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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human sexuality does not fit the procreation-centric view promulgated by both religion and evolutionary psychology The procreation-centric view of sex There are two ways of looking at sex. From the scientific standpoint, sex is a biological function to procreate, that is, to pass our genes to future generations. From the personal standpoint, sex is something that we do for pleasure, moved by our sexual desire and our longing for connection and intimacy. We have been convinced by both science and religion that there is no contradiction between these views. Science, and in particular evolutionary psychology, tells us that lust and pleasure are caused by behavioral drives to spread our genes. Furthermore, it says that men and women have different reproductive strategies. Men want to have sex with as many women as possible and so have a higher sex drive. Women, on the other hand, are coy and select their sexual partners with care because they make a higher investment in pregnancy and raising the young. Religions have been promulgating this procreation-centric view of sexuality for centuries. Their puritanical morality says that the only righteous sexual acts are those that produce offspring. However, this sexual morality crashes against our enormous lust, creating endless strife. Hence, both religion and evolutionary psychology tell us the same thing: “Sex is for making babies and not for your selfish pleasure, you pervert!” And yet, this belief creates a cognitive dissonance with the way we live. We are the horniest of all mammal species - with the possible exception of our cousins the bonobos. In Western cultures, as sexual liberation advances, we see that women can be as lustful and promiscuous as men, contradicting the prediction of evolutionary psychology. In fact, when we examine human sexuality more carefully, we find that it departs from the simpleminded predictions of the procreation-centric view in many ways. I summarize them here as seven enigmas of human sexuality. Enigma 1: hidden ovulation and lack of estrous in women If we only fucked to have children, the number of sexual acts we perform in our lives would be much less, by orders of magnitude! Having 10 children per couple is considered an aberration in our culture, but this was pretty normal in the past, especially considering that many of those children would not make it to adulthood. If a couple has sex twice a week, on average, that would add up to 100 sex acts per year. Considering that a person is sexually active from age 20 to age 60 (an underestimate), then a person fucks on average 4,000 times over his or her lifetime. All that to have ten children, at most? Biologically speaking, this is a huge waste. Having sex involves a considerable expenditure of energy. Besides, it was a dangerous activity in our evolutionary environment because it exposed us to predators, aggression from other humans, and sexually transmitted diseases. The reason why humans have so much sex is that, unlike other mammals, women do not have estrus. We are all familiar with the fact that dogs, cats, horses, etc. only have sex during a short period, when the female becomes sexually receptive. Otherwise, the female refuses to be mounted and the males are not attracted to her. Even our close cousins chimps, gorillas and orangutans have estrus. Some mammals follow a yearly cycle in which they reproduce and have offspring once a year. That way, they get to gestate when more food is available or during periods of inactivity such as hibernation. This restraint and conservation of resources make sense from the evolutionary standpoint. Then, why is it not the same in humans? To deepen the mystery, while females in estrus send out signals to attract males —smells, sexual calls, swelling of genitals, behavioral displays— women do not advertise that they are ovulating. Yes, some women notice it and become hornier during those days, but most women don’t. If women knew when they were ovulating, contraception would be easier and infertility treatments would not require looking at the calendar. Unlike other mammal females, women are receptive to sex throughout their menstrual cycle. Some women even report being hornier when they menstruate, the time when they are the least fertile. Why are we different from other mammals in this? Enigma 2: female orgasms and the location of the clitoris There are two drives for sex: sexual desire and pleasure. Most animals experience a compelling impulse to have sex when in estrus, in the case of the female, or when exposed to a female in estrus, in the case of the male. In humans, sexual desire is less compelling but constant. Animals also seem to experience sexual pleasure during sex, although their copulation is typically much shorter than ours. In humans, sexual pleasure seems to be more intense. Sexual pleasure seems to be stronger in women than in men. Women’s orgasms are more intense and last longer than the orgasms of men. Moreover, while men have a refractory period after ejaculating, women can have multiple orgasms. It seems that evolution created a stronger motivation for women to have sex. Evolution did something even weirder to women: it placed the clitoris away from the vagina. This doesn’t make sense. If the goal of sexual pleasure is to motivate sexual intercourse, then the most sensitive source of pleasure should have been placed where it can be stimulated by the penis. Cats, pigs and a lot of other mammals have clitorises inside the vagina. It is as if evolution wanted to motivate women to masturbate or receive oral sex instead of the old-fashion penis-in-vagina fucking. But masturbation and oral sex don’t make children, so what gives? Enigma 3: menopause Not only do women have sex when they are not ovulating, but they also do it after menopause, when they cannot become pregnant. Granted, some women experience a decrease in sexual desire after menopause, but many of them continue to have sexual desire. Most older women maintain a healthy sexual life. An additional issue is that menopause is unique to humans, being absent in almost all other mammals. The only other animals that have menopause are a few species of toothed whales. Menopause is not simply becoming too old to get pregnant, but a programmed change in women’s bodies that shuts down ovulation and menstrual cycles in the course of a couple of years. This rather sudden cessation of ovulation does not happen in other mammals. Instead, their estrous cycles become more irregular and infrequent. Enigma 4: sexual shame and voyeurism Everybody experiences sexual shame, one way or another. We attribute it to religion and our puritanical upbringing, but it may be deeper than that. Even progressives, skeptics and atheists tend to develop their own forms of sex-shaming as they free themselves from religion. In fact, all human societies seem to consider sex shameful. In the book of Genesis, sexual shame was one of the punishments for eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Sexual taboos change from culture to culture, but there are always some involving being seen naked or having sex. Even in tropical societies that use little clothing, adults cover their genitals. The flip side of sexual shame is voyeurism. We enjoy watching and hearing others having sex. That’s why porn and erotica are so universally successful. We also like to gossip about sex. Why do we hide from view when we fuck and at the same time enjoy catching others in the sexual act? Enigma 5: penis size The human penis is larger relative to body size than the penises of other mammals. For example, a male gorilla weighs twice as much as a man, but it has a much smaller penis: 3 centimeters or 1.25 inches. This has been taken as an indication of the overactive sexuality of humans, but there is no real reason for this. Small cocks can give as much pleasure as large ones. A more accepted hypothesis is that large penises have evolved to attract females, but I fail to see the evolutionary advantage of women being attracted to large cocks. Some women are, but hardly most of them. A similar idea is that a large penis would intimidate or inspire admiration in competing males. But, again, that does not seem tenable. Men are intimidated by the size and the muscles of other men, but not so much by their penises. Which are hidden in response to sexual taboos most of the time, anyway. Enigma 6: homosexuality and bisexuality Since a sex act between two males or two females does not produce offspring, homosexuality should have been quickly culled by natural selection. And yet it is widespread in the animal kingdom. For example, in his book Chimpanzee Politics the primatologist Frans de Waal documents the sexual behavior of a lesbian chimpanzee. And albatrosses have been seen forming female-female couples. However, some have cautioned about applying human cultural categories to animals. What is clear is that 8-10% of men or women have purely homosexual behavior, while a larger percentage are bisexual. Women seem to have a greater facility than men to switch over to same-sex acts. Views of human sexuality centered on procreation have a hard time explaining the emergence of this large amount of homosexual acts. Enigma 7: fetishism, sadomasochism, dominance-submission and other kinks Homosexuality is just the beginning of the weirdness of human sexual behavior. There are many kinks that turn us on, and none of them have anything to do with making babies. Some people say that anything can be turned into a sexual fetish, but in reality they tend to fall under a few common themes: body parts, clothing, age and power exchange. In their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam identified these themes by analyzing internet searches for porn. Even the most vanilla sex is full of rituals and objects that make it more exciting, like lingerie, candlelight and vibrators. And our sexual lives are not limited to sexual intercourse, but intermingle with our life as flirtations, daydreams and reading erotica. Something similar happens regarding food: we don’t just eat to feed ourselves, but we turn it into the arts of cooking and gastronomy. Power exchange is an interesting aspect of eroticism. It consists of giving one of the sexual partners power over the other by using bondage, pain (sadomasochism) or psychological domination (dominance-submission). This seems to emphasize an aspect of sex by which the penetrator is seen as dominant and the one being penetrated as submissive. The use of sex to establish social hierarchy is observed in many species of primates, which could be a clue to explain why power exchange is erotic in humans. In humans, sex was co-opted for bonding Of course, these seven enigmas are adaptations that ultimately increase our chances of winning the game of natural selection. However, in the case of the human species the evolutionary logic is not as simple as the narratives commonly presented by evolutionary psychology. There are two basic reproductive strategies: Have a lot of offspring and invest very little energy in them, Have few offspring and take good care of them to increase their chances of survival. Humans are an extreme case of the second strategy. There is an important fact that is missed in many discussions of evolutionary psychology. The reproduction game is not won when we have offspring, but when our offspring is also able to reproduce. A reproductive strategy that produces lots of offspring that does not survive to adulthood is a losing game. And this is particularly important in the case of humans. The slow growth of the human brain means that we have to take care of our children for at least 15 years until they reach their reproductive age. In our evolutionary environment of adaptation, it was impossible for a couple to take care of a child for that long. It took a village to do that. And a village, or a tribe, requires some complex mechanisms to ensure cooperation, discourage selfishness, and establish social hierarchies. Sex, then, evolved away from its role for straightforward reproduction and into a mechanism for social bonding and the establishment of hierarchy. Often, during evolution, an organ that evolved for one particular function is co-opted for another. For example, although teeth evolved to tear and mince food, in elephants, narwhals and boars they turned into tusks to be used as weapons. Similarly, in humans, sex became a tool for social bonding. How sex for bonding explains the enigmas of human sexuality Sexual acts became more frequent and women became more interested in them because every sexual act promoted bonding by releasing the social hormone oxytocin. Ovulation became hidden in women so men wouldn’t know what children were their offspring. Therefore, they became invested in protecting all children of the tribe. Female orgasms became stronger to motivate women to have sex, compensating them for the risks of pregnancy. The clitoris became located away from the vagina because non-penetrative sex produces as much bonding as penis-in-vagina sex, while being less dangerous for the health of women. Menopause evolved because it is more advantageous reproductively for older women to care for their grandchildren than to have more children of their own — the grandmother hypothesis. Penises grew larger to fit larger vaginas, which are needed to pass the heads of our big-brained babies. Homosexuality and bisexuality evolved so that same-sex members of the tribe could bond with each other. Sexual shame, voyeurism and gossip evolved because the social hierarchy of the tribe was established in great measure by who fucked whom. This was not limited to people of the same sex. Sexual power exchange developed because being the receptive or the active partner during sex became imbued of power symbolism. However, this is not as simple as it seems, because having sex with a person high in the social hierarchy became a way of gaining social status, no matter if it was in a sexually passive or active role. Like grooming in monkeys, who you have sex with designates your place in the social hierarchy of the tribe. As culture became a critical aspect for survival, sexual rituals, fetishes and taboos became integrated into human sexuality. Conclusion: human sex is not just for making babies So there you have it: human sexuality is not just for making babies. Religions that declare sex-for-fun a sin because “it is not natural” are wrong. And so are evolutionary psychologists with their simplistic explanations of sex as a competition to see who can have more children, with men and women have conflicting interests in that competition. That may be true for animals, but not for us. Human sexuality is not a simple biological function, as it is in other animals. It is, literally, “making love” — a profound force that binds us together, not just as couples, but as members of a society crisscrossed by profound erotic currents. Sex is not an animal act, but a complex and beautiful art that gets integrated into our cultures and makes us uniquely human. Some of these ideas are defended in the book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. An opposing view based on the standard view of evolutionary psychology can be found in the book Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior, by Peter Gray and Justin Garcia. © 2020 Hermes Solenzol

Real-life examples of man and bear encounters in the woods Man She walks to the swimming hole just as he dives into the cold water. She catches a glimpse of his naked buttocks sticking into the air. They are pale, hairless and deliciously round. He surfaces, wipes the water from his eyes, and sees her. He has a short beard, green eyes and hair that falls in cute curls down his forehead. He’s gorgeous. His clothes lay piled on a rock nearby. “Oh! Hi there!” he says. “Sorry, I’m naked! I didn’t expect anybody to hike this far up Lundy Canyon today.” “Oh, I don’t mind at all! In fact, I think I’ll do the same thing. It’s hot today!” She drops her backpack, pulls out her sneakers without bothering to untie the laces, gets rid of her socks. Her shirt, bra, shorts and panties soon are piled on the rock next to his clothes. He stands on the river bed, the water up to his shapely pecs. He’s shaved down there, his uncut cock slowly waving in the current. She steps into the water. The cold cuts her feet like a knife. “Wow! It’s freezing!” “I love it! But you have to get used to it. I take a cold shower every day. It’s very healthy!” Wow! A manly man! But if she wants him, she has to stand up to his game. Without thinking twice, she drops into the deeper part of the pool. She comes out gasping for air. The cold water makes her whole body hurt. He is climbing the rocks of the shore, offering her an unrestricted view of his perfect bottom and muscular thighs. He grabs his fleece jacked and starts towering himself with it. He looks down at her, freezing in the water, teeth chattering. “Got to catch up with my boyfriend before he gets too far ahead,” he says. “Nice talking to you!” Bear She aims her rifle at the black bear. It scratches at a log, licks something from it. She will teach the boys in town. They think only they can hunt. Ha! She squeezes the trigger. The bear jumps in the air when the bullet hits him. Then falls to the ground, convulsing in agony. “I got him! Yay!” She walks slowly to the bear. Kicks him. He surely is dead. She leans her rifle against the log and takes out her hunting knife. She rolls the bear on his back. With the knife, she makes a long incision down his chest. It will be hard work, but the bear's skin will do a great job as a rug in her living room. She hears steps on her side. Looks up with alarm. A bear cub has come out of the bushes, staring with a sad look. She looks down at the chest she has begun skinning. Notices the nipple there. Man “Good God! You scared me!” “¡Señora, por favor, un poco de agua! ¡Me muero de sed!¨ “I don’t understand a word you’re saying… What were you thinking, jumping out of the bushes like that!” The man approaches her, extending his hands helplessly before him. “Por favor, deme algo de agua para mi mujer y mi hija. Las tuve que dejar atrás. Ya no podían caminar más.” “What are you trying to do? Rape me? I have Mace, I warn you!” The man stares anxiously at the plastic tube sticking out of her backpack. “Stop staring at my tits, you creep!” She reaches for the container of bear maze in the side pocket of her backpack. “¡Sólo un sorbito de agua, se lo suplico!” He stumbles forward, grasping for the tube. She sprays Mace right into his face. “¡Ay! ¡Ay, qué dolor, por favor! ¿Pero yo qué le he hecho? ¡Yo sólo quería un poco de agua!” He brings his hands to his face, bends over and falls to his knees. “That will teach you to try to assault a woman, you creep! Now, go back to your country! We don’t want dirty scum like you in America!” Bear “Heavens! A grizzly!” The humongous bear has come into view suddenly. It completely blocks the trail. It looks at her menacingly. Slowly, it raises up to stand on its hind legs. It’s taller than her. If she runs, the bear will catch up with her in a matter of seconds. Luckily, she’s come prepared. There are many dangers in these woods in Montana. In fact, a grizzly bear is not the worst thing that can happen. A man would be much worse. She draws the handgun from its holster just in time. The bear falls back on its four legs and charges. She aims at its head and fires. She has time to squeeze the trigger twice before the bear falls on her. Its jaws go straight for the gun, as if he knows that’s where danger lays. The bite almost cuts her wrist clean off. The bears front paws fall on her hips with full force. Then the bear walks away. She cannot walk. With her left hand, she undoes her shoelaces and makes a tourniquet to stop the blood flow in her wrist. Just in time before she passed out. She wakes up in the hospital. Her first instinct is to look at her right arm. The bandages stop a bit further down the elbow. There is nothing beyond that. A gray-haired lady with a clipboard gives her a sad look from the end of the bed. “They had to amputate it. Your hand was necrotic by the time that man found you.” “God, no! How am I going to live without my right hand.” “And that’s not the worst of it… There is no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it… That bear broke your spine. You are paralyzed from the waist down.” “No! They can do something! They can cure me… Can’t they?” The gray-haired lady just shakes her head. “You are lucky that man found you. Nobody goes up that trail.” “Lucky? Oh, God! I wish that bear had killed me!” Copyright 2014 Hermes Solenzol

The number of papers using computer models in biomedical research is insignificant compared with those using animals The claim: computer models are replacing animals in scientific research The buzz is everywhere when animal research is mentioned: experiments in animals are outdated because computer models are replacing them. You may have read statements like these: “Researchers have developed a wide range of sophisticated computer models that simulate human biology and the progression of developing diseases. Studies show that these models can accurately predict the ways that new drugs will react in the human body and replace the use of animals in exploratory research and many standard drug tests.” PETA. “Sophisticated computer models use existing information (instead of carrying out more animal tests) to predict how a medicine or chemical, such as drain cleaner or lawn fertilizer, might affect a human.” The Humane Society of the United States. “But research shows computer simulations of the heart have the potential to improve drug development for patients and reduce the need for animal testing.” Scientific American. “Beginning in 2012, the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program began a multi-year transition to validate and more efficiently use computational toxicology methods and high-throughput approaches that allow the EPA to more quickly and cost-effectively screen for potential endocrine effects. In 2017 and 2018, ORD and OCSPP worked with other federal partners to compile a large body of legacy toxicity studies that was used to develop computer-based models to predict acute toxicity without the use of animals.” Directive to Prioritize Efforts to Reduce Animal Testing memorandum by Andrew R. Wheeler, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, September 10, 2019. Papers using animals, mice, rats and non-mammals There is a way to check if these claims are true. The final product of scientific research is scientific articles. Therefore, we can compare the number of papers generated with computer models with those that used animal research to evaluate the actual productivity of the two approaches. An additional problem is that a tally of the number of animals used in research is not kept for many species, including mice, rats, birds and fish. However, every paper published must report the animal species that was used. A good place to start is to look at the number of papers using all animals, mice, rats, rodents (rats & mice) and non-mammals (birds, fish, insects, worms, etc.). Figure 1 shows that the number of papers using any kind of animals increased linearly from 1975 to 2017, reaching well over 100,000 papers per year. A large fraction of these papers are from research on rodents. Their number increase in parallel with the number of papers using all animals. However, studies using rats remained constant since 1990, while the number of papers using mice increased exponentially in that period of time. The blue line in the graph is an exponential curve, which provides an excellent fit for the mouse data. Therefore, scientists have been dropping rats in favor of mice, likely because of the increasing availability of transgenic mice, which allow performing sophisticated experiments. The number of papers using non-mammals (mostly birds, fish, insects and worms) has also been increasing exponentially, and recently surpassed the number of studies using rats. Papers on humans and clinical trials A search with the MeSH Term ‘animal’ without excluding humans yields a very high number of papers. This is because there are numerous papers on humans. They are shown in Figure 2 together with the results for non-human animals and mice or rats. Note the change in the scale of the Y-axis from Figure 1. Clearly, there are many more papers on humans than on animals. They increase exponentially, while the studies on animals increase linearly, so that the difference between the two becomes greater with time. While in 1975 the number of papers on humans was roughly the double of the papers on animals, today there are six studies on humans for every study on animals. However, this does not mean that animal research is being replaced with research on humans. Strictly speaking, research on humans is conducted in clinical trials, so let us see what happens when we do a PubMed search on clinical trials. Looking at the Y-axis scale of Figure 3, we can see that papers reporting clinical trials are much less numerous than papers on humans in Figure 2. In 2017, there was one clinical for every 50 papers on humans. This is because most papers on humans are medical case reports, epidemiological studies and other medical observations. These could be considered research, but certainly not the kind of research on physiological and biochemical mechanisms that can replace animal research. The number of clinical trials has increased over time, but does not follow a clear trend, either linear or exponential (Figure 3). There was a steep drop around 1990 followed by a rapid increase up to 2003. Since then, the number of clinical trials has remained constant. The result of my search is consistent with the reports in ClinicalTrials.gov, which lists 268,786 completed clinical trials in 2024. Since each clinical trial takes several years to run, this is consistent with the annual number of clinical trials shown in Figure 3. Papers using computer models Now we have enough background information to compare the number of papers using computer models with those reporting research on humans and of animals. Figure 4 shows the evolution in the number of papers using computer models over time. Again, note the big difference in the Y-axis scale with Figure 1. As we could expect, barely any papers using computer models were published before 1985. After that, the number of studies increased slowly until 2001 and rapidly from 2001 to 2008, when it seems to have stopped growing. At that point, the number of studies using computer models was 40 times less than the number of animal studies. Overall, the number of papers using computer models fits quite well an exponential curve, but this is largely due to their initial growth. However, many of these papers use computer models in combination with animal experiments, not instead of them. As shown in Figure 4, excluding the papers that used animals in addition to computer models reduced the number of papers using computer models in 2017 by almost two-thirds. Moreover, the stagnation in the number of computer model studies after 2008 becomes more apparent. There is even a decrease after 2011. If computer models were replacing animal studies, what we would see is an increase in the papers exclusively using computer models. Instead, what we see is that numerous papers use both computer models and animals. This is probably because the models are used to analyze results obtained with animals. Alternatively, animal experiments could have been used to validate the computer model. Computer modeling categories The MeSH Term ‘computer simulation’ has six different subcategories: Augmented Reality, Cellular Automata, Molecular Docking Simulation, Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Patient-Specific Modeling, Virtual Reality. Searches with ‘augmented reality’ and ‘virtual reality’ as MeSH Terms in PubMed yielded very few hits. “A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. […] Cellular automata have found application in various areas, including physics, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling.” Cellular automaton, Wikipedia. Therefore, cellular automata do not seem to be a replacement for research on animals. According to Wikipedia, molecular dynamics “is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules.” It is used in biomedical research to study the 3-dimensional structures of proteins and other biomolecules. Molecular docking is used to study the interaction of small molecules with their ‘docking pockets’ or ‘binding sites’ in proteins like enzymes or neurotransmitter receptors. This is a great tool for designing new drugs that interact with these proteins. However, new drugs designed this way have to be tested in vitro, then on animals and then in clinical trials to be considered useful as medication. The computer model is just the first step in a long process that has to include research on animals. Patient-specific modeling is “the development and application of computational models of human pathophysiology that are individualized to patient-specific data.” It is used to plan surgeries and to model organ function. Clearly, none of these techniques can be used to replace animal research. Rather, they complement it. As we can see in Figure 4, molecular dynamics and molecular docking comprise a good fraction of the recent papers using computer models. Patient-specific modeling generates a very small number of papers. Number of papers with computer models and using different animal species Figure 5 shows a comparison between the number of papers generated in 2015 with computer models, those from clinical trials, and those using different animal species. It shows different bars for all papers with computer models (CM) and for papers with computer models without animals (CM -animals). Most of the papers that year used mice or rats. Computer models produced many fewer papers, and this number was similar to the number of papers on clinical trials. When we consider papers using exclusively computer models, their number was much smaller and comparable with those using dogs, cats and primates. Interestingly, papers using non-human primates are similar in number to those using zebrafish, the fruit fly Drosophila or the worm C. elegans, showing the relative importance of studies in non-mammals and invertebrates. If we add the number of papers using these species, they vastly outnumber the papers using exclusively computer models. Figure 1 shows that the number of papers using any kind of animal in 2015 was 120,000. ‘Replace, reduce and refine’ research on animals — is it working? ‘Replace, reduce and refine’ (the ‘3Rs’) is the approach adopted by scientific institutions since the 1960s to address criticism from animal rights activists. This policy assured the public that the number of animals used in research would be reduced, that animals would be replaced by other methods or by less sentient animals, and that the way animals were used would be refined to decrease animal suffering. While it is true that the ways animals are used in research have improved substantially, the analysis I present in this article shows that the ‘reduce’ and the ‘replace’ objectives are far from being accomplished. It is true that research on charismatic species like monkeys, dogs and cats has been replaced by research on mice. However, it has not been replaced by experiments in vitro or by computer models. Figure 1 shows that, overall, the use of animals in research has been increasing since 1975 and will likely continue to grow in the future. A major part of this increase is due to the exponential growth in the use of mice and non-mammal species. The 3Rs were a foolish promise because the only way we can reduce the use of animals in research is by doing less science. This would imply decreasing scientific progress, which would have a tremendous negative effect on society. We would miss cures for old diseases like cardiovascular problems and new ones like Covid-19. Computer models are not replacing research with animals It is clear is that computer models are not replacing animals in research. The number of studies using computer models is relatively small and is not increasing. When we count only studies that use computer models without animals, their number is smaller and did not increase from 2008 to 2017. At present, many of the papers using computer models deal with molecular dynamics and molecular docking, methods that complement but do not replace animal experiments. These types of papers have been increasing and many include the use of animals. Of course, the number of papers using animals does not reflect the actual number of animals used in research. Studies using monkeys use just a few of them, while papers on mice and rats typically use hundreds of animals. Fruit flies are used by the tens of thousands. However, the number of papers does tell us the relative contribution of each species to the scientific endeavor. Also, given that the number of animals per paper for a given species is not likely to change much over time, an increase in the number of papers for that species is likely to reflect an increase in the number of animals used. The use of animals in research is not being reduced. It continues to increase. Regarding replacement, charismatic species like dogs, cats and monkeys are being replaced by mice and non-mammals. However, animal research overall is clearly not being replaced by computer models. Why computer models will not replace animal research in the future Predictions about the future are risky. Why do I dare to forecast that computers and artificial intelligence (AI) will never replace research on animals? Surely, the rapid growth of computer power will determine that sooner or later biomedical research will move from animals to computer models. Right? Well, no. There are some fundamental issues that determine that, for the foreseeable future, we will need the actual bodies of animals or humans to extract information from them. Even though future computers will help enormously to accelerate biomedical research, they will not be able to tell us what happens inside our bodies or the bodies of animals. We will have to look inside those bodies and tell the computers. The reason for this lies in the nature of life itself. Living beings have been created by evolution, which is a contingent process. The word ‘contingent’ means that there is an element of randomness in a process that makes it impossible to predict its outcome. In the words of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, if we went back in time and run evolution again, we would end up with a completely different set of living beings. While natural selection funnels the direction of evolution through the survival of the fittest, it sits on top of random mutations and genetic drifts, which are non-deterministic processes. It is impossible to know what the animals species on planet Earth will look like a million years from today. All the enzymes, intracellular signaling pathways, ion channels, neurotransmitter receptors, hormone receptors, membrane transporters, etc., responsible for the functioning of our bodies were created by contingent processes. Not entirely random, but still impossible to predict. For example, imagine that you were to design a new car. You will be constrained by physics if you wanted the car to work, but the car could still have infinite different looks. It may have four wheels, or three, or six. It could ride high as a truck or low as a sport car. An external observer could not predict how it would look and how it would work. Likewise, if you told a computer ‘find out how neurons in the spinal cord process pain’, the computer would not be able to tell you. Somebody would have to look at those neurons and find out. You have to feed that information to a computer before it can do anything with it. The amount of information in our bodies, in each of our cells, is staggering. We have barely started to scratch it. The human genome contains 20,000 to 25,000 genes, and we still don’t know what most of them do. A computer, no matter how powerful, is not going to tell us. And knowing what each of those genes does is only a small part of the story. We need to know how the proteins encoded by those genes interact with each other to generate metabolism. The only way to do that is to take the body of an animal and look inside. A computer cannot guess what goes on inside the body, just like it cannot guess the content of a book that it has not read. The mirage of the computer revolution The advancement of computer technology in the information revolution has been so amazing that we have become convinced that there is nothing an advanced computer can’t do. That is why it is so easy for animal rights organizations to convince the public that we can eliminate animal research and replace it with computer models. Even organizations that supposedly defend animal research have helped this misconception by promoting the idea that eventually it will be replaced (one of the three Rs) by computer models, in vitro research or clinical trials. That is simply not true. As I have shown here, as scientific productivity increases, so does the use of animals. What has happened is that we are using fewer animals of some species (dogs, cats, rabbits and primates) by using more animals of other species, like mice and zebrafish. Research using computer models is relatively small and is not growing fast enough to ever catch up with animal research. Computers can do amazing things, but they cannot guess information that they do not have. That is why computer models will never replace animal research. There are limits to what is possible, and this is one of them. How I made the graphs: data mining in PubMed There is a freely accessible repository of all the papers published anywhere in the world: PubMed. It is run by the United States government, specifically by the US National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In PubMed, you can do keyword searches to find articles on any topic, so I used it for data-mining to compare the number of papers using animal research and computer models. In the “Search results” page, there is a nifty graphic on the top left, with bars representing the number of papers per year containing the keyword used in the search. Below is a “Download CSV” link that allows you to get those numbers in a spreadsheet. I imported the numbers into a graphics program (Prism 8, by GraphPad) to create the graphics that I am going to show you. There are several ways to enter a keyword in a PubMed search. You can search for the keyword anywhere in the article (“All Fields”). However, this was not useful for my goal because if an article mentions “computer model”, this does not mean that this was the primary method used in the paper. My favorite method to restrict a search is to look for the keyword only in the title or the abstract of the paper (“Title/Abstract”). Still, this is not optimal because different authors may use different words for the same concept. For example, the terms “computer model” and “computer simulation” are synonyms. To deal with the problem of synonyms, PubMed uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH homepage, Wikipedia), a sort of thesaurus to facilitate searching by linking synonymous terms, so if you enter one of them it retrieves all the terms that are related. This is called doing an “extended search”. PubMed can perform MeSH searches by MeSH Major Topic, MeSH Subheading or MeSH Terms. These different types of MeSH record types are explained here. A descriptor, Main Heading or Major Topic are terms used to describe the subject of each article. Qualifiers or Subheadings are used together with descriptors to provide more specificity. Entry Terms are “synonyms or closely related terms that are cross-referenced to descriptors”. Therefore, I performed my searches using MeSH Terms to avoid having to find the exact wording of a MeSH Major Topic. When you introduce a keyword as MeSH Term, for example ‘mice’, PubMed searches that word and all its synonyms, in this case ‘mouse’, ‘Mus’ and ‘Mus Musculus’. The figures that I show represent the number of papers in the period 1975-2017, because 1975 seems to be the year when PubMed starts gathering most of the papers written in the world. Records appear incomplete before that date. It seems that it takes up to two years for PubMed to complete its collection of citations, since the number of papers in every search drops substantially during the last two years. Hence, I excluded data from 2018 to 2019. This article was originally published in 2019 on the website Speaking of Research and then deleted. I am re-publishing the original version, so my research does not extend to 2024. Also, because the Covid-19 pandemic closed labs for a couple of years, scientific productivity was anomalous after 2020.