theJAGO Song: “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” by Jazz singer Hadda Brooks ‘Queen of the Boogie’ (1916-2002), Pioneer Award and Lifetime Achievement Award winner. Movie: ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950), classic film noir starring Humphrey Bogart. Quote: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

Movie

In A Lonely Place

Peacefulness Interview with Brother David Steindl-Rast, Maata Lynn Barron (Sufi) and Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man. From Moses on the mountain, to Jesus in the desert to Mohammed in his cave, “the mystical experience” has been acknowledged as the core event that forms the foundation of many great religions. In this Global Spirit program, host Phil Cousineau joins Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man and sufi mystic Maata Lynn Barron to shed light on some of the common attributes of those who yearn for and reach, however momentarily, what they describe as a direct experience of God or the Divine. “The Mystical Experience” explores both experiential and analytical approaches to this rich subject (2011).

By John Paul Brammer

• Jan. 14, 2022 (NYTimes.com)

HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL
A Memoir
By Edgar Gomez

The concept of Latinidad, or “Latinness,” is an unstable one. Meant to encompass a multitude of cultures, languages and experiences, it inevitably falls short, as words often do. Although contested, the term at least attempts to put a name to a hazy collection of norms and realities, the pretty and the ugly that together constitute a certain idea of self. It’s largely the ugly that “High-Risk Homosexual” is concerned with, and though often heavy, Edgar Gomez’s debut is also a breath of fresh air.

The memoir recounts Gomez’s life growing up queer in the literal arena of compulsory masculinity: The opening chapter takes place in his uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua. Scenes of the birds sparring, their beaks and talons affixed with blades, are interspersed with those of a 13-year-old Gomez in an Orlando nightclub. In this other, no less lethal kind of arena, his uncle pushes him toward sex with a girl, the man’s former housekeeper. It’s a compelling portrait of machismo: a surveilled, violent dance.

Gomez is something of an alien to these rites, an unwilling participant in the mandatory spectacle of being a man. As a writer, he invites us into the chasm between what he is expected to do and what he is capable of, giving himself plenty of room for emotion, self-deprecation and acerbic observation on the “machistas,” or sexists, who proliferate in Latin culture.

This is as true in the early chapters, which see a young Gomez under the thumb of various authority figures like his uncle and his mother, as it is in the second half of the book, after he’s out of the closet. The banner chapter, in which his doctor labels him a “high-risk homosexual” and puts him on PrEP, finds Gomez caught in a similar bramble. “I didn’t particularly feel high-risk, but given the history of H.I.V. among queers and the disproportionate rates that it affected Latinx people, I couldn’t exactly say I wasn’t,” Gomez writes. “I was stuck.”ImageThe opening chapter takes place in a literal arena of compulsory masculinity: his uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua.Credit…1

This time, he turns to the authority of wise elder queers he’s encountered in art and the media, who lived through the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States. “Be careful, they said. Sex can kill you. Look what it did to us.” Ultimately these elders assume a mirror role to his uncle’s: people who have Gomez’s best interests at heart, but whose expectations he can’t meet.

And like his uncle, this older generation poses the question that runs through the heart of the book: What happens after you’ve tried and failed to be the right kind of man? Or in this case, the right kind of gay man? Can you ever be an authority figure in your own right?

Gomez writes with a humor and clarity that generally keep the melodrama at bay, an absolute must in a memoir that might otherwise have been a laundry list of painful experiences. In a relatable scene that will likely make queer readers squirm, the author recalls a consultation with his doctor in which she asks, “‘Do you prefer to give or receive?’ … as if the question weren’t about anal but my philosophy on Christmas.”

Ever committed to parsing its central themes of masculinity and queer identity, “High-Risk Homosexual” does circle back on itself a bit, the chapters teetering on uniformity. Gomez’s voice is equal parts warmth and acid wit, like a good friend you’re slightly afraid of, but there are times in the middle of a passage where you’ll feel you know what he’s going to say before he says it.

These minor complaints do little to dull the shine of an exciting debut from an author with a rare point of view. “High-Risk Homosexual” deals with some titanic questions. What is Latinidad? What is machismo? What does it mean to be a man, never mind a queer man? By its own admission, the book doesn’t have all the answers, but it makes a compelling case that they will come from the razor-sharp queers living in the margins.

• © 2022 The New York Times Company

(Submitted by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

January 25, 2022 Vanessa Able (thedewdrop.org)

“Emptiness means to be full of everything but empty of a separate existence.”

– Thich Nhat HanhTweet

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‘Emptiness means to be full of everything but empty of a separate existence.‘ This concise description of the notion of interbeing was one of Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh‘s defining contributions to the understanding of emptiness in the Buddhist tradition. Rather than signifying a lack or a void, he took emptiness to be a state of inextricable and fundamental interconnectedness in which it is impossible to identify a single, separate entity. This following excerpt is from the chapter on interbeing from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, The Art of Living. Thich Nhat Hanh passed away last week on January 22nd, 2022.

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Imagine, for a moment, a beautiful flower. That flower might be an orchid or a rose, or even a simple little daisy growing beside a path. Looking into a flower, we can see that it is full of life. It contains soil, rain, and sunshine. It is also full of clouds, oceans, and minerals. It is even full of space and time. In fact, the whole cosmos is present in this one little flower. If we took out just one of these “non-flower” elements, the flower would not be there. Without the soil’s nutrients, the flower could not grow. Without rain and sunshine, the flower would die. And if we removed all the non-flower elements, there would be nothing substantive left that we could call a “flower.” So our observation tells us that the flower is full of the whole cosmos, while at the same time it is empty of a separate self-existence. The flower cannot exist by itself alone.

We too are full of so many things and yet empty of a separate self. Like the flower, we contain earth, water, air, sunlight, and warmth. We contain space and consciousness. We contain our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, education, food, and culture. The whole cosmos has come together to create the wonderful manifestation that we are. If we remove any of these “non-us” elements, we will find there is no “us” left.

Emptiness does not mean nothingness. Saying that we are empty does not mean that we do not exist. No matter if something is full or empty, that thing clearly needs to be there in the first place. When we say a cup is empty, the cup must be there in order to be empty. When we say that we are empty, it means that we must be there in order to be empty of a permanent, separate self.

About thirty years ago I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word “togetherness,” but I finally came up with the word “interbeing.” The verb “to be” can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone. “To be” is always to “inter-be.” If we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” To inter-be reflects reality more accurately. We inter-are with one another and with all life.

There is a biologist named Lewis Thomas, whose work I appreciate very much. He describes how our human bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by countless other tiny organisms, without whom we couldn’t “move a muscle, drum a finger, or think a thought.” Our body is a community, and the trillions of non-human cells in our body are even more numerous than the human cells. Without them, we could not be here in this moment. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to think, to feel, or to speak. There are, he says, no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.

We can observe emptiness and interbeing everywhere in our daily life. If we look at a child, it’s easy to see the child’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, in her. The way she looks, the way she acts, the things she says. Even her skills and talents are the same as her parents’. If at times we cannot understand why the child is acting a certain way, it is helpful to remember that she is not a separate selfentity. She is a continuation. Her parents and ancestors are inside her. When she walks and talks, they walk and talk as well. Looking into the child, we can be in touch with her parents and ancestors, but equally, looking into the parent, we can see the child. We do not exist independently. We inter-are. Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.

I remember one time when I was in London, doing walking meditation along the street, and I saw a book displayed in a bookshop window with the title My Mother, Myself. I didn’t buy the book because I felt I already knew what was inside. It’s true that each one of us is a continuation of our mother; we are our mother. And so whenever we are angry at our mother or father, we are also being angry at ourselves. Whatever we do, our parents are doing it with us. This may be hard to accept, but it’s the truth. We can’t say we don’t want to have anything to do with our parents. They are in us, and we are in them. We are the continuation of all our ancestors. Thanks to impermanence, we have a chance to transform our inheritance in a beautiful direction.

Every time I offer incense or prostrate before the altar in my hermitage, I do not do this as an individual self but as a whole lineage. Whenever I walk, sit, eat, or practice calligraphy, I do so with the awareness that all my ancestors are within me in that moment. I am their continuation. Whatever I am doing, the energy of mindfulness enables me to do it as “us,” not as “me.” When I hold a calligraphy brush, I know I cannot remove my father from my hand. I know I cannot remove my mother or my ancestors from me. They are present in all my cells, in my gestures, in my capacity to draw a beautiful circle. Nor can I remove my spiritual teachers from my hand. They are there in the peace, concentration, and mindfulness I enjoy as I make the circle. We are all drawing the circle together. There is no separate self doing it. While practicing calligraphy, I touch the profound insight of no self. It becomes a deep practice of meditation.

Whether we’re at work or at home, we can practice to see all our ancestors and teachers present in our actions. We can see their presence when we express a talent or skill they have transmitted to us. We can see their hands in ours as we prepare a meal or wash the dishes. We can experience profound connection and free ourselves from the idea that we are a separate self.

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022)
From – The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now

Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See

Donald D. Hoffman

Hoffman explains that far from being a passive recorder of a preexisting world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience.Visual intelligence, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman writes, is the power that people use to “construct an experience of objects out of colors, lines, and motions.” And what an underappreciated ability it is, too; despite the fact that the visual process uses up a considerable chunk of our brainpower, we’re only just learning how it works. Hoffman aptly demonstrates the mysterious constructive powers of our eye-brain machines using lots of simple drawings and diagrams to illustrate basic rules of the visual road. Many of the examples are familiar optical illusions–perspective-confounding cubes, a few lines that add up to a more complex shape than seems right. Hoffman also takes a cue from Oliver Sacks, employing anecdotes about people with various specific visual malfunctions to both further his mechanical explanation of visual intelligence and drive home how important this little-understood aspect of cognition can be in our lives. An especially intriguing example involves a boy, blind from birth, who is surgically given the power to see. At first, he is completely unable to visually distinguish objects familiar by touch, such as the cat and the dog. Other poignant examples show clearly how image construction is normally linked to our emotional well-being and sense of place. Visual Intelligence is a fascinating, confounding look (as it were) at an aspect of human physiology and psychology that very few of us think about much at all. –Therese Littleton

(Goodreads.com)

There’s a counterintuitive explanation for why big lies may be easier to believe than small ones

By MATTHEW ROZSA

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 3, 2022 (salon.com)

Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels coined the term “Big Lie.” According to the supposed quote, Goebbels said that if you tell “a lie big enough” and regularly repeat it, “people will eventually come to believe it.” That said, Adolf Hitler actually did use the phrase “big lie” — but not to describe his own propaganda strategy. In a darkly ironic case of psychological projection, he came up with the expression to defame the Jewish community.

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf,” his 1925 autobiographical manifesto. He observed that most people are only comfortable telling small lies, and imagined others would be as uncomfortable as themselves perpetuating big ones. “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously,” Hitler explained. “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”Advertisement:

Indeed, like many abusers before him, Hitler rationalized his own depraved behavior by falsely accusing his victims of doing the same thing. The story of World War II is, in many ways, a tale of a Big Lie run amok. Germany felt humiliated after its loss in World War I, and the nationalistic pride which had fueled that conflict still burned in the hearts of millions.

This tactic, of a leader hypnotizing vast swathes of the public through the perpetuation of a grandiose falsehood, is a phenomenon that extends well beyond World War II and Adolf Hitler. Recently, the term has been recycled to refer to the falsity that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” in some indeterminate way, a lie that is repeated ad infinitum by Trump and a slew of his supporters at all levels from yard-sign wielding footsoldier all the way up to his closest legal counsel. 

The term “Big Lie” is believed to have been first popularized in the Anglophone world by Walter Langer, a psychoanalyst who prepared a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler for the U.S. government in 1943. In that report, Langer wrote: 

[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Beyond Langer, psychologists and sociologists throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century have been intrigued by the success of the Big Lie strategy — meaning a story pushed by a political leader that is clearly bald-faced, yet so grandiose as to make it hard to believe that someone would fabricate it. Indeed, it is an intriguing question as to why this works politically, and why so many millions are so quick to believe Big Lies — be it about voting fraud or Jewish conspiracies. The counterintuitive nature of the Big Lie tactic is perhaps what is most peculiar: wouldn’t a small lie be easier to pass off than a large one?Advertisement:

Not necessarily, psychologists say. 

RELATED: The Revolution of 2020: How Trump’s Big Lie reshaped history after 220 years

“Repetition is important, because the Big Lie works through indoctrination,” Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor of psychology who is noted as an expert on narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse, told Salon by email. “The Big Lie then becomes its own evidence base — if it is repeated enough, people believe it, and the very repetition almost tautologically becomes the support for the Lie.”

Durvasula added that this is amplified by the numerous media platforms which exist in the modern era, as they trick people into thinking a certain falsehood has been reinforced even if all of their media platforms have the same political leanings.

“The banners and hats crucially add an air of silliness to everything. If I can buy a novelty hat about it, can it really be so serious? It’s a genius mindf**k.”

“Hear something enough it becomes truth,” Durvasula explained. “People assume there is an evidence base when the lie is big (it’s like a blind spot).”

Indeed, Hitler rose to power through a Big Lie that soothed Germans’ wounded egos and targeted already-popular scapegoats: Jews and socialists, who according to the Nazi narrative had betrayed Germany through backroom dealings after the empire had won on the battlefield. All of the “evidence” that Hitler marshaled to support this claim was false (fact-checkers who pointed this out were described as Jews promoting a “big lie”), and for that reason only die-hard Nazis believed the Big Lie — at first. After Hitler gained power, however, he was able to effectively spread both that fabrication and other lies, convincing more and more people that a conspiracy of Jews and leftists were enemies of Europe’s supposedly superior races. Dissent was squashed, fascism prevailed and even so-called moderates began to think that there must be at least some truth in the accusations. After all, they were being repeated everywhere.

This omnipresence, apparently, is a big part of what makes it so easy for people to be fooled by a Big Lie.

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Logician Miriam Bowers-Abbott, an associate professor at Mount Carmel College of Nursing, stressed the importance of repetition in spreading a Big Lie.

“What’s especially helpful is repetition in a variety of contexts,” Bowers-Abbott wrote to Salon. “That is, not just the same words over and over — but integration of an idea in lots of ways. It builds its own little web of support.”

As a hypothetical example, Bowers-Abbott suggested a scenario where she would want to falsely convince Salon that green grapes are a superfood.

“I need to do more than state, ‘Green grapes are a superfood’ repetitively, I need to work it into conversations,” Bowers-Abbott explained. “‘Oh, I see grapes are on sale this week, so much nutrition at such a low price!’; ‘My dietician has a great superfood recipe that features kale and grapes!’; ‘Yes! Green grapes are green! That’s the color of superfoods!'”

Dr. Matt Blanchard, a clinical psychologist at New York University, told Salon by email that this kind of immersion does not have to be merely rhetorical. If the purveyors of a Big Lie are shrewd, they can even incorporate it into a target’s physical environment.

“You might think I’m kidding, but…. Nothing sells the Big Lie like novelty t-shirts, hats and banners,” Blanchard told Salon. “These items are normally associated with sports teams, not life-and-death political issues. But [former President Donald] Trump and his circle have deftly used these items to generate the kind of unbridled loyalty Americans associate with pro football.” Blanchard noted that the mob which attempted a coup on January 6th was “at points indistinguishable from a rowdy tailgate party. The banners and hats crucially add an air of silliness to everything. If I can buy a novelty hat about it, can it really be so serious? Or a flag featuring Trump as Rambo? The use of these sports fan items allows them to both be attacking the Capitol building and at the same time, just having good clean fun.”

He added, “It’s a genius mindf**k. This goofy paraphernalia has confused our response to the riot ever since.”

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Bandy Lee, an American psychiatrist who edited the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” noted that people embrace outrageous assertions for emotional reasons, and that propagandists play into that as they repeat their narrative.

“Usually, they are trying to find comfort and to avoid pain,” Lee wrote to Salon. “This happens in states of lesser health, where one is less inclined to venture into new domains or to seek creative solutions. There is comfort in repetition, and so a people or a nation under duress will gravitate more toward what is repeated to them than what is realistic. Adolf Hitler understood this very well, which is why the American psychologist Walter Langer coined the phrase to describe his method.”

Durvasula also speculated that Big Lies benefit from humanity’s hierarchical nature, given that “primate groups do tend to organize into tribes with alphas and leaders and hierarchies, and that’s us as people.” She added that many people are not sufficiently informed about the narcissistic behaviors that are warning signs “that there are people in our midst that lack empathy, have no care for the common good, are grandiose, arrogant, and willing to exploit and manipulate people for solely their own egocentric needs.” Instead “a sort of halo effect imbues leaders with presumed expertise and power — when that is not at all the case (most if not all megalomaniacal leaders, despots, tyrants, oligarchs share narcissism/psychopathy as a trait).”

Obviously, most of those who rally around  a Big Lie do not do so from a place of deliberate deceptiveness — and they certainly wouldn’t call it that. Take the Big Lie being spread by Trump: That the 2020 election was stolen from him. Like Hitler’s Big Lie, all of Trump’s “evidence” of fraud has been exposed as spurious, from the dozens of lost legal cases (he never once proved fraud in court) to the fact that his own attorney general and Vice President admitted the election had not been stolen. To believe that the election was stolen, one would have to envision a conspiracy including hundreds of Republicans as well as Democrats and absolutely no “smoking gun” leaks — an absurd concept if one tries to break it down logistically. 

“We don’t truly ‘believe’ things, so much as provisionally accept information we find useful.”

Yet the lack of substance is precisely the point, as Big Lies are structured to turn attention away from their lack of substance — in most contexts, a person with Trump’s personal history and lack of evidence would never be taken seriously — by instead playing on the desires of their targets. 

“Everything we know about the human brain suggests it is composed of numerous systems that interact, overlap, excite, inhibit, and often contradict each other, and may even hide information from consciousness,” Blanchard told Salon. “So it comes as no surprise that the act of ‘believing’ is not just one thing that humans do. Instead, this one word represents a wide range of relationships that humans have with information. We don’t truly ‘believe’ things, so much as provisionally accept information we find useful.”

As Blanchard put it, people will weigh information that directly impacts their lives differently than information which seems more abstract. The name of the game is proximity.

“For example, a man who suspects his wife is cheating on him (close proximity) may work feverishly to find the truth, plant cameras in the home, hire a private detective, and so on,” Blanchard explained. “But if the topic switches to Joe Biden’s election (far proximity) the same man probably won’t bother to even check a second news source before he decides what to ‘believe.'” This can lead to a “pretty careless” relationship with political information because people do not truly appreciate the long-term consequences.

“We tool-using humans look at every object and wonder, ‘How can I use this? What is this good for?'” Blanchard told Salon. “Political information is no different. The Big Lie is no different.”

He added, “So most people don’t whole-heartedly ‘believe’ the Big Lie, but they are more than happy to provisionally accept it because… why not? It might be entertaining. It might flatter your identity. It might help you bond with other people in your community. Or it might help you vent some rage.”

The popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram further exacerbates these trends because they add new elements of social pressure. An individual who has embraced a Big Lie repeatedly in those public settings will feel a level of personal investment that makes dislodging that much more challenging.

“It was easier to dislodge untruths before social media,” Bowers-Abbott told Salon. “In social media, people tend to take public positions. When that position turns out to be wrong, it’s embarrassing. And backing down is typically seen as weakness. So they double-down on untrue claims to save face and personal credibility.”

She added, “We are way too emotionally attached to being right. It would be better for our culture as a whole to value uncertainty and intellectual humility and curiousity. Those values help us ask questions without the expectation of permanent answers.”

Durvasula expressed a similar point, arguing that the best antidote to Big Lies is for people to learn more about critical thinking skills.

“Pushback means education in critical thinking (but given that school board heads are facing death threats over teaching critical thinking — that is not likely to happen),” Durvasula wrote. “It means ending algorithms that only provide confirmatory news and instead people seeing stories and information that provide other points of view (again, not likely to happen), creating safe spaces to have these conversations (who will be the referee?), encouraging civil discourse with those who hold different opinions, teaching people to find common ground (e.g. love of family) even when belief systems are not aligned.”

“‘Belief’ is always predicated on usefulness, and useless beliefs do not survive.”

Durvasula was skeptical about the idea that you can persuade someone to abandon a Big Lie through evidence — and Blanchard said the same thing. The problem is that, simply put, a lot of people believe the Big Lie because they want to. It helps them. And the only way to stop the Big Lie, in those situations, is to stop the people spreading it.

“Trump’s lies have always been about power,” Blanchard wrote to Salon. “He demonstrates his power by lying to your face, and when there are no consequences, his power is seen to be confirmed. The actual content of his lies is of secondary importance.” As such, Trump and the other spreaders of the Big Lie will only be discredited in the eyes of their supporters if they face their greatest fear — accountability.

“They must be seen to lose at the ballot box, they must be arrested when they break the law, they must be sued for every defamation, they must be pursued with every legal tool available in an open society,” Blanchard explained. “Above all else they must be seen as weak. Only then will their lies lose their usefulness for the millions who once saw something to gain — personally, psychologically, politically, financially — in choosing to believe.”

He added, “As I said above, ‘belief’ is always predicated on usefulness, and useless beliefs do not survive.”

Lee compared disabusing someone of the falsehoods in a Big Lie to treating regular delusions. One rule: Don’t put them on the defensive.

“Confronting them, or presenting facts or evidence, never works,” Lee told Salon. “You have to fix the underlying emotional vulnerability that led people to believing it in the first place. For populations, it is usually the pain of not having a place in the world, which socioeconomic inequality exacerbates. Deprivation of health care, education, an ability to make a living, and other avenues for dignity can make a population psychologically vulnerable to those who look to exploit them.”

More articles on psychology and politics:

• Are Trump supporters evil, or just wrong? Political scientists struggle with morality
• This is your brain on partisan politics: New scientific study reveals key cause behind polarization
• Is America experiencing mass psychosis?

MATTHEW ROZSA

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

• Science

January 17, 2022 (optimistdaily.com)

While laughter may seem like a trait exclusive to human behavior, nothing could be further from the truth. That’s at least according to a recent study which has found that the phenomenon of laughter is actually quite common in the animal kingdom too.

Can animals laugh?

Conducted by scientists at UCLA, the research explored the occurrence of laughter across different animal species. Investigating existing scientific literature on animal play behavior, the scientists looked for mentions of vocal play signals as an indication of the presence of laughter in animals.

At the end of their study, published in Bioacoustics, the researchers claimed to have found laughter across at least 65 species of animals. These included primates, cows, dogs, foxes, and seals, as well as a few bird species such as parakeets and Australian magpies.

“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” said study author Greg Bryant, professor of communication at the university.

As part of the study, the researchers paid attention to details such as whether the animal’s vocal signals were recorded as noisy or tonal, loud or quiet, high-pitched or low-pitched, short or long — all in a bid to identify familiar characteristics of play sounds.

Laughter as a signal of playfulness 

“When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join,” said study author Sasha Winkler. “Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.”

The study findings intend to help scientists better understand the function of human laughter and shed light on its role in the evolution of our social behavior.

Source study: Bioacoustics – Play vocalizations and human laughter: a comparative review

Lesson 199 I am not a body. I am free.

Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself. The body is a limit. Who would seek for freedom in a body looks for it where it can not be found. The mind can be made free when it no longer sees itself as in a body, firmly tied to it and sheltered by its presence. If this were the truth, the mind were vulnerable indeed!

The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked. Attack thoughts cannot enter such a mind, because it has been given to the Source of love, and fear can never enter in a mind that has attached itself to love. It rests in God. And who can be afraid who lives in Innocence, and only loves?

It is essential for your progress in this course that you accept today’s idea, and hold it very dear. Be not concerned that to the ego it is quite insane. The ego holds the body dear because it dwells in it, and lives united with the home that it has made. It is a part of the illusion that has sheltered it from being found illusory itself.

Here does it hide, and here it can be seen as what it is. Declare your innocence and you are free. The body disappears, because you have no need of it except the need the Holy Spirit sees. For this, the body will appear as useful form for what the mind must do. It thus becomes a vehicle which helps forgiveness be extended to the all-inclusive goal that it must reach, according to God’s plan.

Cherish today’s idea, and practice it today and every day. Make it a part of every practice period you take. There is no thought that will not gain thereby in power to help the world, and none which will not gain in added gifts to you as well. We sound the call of freedom round the world with this idea. And would you be exempt from the acceptance of the gifts you give?

The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom. In Him they have found what they have sought. The body’s purpose now is unambiguous. And it becomes perfect in the ability to serve an undivided goal. In conflict-free and unequivocal response to mind with but the thought of freedom as its goal, the body serves, and serves its purpose well. Without the power to enslave, it is a worthy servant of the freedom which the mind within the Holy Spirit seeks.

Be free today. And carry freedom as your gift to those who still believe they are enslaved within a body. Be you free, so that the Holy Spirit can make use of your escape from bondage, to set free the many who perceive themselves as bound and helpless and afraid. Let love replace their fears through you. Accept salvation now, and give your mind to Him Who calls to you to make this gift to Him. For He would give you perfect freedom, perfect joy, and hope that finds its full accomplishment in God.

You are God’s Son. In immortality you live forever. Would you not return your mind to this? Then practice well the thought the Holy Spirit gives you for today. Your brothers stand released with you in it; the world is blessed along with you, God’s Son will weep no more, and Heaven offers thanks for the increase of joy your practice brings even to it. And God Himself extends His Love and happiness each time you say:

I am not a body. I am free.
I hear the Voice that God has given me,
and it is only this my mind obeys

tvlpodcast “Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.” Carlo Cipolla In the 1970s, an economic historian called Carlo Cipolla wrote a provocative article titled “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”. This week’s episode is about his theory of the destructiveness of stupid behaviour and why it is so underestimated and misunderstood. Show Notes: The Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla The Five Universal Laws Of Stupidity by Corrine Purtill;

Eternalised Carl Jung’s collective unconscious is one of his most well-known (and controversial) concepts. The collective unconscious is the aspect of the unconscious mind which manifests inherited, universal themes which run through all human life. He came upon the idea in a dream. The collective unconscious does not owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition, while the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed. The personal unconscious consists of complexes, while the collective unconscious is made up of archetypes (or primordial images). Archetypes are collectively-inherited forms or patterns of behaviour. They reflect basic patterns common to us all, and which have existed universally since the dawn of time. ⭐ Support this channel: https://www.patreon.com/eternalised ? YouTube Member Perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqos… ☕ Donate a Coffee: https://ko-fi.com/eternalised ? Official Merch: eternalised.creator-spring.com ? Access transcript and artwork gallery: https://eternalisedofficial.com/2021/… ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? Recommended Reading ▶ Man and His Symbols (1964) https://amzn.to/3lYyz94 ▶ Modern Man In Search of a Soul (1933) https://amzn.to/2G3mhw7 ▶ Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) https://amzn.to/3dAcD0z ? Prefer Audiobooks? Get a 30-day Audible Plus FREE trial: ▶ https://amzn.to/332zPzN ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? Discord ➔ https://discord.io/eternalised ? Twitter ➔ https://twitter.com/eternalised1 ? Facebook ➔ https://www.facebook.com/eternalised ? Instagram ➔ https://www.instagram.com/eternalised… ? Podcast ➔ https://anchor.fm/eternalised ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⌛ Timestamps 0:00 Jung’s Discovery of The Collective Unconscious 3:31 Personal Unconscious & Complexes 5:05 Collective Unconscious & Archetypes 9:17 The Psychological Meaning of The Collective Unconscious 11:30 Method of Proof: Dreams and Active Imagination 13:26 Confrontation with the Unconscious ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? Sources Jung, C. G. (1936). The concept of the collective unconscious. Collected works, 9(1), 42 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? Music used 1. Anguish – Kevin MacLeod 2. Lightless Dawn – Kevin MacLeod 3. Drums of the Deep – Kevin MacLeod 4. Silent Turmoil – Myuu 5. Earnest – Kevin MacLeod 6. Evening Fall Harp – Kevin MacLeod Subscribe to Kevin MacLeod https://www.youtube.com/user/kmmusic Subscribe to Myuu https://www.youtube.com/c/myuuji ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you. Thanks for watching, I appreciate it!