Happiness Is...

...the title of the new single from Goldfrapp. Seems they're poking ironic fun at the whole happiness / self-help industry. Quite right too. Here's the video. Man, he must have got tired hopping for that long...

Oh the transhumanity!

The best way to understand the present is to read science fiction. Only sci-fi writers are dreaming far enough into the future to tell us where we are in the present.

The news increasingly reads like science fiction. In South Korea, a company called RNL Bio received the first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American woman paid the company $50,000 to clone her dead pit-bull terrier, Booger.

Meanwhile, in the US, the world’s greatest scientists and futurists met to decide how science could best help the human race over the next 20 years. One of them, the scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, declared that in the next fifteen years, humanity itself was going to go through an upgrade, thanks to the emerging science of nanotechnology.

“We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” Kurzweil told BBC News. The nanobots, he said, would “make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system”.

Kurzweil is talking about something called transhumanism. Never mind communism, fascism, or any of those other 20th century –isms. The –ism that’s going to cause all the debate this century is transhumanism.

The phrase ‘transhumanism’ was first coined in the 1950s by Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous, who defined it as “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for human nature”.

The term was developed in the 1960s and 70s by thinkers like FM 2030– an Iranian called F.M Esfandiary who changed his name to FM-2030 because he put himself into cyrogenic freezing until that date, when he hopes to celebrate his 100th birthday. FM-2030 celebrated the powers of new technology to alter humanity itself, and enable us to speed up evolution and become post-humans.

FM-2030 was a sci-fi writer as well as futurist thinker (the two terms are fairly interchangeable) and other sci-fi writers, such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, helped develop the dream of transhumanism in novels of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) or Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995), which introduced the public to ideas of artificial intelligence, cyberspace and nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology, or engineering at the molecular level, gets transhumanists particularly excited. Nanotech scientists like Eric Drexler claim that we are at the brink of a new technological breakthrough, similar in scope and significance to man’s breakthrough to the industrial age.

Where that age enabled us to construct bridges, railway lines, even airplanes and rockets, the diamond age will enable us to construct machines at the molecular level, with far less waste and pollution, so that we can command matter to do exactly what we want it to do.

We’ll soon be able to use nanotechnology, Drexler believes, to get all the energy we need from solar power; to make 99% of illnesses easily cured by specially-designed nanobot anti-bodies that will hunt down specific viruses in our blood and kill them; to augment our reflexes, our concentration, even our intelligence, with nano-implants in our bodies and brains.

The US government has already become excited about the possibilities this raises for their military, with nanotech assemblers making weapons much more easily, and cyber-soldiers running on the latest upgrades to make them quicker and more resilient in the field of battle. And if the robogrunts lose a limb, as so many soldiers have in Iraq, well, nanotechnology and biotechnology can manufacture new ones, even better and stronger than the originals.

And couldn’t nanobots be the ultimate weapon, an invisible intelligence designed to infiltrate and destroy your enemy’s information systems, including their brains? Thus, in the sci-fi book The Diamond Age, the cities of the future are all defended by nano-barriers, which search out and destroy any alien nanobots found trying to enter the city’s biosphere.

But the transhumanists are far more ambitious in their dreams than simply making better soldiers or weapons. They dream of rising above our natural limits, enabling out evolution into higher beings, becoming supermen. They dream even of immortality, attained either by learning how to replace all broken down organs with artificial ones, or even by downloading human personality into cyberspace, becoming pure consciousness, separated finally from the tyranny of matter.

All sounds pretty groovy, hey? Well, there are a few sceptics. Francis Fukuyama, for example, thinks transhumanism is "the most dangerous idea facing humanity". Why so? He believes that new technology is in danger of destroying the idea of our common humanity, the idea that we are all human and therefore all worthy of the same dignity and respect.

In the future, Fukuyama worries, some of us might become more than human, might become post-human. The new technology will inevitably be more available to rich individuals or rich societies, so might create a “genetic overclass”.

At the moment, the rich have some obvious advantages over the poor, but there is still the “genetic lottery” of nature, whereby a kid born in the ghettos might be favoured with genius by nature, while the son of a millionaire might be a complete dufus. But the transhuman age would cancel out such a lottery, because the children of the rich would be genetically designed, and their personalities would be augmented by nano-implants, by chemical performance-enhancers, by biorobotic surgery.

The poor would argue this was giving the rich an unfair advantage – posthumanity should be the right of every human. The rich would argue that it is their right to give their children every advantage they can. And so the argument over transhumanity would assume roughly the contours of the contemporary debate over public schools – let’s not forget that one of the earliest visions of transhumanity, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, is set at Eton College.

But Etonians, while they might feel it is their right to rule the world, are often bumbling buffoons – think of Boris Johnson, hardly a superman. But what if the rich elite really were qualitatively smarter, faster, healthier, what if they became a different species altogether?

This is the freaky scenario imagined by William Gibson in his cyberpunk novel, Count Zero, where the heroine meets the richest man in the world, a man whose body lies in a chemical vat while his consciousness exists as a multiple hologram, controlling a sprawling corporate empire: “she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human”.

In fact, a controversial report from Bruce Charlton, a professor in evolutionary psychology at Newcastle University, recently suggested that "higher social classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes". Needless to say, it provoked a shit-storm, implying that the upper classes were upper class not just through convention, but through biology...

If we no longer share a common humanity, then society, as Fukuyama pointed out, would likely become “far more hierarchical”, with the working class, or microserfs, either imported from less technologically developed countries, or specially engineered to be hard-working yet docile.

In fact, would there still be a shared society anymore? Or would society break up into discrete tribes, ruled by their own moral codes, and their own technical abilities? This is the future foreseen by Neal Stephenson in his book The Diamond Age, where the ruling tribe are the Neo-Victorians, who recreate the starch Puritanism and the engineering prowess of our 19th century ancestors.

But all this seems a long way away. Or does it? You begin to see it played out in culture and politics already. The hit films of the summer are Iron Man (pictured), about a man with a weak heart who turns himself into a superman through robotic engineering; and Speed Racer, about a racer who mystically fuses with his racing car.

As Time noted in an insightful article: "Maybe it's just a coincidence, but the first two big movies of the summer season are about men fusing with their machines. And instead of being conquered or corrupted by their ambitions, the new machine men triumph."

Adverts are likewise growingly influenced by transhumanist dreams. The adverts for the new Puma football boots showing on TV at the moment show the football of the future, where athletes have become robotically enhanced and superhumanly skilled.

And indeed, these sort of futurist fantasies are playing out in real life. Oscar Pistorius, an amputee athlete who runs with specially designed blades for feet, has just won his landmark law suit to be able to compete in the Olympics this summer. The International Association of Athletics Federation tried to prevent him from doing so, because they claimed he had an unfair advantage over ordinary humans. Pistorius is no longer referred to as disabled. Now, he's 'augmented'.

The truth is, we are all transhuman already. I wear contact lenses, and have a metal pole in my leg where I broke it five years ago. I take omega tablets to enhance my brain power. I am considering getting laser corrective eye surgery. I tutor a boy whose mother gives him Ritalin to enhance his powers of attentiveness. Plastic surgery has become a normal part of our civilization, as has neuropharmacology such as Prozac or Lithium, or biotechnologically-manufactured drugs like the anti-cancer drug Herseptin.

One worries that an age where we can construct humanity will leave us without any dreams of man’s connection to a spirit world or divinity. We will be little more than computers, easily replicable, easily disposable. The dream of the ghost in the machine will fade, and we will be left in what Goethe called “a dismal atheist half-darkness, in which the earth with all her shapes, the heaven with all its celestial bodies disappeared”.

But don’t worry. Our dreams of magic and spirits will come with us, they will mutate and adapt to the transhuman age. In fact, what you see in a lot of contemporary sci-fi is a fusion of futuristic technology with animist ideas of spirits, gods and invisible powers from the pre-modern world. Think of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or The Matrix, or the anime film Ghost In The Shell. Even in the future, we are still likely to be “haunted by the ghosts of dead religion” as Max Weber put it. Call it techno-animism.

What makes you worthwhile?

What is it about you that makes you worthwhile?

Your wit? Your beauty? Your kindness? Your friends or family? Your status? Your work? Your wealth? Your fame?

We all of us, every day, tend to make assessments of our self-worth, our value, our acceptability. When something good happens to us, we get a little release of endorphins, and then afterwards, our mind returns to that achievement, like a touchstone, and we think 'I'm worthwhile, because I achieved this'. For example we think 'I'm worthwhile, because this person loves me' or 'I'm worthwhile, because I got this job'.

And likewise, when something bad happens to us, and we feel we've failed somehow, our emotions veer down, and afterwards, our mind goes to that event, we ruminate over it, and it seems to affect our self-worth. We think 'I'm less worthwhile, because they didn't call me' or 'I failed to get that job, I'm not worthwhile'.

So our self-esteem constantly fluctuates according to how we perceive ourselves to have fared, and how this matches our expectations of ourselves. I, for example, traditionally have very high expectations of myself, so hardly ever feel like I've done well, let alone excelled myself.

We are driven on, relentlessly, by the thought 'what will I have achieved by the time I die? Will I have piled up enough achievements, enough accolades, to somehow confer significance and meaning on my life? Will there be an obituary of me in The Times? Will anyone care or notice when I'm dead?'

But occasionally, just occasionally, it occurs to me that I don't need to base my self-worth on any external achievements or accolades. After all, there is a great deal of chance involved in whether something I do succeeds or not. When I get an article published in a magazine, it might be because I did a good job, or it might simply be because I know the commissioning editor, or because they needed to fill some space. If someone likes me or dislikes me, it is as much to do with who they are and how their day/month/life is going as it is to do with who I am (on that particular day).

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my self-esteem was very much based on how I performed socially. If I was on 'good form', if I received positive feedback from others after a social performance, I felt validated and alive. If I was on 'bad form', if I received negative feedback after a social performance, I felt unhappy, a failure, a shadow.

This was a form of sickness. Why should my self-worth depend on a particular social performance? What did it matter how others rated my performance?

Many of you would perhaps accept that this way of thinking was destructive and illogical. But are other reasons for rating your self-worth any more logical or helpful? Are we more worthwhile, as a human being, if we have brought out a book? If we have earned a million pounds? If our wife is a model? If our children are wonderfully talented? If our child then becomes a drug addict, does that makes us less worthwhile?

I have been reading a book by Albert Ellis, the creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), and one of the two founders of cognitive behavioural therapy, called The Myth of Self-Esteem. Ellis suggests that basing our self-worth on external conditions - which he calls 'conditional self-acceptance' - is a sickness, and is the main cause of mental illnesses such as depression and social anxiety.

The antidote to this sickness, he suggests, is 'unconditional self-acceptance'. We can accept ourselves as inherently worthwhile, not for any reason at all, but just because we can.

Something in us rejects it immediately. What if we're bad? What if we've hurt others? What if we're lazy and don't achieve anything? Surely, in that case, we're not worth as much as, say, an Olympic athlete, or a world famous actor, or a courageous peace activist, or a Nobel-prize-winning physicist...

Ellis rejects what he calls 'self-rating', when we try to rate ourselves or others as 'better' or 'worse'. We constantly do this, labelling ourselves a 'winner' or a 'loser', a 'somebody' or a 'nobody'. But this way of thinking doesn't make any sense.

You could perhaps rate someone as a better scientist in a particular line of research, or a better athlete in a particular race...but a better human being? How can you rate a human, totally and for all time? By what criteria? Humans are far too complex and changeable beings to give them a rating, as if they were participants in a beauty parade.

Yet we constantly do this to ourselves, rating ourselves, comparing ourselves to others (often people we don't know well) and feeling higher or lower status compared to them, as if you can give someone's essence a grade.

In the same way, Ellis criticizes the way we label ourselves and others as 'bad' or 'good'. This way of thinking, and of speaking to ourselves, also makes no sense. 'There are no good or bad people, just good or bad acts', he insists. Even Hitler, he suggests, was not a bad person, he's a person who acted very badly.

We can accept ourselves, even while we reject behaviour of ours which is unhelpful, negative or destructive. But there's no point, no logic, in labelling ourselves or others as somehow inherently worthless or bad.

In some ways, Ellis' theory of unconditional self-acceptance reminds me of Stoicism and Buddhism, the two philosophies that CBT is closest to. Both of those philosophies reject the idea that your self-worth is somehow wrapped up with externals, whether that's how many friends you have, how nice your house is, how attractive other people think you are, etc.

However, these two philosophies still have self-ratings of a sort. They rate people according to how enlightened they are, how mentally controlled, how free of passions. At one end of the Buddhist scale, you have beings in hell. At the other, you have the enlightened ones, the sages. These states are relative, of course - we are all equally inherently worthwhile according to Stoicism and Buddhism, it's just that some of us are more aware of our true inherent worth than others.

But this inherent value relies on something transcendent, on our divine inner nature - which Buddhists call 'the Buddha Nature' and Stoics call 'the Logos' or 'the God within'. It is this, supposedly, that gives us our self-worth. Or, in modern human rights theory, which is very influenced by Stoicism, we have worth because we are humans (to which one might object, do animals have no inherent worth, because they are not humans?) Is it life that confers worth? In which case, do I stop being worthwhile when I am dead?

Ellis' theory is more radical, more Nietzschean, one might say. We are valuable simply because we choose to confer value on ourselves, simply because we can do so. I choose to accept myself as worthwhile, because that makes me a lot happier than basing my self-esteem on external conditions.

But what if you're a monster, a child molester, a despot? Labelling, says Ellis. There's no such thing as 'a monster', there are merely monstrous acts. You can accept yourself, even while you reject your negative behaviour patterns.

Of course, you can't just automatically move to a serene state of unconditional self-acceptance. Your mind is in the habit of basing its self-esteem on external conditions, and it will do this a hundred times throughout the day. Something good happens to you, and your self-esteem automatically goes up a bit, or you receive a knock-back, and it goes down a little.

But you can remind yourself...why should I base my self-worth on externals? Why not choose to accept myself, even if I fail, screw up, annoy others, fail to meet my targets? That way, I'll be happier and more secure, and I'll be just as likely to achieve my goals, and what's more important, to enjoy my life while I'm trying to achieve them.

I think it's one of the most brilliant ideas I've come across.

NEF's Well-Being programme

I met Nic Marks this week, who runs the New Economics Foundation's Well-Being programme. NEF is one of the few UK think-tanks to have a dedicated well-being programme, which it's had for around seven years.

Their main area of focus in creating ways of measuring well-being, which government bodies such as local authorities can use. Nic is a big fan of Ed Diener, the positive psychology academic who's done alot of work in this area. They're working at the moment, for example, with Eurostat, the EU statistics body, on developing a well-being measurement for the entire EU. They also won a big grant from the Lottery's £165 million well-being fund, to work on well-being measurements.

The Lottery well-being fund was announced in April 2006, and they had to give all their money, all £165 million of it, away by July 2006, which seems a bit of a rush.

NEF also won a big contract to advise the Foresight Mental Health and Well-Being project on its findings. Foresight is a government body, a quango I guess, that does scientific reports on aspects of health for the government. It did a big report on obesity last year, for example, which got alot of press, and it's bringing out another big report this summer, chaired by Bill Rammell MP, on Well-Being.

NEF is synthesizing the report's findings, drawn from some 60 experts or so, into five recommendations on what people can do to achieve more well-being. Apparently the key finding is...have better relationships with others. You heard it here first.

Feeling Good

For those who missed it, here is an excerpt from the Imagine documentary about the self-help movement, which was on BBC 1 earlier this year. It had alot of the 'stars' of the self-help movement interviewed in it - Thich Nat Hanh, Susan Jeffers, Anthony Robbins, Thomas Moore.

Included in the except below is a fascinating (if sadly brief) interview with David Burns, one of the most famous cognitive therapists and the author of the best-selling book on depression, Feeling Good. The programme's presenter, Alan Yentob, reveals the astonishing fact that, according to several scientific studies, two thirds of people suffering from depression who read Burns' book recovered after reading it. What an amazing achievement, to write a book that could lead so many people out of suffering.

Gaming and therapy

There's a must-read article in this week's New Yorker about a new form of therapy designed to treat the estimated 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are returning to the US with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The therapy is based on virtual reality - using a specially-modified version of the game Full Spectrum Warrior, which was partly designed by the Pentagon as a training programme, though civilians can also buy it and play it on their PCs or consoles.

The special therapeutic version, called Virtual Iraq, uses a head-set that fully immerses the player in the environment. Psychologists then use it to re-expose the patient to the incident that caused their trauma, the incident which is lodging in their memory like shrapnel, and not letting them get on with their life.

The programme can be modified to quite detailed specifications - the psychologist can take the patient to a number of different environments, such as walking through a market, or driving along a road in a Humvee, and can introduce elements such as helicopters flying over head, people shouting in Arabic, even 'the smell of burnt hair'.

That way, they can gradually up the reality intensity, and get the patient to re-experience it over and over, until eventually they can go through the experience without feeling terror, and the memory can gradually lose its fangs and be processed.

The inventor of Virtual Iraq, is a cognitive therapist called Albert Rizzo. He took a job as a cognitive-rehabilitation therapist at a hospital in Costa Mesa, working with people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries. “A lot of young males are in that population,” he said. “The high-risk-takers. The drunk drivers. Gang members—all of that. With that population, it was sometimes hard to motivate them to do the standard paper-and-pencil drill and practice routines. Then, in the early nineteen-nineties, Game Boys came on the scene, and it seemed to me that all my male clients, at every break, at every meal, had become Tetris warlords. It showed me that they were motivated to do game tasks, and that the more they did them the better they got, and it hit me that there could be a link between cognitive rehabilitation and virtual reality.”

Rizzo says: "“The last one hundred years, we’ve studied psychology in the real world. In the next hundred, we’re going to study it in the virtual world.”

The article made me think of the growing use of gaming in the well-being movement. The Nintendo Wii console, which allows for more physical interaction than other consoles, has started to be used for some forms of physical therapy, or 'Wiihabilitation' as some wags have called it.

Wii just launched a new game, Wii Fit, which analysts think could become the best-selling game of all time. It includes a basic yoga programme, including breathing exercises and yoga postures like the Downward-facing Dog, the Cobra and the Warrior. The programme includes a mat which tells you if you are doing the posture correctly. There is also an exercise called Zazen, where the player must remain motionless while looking at a flame - Zen meditation on a games console!

These moves are just the beginning. Consoles and online gaming are a terrain where many young, socially-alienated people can live out virtual lives which are not being fulfilled in the real world. It would be fantastic if games could be developed that taught these young people the cognitive, physical and emotional skills they need to thrive in real-life.

Imagine, if in a few years governments, psychologists and gaming producers could work together to produce similar games to Virtual Iraq, but for other emotional disorders, such as depression, social anxiety, addiction, or anorexia...

Below is a news story from YouTube about the Virtual Iraq programme:

Esalen

I came across this Times 2 article on Esalen, famed centre of Californian counter-cultural New Age exploraton, where everyone from Joseph Campbell to Timothy Leary to RD Laing to Stanislaf Grof once worked and taught. You could say that Esalen was the birth-place of modern pick n' mix spirituality. Indeed, the centre just brought out a book called 'The Religion of No Religion'.

It's meant to be an amazing place - ancient hot springs, once held sacred by American Indians, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, into which the sun sinks pink and red as a Californian grapefruit. I was thinking of going out there to write a story about it, but looks like I was beaten to it by Stefanie Marsh, who I remember from the dark days of my work experience at Tatler magazine back in 2000.

Anyway, her feature is pretty funny, and she seems to have been slightly mellowed by her experience in California.

The best cure for anxiety....Death

I've come across an 'anxiety blog' by Robert Leahy, who's one of the more famous cognitive therapists working in the US, and the director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York.

The blog, which is hosted by the magazine Psychology Today, requires him to write a post about anxiety every week, which is enough to turn anyone into a nervous wreck.

One post that caught my eye was called How Big A Problem is Anxiety? Very big, says Leahy:

The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950’s. We are getting more anxious every decade. Psychologists have speculated about the possible reasons for this increase in both anxiety and depression over the last fifty years. Some of the reasons may be a decrease in “social connectedness”---we tend to move more, change jobs, participate less in civic organizations, and we are less likely to participate in religious communities. People are far less likely to get married, more likely to delay getting married, and more likely to live alone. All of these factors can contribute to worry, uncertainty, anxiety and depression.

And our expectations have changed in the last fifty years. We expect to have a more affluent life-style, we are driven by unrealistic ideas of what we need (“I need the latest ipod!!”), and we have unrealistic ideas about relationships and appearance. In the 1950’s sociologists would write about “The Organization Man” who worked for the corporation for his or her entire career. Today many people would love to have a job that had that kind of stability. And our expectations about retirement also lead us to feel anxious. We now have to rely on our own savings---rather than a company pension plan---to help us survive during retirement.

Speculations about whether we have become more anxious, or why, are always slightly general and untestable. We may say we're more anxious, or depressed, simply because our culture is now able to talk about these feelings and give them names more easily.

Anxiety is a part of being human - it's just that, 100,000 years ago, the anxiety would have been about whether a tiger would eat us, or whether we'd survive the winter. Now, we no longer live under the daily threat of violent death or sickness. But you can't just turn off our evolutionarily developed capacity for worry, so it has to find new things to worry about - what our workmates think of us, will we find a life partner, is our nose too big, are we too fat.

Sometimes these modern anxieties seem incredibly petty compared to old-school anxieties about death and starvation. But anxiety is rarely completely irrational. What our workmates think of us does matter, and will affect how we do in our career. If we're too fat, it might affect our ability to find a nice life partner.

Of course, anxiety is very often self-defeating: we worry excessively about what our workmates think of us, and our insecurity communicates itself to them, and they think less well of us. Sometimes, in modern life, the least anxious seem to thrive the best.

The ancient world, and the Renaissance, had a good method of dealing with anxiety, which I find still works - the memento mori, or reminder of Death. Ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics, would train themselves to consider Death , to consider how everything around them would turn to dust, how they themselves would soon be eaten by the worms, and forgotten by everyone on earth.

Asian philosophers, particularly the Buddhists and Hindus, also trained themselves to contemplate Death, even going to meditate in charnel houses, surrounded by skeletons and corpses. The Christian Medieval Church was one big memento mori - its art works were overflowing with grinning skulls and dancing skeletons, showing the supremacy of Lord Death over all human pretensions.

And Renaissance artists, inspired by ancient philosophy, revitalized this sombre tradition - Shakespeare's Hamlet, for example, is in some ways an extended memento mori, and other artists and writers like Holbein and Montaigne were equally ready to remind themselves of Death and bring it before their eyes.

Somehow this tradition was lost, probably around the eighteenth century, the century of politeness, urbanity and materialism, when it started to seem barbaric, morbid, even fanatical to focus on Death. The emphasis becomes much more on man's ability to control nature, to achieve his wishes, to cheat Death. Death became merely death, a minor embarrassment in the cocktail party of life.

But I don't think the ancient tradition of the memento mori was necessarily morbid. It was a way of turning down the volume on modern anxieties. By reminding yourself that you would die very soon, you learned to detach yourself from worldly anxieties, from all the petty striving after reputation or status. It was a way of achieving release, liberation, peace.

I remember when I had social anxiety at university, and was really anxious alot of the time, I one day had an epiphany that we would all die. I was sitting in my room, and I suddenly saw that everything in it would turn to dust, that the entire town would crumble and disappear, that I myself would be dead and buried within a few years, and the universe would not have been significantly altered. For some reason, I found this amazingly liberating. Why was I worrying what such-and-such thought of me...what did it matter how my finals went...why did we cling on to worldly things, when they were turning to dust in our fingers? Why do we torture ourselves worrying about our place in the world, when we are only here for a few, brief and insignificant moments?

Later on, when I found myself getting anxious again, I found that reminding myself of Death helped me achieve detachment and perspective on my problems. I couldn't take myself, my career, my love-life or whatever else I was worrying about that seriously, knowing I would be dead in a few weeks, months or years. What was the point? I had no idea why I was alive, but I knew I was going to die soon, in a few decades at most, so I might as well relax, try to enjoy life, and maybe try and help others as well.

So I really think reminding myself of Death helped me to overcome anxiety. The ancient technique still works, that's why we have passed it down to modern times. And I think our modern society, so obsessed with itself, its own glamour and importance, would do well to remind itself occasionally of the grinning skull beneath all the make-up.

Here's one of the few memento moris from popular culture, The Flaming Lips' song, Do You Realize:

Good foundation courses?

I'm looking to do a foundation course in counselling this summer. I'm not certain I want to be a counsellor, but I definitely want more of a qualified grounding for my writing on psychology.

I've been looking around for a foundation course, and I must say, the choice is fairly bewildering. You can train in interpersonal therapy, gestalt therapy, psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, depth psychology, transpersonal psychology, CBT, mindfulness-CBT, REBT, CT, core process therapy, attachment therapy....and more, and more....

I've been quite attracted by core process therapy, in fact, which the Karuna Institute offers basic training in at their manor in Devon. A friend of mine did a course there, and says it's excellent training in mindfulness-based therapy, strongly rooted in Buddhism. I'd love to get further training in Buddhism and meditation, so doing a foundation course in core process therapy might be a good way of combining that with some basic teaching in counselling.

On the other hand, maybe I should simply train in CBT, seeing as I know that that works well with emotional disorders, and also that there's a ready-made market for it through the NHS...

I'm meeting some therapist friends this week to discuss different training courses available, will keep you all posted on the findings.

Happening, and making happen

Read a groovy comment by a friend of mine, Olly Robinson, to an earlier post, which got me thinking. Here is the comment (hope you don't mind Olly):

Rather unfashionably, I am a big fan of the philosopher Berkeley [pictured], who had some very funny ideas. One of them is that the only things that actually MAKE anything happen in a causal sense are souls/spirits, and that our common sense of cause-effect is just contingency, not causality. So the billiard ball doesn't MAKE the next billiard ball move, but it is a necessary if-then relation, like anything else bumping together in time.

For Berkeley, only WILL makes anything happen in a causal sense, because all causes are first causes; by saying that something is a cause, one is saying that it initiated it, i.e. started it from scratch. Therefore every cause is an act of creation, a first cause. The legal system understands this pretty well, hence the notion that if you didn't will it to happen, it was an accident, and if you did, it was your fault, i.e. you STARTED it. How can that be if we are just bumping around like billiard balls? The only way is if you interrupted time and started something completely afresh.

Now, one point of this is that in Berkeley's scheme there is spirit moving creation all the time. The other point is that if a person is going to use their soul/spirit, they have to be a cause and experience themselves as such; they have to initiate things and feel as though control over choices comes from within. If a person is truly in charge of themselves, truly strong enough to make their own choices from the heart, without being subtly coerced, pressured or pacified into action, they become divine, they realise the action of soul. And once in a position of feeling that one is making choices, and authoring one's own life and behaviour, the person becomes fulfilled and healthy.

Jung also believed that human will is a manifestation of soul. He referred to a person who did not initiate their own agenda, simply responds to others, acquiesced to their demands and morphed their personality to fit in, as suffering from "soul-lessness". He saw this as a great root of neurosis. I also believe the soul is something we can lose. It is a gift that can be taken away, or can atrophy if it is not used.

I was thinking very much the same thing this week.. some things we struggle to make happen, and other things just happen to us in the general flow of life.

For example, right now I am struggling to build a new career for myself in the world of psychology and healing - writing articles about it for various outlets (got a piece in next month's Psychologies on Stoicism, by the way...), applying for jobs at think-tanks, doing a workshop on anxiety at a Mind drop-in centre, and considering starting to train as a counsellor.

So this is what I am, slowly and gradually, trying to make happen.

On the other hand, life is happening to me. Out of the blue, a few months ago, some people asked me to edit a magazine about business in eastern Europe. This is very much what I was doing in the past, when I was living in Russia, and is a phase of my life that I considered over. However, it is not easy to refuse a regular paying job, when the economy is in recession, my rent is expensive, and the progress on psychology etc is slow.

So I am trying to balance what I want to make happen, with what is happening to me.
It could also be described as a struggle between dharma - the path forward - and karma - the accumulated habits of the past. We try to struggle forwards, while the habits and the consequences of the past beat us back, like waves.

Now a job has come up at a think-tank, the Young Foundation, on their well-being programme, which is absolutely up my street. They are the think-tank that is working with Martin Seligman , founder of Positive Psychology, on teaching 'emotional resilience' in British secondary schools. They are also looking at making CBT more available to the elderly in the UK. So in some ways it's my dream job.

On the other hand, it only pays about half what I'm earning now, and really not enough for someone in their 30s. So do I make sacrifices and do my dream-job, or do I carry on with the flow?

Well...obviously I will apply for the Young Foundation job, and see if I can get it. Trying to disseminate the insights of Stoicism and CBT through journalism, public policy and direct therapy, is what I am trying to do with my life. It is my attempt to author myself. I don't know if I will get the job, but if I don't, I will carry on looking for opportunities to continue this work elsewhere.

Dial H for Happiness

I've just finished reading Philip K Dick's masterpiece, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Such a beautiful work. I find myself getting more and more into science fiction, because, as I've said before, we are increasingly living in a world where ethics and technology are mixing in strange ways that only sci-fi writers have really considered.

Dick's novel, for example, considers the future of mood management. The characters in his novel all possess special mood diallers, or happiness machines, which connect directly to their brains, so that they can dial up various moods at will: 341, for 'Long Deserved Peace'. 888, for 'The Desire To Watch Anything On TV'. 38, for 'A Positive Sense of the Limitless Possibilities Rising Up in the Future'.

The characters grow dependent on this mood dialler. They schedule their moods for the day. Except for the main character's wife, who for some reason chooses to dial 'Bleak Depression', just because it feels more real to her.

Fantasy, of course, and yet civilization is increasingly enabled by mood management, via Prozac, Valium, Lithium, Cipramil, Olanzipine, beta-blockers, alcohol, caffeine, high sugar products, tobacco etc etc. These are, in many ways, mood diallers, that help us manage our moods to get through the complex daily demands of advanced civilization.

Is it somehow 'fake' to artificially manage our moods with external stimulants? If we invented a cerebral device that could dial our moods, would we be somehow cheating our nature if we fixed the dial on H for Happiness?

I asked Lord Layard this, the so-called 'Happiness Czar' for the British government. He thought that if a perfect drug was invented that made us all happy, then we should take it and the government should provide it. 'The greatest happiness of the greatest number', even if it involved us all walking around in happiness headsets, receiving little electrical jolts of bliss every few seconds.

As for me...I still harbour an outdated and no doubt reactionary belief in the human soul, in the idea of the soul's journey towards self-realization of its own divinity. That means I believe that, sometimes, unhappiness is not meaningless. It is our soul telling us to change how we live, to deepen our self-awareness.

That was certainly my experience of anxiety - it was the soul telling me my psyche was out of balance, that I needed to worry less what others thought of me, and learn to accept myself. If I'd just dialled 'Deep Self-Acceptance', then I would never have learnt that lesson for myself, and I would end up utterly dependent on my mood machine for self-acceptance. So I wouldn't really have accepted myself at all, I'd have accepted the new, upgraded and artificial version of me.

Debt and mental illness

Mind published a good report today, as part of Mental Health Week, on the link between debt and mental illness. The link is definitely there - the Office for National Statistics found that people with experience of mental distress are three times more likely to be in debt than those without such experience.

Mind undertook a survey of mentally ill people for the report. They found that such people, on average, owed £3,250 on credit or store cards, and 70% of respondents had been unable to pay a bill. One in four mentally ill people, they suggested, had debt problems.

The issue has not been addressed so far, Mind suggest, because people in banking have little awareness of how to deal with mental health questions, while people working in mental health have little awareness of financial issues. So it's a prime example of the new joining of psychology and economics, which I've been calling psychoeconomics.

The problem with classical economics is, it assumes individuals are good rational calculators of their economic interest. But we're not. We're highly irrational creatures, swayed by our animal spirits. We are driven by insecurity, fear, greed, excessive positivity, excessive despair. These emotional drives can often translate into serious debt problems.

I think of a friend of mine from school, who like the Great Gatsby always dreamed of joining the leisure class. He mortgaged his apartment, and blew the entire mortgage in a hedonistic month where he took cabs everywhere, stayed in hotels, snorted coke, and for a few weeks fooled himself he was one of the idle rich. No doubt he had many 'mates' during that riotous month. Then he got another mortgage, to carry on living the dream and chasing that illusion of status and acceptance. Then he killed himself on heroin.

I saw a lady at the Mind drop-in centre where I volunteer, complaining about her 'fuc*ing bank', because it wouldn't refund her for what she called credit card fraud. She'd had a manic episode, and when she came out of it, she'd apparently spent over £1,000. 'But I couldn't have spent that, it must be fraud', she said. 'You should complain about it' said a lady who worked at Mind. But is it really impossible that the person spent all that money? She's not in control of herself. She doesn't know what she's doing.

I seriously wonder if people with serious mental health problems should be allowed to have credit cards. I don't think they should, because they can't be held responsible for their actions. But banks seem happy to lend to anyone, the more unstable and out of control the better.

I'm no Islamist, but I do think Islamic banking has better practices in this area, with its controls on interest lending. Otherwise banks have an incentive to keep on lending more and more to individuals who are out of control, to profit from their misery.

You can read the Mind report here.

Are You Neuro-Normal?

Some trainee therapists and I are running an anxiety-management workshop in a drop-in centre in London. The administrators of the group, all four of us, were discussing how to run the group and how to get the most out of it. One of the therapists said: "Well, all four of us are fully functioning, we're neuro-normal, but a lot of the users [ie patients] are sub-normal. The IQs of the mentally disfunctional are often lower than that of the mentally functional."

I've never thought of mental illness in this way. I don't think you can draw a line and say, everyone on this side is 'normal' or 'neuro-normal', and everyone on that side is 'sub-normal', or 'malfunctioning' or 'mad'. You can't have a model of psychology where the psychologists are all on the other side of the line, peering over the wall at the sub-normals, taking notes.

Then, you end up with basically a war between the sane and the insane. In the workshop after the meeting, one 'user' was complaining bitterly about the psychology profession: "They're all arrogant. I dislike them all. They all try to control me, to belittle me." She was making the same mistake - drawing that line between psychologists and the mentally ill, imagining (or being made to imagine) that psychologists were somehow above her, superior, better.

There is no line. Anyone can experience mental illness. It can be a psychotic episode - you could, like my best friend Neil, abruptly descend into schizophrenia in your adolescence. But it could also be minor forms of mental illness - you could take too many drugs and develop social anxiety, like I did. You could get mugged, and develop post-traumatic stress disorder. You could have a bout of mid-life depression. It happens. Mental illness happens to ordinary people, all the time.

I had an anxiety disorder for several years, but I'm not sub-normal. My IQ is not below the average. Think of all the mentally ill people who were far above the average IQ - was Nietzsche sub-normal, or Artaud, or Jung, or Wittgenstein, or Stephen Fry? Their IQ was actually far higher than normal. They were excessively sensitive, that was part of the problem.

I asked the therapist in question, during the workshop, what methods she used to deal with anxiety. We were going round the group asking everyone else to share, and I wanted the other therapists to share as well, because everyone has bad moods to some extent, and methods of coping with them. I wanted to break up the boundary between the therapists and the users. She said: 'well, I don't really get anxious'. Her comment put up a division between her and the users, the weak people who suffer from anxiety. It was basically saying 'I'm a neuro-normal, I'm functioning, I'm on the other side of the barrier'.

Good psychologists, it seems to me, are prepared to cross that barrier, to accept that madness is a part of them, is a part of being human. Think of Jung and his crazy visions. Think of Albert Ellis, the founder of CBT, who was chronically afraid of talking to women, or of Aaron Beck, the other founder of CBT, who was a depressive child. These people could talk back to mental sickness because they could talk its language, they had visited the country, rather than just seen postcards that other people had sent.

And when patients hear that a psychologist has had his or her own experience of mental illness, with all its humiliations and frustrations, they will be less inclined to put up barriers themselves, less inclined to view the psychologist as an arrogant or superior person trying to put them down.

It's a frightening, but necessary, step of empathy that the psychologist must take - recognizing they could lose it too, they could become mentally ill, they could find themselves among the dreaded 'neuro-abnormal'.

That realization fosters a humility, an awareness that we all share a common human nature, and that nature is to some extent mysterious, and destructive, but also beautiful. Our nature can suddenly turn on us, wreck our ambitious plans, demand that we take time out of our busy lives and tend to it. Nature sometimes forces us to our knees, when we have got too cocky. As psychologists, we have to learn the tragic patience, acceptance and humility before nature that the mentally ill already know.

Gurus behaving badly

Another spiritual guru has been arrested in the US. This time, it's Swami Prakashanand Saraswait, a 79-year-old Hindu svengali, owner of a 200-acre ashram in Texas, and founder of 'the International Society of Divine Love'. He's been accused by US police of groping underage girls on several occasions in the mid-1990s.

He's the latest, but by no means the first, eastern guru to lose their celebrity status to scandals in the last few years. Others include:

• Chogyam Rinpoche, founder of the Shambhala schools in the US and Europe, who died aged 48 from heavy alcohol abuse. He once, when drunk, crashed his car into a joke shop in Scotland, leaving him partially paralyzed, and was sometimes so drunk he had too be carried off stage during talks.
  
• Sogyal Rinpoche, founder of the Rigpa schools in the West, and author of the best-selling Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying. In 1994, a $10 million civil law suit was brought against him by former students, claiming he had used his position as spiritual leader to sleep with his female students. The claim included charges of assault and battery. It was settled out of court.
• Richard Baker-roshi, head of the San Francisco Zen Centre, which became a huge speculator in real estate under his leadership. Baker himself admitted to numerous sexual affairs with students.
• Bikram Choudhury, founder of 'Hot Yoga', who told Business 2 magazine: 'Nobody does hatha yoga in America except me. My name is Guru of the Stars! I'm beyond Superman. I have balls like two atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatonnes each. Nobody fu*ks with me.'

And so on. Jack Kornfield, the eminent Buddhist author, once took a survey of around 50 Zen teachers in the West, and found that over a third of them had sex with students. It is everywhere in western spiritual traditions - I was interested in joining a meditation school in London, only to discover through the net it was infamous for its tantra sex scandals.

This is in large part a result of the naivete of westerners when it comes to visiting Asian gurus. People who are deeply suspicious of western organized religion suspend all scepticism when it comes to smiling brown-skinned men telling them to let go of their attachments as they slide their hand onto their knee.

People in the West are so desperate for spiritual salvation they are prepared to blind themselves to the rogues and charlatans making millions of dollars through the New Age industry in the last 30 years.

A basic code of ethics perhaps needs to be established for any type of healer, be it psychotherapist, priest or guru.