Psychology Articles

With every major invention, every technical ratcheting forward human history has been irrevocably altered. Some of the most pivotal alterations have been the result of the least dramatic and perhaps least glamorous discoveries, such as the toilet and interior plumbing. Massive changes followed the introduction of those little white bowls in the average home, most notably the decrease of acute epidemic disease and the increase in the human life-span, which, in turn has had a ripple effect on everything we think and undertake.

If we have 80 years to live instead of 40, well, then we have more time to get educated, we can wait to be married, we can pursue more than one career. Perhaps the most notable effect of our recent longevity has been the illusion that somehow life can (even should) go on indefinitely if we can only get a hold of that slippery little gene or remember to take that new antioxidant.

This dynamic – technology permuting culture – is pervasive throughout our collective experience. As our technology has changed, our lifestyles have changed. And as our lifestyles have changed our expectations, our strategies for living and our psychologies have changed. War has been no exception to the rule. The way we wage it and the battles we choose to fight have been similarly transformed. However, this time not only has the nature of war changed, but our very battlefields have been moved and we barely noticed.

New Terms of Engagement: Media-Driven Battle Grounds

For thousands of years, when one group wanted to conquer another (for whatever reason – land, power, revenge or pride) the protocol was for one group to ride, walk or run over to the desired territory and storm the castle or plunder a village. Whatever the strategies, whether the generals chose to fight with one standing army confronting another standing army or it was a surprise attack in the middle of the night, guerilla-style, it always resulted in hand-to-hand combat of some kind.

Even the Roman armies with their chariots, horses and war dogs (e.g., mastiffs) eventually met their enemies face to face. Killing was personal. Even if it didn’t start out that way, a soldier sooner or later had to use a spear, a knife, a fist or a club. The implement of death had to be wielded by hand and in almost all cases the person wielding it had to confront the grisly death of the other.

Then came gun powder and the laws of physics changed the rules of war. Now balls of lead could be hurled over or even through walls, traversing long distances to explode and expose the viscera of once impenetrable fortresses. War was still a bloody mess and a last resort for any society that valued its own, but it was now feasible to conduct one with substantially less personal involvement.

Not too long after that came the bomb. Not just the bomb, but all bombs that could be dropped from airplanes, fired from rocket launchers or detonated on delays. This once again changed war. Populations that had once been protected by flanks of soldiers who were prepared to give their lives to defend their women and children were now as vulnerable as our most primitive ancestors. We could be reached by air. There was nothing that could stop the invasion any longer.

Now, there is the danger of invasion by organism and bio-technology. We can’t see it, smell it, or fight it. But there it is, knocking on our collective unconscious, silently altering the psychological and eventually the genetic make-up of our entire culture.

The War of Words and Ideas

Which brings us to the state of war in which we currently find ourselves: the war of information in which the primary weapon used is viral fear. There are other weapons used in the information war that are no less serious, of course, such as identity theft, cyber-viruses, misinformation, EM pulses etc… But the war the average civilian is engaged in is tragically one of which he is wholly unconscious.

The war is fought in our living rooms, our bedrooms, subliminally in our movie theatres, on our phones, in our cars, on highway billboards and in shopping malls. We are utterly surrounded.

By What are we Surrounded? What’s the Enemy?

First and foremost the enemy is our own sedation. We are unconscious, made so and kept so by endless entertainment, comfort and complacency. From its inception, televised entertainment, which is intricately enmeshed with corporate and product advertising, has taken many if not most families from having dinner together at the table to dinner in shifts on the couch. We don’t face one another for after-dinner conversation or sit down for a game of chess over which we can proclaim our own world-politic. Instead we go each of us to the privacy of our own rooms, to the cyber-reality of our own headsets, to the seclusion of our own i-pods. We connect less to one another and more to electronics, conducting our lives in varying degrees of dissociative trance. We see the world (to some degree) but we are not fully there.

This is a wholly non-partisan issue. Whether one is radically right, lopsidedly left or somewhere in between, real national security is at risk and our missions will never be realized if we do not become minimally aware. And where there are real threats, America has become a sitting duck.

Secondly we are surrounded by an innumerable quantity of messages both subtle and gross given to us by the media. “Media” as I am using it here includes everything that is transmitted via newsprint, air wave, film, radio wave and optic cable. All of it, without exception, is involved in promoting an agenda. Most often it is a corporate one, even if it is embedded or disguised. (Mind you, this is not any sort of blanket condemnation on self-promotion or vigorous sales efforts. It is a commentary on our state of thoughtful awareness, or lack thereof.) Whether it is corporate or not, whether it is intentional or not, it is almost invariably fear-based and promotes a pathology of inadequacy.

In this last season, how many advertisements did you see where happy families opened lavish and glamorous gifts, where meals were presented in soft candlelight as though Martha herself were in the kitchen? I couldn’t even begin to count the ones I’d seen, not to mention the ones I didn’t. If there were one single message coming through loud and clear it was that happy families are made happy by constant and creative consumption. The irony of the way these holidays are presented is that millions are left feeling lost and lonesome. And even those who have intact families and multitudes of friends with enough money to buy gifts the way they do on television, they never, ever reach the level of perfection they see in the media. Whether we have family or not, we can never measure up. Which is both the promised land for advertisers and the problem for us.

I would like to clarify something for those who think I have an issue with shopping besides personally not loving the process of walking from store to store, sifting through too much stuff and hauling bags for hours. Philosophically speaking there is absolutely nothing wrong with shopping. So long as we exist in a complex society, we will have producers, traders, and consumers. We will always have wants and needs. However, what I do worry about is how we are unconsciously using it as a way to fill in the empty spaces in our soul or because we have nothing else to do. When we give up thinking for shopping, we are in very real trouble as a culture. And as a country at war, it is an act of suicide. It is insane.

A while back my publisher said, “When I was growing up shopping used to have something to do with comparison, with finding the appropriate item at the right price. Now it’s an automatically assumed consumption.” What an extraordinary idea. Our shopping has gone from an activity that required some consideration and thought to an impulse run wild, a substitute for self-worth or a way to shut out the world and shut off our own thoughts.

If we have gone from a production economy to retail economy as many have claimed, then consumption is indeed a critical issue. How does the media perpetuate this purchasing frenzy? The media pushes fear and inculcates inadequacy in us because in order for the economy to grow we must always need more. We must crave more, not just want it. We must not only pursue happiness, we must be willing to buy it. And, naturally, we can never really buy it either. We can only lease it. The happiness lasts only as long as the fad. And then we must have the next thing and then the thing after that and the thing after that ad infinitum.

And the fear is everywhere. This last week had an amazing roster of shows on the History Channel to celebrate the holiday season with “Armageddon Week.” A sampling: Mega Disasters, Siberian Apocalypse, Global Warming, The Last Days on Earth, Nostradamus, Meteors, Asteroids, Tsunami, Comets, Antichrist, Aftershock. And what followed this week of doom? The History of Sex.

The media’s approach to the news is not much different. It is sensational, scandal driven, high-pitched and partisan. I grew up in a home where we watched the news every evening before dinner (at which point it was turned off) and I can’t ever remember seeing people on television yelling at one another in an interview or round table discussion. When Khrushchev slammed his shoe on the table and yelled at the U.N., it was shocking as it well should have been. Now, to get our attention everything has been kicked up a notch. And the danger is that while we’re running around afraid of catching a cold or not making the perfect Christmas dinner, we’re tuning out on the issues that will profoundly affect us all. Very little is presented in a rational way about what America is actually facing and what we might do about it, only what might one day happen.

What It Does and What We Can Do.

What does a brain do with all that?

I would imagine that it starts to grow scales. Whatever it ultimately will do, we can’t tell yet, but what we do know of this endless assault of disjointed, anxiety-inducing visual and auditory stimuli is that it is lighting up certain areas of the brain more than others. The parts of our brains that respond to aggression, fear and sexuality become ignited while the cortical areas, the frontal lobes and other more sophisticated, executive areas of the brain are dimmed. What the human being has struggled to become over the course of millions of years is being reversed.

Another way of understanding this is working one group of muscles more than another. Say I go to the gym four days a week and all I do is work my upper arm muscles. I don’t bother with forearm, back, chest, abdominals, or legs. What happens is fairly obvious – one day I’m going to look in the mirror and see big arms on a small, perhaps atrophied frame.

What should we do? How can we reverse the current downward trend on the evolutionary scale?

1. Start with awareness. If we wake up and see the media’s message for what it is, we can become less susceptible, less automatic in our responses and hopefully more thoughtful. When an ad comes on or you see a product being promoted on a show or in a movie, remind yourself who and what put it there and why they’re spending so much money to do that. Awareness limits the impact of the messages that bombard us. If a sentence in an advertisement starts with “could,” “would” or “should” we can safely assume there’s an incoming fear missile. “Could it happen here?” “Could there be a bomb on New Year’s Eve?” “Should you get the vaccine now?” “Would you know what to do if…” Grammar is an extension of intent. Listen to what’s being said critically.

We can then remind ourselves that the way products and services are presented (as image, as icon, as identity or extension of self) is illusory and speaks to our fears and inadequacies more than our good judgment. They will never satisfy us in the way we are told they will. Be conscious of the truth and you will recognize the lies.

2. Do the obvious. We can limit the amount of time we (and particularly our children) spend with television, i-pods, game-boys or cyber-tennis and make a conscious effort to spend more time with one another. I do not for a second imagine that Americans will all start taking up Buddhist meditation, but having a few minutes a day without having our senses assaulted might be a good idea. The other day I met a friend at a place called the Hyatt Tamaya. It is a resort of sublime beauty, filled with roaring fires in handmade kivas, Native American artwork, sensual flute music and captivating views from every angle. I had to wait for her a while and sat near one of the fires when a man and his wife sat across from me. Presumably they’d come to the hotel together, but she sat in one corner of the couch reading a book and he sat in a chair with earphones blasting percussive music I could hear from more than 10 feet away. Why bother spending $300 a night to tune out the place you’re paying a fortune to be in doing what you do at home?

3. Ask yourself: What drives you? And spend some time with that question before you answer it. Think about what motivates you to buy, what you buy and when you buy.

4. Spend time doing things that are diametrically opposite to what is promoted in the media, such as being still, being with your family without electronic accessories, pray, walk, think, read. Live slowly, breath deeply, linger.

5. Be present. Don’t pursue anything. Especially happiness. It’s a waste of time and will only serve to make you frustrated. The only place you can really have what you long for is where you are right now with exactly what you’ve got.

Judith Acosta, LISW, is a licensed psychotherapist, crisis counselor and homeopath in private practice in New Mexico. She is the co-author of The Worst Is Over: What To Say When Every Moment Counts, hailed as the “bible of crisis communications” and Verbal First Aid for Children (Penguin 2010). She lectures around the country on Verbal First Aid, trauma, stress, and intuition development. She may be reached at http://www.wordsaremedicine.com .

A fascinating lecture took place recently in the psychology department of a University in Dundee Scotland. It was designed to provide a window for school pupils who were considering a career in psychology and it was delivered by several distinguished lecturers. What the students didn’t expect, however, was that they would be receiving a lecture on the value of lying. The professors detailed why lying was an inevitable, indeed necessary, part of the human social fabric. They provided further validation of the fact by citing recent research that tentatively suggests that large brained primates – like chimps – use deception too.

A core aspect of many schools of psychotherapy is helping people understand the inevitability of human flaws such as this. Indeed, what the academic psychologists are finding is that not only is such behaviour inevitable, it is desirable too – in an evolutionary sense and for the good of the species as a whole.

Genuine awareness comes from true acceptance and contemplating the realities of moral issues such as this is a very good gateway into such awareness. The reality is that our imperfections themselves are what makes us perfect. You cannot have perfection without imperfection. Yes, this is a paradox, but it is no less true or powerful a reality for that. There are things about us that we may not like that, nevertheless, serve a purpose too. In isolation we may not appreciate them – nor should we – but they have value in the wider context.

Acceptance is the key. Acceptance is the ultimate destination of the journey of self awareness. All therapy – face to face or Internet therapy – is, one way or another, designed to help you get there. At the same time, however, it is also important to find a way to embrace the need for change. This might sound like another contradiction, but, in fact, it follows: If you really accept every aspect of yourself such as the occasional foray into dishonesty, then you will, at the same time, feel a compulsion to change. After all, no one wants to be dishonest. To truly be at one with acceptance, you must also be change. So, again, we reach a paradox. And the corollary is also true; you cannot embody change, without simultaneously, embodying acceptance. To really change, you must first accept all parts of you, otherwise you will be unable to change – all effort to do so will serve only as a temporary escape, often exacerbating the original status quo that you wanted to change in the first place.

So there you have it; the paradoxical goals of psychotherapy. These are the circles all of us are trying to square – I see it in myself, as well as the clients I have seen in offline and Internet therapy too; we must embrace our imperfections without ceasing to seek perfection, we must embody acceptance, without failing to strive for change. These are not destinations you will ever fully arrive at. It is the journey of life, and the psychology lecture in a Scottish University was a good starting point.

Dr Russell Razzaque earned his medical degree from the University of London, he is a member of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists and is a Consultant Psychiatrist practicing in the British National Health Service. In 2009, after several years of development, he launched an online stillness based self help program – Sileotherapy – a unique combination of meditation techniques and Internet therapy:

http://www.meditation-therapy.net

People start learning right from their childhood. They form concepts and then arrange those concepts, then store those concepts and then when called upon by the circumstances use those concepts. This processing of information and concepts is called cognition in Psychology. Such people who can make so many users of the Cognitive information and the concepts of cognition are called learned ones when they cross a minimum level of storage of such Cognitive informations.

When a child is born he has no concepts. Experience of The child which increases with his age teaches him more and more. At the time of birth the child has no name, religion or other particulars. After his birth all this adjectives are given to him. He is given a name. He is told about his religion. He is told about his parentage and other adjectives. All this information is injected into him as if this was an integral part of his existence.

A person hardly has an occasion to think if he were the same person without his name or parentage or religion etc. He is imbibed with a belief that all this information about him was an inseparable part of his personality.

As he grows he is given education. He is taught about the theories given by some predecessors. He is repeatedly told about and is made to believe in the sanctity of the theories. He is taught about the infallibility of the theories. In the same way, as he used to identify himself with the concepts of his name, parentage and religion etc. now he starts to identify himself with these theories. People feel proud in calling themselves democrat, pragmatic, revolutionary, extremist, communists and so on so forth. People have identified themselves with theories.

After theories people further go on adding to their acquired characteristics. They now start identifying them with values. They feel proud in such identification. They call themselves as honest, gallant, clever, beautiful, sharp and no one knows what more. People are conceited with their these acquired identities.

In the childhood a common story is usually recited. Several seekers went to a Guru to learn music. The Guru asked the first seeker his earlier qualifications. The seeker told that he knows nothing about music. The Guru told him that it would take him 6 months to learn music. The second seeker was a bit acquainted with the rules of music. And Guru told him that it would take him more than a year to learn music. The third seeker told that he had already earned degrees in music and knows a number of scriptures about music. The Guru asked him that it would take him for about 10 years to learn music. On being asked the Guru explained that the learning period of all three is the same i.e. 6 months, the remaining time will be used to cleanse the garbage they had accumulated in the name of knowledge. It is always easy to write on a clean slate then to write on a dirty slate. For a dirty slate is to be cleaned first and then it can be used for writing. If the slate of mind is dirty then it takes quite a long time to make it clean because the concepts are engraved on the surface of mind. They are not simply written with cleanable chalk.

A scripture is the experience of the past generations. It tells about the history. It tells about the past. But you have to prepare for the future. Making preparation for the future based on the accounts of past is useful only if the nature were to repeat itself again and again. But this does not happen. The nature is not found repeating itself. It does not repeat itself. Then why all those learned people have burdened themselves with the load of the past.

In the real life, when they are confronted with the circumstances where they have to have resort to values contrary to the values of truthfulness and honesty for winning a competition, it would create a tension in their personality. They find their deeds and beliefs standing poles apart with no consonance in them. They are at the verge of breaking. Whenever there is an inconsonance between the deeds and beliefs of a person, he is confronted with an internal turbulence and the psychology calls it Cognitive Dissonance.

You ask a communist to learn an essay on "The Advantages of Capitalism". It would be the toughest task for him. In India the followers of Jainism finish their dinner before the sunset. A test was given to several Jainese who followed this practice, to have a dinner late at night. About 72 times out of 100 they vomited and others felt very inconvenient after the dinner. It is Cognitive Dissonance.

This mind is full of beliefs. It feels inconvenience when any new value contrary to the earlier beliefs is encountered. The beliefs in your mind resist the new value. More beliefs you have more resistance they offer. More deep rooted beliefs you have, more resistances they would offer

This Cognitive Dissonance is nothing objective. It is purely subjective value confrontation. The same set of values may cause a great Cognitive Dissonance in one person while it may not do anything noticeable for a second one. It is a confrontation of values acquired and the values encountered. Values acquired are those values with which you start identifying yourself. These are those values which assume prominence even over you. You go in the background and the values come in the forefront. Gradually you are thrown overboard and the only values remain there. There are a lot of instances in the human history when people have sacrificed themselves for the sake of values they uphold. An honesty valued person would die rather than being dishonest. A gallant person would die rather than fleeing as a coward. It is the honesty and the gallantry which are prominent and not the person who possess them.

The aforesaid two values of honesty and gallantry may be appreciated by a lot of people so don’t be confused by the names of the values. A value if repeated in action frequently then it is called habit. The habit of drinking, the habit of consuming contraband drugs, the habit of adultery, the habit of gambling are other habit i.e. the values repeated again and again. It may be honesty, gallantry or drinking, smoking or gambling these are all values injected into you from outside. These were injected to improve you but these values overpowered you and thrown you out of you. It is something like a landlord being thrown out of his house by his tenant.

The learned ones are those who plead that a land lord cannot be homeless because it is inherent in his name – "Landlord" itself that he owns the land. How can he be landless? The learned ones argue that the tenant means who has got the right to live in the premises. Therefore it is all OK if the landlord is thrown on the road because he can never, as a meaning of his name, be landless. The learned ones, more often mix the reality with the definitions. They solve the problems of existence by using the syntax of syllogism.

The learned ones ask how to become more sharp? How to use more brain power? How to overtake others? They then hypothesize the answers also. They suggest more and more acquisition of theories, values so that a strong syllogistic base is prepared. Their followers obey them. And the result is more and more Cognitive Dissonance.

More and more Cognitive Dissonance prompts them to go more and more to the learned ones. They, in turn give more and more theories and more and more values. A vicious circle is forcibly generated by the leaned ones and their followers.

To avoid this problem of internal turbulence is to avoid this Dissonance. The better way to avoid Dissonance is to leave living in syntax. Live in the life. Don’t fill your mind with the garbage of theories. Those who gave theories, it was their experience. It is the least probable that the nature would repeat itself and take you to the same circumstances which were faced by the learned ones who gave that theory.

Having resort to the value is not bad. It ought not to be ousted. It is as a routine as it is to have a breakfast in the morning. If you find a value of any use then make use of it and then throw it away. Do not allow any value, may it be of this category or that category, to sit on your head. You are the master to choose a value and you should remain a master. Never be a slave of any value. So never be a learned one.

My website is psmalik.com

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On why we have dreams and the functions of dreaming

The psychology of dreams has been explained either with the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and the psycho-physiological process of dreaming. Thus there are two distinct schools in the psychology of dreams – one school of thought believes in the relation between REM sleep and dreaming, the role of dreams in learning and dreams as a result of random neural firings further leading to random images that may not have any significance; and the other school of thought believes that dreams occur as a result of unconscious and repressed impulses and could be explained with psychoanalytic symbolism and in turn also explain psychic phenomenon or even lead to understanding the causes of mental illnesses.

According to Freud, ‘dreams are the royal road to the unconscious’, in the sense that dreams could be analyzed in a way that will reveal the hidden impulses in the unconscious. Dreams may thus reveal who we ‘really’ are, what we ‘really’ want and how we want to attain these desires. Yet many contemporary psychologists have moved away from this ’semantic’ view of dreams that emphasize on repressed desires and ‘meanings’ of dreams, and have suggested that dreams occur simply due to random neural firings in the brain when the body is at rest and these random firings produce images in the brain. There are several stages in sleep and the REM sleep is the final stage.

Dreams are related to this REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep and we tend to have several dreams in one night although we forget almost all these images. We don’t act out these dreams because during the process of dreaming, the body undergoes temporary paralysis which is a protective or bodily defense mechanism against any external injury.

Dreams according to psychology is also a defense mechanism as all repressed desires which could have harmful effects on our psyche are released through the process of dreaming, so both physiologically and psychologically, dreams have defensive or protective functions helping in release of excessive stress, traumatic thoughts, repressed impulses as also protect the body from external injury. Dream recollection and control through the process of lucid dreaming and hypnosis as used more frequently by traditional psychotherapists are not too popular any more although these processes provide more insights into images in dreaming and how these could be evoked or elicited in psychotherapeutic sessions or could be remembered and interpreted to provide more access to the unconscious.

The physiology of REM stage of sleep may be able to provide answers as to why we dream of certain images yet this mechanism would be unable to explain exactly why these specific images occur. Some theories have suggested that certain repressed thoughts and desires or repeated occurrences could manifest in dreams through images.

Sometimes trauma or any event with significant emotional value could lead to repetitive dreams with the same images. Considering existing literature, I suggest that dreams could have five principal functions – a clinical function of explaining mental illness, a cognitive function of aiding learning, an adaptive function of restoring body mechanisms, a cathartic function of releasing traumatic or repressed feelings and a defensive function of providing a protective shield to the mind and the body. So dreams could actually be explained both from psychoanalytic and psycho-physiological perspectives. In fact we have to understand psychoanalysis and psycho-physiology and integrate findings about dreams from both these fields to reach a comprehensive understanding of dreams.

The five functions of dreams are given here and the basic thesis of a comprehensive dream theory should be based on all these five functions.

Clinical Function of Dreams – Some psychologists believe that dreams are closely related to mental illness and that many post traumatic dreams represent anxiety and prolonged or repetitive traumatic dreams could suggest initial symptoms of mental disorder or failed physiological functions in the body. In fact many mental illnesses could be traced back to certain dreams and we can even understand the roots or causes of mental illness by studying why certain dreams occur in certain people. The clinical value of dreams has been recognized in psychoanalysis although the full potential of this function has not been very clear in physiology. Further scientific research is required to understand the role of dreams in explaining, preventing or even curing mental or physical illnesses.

Dreams could highlight issues of brain disorder, brain ailments and hormonal changes in the body and could have clinical value in identifying many diseases and abnormal conditions in the body.

Cognitive Function of Dreams – Dreams are useful in learning and scientific studies have proved that dreams play a cognitive role in children who have many more dreams and increased REM sleep than adults, thus children tend to learn while dreaming and dreaming and REM sleep could also have a positive effect on learning physical skills. This might explain how dreams could also provide insights into problems as solutions and many discoveries, inventions and novel ideas emerge in dreams. Dreams show various possibilities in our thought process and through permutations and combinations provide cognitive solutions to some of our life goals. Dreams could thus be very effective learning tools, help in self understanding and realization and improve and consolidate cognitive abilities.

Adaptive Function of Dreams – Dreams help us to adapt to our surroundings and although the evolutionary advantage of dreaming is not clear or has not been studied extensively, the fact that we continue to dream and even learn and defend ourselves through dreams makes dreaming an important part of our passive and active life. The adaptive function of dreams is however physiologically advantageous as it helps restore bodily mental and physical balance. Although this remains a controversial viewpoint, the complete psychological and physiological advantages of dreaming will have to be studied from an evolutionary perspective.

Cathartic Function of Dreams – Dreams are highly cathartic. They release stress, and through symbolic representation of images, purge out our fears, our impulses and urges and help us to confront our own mental lives. Dreams are more than the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, they are basic shields for our own defense and release. The thoughts and emotions that may be too dark, traumatic, shameful or dangerous for real life are manifested in dreams and help us to confront realities. Psychoanalytically dreams represent wish fulfillment and many images in dreams like elongated objects for example, are considered symbolic of sexual organs. It is however controversial whether all dreams are a type of wish fulfillment and some dreams could simply be a release of anxiety or completely the opposite of any wish fulfillment. If you repeatedly dream of your own injury or injury of close ones, you are simply releasing your unconscious anxiety through the dreams which in turn may help you to function better and be more cautious in reality.

Defensive Function of Dreams – This is related to the cathartic and adaptive functions of dreaming as when we release through catharsis, we also adapt to situations and this in turn provides a defense or protection for the mind and body to continue functioning without harm or hindrance. Although this concept is unpopular among many psychologists, dreams may have strong defensive functions. While we dream, the physiological changes in the body such as release of glycine, an amino acid highlight a defensive mechanism and both physical and mental irritations could be released through dreaming, providing in turn a shield for the body and mind. Dreams are thus not just the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, they are essential covers or shields to protect the mind or body against excess stress. Just like your boiling kettle has provisions to release excess steam, dreams too serve as a regulatory mechanism to release all excesses from the mind and body.

Dreams are finally mind’s excretions. The view that dreams have no evolutionary advantage and that they have no functions has been endorsed by many scientists, yet if we look deeper into the annals of psychology, the significance of dreams in explaining mental life cannot be overlooked. Only further research in physiology, imaging techniques and psychotherapy delving into the psychology of dreams would be able to tell us why we dream and whether dreams are rudimentary or regulatory.

Reflections in Psychology – Part I by Saberi Roy

http://www.lulu.com/content/5865445

Who’s in control of the choices that you make? Is it you? Science says not a chance! What do you really control anyway, the volume on your radio, the temperature of your car. What else?

The brain has specific cortical circuits that when triggered are associated with sensations that arise in the course of wanting to initiate and then carry out a voluntary action. Once these circuits are connected and their molecular and synaptic signatures identified, they constitute the neuronal correlates of consciousness for intention and action.

It works both ways. Your thinking impacts your physiology and your physiology impacts your thinking and both orient what actions you take. The question still remains however, are you in control of how you think, feel and act?

Benjamin Libet, 1980s psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, stated;

“A few hundred milliseconds before a person thought he or she decided to press a button, brain areas related to movement were already active. The unconscious brain calls the shots, making free will an illusory afterthought!”

The research indicates that human behavior is wired in for survival, all of it! Consider the following; What do you see?

(Black spots up close, image of a dog when you pull away. Send an email and I’ll send this image to you.)

The reality of the above observation is black patches. However, the human brain is genetically coded to recognize a pattern. This pattern is a dog. This dates back to evolutionary days of survival of the fittest. It favored survival to be able to instantly recognize danger and to initiate an avoidance response long before you were conscious of the threat.

Our brain was selected for pattern recognition and action long before conscious thought occurred. This also required less brain energy. Human evolution has always favored conservation of energy. Here are some examples of both conservation of energy and pattern recognition.

What is 12 divided by ½? Most of the population will conserve energy, recognize a pattern and answer 6. That is incorrect. It is 24.

Here’s another example.

Frank is looking at Mary but Mary is looking at Bill. Frank is married Bill is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

a) Yes
b) No
c) Can not be determined.

Most of the population, 80%, answers c) Can not be determined. That is not correct. The answer is a) Yes. This is called a cognitive miser. The individual recognizes a pattern and jumps to a conclusion. It is low in computational power but it is fast. It doesn’t interfere with other ongoing cognitive functions. It’s easy, conserves energy and initiates survival action. What you gain in speed you lose in computational accuracy. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort even if they are less accurate. We need to act first and figure it out later because 5 million years ago that meant survival.

The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Mary is married or not suggest to people that they don’t have enough information and they make the easiest inference c) without thinking through the possibilities.

What controlled this choice? It was a genetically programmed, pattern recognition that saved time and created action, for survival!

Every choice that we make is govern by the essential law of human performance. We are coded to avoid the highest level of perceived pain. We are avoidance machines. We recognize patterns and react then analyze. We are preprogrammed genetic machines!

Although we can not change our genetic coding and neurological wired patterns of predisposed behavior, we can purposefully direct it with behavioral contracting.

Make a commitment and then place a painful consequence for non performance. Make a penalty that will be enforced if you don’t accomplish the commitment. You are already wired to avoid pain, to see patterns of opportunity for the avoidance of your highest level of perceived pain. You will “see” opportunities to avoid the penalty that would never be available to you had you not participated with a behavioral contract.

Make a commitment, put a consequence for non performance on the task, have someone else hold you accountable and watch how creatively you can avoid the pain and do the activity!

High Performance Training, Inc.
Bob Davies, M.Ed. Psychology, B.S. Health, MCC Master Certified Coach
20992 Ashley Lane, Lake Forest, CA 92630-5865
949-830-9192 fax 949-830-9492 Email: Info@bobdavies.com
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Bob Davies, named in the top 100 greatest minds of personal development world-wide by Excellence Magazine.

Human nature is the fundamental dispositions and traits of a human. Human nature can be understood in 2 aspects, namely the genetic blueprint and the growth blueprint.

1. Genetic Blueprint

The genetic blueprint of human nature consists of evolutionary anatomy and primal instincts. Evolutionary anatomy is based upon the categorization of humans as mammals under Linnaeus classification system. Humans are similar to mammals in most aspects except that humans are physiologically challenged when it comes to survival. Primal instincts can be understood as the id in Freudian Psychology. The id is a selfish and irrational force that supports our fight-or-flight self-defense mechanism in times of threat and danger.

An individual will inherit his parents and ancestors human nature through the genes. The most fundamental need of human beings is to survive. Hence, we have inherited the nature of aggressive in order to survive.

2. Growth Blueprint

The growth blueprint of human nature consists of our layman mind and body. One of the fundamental differences between humans and animals is the absence of an intelligent mind capable of unlimited growth. The mind does more than enabling our sensory capabilities. It is able to integrate our sensations into experiences and crystallize knowledge into wisdom. With a combination of our experiences and wisdom, we are then able to interpret situations and take active ownership of ourselves. That is why we are conscious of how our body develops the societal preferences from the different cultures and our own dreams and goals. This consciousness thus enables us to develop not only our mind, but also our body. We will know what to eat and what to work upon on our bodies to train for athletic superiority. That is why humans are about the only species that can develop and push our physical limits from that of an ordinary man to that of an Olympic runner.

The study of psychoanalysis which include classical Freudian psychology and genetic science enable us to better understand our genetic blueprint. While the study of humanistic theories such as Carl Rogers’ Person Centered Therapy and William Glassers’ Choice Theory, enables us to understand the unlimited boundaries of the human potential in a scientific manner.

Dias Lu is an entrepreneur who specializes in self-empowerment, wealth mastery, and entrepreneurial leadership. Currently he is running his internet marketing business and doing part-time experiential coaching.

To continue to benefit from his shared experience, visit his blog at http://www.diaslu.com

While not actively pursuing his dreams, he will be practicing his martial arts, reading and writing articles. He believes that everyone has a right to their dreams and that perseverance and helping one another will achieve exactly those dreams.

He continues to blogs and shares his ideas at http://www.diaslu.com

For all its utility and mysterious complexity, consciousness is full of defects. The common sense view – largely unchallenged throughout our history — is that consciousness presents us with a picture of how things are “out there” that we are able to view “inside” our minds. Philosophers have called this view the “Cartesian Theatre:” the experience of viewing the world in our minds presupposes a division, on the one hand, between the materialistic world of real objects that have substance and weight and, on the other, the inner, non-materialistic mind that constructs representations of those objects and reacts. This dualism no longer sits comfortably with most scientists and philosophers. Moreover, the philosophical dilemma of dualism leads us to two highly practical problems: misleading appearances of coherence in the world and illusions of agency in the self.

First off, the picture we view in our “Cartesian Theatre” imposes a false unity on our experience. We see a coherent world, seemingly available for scrutiny and systematic thought, but that world does not actually map onto reality. This is the “user illusion,” as it has sometimes been called, based on the analogy of our relationship with our computers where we interface with pictures and programs, not the thing itself. As Edelman has put it: “The take-home lesson is that our body, our brain, and our consciousness did not evolve to yield a scientific picture of the world.”

Damasio has endorsed Dennett’s “Multiple Drafts” model of consciousness to reflect the complexity of how consciousness is actually constructed. Our experience, in the “Cartesian Theatre,” presents a simple and coherent view of the world because the multiple drafts of reality have been invisibly edited and synthesized. We are unaware of the machinery that goes into its construction. In order to present coherent messages suitable for action, vast stores of information that cannot be processed are discarded. Moreover, what is missing, the gaps, are filled in by inference or memory. What we experience consciously, in other words, is a simulation, a fiction.

Psychologists refer to “accessibility” to describe what gets included in the final edit, but many factors enter into the accessibility of information: how recent and how frequent our exposure to it has been, how relevant it is to the actions we are considering, how frequently it has been used in the past, how it makes us feel. This latter point accounts for the relative ease with which information that makes us uncomfortable or that does not accord with our idealized versions of ourselves tends to be discarded. As the psychologist Timothy Wilson has put it: “We are masterly spin doctors, rationalizers, and justifiers of threatening information.”

Dramatic examples of such editing are described in the research on “split brains,” where neurosurgeons have severed the connections between the left and right hemispheres in order to prevent epileptic seizures. Joseph LeDoux, describing this research, noted that patients inevitably compensated for what they did not understand about their own behavior: “Time after time, the left hemisphere made up explanations as if it knew why the response was performed. For example, if we instructed the right hemisphere to wave, the patient would wave. When we asked him why he was waving, he said he thought he saw someone he knew.” The lesson is that, however impaired, the brain does not cease its sometimes heroic efforts to impose unity and coherence on the information it processes.

The second set of illusions has to do with agency. Consciousness fosters the belief that we are in charge of our actions, but the evidence of neurobiology suggests that most of our decisions are made automatically. Our reactions to events are underway before we become aware of them. As Freeman has put it: “taking responsibility for one’s self is more like trying to control one’s teenager than one’s automobile.

Sometimes, of course, it is obvious that making something conscious impedes our reactions to events. LeDoux has noted that “prepackaged emotions” quickly elicit reactions to danger that aid survival, a point that Darwin also made. If we see a stick that moves, our bodies do not stop to figure out if it is a snake before starting to flee.

Indeed, our brains often embark on actions or construe reactions to events without our needing to know what we are doing. Almost fifty years ago, Michael Polyanyi pointed out the importance of “tacit knowledge,” knowledge we take for granted. When we recognize familiar faces, for example, we rely upon such knowledge without knowing we possess it. More recently, psychologists have distinguished between “implicit” and “explicit” memory, highlighting the importance in our daily lives of the information we process subliminally, without consciousness. Similarly, they have studied “procedural memory,” the built-in sets of perceptions and skills that are required for riding a bicycle or driving a car.

But many have argued more broadly that these are merely particular instances of a general truth: consciousness always arises after the fact of perception and response. Freeman notes that awareness “continually runs to catch up with the self, half a second late but backdated.” Damasio puts it this way: “We are always hopelessly late for consciousness and because we all suffer from the same tardiness no one notices it.” In other words consciousness arises from the information we have received, the interpretations we have constructed, and the decisions we have already made. Our bodies and brains have processed that information and constructed a response that is already set in motion when we become aware of it. The evolutionary value of consciousness turns out to be, from this perspective, not in the capacity it provides for us to decide on our actions in advance so much as the opportunity to reflect on the world we perceive and plan new courses of action, after the fact. With it, we can inhibit or alter our behavior, and we can plan better responses for the future. As Damasio put it in the passage quoted earlier, the evolutionary benefit is “forethought.”

Ken Eisold is a psychoanalyst and organizational consultant who has written What You Don’t Know You Know, a book that expands our understanding of the unconscious to include organizations, politics, economics, and public affairs. He comments regularly on current events on his blog: http://www.keneisold.com

Michael Jackson’s death is a reminder of the vitality of America’s (and the world’s) cult of celebrity. The intensity of the global public response moves one to ask: why is society so deeply affected by the death of a person who was known for bizarre behavior and questionable judgment? Evolutionary psychology provides a helpful perspective.

When evolutionary psychologists observe that a behavior is widespread and common in a particular species, they first seek to find out whether such behavior is “adaptive,” meaning, beneficial from a reproductive point of view. Hero-worship is interesting in this respect because we find versions of it in all societies. Our earliest recorded literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was concerned primarily with the lives of two heroes. From Odysseus to Elvis, great performers have evoked veneration. Why?

Public performance can be understood as a form of genetic signaling. This is one reason why young animals play. When puppies frolic and run about playfully, they are sending very serious messages to future competitors and future mates about their genetic fitness. A puppy that is especially big or fast in play is communicating with competitors (“you won’t want to mess with me when I grow up”) and future mates (“my genes are the best – you’ll have great kids with me”).

It makes sense, therefore, for youngsters to enjoy play (they do) and to be great “show-offs” (they are). In fact, the whole purpose of play, from an evolutionary perspective, is precisely to “show off” our exceptional genetic fitness. As we grow older and mature into sexually active adults, we don’t really stop playing. Instead, our play becomes deadly serious (we begin to call it “work” or “art”), and many of us become even more extreme “show-offs”. We’d better. Our “performances” on the job or in social occasions are the most likely indicators of whether or not we will succeed in the reproductive marketplace.

Although there are many ways of displaying genetic fitness, humans appear especially attuned to verbal, musical or athletic performance. Our top politicians, actors, musicians and sports stars receive overwhelming adulation. Verbal and musical displays likely evolved as a form of competitive play meant to signal intelligence. “Playing the dozens” and hip-hop dissing contests probably have roots in human behavior stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. As humans evolved into more intelligent creatures, the pressure of sexual selection put a premium on displays correlated with intelligence.

Thus, when musical superstars perform in public, they are inserting an ancient evolutionary key into a special lock in our brains. When the key turns, we receive an exhilarating blast of dopamine, the brain’s own version of cocaine, the ultimate feel-good drug.

The fascinating thing about public performance is that it feels good to the performer as well as to the audience. Again, from an evolutionary perspective, this is to be expected. The performer’s brain is being rewarded because evolution has provided a great stimulus (a dopamine fix) for us to show off successfully whenever we can get away with it. Doing so maximizes our chances of attracting a desirable mate. Showing off feels good. Showing off in front of a large audience feels great.

The audience also finds its brains rewarded by evolution as well, but for different reasons. Why do we enjoy watching exceptional performances? There are three reasons. First, spectacular performances are in a sense “instructive”. Humans are the most imitative species on earth. Much of our intelligence has to do with our ability to model and mimic adaptive behavior. It makes sense for us to be especially attentive to superior performance of any kind – the more we enjoy it, the closer we will pay attention to it, and the more likely that we will learn something from it. Second, if we feel that we are somehow socially or emotionally linked to the performer, we are encouraged by the increased chance that we or our offspring will share in the genetic bounty represented by that performer. Third, the more we ingratiate ourselves with the performer, as by displaying submissive and adoring behavior, the more likely we are to earn the performer’s esteem, and with it, a chance to mate with the performer and endow our offspring with the performer’s superior genes.

It seems likely that humans have been programmed by evolution to turn either into rock-stars or groupies (or both). Which path we take depends on our location within the competitive space of our generation’s gene-pool. If we are the best singer or dancer of our generation, we will be tempted to perform: the rewards, both in terms of our brain’s dopamine revels and in the attention of sexually-attractive mates, could be huge.

Unfortunately, while it makes sense – from an evolutionary perspective — for members of our species to be attracted to musical genius, it does not necessarily make sense from an individual perspective. Many people have learned this in the most concrete way, by marrying musicians (I did). My eldest son inherited exceptional musical talent, so my genes are happy. My genes were never concerned with my wife’s operatic temper (she’s a mezzo-soprano), that’s been purely my affair. Evolution promises us adorable children; it doesn’t promise us a rose garden.

Michael Jackson’s fans have to some extent been tricked by evolution. Watching the Gloved One’s uncanny gyrations and masterful crooning released entire oceans of their cerebral dopamine, but that did not change the fact that their hero was a very weird man.

Indeed, Michael Jackson’s life represents the very opposite of wisdom, the opposite of what one should admire or seek to emulate in a role-model. Dopamine-rushes can be addictive, exactly like cocaine. Young Michael’s success as a child prodigy may have destroyed his chances for happiness as an adult. He was never able to improve upon the Peter Pan-like ecstasies he achieved as a child star, so he spent his life in a perpetual attempt to remain a child. This is already very unhealthy at age 20 or age 30. At 40 or 50, it is a sign of mental illness.

Evolution has left our brains vulnerable to deceptive evolutionary keys. Fortunately, it has also endowed us with an alarm system called “reason.” We can learn to recognize our ancient evolutionary triggers for precisely what they are – stimuli to do things that may or may not be good for us. Nothing can stop that dopamine from flowing once our fingers start snapping to “I’m Bad,” but our reason can stop us from taking the whole thing too seriously. And it should.

We should not disparage the pleasures and delights of participation in spectacles. Whether we find ourselves cheering in a sports stadium or at a jazz concert, our delight is deep and real. We should indulge in this joy – it is one of the highlights of human experience. However, we should look for role models in the people we really know and trust around us, not in musical superstars, no matter how gifted.

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We are almost completely unaware of the evolution of psychic function. We believe that people of ancient times were exactly like us, as if conscious human nature was born, like Paul Bunyan, in it’s present form, without any need for psychic leaps of understanding-perhaps most of which haven’t happened yet. Whether as archeologists, historians, sociologists, or anyone studying ancient times, we draw conclusions about motive and state of mind based upon present-time human consciousness, assuming that psychically we always have been like we are today, and always will be exactly the same.

Indeed the entity least studied on planet Earth is human nature. We know as much about ourselves as we know about the deep sea, less than 10% of which has ever been explored. We’ve found very exotic wonderful animals on the bottom of the ocean, and we’ve imagined strange and unfathomable traits in the dark recesses of our unconscious. But both deep places remain as mysterious and unknown as paleontology or archeology was 200 years ago-which may be how long it will take us seriously to understand ourselves.

After over 100 years of clinical study one would think that psychology would have revealed much more information. In a sense it has, though that knowledge is perceived so obliquely that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Studying ourselves is still very much like trying to understand the normal function of deep-sea creatures when the only way we can accurately examine them is to remove them from their natural environment. Indeed, except for psychotherapy, the study of psychic human nature is treated as a function of brain physiology, as if the human spirit derived from grey matter. Instead the human psyche is an intangible, ephemeral spiritual entity, unlike any other living creature, capable of observing and knowing itself.

Humanity has evolved some very virtuous and wonderful traits, like our ability much of the time to restrain a powerful tendency toward violence, and a capacity for thoughtful sensitive acts of caring and love. But in the study of psychology our principle efforts have been committed to discovering various kinds of psychopathology. Because of this emphasis upon illness, not much illumination has been shed upon normal human psychic function, which has been defined almost entirely in a negative way, as the absence of psychopathology. What a strangely dark cast to put upon what is assumed to be, in its normal state, at least in part the epitome of happiness and satisfaction? Why this predominant emphasis upon dysfunction?

Curiously, in spite of this clouded perspective, most of us regard ourselves as perfectly normal. If so, why do we spend so much time studying human pathologies? The average person would explain this as evidence that it’s the shrinks who are crazy, looking for insanity everywhere else but in themselves. In contrast professionals mostly avoid the issue, or put a positive cast upon what is by definition negative phenomena-in other words, pathology. There is at present a strong cultural movement to regard everything previously perceived as abnormal, as if it were indeed the epitome of normal. This includes everything from food binging to criminality.

In trying to make everything okay, yet professionally continuing to study the intimate details of psychopathology, what are we wrestling with? Insisting that we’re all perfectly normal, yet secretly worrying about things that feel quite beyond our capability, we struggle with how to put the pieces of this strange contradictory puzzle together. As a result of the environmental movement, many of us have begun to think of ourselves as a cursed and destructive species that deserves to be annihilated for the safety and survival off all other living things. Most likely, if we put all of this contradictory evidence together, it means that we’re gnashing our teeth in the sometimes-frightening dilemma of finding out just who we are-in spite of our pretense that we already know.

Until the last 200 to 300 years we’ve been exclusively the property of God, Who has, since time immemorial, defined who we are and what we’re not, or shouldn’t be. Though all of this defining was, and still is for many, done in the context of good and evil-which, if you look at it carefully, is a very primitive system of understanding. It has only two alternatives-instead of millions, a number that characterizes the complexity of the ecosystems that science has revealed to us.

The multiplicity of options our study has unveiled in the realm of physical reality has made possible the proliferation of our proudest achievement-technology. We are so enamored of the miraculous power technology has given us, we can’t stop watching the thrill of it erecting and exploding things. There’s strong evidence that we would prefer to be a machine in order to give us superhuman strength. In a sense we’ve all become computer nerds in order to occupy and master what many regard as the brain-god of the future.

Meanwhile back at the farm, psychology-actually psychotherapy, the best laboratory for the study of the human psyche-continues to unravel the mysteries of psychopathology. In our private thoughts, and sometimes within a social context, we fully accept the guilt of this negatively charged concept of human nature, while we also strongly resist it openly being applied to ourselves. So which view is true?

The answer is perhaps a mixture of both perspectives, meaning what we’ve discovered in psychopathology is true about us, but on the other hand, these dysfunctional traits aren’t pathological, though they can be very painful and frightening. Is it perhaps normal to be, and do what for so long we’ve called crazy?

Lets consider this radical option and see where it takes us. What we discover immediately is that a remarkable man, a Princeton psychologist, Julian Jaynes, has been here before us. He proposed just such a theory in the 1970’s (The Origin of Consciousness), which asserted that prior to about 3000 years ago, the vast majority of humans hallucinated! If that is so, perhaps what we call psychosis, with its delusions and hallucinations, represent a normal stage in the evolution of the human psyche.

What Jaynes discovered both academically, and in his own life-he occasionally hallucinated, as do many non-psychotic humans-was that the human brain evolved to make hallucination very easily accomplished. Electrically stimulate the only connective tissue between the brain’s right and left lobes, and most people will momentarily be delusional or hallucinate. But for what purpose would nature play what seems, at first glance, to be such a dirty trick upon us? The answer is in order to be able to off-load much of human experience until it could be gradually understood and integrated into a more evolved mature psyche, capable of containing what, to an earlier human, was unimaginable.

Having lost the ability to hear commanding voices telling us to do what we could not internally comprehend, humanity suffered deeply for eons of time, revealing why oracles, the use of psychedelics and trances, for instance, were so terribly important to ancient civilization, and up to the present time, in our efforts to bring the voices back.

To illustrate what may well have been a gradual and painful evolution of psychic capability, consider just one concept it has taken humanity tens of thousands of years to evolve-democracy, in some ways that is still poorly conceived. This enlightened political idea failed to happen for so many centuries not because of oppression, as we normally assume, but because a sufficient majority of humans were not yet capable of assuming the responsibility-or even imagining it-of being sufficiently independent of the social matrix to presume to have a mind of their own, putting them at odds with, and outside their family or social group. Imagine the emergence of selfhood in a child growing up as a reenactment of that evolutionary process.

A second question emerges. If hallucination is an evolutionary part of human nature, then what psychic strategies followed it as a replacement? Total psychic maturity most likely didn’t follow immediately, and may never entirely be accomplished. The answer is to be found in today’s most-studied form of psychopathology-borderline personality, more accurately known as someone who employs dissociation.

Psychosis exists in a psyche unable to contain all of its personal experience as something, at least partially, originating from inside. Instead part of what that psyche is, feels and thinks must be heard and obeyed in large part as a command from an external source. In sharp contrast, dissociation is a psyche capable of containing much, if not all experience, but who is able to pay almost no attention to what is external. The severely dissociated personality operates instead from a made-up, pretended, personal fantasy system that makes it possible to live in what we like to call the real world, but to regard all external stimuli as completely unreliable, threatening and perhaps even deadly.

Whole societies, obviously of a very warring nature, have functioned in this way.

The psychopath is perhaps the best-known example of severe dissociation, as someone who appears utterly without conscience, meaning any regard whatsoever for anyone else. Though they pretend they do, becoming very skilled at appearing entirely sympathetic to others, but only in order to be able to entice them into being a pawn in their usually malevolent game plan-treating the world the way it treated them, as dog eat dog.

In general dissociation means literally to put out-of-sight, out-of-mind-the way we used to regard and treat children precisely because they are primitive in their function, and we didn’t want to be contaminated by this primitive content. Denial is one of the strategies of dissociation.

In the case of non-psychopathic dissociative personality, others don’t suffer; they do, very deeply. They have cut themselves off from the real world because the one they occupied as a child was so utterly mortifying, terrifying, and dangerous, that they could arrange to survive by occupying primarily their own fantasy/body system. They remain fiercely loyal to their family of origin, ironically by learning not to see this terrible villainy; only in their private fantasy world could they believe in an ideal loving space, turning what is malevolent into something holy. They may pretend the outside is safe, but they meet it with indifference.

Perhaps the best-known example of such psychic functioning is in the book, and then movie, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. It’s a story of a very disturbed girl who lived honestly only in the company of her private invented gods. The extent, to which children will go to prove their parents are good and they are bad-to protect the connection envelope-is beautifully revealed in the movie, Ordinary People, where a young man attempts suicide in order to take personal responsibility for, and conceal his mother’s hatred of him.

There is evidence to suggest that dissociation may be a generic defense of all humans, more or less. Truth is we ignore most of the evidence that passes in front of our noses every day. It’s not because we’re bad. It’s because we haven’t learned to integrate it. By way of illustration, lets consider a piece of history that is not well known, which has to do with the enormous difficulty of achieving a more perfect democracy.

“The Constitution will inevitably produce an oligarchy.”

It was Thomas Jefferson who said this, following ratification of the Constitution. That’s when he wrote the Bill of Rights to counteract that eventuality, though historians don’t teach that. Much of the how of governing ourselves by direct-vote-a true democracy- is something we can’t yet even imagine.

At first Thomas Jefferson tried to insert into the body of the Constitution the convening of a Constitutional Convention every 25 years-every generation-to facilitate updating it. So what have we made of it instead? A sacred document that will never change; responsibility is indeed an awesome experience, intimidating to consider.

But we should not be discouraged. In spite of all our shortcomings, humanity continues, with much stumbling, to make progress. The fact is we have evolved probably far more than we realize. Taking just a small piece of that movement, perhaps the greatest achievement of the 20th century will be the discovery that war, as annihilation-what it’s always been within the limits of technology-is unwinnable. The Bomb taught us that. This has begun to lead us to the realization that war must become exclusively preventative, to stop conquest and racial extermination-in other words to exterminate itself. This could make it possible for centuries of peace ruled by democratic principles instead of by tyrants, who have brought long years of peace before, but only as absolute rulers. Such prolonged stable conditions are required if the human psyche is to grow significantly larger.

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