About the art of living

Claudia Gelernter honors our magazine with an article that deserves to be meditated.

"With the advancement of science, thanks to neuroimaging equipment, we have been able, in the last 20 years to jump on the issue of learning about our brains. We have understood that it has a plasticity, we can change its structure, both for better and for worse, through our thoughts and attitude towards life. (...) Therefore, understanding aspects of the art of good living can not only change our mood, but even our brain organ. And that is a wonderful thing, because when this changes, the power of positive thinking is strengthened. Here is a virtuous circle that is born! "(Claudia Gelernter)

Advances in neuroscience have produced knowledge never before envisioned by neurologists. It is interesting to note that the work of André Luiz, especially in "In the Greater World", 1947, said in an extraordinary way many of this knowledge.

When science has knowledge of perispiritual brain as the mold of the somatic brain as causal model, various puzzles are solved. While staying focused on organic machine, never pick up why phenomena that transcend the brain mechanics. Continue considering the intelligence and the soul as this epiphenomenon mechanical, as if one and the other were just sort of side effect of brain chemism.

"I often point out to my patients to assemble a special gratitude notebook. Every night must register at least five significant events that happened on the day and should receive emphasis in consciousness once again. This is a very interesting exercise, able to change mental structures built with other directions. It brings immediate welfare by the way."(Claudia Gelernter)

The mechanism of becoming aware is especially characteristic of psychoanalysis, in which unconscious contents are revealed. This is especially relevant to disentangle symptoms, generally linked to repressed contents.

An exercise like this, so simple and so effective, it is a way of approaching consciousness as a healing mechanism. Changes in mental structures should be considered at the level of neurotransmitters and in a more structural way.

Anyway, it is a simple exercise that brings immediate benefits, such as welfare.

"The values give us the positive north in the actions, the talent shows us the areas in which we can act in the world. There is the need to go in search to discover our talents, seeking to use them with positive values. We see as positive values: compassion, kindness, courage, perseverance, humility, wisdom."(Claudia Gelernter)

All the virtues to be cultivated by man are, in essence, the components of charity. Bringing patients to the cultivation of virtues changes the focus, perspective, directing them not to settle in morbidly content. After all it is a gratitude notebook.

The talent is subordinate to value. The value is the parameter, the model, the standard that effectively shapes the talent. Give a reason for being ethic in skills is to opt for healthy practice, but with pragmatism of virtue. The healthy structure of the brain chemism is perhaps the biggest practical gain of the knowledge about the neurosciences.