Off and on for twenty years I’ve thought deeply about God and his chances of survival (for “his” you can substitute “her” or “its,” since an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present deity doesn’t have a fixed gender). But this Sunday, God’s survival became the subject of a debate before an audience at Cal Tech.
View By:
Most Recent Popular Most Commented-
Can “Evil” Corporations Become Conscious Corporations?
March 8th, 2010
3A while back there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “Will Big Business Save the Earth?” A startling question given that corporations are firmly entrenched as evildoers in the public mind, with an environmental record as black as an oil spill and as toxic as the waste dumps in Bopal. Yet the author, noted professor and counter-thinker Jared Diamond, comes up with a more nuanced view: “…while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.”
-
Why it’s better to have a mind than a brain (part 2)
March 1st, 2010
17Last week I proposed that we need to look to the mind instead of the brain as the answer to many things. One example was depression. In the wake of new research showing that antidepressants don’t work, and that the brains of depressed patients don’t seem genetically different from those of undepressed people, we have an opening to look at the mind with fresh eyes.
-
Why it’s better to have a mind than a brain
February 22nd, 2010
7I’ve decided once more to write about the mind. In particular, the point must be made that we are not our brains. We are our minds, a rich, alive, constantly changing mystery. The brain carries out what the mind wants. To mistake the brain, a lump of proteins, sugar, and water, for a mind is a drastic mistake.
-
How To Be Your Own Placebo (Part 2)
February 15th, 2010
5In an earlier post I raised the question of the mind healing the body. We know that this is possible because of the placebo effect, in which patients obtain relief even though the doctor has given them only a sugar pill, an injection of saline solution, or some other innocuous substance. The placebo effect, contrary to widespread suspicion, is a “real” cure. Pain is diminished; symptoms are alleviated. But it depends upon deception. The doctor knows that he is giving a harmless substance; the patient doesn’t.
-
How to Have a Good Life? Have a Good Day
February 8th, 2010
4One piece of bad news that keeps getting repeated has to do with well- being. Americans are bombarded with advice about prevention and positive lifestyle choices. Yet as a population we continue to be more sedentary and obese, with unregulated stress, too little sleep, a high-fat, high-sugar diet, and so on.
-
Why Is Happiness Still a Mystery?
January 25th, 2010
19PBS has just finished a three-part special on human emotions, with the final episode devoted to happiness. It may surprise many that happiness is a hot subject, especially in the new field of positive psychology. Just as medicine studies disease to find out how to get patients well, psychology has almost entirely been about the mind’s maladies. Positive psychology attempts to reverse this focus by studying a person’s strengths rather than his weaknesses.
-
Words That Heal
January 17th, 2010
11There is a long tradition, both East and West, about sacred words. We don’t resort to that kind of thing very much in modern life. If you are a devout Catholic you repeat the rosary, and in many sorts of Buddhist and Hindu meditations a mantra is repeated over and over. There are two reasons for this, usually. One is that the repeated words go directly to God, as prayers do. The other is that repetition fills the mind with a deeper intention that can create a good effect.
I wonder if it isn’t time to consider how words can help to heal. I’ve been fascinated for a long time about how to update traditional spiritual practices, and this one is especially promising.
What can a mere word do to heal?
In ordinary life words can be incredibly powerful, creating instantaneous, often dramatic change in mind and body. Think of the difference between hearing the word “You’re hired” and “You’re fired.” How many lives have been changed by “I love you”? Yet we actually know very little about how to consciously employ the effect that a single word can have.
Let me make some suggestions for you to ponder:
Withhold harsh words: Being honest doesn’t mean being brutal. In the name of telling the truth, we’ve all heard — and said — things we’re sorry were ever uttered. It’s worth remembering that every cell in your body is eavesdropping on the brain, and when you feel hurt or shocked by what you hear, the same shock is occurring to hundreds of billions of cells.
I became a doctor just on the cusp of a big change in this regard. It used to be that physicians hardly ever told fatally ill patients that they were dying, often withholding even the diagnosis. (When the last emperor of Japan died, he was not told his diagnosis — the old practice still holds in other cultures.) It was thought that receiving bad news could hasten a person’s death and impair his chances of recovery. This effect is known as nocebo, the reverse of placebo. In essence, your body metabolized bad news and becomes sicker, or it metabolizes good news and starts to heal.
Today, we believe it is only ethical to give patients full disclosure about their illness, and on the whole that is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t erase the nocebo effect. Leaving medicine aside, consider withholding harsh, harmful truths in daily life. There is no reason to discourage a child, for example, by saying hurtful things.
It’s well known in psychology that descriptive statements (such as “you’re lazy, you can’t be trusted, you’ll never be as smart as your sister,” etc.) make a much deeper impression than prescriptive statements (such as “pick up your room, remember to come home on time, be nice to your sister” etc.) Sometimes a single derogatory sentence from a parent or close friend can remain stuck in the brain for life, serving as a toxic seed that grows into a belief that one will never be good enough, smart enough, or beautiful enough. It’s much harder to remove these seeds than not to plant them in the first place.
Words that heal: Besides holding back on harsh and derogatory words, saying words that heal really works. Offering reassurance in an anxious situation settles people. Reminding someone that they are loved, respected, and valued should be a habit. Such words serve to bond two people together at a deep level if the words are backed up with simple, sincere, believable emotion — not over-stated emotion but natural feeling. We tend to be shy about exposing ourselves emotionally, but only if you try can you gain the benefit.
Then there are words we say only to ourselves, silent words of healing. In the East there are thousands of such formulas, many gathered under the loose term of mantra, that are repeated in order to infuse the mind with their good effect. You can’t get much effect from repeating a word like love, compassion, kindness, and forgiveness when your mind is agitated or filled with the flotsam of everyday life. But if you deepen your awareness through meditation, which brings one’s attention to a level of silence beneath the surface static, then healing words can have quite a strong effect.
It is taught that healing words, when said at a subtle level of the mind, can do several things. They can purify the mind of negative thoughts by introducing a more positive effect (such as replacing “It’s my fault” with “Blame won’t help anybody”). A healing word can bring comfort; it can add a positive element to your surroundings. It can improve your mood and the overall tone of your demeanor, which others will notice and take heed of.
I’m suggesting that healing words need to play a more important role in our lives. This is a vast territory worth exploring. As a society, we’ve become experts at words that definitely don’t heal: gossip, cynicism, skepticism, accusation, partisan wrangling, smear campaigns, and character assassination. As a result, we know all about the bad effects of such words. Why not consider the positive effect of saying words that work in the opposite way?
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
-
Fake Fears and Why You (Probably) Believe in Them
January 11th, 2010
175Is there a solution to America’s current addiction to fear? The near-hysteria over the Christmas Day airplane attack shows how overblown our anxieties have become. A gloomy, jittery public seems willing to believe in alarmist stories, even when they amount to demagoguery. Consider the following hyperbolic or even fake sources of fear and outrage.
1. Al-Qaeda remains a potent threat to U.S. security.
2. Under proposed healthcare reform, “death panels” will have power to decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t.
3. Healthcare reform will beggar future generations.
4. The current deficit is so oversized that it will bankrupt the country.
5. Wall Street has benefited from government bailouts to the detriment of Main Street.
6. The U.S. owes so much money to foreign countries that soon the dollar will drastically decline.
7. China is rapidly overtaking the U.S. on all fronts.
You may be immune to the death panel scare, for which we have Sarah Palin to thank, her fear-inducing theme — a total fabrication — being quickly taken up by the far right and even mainstream Republicans. But the other sources of fear are far easier to fall for, despite rational arguments and solid facts that run counter to them.
1. In fact, the U.S. has greatly weakened Al-Qaeda, which has been pushed to the far hinterlands of places like remote Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. A large number of high-level operatives have been killed. No attacks on the order of 9/11 have occurred in eight years. International sharing of intelligence is at an all-time high. The failure to prevent the Christmas Day airline attack was a wake-up call, but overall, the terror threat is manageable. With large-scale policing efforts in place of misguided wars and mass panic, the future of Al-Qaeda looks dim.
2. Death panels always were a lie, but in fact a national healthcare system will lead to some cuts in Medicare benefits and higher taxes. These are reasonable burdens to bear in the name of social justice. Far more serious and credible threats exist to the American way of life than proposed cuts in Medicare. (Sarah Palin, the author of death panels, is skilled at framing appealing lies. Her populist campaign against big government, for example, ignores the fact that her home state of Alaska receives more government money per capita than any other state; fully a third of all jobs in Alaska are government jobs.)
3. Our present healthcare system has a much greater chance – it’s almost a guarantee — to beggar future generations than any proposed reform. It’s not reform that is bankrupting us but the failure to cut soaring medical costs and the $700 billion spent annually on unnecessary tests and procedures.
4. Right-wing propaganda to the contrary, the current and foreseeable deficit is no greater, as a percentage of gross domestic product, than what the U.S. has carried in the past. The immediate postwar deficit in 1945 is an example. European countries routinely carry the same percentage deficit without undue harm. Large deficits need to be incurred during serious recessions in order to stimulate spending when the public is too afraid or unable to spend. Such incentives are part of the modern nation state. The touting of free market mechanisms has been proven wrong over and over. It may be confusing to know what to do in economic downturns; however, doing nothing is the worst choice.
5. Wall Street’s reaction to its own misbehavior has sparked outrage, and rightfully so on moral grounds. But the huge recovery of the stock market, with a 40% rise in the S&P index for 2009, also benefited Main Street. Billions of dollars of new capital entered the economy, allowing for more lending, spending, and capital investment. There are complex reasons why the economy acts the way it does, but blaming Wall Street entirely is unrealistic and divisive.
6. The dollar showed strength at the beginning of the recession but has subsequently declined. It may be that there is a long-term decline in view, but not over the short term. At present U.S. Treasury bills are selling well at low interest rates. Attempts to replace the dollar as a world currency have not been successful, just as decoupling foreign stock markets from Wall Street have not been successful. We are in a financial crisis and many trends are not favorable. But the rest of the world is in the same crisis, and everyone’s fate is intertwined with everyone else’s.
7. China is rising quickly and has the advantage of central government control. Its huge work force is expected to produce a gross domestic product that will equal the U.S. in a generation. But for now the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — taken together equal the domestic product of the U.S. We hugely dominate the world economy, and contrary to the alarmists, increasing the wealth and productivity of developing countries will benefit America, not hurt us, by offering more people who can buy our goods, travel to the U.S. and buy our currency.
As you can see, it’s more meticulous and time-consuming to learn about these complex issues than to run scared. Fear is easy to fall for. Fortunately, we now have an anti-fear administration. Whatever one may think of President Obama’s performance in office, he is certainly a level-headed thinker, whose fix-it agenda is based on a rational approach. It would be good for all of us if we followed his lead and stop being addicted to fear. The frisson of bad news creates a momentary high, but in the long run fear is our enemy, as it has always been.
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
-
Medical Alert: We Need a Cure for Bad Faith
January 4th, 2010
22I am far more worried about an invisible epidemic than I am about H1N1. I’m referring to the spread of distrust that has become contagion beyond all reasonable boundaries. Politicians have always borne the brunt of mistrust. It comes with the job, since no piece of legislation satisfies all constituencies, not even tax cuts and cheap drugs. But when mistrust becomes the actual, avowed basis for politics, healthy skepticism has turned malignant.
Loading...