Truth and Consequence

Truth and Consequences Basil Gala, Ph.D. In Search of Meaning Humans are forever looking for the truth everywhere; we’re very curious animals because we survive in Nature by knowing what is true or false and coping accordingly. How do we judge what is true or what is false? In school the teacher asks us to respond to questions with “true” or “false” answers. Naturally we look to the teacher’s lectures for the “right” answers. Similarly, in taking a Department of Motor Vehicles test for our license renewal we face multiple-choice questions and give the answers in the manual supplied to us by officials. We accept as true what is handed down to us by those of superior standing, knowledge or power: parents, teachers, experts, authorities, or officials. Deciding what is true or false is largely a matter of consequences and conveniences: what suits us, what is useful, what does no harm, what benefits us in dealing successfully with fellow humans, other living things, and the inanimate world. True is what supports our values and ideals, what is productive, bringing desired results; false is what hampers our actions in surviving and achieving goals we deem worthwhile for ourselves and for society. True is what works; false, what fails. Yet truth itself is a major value and ideal for us, much like beauty and love, to be admired and sought to perfection. Scientists, artists, theologians, and social leaders seek truth in different ways. We should strive for the ideal of truth, keeping in mind practical aims. The ideal of truth is something to which we aspire as best as we can in our thinking but can never reach. In Plato’s ideal world what is not totally true, what has even a tiny bit of falsehood, is false. Yet, most of us lead lives wrapped up in false beliefs or at best in half truths. We may ask, hasn’t Science been pursuing the ideal of truth diligently for a few centuries now with astounding success? Yes, the scientific method has been very fruitful in approaching the ideal of truth. Scientific Truth Is it true that an electron is a particle? Science says an electron is a particle with a mass of 9.11 times ten to the minus 28 in grams and a negative electrical charge. But the electron is also a wave, the electron’s position determined by a probability density; thus, if electrons go up against a barrier like a diode, some electrons will appear across the barrier, giving rise to the tunnel diode. What then is an electron (or any object), a particle or a wave? The answer depends on the experiment we’re conducting; we can call the electron a particle or a wave, whatever suits our situation. It suits scientists to steer away from stating absolute truths as prophets and some philosophers do regarding divinity, immortality, justice, grace, and goodness. Mathematicians too can be absolutely sure of their results; scientists never are, although they aim for certainty. Einstein wrote: “In so far as the statements of geometry speak about reality, they are not certain, and in so far as they are certain, they do not speak about reality.” We cannot fit Nature in the straightjacket of any mathematics, but if a mathematical model fits well enough, scientists accept it as useful in making predictions or manipulating materials. The Standard Model in particle physics fits the findings from the Large Hadron Collider, but facts in physics are less certain than facts in mathematics. Have scientists at CERN discovered the Higgs boson? Yes, early in 2012 they located this particle within a confidence interval of three standard deviations and by the middle of the year within five standard deviations. There is a possibility that the Higgs signature is a random fluctuation of energy, but that chance is one in three million. Science is the search for certain knowledge, but that is an ideal, not what scientists can achieve. We are fortunate, however, that nothing is impossible in good science; a small probability is attached to its existence. Cold fusion may be possible, but investigations show it’s extremely unlikely. Mathematicians can state some results are impossible, such as division with zero. Such a division is forbidden, because it results in infinity, an unmanageable quantity that blows up a computer program, ending in a logical error by the machine. Mathematicians can be certain of their results because they make up the rules about the objects they study, as opposed to scientists who have to contend with Nature’s rules. Einstein again: “How wretchedly inadequate is the theoretical physicist as he stands before Nature—and his students.” Mathematics is much simpler than natural processes. Engineers use mathematics, fitting a part of Nature to a bed of Procrustes, to manage practical problems and find useful solutions. On the other hand, scientists aspire to finding the real facts in the universe, separating those from artifacts and illusions such as Percival Lowell’s Martian canals. We proceed in science from observation to theory or from theory to observation, if possible experimentation, then to measurement, recording, and finally to a likely proof of our theory, never absolutely sure of the truth of our results, but accepting them conditionally as long as they aid our understanding and our endeavors. A true finding in scientific work must be repeatable, by the researcher who found it and by others trained in the same field. If other independent researchers can’t come up with the same results in an experiment under the same conditions, scientists don’t accept the finding as true. That’s how cold fusion failed a few years back. Like cold fusion, a finding could be a true but very rare phenomenon, an event that occurs only for the benefit of the original researcher; still we don’t accept it as a scientific fact, because it would not be useful for the rest of us under normal circumstances. This is the method scientists and engineers use to achieve their astounding successes. We observe and measure; experiment if possible, then observe and measure exactly. How exactly? We measure as exactly as necessary for our purposes. Let’s say a machine part must be 10 cm to fit well. Our die cuts it to just slightly over 10 cm then we use a piece of fine sandpaper and shave layers of molecules off until it fits flush. We have discovered the truth of what is 10 cm in length for a piece of metal. Here’s another practical approach to the truth of an exact measurement. We take a tape and measure the object under observation numerous times. The measurements should fall into a normal, bell-shaped, distribution, unless our approach is biased towards the high or low end. We pick the average length and correct for any bias. We have arrived at a truth of some sort for practical purposes. Is it true that a 2x4 stud of Douglas fir is 2 inches by 4 inches? It was true a hundred years ago; now the stud is 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches. Lumberyards got the same price for less wood, conveniently. Is it true that the earth is flat? It certainly appears to be flat, unless you climb a mountain and look upon the curvature of the sea. The earth is flat locally, but spherical globally. This applies to many phenomena, for example amplifications which are linear and predictable in an operating region, but curved or interrupted with singularities further out. A large nation’s economy is complex and becomes chaotic under extreme circumstances, like a spring that we can pull and it extends until it reaches a breaking point. Philosophical and religious truth What is true? What’s really out there? We can’t know completely; we can only guess. Human knowledge has its scope and limits, as Bertrand Russell pointed out. We look at a table and recognize it as a table; but what it’s really like is speculative. A lot depends on the aspect of the table we look at, the lighting, its surroundings, even our own mental state. We see a table as a solid object, but physicists tell us it’s an arrangement of atoms, nuclei surrounded by a cloud of electrons, and the table is mostly empty space, with its material parts simply bundles of energies held together in a stable state by the strong nuclear force. We can never really know what’s out there; learning is supposed to be the process of acquiring truths; actually, learning is adapting for success or survival—getting the prey or prize, avoiding predators and living another day to reproduce. We don’t know for sure what’s out there beyond what our senses tell us; but we rely on vision while driving on the road to avoid colliding with other cars, and so far vision and hearing has worked well enough to keep us alive. Is objectivity possible? Bertrand Russell mentions the statement “two plus two equals four” as an objective truth. René Descartes believed as certain that a triangle has three sides and its internal angles add up to 180 degrees. Certainly this fact is true within the context of Euclidean geometry, but not so in other geometries we may design. Euclid’s theorems served well the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, not well enough today’s modern physicists. Is there an objective truth to UFOs? Of course there is; we’re constantly observing unidentified flying objects. We just don’t know whether they’re all natural objects or some are extra-terrestrial vehicles. Most of us find it practical to consider UFOs as natural phenomena—that way people are less likely to consider us odd and laugh at us. Belief in UFOs is like religion for some people; we laugh at these people, but they’re fervently searching for an ideal world in their imaginations. The search for imagined ideals, such as the brotherhood of men, a compassionate Creator, a perfect place, and eternal life, this search is religion. Men call each other brothers; then wage wars causing mass killings. We sometimes question the existence of a Heavenly Father, seeing all the bitter cruelties in the world and the disappearance of loved ones, never seen again except in dreams. Yet the ideals remain with us for peace, justice, and true security. Most of us--Christian, Muslim, or Hindu--hold as true that we are not our bodies; we inhabit our bodies and operate our bodies, but we believe in the idea that our spirits exist as entities separate from our bodies. We believe we’re always in the hands of God, who exists in Nature, but apart from Nature. Is this particular belief true? Does God in fact exist? René Descartes stated that the existence of his own mind and the mind of God were true without any doubt, while he doubted practically everything else he read about in the sayings of sages. Some of us, especially those trained in the scientific method, doubt everything, even God and our own souls, accepting the truth of anything only with a degree of confidence, great or small. We may accept God and our own spirits only as useful concepts in coping with life’s vicissitudes. Those who believe resolutely in God believe they’re always safe in God’s hands and that they can count on His guidance and support in life’s struggles. If such a belief gets them through a dark night to a bright morning; if it helps them survive and prosper and be at peace with themselves and the world, it’s a useful belief, and it may have a connection with reality, like most useful concepts. If we meditate and ask God for help and inspiration to solve a crucial problem, and if an insight come to us and we solve our problem, did we actually receive help from outside our own mind? Sigmund Freud would say that the insight came from the subconscious, which is the central processing unit in our brain, processing ninety percent of the information we get. The conscious mind is simply the input-output processor, focusing and directing our subconscious. But is there a connection in our subconscious to the Universal Mind? If it is useful for us to think we’re getting help from a Supreme Being, consciously or subconsciously, then it may be true that God exists; surely He exists for true believers. True believers also hold as true that God created the universe. Is creationism true? How about evolution? The theory of evolution is supported by a vast amount of hard evidence; creationism is supported only by biblical references. Could both creationism and evolution be true? All of nature may not be a creation, but certainly most of the products and services we use and enjoy today were created by humans--God’s free agents according to the scriptures. What then is really true and what is imaginary? Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. He did not mean that knowledge and hard work are not also important in actualizing our dreams. Dreams and emotions such as hope and love are necessary in our lives; but in logic, to make a statement simply because we desire its truth without sufficient supporting evidence that is called a subjective argument, a fallacy. Still, we can dream a desired goal, believe we can achieve it, and do what is necessary to realize it; then our dream can come true in the external world as well as in our mind. We can be objective in facing a problem, but fight back with a positive subjective attitude which helps in its solution. The attitude is that of “can do,” or “can handle this.” We can have an attitude that life is wonderful or that life stinks. In making a choice, what outlook is more beneficial? “Oh, what a wonderful morning, oh, what a wonderful day, I have a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way,” from the musical “Oklahoma” by Rogers and Hammerstein. We’re more likely to make a good day when we’re feeling good about our situation. Feeling good with song, wine, or religion is fine, but we should not take this approach to extremes. We become irrational when we respond disproportionately to the circumstances that challenge us. With stress or aging such irrational behavior becomes common to all of us, and if not checked, we descend to insanity. Insanity is lacking a sense of proportion. For example, it’s sane to care about money but not too much to the point of becoming a miser; or saving things, but not becoming a hoarder; or enjoying a drink or two of alcohol, but not becoming an alcoholic. It’s insane to turn a blind eye to an obvious truth because it’s uncomfortable or even painful. We are insane when we are unable to function mentally well enough to get along with others and with nature, failing and risking our survival. Finally we are insane when we confuse our thoughts with outer reality and believe in illusions. Sigmund Freud called religion an illusion, and famous author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls faith a delusion. God is an internal truth, inside the minds of faithful humans, but not an illusion or delusion if we accept that it’s a personal, not an objective truth. If belief in God and our spirits, however, are very useful in our lives, allowing us to survive longer and better, is it possible these beliefs are connected in some subtle way with reality? A devout atheist, Richard Dawkins acknowledges this possibility, although he judges the possibility to be extremely small. Should we think the impossible dream like The Man from La Mancha? Yes as long as we know it’s a dream. As to the existence of God, Descartes could not imagine that an imperfect being such as himself could have ideas of perfection, unless a Supreme Mind, God, gave him these ideas, and only a perfect being could have done so. We may wonder how we get our ideals, our sense of perfection in a piece of art which thrills and uplifts us, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or Mozart’s Laudate Dominum. Our wondering is not a proof of God’s existence. The proof of God’s existence is a secret. Since ancient times, jealous gods have kept secrets from us because they want us ignorant and obedient to them. But Prometheus gave the secret of making fire to humans out of compassion for their miserable existence. Knowledge was the apple of Eden, plucked by Eve, who gave it to Adam to eat so that he might become a god. Knowing the truth about things raises us up from an animal status to a human one and from there to the divine. Knowing the truth about good and evil, that is the most critical phase of our human development; animals don’t distinguish between good and evil, acting on instinct alone for their survival. We call one man evil, another good. But is anyone totally evil or good? Most of us have both good and evil traits, except saints who are ideal beings in imitation of God. Jesus said, “Know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” He said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) A simple but powerful message telling us to look to His ways for the truth and we shall find an eternal life of the spirit. Jesus also spoke of prophets after him, true or false, thus: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” In other words, the prophet tells the truth when prophesies result in benefits, when visions are profitable, like those of Steve Jobs of Apple Corporation. Steve Jobs followed in the footsteps of Thales of Miletus, a scientific philosopher in Ancient Greece. People laughed at him saying, if he was so smart why was he not rich. So Thales predicted a rich olive harvest after studying the weather and kept the knowledge to himself. He reserved all the olive presses in Miletus at a discount ahead of time and made a huge profit by renting them when demand peaked. All practical, pragmatic, applied philosophy deals with success, which depends on the quality we put into our efforts for favorable outcomes in business, professional career, social relationships, romance, family, personal growth, or peace of mind, whatever we find desirable to achieve in life. Philosophy, speculative and critical thinking, offered benefits and philosophy begat religion and science. Early on the two were mixed up. “The stars themselves proclaim the birth of kings,” as Shakespeare wrote; and so it happened at Bethlehem when the King of Israel was born. This outlook is astrology. You’ll be surprised to find out how many people today follow the connections between the stars and human lives. Are you a Capricorn? I’ll tell your prospects today. That is taking naivety to extremes. Setting naivety aside, even in careful scientific observations, the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty applies: the act of measurement distorts our findings. The situation is more certain in religion: our particular faith is true; all else is heresy. It is easier to accept this position because religious truths are inside our brains, not in nature outside. These religious truths are subject to the rigid rules we make up, just as in mathematics. The validity of mathematics and of religion depends on their usefulness. We all accept as true often not what is useful but what we’re told by those we admire, respect, love, or fear. We assume our parents’ beliefs, at least until we reach our rebellious teenage years: our being Jew, Christian or Muslim depends on our parents. Our parents also teach us to be truthful, to be honest; if we are truthful, they can control us more easily when we’re growing up. At the same time, they tell us about the tooth fairy and the boogeyman, again to control us. Honesty is the best policy, unless we have an alternative action that serves our purpose better. Whatever we claim as the truth, we should write it down, publish it, advertise it repeatedly; most people will believe us most of the time. We tend to think some statement is true if it’s written down, printed and published. Jesus often began teaching by saying “It is written.” He meant, of course, written in the Hebrew scripture or writings. Every nation, every culture, every religion has a scripture, those writings revered by members. Mao issued his little red book, held up high by his followers. Gadhafi had his green book. Hitler, “Mein Kampf.” Hindus admire the Mahabharata and Muslims the Koran. Mormons hold up the revelations of their prophet, Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon. What is written has prestige and is believed to be true. That comes from the time when few people could read or write, literacy being mainly the province of priests or government officials. Only a few men possessed the arts of writing and reading until a few centuries ago, and it’s still so in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. Artistic Truth The artistic domain intersects mathematics and religion. What is the utility of all our arts? What makes an artistic expression in music, literature, painting, or dance a true one? What is the meaning of the word truth in the arts? Truth in Latin is veritas and in Greek, aletheia. In English, truth is what is real and also what possesses fidelity or loyalty to an original standard or ideal. If you’re a true lover, you’re loyal, faithful, and constant. Shakespeare in Hamlet wrote: “…to thine own self be true…thou canst not then be false to any man.” Is fidelity real or an illusion? Art produces things of the imagination, illusions. The artist is a magician, impressing audiences with sleights of hand. In his famous sleight of hand the poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” John Keats penned “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That which is beautiful and pleasant is generally beneficial. We have evolved in Nature to survive by enjoying ourselves unless we do it to excess. That which is adulterated is ugly; it doesn’t lead to joy. Similarly, truth is beautiful when truth is profitable, but only if it’s pure, genuine, and novel. In the arts, we find repulsive those pieces which are imitations, copies, and fakeries. Ernest Hemingway told his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Your writing will be good when it’s true.” The romantic artists of the eighteenth century dealing with imagined subjects were followed by the realists in the twentieth century. Emil Zola with “Nana” followed Victor Hugo of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Then we had the reaction of surrealism with melting clocks and other oddities. Social Truth We enjoy romances, realistic stories, and even surreal presentations, even though we may admire and practice reason. Logical derivations if correct always turn out to be true. Why? Because logical rules are based on universal experiences which we have derived as a species to survive in a hostile world against better equipped competitors, such as saber tooth tigers and fierce lions. By comparison, much of what is said in the media—political, business, personal—involves lies, half-truths, and equivocations, changing the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument. Much writing and speaking is riddled with ambiguity, vagueness, and prevarication. Whatever its defects, logic--classical and modern--is clear and free of nonsense. Logical axiom: something is or is not, not both. All axioms of logic are also useful in thinking clearly and dealing with the world. Codified by Aristotle, the axioms evolved in human minds based over millions of years experiencing the world as it is and surviving in it. In popular writings, however, we see much stuff about myths, things not true. For example, we read about the five myths of dieting, or the seven myths of economic growth, or the six myths of success. On the other hand, what works is called a law: the five laws of success, the three laws for a happy marriage, and the eight laws of effective management. The word law is used to lend some scientific weight to the argument, a phony weight. In popular media, truth is an emotional thing. In the 1955 film “High Society,” Bing Crosby sang Cole Porter’s “True Love” to Grace Kelly, moving us sentimentally. “For you and I have a guardian angel with nothing to do, but to give to me and to give to you love forever true.” Here again we find truth as fidelity, loyalty, and constancy of affection. A young girl wonders about the love of her boyfriend. Does he love me or does he not? She picks up a daisy and plucks the flower petals one by one. He loves me, he loves me not. The last metal picked reveals the truth to her about her lover. Or does it? Is love a random event like that? Love is caring for someone, caring consistently and constantly, seen in the lover’s behavior over a long period of time and under easy and difficult circumstances. We cannot know how another person feels. We can only infer love based on behavior towards ourselves and others. The more observations we collect of behavior the greater our confidence in a person’s true feelings, but we can never be absolutely sure. When in love, however, we feel sure of the truth and validity of what we feel. It is an internal truth, not an objective fact that can be considered certain. Emotions have an internal validity and are objectively true if they lead to the survival of the genes in family, nation, race, and species. People who are effective with affective states possess emotional intelligence, not measured by the Stanford-Binet IQ tests. We have all seen cases of emotional intelligence in people we know. Yet, projecting emotions such as love or hatred to the outside world as if they are real objects can lead to irrational behavior. That’s why people say, “He’s madly in love.” Truth is not what the world wants us to believe; truth is what we want, need, think, feverishly desire, and know from personal experience. Much of what is reported in the media (newspapers, radio, television, Internet) is mere propaganda by vested interests. Truth is a word, a tool for transferring information, which needs to be beneficial for our survival or at least convenient. Societies promulgate as truths those statements that serve their purposes. Does a doctor say to a dying patient the truth that she has three months to live, or does the doctor refer her to the City of Hope? Is it true that a pastor is the shepherd of his flock of parishioners, his sheep, guiding them to green pastures, protecting them from wolves? The good shepherd in the sheepfold of heaven separates the sheep from the goats, putting them away from the swine. Is it also true that a shepherd fleeces some of his sheep and consumes their flesh? We are not insects serving a queen, but in human society too we adapt to what those in authority require of us as a means of survival, as the hero of George Orwell’s “1984” eventually did. We find it expedient to accept a statement, true or not, forced upon us by those in power. A fallacious statement from an authority is called an argument from force (argumentum ad baculum) in logic. But the logic of power is more potent than that of Aristotle or Kant. The Stockholm syndrome usually holds for those in captivity, those in the power of others, as Patty Hearst learned from the Symbionese Liberation Army. Did Patty actually believe in the truth of the SLA doctrine? She did believe, because she had been brain washed, closeted, raped, tortured, and threatened with the loss of her life; and she did survive and made a life for herself with bodyguard Bernard Shaw, after she had served 22 months of a commuted sentence in jail for participating in SLA robberies. More importantly, was the SLA doctrine true--that of liberating oppressed blacks and other minorities through violent revolution, financed with robberies from banks, the pillars of capitalism? Was the communist doctrine true, that of establishing a workers dictatorship, killing or exiling those who ruled previously, and controlling the lives of people for their own good? The communist doctrine holds much truth, although abhorrent to us, because it has its roots in ancient tribal living and village society sharing resources for the benefit of all. To leftist revolutionaries, such as Lenin, Mao, Castro, and Chavez, captains of business and industry and their government minions, even educated professionals, were bloodsuckers bloated by exploiting the sweat of the common worker—an ideology which at one time led to the atrocities of the Great Cultural Revolution in China, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. On the other hand, the rightist doctrine declared workers to be stupid, lazy, and constantly agitating for higher wages and benefits without producing more goods, lacking in family planning and proper care of their health, boozing and wasting their money on junk and gambling—a class of people needing a firm hand from a strong government, continuous discipline and frequent incarceration when they behaved badly with liquor and other drugs. Where does the truth lie? The truth is where we choose to put it for our convenience in the circumstances we’re in. People in the professions (medicine, law, sales, accounting, advisory services, and politics) all are tend to put the truth where it serves their interests first, their client’s interest second. Much of what they say is a mixture of truth and falsehood. For example, a heart specialist is likely to push for an angiogram, angioplasty, stents, even a bypass, to a patient suffering from arterial blockages, rather than a program of therapy with diet, exercise, stress management, and avoidance of stimulants. The specialist is acting according to the training received in Medical School and in such a way as to earn higher fees. It’s not conscious lying; with most patients medical intervention is the only course of treatment that works, because most people most of the time are unable to change their behavior sufficiently and in time for a natural treatment to be effective. To what extent do we need the insurance coverage our agent recommends or is our agent pushing for bigger commissions? Our plumbing contractor recommends re-plumbing our house with copper—good to last for fifty years. Could we fix the leaks in our galvanized pipes with much less money? Does our car really need the repair our mechanic recommends? Our stock broker arranges that we sell this stock and buy that stock; are we going to profit from the change or are the investments being churned? We go to the dentist to have our teeth cleaned. The dentist suggests deep cleaning, which will cost us three times as much as regular cleaning; do we really profit that much from deep cleaning? Health advisors in newsletters tell their readers what they want to read about their health. “Calories don’t count; eat as much as you want, but take this supplement I recommend. Grapefruit has negative calories and grapefruit extract will slim you down.” Shall we believe there is a cure for arthritis, cancer, diabetes, or aging? Many writers or pill pushers are out there ready to convince us that there is, if we’re suffering. Suffering does not add any evidence to the truth of things. We will forever have with us snake oil salesmen offering us cure-alls for a small or large price as long as suffering augments our credence. Beware of all broad statements and claims. The Post Office warns us, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” Any offers of “free gifts” tied to subscriptions are suspect; free gift is an oxymoron, the same as a free lunch. There is nowhere to be found pure 24 carat gold; any sample of gold has impurities. However, when a gold coin company is advertising .24 pure one-ounce gold coins for $100 each and we buy these, we need to have an eye examination or a mental one. A store is advertising its furniture for sale 50% off. What was the original price and was that price low? It can be anything. The advertising isn’t false, but it’s sucker bait. Politicians rarely tell the truth to the voters. They tell them what voters want to hear. Those politicians are elected who can fake their positions best. Politicians and their trainers know voters are naïve. Naivety is alive and growing among stock market investors. Nothing is more uncertain than new stock issues and the penny stocks, largely manipulated for profit by those in the know at the expense of the rest of us suckers. Will the price of Google go up some more? Will Facebook investments prove profitable? It is safer to look to the stars for guidance rather than follow investment advisors who predict explosive growth in the price of a stock issue. Advisors in general make predictions of what will happen for our convenience, for what suits us, for profit, and what makes us feel good. That is the way of the optimist and the soothsayer; the truth they see sooths our fears and pains. All predictions are chancy, because they deal with the future, always uncertain to a larger or smaller degree. Historical events are much more certain when we have good records of what happened; otherwise, history is largely speculation, filled with falsehoods and errors, which justify the point of view of the powers in place. The past is misty and so is the future; the present is also misty because our perceptions are poor; yet, we must rely on our perceptions when getting around because they’re all we have. Using perceptual data we obtain measurements of an object which we classify it as true or as false; the classification presumes a clear separation exists between the objects which are false and those which are true. We find the boundary between the two classes and measuring the distances of the unknown object from the centers of the two clusters, we assign the object to the class of false or the class of true based on the shortest distance. We assume the classes don’t overlap; but they often do, making some things partly true and partly false. More generally, we receive sensations from outside our minds that we organize into clusters of data so that we can see them as familiar facts, fitting them into prior knowledge, inherited or acquired in past lives. We see the things that fit into prior knowledge as congruent and true. In the meantime, the world has changed and what we find as true may not be so. Much of what we see now is what we have seen in the past; we fit, aptly or not, our new sensations to what we conceived in previous experiences. Our pre-conceptions, our prejudices, and our automatic responses rule our beliefs and behaviors. Periodically we need to stop in our tracks and ask ourselves whether this thing is true now or has it changed into something not so true. We must stop and think because what we perceive as real depends a great deal indeed on our mental state, our reasoning and our active emotion. Fear, anger, love, hatred, envy, pride, all these color and change the object we see. A powerful and feared enemy is seen as bigger and more menacing. When a shocking event occurs we tend to deny the truth of it. When a beloved child, brother, sister, parent, or friend dies suddenly, we blurt out, “Oh no, no, no!” In court we’re asked to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. How can we know the truth, mere mortals, and separate it from falsehood so well, refine it to such a pure state that it becomes nothing but the truth? Deception among people is common; self-deception is everywhere. People deceive themselves about getting old, about dying, about the worth of their children, about being afraid and about being selfish, about having everything change around them and in their lives. Above all we want comfort and stability. Here’s some pertinent dialogue from the 1992 film “A Few Good Men,” starring Jack Nicholson: Col. Jessup (Nicholson): “You want answers?” Kaffee (attorney): “I want the truth.” Col. Jessup: “You can’t handle the truth!” We believe in the truth we can handle, what we find convenient, useful, comforting, familiar, and free of unpleasant consequences. But it is in the nature of reality that consequences follow, like them or not. During the Libyan revolution, NATO bombs crashing around him, Colonel Gadhafi believed his people loved him and his enemies were rats. “Sing, dance, celebrate,” he exhorted his people, who cheered themselves hoarse in his presence. He was convinced of his own importance and righteousness until the rats shot him dead. Not unlike Gadhafi, the so-called “Greats” were not really great. Alexander, Peter, Kathryn, Elizabeth, Napoleon were largely despicable people much like Hitler and Genghis Khan, their cultural contributions small compared to their large killings. They believed themselves to be gods or demigods guided by the stars; these Greats proclaimed doctrines and made naïve followers believe, leading nations to war and havoc. These greats should have looked at their miserable selves in the mirror more often. Each one of us should take sodium pentothal, truth serum, alone in front of a mirror at least once in life before it’s too late to discover the truths about ourselves we’re unwilling to admit openly. We should then face our moment of truth. Vista, California July, 2012

Knowledge: Canned and Stale or Real and Fresh?

Knowledge: Canned and Stale or Real and Fresh?

Basil Gala, Ph.D.
In Search of Meaning


(1844 Words)

Someone older and wiser that myself in my family likes to argue that school knowledge in words and symbols is canned knowledge, stifling the mind and preventing us from getting to the real knowledge afforded to us by our own experiences. This person finished college in a profession, although he was kicked out of several private schools for his antics in his younger years. Since he's been quite successful in life and business, I felt compelled to pay close attention to his opinions. I concluded that the book knowledge taught in our schools is feeble, impotent, and of little use to anyone desiring success in any creative field, maybe even an obstacle to one in pursuit of original work in the arts, sciences, or humanities.

Are we then to ignore all the accumulated knowledge of humankind, so painfully and laboriously gained by clever individuals working in nature, laboratories, and on desks? No, I don't suggest that we do. Isaac Newton wrote that if he saw as far as he did it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants. Other giants like Gauss, Maxwell, and Einstein followed Newton in the centuries between Newton and us.

Bertrand Russell, mathematician, philosopher, Nobel prize winner for literature may help us clarify our dilemma. In his famed treatise, “Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits,” Russell separates private knowledge from public knowledge and explains the difference. Private or personal experiences give us capabilities which we cannot get from words or signs in books or lectures. In many cases these experiences cannot be put into words or symbols. That's why schools provide laboratories for students to get hands on experience with phenomena in physics, chemistry, or biology. From what we see in the lab we draw inferences of our own, which may be different from those of our teachers.

Russell also wrote that whatever we know without inference is mental. No doubt many mental objects are of great value, such as mathematics, built up over the millennia, starting with simple digits in arithmetic, then on to algebra, calculus, probability and statistics, and now computational mathematics. We could not design modern buildings, bridges, aircraft, or electronic devices without mathematics, the symbols of mathematics and the theorems of mathematics. Neither could we do these designs without the private experiences of engineers and scientists testing and trying forms in laboratory and field with much trial and error. How far would aircraft designs go to get planes off the ground without the wind tunnel, and actual flying checkouts of all systems?

A medical student goes through a vast number of courses at the University, absorbing an overwhelming amount of word knowledge about the human body and its processes. Then he may specialize in surgery and observe other experienced surgeons operate on actual patients in a hospital theater. Would you trust a young surgeon with your body if the surgeon has little in his record of surgeries successfully completed on his or her own? Nothing in words or symbols can take the place of personal experience in surgery. An experienced surgeon goes through the right motions without even thinking consciously about what to do. The surgeon is guided by a rich unconscious experience of reality: what is and what is possible on the operating table.

Russell again from “Human Knowledge”: “I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they may be those of a dream or those of waking life.”

Notes of music on a piece of paper are symbols too; when played on a musical instrument they render to us experiences of deep meaning, thrilling us to our core. Words have objects in our experience as referents; notes have notes, standing waves, as referents. So much of the musical experience, however, depends on the player, known as the interpreter of the musical composition. What is this meaning in music? The music may bring tears to our eyes from a stirring emotion or get us on the floor dancing with legs, arms, and body. The thoughts and feelings, often spiritual, are not expressed in the symbols, but in the playing of it by a fine artist, unless like the deaf van Beethoven you can read the symbols and hear the music from memories of tones. Music such as Samuel Barber's “Adagio for Strings” comes to us like a memory from another place, another time, far more perfect than today's earth. Were we able to play the violin well with Barber's notes, we would appreciate even more the magic in his score.

Notes or words on paper reflect past experiences. New experiences, always private, new discoveries, always by individuals, become public knowledge when we attach to them new words we think up or get from Greek-Latin roots, especially in science. But the public will never get the true meaning of the symbols unless they travel the same road of personal experience as the discoverers.

Scientific knowledge has other limits too. Science deals with phenomena which are repeatable by others, and cannot deal with extremely rare events, or events which occurred long ago once, such as the appearance of living things on earth. I am deeply interested in physics and mathematics; the symbols representing objects in motion, including atoms and sub-particles, forces and energies, seem to be meaningful to me, but how true are the phenomena they depict?

In 2011 at CERN and Fermilab physicists think they have cornered the Higgs boson. They think some fluctuations of energy indicate its presence within a degree of confidence of two standard deviations; but that confidence is not enough in physics to declare something as true. Experiments continue to establish its presence with a confidence of five standard deviations. If the existence of the Higgs boson is ruled out, it is said particle physics theory will have to be rethought in its entirety and recast. So what happens to all the so-called knowledge we have accumulated for a century?

Sometimes I prefer the certainty of mathematics, a world of mental phenomena, assumed to be true or following logically from axioms. Einstein, an excellent physicist and mathematician, said, “as far as mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Centuries before him Rene Descartes, seventeenth century Belgian philosopher and mathematician, sought to discard all beliefs from his mind that he could not rely on with certainty except mathematical theorems, like that of Pythagoras on right triangles, and the existence of his own mind and of God.

Our Christian faith teaches the unity of God, Jesus and the Holy spirit. The Trinity is said to be of one substance and must be accepted without proof, a mystery, but true for all believers. In the past you could get into a lot of trouble, including being burned at the stake, for having a different opinion of the Trinity. Wars were even fought over the words of the Trinity. I would rather put my faith, like Descartes, on the right triangle, that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides. I can prove the truth of this statement in many ways logically using geometric axioms or I can measure the sides of many right triangles of different shapes to establish it by inference.

Yes, I was taught these facts in school, but I can see for myself they are true. Teachers are good souls and mean to help us, but those who teach usually can't do anything. They are replicators, replicating canned knowledge.

Our best knowledge is innate; part of our endowment as human beings, from sources unknown. Plato in his dialog of Socrates “Meno” demonstrates this. Socrates poses a series of questions to an illiterate slave boy who served the watered wine at the symposium. The slave boy arrives at the truth of a non-trivial theorem in geometry with his answers without any prior knowledge of geometry that he was taught.

The slave boy possessed what Russell calls universal as opposed to inferential truths, which we form from our experiences. One of these is that two plus two equals four. We can express these with words or symbols.

How do we express, however, an experience people associate with God or Heaven? We do it with much difficulty and in poetic terms, like Rumi in “Signs of the Unseen.”

Still, it's worth recording in words what we have experienced and passing on what we have discovered to generations down the road of life. What a tragedy for human culture that Ancient Greek music was not inscribed in notes! The Ancient Greeks attached much importance to music in their culture, but without the record of notes or recordings of the actual music, we know very little about it. If their music and painting equaled their literature, sculpture, and architecture, they must have been magnificent.

Knowledge of Ancient Greek laws has come down to us from their literature too. Laws written down by authorities are said to be codified. Then there are laws which evolve in the courts by decisions made, cases known as common law when written down. But there also laws of society not written but duly observed by any people, their native culture and customs, also evolving, like our customs in Greece, good, bad, or indifferent.

Other nations can say bad things about the Greeks these days, but “sticks and stones can break our bones, but words can never hurt us.” Or can they?”

The power of words or symbols (like the swastika) lies in what they communicate to others. You can communicate with gestures too, bodily posture, or sign language like a mimic, foreigner, or deaf and dumb person. How can we discount the power of Charley Chaplin in his silent films?

As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Marshall McLuhan said the same thing with his “the medium is the message.” When we put something into words or symbols we're abstracting something in the outside world or inside our minds. The abstraction, useful as it may be, is something less than the actual thing it represents. We depend on our memory of prior experiences in detail to interpret the symbol. Without the experiences in our background, the symbol lacks much meaning.

Moreover, words and symbols, sequentially placed, one after another, linearly, are good for logical analysis and proof, not so good for the non-linear world of invention and discovery of new ideas. To invent and discover new things we need to draw from the stores of our subconscious mind in a state of calm and commotion. Consider how many ways there are for saying the words “I love you.” A consummate actor can come up with thousands of different feelings in these three words.


Andros, Greece, August, 2011

Blessed Be The Stressed

Blessed Be the Stressed

By Basi Gala, Ph.D.
In Search of Meaning

(6195 Words)


When the talk is about stress (“Oh, I'm so stressed today”), I remember the executive monkey from my college Psychology 101 course. In 1958 Joseph V. Brady gave electric shocks to two hapless monkeys, one could depress a lever and stop the shock, the other had no lever (no control), but received the same amount of shock because it was yoked to the executive monkey. Both got stomach ulcerations but the executive monkey got more of them and it frequently died—23 of the executives died in the original experiment. I remember the pictures in my textbook of the sad monkeys in their restraints, feeling sorry for the poor animals.

In 1971 Weiss got the same effect stressing rats. In his experiments the executive rat suffered more when its responses pressing a bar after a signal of an impending shock were frequent; the executive rat suffered the worst ulcerations when negative feedback was applied, that is, with its response to the signal causing shock instead of preventing it. That is no way to treat close relatives of ours like the rats just for the sake of science; but the findings were useful because they apply to humans.

Findings by Hans Selye of McGill University, Canada, and other researchers show that excessive stress, especially of long duration without relief, known as chronic stress, causes a host of illnesses, such as high blood pressure, severe headaches, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, as well as stomach ulcers. Continued severe stress in war drives many soldiers to depression and suicide. Researchers estimate chronic stress causes or aggravates as many as eighty percent of human disease.

Should we then avoid stress altogether and turn ourselves into vegetables? Well, vegetables get stressed too from lack of water, sunlight, or rock music. No, stress also is how organisms, under the right circumstances, adapt, grow and get stronger. Avoid the stress of exercise and your muscles, tendons, and bones atrophy. Birds with wings tied for a while cease to be able to fly. Astronauts had bone loss and weakness from the lack of gravity until they started exercising in space. Great athletes suffer extreme stress to break world records. Hercules battled the Hydra and other savage creatures; he tackled impossible tasks until he walked up Mount Olympus to live with the gods. Friedrich Nietzsche's superman was not born that way; he became super with immense effort. Think of Jesus on the cross. Crucifixion was an ingenious Roman execution of traitors and criminals which killed and tortured with splendid effect on the criminal and bystanders. (The old English custom of disembowelment and dismemberment while the criminal was alive equals the Roman feat.) One does not survive disembowelment and dismemberment, but Jesus survived crucifixion and arose from the cenotaph to preach again to his intimate circle, then left the land of Israel not to return as yet. He survived thanks to his godlike response to the pain, hunger, thirst, and humiliation of being nailed hands and feet on a wooden cross, after a mocking trial, beatings and a crown of thorns. His disciples, Paul, Thomas, Judas and the others, dazzled by his appearance after the crucifixion, fervently believed in the divinity of Jesus and carried on with his gospel, and were tortured and killed in their turn, making themselves martyrs and saints. Verily I say to you, blessed be the stressed, for they shall master heaven and earth.

The price of mastery

To master, you pay a price. The price is a risk to health or even to life. After a splendid concert, a lady approached Isaac Stern and gushed: Oh, Mr. Stern, I would give my life to play the violin like you do. The master responded: Madam, I have.

A master baboon, an alpha, has more stress than a beta baboon and may get coronary disease if he remains an alpha for long, suffering attacks from those who want his position and best access to females in estrus. The worst position is that of a junior or submissive male forced on the periphery of the baboon troop foraging on open ground. Predators, such as a leopard, will often snap up one of these males. The females are in the center of the troop with their babies, surrounded by three dominant males. The peripheral male sounds the alarm and the dominant males run to face the predator jointly, baring their large canines, but in the meantime junior may have become dinner. Becoming someone's dinner is an acutely stressful experience.

We have a similar situation in our business world where top executives suffer ulcers, heart disease, and cancers (think of Steve Jobs of Apple and his pancreatic cancer) more often than others, in exchange for their position, money, a trophy wife and mistresses. Great athletes and entertainers achieve fame, fortune, and awards at the risk of becoming addicted or suffering serious injuries in the field (think of Tiger Woods and his sexual addiction). Jim Fixx, runner and writer of “The Complete Runner,” died aged 52 of a heart attack after his daily run; three of his coronary arteries were blocked with atherosclerosis. Even sexual athletes sometimes die doing their thing, like Pietro Aretino, bisexual inventor of literary pornography, satirist, and poet in Renaissance Italy. President Bill Clinton (with heart disease) was wise not to have sex with that woman. At the bottom of the social ladder, however, things are worse. Blue collar workers and the under-employed are more likely to smoke, get obese, drink to excess and die young like the peripheral baboons, meat for corporations.

Moderate versus great effort

Is there no middle ground? Yes, you can be a beta or gamma, moderately successful, if you're satisfied with a moderate share of the nooky. Strive, but not to such excess so as to injure yourself.

Still, great feats seem to demand great efforts and risks. Think of the explorers of the poles or the climbers of Mount Everest. Many lost their lives aiming for their goals, or at least toes and noses. Can I suggest a way in striving for the top without risking grave injury or death? Yes, I can. It's called a helical climb, like the climb of a car or a train going up a high mountain. The stress of effort should be followed by relaxation and recovery of equal intensity and duration. Following recovery of bodily or mental resources, you pick up the effort with greater intensity than before, but if you don't have the energy for that, you back off, because you have not recovered sufficiently. Perhaps you have reached a plateau, when you should try a different kind of training rather than persistence to a break. Maybe you have reached your limit, not being a god, and need to give up; but you'll never know your limit, unless you have stressed yourself towards your limit.

Finding our limits

Many factors limit our ability to withstand stress, create and grow: our native genes, our lifelong experience, our ability to connect with spiritual resources, and our capacity to laugh at obstacles and failures on the way to our objective.

Finding the limits of strength in materials to stress was what we studied in the laboratory of engineering school. We defined stress as the force per square inch applied on, for example, a block of concrete. We increased this force with a hydraulic press until the block collapsed due to compressive stress; that was the limit for that material, a useful number if you're designing columns for buildings or bridge pylons. We also pulled on steel rods or cables; they stretched due to tensile stress, but after the force went up enough, they broke. We also had torsional tests with similar results. Most objects that we pulled on became longer. Elongation under stress is called strain and is proportional to the intensity of the force applied. Some objects that we stressed, like springs, returned to nearly their original shape, a response called hysteresis. But once broken, the material never returned to its original shape by itself—interesting. Even if the material does not break suddenly due to excessive force, it will fatigue and crack when stressed for a long time, such as an airplane wing vibrating in turbulence, its crystal structure changing, developing tiny cracks, and finally collapsing—more interesting.

Compare the above results to stressing muscles. When you lift weights sufficiently heavy or for long enough, your muscles develop tiny tears. After a day or so, given rest and good nutrition, the muscles repair themselves and become stronger—most interesting. Clearly, living things differ in some fundamental way from inanimate objects. Even large cuts in muscles heal after weeks or months with some sewing and stitching. Tendons and bones require more time to heal, and nerves almost never heal.

We normally don't damage tissues in people, but we train children, athletes and soldiers by gradually stressing their bodies and minds up to some limit we think is safe and profitable for growth.

Training for growth

We have at our disposal in training many types of stresses, which are due to different causes, called stressors. Stressors can be physical, such as toxic chemicals, caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, heroin, alcohol (a depressant), cortisol, adrenaline, heat, cold, dehydration (thirst), hunger, pain, sleep deprivation, tiredness, radiations (including sunlight), smoke, dust, alcohol, bacteria and viruses, insect bites, snake venom (used for training by American Indian shamans, or holy men).

Exercise is often said to be relaxing and stress relieving. It's likely to be so if we do it gently as a meditative practice, such as tai chi and qigong, or we do for fun; it's stressful if we compete with others or with ourselves to win and break records. Stress reduction in any case comes in when we take sufficient rest after the exercise. A guideline I follow is to rest physically for one hour after exercising for one hour. Mental or psychological effort also requires a commensurate period of rest and relaxation for our nervous system (when we get our most creative ideas).

Psychological stressors are just as numerous, from within ourselves and from without: any rapid change in life, divorce, marriage, death, birth, insecurity, having to learn new behaviors, loss of job, new employment, retirement, graduation, boredom, excitement, horror stories, competitive games (chess, backgammon, Warcraft), frustration, disappointment, depression, fear, anger, jealousy, envy, pride, greed, work, idleness, offending enemies or friends, demanding bosses, freeway jams, warfare, poverty, wealth, politics, business, beggars, solicitors, fundraisers, sullen-sniveling-screaming children, nagging or feuding spouse, conflict of any sort, deadlines—I can go on forever with the list, all stressors subject to raising blood pressure or laughter, depending on your reactions.

Deadlines can often lead to stress which motivates some people to take action. I know people who wait for a deadline to come close for stress to build up their internal energy for meeting the deadline. Use stressors cautiously in training yourself or others, never reaching dangerous levels and allowing for relaxation and recovery.

Some institutions, however, army, navy, air force, law andmedical schools, sports teams frequently put young people through dangerous levels of stress. The intent is to weed out incompetents and select the toughest and best candidates. In the film An Officer and a Gentleman, the character of Richard Gere goes through naval academy training, nearly breaking down, but persisting and surviving because he (screaming) “I got nowhere else to go!” Medical interns suffer similarly, some of them breaking down mentally and committing suicide, as depicted in the television series Grey's Anatomy. Law schools routinely weed out fifty percent of the students in the first year with tough courses and assignments, sometimes impossible ones. In the one semester of law school I attended once, I found often the relevant pages in reference books torn out and I could not complete the assignment. I never had that problem in engineering school. Care to comment?

Stress is a different problem for individuals such as you and me, our children or loved ones, than for groups or populations. Leaders can tolerate losses in the group they command, relying on those who survive for success and victory. Generals send young people to training camp or battle fully aware that they will lose some of them through breakdowns, back downs, escapes, or even deaths. Those that remain in the line will be stronger and will fight on, win, and breed a tougher generation to come. Or perhaps, the quitters will do the breeding, while those who persist die in battle.

At least in hospitals that is how populations of super bacteria are bred, such as Staphilococcus aureus. Hospital officials are overly prejudiced against bacteria, seeing to cleaning, scrubbing, disinfecting, and using antibiotics liberally, causing bacteria populations to adapt and change through natural selection until they become super tough and dangerous. If you want to stay healthy, stay away from hospitals.

If you want a healthy body, you need healthy body cells. Our bodies are complex cultures of single cells, much like bacteria. We are evolved colonies of cells that have differentiated to cooperate better and be more effective so as to survive. When we discipline our individual body cells through proper living, we strengthen the body and boost the immune system. Say to your body cells, “no pain; no gain.” One way to do that is to keep nourishment to the minimum, with an occasional fast. Weak cells die and the stronger ones reproduce body tissues. Stressing your body with calorie deprivation makes you healthier, if you take in necessary nutrients but no more food. Trees that are given such tough treatment with little water produce the tastiest fruits. Such a procedure is sometimes called eustress, good stress.

Good stress allows for full recovery of the organism and further strengthening. We get a cycle of tension and then relaxation. The “stress of life” is not all bad as it seems to some people. Yes, when we face danger, a major challenge, our muscles tense up, our heart rate and blood pressure go up, adrenaline and cortisol hormones surge, blood thickens, cholesterol and blood sugar rise, all of these and other changes get us ready to fight or flee. It's an old evolutionary response we share with our animal relatives, but it doesn't work well in the constraints of a modern world, because we're not allowed to express ourselves by hitting or running. We suffer from bottled up energies and feelings, leaving us with the options of crying (not for men) or turning the situation into a joke and laughing.

Once we have relaxed well enough one way or another after stress, after we have escaped danger, won, lost, given up, withdrawn to sleep or elsewhere, our bodies return to normal and repair themselves. Calm, peace, returns to our mind, our soul is refreshed, rebuilt—sometimes better than before the emergency.

In Japanese boot camps for managers, trainees are stressed with yells and rough talk, wearing ribbons of shame on their foreheads with inscriptions of their failures, a story about Japanese and American auto workers, tellingly depicted in the 1986 Ron Howard film “Gung Ho.” How effective are such treatments of young people? Some subjects will rebel and quit; others will submit to the treatment. Those who quit will not change their behaviors; those who submit may change under intense pressure. I know of no other way to change. Sweet talking, which is my choice, doesn't cut it.

Changing behavior

Change of behavior involves learning, which occurs in the nervous system made up of nerve cells or neurons. Existing neurons adapt to change, even fresh young neurons appear in the brain adapting more effectively. I mentioned earlier that nervous tissue heals only rarely from damage. For almost a hundred years scientists believed we were born with about 100 billion neurons, never to have any more, but only to lose some every day because of aging, shock, and toxins, such as alcohol. In 1999 Elizabeth Gould and Charles Gross at Princeton showed that in marmoset and macaque monkeys a continuous stream of fresh neurons migrated from the center of the brain to the cerebral cortex and became integrated by connecting with existing neurons. Other scientists confirmed the finding. Fred Gage of Salk Institute in La Jolla showed that such neuronal regeneration in the human hippocampus is related to the degree of cognitive challenge. Use it or lose it.

But don't use it too much. Excessive or unrelieved stress can have the opposite event on the hippocampus, causing the death of neurons and Alzheimer's disease. Stressed is best up to a point allowing a return to a body-mind equilibrium, or homeostasis.

What is the limit point is often difficult to determine. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger,” in the Twilight of the Idols, 1888. He was being a German romantic and exaggerating. Short of killing ourselves, we may damage our bodies or minds beyond repair trying too hard. Extend yourself a little at a time, allowing your resources to recover completely before further extending your limits.

The cause of stress illness

What causes illness is not stress itself, if reasonably limited in intensity; not letting go of effort after a time to allow for healing to occur-- that causes heart disease, cancer, ulcers, depression, even death. The struggle and pain must be controlled in intensity, duration, and frequency, with no permanent damage to the body or mind, to stimulate growth. Match the recovery to the struggle in intensity, duration, and frequency, and approach your limits in these parameters safely, just as a weight lifter progresses in raising weights to avoid an overload and injury to muscles, bones, or nerves. In exercising for a target work slowly, fully aware of your ideal form, closing your eyes if necessary, warm up, breath deeply, get a full range of motion, and strive for balance in using all muscles--or other resources; then before starting up again, cool down and relax.

Stress damages when not followed by relief, when it's excessive, when it comes on suddenly with no warning and no time to warm up, and when it stops abruptly, without a cool down or winding down of your system.

Andy Potts, star triathlete, does more than warm up or cool down. While running, biking, or swimming, he constantly monitors his heart rate and energy output, and remotely stores his body's response to stress in a computer for analysis, setting up a feedback loop for his efforts. He looks for a heartbeat of 165 for peak performance, then an adequate recovery at 140 beats per minute and an energy output of 410 watts. (For training, not peak performance, a steady pulse rate of about 80% of the peak is sought.) The trainer subjects Potts to a careful dose of punishment, reflecting the athlete's response to stress, pushing Potts to near exhaustion and generating data for the next day's exercise plan; that's the feedback loop.

The feedback loop for growth

The feedback loop works best when recovery includes relaxation and meditation. Meditation is not lethargy, although we usually do it sitting or lying still. Body and mind function best when relaxed, after a struggle phase, to achieve whatever goals, athletic or others, you want to achieve. Meditation is awareness of everything that is happening to us, physically, emotionally (worry, upset, anger), and spiritually, in our connection with the life force. Breathe deeply focusing on the here and now. Awareness in turn increases our control of resources inside and outside of ourselves. Quiet your mind in relaxation and take full notice of the effects of the stress you're under, making changes in your behavior before illness or accident strikes.

While some people make themselves ill, injured, or dead with overstress, some of us avoid any significant effort and stress as long as they can, often extending that attitude to others they can influence. When I exercised together with my daughter Alia and she would get flushed and sweaty, her mother would worry about her and stop her. Flushing and sweating is a natural response to vigorous movement and heat, the body's adjustment to these stressors. Most people today turn on the air conditioning as soon as they feel a little uncomfortable with heat or cold, weakening the body's ability to handle these stressors. I admire the Tibetan monks who wrap themselves in frozen blankets for part of their training or lie on lake ice until they melt it bringing blood to their skin with mental discipline.

The attitude of some of us is: Always follow the easiest (not the best) way out of a difficult situation. I'll do all I can to avoid a problem instead of solving it. Let somebody else handle a nasty, dirty, smelly case. If I can't avoid a challenge, I won't fight: I'll cry, sleep, drink, smoke, play, watch television, read pulp fiction, or eat pizza and ice cream. Let relatives or welfare take care of my needs. If nobody comes to save me from trouble, I'll kill myself. Oh, death, the ultimate escape.

John Donne wrote in his meditations: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved with mankind.” I too am diminished by any living entity's death, suffering, or stagnation; that's why I write, coping with challenges, teaching to others the tools of coping.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” John Donne also wrote. We are social animals, but not like insects. We evolved in troops or tribal units over millions of years, for security, comfort, and reproduction. Being alone, physically or mentally, is stressful because it's dangerous, or at least uncomfortable. People need people to feel secure, to love, and to be happy. A sense of isolation from others can be devastating.

Involuntary or forced isolation is different from chosen solitude. Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus and Mohammed in the desert, Buddha in the forest, found solitude from the tumult of crowds and the constant business of life, to reflect, to meditate, to relax, to communicate with God in the burning bush not burning, then returned to the people to teach their message. Here's my message such as I too have gathered in solitude.

Solitude and isolation

We may feel isolated, but the life force field permeates the universe like gravity inside of us and outside of us, connecting us all. After all, we are parts of this physical universe ourselves. Why do we then often feel isolated from a Higher Force, from our inner self in the subconscious, and from each other, loathing, disgusted, and even hating others or ourselves? Why does a sense of isolation lead many people to great distress and stress, causing ill health, accidents, and slow or instant suicide (sometimes homicide)? As theologians say, what separates us from the infinite compassion of God? As psychologists say, what is keeping us from reaching the gold or coal of our subconscious, which I believe is ninety five percent of our brainpower? As humanists say, what is keeping us from speaking freely, truly, and peacefully to our fellow humans and listening to them attentively? What is doing that are barriers, walls, diaphragms, sphincters, valves in between heaven, the subconscious, and the social worlds, existing from birth for our protection and survival, barriers fortified, raised, hardened, closed tight to avoid rejection, pain, danger, fear, exposure.

To relieve the stress of isolation we need to loosen up these barriers gently, cautiously, with soothing loving oils and massage, groping inside of us and outside of us, until contact is made again fully, as in psychoanalysis, religious confession, or plain relaxation with meditation. In the end we may have an epiphany, a sudden self realization of our potential, or a gradual healing of our spirit (and body) from the stress of isolation.

Let me show you a picture. The vast space of the life force or universal mind is a sphere, touching the sphere of your subconscious mind, attached to the smaller sphere of your focusing conscious mind, sensing other sentient beings and the sphere of the physical universe. Two information valves or sphincters block or allow information and feelings to be channeled between the first three spheres. (Clearly, your skin, with sense organs specialized skin cells, is the valve between the conscious mind sphere and the physical sphere of the universe, the eyelids separating you from light radiations.) When you open up to experience the love of the life force or an another human being, you may be thwarted, rejected, disappointed, or hurt because of your own failings or those of others; then the sphincters tighten up, closing the channels, insulating you from pain and isolating you at the same time. Isolation can become chronic, perpetual, lasting for years, or a lifetime, exacting huge costs on you health, happiness, and overall effectiveness.

You're doing fine if on occasion you isolate yourself from others, from your subconscious, even from the searing energy of the life force, to protect your body and mind and survive the moment.

Acute stress, chronic stress

When you're experiencing an acute stress--you'll get over it with rest, relaxation, and recreation, rebuilding your integrity of mind until your next foray. Your sympathetic nervous system is stimulated into action, your blood pressure goes up temporarily, your hormones surge, your muscles tense up as when you face danger, but these return to normal (or you die) when you relax and your parasympathetic nervous system takes over (after the crisis is the time of greatest risk of depression, damage or death). In chronic or habitual stress, however, your vital fluids and energies get stuck at an unsustainable level, causing continuous damage that cannot be repaired by your body's or the mind's homeostatic mechanisms of recovery. Your parasympathetic system doesn't get a chance to do its work. Push, push, push! You're a spring that has been stretched beyond hysteresis. Chronic stress is itself a big danger and many of us are habituated to it, suffering illness until this stress is subdued or until we're dead. Chronic stress has no benefits; it's a dead end.

How do you know whether you're suffering from chronic stress? Is your blood pressure up constantly? It may be due to a salt intake that is too high for your metabolism, to renal (kidney) failure, or other causes. Quite often chronic stress is the cause of it. Is your resting pulse rate high? Do you get frequent headaches? Is your blood sugar or cholesterol level above normal? Do you have insomnia? Do you feel habitually nervous, tense, jumpy, or anxious? Do you overeat or eat sugary, starchy, fatty foods? Do you have excess fat deposits in waist, hips, or buttocks? Do you get skin rashes, have unexplained aches and pains in neck, shoulders, back especially, suffer from frequent infections, virus attacks, fatigue when you wake up, heart beat irregularities (arrhythmia), low mood, gastric acid secretions, sluggishness, sadness, boredom, irritability, petty anger, loss of appetite, suicidal thoughts, panic attacks, inability to concentrate, lack of joy in doing your everyday activities? Most likely, you're under chronic stress; you're in danger of a health breakdown.

How do many people treat symptoms of chronic stress? Not by treating the cause of it as they should, but by taking palliatives. When sluggish, they gulp more coffee, tea, coke, or other stimulants. When nervous or tense, they drink alcohol. When unable to sleep, they take tranquilizers. When sad, they escape into fantasy. When they have infections, they take antibiotics. When their stomach hurts from gastric secretions, they take antacids. For headaches, they take aspirin. When they're bored, they seek excitement in competitive games, adventure in horror movies, books, and video games, or pick fights with a spouse, relative, friend, acquaintance, server, co-worker, or boss. For aches, these people take pain killers or muscle relaxants. When nervous or irritable, they take tranquilizers. All these “cures” of the symptoms simply perpetuate the vicious cycle of chronic stress.

Before you can have the benefits of manageable acute stress, before the achievement of any great struggle, before reaching the happiness of inner peace, you need a real cure of chronic stress before it kills you. If isolation is the problem, reconnect. If the cause of your chronic stress is spouse, relative, friend, boss, distance yourself from them or change your relationship with them. If in the morning you don't to want to lift an eyelid, let alone your body, without your Starbucks coffee, before heading for traffic and work, change employment. You yell, “I need my job; I can't afford to quit.” Can you afford cancer, heart disease, arthritis, or stroke? You say, “I have young children; I can't quit.” Will your children be better off as orphans, raised by others? You really have no other choice but to cure chronic stress for good, doing whatever it takes to do the job, or else you're doomed.

Healing from chronic stress

To heal thyself, you begin by focusing on your life source connection, to strengthen it, to clarify it, to tap its power to the fullest. No doubt the life force exists, though it may not be as fatherly, motherly, compassionate, as some people believe. When you tap it, you naturally re-invigorate yourself, as a battery does when it's plugged in to recharge. The closer you are mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to the life force, the more powerfully the force will affect your adjustment to homeostatic equilibrium, healing, and growth.

After you have re-established contact with the force that created you and all life, come to terms with your inner self through introspection, meditation, yoga, and the help of a good psychoanalyst, airing out long suppressed anger, guilt, and regret. Also get close to friends and relatives who sooth your nerves, support you and cherish you. Distance yourself from disturbing people. Quit all stimulants and depressants, and avoid all games, dramas, and “entertainments” that excite you unduly. If you are often glued to such entertainments, you have a cortisol addiction to kick; enjoy comedies instead. You can include most news stories in things to avoid. Find romance and intimacy if you can. Engage in gentle exercises and activities which interest you but don't stir up your competitive urges, such as yoga, tai chi, qigong. Enjoy fine art: music (try Massenet's Thais), paintings, dancing, and cuisine. Follow a healthy diet with delicious food. Take liquid potassium, calcium and magnesium supplements. Try regular massage sessions with a therapist or a massage chair. Chuck every worry you have been carrying around, keeping only suitable concerns. That's the treatment.

How long will it take for full recovery from chronic stress? It has probably taken years for the syndrome to develop; it may take a long time for it to disappear. As I grappled with personal, family, and business problems over several decades, I developed chronic stress syndrome and last year coronary ischemia. I'm still treating my syndrome as I have prescribed to you, hoping to return soon to major challenges in a measured way, cortisol and adrenaline under control, with full recovery after each fight; that is, I hope to do so before I'm stopped in my tracks by the ultimate stressor of us all--aging.

After we have reached the steady equilibrium of body and mind in homeostasis, we can turn to the great blessings of stress, staying duly cautious not to overload ourselves and not to relapse back to chronic stress. Studies at Harvard and other institutions have shown that business executives placed under stress keep becoming increasingly more productive as the intensity of the stress and its duration increase—up to a point beyond which performance declines. What is that point of inflection in the upward curve? When do we know we must end the struggle for now and take our rest? When we can struggle no more, empty of all reserves of energy, the pain no longer bearable.

Herbert Benson, M.D., the Harvard researcher of the relaxation response, shows us how to deal with great stress in his new study, “The Breakthrough Principle.” Briefly, for our great struggles to be effective we must follow them with deep relaxation and meditation in the stillness tapping the wellsprings of our spirit and transforming ourselves into beings of a higher order.

Struggle and transformation

Like a butterfly emerging from the cocoon it made as a caterpillar, after a long rest, we emerge transfigured and winged. Like Jesus in the grave, we stand up and ascend towards heaven. Blessed are the stressed who have not broken or given up too soon, for they master themselves first, then go on to master the ideal world before possessing the physical world.

Why is it that challenge and torture turns some persons into sinners and some into saints? We often say the saint possesses the resource of a sturdy spirit. We don't know scientifically what the spirit is (we cannot measure it or observe it under a microscope), but we can experience it when we see its magic in others or ourselves, the mind is steady and quiet. If muscles can repair little tears from intense exercise, if broken bones can mend and grow whole, if newborn neurons can emerge in the brain to mend it, how much more resilient and capable must the spirit be a thing so close to the source of life!

Some persons are able to emerge whole and noble from great trials because of their sturdy make up or because of an attitude they have in their approach to pains. Taking pains means doing good work. Christ wounded and parched on the cross transcended his human limitations, becoming more than an ordinary man in the midst of extreme agony. Recovering from his wounds and thirst in the coolness of the cenotaph, he emerged to complete his mission on earth.

The prophet Mohammed sat in deep meditation outside his desert cave and looked up at the brilliant stars. Gabriel, an angel of God, appeared before him and commanded: “Recite!” The illiterate camel driver recited the immortal poems of the Koran, later memorized by his followers and written down as the Muslim scriptures. Inspiration, creative passion, may follow a powerful struggle to overcome an obstacle, if a person afterward allows for a period of tranquility and meditation.

Herbert Benson has shown with EEG recordings that the brain in deep meditation is calm overall, but some parts of it are in a state of high excitation. Benson calls this state of mind calm-commotion. Could it be that in a calm-commotion state our minds approach the divine source of all life, knowledge, and power?

You don't have to believe in the divine to make use of scientific findings regarding extreme stress and meditation, devotion, and prayer. Direct your prayer and devotion if not to God to your ideal whatever that is: beauty, truth, justice, peace, creation, invention, perfection, wealth, power, happiness. Be well prepared to pay the price of the struggle phase in your transformation. You will not transform yourself, changing lifelong habits, without first engaging in a great struggle. Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Luke 9:23 NIV) You can only transform your world into a better place after you have successfully changed yourself to the super human you visualize vividly. A fine human character is like a diamond, formed from coal under immense pressure and heat in the bowels of the earth or in a laboratory.

As a rule you can expect human beings to remain as they are without changing their character. You can trust people, yourself included; you can trust them to be themselves, good, bad, or indifferent in their behaviors according to their established habits. We're like robots, each one of us following our internal memory programs blindly, helplessly; freedom of the will is an illusion. We break the chain of causality in our lives only rarely, very rarely, miraculously, only under great pressure and stress well directed.

You achieve greatness in any endeavor by driving yourself to exhaustion, but not to a breakdown. Yes, you risk a catastrophic failure of body or mind; taking calculated risks is a part of exploration, growth, and breakthrough achievement. You follow such an effort with relaxation, living the present moment, not thinking of things past or future, in deep tranquility, absorbed in soothing music, in a beautiful natural setting, bathing peacefully in warm waters, or just sitting and meditating. You breath deeply, letting prana or spirit inside. The ideas come then, the fantastic visions which will be realized, the solutions to big problems of design, science, art, philosophy or religion. No block exists to your creativity. Artistic block is fear of failure, fear of losing your capacity to create—fear and block cannot exist after you have been transformed by guided stress and relaxation.

Transformation from stress can work for societies as well as individuals. Economic hard times can stimulate creativity, toughness, growth in new directions in a people of courage and enterprise. The ancient Greeks emerged victorious from their battles against the invading Persians, producing a golden civilization. In America, the Great Depression gave rise to a rebirth of culture, prosperity, and dominance in the world, because many leading people, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, met great danger, hardship, pain, and disappointment with courage and ingenuity.

As long as super humans are willing to take on their shoulders the burdens of the earth, the world will keep progressing. When Atlas shrugged, as Ayn Rand wrote, watch out for a new Dark Age to begin.







Andros, Greece
July, 2011

Up From Tactics

Up From Tactics

By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
In Search of Meaning




(6606 Words)


After living for nearly eighty years, bumbling about most of the time trying to find my bearings, I've come to the conclusion that to live a satisfying and successful life it's vital to gain a thorough understanding of tactics, strategies, goals, and values, and how they relate to each other, if they relate at all. (The other conclusion I've come to with the end in sight is that life is altogether too short--though it seemed like forever when I was a boy--what with time wasted sleeping, studying, and waiting in queues.) What is satisfying and successful in life emerges from such an understanding, if you live long enough and don't despair early on.

Tactics

Tactics and strategies originated in the military, but they are often used in other arenas, such as business and sports, even the professions of law, medicine, politics, ah yes and marriage if you're naive enough to take it on as a career. Goals and values are more difficult and stressful concepts than tactics and strategies, so I'm going to look at goals and values later if at all because I don't want to stress you out. Tactics come first because all of us, except college professors, tend to go for the quick response and payoff, the clever tactic (from the Greek taktikos, arranger) to gain an immediate advantage—it's our heredity for survival (our own), the animal instinct. In the face of superior force, you run like the devil. If your opponent is weak, bear your fangs and attack. When somebody hits you, you hit back—eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and, ladies, hair for hair.

We resort to tactics without thinking, because they work in the short run, usually long enough for us to survive, tactics having become wired in our brains, instinctive. It takes more thought to hold back and provide a better response to the attack, to turn the other cheek perhaps, if you're a saint. Indeed, tactics served us well in the past, becoming habits, even deadly addictions, like overeating to store fat reserves when food is plentiful. Have you noticed how some people spend their every minute busy, busy doing nothing of any importance? Instead, they need to use plans, strategies, to properly orchestrate their moves, to spend all their time charting their course, doing nothing at all. I’m just kidding. We do move up from tactics when we employ strategies, because strategies are superior to tactics for success—or failure.

Tactics are important too; we need to execute strategies in tactics, or they're of no use. At the time of the American Revolution the British redcoats stood in line and fired on command. The rank behind them moved up and those who had fired knelt down to reload their muskets. The rank closed in front of those who had fallen to enemy fire. That was an effective tactic for the times. The volleys of bullets were devastating. Also, a soldier could not easily turn coat and run, especially with the captain behind him pistol in hand. The American militia used the tactic of hiding behind trees and rocks as they fired, showing only their coon caps and gun barrels to the enemy; but they were more likely to turn coon tail and run when the British troops attacked in force.

Tactics often will serve us well until we can come up with a suitable strategy. In science and mathematics tactics are called heuristics: a bag of tools (tricks) for solving problems on the go, because we can't come up with an overall plan of attack. Much of medicine and engineering are heuristic. Your doctor tries this or that medicine or therapy to heal you, because the human body and mind are too complex and subtle for anyone to comprehend, especially for a doctor who’s not very smart. The aerospace engineer was trained in college to design a plane using theories and mathematical models, but the plane flies because the engineer succeeded in finding those contours that work best by trial and wind tunnel. That's expediency, but we don't get to the root of the matter that way. Certainly, if we do have a plan, a strategy, it's best to discard tactics which don't contribute to the plan, saving time, energy, and money pruning our tactics.

Strategies

When you have fixed on some tactics that fit your strategies, it's time to focus on them to carry out your plans. Ultimately, success over competitors depends on attention to detail; as they say in Buddhist meditation: pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. Make your mind like a laser beam cutting through anything obstructing your way. Tactics is the art of accomplishing an end using all available means, even subterfuge, vilification, and backstabbing. (See Niccolo Machiavelli's “The Prince,” an indispensable manual for business managers.)

Strategies in conflict are few, tactics innumerable: bluffing, camouflage, ambush, cover, obstacles and defenses, reconnaissance, muddling the waters, seeking high ground, fainting attack, etc. Bobby Fischer, the chess grandmaster, was famous for his sharp tactics on and off the board. Yet tactics seldom win a conflict without plans or strategies organizing them into an effective form, and that Fischer did too. Relying too much on tactics you may miss the ladder for the steps, getting bogged down in irrelevant or trivial details, becoming overwhelmed by details. Being exacting on details and execution is productive; nit-picking is not. Picking your nose is even less productive.

Yet, any manager will tell you the devil is in the details, executing them faithfully, accurately, precisely, rather than haphazardly, under the guidance of good strategies. The Chinese scholar Sun Tzu laid it all out in “The Art of War” several centuries before Christ. Read this book on tactics and strategies; it's interesting and up to date. Good tactics follow from better plans or strategies, strategies winning the game, war, or business venture in proper balance with effective tactics.

Strategies may take one, two, three or more forms depending on the possible scenarios in a conflict. Don't go to any endeavor without Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, if three scenarios are likely at the time you plan your campaign. In addition, always hold in reserve Plan D for a quick exit to save face, if not your rear end.

Here's an example of strategy: You may test the intelligence of a chimpanzee by hanging a banana from the ceiling and placing various implements on the floor: a stick, a chair, a rope. The chimp may jump up to reach the banana, but it's too high. He may use the stick to knock it down, but it's tied too firmly. That's tactics. Eventually the chimp places the chair below the banana, ropes the banana and pulls it down. That's planning and strategy, indicating a more advanced mental functioning, the kind that propelled mankind to prominence on the planet among other clever animals, enabling us to destroy ourselves and the whole earth.

Strategic planners are far more useful in organizations than clever tacticians, though tacticians are useful too. You may be a one-person organization seeking success in your private ventures; even so, give proper weight to planning, organizing, laying out strategies before launching your execution with clever tactics, but get off and get going one day.

Goals

But what is the worth of strategies if there’re not tied to goals? Plans and their execution, make no sense without specific goals or purposes. Strategy is the art of using various capabilities to achieve goals or promote policies. Success is unlikely without a plan for achieving it; it's like sailing the seas like Ulysses, without maps and GPS. But goals are superior to strategies, because without goals, strategies are loose robots.

You can use a tactic without a strategy or plan, but you cannot have a strategy without a goal: an objective to achieve in coping with an enemy or business competitor. If you want any major success in the world, you have to contend with competition or worse. It's a jungle out there, friend, as far as you can see. You set up a desired result and put together plans to use your resources for its accomplishment. In business this is called goal-oriented management, usually involving measurable sub-goals with deadlines in time for their achievement. Sub-goals need to be realistic and attainable as well as measurable--the stress induced in you and your team bearable. According to some business leaders, like Steve Jobs CEO of Apple Corporation, carry any stress (bearable or not) to succeed, or you're a wimp.

How are goals selected? Rationally, goals should serve our values, principles, or ideals. We need to consider, however, our unique capabilities, our talents and abilities to pursue goals we can achieve. We all have some talent since all men, and women too, are equal in the eyes of God. It's common sense to avoid tasks and purposes which you're poorly equipped to accomplish but rather to work from your strengths, despite “Man From La Mancha,” dreaming the impossible dream. Alia wanted to work in astrophysics, but her quantitative ability was not high; she had good verbal and artistic abilities, so I advised her to pursue artistic and teaching goals, maybe in describing astrophysical objects. Elizabeth had an aptitude in math but was not interested in this discipline. She liked practical and profitable tasks, so to her I suggested a business education and career, which she has followed. As for myself, what I've wanted most since I was a child was to become one of the idle rich, free to play, think, experience the good life, free from work to seek wisdom, learning fundamental truths, writing down my meditations, and generally fooling around. After a lifetime of pursuing necessary goals (earning money to live), after forced retirement, and not retiring, now I'm happily doing what I've always wanted to do with the balance of my days. Do what you enjoy and what you're good at doing.

A general, strategos, in Greek, if able is able to conceive grand strategies for the success of the campaign. Is the campaign to defeat the enemy, to demolish the opposition, to weaken it, to enslave it, or to turn the other party into a friend? The Americans and British turned their German and Japanese enemies into friends after WWII, but the Soviets did otherwise. Political leaders, set their sights higher than strategies, limiting the goals of generals, like President Harry S. Truman over-ruling General Douglas MacArthur (named prima donna) in 1951 Korea.

MacArthur's goal was to defeat communism in Asia, thus relieving pressure on Europe from the Soviets. He would knock out North Korea and if necessary bomb China with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union, however, had such weapons, including the hydrogen bomb, and they could have intervened. Truman wanted peace on the peninsula and avoidance of WWIII, also known as Armageddon. In MacArthur's mind: “There is no substitute for victory.” As a soldier, victory was his highest value. Truman, as a statesman and a former haberdasher, valued peace. Values are more important than goals, but we don't know who was mostly right in the argument and who nearly wrong. North Korea is still poking our side: communistic, militaristic, authoritarian, under a hereditary dictator—armed with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, breaking up into its component nations, excluding Chechnya. A nationalistic, capitalistic, authoritarian regime has ruled Russia in recent years under Putin, after a brief flowering of democracy with Yeltsin. China is in similar circumstances, dominant in the world as a manufacturing nation, largely capitalistic, opportunistic, partly communistic, challenging the U.S. with nuclear weapons, technology, and a with rapidly growing economic-military prowess; China is also outstanding in monetary inflation.

Goals, leading to strategies and tactics, are vital for victory or other kinds of successes, like becoming Miss America. But values, such as world peace, give rise to goals that are meaningful. Goals, strong purposes, motivate people to organize their efforts and achieve what they want. For example, a person may come to realize the importance of money and work hard, sacrifice, save, invest, achieving the goal of getting rich and powerful, then finding out that's not enough for happiness and a sense of self worth, or realizing the end is near and there's no way to carry the loot beyond. Fortune, fame, power, influence, popularity, possessions are all hollow—vanity, vanity, all is vanity and vexation of spirit, as the Bible says in Ecclesiastes. Start by setting up a sound system of values, because good values are superior to goals.

Values

Values give rise to goals, goals to strategies, and strategies to tactics in their execution. How do we rationally or intuitively come to our values? Can we derive values from an upstream idea? If not, how do we select our own values from all those available to us? We could toss a coin for the decision, which I did at least once at a critical time in my life to choose between marriage and my personal freedom. Values, ideals, axioms, postulates, or premises are the mountain springs of human motivation. We have come up from tactics--maybe even up from habits, instincts, and addictions--to values, most important and vital guides to our actions, unless we're already dead.

Most people absorb their values from their family, society, and religion, good values usually, based on cherished traditions. Others, like I, search for their values, looking for meaning within themselves and in the writings of freely thinking philosophers, looking and risking a tumble.

Values, emerging from our core self, once fixed are not changed, or are changed rarely; they are pole stars in a night clear of clouds. Goals have to change to promote our established values or ideals given a world in a state of flux and random events in our lives (we get none other); strategies or plans we need to adjust or change more often than goals; tactics we have to vary constantly to adapt our actions to new challenges when always something hits the fan. The more randomness and flux we encounter in our enterprises, the better we need to adapt. Falling rocks on the road to our destiny is Nature's way of testing our will and spirit. (Nice image, eh?)

Up from tactics I come to the fixing or selection of life's values or guiding principles, my main discourse. You've heard of family values: The family that prays together stays together. That's fine if you have an unshakable faith in your religion and the doctrines handed down to you from parents, teachers, and political leaders. If not, we're together facing this problem of choosing values for better or for worse.

As a first step, I need to choose values that preserve my life as long as possible, and the lives of family, community, humanity, and the biosphere, if I want to go that far afield. If I don't live I can't do anything about all else that I admire and want, and without the lives of others, all living things, there is no future for anything else I find valuable in the world, such as beauty, truth, and justice, all my highfalutin ideals, because my end is near as it's near for you. Even if you're young you're a tiny candle burning, burning, and burning out. The end is nigh for all of us; let us prepare for the Kingdom, or whatever we visualize for the world beyond the grave. If we can survive on earth for five billion years, we have a chance to find out something eternally good.

Having done what I can do for survival, what then do I do with the life I have earned and I have been granted by Providence or Luck?

Survival value

Survival motivates me strongly as it does most people, unless they're patsies for al-Qaeda. People also seek and value joy, fun, pleasure, or happiness. To them something fun is something worth doing, often whether they can afford it or not. To these same people pain, even discomfort is anathema, and they avoid it with all their means. They do no better than a donkey you can lead with a carrot and a stick. Let it be known, to paraphrase Jack Kennedy, that from this day forward I will bear any burden, suffer any hardship, bear any cost, in the defense of my ideals. I want joy, pleasure, and happiness only in the course of doing my duty by my highest values--unless someone tempts me too much.

Motivation

What motivates humans--what motivates me? Motivation is a need or driving force in us that causes us to achieve goals or desired states, both inside of us and outside. Abraham Maslow made it known there is a hierarchy of needs in humans. We begin with the physiological needs of food, sex, sleep, excretion, etc. Then we seek safety, health, and property. Having achieved these, we want esteem among our fellows and success. Finally, we aim for self-actualization with morality and creativity, if we can reach that high. Actually, many humans are motivated by gluttony, greed, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and the seventh, most deadly sin: wrath or hatred, leading to violence and the shedding of sweat, blood and tears. Following Maslow and the prophets, should we not aim for self-actualization, which I shall explore, and go for high ideals, if we are Maslow's humans and not Pavlov's dogs?

Religious values

We can find ideal values and doctrines in the best of religion. Worship and adoration of deities is really the worship of various ideals: that of wisdom, compassion, knowledge, beauty, power, creativity, and inner peace. Keep in mind, however, where religions agree, they're all correct or all false; where religions disagree, some, perhaps your own, are false. Very often, obedience to gods is obedience to priests. Avoid doctrines, unless they lead to good things: “By their fruits, ye shall know them,” Jesus said referring to false prophets. What are good fruits from the right doctrines?

What remains is to decide what's good or bad fruit arising from a doctrine.

A doctrine, axiom, premise, or postulate (in logic) is a truth we accept as obvious, not needing proof, self evident. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” If only truths were that easy! What is clearly true to some thinkers may be false to others. Matters of fact are true, false, or doubtful, like cold fusion. Statements of opinion are subject to debate. Jefferson should have known this, writer-artist-architect, statesman, president to be, Virginia plantation and slave owner, father of children with a fifteen-year-old house slave, but it was fashionable in 1776, as it is today, to declare as true what was in the scriptures or what is convenient.

Convenient values

Convenience may not be such a bad gauge for truth, a place in the scriptures less so. We can call that the utility criterion for judging validity. The axioms (deemed worthy) of logic, from which all mathematics follows, offer such utility. For example, given that A and B are true statements, it must follow that A is true, B is true, or both A and B are true. Another axiom from logic: Statement A cannot be both true and false. Euclid's geometry axioms are all obviously true: any two points can be connected with a straight line, for example, or you can extend a line segment continuously in a straight line, etc. Yet, people have invented new geometries with different axioms that describe phenomena Euclidean geometry cannot touch.

We can use the axioms or truths that lead to useful results, tools that work to solve problems. What works is likely to have a close relationship to reality; what reality is we don't really know. Besides, usefulness in an axiom is fine, but useful to what purpose, to promote what value? Here we end up with a circular argument for choosing values. Logic, reason, as powerful as they are, sometimes leave me in the dark, befuddled.

Spiritual values

In the dark we can turn to an inner light for guidance, call it God, if you like. Meditation has led to the discovery of religions. I can attest to the power of meditation and to its dangers. Mental institutions are crowded with people that went off the deep end of mysticism and religion, though even more numerous lunatics walk the streets.

Insanity is the belief that something imagined is real, leading the believer to loss of function and getting the believer into trouble with nature or the police. (What we imagine can become real only through effective action). We all suffer from some delusions, those who believe in astrology and those who trust in the essential goodness of men, priests, doctors, attorneys, businessmen, journalists, and politicians. (I'd rather trust women, excluding amazons, who evolved as mothers, gently to care for the precious few fruits of their wombs). I often get the feeling that insanity rules in the world of men when rapacious business leaders cause economic disasters, ambitious politicians launch wars against other nations for reasons other than self defense or tyrants slaughter their own people to hold on to power. What inner god pushes certain persons to seize power and hold on to it causing agony and destruction? How could such ridiculous men like Mussolini, Hitler, Gaddafi come to lead whole nations and plunge them to disaster? Do such men succeed in their work because the rest of us hold on to our delusions about them?

Is God an illusion (Freud) or delusion (Dawkins)? Is God what we imagine or define God to be?

I don't know the answers to these and many other questions with certainty. Let me resume my focus. I know beauty is better than ugliness, knowledge better than ignorance, power better than helplessness, kindness better than cruelty, happiness better than misery, order better than chaos and cleanliness better than filth, life better than death. I want to take up goals that promote beauty, knowledge, kindness, happiness, order and cleanliness, life--and work against their opposites. Once I have survival under control for a while, these are the goals for me to pursue and I need to build these goals into a lifetime career, a ladder of projects upwards for the short balance of my years. That career for me is in thinking and writing down, as well as I able, ideas and strategies that will achieve these goals for me, and others who are like minded. I want to solve problems doing mental experiments and inventions, one statement after another logically, creatively, simply. I will execute the most promising strategies with the best tactics I can muster and leave the rest of the execution to those that follow me: my children, grandchildren, or surrogates.

As in mathematics, I move up from tactics, by stating my axioms, first principles, fundamental tenets, doctrines, or values; then I rework my goals, strategies, and tactics to bring these in line with my core values.

Beauty

Let me begin with the ideal of beauty, because what's living worth without beauty? As the unorthodox teacher, John Keating, in the film “Dead Poets Society”, said to his preparatory school students: “The Law, Business, Medicine, all these are worthy and necessary pursuits, but Art, Romance, Poetry, Music, that's what we live for...Carpe diem, seize the day: Make your lives something extraordinary.” Nature is overflowing with beauty on our planet in rocks, streams, skies, and in living things of flowers, animals, and people. The Hubble telescope has revealed wonders in stars and galaxies and dust clouds. We capture beauty when we create melodies, poems, dances, perfumes, dishes, paintings, sculptures and jewelry. I want to be surrounded by beauty, to quietly enjoy art, not to own it, and to create artworks free to the world as a wordsmith. Those who create art usually don't care to own artworks; they sell or give away their creations, if they're true artists. Artists get much of their inspiration from Nature's wonders, free to all of us: flowers and plants, skies, animals, waters and lands. True art is honest, unpretentious, integral, organic, innovative, unique, and passionate, so passionate that some artists like van Gogh or Tchaikovsky on occasion flip their lids. I'm not aiming that high, thank you.

I have not mentioned artworks in the form of drama, tragedy and comedy, the cousins of drama, sports and games. Any expression that deeply stirs our spirit, enabling our connection to the source of life is true art. Successful players in drama and sports make us love them, building great and profitable careers and transferring from one field to another as entertainers. All dramatic arts arise from our natural tendency, so important in childhood, to play and learn from play. Tragedy ends in death or mayhem, while all ends well in comedy (our side wins), or we look at mishaps with laughter. Sports are a source of great photographs and films. These days I don't often follow drama on stage or on paper with novels and stories. I find actual events in the world sufficiently interesting and entertaining, such as local wars and disasters. I do play a fascinating card game called Biriba with relish, and I wrote a manual for that. I'm not a sports fan, although I realize sports (golf, football, baseball, basketball) are important to many men, almost like a religion for some of them. The Olympics in Ancient Greece were dedicated to the gods and all men stopped what they were doing, including wars, to follow the Olympics, something we might emulate today.

Of all the beauties in the universe that I have seen, the view of our blue-white earth from space is the most excellent. Gaia--living things, air, water, and land on a harmonious sphere--stirs the emotions of love and longing in me like few things, even among the greatest artworks of humans, little ants seen from high above the surface of the globe.

Power

As to power, I seek power only over myself to control my weaknesses, addictions, and failings, not power over others. I don't want ever to feel or be helpless; there's always something I can do about a problem, no matter how tough. I want the power to ban all fears and all hatreds from my heart and look at every untoward event calmly, relying on reasoned action for all emergencies and threats to my existence and the existence of loved ones. I desire the power to learn and remember what works and is beneficial to me and others. I want the ability to know deeply and thoroughly what matters, if anything does.

Truth

When I look at knowledge, the truth of things, what is witnessed by reliable observers, I find that truth is different from beauty: truth is cold, crystalline, dispassionate; but truth can be elegant and attractive too, such as a fine mathematical structure, for example, the exponential (and its other face, the natural logarithm, used to express information and entropy). When I studied James Clerk Maxwell's differential equations in vector form describing electromagnetism, I found these cold equations beautiful as well as true, showing that magnetism, electricity and light were together one phenomenon, the electromagnetic field. John Keats ends his “Ode to a Grecian Urn thus: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Beauty in great art is eternal, as the truth of rigorous science is eternal, because beauty and truth exist in the Universal Mind forever.

Knowledge, such as pure science and mathematics, is valuable for its own sake, without regard to utility. I was trained as an engineer in electronics and computer design, but I have been mostly attracted by the search for pure knowledge of an abstract nature in every discipline known to man, and I'd like to continue acquiring more such knowledge, much like Aristotle in his time. I passionately love history, of all times and places, which I find attractive in that history is perfectly frozen and unchanging, as far as we can see and many lessons are to be learned from it. Knowledge is not wisdom. I admire brilliant art and fiery passion, but I'm more inclined towards calm reason and intellect. The fire that burns more slowly lasts longer. I think of myself as an abstract entity, pure intellect, floating free over my body, its sense impressions, joys, pleasures, pains, loves, hates and other passions, until such as a time as I stumble and fall on my face.

Justice

I admire the ideal of justice, which includes freedom for all living things, allowing people and other beings to live and prosper, because they are the salt of the earth. I find that kindness to all living things is worthwhile, especially towards animals. (Hey, what can we say about mosquitoes, cockroaches, bedbugs, and leeches?) “I think I could turn and live with animals,” as Walt Whitman declared, “because they're so placid and self contained.” I do abhor the mistreatment of dumb mammals, our close relatives, who feel the same pains and sufferings as we do, and love their kids and relatives as we do. Having become a vegetarian during the last stretch of my life, I can say with some self righteousness, I'm not causing the death and suffering of our animal fellows in order to eat (plants that I eat at least don't scream when killed).

A big thick steak on my plate might make me happy, but not at the expense of my health or the killing of a sentient being like an animal. I'd rather be happy than miserable, if that does no harm to anyone. The pursuit of happiness, my right as a human being, is not my goal, although I like to focus on pleasure and joy in whatever I must do. For me happiness is much more than feeling good, more than hedonism, and the absence of pain. Happiness for me is the knowledge that I'm doing the right thing for myself and for others, and that all things within my power are in as good an order as much as they can be.

Happiness

Bertrand Russell writes in his little book, “The Conquest of Happiness,” that as a youth he was miserably gloomy being raised by strict religious grandparents, depressed to the point of suicide, which he avoided because he wanted to learn more mathematics. I think he was suffering from youthful angst and lack of direction in his life. Most unhappy people make themselves that way by dwelling too much on what's wrong with their lives, the lives of family and friends, the nation, the world with wars, financial crises, and planetary warming, even the universe ending in total entropy. Of these worries the prospect of another world war with nuclear weapons is the most horrific; yet, inner peace for me is more important than world peace. I prefer to live in the moment enjoying what I can and being as happy as I can. Who's likely to do good works, one who moans or one who laughs? Let me laugh then, especially at my own foibles.

Order

Finally, my devotion to order and to life (an orderly arrangement of matter) is dedicated to a very special God who said “Let there be light.” I am part of life (the highest ideal), a product of the fifth force ruling the universe after gravitation, electromagnetism, and the two nuclear forces. I seek to preserve my life and the lives of those and far from me. We all who are sane seek self preservation and security, never achieved by anyone for long, and lost eventually to death and destruction. Yet, life keeps organizing random elements into meaningful, orderly, and stable forms, very much like great art, holding back chaos--for a while.

I hate war, greatly entertaining drama as it may be from a distance, because it's disorderly, dirty, and destructive, as I knew it in my childhood during WWII. There is much chaos in the universe, not everything is well ordered, and this is as it should be, for things need to change, and no new and higher order can come into being without an older order being destroyed. I don't know this is so, but it may be so, that we need to die in order to be born again perhaps into a higher form—death and transfiguration. A star explodes into a supernova, scattering all the heavier elements that produce a new generation of stars and planets where beings can emerge and grow and diversify into a new tree of life, such as our own biosphere. A certain special ordering exists in every thing that captures beauty in its making. Beauty is not in the sense impressions but in the patterns or structure of sense impressions, forms showing symmetry, sometimes broken symmetry, periodicity, centricity (focus), variety, color, and other qualities. I can run my own life in an orderly fashion, creating order out of chaos, in my garden and house, and in my word compositions to infuse a beautiful ordering to my family as far as they will allow me and to my other relatives and friends, including you the same.

Self realization

I have explained my values and ideals, but not how I have come by them, how I have selected them. I did so by looking inward in meditation and finding a connection with the Cosmic Mind, the first principle, first cause of everything. After Maslow, I came to my self actualization or self realization. I asked myself, as in meditation training: “Who am I? What am I?” My values are who I am and what I am in my essential nature. The Cosmic Mind chose and formed my essential, spiritual nature. If I'm honest in my nature, I value honesty; if I'm artistic, I appreciate art. I didn't choose my ideals; they chose me. I didn't pick my mission in life; my mission has selected me. My ideals inevitably led me to my life's purposes, strategies, and tactics. Like numberless apostles and martyrs past and present, I follow my faith if I can help it—never mind torture, give me joy.

The Cosmic Mind believes in us and chooses us, not us the Cosmic Mind. St. Paul taught Christians: “God is love.”

I don't use the word God because it has been much abused by the faithful and atheistic alike. The Cosmic Mind is called Higher Power in AA meetings, where people pray together to get help in controlling their addiction to alcoholism, also called Universal Consciousness by those who don't want to offend any religious prejudices. After René Descartes, I cannot derive the truth of my axioms from anything else; hence, the source of axioms must be outside my own mind, in the Cosmic Mind. Where else would their source be? Think about it and tell me.

Values, ideals, and creative works are inspired, enthused, meaning that the spirit of the Cosmic Mind has entered the artist. We are passively receiving, actively retransmitting. Evidence for the existence of a Cosmic Mind may exist in such phenomena as the achievements of great creative geniuses: Democritus (the laughing philosopher), Archimedes (an arch scientist), Galileo, da Vinci (a peak Renaissance spirit), Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton, Gauss, and Einstein. Goethe said Mozart proved the existence of God with his extraordinary musical compositions. I hedge my bet: Mozart and his pals indicate the possible existence of a Cosmic Mind.

Ah, talent, so rare yet vital to culture and progress in the arts, sciences, business, government, the military is a gift from above. When you have found talent in yourself or others protect it, nurture it, and allow it to flourish, for it has a tendency to die early, as with Mozart, Chopin, Shelley, and so many other brilliant lights. It's as if the Cosmic Mind misses these spirits and calls them back—or they burn up quickly channeling the divine energy.

Such a God as the Cosmic Mind may be quite different from the God of ministers, priests, mullahs, or shamans.

The Cosmic Mind hypothesis may explain how we get our concept of perfection for which great artists have such a passion. The Cosmic Mind is not a controlling force, but like the wind steadily swelling our sails: We can move on the waters or stand still by taking our sails down. (How do you like my metaphor?) We learn by quieting our incessantly chattering mind and listening. Leonardo da Vinci worked for many years on his portrait of the Mona Lisa seeking perfection in this painting. Paul Gauguin abandoned his family and position as a stock broker in Paris and Copenhagen to wander as far as Tahiti in search of artistic perfection, a life beautifully told in novel form by Somerset Maugham in “The Moon and Sixpence.” In the 2010 film of Darren Oronofsky, “The Black Swan,” the psychotic ballerina and the artistic director are obsessed with perfection in performing Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky. Perfection is amazing when it flows out spontaneously as in the works of Mozart, but even more astounding when it's formed with much sweat, blood and tears. The source of artistic or scientific perfection is not to be found in the rarest genes or the finest education; perfection is a gift form the Cosmic Mind guiding us on to a higher level of consciousness. I give you then my best thoughts the same way, gifts to use as you wish to achieve such a consciousness. What is a higher level that is up to you to determine.

Meditate, if you will, pray and devote yourself to a deity, the embodiment of an ideal such as the wisdom of Athena, the beauty of Venus, the knowledge of Apollo, the power of Zeus, the industry of Hephaestus, the compassion of Hera or all the ideals in one God, Jehovah-Krishna-Allah-Great Spirit. Submitting to the will of God, Islam, means that you dutifully obey your ideals in everything you do, actively pursuing your values to perfection.

Praying you may wander into a world of fantasy, Alice's Wonderland, fighting for a nonsensical cause, a la James Thurber, a little cartoon man charging up a hill with his “Excelsior” flag, but better than no cause; you will not lead a drab existence. The spiritual ground is a psychic minefield, but there's gold in them there mountains. Find a calling, like Ray Chambers, founder of “Malaria No More,” saving one million lives, or Aung San Suu Kyi (Nobelist), two decades in detention, advocating democracy in Burma (Myanmar), or Mayor Cory Booker, servant-leader, reforming schools in the inner city of Newark, N.J., or Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president, standing up against dictators and fighting for democracy, social equality, and the rights of women, or Azim Premji, Wipro Chairman, setting up the AP Foundation in India for universal primary education for 25 million children, or Joseph Stiglitz (Nobelist for his research on information asymmetries), foreseeing the 2008 financial havoc; and the list of callings goes on forever.

If there is no God, to who's will are these people submitting (“Thy will be done, not mine”) and to what are they submitting? They submit to a postulate, an established principle, assumed to be true. Even empiricism, induction, requires many assumptions about the nature of reality. Nothing can be deduced if nothing is assumed.
Andros, Greece, June, 2011