside of the axon they change the membrane potential from negative inside to positive inside. The battery at the membrane actually changes polarity, going from -70 mV to +40 mV. There are also voltage-gated potassium channels in the axon that open when they sense this strong depolarization. Since there are more potassium ions, K+, inside the axon, they flow to the outside of the axon. This creates a current opposite to that of the sodium ions, which restores the membrane potential, even with a slight overshoot (hyperpolarization). At the same time, the voltage-gated sodium channels become desensitized and they close. The voltage-gated sodium channels in the nearby part of the axon sense the strong depolarization of the action potential and they open, so the whole process repeats itself down the axon. The result is a wave of reversal of the membrane potential moving down the axon, which is the axon potential. Since the segment of the axon where an action potential has just occurred is hyperpolarized (more negative than -70 mV) by the opening of potassium channels, sodium channels cannot open there. This has two consequences: It forces the action potential to move in one direction, instead of traveling both ways in the axon. It creates an interval of time when an action potential cannot occur in that segment of the axon, putting a limit to how close together two action potentials can be. In other words, there is a limit in the frequency of action potentials, which is different for different types of axons. Saltatory conduction: the amazing jumping action potentials Most axons are covered by coats of myelin, fatty envelops that leave between them gaps called nodes of Ranvier. A membrane depolarization in one node of Ranvier is strong enough to trigger the opening of voltage-gated sodium channels in the next node of Ranvier. Hence, an action potential in a node of Ranvier triggers an action potential in the next node, causing action potentials to jump from one node of Ranvier to the next. This is called saltatory conduction. Saltatory conduction has two advantages: It reduces the amount of energy spent to send an action potential. Sodium ions that come into the axon with each action potential have to be moved back out by ion pumps, at the expense of metabolic energy. Without saltatory conduction, our nervous system would expend so much energy that we would not be able to afford our large brains. Saltatory conduction increases the speed at which action potentials move down the axon, from about 1 meter per second (m/s) to up to 100 m/s. Without this speed, human brains would not be able to function. Not all neurons have axons covered by myelin. C-fibers, which are the axons of many of the neurons that transmit pain, are unmyelinated. Since they cannot use saltatory conduction, they have slow conduction speeds, about 1 m/s. That means that the pain elicited at a distant area of your skin takes a good fraction of a second to get to your brain. Enough time that you can tell the difference between the moment that you feel the impact - a tactile sensation carried by myelinated A fibers - and the pain of the impact, carried by the C fibers. Frequency and firing patterns of action potentials A neuron doesn’t fire just one action potential, but many action potentials in rapid succession. The frequency and the pattern of this firing of actions potentials encodes the information that the neuron is sending to other neurons. Frequency means that a neuron may fire from one action potential per second - 1 hertz (1 Hz) frequency - to 100 action potentials per second (100 Hz), or even more. Pattern means that action potentials may be evenly spaced at a fixed frequency, or grouped in bursts of several action potentials at high frequency separated by intervals without action potentials. One pattern of action potential important in the brain is the theta burst: a few action potentials at 100 Hz forming bursts separated by 0.2 seconds. This firing pattern stores memory in synapses in the form of synaptic plasticity. It also triggers the release of special neuropeptides like brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Dendrites Dendrites are the many branches that converge into the cell body (soma) of the neuron. They are shorter and thicker that the axons. While axons have a uniform thickness, dendrites get wider as they approach the soma. For a long time, it was believed that dendrites do not have action potentials. Later, scientists found that they do have them, although they are different from the action potentials of the axons: they are mediated by calcium ions and not just by sodium ions. Still, the main means by which dendrites transmit information is through waves of depolarization in their membrane that are longer and less intense than the action potential. These depolarization waves start at the synapses as excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs). While action potentials are so strong that they reverse the membrane potential, EPSPs are merely decreases in the membrane potential, or waves of depolarization. And while action potentials have the same amplitude, EPSPs can be of different intensities. As they move down the dendrites, the EPSPs of different synapses add to each other, increasing in amplitude. Some synapses are inhibitory, meaning that they generate inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) instead of EPSPs. IPSPs are waves of hyperpolarization, or increases in the membrane potential. When an EPSPs encounters an IPSPs in the dendrite, the IPSPs decrease the size of the EPSP, sometimes canceling it altogether. This interplay between EPSPs and IPSPs in the dendrites and the body of the neurons is how the neuron processes information. All these waves of membrane potential finally converge at the place where the axon begins (the axon hillock). If the depolarization is enough to open the voltage-dependent sodium channels there, then an action potential is fired. If it falls below this threshold, then nothing happens. In reality, what happens is that large depolarizations at the axon hillock trigger multiple action potentials, whose frequency is proportional to the size of the depolarization. Smaller depolarizations trigger action potential firing at lower frequency. This way, information in the dendrites is encoded into the frequency of the action potentials. The neuronal soma The soma or body of the neuron contains the nucleus, the part of the cell where genetic information is stored in the DNA. A neuron, just like any other cell, synthesizes its proteins by transcribing the genes in the DNA into messenger RNA (mRNA), which is then translated into proteins in the ribosomes. These are veritable nanomachines that read the genetic code in the mRNA and assemble amino acids, one by one, following a specific sequence to make a protein. All the proteins that I mentioned before - ion channels, ion pumps, neurotransmitter receptors - plus all the enzymes and structural proteins of the neurons, are made this way. An interesting problem is that each synapse builds its own proteins according to action potentials it receives from other neurons, independently of what is happening in the other dendrites and synapses of the same neuron. Then, how does the nucleus know what proteins it needs to make and where to send them? As it turns out, many proteins are made at ribosomes placed next to each synapse, that capture mRNAs coming down the dendrite from the nucleus according to the signals received by that particular synapse. This makes possible for synapses to grow or shrink, a phenomenon called synaptic plasticity. Synapses and synaptic plasticity deserve their own explanation. I will devote another article to that.

Properly cited scientific papers increase your credibility and provide evidence for your arguments. Poor sources of evidence Many writers use as evidence links to sites that have poor credibility. These include: Websites with an ideological bend. These have the worse credibility of all because they are obviously pandering a set of beliefs. If you link to them, you identify yourself as a member of that ideological bubble. For readers who accept those beliefs, your article would be preaching to the choir. For the rest, it would generate distrust. Blogs. You would be basing your argument on somebody who has just another opinion, and maybe even less credibility than you have. Magazines and newspapers. These have various levels of credibility depending on their reputation. However, almost all of them can be placed somewhere in the ideological spectrum, which means that they are biased. Even if the writer makes an effort to be intellectually honest, they still will be filtering information according to their level of education and the amount of research that they did. Unfortunately, most journalists have a poor understanding of science. Of course, if you want to document an event that happened in the past, you should cite newspapers reporting it. Science news and university press releases. These should be avoided like the plague because they have become a major corrupting influence in scientific culture. Major universities have created their own propaganda machines to tout the achievements of their professors in news releases, sometimes to position them ahead in battles for patents and awards. Needless to say, this is not conductive to honest reporting and balanced scientific discussions. It is also promoting a culture in which scientists become just another type of celebrities, like the sport stars that have long been used to prop up the prestige of universities. I love Wikipedia and I often use hyperlinks to its pages. I do that here. However, I will discuss its use in another article. What you should do is to go directly to the source of scientific knowledge: the scientific papers. You should do so in a careful and balanced way. However, this is hard to do for non-scientist. In this article, I will explain a few basic things about scientific papers that you need to know to cite them properly. I will also tell you how to use PubMed to find the best papers for your writing. The different sciences There are many scientific disciplines: physics, astronomy, geology, biology, biochemistry, medicine, pharmacology, neuroscience, etc. To cite a paper in one science to support claims in another science would be a major blunder. The humanities - philosophy, history, economy, literature, law, art, race studies, feminist studies, etc. - are considered different from science. Some of them, like history, are based on facts. Others, like philosophy, are based on reason and speculation. It has been argued that science and humanities belong to two cultures, often at odd with each other. In any case, you should not cite a paper in the humanities as scientific evidence. In this article, I explain how to find papers in the general area of biomedicine, which covers chemistry, pharmacology, biology, molecular biology, medicine, neuroscience and psychology. Papers about physics, geology and other sciences are not listed in PubMed and have to be searched in other repositories. Types of scientific papers There are many types of scientific papers, that are used for different purposes. You need to be aware of this when you cite them and discuss them. Here are the main types of scientific papers: Basic research is done using instruments to examine the properties of matter and living tissue. They range from the telescopes that study the immensely big to the electron microscopes that examine the immensely small. But they also include many other techniques: mass spectroscopy, DNA sequencing, gene modification, cell cultures, electrophysiology, etc. In physiology, neuroscience, cellular biology and molecular biology, these type of experiments are called in vitro, which means in the glass - the glass of test tubes and Petri dishes. Animal research is done in live animals (in vivo) or in tissue extracted from animals and kept alive (ex vivo). Examples of the latter are primary cell cultures and tissue slices. Most biomedical, pharmacology and neuroscience research is done on animals - mostly mice and rats, but some essential research needs to be done on monkeys. However, animal rights activists have spread the lie that animals are not necessary for scientific research. Because the same activists stalk and terrorize scientists and their families, universities and other research institutions hide the fact that they use animals, which has the unwanted consequence of giving the impression that most research is not done in animals. In fact, in the last decades, genetic modification of animals has blurred the line between basic and animal research. Clinical research is done in humans, often to test new medication, devices and medical procedures. Most commonly, it consist on giving sick people and healthy controls a drug or a placebo. Other times, experiments are done in people. For example, using electrophysiology, positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or trasncranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Clinical research also includes epidemiology: the science that studies the spread and causes of diseases. Surveys consist of asking people a bunch of questions and analyzing their answers using statistics. They are used in psychology, diet research and sex research. Reviews are papers that collect, examine and discuss the papers on a particular topic. Although they are not original research, they play a fundamental role in summarizing the state of the research on that topic and in building scientific consensus. Citing reviews is your best bet when you want to prove that there is a growing scientific consensus on a topic, or when you want to cite a bunch of research at the same time. However, you should also be aware that some reviews can be biased to promote a certain scientific view and to ignore another. A lot of scientists that write reviews include a lot of their own papers in them (self-citation). This is not improper per se - scientists usually write reviews about something that they know well precisely because they have been working on it - but it can be abused. Meta-analyses also summarize a lot of previous work, usually on clinical research. However, unlike reviews, they do so in a systematic way by pulling the data from previous studies and doing a statistical analysis of all those data together. This lead to strong conclusions. When you cite a paper, it is a good idea to mention what type of paper it is. What is peer-review? You may have heard that, for evidence to be reliable, it had to be published in peer-reviewed papers. But, what is peer-review? How do you know that a paper has been peer-reviewed? When modern science was being created in the 19th century, a tradition was established that scientific papers should be evaluated by other scientists before being published. These scientists are called reviewers and should be anonymous and unbiased either in favor or against the authors of the paper. These days, when a paper is submitted to a journal, an editor assigns it to three reviewers, who remain anonymous and do not know who the two other reviewers are. They decide whether to accept the paper, require modifications, or reject it. The second and third options are the most likely outcomes. The editor then makes a final decision by balancing the opinions of the reviewers. Sometimes, a paper goes to several review cycles before being accepted. Almost all papers deposited in PubMed are peer-reviewed, except letters to the editor. If a paper was published in a reputable scientific journal, it is safe to assume that it was peer-reviewed. Peer-review is also used to score grant proposals to obtain the government grants that fund most of the research done these days. In the USA, these grant are administered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. In my scientific career, I published 65 peer-reviewed papers and obtained half a dozen grants from the NIH and the VA. On the other side of the equation, I reviewed many papers and grants proposals to the NIH and the VA. Although peer-review has been criticized, it is by far the best way for gate-keeping and quality control for science to remain in the hands of scientists, instead of being handed over to corporations and politicians who would quickly corrupt science. What parts of a paper should you read? Most writers don’t read the papers that they cite. This can backfire when a clever reader uses the paper that you cite to counter your own argument, which is embarrassing and undermines your credibility. However, reading a scientific paper is very hard and requires a specialized education in the scientific field of the paper. Unless you have a Ph.D. or similar degree in that subject, you should approach the paper knowing that you are in way over your head. Even if you are a scientist, reading a paper can take you two or three hours. So, what do you do? You should read the abstract, which is short summary of the paper. You should also skim the paper looking for the information that relates to your writing. Yes, I know… The full text of many papers is behind a paywall. I will address how to deal with that in another article. There are parts of the paper that are written in less specialized language accessible to most people. These are: The abstract. This is a summary of the paper in 250 words or less - a limit imposed by most journals. Even if the paper is behind a paywall, its abstract should be accessible in PubMed and other repositories. Most scientists only read the abstract of a paper, unless they are looking for detailed information. The problem is that abstracts condense a lot of information to get under the 250 word limit, so they are hard to read. They also use specialized language because that’s the only way to condense information. Therefore, an abstract is hard to read for non-specialists. The introduction is the text following the Abstract, without a heading. It presents the state of the research on this topic and the goals of the paper. Because it uses less specialized language, it tends to be easier to understand. It tells you what the paper is about and what is the previous knowledge on its subject. The figures are often hard to understand, but sometimes they are the best way to appreciate the results and how solid they are. Some figures are beautiful, veritable works of art. But don’t grab figures and put them in your article. You need to request permission to do that, not from the authors but from the journal, which usually owns the copyright. The discussion is the last part of the paper, after the results and before the list of references. Here, the authors go to town explaining what they found and why it is important. Like the introduction, it tends to be in a more colloquial language. The reference list can be used to find other papers on the same topic. However, you would be moving backwards in time when you do that, so you will miss the most recent research. How to judge the quality of a scientific paper Every scientist knows that there is a world of a difference in the quality of papers. Publishing in journals like Nature, Science, Cell or PNAS is a lifetime achievement. On the other end of the spectrum, there are a bunch of new journals that will beg you to publish in them (I get half a dozen emails every day) - if you pay their publication fees, of course! They are just a way to get your research money. Therefore, to cite papers, you need to be aware of the hierarchy of journals. It’s not the same to cite a journal in Nature as a paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results - which actually exists!. However, there is a way to quality of a journal: look at its impact factor. This is a metric that was created in the 60s and 70s by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) based on how often papers in that journal are cited. Journals with impact factors higher than 5 are exceptionally good. Run-of-the mill journals have impact factors between 3 and 5. Some good journals that publish a lot of papers can have impact factors below 3, but below an impact factor of 1 we are definitely in low-quality territory. Using the impact factor to determine the quality of journals and papers has many problems. Nevertheless, it is useful for those unfamiliar with science. How to use PubMed to search for papers PubMed is a free, searchable repository of all reputable scientific papers on areas of biomedicine published in the entire world. It is run by the National Library of Medicine, which is part of the NIH and funded by the USA government. Since a lot of biomedical research done in the United States, and even abroad, is funded by the USA government, it is now mandatory that scientists deposit papers created with that funding in PubMed. Therefore, you can find the full text of many papers in PubMed. If the full version is not accessible there, at least you can find the citation and the abstract. Here is a simple way to do a PubMed search to find papers on a given topic: Follow this link to PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/. You will see a big white rectangle with Search to the right of it. However, I do not recommend that you do your search here, because this will give you an imprecise search with too many results. For example, searching the word choking gave me 43,679 papers. Way too many to even scan their titles. Instead, click on Advanced under the search bar. This takes you to a more complex search page, which is actually better for our purposes. In the box All Fields, scroll down to Title or Title/Abstract. This will restrict your search to paper containing your keywords in the title, or in the title or the abstract, respectively. Enter your keyword in the bar to the right and press ADD, then Search. For choking, I found 509 references with Title and 2,434 references with Title/Abstract. These are still too many, so you need to narrow down your search. For example, if you are interested in the practice of choking during sex, you can use the AND function to restrict your search to papers that have the keywords choking and sex. The search (choking[Title/Abstract]) AND (sex[Title/Abstract]) gave me only 106 results. You can now scroll through the titles and check those that may be interesting in the big square boxes next to the title. At the top left of the list of results, you will find options to save your checked references in a file, have them emailed to you, or send them to the Clipboard, My Bibliography, Collections or a citation manager. I normally send them to the clipboard, where I can delete those that I don’t want and add more citations from new searches. When I am done, I send the citations to my citation manager. I will address the use of a citation manager in another article. Intellectual honesty and credibility Now, it is up to you to use this information. Anybody who loves and respects science should have intellectual honesty: “Intellectual honesty is a personal commitment to search for the truth by examining the evidence and thinking rationally, to tell the truth, and to act according to the truth.” Hermes Solenzol in Sex, Science & Spirit. I wish I could tell you that being intellectually honest and building your credibility would get you more readers, but I am afraid that this would not be true. You will find yourself arguing with unethical fools who will use all kinds of dirty tricks to protect their beliefs. However, in the end, self-respect is one of the most valuable things that you will achieve with your writing.

Intellectual honesty is a commitment to examine the evidence, think rationally, tell the truth, and act according to the truth. What is intellectual honesty? Intellectual honesty is a personal commitment to search for the truth by examining the evidence and thinking rationally, to tell the truth, and to act according to the truth. The above is my own definition of intellectual honesty, which I think is more complete than the one provided by Wikipedia: "Intellectual honesty is an applied method of problem solving, characterized by an unbiased, honest attitude, which can be demonstrated in a number of different ways: 1) One's personal beliefs or politics do not interfere with the pursuit of truth. 2) Relevant facts and information are not purposefully omitted, even when such things may contradict one's hypothesis. 3) Facts are presented in an unbiased manner, and not twisted to give misleading impressions or to support one view over another. 4) References, or earlier work, are acknowledged where possible, and plagiarism is avoided." How science taught me intellectual honesty Over many years, as my beliefs drifted through several religions, philosophies and political ideologies, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the dogmatism I encountered everywhere. At the same time, doing scientific research acted as mental training, teaching me not to become enamored with a particular idea, but rather to put it to the most strenuous tests. No matter how genial an idea seemed at the beginning, I had to challenge it in my experiments to avoid being led in the wrong direction, wasting precious time and resources. Mother Nature does not yield her secrets easily; she only reveals the truth to those who are willing to humble themselves and leave their ego behind. I gradually realized that I had to apply the same discipline to my own personal life. It has been a slow, hard process. It is difficult to live in a state of constant doubt, to realize that many things will remain forever unknown. On top of that, people do not like complete honesty, no matter what they say, and they will not forgive you if you challenge their beliefs. The value of truth Why should we place such a high value on the truth? Because living a happy and meaningful life depends on making sound decisions based on truthful knowledge. A mind full of confusion and false beliefs not only leads us to behave badly, but it is also in itself a source of unhappiness. Buddhism recognizes this when it teaches that ignorance is the root of suffering and that discovering the truth will liberate us from it. The ancient Stoics of Greece and Rome reached a similar conclusion when they advocated a life of virtue based on honesty and rational thought. Living a life of virtue (eudaimonia) means living in close relationship with the truth. Lying to oneself leads to confusion, wrong decisions and even neurosis. Lying to others also leads to confusion, because the only effective way of lying is by building alternative realities that we end up believing. On a larger scale, the triumph of Western civilization is based on science, which is a way of gathering knowledge about the world that is rational, rigorous, evidence-based, self-consistent and self-correcting. Undermining science and its standards of truth will lead to the demise of our technological civilization, the one that has produced unprecedented standards of living and to a worldwide decrease in suffering. And yet, we live in a crisis of truthfulness. Much has been said about President Trump and his lies, but Trump is just the symptom of a disease that has been growing in both the Right and the Left for quite some time. While the Left was traditionally a bulwark for science and rationality, postmodernism and political correctness have convinced us to sacrifice truth for political expedience. As I discuss below, dogmatism, ideology and political correctness have infiltrated the intellectual discourse to such a level that it is hard to find an honest point of view anymore. We need a large group of people committed to intellectual honesty to counter this dangerous trend. Twelve things an intellectually honest person should do Say “I don’t know” when there is no evidence or rational argument to answer a particular question. Recognizing our lack of knowledge on a particular matter provides a good starting point for any inquiry. Logical fallacies are a constant threat to sound thinking. Anybody committed to intellectual honesty should study them to become able to recognize them in our own thinking and in the arguments of others. Needless to say, the intellectually honest person should expunge fallacies for his discourse and apologize if he unconsciously uses them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This means that it is intellectually dishonest to argue from ignorance, as when we say “you have no evidence for what you say, therefore what I say must be true”. Anybody who makes a statement that departs from the “I don’t know” baseline must provide evidence or logical arguments to support it. And this includes negative statements like “there are no unicorns”, which are the hardest to prove. When there is conflicting evidence for something, the intellectually honest person recognizes the evidence against his opinion and bases his argument in balancing evidence for and against his position. A critical thinker should avoid both type 1 errors (believing something that is false) and type 2 errors (not believing something that is true). The “skeptic’s fallacy” is giving more weight to evidence against a statement than to evidence for that statement. While it is true that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, this idea has been abused by skeptics by labeling a theory that they dislike as “extraordinary”. A more thoughtful approach is to realize that our description of reality must be internally consistent. Therefore, if something challenges that consistency, the evidence for it must be equivalent to the collective evidence in favor of all the theories it challenges. Alternatively, we must provide a way to reconcile the new idea with previously existing knowledge. Science provides a description of the world that is consistent from the very small (quantum mechanics) to the very large (astrophysics and relativity), and from the simple (physics and chemistry) to the complex (biology and neuroscience). If an idea does not fit into this consilience of the sciences, it should be in deep trouble. Lying is unethical for many reasons. It undermines trust and creates confusion in our own minds. But the main reason not to lie is that everybody has the right to know the truth and when we lie we rob them of that right. It is important to realize that being intellectually honest means not just that we must know the truth, but that everybody should know it as well. The principle of telling the truth is not an absolute one, but must be balanced against the moral imperative not to harm other people and to increase the collective good. There are inconvenient truths, which can range from something that clashes against our lifestyle to something that can actually harm people if it became known. However, we should keep in mind that even if something is harmful, that does not make it false. This is a fallacy known as “arguing from adverse consequences”, and it keeps creeping into politically correct discourses. The world is as it is, it has not been created for our convenience or in agreement with our ethical principles. However, if we know that the truth is going to harm somebody, we do not need to disseminate it. In fact, we may have the moral obligation to keep it hidden. For example, scientific findings that would encourage racism or sexism should be thoroughly challenged and not disseminated until they have been vetted. Lying is not just making false statements. There are many subtle ways of not telling the truth. For example, we can lie by omission: by giving the impression that we are telling the whole truth when in fact we are concealing something. However, this does not mean that we have an obligation to tell everything we know; everybody is allowed to keep secrets. What it does mean is that it is unethical to selectively tell some facts and hide others to buttress our opinion. Another subtle way of lying is by misrepresenting the certainty by which we know something. Unfortunately, it is quite common to bolster our ego by bragging about how much we know about something that in fact we have not studied in so much depth. The right thing to do is to bracket what we say with some information about how we know it and how well we know it. Exaggerations, personal attacks and other rhetorical tricks are also attempts at tweaking the truth to our advantage. Hypocrisy is also unethical. This means that when we know something to be true, we must act in accordance with that truth. Or at least recognize that we are not doing so, for whatever reason. Wishful thinking is an ever-present temptation, and so are negative thoughts that arise from our self-doubt and insecurities. We must become aware of how our emotions color our ideas and worldview, and strive to achieve the most impartial view that we can. The way I do that is to explore my mind and my emotions with practices like meditation and mindfulness. Not everything we say must be fact-based. Life would be incredibly dull without fiction, fantasy, opinion and speculation. However, we should strive to label any of these things as such. Of course, the line between speculation and opinion, and fact-based statements and logic is necessarily blurry. It must be so, or we would risk killing our creativity. Religious dogmas are unethical Dogmatism is to declare an idea as the truth, rejecting any evidence and arguments that oppose it. The main sources of dogmatism are religious beliefs and political ideologies. Some religions, like Buddhism, value free inquiry. Other religions, like Christianity and Islam, hold that believing in the absence of evidence is a moral good, which they call faith. However, even the religions, like Buddhism, that pay lip service to free inquiry, hold some unquestioned beliefs, like the existence of reincarnation and nirvana. Faith and dogmatism are not moral goods. They are unethical because they infringe the basic moral principle of respect for the truth, which must be sought freely and honestly. The basic immorality of religious faith has dire consequences: centuries of religious persecution, inquisitions, witch hunts and religious wars. Agnosticism In the 19th Century, Thomas Huxley, a biologist who was one of the earliest defenders of the Theory of Evolution, argued that faith and religious belief in the absence of evidence is, in fact, a moral wrong because it is a form of self-deception. He called his idea agnosticism. Later on, agnosticism came to mean indecision when confronted with the question “Do you believe in God?” I like to call Huxley’s original idea Strong Agnosticism. Instead of focusing on the idea of God, the strong agnostic confronts the “believe” part of the question, arguing that it is unethical to believe in something for which there is no evidence. Therefore the strong agnostic draws a sharp distinction between the two, apparently similar, statements “I do not believe in God” and “I believe that there is no God”. The first one is intellectually honest, because “I do not believe” is equivalent to “I do not know”, whereas the second would require proof for the statement that there is no God. Ideologies Ideologies often become similar to religions in their disrespect for the standards of truth. However, I am not arguing that ideologies are necessarily bad. By providing an internally consistent worldview, they are extremely effective in promoting effective ways to change it, hopefully for the better. Just like religions, ideologies become more powerful the more their followers believe in them, which creates an incentive for dogmatism. Still, the deceptions weaved by ideologies are more subtle than the blunt articles of faith of the religions. They may involve framing reality in such a way that emphasizes some aspects and hide others. Marxism emphasizes class differences, class struggle and the production of material wealth, while hiding the need for freedom and other non-material assets. Capitalism also focuses on material wealth, but justifies inequality on a supposedly selfish and competitive human nature. Feminism often veers to an extremist position that views everything through the lens of gender disparities. It erects the Patriarchy as the ultimate origin of most evils; not just the oppression of women, but also wealth inequality, violence and war. Animal liberationists exaggerate the similarities between humans and animals while discarding the obvious differences, as well as the moral contract that forms the basis for human rights. Another subtle way by which ideologies twist the truth is by starting with an idea and then searching for evidence supporting it, unlike the open inquiry for the truth practiced by science. This leads to rationalization (one-sided justification of a preexisting idea) and confabulation (made-up narratives to explain an event), two forms of self-deception that are common in the human mind. Again, I am not saying that we should discard all ideologies — in fact, I label myself as socialist, feminist and sex-positive — but that we should question them when they become dogmatic or frame inquiries in a restrictive and biased way. Political correctness Political correctness is a modern form of thought-control based on the manipulation of language and the exclusion of ideas. In the name of equality, respect and fairness, it deems that certain words and ideas are too immoral to be said in public and condemns anybody who dares say them to ostracism, loss of career and even worse - cancelling. Political correctness does not argue against ideas. It argues against your right to think, express and debate those ideas. This encourages bigotry, because politically correct ideas go unchallenged. Political correctness is a form of dogmatism, because it is impossible to consider the truthfulness of an idea if you cannot express it. But the problem with political correctness is not just censorship. It also has an active side that promotes certain ideas, like ‘mansplaining’ or ‘speciesism’, that have not been vetted by critical thinking, are assumed to be true, and cannot be criticized. Another problem with political correctness is that it deliberately confuses opinion with behavior. For example, expressing the opinion that pedophiles can be rehabilitated will get you labeled as a pedophile. Another insidious belief of political correctness is that we are conditioned to believe certain things by our gender, race, nationality, etc. This serves to justify censorship by discarding the opinion of a person based on the group he or she belongs to, and not on the value of their ideas. Bullshit Bullshit is not lying. It is an ongoing discourse done with absolute disrespect for the truth and with the goal of bolstering our ego and our social standing. "In his essay On Bullshit (originally written in 1986, and published as a monograph in 2005), philosopher Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University characterizes bullshit as a form of falsehood distinct from lying. The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress." Wikipedia. Conclusions We desperately need more intellectual honesty in all aspects of modern discourse, but particularly in politics. However, the critical thinker faces an uphill battle because he will be attacked from both the Right and the Left. Challenging beliefs engenders a remarkable amount of violence. For many centuries and even today, religions have punished non-believers with torture and death. Modern political correctness and cancelling are used to ruin people and end their careers. Only by establishing intellectual honesty, critical thinking and free speech as core values in our societies we can fight this awful drive towards dogmatism.