This video is sponsored by professional photographers of America. Join a community of over 33,000 photographers and find equipment, insurance, education, and business tools made specifically for photographers like you. This is the ZWL AM5, this is the IOPRON M27, and today we're going to see if these little harmonic drive mounts can take on my tried-and-true Skywatcher EQ6R in an astrophotography mount showdown. Ask any experienced astrophotographer what the most important piece of gear is in their system, and they're likely going to tell you the mount. The mount has to not only hold your telescope and camera steady, but it has to do so while tracking the night sky at a very high level of precision for minutes at a time. It has to do that so that we can take long exposures with round stars. In general, if you want to use a bigger telescope with longer focal length, it means you're going to need a bigger mount. At least that was true. This new type of telescope mount, called a harmonic drive mount, may change all that, as this type of mount uses a different kind of gearing inside called strain-wave gearing. It can be made very small in terms of the mount size, but due to its design, it can handle a huge payload even without counterweights. As I understand it, the only reason to use a counterweight at all with this harmonic drive mount is so the whole thing doesn't fall over from being so far on balance. These kinds of mounts have actually been around a while. I first saw them offered by a South Korean company called Rainbow Astro. They were demoing them at Neef in 2019, and I remember thinking, wow, that looks really cool, but it was way out of my price range at the time. I think the price was higher back then because they were brand new. So they've definitely come down in price since. Even the premium ones from Rainbow Astro and Crux have come down in price over the past four years. But 2022 was an interesting year because all of a sudden there's tons of harmonic drive mount announcements, including from manufacturers who had never made a mount before like ZWO, like Sharpstar, like Pegasus, Astro, and others. Ioptron is a well-known maker of mounts, and this one is their first harmonic drive mount, the Hem-27. So with all this attention on these new mounts, I was naturally curious about them. And so this is a review video of the two cheapest harmonic drive mounts widely available in the US market today, the ZW-AM5, the Ioptron Hem-27, and then I'm using my EQ-6R as a control sample of a good mount that's not harmonic drive. And in this video we're going to talk about the design, the features, the cost, the setup, all of the things, and end of course with real-world imaging tests that I've done with these mounts. And since it's a review, let me start with some disclosures. The EQ-6R I bought personally several years ago. The ZW-AM5 I bought for the channel using income I generate from ads and Patreon. I bought it directly from ZWO when it was still a pre-order item. The Ioptron Hem-27 is on loan from Highpoint Scientific, which is an awesome telescope store here in the Northeastern US. This video isn't sponsored by Highpoint, but they are letting me borrow this mount for a couple months for free. So thank you very much to Highpoint Scientific. I really appreciate everything you do. Everything else in this video may have started as review units, but I have since bought. This video does have a sponsor, which is PPA, and I'll talk about them a little bit later. Okay, so let's start with the design and features. The EQ-6R and the Hem-27 are equatorial mounts only, meaning you polar-align them. They track the night sky and right ascent. The AM-5 is also an equatorial mount, and that's how it comes shipped, but it can easily be converted and operated in Alt-As mode too. The way to do this is you set the azimuth adjustment here on the equatorial wedge all the way to 90 degrees. You then hold down the cancel button on the hand controller while turning the mount on, and this little status light will turn green instead of red. That's how you know you've switched it into Alt-As mode. So why would you want to switch modes? Well, I think the primary reason is if you're going to be using the mount for visual observation, like with an eyepiece. It's then more convenient to use it in Alt-As mode compared to equatorial, because the telescope's going to be in a more natural position, and visual observers just prefer Alt-As to equatorial. If you're only thinking about the AM-5 for photography, then this feature probably doesn't matter to you, but I just thought I'd mention it as it's only available on the AM-5 between these three. Okay, so for the rest of their view, we'll just be talking equatorial, and because these three are equatorial mounts, it means they do need to be polar aligned. The EQ-6R comes with a visual polar scope that's installed inside the mount head, and if you want to use a dedicated electronic polar scope, there are very easy ways to add either a QHY pole master, as I have here, or an iOptron iPolar. The iOptron HEM27 can be bought with an iPolar camera already installed. Then it's the HEM27A, and that's just $100 more than the base unit. I think this is a no-brainer if you plan to use the mount with a Windows or Mac laptop or a mini-PC. If you only plan to use the HEM27 with an ASI Air or StellarMate, or any other kind of Raspberry Pi-based system, I don't think the iPolar camera software works with those, so then you would just be relying on other polar alignment routines, and I would get it without that add-on. The ZWO AM5 does not come with a polar alignment scope, and there is no option for one from ZWO, so you're on your own in terms of using one of the electronically assisted methods, like an ASI Air or something like that, which is probably fine because if you're buying this mount, it's not a good choice unless you plan to use it with an ASI Air or a computer because it doesn't have a full-featured hand controller, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. In terms of adjusting the equatorial wedge on these mounts to dial-in polar alignment, I find them all slightly annoying, but in different ways. The EQ6R system is the one I'm most used to, and I've probably done it over a hundred times. It's not perfect, but it is a huge improvement from this mount's predecessor, the EQ6. For the R version, they went with bigger plastic knobs on the azimuth adjustment, and then they added a plastic knob to the front altitude adjustment here, too. This spring-loaded handle on the back altitude knob is not the best design, especially when dealing with heavy payloads, and so many people modify this bolt to make it easier. A friend of mine has given me 3D printed knob to replace this little spring-loaded lever, but I haven't gotten around to putting it on yet. In any case, this is purely a push-pull system, so you loosen one bolt and then tighten the other bolt. It pushes against a pin, and that moves the mount head slightly to dial-in polar alignment. Then the only way you are locking it down is just by making both the push-pull bolts tight against that pin, that piece of metal. And I find after practicing this a half dozen times, you're going to get it, and it becomes pretty easy to pull or align quickly with just a push-pull system like this. Both the HEM27 and the AM5 use a slightly more complex design. There are still push-pull mechanisms, and there are also locks on both systems here. So there's more points of contact to dial-in polar alignment. And the problem with that is once you get it right with two of the knobs, then when you're locking the others, it can throw off polar alignment. Now to avoid that, what you need to do is tighten up the locks 95% of the way when you're very close to polar alignment, so then you can just make a tiny little final adjustment by fully locking it down. But I find it's a little bit more fiddly. It takes a little bit more practice to bump polar alignment just into that perfect position once you have everything very close with all the different little knobs and adjustments. But the ZW01 is laid out very well. I think all of the plastic knobs and things are nice and easy to grasp and tighten or loosen. The Ioptron design is quirky and honestly not my favorite in this regard. The knobs for the push-pull on the azimuth here are fairly standard, a little bit small for my taste. But they are plastic, which is nice at night. But then the locks that you have to use are all tightened by this little hex key that's included that's magnetically stored on the side of the mount here. Okay, so in principle this may work. If I just am doing it inside, it's no problem. But in practice, I find that this is one of the biggest pitfalls of this mount. The problem for me is asking me to operate a tiny metal hex key that fits into these tiny hex screws in the dark, in the cold is just not a good idea. If I were to drop this in the stove because my hands are cold, I've now lost a crucial piece of equipment to adjust polar alignment. For the altitude adjustment, it's again a fairly quirky system. They split the altitude into two ranges here and the change between one or the other requires taking the mount apart. For fine adjustment of the azimuth, instead of a push-pull system, they give you just full access to this long rod with a nice big knob on it to go up and down. And this is very nice. I had no problem using it. And they even put holes in the knob so you can get a bit more torque if you put the hex key in like this. So for all my complaints about the design here of the wedge on the M27, in the end, I didn't find it slowed me down that much in terms of polar alignment compared to the ZWO AM5. Everything did move smoothly and reliably. I just don't think this design with all its reliance on, you know, little screws and the hex key is particularly grab-and-go friendly. I'm proud to say this video is sponsored by PPA, Professional Photographers of America. I am a member myself and I'm very happy with what they offer as part of membership.  I'm just going to highlight some of the ones that are most important to me as primarily an astrophotographer. If you're watching this video, you already know that astrophotography gear can get very expensive. And so it's a good idea to ensure your equipment. Well, PPA makes that super easy because membership includes photo care equipment insurance. It's a very nice plan that covers up to $15,000 in equipment coverage. And if something breaks and you need full replacement, it's a $350 flat deductible. Or if you can get your equipment repaired, it's just a $50 flat deductible. And that's a much better deal than I can get with my renter's insurance. So the equipment assurance alone makes PPA worth it for me, but then they also offer many other benefits like photography, education, and training. So I think this is just a really great organization to join. And if it sounds like something that you would be interested in, you can get a special discount if you follow the link in the video description. Okay, let's now go on to connections with these mounts. On the AM5, they are on the front of the mount mostly. There's also one DC out on the side. On the M27, they're almost all on the back of the mount here. And on the EQ6R, they're here on the side. To me, it doesn't make a huge difference where the ports are. But I guess I prefer the EQ6R because it's the easiest. I don't have to duck under the telescope or anything to plug things in and switch the power on.  It's the easiest to see in the dark as I'm plugging things in with just a red light. Black control panels like on the AM5 and the M27 are some of the worst in that regard. They all can be run off DC or an AC adapter, but only the M27 comes with an AC adapter included in the package, which is very much appreciated. I wish they all did that. The EQ6R comes with a cigar-style DC cable with the right connector, of course, for powering it. A lot of people think this is a proprietary power connector on the EQ6R, but it's not. This is called an aviation plug, or also known as a GX series connector. And this particular one is a 12mm 2-pin plug. So it's not the most common, but it's also not proprietary. And I personally applaud Skywatcher for using a locking connector, because I think that makes a lot of sense for power. The AM5 uses the most common type of power connector, which is a barrel plug with a 5.5mm outside diameter and a 2.1mm inside diameter. My unit did not come with any power cable included. The M27 uses a slightly less common 5.5mm plug with a 2.5mm inside diameter, meaning the cables that come with your Pegasus power box or your ASI air will not fit. But what I always have in my kit is several of these little adapters that convert from 2.1 to 2.5mm, because both are fairly common connectors. In terms of hand controllers, each of these mounts comes with a hand controller. On the Skywatcher, it's your standard full Sinscan hand controller for equatorial mounts. With the Ioptron, it is the standard GoToNova hand controller. And if this is your first Ioptron mount, I'll just note this hand controller requires a CR2032 button battery that is not supplied with the mount. You'll also need a mini screwdriver to take off the back plate and install that button battery. The M5 does not come with a traditional full hand controller. Instead, it's just this little joystick. So this is an important differentiation. These hand controllers from Skywatcher and Ioptron both give you tons of different options to control the mount. You can control the mount fully without a computer, just with the hand controller, including having access to giant GoTo catalogs, lots of alignment options, park options, and so forth, right in the hand controller. The ZWO1 just lets you move the mount at different speeds, and that's it. To access most of the features, you're going to need to use an app or an ASI Air or third-party software on a connected computer. Now, this is not necessarily a drawback, as many imagers don't really use the hand controller anyways, because they have all of those options on the computer, so they have no need for the hand controller. Now, in terms of bypassing the hand controllers completely, the M5 makes this quite easy. It has both Wi-Fi as an option or a full USB data connection. It's a B-style port right here on the front, and you can connect that to ASI Air or to a computer if you have the appropriate driver. I tried the ZWO Ascom driver on Windows, and it worked very well with no hiccups. The Skywatcher EQ6R is a bit complex in this regard. I have the Gen 1 EQ6R. The only way I can bypass the hand controller is with an EQ direct cable, which goes from this serial port connector on the mount to USB. In subsequent releases of the EQ6R, I know they've started adding a full USB port, and now with the new RI model, they even have built-in Wi-Fi connection, but I have not tested those. On the driver side for the EQ6R, there are many options. I personally use EQ Ascom, which is part of the free EQ Mod project. Another popular one is Green Swamp Server, and then also popular is ASI Air and other indie-based options. The HEM27 doesn't seem to allow one to fully bypass the hand controller. In my testing, it did need to at least be plugged in for the mount to operate correctly, but if you plug a USB cable into the bottom of the hand controller, most things can be done fully from the computer. For instance, an ioptron commander here. I can sync the date and time from my PC. I can set the latitude and longitude manually, and sync those back to the mount, and of course I can have full control over slewing and parking and all of that from the computer, too. In terms of other connections, they all have ST4 ports, so if you want to auto-guide with ST4, I don't really recommend it because pulse-guiding is better, but it is there if you want it. The EQ6R has a snap port for triggering your DSLR shutter. You have to use the hand controller if you want to do that. The HEM27 has an iPolar port for connecting to the iPolar camera if you have that installed. It also has USB 2.0 pass-through going from the saddle to the back of the mount, and it has two 12-volt power ports, one here at the top and one on the saddle. The ZWO AM5 also has DC out port on the side. Next, let's look at the saddles. If you look online, all of these mounts claim dual saddles that will accept Vixen or Lasmandi D-style plates. But the EQ6R and the AM5 have what I would really call a dual saddle, meaning they are ready to take either style plate at any time. You just slide them right in. The HEM27 can only do one style of plate at a time, and if you want to switch, it requires taking this whole saddle apart. So that's something I'd only want to do indoors since there are eight different screws that you have to remove to make that change. And again, this to me seems like a weird design decision on the Ioptron for a grab-and-go sort of mobile mount. Maybe it doesn't affect most people, but personally I have some telescopes on Vixen plates and some on Lasmandi plates, and so it is mildly annoying that I have to remember to take apart the saddle before I leave the house for an imaging session. My guess is that Ioptron did this to reduce the size and weight of the head because they really have made this a very compact unit. While we're up here on the Ioptron saddle, let me point out that it has a locking clutch right here. And the reason this has a declination clutch is because this is actually a hybrid mount where only the RA axis is driven by a strain-wave gear system while the declination axis is driven normally by a belt and a worm gear. While on the AM5, both RA and DEC are strain-wave gearing, there are no clutches whatsoever, and of course on the EQ6R it's not strain-wave, so both the RA and the DEC have clutches and the mount has to be carefully balanced to work well. On the topic of motors and all that, I know some people are interested in how much sound these mounts make, both when slewing and when tracking, so I am going to do some audio tests here to compare them. Okay, the next thing is weight and payload, and this is where harmonic drive mounts are so very interesting because the mounts don't weigh much, but they can handle a lot of payload. The ZWO AM5 mount head weighs 12.1 pounds, the max payload without counterweights is 28.6 pounds, and the max payload with a counterweight is 44 pounds. The ratio of max payload to mount weight is 3.6 to 1. The iOptron M27A, the one with the iPolar, the mount head alone weighs only 8.2 pounds, the max payload without counterweights is 29.7 pounds, and the max payload with a counterweight is 44 pounds. The ratio of max payload to mount weight is 5.4 to 1. The Skywatcher EQ6R mount head weighs 38 pounds, the max payload without counterweights is not really a feature of this mount, but I can tell you I've put a few pounds on it without counterweights and it still tracks fine. The max payload with a counterweight is 44 pounds. The ratio of max payload to mount weight is 1.2 to 1. So of course the interesting thing here is you, when you're using a counterweight, all these mounts have a max payload of 44 pounds, but the weight of the mount head is really pretty different with the M27 coming in the lightest at just a bit over 8 pounds, the AM5 right behind at just a little over 12 pounds, and then the EQ6R is a very heavy mount at 38 pounds just for the mount head. Now I'd like to talk about the cost of these mounts and then that will also lead into a discussion on the different tripod options and different accessories you can buy optionally with these. The Skywatcher EQ6R at time of recording is $2025 and that includes the steel tripod, the tripod spreader, two 11 pound counterweights and the hand controller. The AM5 is $2000 for just the mount head with no tripod, no counterweights, no counterweight shaft, but just the joystick and the mount head. The M27A, the one that includes iPolar is also about $2000 without tripod counterweight shafts counterweights that includes that full hand controller. And as I said earlier, you can get the M27 without iPolar for now $1888, so about $100 off. Both the AM5 and the M27 have carbon fiber tripods available that are designed to work with them, so for many people I think these tripods are going to be the right choice. The ZW-01, the TC-40 is $300 and the Ioptron-1, which actually works with many of their mounts is $318. These are very similar tripods. The Ioptron-1 gets a little bit taller and then they have different top plates because the way that they connect to the mount head is different. Next up we have cases, I forgot to mention that both of these mounts, the harmonic drive mounts come with really nice cases that holds the mount heads and some accessories. The Skywatcher does not. It does come with some nice foam packaging foam and there's now a third-party option High Point Scientific under their Apertura line makes a very nice case set for the EQ6R mount that includes cases for the mount head, the tripod and the counterweights and you do need to keep the original foam that came with your mount head to use that case set. At the time of recording this case set is on sale for $150 US but the normal price is $250. The EQ6R comes with the counterweight shaft that's actually part of the mount head and the counterweights, the Hem-27 and the AM-5 do not come with any kind of counterweight system because you can use them without counterweights up to about 25 pounds. If you do want a counterweight bar, the ZW-01 costs $39, the Ioptron-1 costs $45. And then you're going to need an appropriate counterweight. In my tests I just used a Skywatcher-1 with the insert removed. And sorry for the condition of my counterweights I do plan to repaint them soon. All of these mounts have optional pier extensions which can help bring the mount head up from the tripod and avoid your long telescope hitting the tripod in certain positions like when it's pointed near the zenith. And these pier extensions seem to also allow you to more easily adapt the harmonic drive mounts to beefier tripods, which would probably be a good idea if you're really planning to push these mounts to their limits. In any case, when we total everything and include cases and tripods which are both sort of essential items all of these mounts end up being around the same total price which is $2,300 US. You can bump up the harmonic drive mounts up to about 2400 total if you need the optional counterweight stuff. Now one thing to note about the Hem-27 is like most Ioptron mounts they do offer an EC version with high precision encoders. That costs $3,248 US today and since I haven't tried it I can't really tell you if it's a worthy upgrade. But Ioptron claims that you can forego guiding with this EC version so that could make for a very interesting proposition. But with the normal Hem-27 you definitely do need guiding and fast guiding. I was using 0.5 second exposures. So let's now move on to the imaging tests I've done. I first tested the three mounts with this setup. This payload weighs 15 pounds or 6.8 kilograms. The focal length on this scope the stellar view SVQ-86 is 464 millimeters. The camera is the ASI 2600MC and that makes the image scale 1.67 arc seconds per pixel. With the EQ-6R I did use counterweights and bounced the mount of course and with the harmonic drive mounts I did not use any counterweights. I wanted to use the same polar alignment method with all three mounts. So on this first night I tested I used my QHY pole master attached to the end of the dovetail like this with a Buckeye Stargazer 3D printed adapter. So let's first look at the guide logs for each mount using Andy Galasso's PhD2 log viewer. We're starting here with the ZWO AM5's calibration. So what you're looking for here is that it's basically at a 90 degree angle which this one is pretty close. I would call that a successful calibration and then here is the guide graph. It's a little bit over one hour of data and I've set it up so I think this is the default behavior that the dithering sections are excluded from the statistics. That's these little gray vertical lines but it is interesting to see where the mount is dithering because then you can see how quickly it settles and the settling time on the AM5 looks very good. Even when we have a very big movement right here about seven and a half arc seconds the star moved it then recovered pretty quickly and went back to normal. The other thing to look at in this guide graph are spikes in guiding. Those are always what we're concerned with. We have too many spikes and then it takes a long time to recover. You can get trailed stars. Now most of the spikes with the AM5 are looked to be around two arc seconds to two and a half arc seconds spikes in guiding. That means the star moved that much on screen and it recovered very quickly which is sort of what you'd expect in a harmonic drive mount I think. I don't really see any big issues. This section right here, this image looks a little rockier but then some other images look very smooth in terms of the guiding. The headline number is the overall total RMS over the one hour that it was guiding and that for the AM5 was 0.79 arc seconds. Pretty good. Let's next look at calibration for the Ioptron M27. This to me looks textbook even better than the AM5. That's just exactly 90 degrees I think. And then here is the guide graph. The one thing that concerns me a little bit here is how long it would take to recover after a spike in deck because you can see with some of these deck spikes like this one here it took a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds to recover back down to the normal baseline. That might be concerning especially at a higher focal length than what we're dealing with here. The faster it can recover from a spike the less likely that's going to result in any kind of degradation of your actual image meaning star trails. One interesting thing here to note is that remember the M27 is a hybrid mount where only the RA axis is the strain wave gearing. And if we compare the RA to the deck, this is the deck and this is the RA, you can see they do look pretty different there. So it's interesting if we look at the total RMS over the one hour and 19 minutes, it is 1.14 arc seconds. Okay, there's the calibration for the EQ6R, looks good, looks textbook. And here is the guide graph. I did exclude the first few seconds here because I think I was messing around with focus still. You know, this looks really good, you can see there's these spikes, all these spikes are when it was dithering basically and then it recovers very quickly. So if we actually look at the results in between these gray bars, you can see it's very good. Okay, headline number here, total RMS is 0.74 arc seconds, so very similar to what we got with the AM5. The loser of this night, I guess, in terms of numbers was the ioptron M27. But let's now actually look at the images because the images are the ground truth, of course. So we'll head over to PICS Insight and look at those. Okay, so first, again, this is one hour of data for each one. There's the AM5, there's the M27, there's the EQ6R. And what I want you to see here is just that at first glance, these are identical. You might think that I am tricking you and these are actually the same image, I assure you they're not. You can see slight little differences, but I mean, they look very, very similar, right? When we just look at the whole image like that. So let's zoom in and see if we can see any differences when zoomed in to about 200%. And I would say, no. Now, keep in mind, the image scale here was 1.67 arc seconds per pixel. The average RMS on the M27 was like 1.1 arc seconds. On these two, it was under an arc second. So you wouldn't really expect to see any differences, but we don't. Looking at the smallest stars in the image, I can find that same small star in each one. There might be slight differences with noise levels here because I took one hour with one mount, then I switched the telescope, took one hour, and then took the last hour. So Orion was in different parts of the sky slightly, so the noise might be slightly different, but in terms of the stellar performance, how round and small the stars are, they look identical. On my second test with all these mounts, I used a much bigger telescope. This payload weighs around 34 pounds or 15 kilograms. This is the Asgar 130PHQ, which has a 1,000 millimeter focal length. And the camera is the QHY533M, so that makes the image scale 0.78 arc seconds per pixel. On this night, I didn't have the right Pullmaster adapter for a Las Mandi plate, so I instead puller-aligned each mount with Sharp Cap Pro's puller-alignment routine, and that just uses the guide scope and camera and plate-solving to assist in puller alignment. Okay, so we're looking at the calibration for the AM5 with that heavier telescope. I didn't have quite as much time this night, so this is not an hour's worth of data. It's 35 minutes, but I think in 35 minutes we can still get a pretty good picture of what was happening. Just like last time, I excluded the dithers, so the total RMS with this heavier setup was 0.9 arc seconds, and if you remember before, it was like 0.79. Now, something to keep in mind with that number is we can't be sure if it was actually the heavier setup that caused this number to go up a little bit. It may have just been sky conditions being different between the two nights. So, really pretty similar, though, performance to last time with the AM5. We have some spikes, but they're, well, they're going a little bit higher than maybe last time around. Some of these are just a bit over 2.5 arc seconds. Okay, here's the calibration for the M27. Again, looks great, and here's 35 minutes of guiding, and the M27 was a lot closer to the AM5 this night. So, still not quite as good as 0.97 arc seconds total RMS, but very close. I mean, that's a rounding error, definitely. And whatever problem I was having with all of those sort of spikes in deck that took a while to recover the other nights, they're not showing up here, right? So, if I just look at the deck axis, you can see even when we do have a spike, it's recovering a lot quicker. So, that's interesting. I don't remember changing much in terms of settings, but maybe I changed them a little bit, but I'm not a master at PhD2 settings. Here is the calibration for the EQ6R. This looks like a little funky. It's a little bit wider than 90 degrees. I'm not sure why. And here is the guiding. Now, the total RMS with the EQ6R is one arc second exactly. The conditions were getting a lot worse at this point. So, sometimes guiding won't get a lot worse even though you have high clouds, but there was high clouds. So, I'm not sure how much that affected the performance of the EQ6R here, but in any case, it did pretty well. Okay, so here is the ZWOAM5, there is the M27, and there is the EQ6R. And again, the EQ6R looks worse here. We're not getting as many details in the dust, but that was because of conditions, sky conditions, not because of the performance of the mount. So, otherwise, I think these look very similar in terms of what we got, but let's zoom in and see if we can see any differences here. And not really. I mean, I think that the AM5 looks the best, but it was also the mount that I started with, and I think the sky conditions were the best at the beginning of the night. Other than that, I would say these look very similar in terms of how round and small the stars are. The stars look a little bit different over here on the EQ6R, but again, I think that is conditions and not actually anything we can conclude about the tracking or guiding of the mount. So, I hope this was helpful. I mean, basically, what I proved here in the performance section was any of these mounts can handle imaging setups within their limits. And if you're an experienced imager, you're gonna have no problem with any of these mounts. So, the real deciding factor is probably going to be other things. The only kind of performance difference that I saw was that the AM5 on paper guided a little bit better than the M27, and the EQ6R settled faster than either of the smaller mounts. You're now seeing everyone who supports me and this YouTube channel over on patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. It is an excellent community of dedicated amateur astrophotographers, people who want to learn more. We have over 800 members now. There's an active Discord community you can get involved in, and I can't thank my Patreon community enough. I am now doing this full-time thanks to all of you, and it really means the world to me to get that kind of support and allows me to make these videos and to really pursue what I want to do in life, which is help people learn astrophotography. So, thank you to everyone who supports me on Patreon, and if you enjoy this channel, I think, you know, you can get a lot of benefits out of joining my Patreon community. It starts at just $1 a month, and you get all kinds of support and a monthly Zoom call where you can ask me questions directly. We do a monthly imaging challenge, different objects every month, and you can see sort of people's different results. We pick a couple winners every month, and so there's a lot of fun stuff going on. So, if interested, head over to patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. Until next time, this has been Nico Carver. Happy holidays and clear skies.


Okay, Chavatzalim and Chavatzalot, look it up. Today's topic is spiritual self-defense. Spiritual, you say? Is anything wrong with you, Sam? Are you more drunk than usual? Actually, it's my first sip of the day. And had I been inclined to believe in the, to adhere to the delusional disorder known as religion, I would have said, oh my God, but since I'm not, I should just say, heaven for fend. Look it up again. To look it up in one video, that's a bumper crop. Okay, my name is Sam Baknin, I'm the author of Malignan Self-Lab, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, Wostov-on-Don, Russian Federation, and a long time member of the faculty of the Commonwealth of International Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada with an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria. And this consumed half the video. Let's see what time we have left for the actual topic. The actual topic is spirituality and how spiritual self-defense is essential in the recovery and healing from narcissism. But what is spirituality? How can we use a word without defining it well? What about the role of terminology? So here's the thing. We human beings, we are creatures made of dreams. Our fabric is the fabric of fantasy and language constitutes us, makes us, helps us to become. We bring other people into existence and into our lives via speech, via imaginings and through the good services of dreaming and fantasizing. We are ethereal and ephemeral, passing thoughts. And so, although we can be clinically and technically reduced to cells and then to atoms and then to quarks, atomic particles, still, there is this extra something which science and philosophy hitherto have failed to capture. This extra something is called consciousness, it's called the soul, it's called the spirit, it's been called many things throughout the ages. But we all know that even if we were to drill down layer after layer, layer, level after level, we would still be, we would still remain face to face with this apparently unresolvable enigma of what it is that makes us who we are, what is this essence, what is the quiddity of being human. And so we, some people call it spirituality. The truth is that there is a bridge between the mind, the abode of the spirit supposedly and the brain, the hardware and the software. And this bridge is language. Using words and narratives, pieces of fiction, stories, we organize external reality, but even much more importantly, we affect our internal landscape. It has been proven beyond any doubt that words, for example, rearrange the brain. On a physical level, they rewire the brain. It's been proved that exposure to messaging does change the frequencies of waves emitted by multiple units of neurons. It's been proven that stories can affect and shape behavior. So language is the bridge. We mediate ourselves and the world. We introduce each other to one another via language, via words, via narratives, via stories, via hopes, via dreams. Stuff that no scientist can capture in any while can never be studied in a laboratory and evaporates the minute you try to nail it down. Call it the spiritual uncertainty principle. Spirituality is a concern for or sensitivity to things of the spirit or the soul. And it is frequently opposed or opposed in contradistinction to materiality. So there's material and there is spiritual. And as I just explained, this is grossly misleading because the brain is neuroplastic and abstracts, abstract thinking, words, symbols, rewire and change the brain fundamentally, profoundly, and very often irrevocably. So this is where spirituality becomes a facet of materiality or the other way around. Materiality is just the manifestation of some abstract principles and some linguistic concepts. And so no healing and recovery from narcissistic abuse or any other type of abuse or any other type of trauma for that matter is complete without this dimension. They land in between the material and the spiritual. No process of personal transformation, of regaining one's mental health, functionality. No such process is complete without catering to the body, which is the hardware, catering to the mind, which is the software, and then taking care of the language that bridges hardware and software. This is known in psychology as the spiritual factor, any moral, religious or mystical belief that somehow plays a role. Influences, behaviors, emotions, thoughts, cognitions, somehow alters our internal environment, introduces inhibitions or disinhibits. Somehow affects the brain in ways that can be visualized in functional magnetic resonance imaging. Any such belief, any such article of faith, any such mystical experience, any such religious practice, any such moral teaching that interface with, get entwined with and interlaced with our hardware, the brain itself, thereby changing our minds in effect. These are known as spiritual factors. Now I don't want to venture too far. When people take things to extreme, they come up with nonsensical phenomena and nonsensical claims. One such example is spiritual or faith healing, the treatment of psychological illness by means of remote praying, laying hands on people and so on and so forth. It is possible that certain placebo practices can and do have an effect on measurable physiological and psychological outcomes. It's even likely, I would say. So if you believe that people laying hands on you can change the state of your mind, your mood and your emotional regulation and your mood ability, if you believe in that, it can come to pass. Your belief is the critical factor, not the outside environment and not any actions or inaction by anyone. In effect, you are in charge of your own psychology. You have the absolute power to impact it, to alter it, to get ahead with it, to stop it, to get rid of unwanted elements, to introduce new ones.  And whatever tools may be of help, prayer, laying of hands, mystical experiences, if they work, if they induce in you the change that you seek, by all means. Psychotherapy, to a large extent, is a superstitious practice. It is not founded on hard science. Psychology is not a science. Absolutely not. It's a pseudoscience. It doesn't resemble physics. My PhD is in physics, I can tell. It does not resemble physics. It does not resemble even mathematics. The manipulation of abstract symbols via axioms and rules of derivation and reference. It's not as rigorous even as this. The subject matter of psychology is you, and you change from one minute to another. You absorb information from the environment. You then react to it by modifying yourself, by using different self-states. You can't be measured twice. You can't repeat any experiment in psychology. That's the great replication crisis. So forget all this nonsense. That psychology is a science, and when you attend therapy, you're talking to a scientist.  That other person has had exposure to the thoughts and ideas of previous generations of psychologists.  Yes, that other person, the psychotherapist, has something to offer you. But whatever it is that he or she offer you is not science. And in this sense, psychotherapy is indistinguishable from religious practice. It is the use of words to affect change in a tissue in your body known as the brain. That is all the talk therapy does. It changes your brain, and hopefully, consequently, has an effect, a long-lasting effect, on your mind. That is precisely what happens in a church, or in a synagogue, or in a mosque, or in a monastery. People use words, written words in scriptures, spoken words in sermons. People use words to change your mind. So faith healing, religious healing, spiritual healing, are for all intents and purposes forms of psychotherapy. Mental healing is the process of alleviating or attempting to alleviate mental or physical illnesses through the power of the mind. Typically, using such methods as visualization, suggestion, the conscious manipulation of metaphorical energy flows, psychic healing, or faith healing. That's a treatment of physical or mental illness via spiritual means. Everything is symbolic. The words used by spiritual or psychic healers, their symbols, their metaphors, their allegories. Similarly, crystal healing uses a physical object, a crystal, to ramify, to embody, to symbolize the process of internal healing that only you can induce in yourself. You see, you are in charge, always. Nothing comes from the outside. Everything that you attempt to do with other people amounts to triggering. Psychotherapy, spiritual healing, crystal healing, faith healing, religious healing, all these forms of healing are triggers. They trigger in you cascades of emotions, of memories. They alter your identity, your perception of the past, your hopes for the future. They make you a different person. All this has to do with the concept known as the empirical self. We all have two types of self, the nominative self and the empirical self. The empirical self is the self that you know. It is not the self itself. It is not the self that knows. It is the self as you know it. So each one of us has a self in my work. It's not unitary. It's an assemblage of self states. But each one of us has this organizing principle, hermenoitic explanatory principle. Each one of us has this core that somehow guides us and provides us with the illusion of a continuous identity across time and space. And then we know that this self exists. But who does the knowing? Who knows? Who is it in us that knows that we have a self? It's another self. It's the empirical self. So in the psychology of William James, the empirical self consists of two elements. The material self, which is everything material that can be seen as belonging to the self, neurons, the brain, etc. But it is coupled with the social self as perceived by other people and the spiritual self, the self that is closest to one core subjective experience of oneself. So according to William James and other thinkers in the 19th century, we didn't have a single self. We had an infinite regression of selves. We had what I call in my work, Hall of Mirrors. There is a self somewhere there or an assemblage of self states, doesn't matter, a repertory of self states. There is a self. And then there is this self as seen by other people and that is the social self. And then there is this self as it is experienced by us, experienced by you, the way you experience yourself and that is the empirical self. It's the me. When you say me, when you say this is, this is the experience of yourself. So earlier thinkers in psychology made a distinction between I and me. Me is the way you experience the I and the I is the nominative self. The self is nowhere of the self rather than the self so known. These are the two types of self. Why am I mentioning this? Because it seems that the nominative self, when it observes the empirical self, canon does create change in the empirical self. This is very reminiscent of quantum physics. When we observe an elementary particle in quantum physics, we change its direction and its position and its momentum. In order to observe an elementary particle in physics, in the world, we have to bombard it with photons, with light particles. The light particles hit upon the elementary particle that we are observing and transfer energy to it so that they change the direction, momentum and position of the particle being observed. Similarly, when the nominative self observes the empirical self, the very act of observation, the very act of self-consciousness, the very process of being self-aware, the very concept of the existence of a self. All these things, all these processes change the self. So introspection, observing yourself, becoming self-aware, developing a self-image, a self-perception and a self-conception, they change the self. Now what does religion do? What does spirituality do? What do mystical experiences do? They take you outside your body. They force you to observe yourself from the outside. They encourage self-awareness, self-conception, self-consciousness. In short, the spiritual dimension of healing and recovery enforces, enhances, buttresses, strengthens the nominative self when it observes the empirical self. And because introspection this way becomes much more intense, much more filled with energy, the changes that are subsequent are much stronger. Religion, spirituality, mysticism, force you into a highly intensive form of introspection by coercing you in a way to stand aside and see yourself via the gaze of an agent. For example, via the gaze of God, via the gaze of some mystical principle. Suddenly you perceive yourself from the outside and this is a tremendous impact on your empirical mind. An impact which invariably is a healthy impact as it changes you for the better, makes you stronger and more resilient. This lecture is a time travel. I've gone back to proto-modern psychology, modern psychology that just started to emerge in the 90th century, in Germany, a little later in France and Austria and at the same time in the United States. Why am I going back that far? What's wrong with cognitive theory? What's wrong with even psychoanalytic theory? Why do I have to go 150 years back? Because we lost something along the way. Freud, Sigmund Freud and Wundt and other psychologists, they tried to convert psychology into an exact science similar to physics or chemistry. Freud said that he is describing the dynamics of the mind the same way Newton described the dynamics of bodies. Wundt created the laboratory to study psychology and that was in 1895. The Germans and the Austrians, when they took over psychology they tried to render it an exact science similar perhaps to biology or even to medicine. But psychology cannot be reduced to materialism. Psychology is not the sum total of the components that make our brain or our intestines or even our body. Psychology deals with the emergent phenomena, with the epiphenomena. Psychology deals with behaviors and traits and cognitions and emotions that are irreducible to the hardware that produced them. Think of it this way. If you take oxygen and you take hydrogen, oxygen is not wet, hydrogen is not flowing, but if you put oxygen and hydrogen together you get water. Water is wet. Water is flowing unlike oxygen, unlike hydrogen. We call this emergent phenomena or epiphenomena. It's the same with the human body and the human brain. If we were tomorrow to obtain 100% knowledge about every nook and cranny and crevice of the brain we would still not understand the human mind because the human mind is not the combination of all the various aspects and parts and structures of the brain. It's not. It is an epiphenomenome. It's an emergent phenomenon. It's like the wetness of water. The fact that water is wet does not come from oxygen, does not come from hydrogen and never mind how much knowledge we acquire about the molecule of water. We still can't say why it is wet. We can't reduce it. It's irreducible. And the psychologists that preceded Sigmund Freud, as I regard, I think to a large extent the German schools and the Austrian schools corrupted psychology. By imbuing it grandiosly with a pretension to science they destroyed the irreducible spiritual dimension of psychology. Spiritual, not in the sense that I believe in God or I believe in souls or I believe in spirits, I don't believe. I'm a scientist. I observe.  And as long as psychology pretends to be a science, it gives up on numerous extremely effective therapeutic tools. Prayer, for example, praying to God is a highly effective tool of therapy. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to discuss it in psychology because psychology is a science. It is serious. Psychology is a scientist. This is an example of grandiose Nazism in action, actually. So that's why I go back to the psychologists of the 19th century that preceded Freud. And at that time, there was a distinction between what was called as the Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie. I'm sorry, this is German. The Germans put together multiple nouns and create the longest words in human history. So Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie is one such word. The Germans divided the German psychologists that preceded Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis and Wund and his laboratories, the German psychologists which were closer to William James, for example, in thinking at least. They divided psychology or the study of the mental mind of the human mind. They divided it to two types, the spiritual type of study and the natural type of study, the Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie and the Naturwissenschaftliche Psychologie. So these were the two types. The spiritual study was defined by German academics in the 19th century as the psychology which deals with the science of the mind or the spirit. German psychologists at the time were Cartesian. They accepted the duality of mind and body, which was first described in rigorously by René Descartes in the 17th century. So they said, we need one branch of psychology to study the mind, to study the spirit, and we need another branch of psychology to study the body, to study the brain. And so the first branch, the spiritual branch, was intended to encompass the moral, spiritual, historical, and human aspects of behavior. And it's very similar to what we call today social sciences. The natural branch of psychology was supposed to be experimental, was founded on experiments and laboratory techniques. And the Germans at the time, the German psychologists, they said, you can use experiments, you can study psychology in the laboratory, but this is likely to limit your knowledge. You can study only specific classes of phenomena, for example, perception, for example, memory, these you can study in a laboratory. But there are many things you cannot capture in a laboratory and you cannot study via experiments. These techniques, the Germans said, are inappropriate for studying higher mental processes such as language, social interactions. And so the early German psychologists, the ones before Wundt and before Freud, they legitimized the spiritual treatment of trauma. And in the recovery and healing from narcissistic abuse, we need to reintroduce this dimension into any and all treatment modalities. We need to accept that people are not laboratory rats, they are not basic animals. People have a mind and we still know close to nothing about the mind. In millennia of practice and learning, we have come to develop very effective techniques of modifying the mind, treating the mind, healing the mind, anything from yoga and meditation in the east to religion, monotheistic religions in the north, in the west.  This is wrong.  Because these are by far the most efficacious techniques we have to treat trauma, religion, mystical experiences, faith, faith, self-regulation and self-modulation via belief, via auto-suggestion, these are far, far more efficient than any therapy I'm aware of. And yet we don't use them. Psychologists regard religion as competition. They regard spirituality as an incursion on their sacred territory and turf. Very few psychologists use spirituality in their practice. The Germans at the time had another concept, verstehen de psychologie, understanding psychology. It was an approach to psychology advocated by a philosopher actually. His name was Wilhelm Dilthi. Dilthi argued that psychology belongs to the human sciences and not to the natural sciences. He said that psychology can never be explained using natural laws like the laws of physics. He said that for psychology the object of understanding is lived experience, a labeness, a labeness in German. The goal must be the articulation of the meaning of the experience from the perspective of the person living it. It was an amazingly right direction. It was the right direction for psychology. And then psychology was hijacked and abducted by wannabe, wannabe scientists, wannabe physicists. There was physics in the end of the 90th century, was all the craze. Physicists like Albert Einstein became celebrities. They were like the rock stars of the period. So psychologists also wanted to be rock stars. They also wanted to be physicists. And they dumped the approach of understanding psychology. They dumped Dilthi's writings. But his work was genius. He said that the only guide to psychology is the lived experience, the way we experience life itself and what is the perspective of the person as he experiences his life. And he said that the aim of psychology is to heal and to cure. It's a branch of the social sciences. It's a branch of medicine, if you wish, but not of physics. And he said, how are we to help people? How are we to cure people? If we don't consult them, if we don't talk to them as equals, if we don't inquire as to how they experience their existence, their pain, their trauma. And this led later to the development of phenomenology and to some extent existentialism. Existentialism is a school of philosophy. It started actually in the 17th century with Blaise Pascal and later with the Danish philosopher Cern Kirkegaard and with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Fjodor Dostoevsky, the famous author, was in existentialism. But existentialism is a rigorous philosophical discipline, was first described by Martin Heidegger, another German. I don't know what's happening today. It's a German lecture. Heidegger came with the concept of design, which I will describe a bit later. And then there was the French philosopher Jean Paul Sautre and so on and so forth. Existentialism was a rebellion, rebellion against systematic scientific philosophy, a rebellion against science as a guide in human affairs. An emphasis on the human condition rather than the study of the human condition. So existentialism said that human beings are thrown, they are thrust into the world. The world is given. The world is contingent. There's nothing you can do about it. It's a take it or leave it proposition.  You feel as if you've just received a life sentence with a death sentence following it. It's as if the whole world is a huge prison. And in order to convert the world from a menacing form of incarceration to a livable, even lovable experience, in order to accomplish this feat, you need to imbue the world with meaning. You need to use your values and your authenticity to render the world less absurd, less purposeless. You need to perform this task of changing the world in order to render it acceptable and palatable. The alternative is suicide. So when you take on the world the way a baby takes on the world in the separation, individuation phase at age two years, the baby, let's go of mommy. He says goodbye to mommy and he explores the world. Sartor says that this project of exploration continues throughout life. It's a lifelong project. And because you are constantly exploring, constantly learning, permanently or perpetually changing, you never have a fixed essence. You never have an inherent nature. You never have a core identity. You never have a unitary self. Now you're beginning to see the philosophical roots of my thinking. By accepting this burden of the responsibility to change the world with your decisions and choices, it's a burden because it's a responsibility and you will be held accountable and you will pay the price if you make the wrong decisions and choices. But you lovingly accept this price. You know that the cost of life is worth it. The price is worth the price. And so you accept your fallibility, your imperfection. In short, your humanity. In the recovery and healing from narcissistic abuse, you need to accept that you have made mistakes. You need to accept that you had contributed to your own abuse and that to the trauma that had been inflicted on you. You need to realize that you have made wrong choices, wrong decisions. You need to assume responsibility for your part of the calamity that had befell you. This is not moral responsibility. The abuser is morally responsible for abusing you. You were victimized.  You were not guilty. It's not a question of guilt. There's a big difference between guilt and responsibility. You are not guilty for having been victimized, but you're responsible for having found yourself in the condition to be victimized, for having generated the circumstances, for having been less vigilant, for not loving yourself enough, for having chosen the wrong mate, etc., etc., mate selection. So existentialism places on your shoulders the burden of choice and all the consequences of your decisions. In this sense, existentialism makes you more human.  But to do so, existentialism is forced to introduce concepts such as alienation, authenticity, freedom, in short, the human spirit. Existentialism, ironically, is a spiritual movement. An existential philosophy or existentialist philosophy is a highly spiritual philosophy, similar to humanistic, existentialist psychology, I'm sorry, is a highly spiritual form of psychology, similar to humanistic psychology. I recommend to victims of narcissistic abuse to avoid the materialistic, pseudoscientific treatment modalities, starting first and foremost with psychoanalysis and all the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic schools. They're wrong for you. You need to accept responsibility for your contributions to what had happened to you, and so you need to modify yourself via, for example, cognitive behavior therapy. You need to use every tool at your disposal so you need not neglect the spiritual aspect of you, the mind, and all the techniques available to you to modify your mind in a way that would be conducive to much better outcomes in the future. So you need to resort to psychotherapies and treatment modalities that are holistic, comprehensive, and collaborative. Types of treatment where the therapist is your equal. Together with you, the therapist explores your inner landscape.  The therapist is not superior to you, is not a scientist, is not a medical doctor, is not dictating to you. He is there to facilitate, is there to help, but you own the process. And it is only you, through your powers of belief in conviction and suggestion and faith, only you can change yourself sufficiently to reintegrate with society, function again, and avoid such mistakes in the future. Trauma is a learning opportunity. It should not be wasted by limiting ourselves to a repertory of techniques which are essentially manipulative and materialistic. That would be a serious mistake. Existentially psychology is a general approach to psychological theory and practice. It derives from existentialism. It emphasizes the subjective meaning of the human experience, not the objective theory, but the subjective experience, the uniqueness of the individual, and the personal responsibility reflected in every choice you ever made. It was pioneered by the Swiss existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger. You never heard of him, probably. It's a great pity. The existentialist psychology, in my view, if it is coupled with CBT or schema therapy, is the most powerful combination in tackling trauma. And then, having graduated existentialist therapy, you should try logotherapy. I have a video dedicated to logotherapy on this channel. Existentialist psychology, or existential psychology, has a central concept. It's called being in the world. In the theory of existential psychology, the clinical approach, being in the world is typical only to humans. According to existential theory, being in the world is a uniquely human experience. Animals in animate objects, abstract concepts, symbols exist. They have a being, but they don't have a being in the world. A being in the world emerges as a concept in Germany that is very similar to the sign. It's a term used by Martin Heidegger, I mentioned it earlier. And in France, in Germany and in France, almost simultaneously, what it means is being is an act. It's not a passive state. Being is not inert. It's not like something you don't have to think of, something that happens to you, your kind of passive recipient of the process of being. No, according to existential theory and existential philosophy, existential psychology, human existence is an activity. It's not a state. It's not a condition. It's not a circumstance. It's an activity. Human beings, their being is about becoming. They constantly become. Change is being. The world is a much richer and more meaningful ground for human life. It's not the environment. The environment is a given. The environment is there. The environment is a precondition. It's a take it or leave it proposition. I mean, that's it. That's your environment. No, the world includes multiple environments. So you have a choice where the environment, the concept of environment is devoid of choice, renders you passive, a hostage, kidnapped somehow. The concept of world in existential psychology is much more nuanced, much more diverse, much more pluralistic. The world is a sum total of all environments, environments that exist, but even much more importantly, environments that you can make happen, environments that you create, environments that you make with your own choices and decisions, environments that reflect who you are, environments that suit you much better than environments created by other people. In short, you create your own world. Being in the world is about meaning. It's about growth. It's about reconstruction. Recovery and healing is about creating a world in which you are not traumatized, about creating an environment in which you are not in pain. Shifting, moving away, using your power, your agency, your self-efficacy, your autonomy and your independence to say, I'm out of here. I'm out of my trauma. I'm out of my pain. I'm out of my hurt because I am an agent of action. I have the power. Only I have the power because I'm a human being. I have the power to create the world. Human beings are creators of worlds because the universe is a dream. Any physicist would tell you this. The universe is made of abstracts, not of matter. And so, we can dream the universe into existence. We can fantasize other people into our lives, and similarly, we can fantasize them out of our lives. We are in control. That's the message of existential psychology. When you attend other types of treatment, you are called patient. You are the patient.  And you come to this therapist and the therapist is going to fix you. You need fixing. That's not the attitude in existential psychology. In existential psychology, you are the fixer. You are the healer. You are the rescuer. You are the savior. You are your own messiah. No one else is coming to save you. No one else can, even if they want to. Isn't this the greatest lesson? The biggest lesson in abusive relationships? No one can save you. No one can help you. There is no rescue.  This is the bad news, and this is also the best news imaginable.  So the very concept, the very idea of identity of self in existential psychology is a dynamic process. That's why I'm much closer to existentialism than to other schools of thought, because existentialism is dynamic. And in my work, there's no unitary fixed self. In my work, there are assemblages of self states that are very dynamic and change all the time. I keep saying that men, human beings, men is not a pond or a puddle. Men is a river. Men is in flux. You never meet the same person twice. So there's a world design in existential psychology.  It's the essential model of being in the world. Each and every one of us has this model, this narrative. Each and every one of us has this theory about the world, the internal working model, a theory of mind. We all try to make sense of the external environment, the universe, other people by telling ourselves explanatory, organizing hermeneutic stories. So the world design is a concept that was introduced by the existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger, which I mentioned earlier. The person's world design includes the way in which a person integrates the totality of his or her personality with the world. She experiences the world. But what is experience? What does it mean when you use the word experience? What does it mean? It means the meeting point, the connection between who you are in the world.  And if you study this experience, if you focus on this experience, you learn everything you need to know about the world and about yourself, and about yourself in the world. So understanding a person's world design is essential to understanding the person. This is the French concept, you know, a French-German concept. Heidegger called it the sign. Heidegger was a philosopher and he has written the most incomprehensible texts in human history, I think. I don't understand the word he's saying most of the time. But luckily, the sign is a concept that is accessible. So Martin Heidegger said that the sign is a particular kind of being. It's a form of being that is manifest in humans. Humans exist as the sign. The sign is the way humans exist. It's the way of being and it allows humans access to a larger question of being in general, not only their being, but general being, like what is existence? What is the world? So the sign is the principle of being. And because people experience the sign, because they experience being, they can understand the being of other things, of animals, of the world, and potentially of abstract entities like God and so on. So people feel that they exist because exactly like the rest of the world, they experience the sign. The sign gives them access to the world. Their own being is the key to the world's being. Now, in existential psychology and in existential therapy, we use the concept of the sign because if you have the master key to the world, then you're in charge. It empowers you.  No pain can demolish you. No hurt can eradicate you.  You're the master. You're Godlike, but in a good way, not in a grandiose way. You're Godlike because the sign is God's mind. God made things happen. Yes, he's the creator. God brought being into being. God is the source of being. God is the ultimate the sign, but you are a particle of God. You have as much the sign as God, only on a much smaller level, more diminutive. But in this sense, God is in you and you are in God. And so praying to God, mystical experiences, faith, these are all ways of connecting to yourself. And that is why they're so effective. They're so effective because you're inducing change in yourself by identifying with the world or with God, if you wish, via the breach of being. What is common to you and God? What is common to you in the world? Being. It's the only thing that's common to everything. God exists. Whatever else we may say about him, the only thing that is indisputable across religions and faiths is that God exists. But you exist also. You're much more limited than God, of course, by any attribute. But you still exist. And for the brief moment that you are on this planet, you exist the same way God exists. You both access the same principle, which is the principle of the sign and essence. Essence is the ontological reality at the core of something that makes it what it is and not something else. You are unique and special, not in the grandiose narcissistic sense.   They have a positive definition and they have a negative definition. On the one hand, you are you. On the other hand, you are not anyone else. Positive identity and negative identity. You are necessarily you. You can never be anyone else. Never mind how hard you try. Your essence is necessary. It's a great argument against suicide. Your essence is necessary to the world. If you take yourself out of this world, the world will never be the same. You see all the trillions of stars and billions of galaxies, God himself, billions of people on earth, probably trillions of aliens, sentient and intelligent, more than us. This totality of creation, if you kill yourself, would no longer be the same ever by definition. If you remove yourself from reality, you are changing the entire universe to the furthest atom in the furthest galaxy. That is the power that we have. We have this power and it is the power of God because we are beings and God is a being. God is a different being qualitatively and quantitatively, but we are united in existence and we do have the power, power of choice, to alter, to transform and to change God's creation. For example, by committing suicide, but we can also change God's creation by healing, by behaving differently, by making choices and decisions, by being ourselves or by not being ourselves. In short, everything you do has universe-wide implications, universal implications. This is your essential property. Concert of essence in psychology is relevant to discussions of personhood, including questions of human agency and the self. It is important for personality theories. It's not incidental, it's not a fringe issue. We have essential properties. There is an essence there. Maybe there is no unitary self, but there is an essence and this is known in psychology as essentialism and it's intimately connected with the concept of authenticity and existentialism.  There's a famous example of the waiter in Jean Paul Sartor's book when he sees a waiter. He says the waiter is not authentic because the waiter is imitating other waiters before him, is imitating waiterhood, so he's not authentic.  And similarly, you never coerce people, you never abuse people because coercing and abusing people provides you with false information about other people, about the environment, about the world at large. And when you are fed with false information, it falsifies you.  Take away any one of these bricks and the whole edifice collapses. You need to be surrounded by truth, external and internal in order to be true to yourself. If you're fed by falsehoods, if you're surrounded by fake people, you will never be true to yourself, never. And a huge part of healing from narcissistic abuse and recovery is to expunge, to purge toxic people, fake fallacious people in your life on the one hand, and to insist on truth in all your transactions with other people and with the world at large. A therapist supposedly should provide you the truth. He should be caring, he should care about you. If you care about someone, you'll never lie to them. Caring goes hand in hand with truth. What is a test of love?  If you're being lied to, that person doesn't love you. That's the only test I accept. Some people will say, yeah, but you have to lie. I lied to her because I didn't want her to be hurt. I didn't want her to be in pain. That's not love. That's manipulation. Caring and love are predicated on 100% truth telling, however painful. And the therapist supposedly provides you with this, provides you with a mirror where you can see the truth and he does it in a caring and loving fashion. In existentialism, authenticity is a mode of being. Humans can achieve authenticity by accepting the burden of freedom, the responsibility of choice. When you say, I'm in charge, my decisions and choices shape the world, at that moment you become authentic. That is authenticity. When you don't deflect, when you don't lie, when you don't prevaricate, when you don't excuse yourself, when you don't shift the blame, when you don't guilt trip, when you face the world bravely and you say, this is me, this is what I've done and this is a price I have to pay for better or for worse. At that moment you are 100% unadulterated you. That is authenticity. Authenticity is freedom to choose choice and the responsibility that comes with choice. Constructing your own values and meanings in a universe that otherwise is meaningless. You imbue the universe with meaning. The universe is an object. A glass is meaningless unless you fill it with wine. At that moment it acquires its functionality. It acquires its reason to be. The universe is meaningless without us. Had all the sentient intelligent creatures in the universe vanished, the universe would have been rendered dead. A dead object. A meaningless object. And even in religion, for example in the Kabbalah, God created sentient intelligent beings because he needed them to heal him and to complete him. They have a mission and the mission is to allow God to be. Human beings are the sign of God. Human beings are God's being in the world, state and principle. That's how important we are. And this leads me to humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology was an approaching psychology. It flourished between the 1940s and the 1970s. It clashed with behaviorism. It was a big mess. And even today some humanistic techniques and so on and so forth are visible in psychotherapy and counseling. It derives from ideas in existentialism and phenomenology. It focuses on the individual's capacity to make choices, create their own lifestyle and actualize themselves in their own way. You heard of muscle laws, self-actualization. The approach of humanistic psychology is holistic. And the emphasis is on the development of human potential through experiential means. Humanistic psychologists believe that you can realize your potential only via experiences. You cannot learn. You cannot learn things. You have to experience them. Even when you do learn something, you have to put it to use. Only when you put it to use, you learn. Learning is predicated on being and being is predicated on experience. The approach is very interesting in this sense. Humanistic therapy sessions are amazing. Humanistic psychology breaks all the barriers. For example, it encourages transference, even bodily contact, which today would be considered probably criminal. They analyze the unconscious and they accept certain psychoanalytic tenets as a precursor to modifying behavior, but they are much closer to existentialism. So, those of you who want, I encourage you to read works by Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Ronald May, Humanistic Theory, Human Potential Movement, and so on and so forth. I'm mentioning these schools because I think victims of narcissistic abuse, traumatized, bleeding, wounded, broken as they are, they don't need therapy that would be analytical and cerebral and scientific. They need a hug. They need a hug. They need warmth. They need to reacquire their power. They need to be empowered. They need to become a genetic. They need to believe that their agency can change the world and themselves. They need to acquire some conviction in the power of faith. They need to self-administer placebos, if needed. They need a much more human approach. And existentialism, on the one hand, places the burden of choice and responsibility on the individual, but on the other hand, it's very, very warm and caring because it emphasizes on subjective experience. Same with humanistic psychology, same with logotherapy. CBT is a technique. It's like fine-tuning. So, it's recommended as an adjunct to these therapies. In humanistic psychology, there's something called the fulfillment model. It's a basic type of personality theory. It is based on the assumption that the primary motivation for behavior is self-fulfillment or self-actualization. There is a drive to realize one's innate potentials. In life, we feel that we can do something, so we want to do it. We feel that we can become someone, so we want to become that someone. I don't know. Mothers feel they can become mothers, so they have children. Intellectuals feel that they can become intellectuals and they become intellectual. This is called self-actualization, and it's the self-fulfillment model or the fulfillment model. This is the primary motivation for behavior. According to humanists, everything we do, including self-destructive acts, self-defeating and self-handicapping behaviors, they're all geared towards self-fulfillment. Not attaining self-actualization is very painful and very traumatic, so sometimes people punish themselves for this kind of failure, and humanistic psychology teaches you not to. It's part of the human potential movement. It's an approach to psychotherapy and psychology that emphasizes personal growth, interpersonal sensitivity, and greater freedom and spontaneity in living. I refer you to the work of Frederick Pearls, an amazing thinker, German, of course, needless to say, but he moved to the United States, to his credit, and he was an influential force in the development of human potential movement. The general perspective is we are humans, we have potential, we need to realize it.  And so the way to counter narcissistic abuse is to thrive, to prosper, to succeed, to experience, to become who we could always be, to realize our potential, to actualize ourselves. Not revenge, not revenge, because revenge is the perpetuation of abuse by other means. Revenge means you're still attached to your abuser, and these psychologies, these schools of psychology tell you, forget your abuser. Your abuser was part of the world, and because you are in control of the world, you can just eliminate him, and move on and thrive. And this is the only thing you should pursue, and do not become a victim, do not disempower yourself, realize how close to God you are at any given moment.


This schematic diagram shows the neuromuscular junction so this is the nerve terminal and this is the part of the muscle membrane where the nerve terminal is making contact. Now when an action potential arrives at this nerve terminal there is opening of voltage-cated calcium channels and there is entry of calcium right and this calcium causes the fusion of vesicles containing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine onto the presynaptic membrane. This releases the acetylcholine in the synaptic cleft and acetylcholine goes and binds to its receptors which are present in these folds on the postsynaptic membrane. So these receptors are N acetylcholine receptor, nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Now once acetylcholine binds to these receptors they are actually channels and they open causing the entry of sodium into the postsynaptic membrane and this leads to generation of end plate potential. Normally this end plate potential at the neuromuscular junction always reaches the threshold and once it reaches the threshold it leads to opening of voltage-cated sodium channel. So there are two types of channel N acetylcholine receptor channels and voltage-cated sodium channels. So once EPP reaches the threshold these voltage-cated sodium channels open causing the entry of sodium, more and more entry of sodium and leading to the generation of action potential. So those are the basic steps of neuromuscular transmission. Now there are certain diseases which affected this transmission and very important of those diseases is mysthenia gravis. Now mysthenia gravis is a condition in which there is destruction of these N acetylcholine receptors. Actually it is an autoimmune disease okay, autoimmune disease where there is a production of N acetylcholine receptor antibodies and these antibodies can act in various ways such that either they destroy these receptors so they can act in this way or they can even block these receptors. So there is competitive blockage of this receptor. Third they can also cause increase in endocytosis of these receptors. So all these three mechanisms will prevent the acetylcholine which is released in the synaptic cleft to act on these receptors. So if N acetylcholine receptors are not bound to acetylcholine what will happen? EPP which is there that is the graded potential which occurs that may not reach the threshold and action potential will not generate. So in mysthenia gravis actually what happens is that these N acetylcholine receptors they actually reduce okay. So the number of N acetylcholine receptors on these post synaptic membrane reduce and also you see here there are certain folds shown. There is flattening of these folds. So actually these folds are increasing the surface area so that the number of the receptors which are there they can be more okay. So there is flattening of this fold also and decrease in N acetylcholine receptors. Now remember physiologically something happens known as presynaptic rundown presynaptic rundown that means that when our neuromuscular junction is repeatedly stimulated so these vesicles which are there they are continuously being released okay they are fusing to the membrane and acetylcholine is being released. Due to repeated activity throughout the day what happens the number of vesicles which are there they decrease and the amount of acetylcholine which is there which can be released also decreases that happens physiologically throughout the day but it does not affect the contraction of the muscles physiologically why because normally there is a safety factor that means suppose in the morning the amount of acetylcholine which is released is too much high such that this EPP always reaches the threshold rather not only that the amount of change in potential is much more 2 to 3 times caused by this EPP only that means 2 to 3 times of the threshold okay and action potential that's why is always generated but as this presynaptic rundown occurs the amount of acetylcholine release decreases but because of this safety factor yet EPP is always able to reach the threshold now that doesn't happen in case of mysthenia gravis in the morning when the acetylcholine released is too much high then okay EPP will reach the threshold and action potential will be generated but as the day passes by and the presynaptic rundown which is physiological happens maybe this EPP will not reach to the threshold because less acetylcholine is released and the receptors available are also less okay so it is not able to act that much efficiently causing decrease in EPP and hence action potential may not reach the threshold so that is the pathophysiological basis of mysthenia gravis now let's come to its features so its features include weakness and fatigability now this weakness and fatigability as I told you that in morning it may be okay this weakness and fatigability increases late in day that is very important and it improves following risk why does it improve following risk because the store of vesicles acetylcholine vesicles which is there again gets depleted and again they can be released from the presynaptic terminal in much more amount so that is the characteristic feature of mysthenia gravis then what are the muscles affected most common muscles affected are lids and extra ocular muscles and that is why the most common feature of mysthenia gravis will be ptosis okay so because lids are affected and extra ocular muscles are affected that is responsible for the eye movement so there will be presence of diplopia then there are features suggesting the involvement of other cranial muscles also the muscles which are supplied by cranial knobs so there will be facial weakness they can be chewing weakness problems in deglutation then in speech there may be problem causing nasal regurgitation and in a speech there will be nasal twang not only that in generalized mysthenia gravis other muscles may also be affected and very important if respiratory muscles are affected then respiratory assistance may be required and actually this is known as a crisis in mysthenia gravis whenever respiratory assistance is required it is known as crisis let's come to the diagnosis part how it is diagnosed so for diagnosis obviously the characteristic history is there the characteristic presentation is there then we can do examination also we can look for the problems in eye movement then we can look that how much time is being taken to develop ptosis when the patient is asked to gaze upward then there is a test where the person is asked to abduct his arm and how much long he can hold his arm abducted is noted that is known as forward arm abduction time and finally spirometry is done for looking for the involvement of the respiratory muscles and basically forced vital capacity is very important because this mysthenia gravis muscles are involved so there will be problem in expansion of the chest and this is basically a type of restrictive lung disease it will cause so a pc is going to decrease so this is on history and examination but obviously there are certain tests also investigations which need to be done and these investigation include the detection of n acetylcholine receptor antibodies now these n acetylcholine receptor antibodies if present found present then it is diagnostic of mysthenia gravis however if they are negative it does not mean that the person does not has mysthenia gravis for that then we have to do other test and one of them is detection of anti musk antibodies so it has been found that these type of antibodies anti musk antibodies are present in approximately 40 percent of patients who are even negative of n acetylcholine receptor antibodies actually these are responsible for movement of these n acetylcholine receptors so here it's a cell right so n acetylcholine receptors which are present here they need to be moved here on the postsynaptic membrane in the folds of the postsynaptic membrane and this musk that is the muscle specific kinase protein is responsible for the movement of n acetylcholine receptors to this postsynaptic membrane so this anti musk antibodies may also lead to mysthenia gravis so simply if n acetylcholine receptors antibodies present it is diagnostic if negative then we have to do other test one of this is detecting the present of anti musk antibodies they may be even absent but we have to continue looking for other test and one of them is electro diagnostic testing now what is this is that the neuron is repeatedly stimulated so that is known as repetitive nerve stimulation test neuron is repeatedly stimulated and EPP end plate potential from the muscle is recorded and as we have seen before in the pathophysiology that initially end plate potential may be normal but when repetitive nerve stimulation is being done what will happen there will be depletion of the vesicles which are present in the presynaptic neuron the amount of acetylcholine which is being released will go down and because of decreased n acetylcholine receptors this EPP will also start going down okay so this is known as decremental response decremental response that is decreased in EPP on repetitive nerve stimulation testing so that is the electro diagnostic test now if both these tests are negative both n acetylcholine receptor antibodies or whatever antibodies and electro diagnostic tests all are negative then we have to go ahead with anti-choline hysteria is just what is this what we do in this test is we give a drug that is edrophonium which is very short acting this edrophonium actually inhibits and inhibits acetylcholinesterase enzyme this acetylcholinesterase enzyme what it does as a name suggests is it breaks down acetylcholine acetylcholinesterase so this breaks down acetylcholine normally physiologically hence acetylcholine is removed from the synaptic left very fast now if we inhibit this enzyme what will happen this acetylcholine which is released from the presynaptic terminal it will accumulate here okay and once it accumulates despite decrease in an acetylcholine receptor it will be able to act better so what we do is we give edrophonium which inhibits acetylcholinesterase and then we see improvement in the test so what we do is first maybe ask the person to do forward arm abduction time then we give edrophonium and then see whether the time in forward arm abduction is improving or not it has increased or not if it is increased that means edrophonium is working and that the accumulated acetylcholine is now causing improvement so it is suggestive of myasthenia and gravus okay so how about treatment of this condition obviously one we saw here is that if we let acetylcholine accumulate in the synaptic cleft it will cause improvement in the muscle action so first treatment is acetylcholinesterase inhibitor and when we are giving for treatment we have to choose a drug which is longer acting not like edrophonium which is very short acting so the drug which is used is pyridostic mean okay so this is a little longer acting acetylcholinesterase inhibitor then in case of generalized myasthenia gravus where most of the muscles of the body are affected and especially if respiratory system is affected then thymectomy is recommended now thymectomy why it is recommended what is the physiological basis well the antibodies which are there which we are talking n acetylcholine receptor antibodies anti musc antibodies their action is actually T cell dependent so when we do thymectomy we are removing these T cells and the response of the antibodies is prevented so this thymectomy is very useful in myasthenia gravus so these are the two main treatments however in conditions in which we want a very fast response as in case of crisis okay where respiratory muscles is involved in respiratory assistance as required there we do plasma ferruses to remove the antibodies from the blood very fast or intravenous immunoglobulins can be given how these intravenous immunoglobulins act that is not known but they also help in removing these antibodies very fast and if this doesn't work in that case we require immunosuppression by means of glucocorticoids or maybe some other immunosuppressants so that was all about myasthenia gravus it's pathophysiology the presentation how we do diagnosis and what is the modality of treatment and its physiological basis thanks for watching the video if you liked it do press the like button share the video with others and don't forget to subscribe to the channel Physiology Open thank you