The Seasons of Wellbeing as an Evolutionary Map for Transpersonal Medicine

The four Seasons of Wellbeing (Discover, Transform, Awaken, and Integrate) refer to distinct rhythms, periods, and factors that influence the accessibility of an individual’s resources during the journey of life. Each season is explicitly and implicitly related to an individual’s experience, focus, and capacity for self-organizational states. Each can be used to understand, organize, and foster behavior change, positive growth, transformation, and human development. A genealogy of the seasons is described, emphasizing the empirical and theoretical foundations of Reorganizational Healing and its roots in models such as Grof ’s Systems of Condensed Experiences (or COEX Systems) and Wilber’s Integral Theory and Pre/Trans Fallacy. In the context of transpersonal medicine, the seasons offer a framework through which various levels and states associated with an individual’s growth can be mapped and utilized for personal evolution. In this context, seasons are applicable for practitioners and clients who have used transpersonal states to avoid painful emotions or difficult actions. The seasons can guide transpersonal medical clients on a path towards transpersonal being and integration of various states leading to a higher organizational baseline. As a practical tool, the seasons have pertinence in the development of “transpersonal vigilance,” a term defined in this article. The seasons offer resources to practitioners to support clients toward transpersonal being, in a reorganizationally informed or reorganizational way

Negative Energy Density States for the Dirac Field in Flat Spacetime

Negative energy densities in the Dirac field produced by state vectors that are the superposition of two single particle electron states are examined. I show that for such states the energy density of the field is not bounded from below and that the quantum inequalities derived for scalar fields are satisfied. I also show that it is not possible to produce negative energy densities in a scalar field using state vectors that are arbitrary superpositions of single particle states.Comment: 11 pages, LaTe

A Universal Model of Global Civil Unrest

Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion in the context of modeling and identification of universal patterns of behavior. In contrast, the possibility that civil unrest activities, across countries and over long time periods, are governed by universal mechanisms has not been explored. Here, we analyze records of civil unrest of 170 countries during the period 1919-2008. We demonstrate that the distributions of the number of unrest events per year are robustly reproduced by a nonlinear, spatially extended dynamical model, which reflects the spread of civil disorder between geographic regions connected through social and communication networks. The results also expose the similarity between global social instability and the dynamics of natural hazards and epidemics.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Quantum inequalities for the free Rarita-Schwinger fields in flat spacetime

Using the methods developed by Fewster and colleagues, we derive a quantum inequality for the free massive spin-${3\over 2}$ Rarita-Schwinger fields in the four dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Our quantum inequality bound for the Rarita-Schwinger fields is weaker, by a factor of 2, than that for the spin-${1\over 2}$ Dirac fields. This fact along with other quantum inequalities obtained by various other authors for the fields of integer spin (bosonic fields) using similar methods lead us to conjecture that, in the flat spacetime, separately for bosonic and fermionic fields, the quantum inequality bound gets weaker as the the number of degrees of freedom of the field increases. A plausible physical reason might be that the more the number of field degrees of freedom, the more freedom one has to create negative energy, therefore, the weaker the quantum inequality bound.Comment: Revtex, 11 pages, to appear in PR

Entangled Stories: The Red Jews in Premodern Yiddish and German Apocalyptic Lore

“Far, far away from our areas, somewhere beyond the Mountains of Darkness, on the other side of the Sambatyon River…there lives a nation known as the Red Jews.” The Red Jews are best known from classic Yiddish writing, most notably from Mendele's Kitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi (The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third). This novel, first published in 1878, represents the initial appearance of the Red Jews in modern Yiddish literature. This comical travelogue describes the adventures of Benjamin, who sets off in search of the legendary Red Jews. But who are these Red Jews or, in Yiddish, di royte yidelekh? The term denotes the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the ten tribes that in biblical times had composed the Northern Kingdom of Israel until they were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Over time, the myth of their return emerged, and they were said to live in an uncharted location beyond the mysterious Sambatyon River, where they would remain until the Messiah's arrival at the end of time, when they would rejoin the rest of the Jewish people. This article is part of a broader study of the Red Jews in Jewish popular culture from the Middle Ages through modernity. It is partially based on a chapter from my book, Umstrittene Erlöser: Politik, Ideologie und jüdisch-christlicher Messianismus in Deutschland, 1500–1600 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). Several postdoctoral fellowships have generously supported my research on the Red Jews: a Dr. Meyer-Struckmann-Fellowship of the German Academic Foundation, a Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica/Alan M. Stroock Fellowship for Advanced Research in Judaica at Harvard University, a research fellowship from the Heinrich Hertz-Foundation, and a YIVO Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship. I thank the organizers of and participants in the colloquia and conferences where I have presented this material in various forms as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of AJS Review for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Jeremy Dauber and Elisheva Carlebach of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, where I was a Visiting Scholar in the fall of 2009, for their generous encouragement to write this article. Sue Oren considerably improved my English. The style employed for Romanization of Yiddish follows YIVO's transliteration standards. Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Latin are my own. Quotations from the Bible follow the JPS translation, and those from the Babylonian Talmud are according to the Hebrew-English edition of the Soncino Talmud by Isidore Epstein

The impact of increasing urban surface albedo on outdoor summer thermal comfort within a university campus

The impact of increasing urban surface albedo on outdoor thermal comfort was studied in two phases: Firstly, the thermal conditions of three locations with different ground surface materials were compared. The study used CFD modelling followed by a measurement campaign to validate the control simulation. It was observed that the physiological equivalent temperature (PET as the outdoor thermal comfort index) in the campus park (covered with grass) was 11.0 °C lower than the parking lot (paved with concrete) at 16:00 CET. As the next step, the albedo of the roofs and walls were increased from 0.2 (control) to 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6. It was found that increasing the albedo made the open space of the courtyard uncomfortable due to the higher reflectivity of high-albedo materials. An increase of every 0.1 albedo of the surfaces led to 1.2 °C higher mean radiant temperature, and consequently, 0.8 °C higher PET. The study also showed that the increase of albedo radiated more sun to the ground surface. This increased average ground surface sensible heat flux (6.7 W/m2) and surface temperature (0.4 °C) during the day. This finding shows that the position and orientation of high albedo materials can significantly affect pedestrians' thermal comfort in urban open spaces

Risk and protective factors for self-harm and suicide in children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis protocol.

INTRODUCTION Self-harm and suicide are major public health concerns among children and adolescents. Many risk and protective factors for suicide and self-harm have been identified and reported in the literature. However, the capacity of these identified risk and protective factors to guide assessment and management is limited due to their great number. This protocol describes an ongoing systematic review and meta-analysis which aims to examine longitudinal studies of risk factors for self-harm and suicide in children and adolescents, to provide a comparison of the strengths of association of the various risk factors for self-harm and suicide and to shed light on those that require further investigation. METHODS AND ANALYSIS We perform a systematic search of the literature using the databases EMBASE, PsycINFO, Medline, CINAHL and HMIC from inception up to 28 October 2020, and the search will be updated before the systematic review publication. Additionally, we will contact experts in the field, including principal investigators whose peer-reviewed publications are included in our systematic review as well as investigators from our extensive research network, and we will search the reference lists of relevant reviews to retrieve any articles that were not identified in our search. We will extract relevant data and present a narrative synthesis and combine the results in meta-analyses where there are sufficient data. We will assess the risk of bias for each study using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and present a summary of the quantity and the quality of the evidence for each risk or protective factor. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION Ethical approval will not be sought as this is a systematic review of the literature. Results will be published in mental health journals and presented at conferences focused on suicide prevention. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER CRD42021228212

Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. We review the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. Using case studies from longitudinal research we demonstrate that assets can afford useful insights into important change