On the threshold of the third millennium, it seems that man, despite the advancement of technology and discoveries, feels increasingly alone and defenseless on this world in constant prey of disturbance. Climate change, increasingly aggressive viruses, indifference of people and more and more accentuated loneliness of man even though living in populous cities seem to be the triggers of most of his diseases. Not for nothing, suicide cases especially in America, a highly civilized country, are statistically higher than the world average, as well as diseases related to insomnia or depression are increasing. Public or private pharmaceutical companies proliferate on this ground of despair, the latter having risen like mushrooms.
The real disease ̶ that I call the cause of industrialization with the consequent loss of contact with mother earth (agriculture and enlarged patriarchal society) and relationships with people based in the past on mutual trust ̶ arises from an unbalanced human-environment relationship and excessive consumerism that led man to consider satisfying his material needs and less than his spiritual needs as a priority.
The soul has been relegated to second order, if it is recognized as existing by the denial of those who feel satisfied only by an unbridled craving for consumerism, exasperated by the continuous drumming of the mass media and all the propaganda tools that leverage a media mantra which affects the human mind. In fact, it is well known that men, like all animals, are habitual (1).
In this regard, I quote the Russian Pavlov with his experiments conducted on animals, which has shown how habituation produces stimuli within the brain such as to reiterate actions that manifest themselves in the request for food at a predetermined time, conditioned reflexes, etc.
We humans, mixed with body and soul (the latter invisible and therefore often unrecognized), are led to reiterate repetitive actions. But the dissatisfaction often caused in us by not knowing how to adequately respond to the pressing demands of society and technology, our inadequacy to get on with the pace of our fellow men, the stress induced in us by unnerving work rhythms and social practices, etc. . they confront us with extreme crises and often exasperating dilemmas.
This happens to anyone of us who tries to face school, work, social challenges from the first years of life. It is no coincidence that the Swiss Jean Piaget, psychologist, pedagogue, biologist and philosopher, in his famous studies on the evolution of the child and on the stages of his cognitive development from zero to seven years, in particular, and up to 11 for the formalization of thought Logically, he pauses to consider the importance of genetic epistemology and of the stages of cognitive development of children in developmental age.
In synthesis, we humans are highly habitual beings and very influenced not only by
Es, Ego, Super-Ego, as Sigismund Freud (3) explained us, but also from the collective conscience of Carl Gustav Jung (4), both psychologists and pillars of modern psychoanalysis.
In summary: Es is the instinctive, primordial subconscious, deriving from human nature and driven by sexual drives; Ego represents the emerged, conscious part (according to Sigmund Freud located in the cerebral cortex; Super-Ego is a super-consciousness matured by the “civilization” of man, the code of behavior. Treating all the symptoms induced by high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, insomnia and other diseases, it means going first to examine your soul.
As the ancient Romans said “Mens sana in corpore sano“, as an optimal gymnastics for the body induces serotonin and a general state of well-being, so a soul that permeates our emotions, sensations and feelings generates a state of well-being avoiding all typical evils of our society.
Why in our western society, unlike the eastern one, has the soul been neglected? Did it also depend on a split induced by the various religions that have not been able to integrate the spiritual part with the material one, as happens in Eastern philosophy? I believe it is also due to the introduction of the idea of sin as regards the sexual sphere (Freud teaches us) and to the instincts deliberately ousted by the well-meaning religious and moralizers, who have tried to block libido in all possible ways, pointing to penalties and non-existent sins.
Time and space do not really exist, according to the new frontiers of quantum physics, if not the first in the biological sense. Einstein was a visionary, like all scientists. Max Planck went beyond Einstein, beyond the localization of events, beyond time itself, which exists only biologically (a cluster of atoms that form bodies and thermodynamically undergo an aging process).
Thanks to Quantum Entanglement, today we know that two subatomic particles (such as photons), even if distant, can behave as a single system. This is a departure from the localization principle (an object can only be influenced by its immediate environment), dear to Einstein and his theory of narrow relativity. One explanation may be that of the “hidden variables” that escape us. Thus, even if distant, these particles have an effect on each other.
I quote to conclude St. Augustine, philosopher and father of the Church, 4th-5th century AD, and his spiritual theories. For the Bishop of Hippo, time is a dimension of the soul, it is consciousness itself that expands to embrace with the present also the past and the future. Time represents for him a subjective dimension due to the human spirit that gathers in unity the plurality of dispersed external experiences.
Even though evolution has been great today, ignorance of knowledge seems to overcome all aspects because it contemplates only the purely material and apparent side of things.
We are clots of atoms and therefore of energy, as Einstein’s famous equation (E = mc^2) teaches us, or rarefaction of consciousness (the soul) through neurons that connect together by sending electrical impulses. In the mystery of the brain is hidden the secret of our being a sort of micro-world within a macro-world, whose true boundaries escape us.
We are ̶ as the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher taught us beyond the geometric and conventional schemes of the world ̶ particles of God splashed on Earth like meteoric fragments, or a concentrate of infinity like our invisible soul which is the basis of many of our frustrations and desires.
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- Ivan Petrovič Pavlov (in Russian: ИванПетровичПавлов?; Rjazan’, September 26, 1849 – Leningrad, February 27, 1936) was a Russian physiologist and ethologist, whose name is linked to the discovery on dogs of the conditioned reflex, announced by him in 1903.
The discovery of conditioned reflex (1903) made it possible to apply the objective methods of physiology to the study of higher nervous processes. Natural and artificial conditioned reflexes, their modes of formation and action, assumed great importance in physiology, psychology and psychiatry, although with alternate results. In the first half of the twentieth century, the theory of conditioned reflexes was used to give credence to behaviorism, founded by John Watson, who stated that the psyche could be studied only through the analysis of behavior. Through conditioning Pavlov demonstrated the possibility of inducing neurotic human-like behavior patterns in animals (“experimental neurosis”).
Thus, research was developed that proposed modification by conditioning behavior. These pioneering studies initiated behaviorism to build strategies for treating pathological behaviors.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell also supported the importance of Pavlov’s discoveries. Bulgakov was also interested in the studies of the Russian physiologist, who inspired him to write the novel Heart of a Dog. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World (writing about the so-called “Neo Pavlovian Society”), and Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, were also inspired by Pavlov’s findings.
The works and the last years of life:
Among the most important works of Pavlovian art there are:
- Data on the physiology of sleep (1915)
- Twenty years of experience on the objective study of the superior nervous activity of animals (1922)
- Lessons on the work of the great cerebral hemispheres (1927).
(2) – Jean Piaget (Neuchâtel, 9 August 1896 – Geneva, 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist, biologist, pedagogue and philosopher.
He is considered to be the founder of genetic epistemology, i.e. the experimental study of cognitive structures and processes related to the construction of knowledge during development, and he also devoted himself to developmental psychology.
(3) – Sigismund Schlomo Freud, known as Sigmund Freud (Freiberg, 6 May 1856 – Hampstead, 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher, founder of psychoanalysis, certainly the most famous among the theoretical and practical currents of psychology. He is known for having elaborated a scientific-philosophical theory, according to which unconscious psychic processes exert decisive influences on thought, human behavior and interactions between individuals: he tried to establish correlations between the vision of the unconscious, symbolic representation of real processes, and its components with the physical structures of the human mind and body, theories that have found partial confirmation even in modern neurology and psychiatry.)
(4) – Carl Gustav Jung (AFI: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]; Kesswil, 26 July 1875 – Küsnacht, 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, philosopher and academic, one of the leading figures of psychological and psychoanalytic thought. His technique and theory, of psychoanalytic derivation, is called “analytical psychology” or “psychology of the deep”, more rarely “complex psychology”.
Initially close to Sigmund Freud’s conceptions, he moved away from them in 1913, after a process of conceptual differentiation culminating in the publication in 1912 of “Libido: symbols and transformations”. In this book he set out his orientation, expanding his analytical research from the history of the individual to the history of the human community. There is a collective unconscious that expresses itself in archetypes, as well as an individual (or personal) unconscious. The life of the individual is seen as a path, called the process of individuation, of self-realization in comparison with the individual and collective unconscious.