The Problem of Self-Development and Striving
As I’m reading all this Carl Jung information for a series on him, I’ve noticed that there’s a big hole in the reviews I’ve already done. There are some hints in the videos for Letting Go, Flow, and How to Motivate Yourself. So far I haven’t really gone into a deep enough dive on motivation. All these psychological videos involve some form of “you are here and you need to be there, and it sucks!” But without e-motions, emoting you with motivation to act, they end up being thoughts that quickly get replaced by habitual ones, and one then has to do enormous ego-forcing to take action. The irony in having to force yourself to be more authentic, is that it leads to inauthenticity. You’re acting, pretending, faking it until you make it. There’s a certain wisdom in doing that and you may have to fake it because of time constraints.
Letting Go: https://rumble.com/v1grbjr-mindfulness-letting-go.html
Flow: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
How to motivate yourself – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv3zl-how-to-motivate-yourself-freud-and-beyond.html
Ideally, a person developing different cognitive functions, if they are trying Jungian Individuation, would look for the joy and benefits of the cognitive functions they hate, or find indifferent. Daydreaming about the benefits that one could gain in one’s life by incorporating it into one’s goals, can be a pleasing 1st step. With Thinking Introversion, one can daydream about personal principles that one believes in and to actually reduce hypocrisy by following them. One of the pleasures here is a clear conscience. Thinking extraversion involves facts and reality that can be confirmed by others. The connection of one’s principles and logic becomes enjoyable when one can see confirmation outside of themselves. Feeling Introversion recognizes the individual. Individuals need freedom to experiment and to gain intrinsic motivation. Without self-gratification, it’s well known that suicidal tendencies flow up to the surface. Therefore play and wonder are enjoyable in of themselves, and are healing. Feeling extraversion understands social bonds and the pleasure of intimacy and shared pleasure. It’s true that to be able to experience pleasure with oneself in hobbies and jobs that one likes is a core part of the self, but another part of the mind enjoys good company. It may take a lot of effort to weed out people who won’t sabotage your happiness, but when good friends and intimate partners are found, the pleasure of belonging permeates your entire body. Intuition introversion has a vision of the future. It’s predictable that life is a bumpy ride, but not everything in the future is impossible to predict. Being able to plan farther into the future allows for the pleasure of a smoother life. Intuition extraversion looks at life as a smorgasbord of possibilities. There’s enormous pleasure in exploration, and the more we explore, the more we realize what we authentically like the most. Sensing introversion gets us to check the world against what we think is reality, and every confirmation that we’re on the correct path increases confidence. Sensing extraversion has a wonder in present moment sensation and so much art, and appreciation, can be created simply by comparing different sensations and learning to curate entertainment, music, food, sex, and thrills: Enjoying the sensation of being alive.
Not different than becoming a doctor or an Olympic athlete, people need strong reasons to make big choices or sacrifices, especially if they are trying to add to their personality. Of course I hate the term “sacrifice” because it means you don’t really want to do that thing and would prefer to do something else. Much of the time when people are engaged in their work, relationships, exercise, and chores, if there’s motivation there’s no sense of sacrifice. Many of us have these motivations from time to time, but very often the motivation is the worst kind of short-cut mentality with just a means to an end. Being efficient is helpful, including actual short-cuts that reduce unnecessary work, but there’s a temptation to use flimsy short-cuts that makes work slip-shod, relationships a going-through-the-motions, health routines a chore, and self-discipline a bane.
When reading this review, or any other, lists of actions to take and strategies are ego exhausting and the best way to incorporate lists into your life is to make them into motivating actions and eventually new habits. Like with our past conditioning, it came about through a lot of emotions and operate automatically as an adult. They can also harden and make character defects into cartoonish limitations as one gets older.
The typical Jungian development of targeting your weaker cognitive functions and developing them just becomes another chore to rebel against and ease back into those old ruts. People change their character when they FEEL like it and usually in small shifts that add up to something more. Sometimes people even have to hit rock bottom until they yearn for change. Yet no matter how PhD a person is with psychology and development, you can’t live long enough to truly be master of all cognitive functions equally. There is also a legitimate argument for someone to want to specialize in an area that can provide you income and develop strengths so they are reliable, or a “Hero” function as many Jungians like to describe one’s favorite cognitive function. These specializations extend into a social harmony when people can trade the value of those specializations.
Part of the Jungian mandala is to be able to have occupations for different specialties so that those specialties can be traded amongst ourselves. If everyone fights for the same jobs and industries, there will be a vicious weeding process to keep whole populations out of a profession, sport, art, or any other lauded occupation that millions try to imitate. As people languish in rejection, they begin to feel like Sartre who said that “hell is other people.” A lot of the reason for people feeling down to their core, René Girard’s “being-disease,” where people hate their being and attack themselves with masochism or attack others with sadism, for temporary relief, has to do with population bottlenecks and conflicts over scarce occupations that provide a middle class lifestyle that holds up one’s self-esteem. People who are poor are met with derision, disgust, and more rejection, which makes their attempts to improve their lot even harder. Being-disease can be caused by chasing after jobs for the right amount of dollars to buy the right kind of furniture, clothing, and toys to keep shame at bay, but ironically not too much wealth, because it may stoke envy in powerful others who could take those resources away from us.
Like with the current atmosphere of Cancel Culture, censorship, and dare I say it: Communism, the prevailing powers are doing what George Orwell warned of. “In our world, there will be no emotions, except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. The sex-instinct will be eradicated. We shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the party, but always there will be the intoxication of power. Always at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy that is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.” This is basically a sadomasochistic world with no other pleasures, most especially peace. Even in relaxed times, pleasure has to often be secretive, or else shared, to avoid envy consequences from narcissists. I think this is the main obstacle next to being one’s own obstacle. People often have to lose friends and even family in order to develop. Many others will not celebrate your improvements because it means tolerating the feeling of a negative comparison. Then there’s direct rivalry for positions that cannot be shared, as I explained many times before. The reason why this is a main obstacle is that the knowledge that one needs to advance is not in school textbooks and is often with people. That knowledge is political and may force you to reinvent the wheel over and over again to develop your own version of those skills. Then if you gain hard won knowledge you’ll now become the person that wants to protect that information from all comers just as you resented those who held you back before. The pressure to perform for organizations meets head on with the desire to protect one’s own butt. The happy medium is to be able to trade your skills with others who provide what you want, while fending off interlopers who want to be in your place or who want to interrupt the exchange or steal from it. People like your differences if they have no intention of going there and want what you have, and agree to trade. As soon as people can imagine themselves in your place, rivalry brews.
Orwell’s final warning – Picture of the future – TJOP: https://youtu.be/9k_ptxWsadI
John Vervaeke – How To Deal With Losing Friends As You Develop – Chris Williamson: https://youtu.be/DSPJKuX5Cno
Jordan Peterson – How To Deal With Losing Friends As You Grow – Chris Williamson: https://youtu.be/ApoxLQuk06s
“We live in a time when smart people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.” – Sky News Australia Suspended – Alan Jones: https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/alan-jones/the-challenge-to-free-speech-is-real-with-youtubes-sky-news-australia-suspension/video/033e5f39dfc58cd93242906366f09a99
Like we see in modern day politics, there’s a temptation to cut corners, cheat, rig the game, and slander others in order to amass enough power to win all the time. Usually with politics it involves the comparison of skills and the blaming of those who are incompetent, or to make others appear that way to avoid blame. If you do good enough work, you may last long enough to learn more skills so that work becomes more secure, and possibly you’ll have more political power. In the blame game, some focus on developing their own skills and realize that one has to be the best, or at least “better than the other guy.” We often don’t know what’s best without a comparison. Then there are others who have skills, but one of their main skills is being able to lie convincingly. Lies are like onions and those who are good at it are capable of creating layers of lies so that when one lie is peeled back there’s another one to rescue it. The game is to exhaust the investigator so that they are not willing to keep on peeling the onion, because their eyes are watering. With enough skill, blame can be shifted to others, big mistakes can be overlooked, and corruption can expand. Those with little conscience have developed these skills since the days they were able to manipulate their teachers, for example. For truth tellers, facts and evidence have to be piled up in order to counter these tactics, especially in large bureaucratical organizations. When corrupt people are in deep, they are too emotionally invested in coming clean. Scapegoating and blame gets shifted to whoever is most convenient, and we are back to the scapegoating mechanism.
The Jungian project is more about balance, and of course this balance is achieved as one advances in life, work, and relationships, and it’s not done all at once. Jung expected a certain order to that process, but people often enter backwards. Usually one has to work a lot when younger and develop a balance as one has more wealth to rely on in investments, pensions, after the children become adults, or after selling a business. Many of course never get to that point, and it can turn into just an expectation of social benefits, because most work money in low paying jobs are just enough to go in and go out. The need to develop is always lurking in the unconscious.
The problem is that self-development involves the same ambitious striving that drains energy just before you need it for an activity, and this is applies to any psychological model you are following. Perfectionism, striving, ruminating, worrying, and fretting will leave no energy left.
As an aid for your self development, no matter if it’s Freud, Jung, religious models, atheist models, new age, or integrated models, this review will survey current knowledge of what is known about bringing that sense of intrinsic motivation, which is the opposite of the feeling of slavery and helplessness that so many find a regular part of their day. No matter how idealistic we are, there are limitations with these methods and there are no places on Earth that will provide endless Flow, Balance, Enlightenment, etc. The realistic goal is to find MORE ways of including that feeling into life so it’s at least a larger part of it.
Since a big area of resistance to happiness involves work, let’s start with the Japanese concept of Ikigai.
Ikigai
One of the more popular conceptions of happiness at work comes from the Japanese term Ikigai, which roughly translates into “reason to live/exist/be.” In the book The Experience of Meaning, by Jan Zwicky, I like how she simply puts it that “Meaning is what Matters.” This way we can see that Ikigai is best looked at as a way to engage in activities that more or less make some positive impact, and also importantly, we gain pleasure in these activities. On top of that, there’s a desire for appreciation from others, which is another form of pleasure and meaning.
The regular interpretation of Ikigai is to view those related activities as a way to stave off feelings of being useless, unwanted, or helpless. In Ikigai – Giving every day meaning and joy, by Yukari Mitsuhashi, she says that “whatever gets you up in the morning is your ikigai – and no one can tell you otherwise…If you have a goal or something to look forward to, then – even if you feel that you’re not in a good place right now – you are more likely to be able to see your current situation or circumstances as a pathway towards that future and to find value in the present moment.”
Reading Japanese authors on the subject is a good way to help decipher what the Japanese mean culturally because a lot of Western ideas have intermixed in ways that can be misleading. The most famous is the Venn diagram which mixes some of Aristotle’s ideas with it. “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.”
Ikigai chart: https://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ikigai-chart-reason-for-being_1088160854.jpg
“The Venn diagram consisting of four overlapping circles – what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for – with ikigai at the intersection of all four…It took me by surprise. Why? Because it limits the concept of ikigai to things related to work: in this narrow definition, your ikigai needs to be something you can be paid for. But for Japanese people, ikigai is a much broader concept, and one that is rooted in our everyday lives. Ikigai might be our work, yes, but it can also be a hobby, our loved ones, or something as simple as enjoying the company of friends. In a survey of 2,000 Japanese men and women conducted by Central Research Services in 2010, just 31 percent considered work as their ikigai. In fact, ikigai was most commonly related to a hobby or leisure interest, followed by family and pets or time spent with them.”
Like with most lessons on mindfulness, Ikigai includes those same lessons. “In our everyday lives, whether we are immersing ourselves in nature or devouring traditional Japanese food, paying attention to detail grabs our focus onto what is right in front of us instead of wondering about our to-do lists in our head. Our nature of paying attention to detail allows us to enjoy individual moments in our lives, permitting us to find joy and ikigai in simple, everyday things.” To advance this enjoyment of everyday things, especially for those who tend towards boredom, I still suggest a Heideggerian meditation on wonder, where you avoid the usual comparisons of “this is better than that, and this is even better, and anything that isn’t better is boring,” and replace it with comparing something to non-existence. The world exists as it IS, and this IS-NESS is funny in how it manifests in a particular way, and when compared to alternatives, all you get is a blank, unless you are a special person connected to another universe, IS is all there IS. It pulls you out of the addictive boredom and tolerance that prevents many adults from tapping into that child-like wonder that was taken for granted when they were younger. It isn’t a meditation where you are discursively talking in your mind about wonder. Your in a meditative Samadhi vibrating and shining in IS-ness, and a wordless appreciation is all that is needed.
There’s also a sense of enjoying ephemerality, instead of the typical Buddhist letting go and being detached. “When something is hakanai, it is considered beautiful because it can be enjoyed only for a short period of time.” As you develop, essentially enjoyment and appreciation skills, you can see how it connects, like with so many subjects. For example, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. “Remember this when you are exploring your ikigai – it is something that will grow and change with you.”
For Yukari, knowing about your Ikigai is like knowing more about yourself, your talents, skills, and preferences. We do this with comparison between activities. “A > B…whatever a person’s ikigai, it has a tendency to be more A than B.”
These small books on Ikigai are only general, but you can see how the specific builds up to the general principle. “It’s worth investing this time and effort, thought, because once you understand your ikigai you can find ways to pursue it, and you may find that many seemingly unrelated areas of your life end up contributing to it in one way or another.” This observation matches with more scientific studies on video games and learning. In Learning By Playing, by Fran C. Blumberg, there’s an understanding that general transferrable skills help with learning and the enjoyment of using skills. The difficulties are making sure that people know that their prior skills can be used at specific times. Not cuing the skill may mean it is not used, and the opportunity is wasted. Their studies ended up matching up with Anders Ericsson’s Deliberate Practice. “These games would target specific skills, would be structured so that they encourage the mastery of subskills required for the performance of these overall skills, would provide useful, informative, and immediate feedback [Flow precursor], and would allow players multiple opportunities to solve problems, with time and encouragement to reflect on the outcome of each attempt. Deliberate practice activities are not inherently enjoyable, and more enjoyable game components might be incorporated between deliberate practice activities to maintain motivation and allow students periods of rest.”
Another area of connection with Yukari’s survey of Ikigai is allowing that often maligned narcissism of showing your skills to others to enjoy pride. Considered a pillar of Intrinsic Motivation for authors Deci and Ryan, called Relatedness, the fact that a person likes an activity for its own sake means that it has emotional support so that if those activities are rejected in the public sphere the person may still continue these activities as a hobby. Narcissism is much more connected with doing things you hate in order to get the same attention. You lose connection with yourself, and that’s a distinctive characteristic of Cluster B personality disorders, always looking for social rewards, prestige, domination, and losing connection, or never developing a connection in the first place to things that are enjoyable for their own sake. First, parents want the child to make them look good, then the child becomes an adult and has to make bosses look good. “Ikigai is not just something you find within yourself, but is often something that connects you to the outside world. For example, people enjoy hobbies, such as photography or baking, not only for their own sakes but also because they are able to share their experience or what they are good at with others. Work, hobbies and volunteering are all ways in which we connect to the outside world.” Even if you have trouble separating, for example your art from what others like and their tastes, all you have to do is visualize the meaning of the art, imagine yourself in the art, if it’s like a photograph, and just marinate until you see what’s good about it, then you can go back to what people like or dislike about it, and often you see that it matters what you name your art, or photograph, because it can fail communication to the outside world, like a failed museum curation. You give people hints so they can put it together and get their own sense of Flow from your work. Maybe you aren’t doing art, but some other form of work that isn’t entertaining. Seeing the value of the work in terms of how it reduces pain for others or increases pleasure can be something that connects one to another by seeing OBJECTIVE benefits. Again the “meaning is what matters.”
How to Appreciate Art: https://rumble.com/v1gvlhb-how-to-appreciate-art-psychology-of-things-22.html
For those with damaged selves, but not so damaged to the point of a personality disorder, one can still reconnect with what one liked in the past and this is often one of the remedies prescribed when one has separated from toxic relationships. It’s a feeling of remembering an old identity that was lobotomized for a period of time. “What are you actively pursuing (even though, no one is asking you to)? Looking back over your life, are there things you have continued to do without conscious effort? Ikigai motivates you from within and is something you do because it makes you feel good.”
When people aren’t sure of their Ikigai, it helps to go into exploration mode. Technically, this is what parenting and childhood was supposed to be about. It’s about finding individual talents, desires, and skills to channel into a future career, if possible. For so many people this promise was never fulfilled or the complexity of finding a calling was just too much. A more realistic way of infusing Ikigai into any job is to create self-made goals that allow for employee input and suggestions for improvement. Top down autocratic environments tend to discount frontline workers and treat them like robots, like the ones they hope to one day replace with actual robots that don’t complain. In a study on job performance, Yukari found that “[allowing employees the opportunity for] customizing their job resulted in shorter call times and boosted their sales performance.”
Other proactive tactics are purposefully paying attention to detail, experimenting, and finding room for creativity. Creativity here, I mean to be looking at products and services and trying to create something that isn’t in the market yet. Like with Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, concentration on doing things well, which isn’t always supported in jobs that focus on expediency, is like meditation and allows one to go into Flow while at work. When there are setbacks, concentrate more, pay attention to detail, add experimentation to learn more about a subject and develop skills so they can again be transferrable and applicable to your new activities. Like in playing a new video game, you tend to gravitate towards those games that remind you of old favorites because they provide just enough challenge to learn new skills.
“Boost your concentration level so that you are able to tackle things in a shorter amount of time…make the best of whatever time is available to you.” This sometimes means going into recreation to find a place where Flow is more easily attained to get that feeling back again for inspiration. “I think the key is to take action. Although I wanted to stay in bed all day. I went out and met people to get inspired…Visit places that are a little out of the ordinary. Whatever helps you feel inspired, any action is better than no action…You don’t always find ikigai right away; it often takes time to find one at any job.”
The reality is that all these tips are general and one has to incorporate them with action, trial and error. This is a main point for Herminia Ibarra in Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader. “…You can only learn what you need to know about your job and about yourself by doing it – not by just thinking about it.” In How to Ikigai, Tim Tamashiro also follows the A > B method of comparison when engaging in activities. What activities give more Ikigai? “Follow the clues. When you find things you enjoy, then do them. They will lead you to more.”
From the Jungian perspective, if one is following Ikigai, one is most likely using their hero function, which is their most used and most consciously available function. It’s where people regenerate their interest and it’s the most confidently used function. It’s the easiest to use and it feels like a refuge.
Blocks to Flow
Now it sounds simple, just “follow your passion, follow your Ikigai, etc.” The rub of course is that we need a certain amount of obstacles to hold back boredom, but more realistically we find that the level of skill required and the challenges are more likely to threaten burnout than anything else. There is a real possibility of over-striving. This is why a mindfulness meditation practice is so necessary. When reading people like Cal Newport, in Deep Work, one could get the idea that furrowing one’s brow, gritting one’s teeth, and screwing your face up will do the trick. “Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea…High-Quality work produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of focus)…Schedule every minute of your day.” In Buddhism, optional tensions in the mind and body are a form of what they call Fabrication, or Imitation, or Fakery, or Striving, and it literally hurts. I think focus that is more relaxed and based on consistency, rather than intensity, would be more sustainable. A lot of this advice is couched in “make sure to rest properly” and similar things because of the easy trap of falling into excessive striving and burning out.
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
Any kind of intensity would be best if one followed Ericsson and realize that deliberate practice of mediocre standards leads to mediocre skills, no matter how many repetitions. Practicing to the edge of one’s abilities and continually mapping out what high skill looks like in the real world will lead to better results with practice and more DEPTH as described in Newport’s Deep Work, which is simply what standards convey to you, how much depth has been met. I’m sure in the modern world, many people have struggled with a computer skill, but they looked up a shortcut that saved literally hours of time. The end result was the same but a more efficient way was found. Energy savings and repeated rest will always be needed. This is often why people turn to a coach for help, but not all coaches are created equal.
One of the ways to assess whether you need a coach or not is to follow the Flow system to see what is accessible in terms of knowledge you can discover on your own. If a coach can’t really provide any info that will fill in knowledge gaps, or if these things are accessible to you already, why waste the time and money? When you have a block to Flow, you can whip out this old list from my review on Flow:
Knowing what to do – Not knowing what to do next is anxiety or boredom. When exploring this block, try to find out what the next action needs to be, or at least the next exploration or skill that can lead to the next action.
Knowing how to do it – Not knowing how to do something is anxiety. This is more for the overall skill. Again, one can look at blocks to learning new skills, or seeing if information is unavailable, or more commonly, the knowledge is installed in people and that information is political. Reading endless textbooks and general information will not replace specific pointers that are undiscovered or protected by a gatekeeper. The typical way of creating checklists and procedures as you run into obstacles and have to solve them yourselves becomes your only way to gain knowledge.
Knowing how well you are doing – Uncertainty can lead to either boredom or anxiety depending on whether your situation is dangerous or safe. We often do this automatically. We measure self-narratives all the time and that’s where a lot of the pleasure and pain come from, which twists and turns in narratives that are good or bad. Newport advises in his typical intense style, which is to “keep a compelling scoreboard.”
Knowing where to go – Not knowing where to go is anxiety. This can often manifest when sources of knowledge are still unknown. Is it in literature or in people, or a mix of both? Is it something that is undiscovered and requires experimentation?
High perceived challenges – This prevents boredom. The prior steps help to assess the appropriateness of goals in terms of challenge. Doing these assessments also helps to relieve stress when one disengages a goal that is too difficult. It prevents masochism. Why approach goals unless you are reasonably prepared?
High perceived skills – This prevents anxiety. Knowing how good you are is usually easy to assess. You tend to see this in your life where your motivation comes easily. You just knock baseballs out of the park, so to speak. This is when you don’t need excessive strategizing and permission from others to act. You just act on these skills on your whim.
Freedom from distractions – This is a difficult one and I often link it to trying to escape from quicksand. Intense distractions usually involve people, and can come in the form of family, friends, and co-workers. Managing toxic people out of your life means a very lonely existence for some people. You may have to move them ALL to the curb. This is often when people dream about running their own business so they can make all the decisions in their lives. It’s when people do a massive reshuffling of relationships and realize, sometimes for the first time, that they were surrounded by negative energy drainers and envious fifth columns, this whole time! If you have to work with a team, you realize why so many bosses obsess about firing people and take great pleasure in it. You begin to “fire” a lot of family and so called friends who give the worst advice and are openly sabotaging you.
Being around these people for most of your life also means that they are living rent free in your mind. Psychologists call these imitated people in our minds, Objects, which are more or less assimilated into our habits. We can rehearse and practice arguments with these people and rehearse the same emotions. Trying to eject them our of your mind is more difficult and it’s where visualization and imagery is so important. A modern life of constantly taking in opinions from others without any assessment as to their value or if facts support narratives is what Shakespeare accurately described as psychological poison.
Flow: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
Visualization
As we get close to the crux of the problem, which is reading about motivation, but not FEELING IT, it comes down to how crowded the mind is with habitual visualizations. A lot of our desires are viewed through the lens of others we’ve imitated, and in turn we can get stuck needing validation from others, needing to ask permission, when we are supposedly free adults, and energy predictably deflates. One of the more famous apologists for staying in this energy, or as she calls it, The Vortex, is Esther Hicks from The Law of Attraction fame. Certainly reading her materials and listening to some of the audio online, it’s a mixed bag, but part of the fun of reading psychology is being able to see what is actually good in New Age/Self-Help books and to be able to add it to what you already know, instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Any metaphysical beliefs she has, that can’t ultimately be proven, are similar to metaphysics in religions where they are used as helpful guides to put an overall theory in a neat package and to develop a form of meditation, which is really a forward-thinking visualization practice. “In order for things to change, you have to see them as you want them to be rather than continuing to observe them as they are.”
Through the superstitions, including health claims that are very problematic, there’s method in her madness that helps out with the above Flow list and how to navigate through it via imagination and feeling. Her practice isn’t to ignore action, but instead to create the motivational energy needed so that action is less labored, and to learn to handle obstacles with more grace.
Part of the fun that made me giggle is seeing some of the Flow diagram mirrored in her advice, especially related to handling challenges and how Esther navigates difficult situations and people, and to be able to disconnect from needing to change other people, or to avoid banging one’s head, so to speak, on impossible obstacles. How does one navigate the Flow diagram through skills and challenge only with feelings? “Be as detailed in your thoughts about your desire as you can be – and still feel good.” As your imagery can contain more and more of your skills, and it also gets more detailed, the motivation increases, because the feeling of “I CAN DO THIS” also increases.
No matter how collectivized people feel they are from time to time, they are still individuals and will want to gain individual happiness while negotiating interdependence with everyone else. We all move with others between varying levels of harmony or conflict. “By focusing upon what you desire, you could ignore their opposition. If you oppose their opposition, however, then you would not be focused upon what you want, and your creation would be affected. It is easier to walk away where you no longer need to focus on the opposition in order to stay focused upon your desire. But if you need to walk away from someone because of the potential for opposition, then you need to get out of town, too, for most certainly there are those there who are not in total agreement with your ideas; and out of this country; and off the face of this planet. Removing yourself from opposition is not necessary. Just focus upon what you want, and by the power of your own clarity, you will be able to positively create under any circumstances.”
“The Art of Allowing is: I am that which I am, and I am pleased with it, joyful in it. And you are that which you are, and while it is different perhaps from that which I am, it is also good…Because I am able to focus upon that which I want, even if there are those differences between us that are dramatic, I do not suffer negative emotion because I am wise enough not to focus upon that which brings me discomfort. I have come to understand, as I am one who is applying the Art of Allowing, that I have not come forth into this physical world to get everyone to follow the ‘truth’ that I think is the truth. I have not come forth to encourage conformity or sameness – for I am wise enough to understand that in sameness, in conformity, there is not diversity that stimulates creativity. In focusing upon bringing about conformity, I am pointed toward an ending rather than to a continuing of creation.”
Here we have the essential description of boundaries, and people can safely move in those spheres, trading their differences and specialties with each other and allowing further creativity and experimentation in others. By choosing objects that have less social conflict, one is also more likely to achieve those things, feel a clear conscience, and steer away from converting people with one belief system or another. “You, from your physical perspective, may not be allowing your own expansion, and when you do not, you feel rotten. And when you do not allow another, you feel rotten.” I am reminded of the late Buddhist teacher Rob Burbea when he recounted Buddhist students arguing about dogma instead of meditating. Rules are there to help guide, but the social brain has trouble with the idea of letting people be and keeps trying to gain attention and superiority through debate, which is addictive, but in a lot of cases your arguments are not as convincing as your actions, your savoring, and your actual wealth and success. Role modeling is more effective than preaching, and it reduces conflict because you focus on yourself first before debating with other people. “…Set the example of joy. Become a Being who thinks only of that which he is wanting; who speaks of only that which he is wanting; who does only that which he is wanting – therefore brings forth only joyful emotions…There is not a need to prove anything to anyone with your words. Let that which you are – that which you are living – be your clear example to uplift others.” In the case of Jungian Individuation, where you develop weaker personality functions, a debate over which functions are important and how to use them, is not going to get you much further than actual development in your own life.
The attraction in The Law of Attraction, is the phenomenon of desire and projection, in that what we think about grows, and what is counter-intuitive is that desire can find negative forms of pleasure in the negative thoughts simply because one keeps the negative in the foreground of the mind, which tempts the short-term mind to make hay out of even the contemptable. The goal is to steer away from self-fulfilling prophecies by directing the short-term mind to something better it can chew on. It’s very much a THINK POSITIVE method, and we are to add this mentality to all projects in life. “…If you hold your attention or awareness long enough, the Law of Attraction, will bring it into your experience, for there is no such thing as ‘No.’ To clarify, when you look at something and shout, ‘No, I don’t want to experience that; go away!’ then what you are actually doing is calling it into your experience, for there is no such thing as ‘No’ in an attraction-based Universe. Your attention to it says, ‘Yes, come to me, this thing I do not want!'” I could see how this might help someone who did something bad in the past, and they want to move on. Certainly moving on in Esther’s method would be to move on by literally taking your attention span and moving on. Dangers with this type of moving on would be not processing past information emotionally, going into denial, steamrolling people, and just “moving on,” and engaging in censorship with others, not reporting important details, and blanking out important negative details that have to be responded to. This practice has to be done with delicacy and not a lobotomy where you iron out the folds of your brain. It’s okay to look at the negative, but once you’ve processed it properly, then staying obsessed isn’t necessary. Also, one can daydream about positive aspects in response to negative ones, just like you would when you plan out strategies to overcome obstacles. Negatives can be co-opted into plans for overcoming, and they are pointers on where there are skill deficits.
Now, no matter what you read in this review, there’s always a sense of obstacle, or limitation in life, which isn’t always a bad thing, but the reality is that you will predictably progress in a direction that you CAN move in. Most self-help books, or even hardcore psychology books, derive a lot of their success in finding situations that are accessible for patients or followers. There is an outcome, including really bad ones, simply because time passes and progression can only move on opportunities that appear. If an opportunity appears, and a person acts on it, then there’s the result. When people get good results from one method or another, they tend to worship what influenced that choice. This is even if the person would have chosen that opportunity with or without that advice, and also because that person’s choices may have been very narrow in the first place. The inevitability can also be seen in Jungian psychology, because if you never visit a psychologist, you may bump into events that require you to develop without any need for guidance. Your feelings and skill development are right there. Also, when you gain more skills, more opportunities open up for you, just like in the Flow diagram. Some of those skills are transferrable to weaker ones, and then the pathway for growth can seem more accessible. This isn’t lost on Esther. “The more you come to understand the power of the Law of Attraction, the more interest you will have in deliberately directing your thoughts – for you get what you think about, whether you want it or not…You will begin to notice that your own thoughts may be stimulated from something you read or watch on television or hear or observe from someone else’s experience. And once you see the effect that the Law of Attraction has upon these thoughts that begin small and grow larger and more powerful with your attention to them, you will feel a desire within you to begin to direct your thoughts to more of the things that you do want to experience.”
It’s easy to see that this could lead to hedonism or addictions, but Esther’s view of Inner Being, can include responsibility, but it’s via emotions as well, and not egoic striving and pushing based on rigid principles. “Your Inner Being, or Source Energy, always offers a perspective that is to your greatest advantage, and when your perspective matches that, then positive attraction is occurring…Disappointment is communication from your Inner Being letting you know that that which you are focused upon is not what you want. If you are sensitive to the way that you are feeling, then the disappointment itself will let you know that what you are thinking about is not what you want to experience…Your negative emotion is your indication that you hold beliefs that are contrary to your own desires…Whenever you are able to identify something that you do not want, you can always then identify what is it that you do want. And as you do that again and again, your pattern of thought – on every subject that is important to you – will shift more in the direction of what you do want. In other words, you will gradually build bridges from any current beliefs that are about things you do not want over to beliefs about things you do want.“
How one gets aligned, I personally think, is when positive desires are compared, like in the Ikigai A > B example above, and when one makes a choice that is inauthentic, there’s a feeling that something more balanced or something better is missed out on. There are unpleasant consequences that one can imagine. The desire is hollow and unsatisfying, despite the fact that there’s some pleasure. Yet pleasure is still the main goal and one just has to keep all the wisdom they’ve already learned and learn to find pleasure in those things that are more responsible, but based on the sense of remorse, and a desire for peace. To me that’s one of the important areas of intrinsic motivation, because one wants to be responsible because one likes responsibility, not because they are afraid of what people will think. It’s independent and free, because you’re not lost looking constantly to leaders for every step of the way. You may look at Esther as another guru, and there are definitely signs in her books that show a desire for large amounts of money based on the early chapters and how she got inspired and the books she read for inspiration. Again, all these gurus and motivational speakers and coaches just provide tips and they are best used when you are able to navigate with all the other things you’ve learned and are comfortable with accepting or discarding based on your own feelings and results you see in others. So if you feel inner conflict, then Esther would still want you to listen to that. When you listen to that for long periods of time, you are listening to your own feelings for long periods of time. This enhances a healthy sense of self and independence where one can actually enjoy freedom without constantly looking for cues from authority figures. Having legal freedom is not the same as having psychological freedom. It’s a support for psychological freedom, but being able to weigh options will always feel better than searching for others to command you. “Most of you have been seeing yourself, not only through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others; therefore, many of you are not now currently in the state of Being that you want to be…We are amused as we watch the majority spending most of their life seeking a set of rules against which they can measure their life experience, looking outside of self for those who will tell them what is right or wrong, when all along they have within themselves a Guidance System that is so sophisticated, so intricate, so precise, and so readily available…They have often become convinced of their unworthiness and of their incorrectness, so they are afraid to move forward, trusting their own guidance or their own conscience, because they believe that there may be someone else who knows more clearly than they do what is appropriate for them.”
In psychology, the above practice is clearly getting people to know their sense of self in the body and in emotions. It’s a reconnection, if one has been lost for a long period of time. “Few realize that they can control the way they feel and positively affect the things that come into their life experience by deliberately directing their thoughts. But because they are not accustomed to doing that, it takes practice…To make the statement ‘I want to know what I want!’ is a first and powerful step in Deliberate Creation. But then, a deliberate directing of your attention to the things you want to attract into your experience must come next…By deliberately directing your thoughts and by creating pleasing mental scenarios in your own mind that induce good-feeling emotions within you, you begin to change your own point of attraction…In order to effect true positive change in your experience, you must disregard how things are – as well as how others are seeing you – and give more of your attention to the way you prefer things to be…The variety of your life experience gives you the clay from which you will mold your life experience, and merely observing it as it is, without getting ahold of it and deliberately molding it to match your desires, is not satisfying – and is not what you had in mind when you made the decision to come into this time-space reality. We want you to understand that your ‘clay,’ no matter how it may look right now, is moldable.”
As one gets better at the practice, Esther has deliberate pointers for the big picture topics to navigate through, such as in economics. “One who wants to sell does not do well to attract another seller. But the attracting of a buyer brings for the harmony.” She also has pointers for modern day people who perpetually feel they are a victim. “More often, one who feels discriminated against is the most powerful creator in that experience…It is his attention to the subject of the prejudice that attracts his trouble.” She has beliefs about co-dependency. “Unless you are selfish enough to care about how you feel, and therefore direct your thoughts in such a way that you are allowing a true connection to your Inner Being, you have nothing to give another anyway.” There are beliefs about being a do-gooder who wants to save the world and accidentally gets in over their head. “One who sees himself as a ‘savior,’ saving little ones from the big ones, will find himself often coming across people who need to be saved…And if it is your desire to have these kinds of experiences, then continue the thought of those kinds of experiences – and the Law of Attraction will continue to bring them to you. But if you prefer something different, think about that – and the Law of Attraction will bring that to you. The subjects of your thoughts are preparing your future experiences.” Following her reasoning to where the savior vibration goes wrong, that vibration can send the opposite signal of what was intended. She says that “the vibration that you are transmitting is actually saying to them, I do this for you because I see that you cannot do this for yourself. Your vibration is actually focused upon their lack of Well-being and therefore, even though you have offered money or food through your action, your dominant offering is perpetuating their lack…The greatest gift that you could ever give another is the gift of your expectation of their success.”
When you make good choices of what to attract, your goal orientation in a sense keeps you safe, and by targeting Joy, the mind then makes a goal of searching for what makes joy for you, and because you are a particular person, only you can find this for yourself. “Deliberately guiding your thoughts is the key to a joyful life, but a desire to feel joy is the best plan of all…because in the reaching for joy, you find the thoughts that attract the wonderful life you desire.”
The key to making this work is to keep returning to the feeling in the mind and body to avoid intentions that are dry and unmotivating. “They become impatient and try to make it happen by jumping into action.” Similar to Freudian and Psychoanalytic drive theory, Esther agrees that “we want you to be aware of your emotions and then guide your thoughts until you feel relief.” Then at times she repeatedly hammers home the message, much like Yoda talking about The Force, “Words alone do not attract, but when you feel emotion when you speak, that means your vibration is strong – and the Law of Attraction must answer those vibrations.” If it takes some time to reconnect with the Inner Being, Esther recommends the typical waiting and letting the unconscious chew over a subject until good ideas pop out, much like what meditators experience when the try to concentrate and fail. “Have you ever been working on a project and you thought about it, you thought about it quite a lot, and suddenly you say, ‘I have a good idea!’?”
The more serious side of this subject is how people feel so alienated in their lives and this can easily lead to extreme authoritarian politics as helpless people look for leaders to solve all their alienated feelings. In the above examples, Non-Alienation is directing thoughts with emotion, and alienation is just going through the motions and following orders. We all certainly have to follow orders to a certain extent in all organizations, but the creativity is found in each individual who is able to create their own metrics and sub-goals within overall organizational, or family goals, to create a sense of contribution.
In psychology, the more controversial element of these visualization practices is the possible bumping into vicarious relief and pleasure where motivation may in fact be discharged with the imagery alone, and researchers like Gabrielle Oettingen, would prefer people to hold the sense of lack for longer and use the imagery of the end point only at the beginning of the goal process. The sense of lack must be maintained while planning for actions that deal with obstacles. Then relief should only be discharged when the obstacles are ACTUALLY surmounted. The difficulty with planning is remembering to do what you need to do at the time when you need to do it. One of those methods Gabrielle recommends is Implementation Intentions. The mind tends to remember primed intentions where you say, “IF this happens, I commit to doing THIS.” As people go throughout their day, and if they get used to practicing this method of priming and rehearsal, the mind, like a biological clock for waking up at the right time, brings up those intentions exactly when those IF-possibilities turn into present moment opportunities. Once the brain gets a handle on it as a useful tool, it naturally turns to it.
Gabriele Oettingen, gives Noah a Consultation using the WOOP App. on Swarfcast Podcast: https://youtu.be/74o2xP1aIpU
The Psychology of Thinking About The Future – Gabriele Oettingen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781462534418/
Rethinking Positive Thinking – Gabriele Oettingen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781617230233/
I think that both sides are partially wrong. Paying attention to the lack during the obstacle phase as Esther points out, could just be draining for someone who has regular depression and low self-esteem. They’ll just give up. Those who are procrastinators may also totally forget their initial intentions with their visualization practice and get lost in short-term distractions. They may need primed intentions + vivid motivational imagery. Through trial and error, people will have to find out what a good balance is for them. A concentration practice of course can mediate all these methods and years of practice may make it easy to see both the end game and use intentions without being distracted.
One of the ways to create a visual that may include completion of the goal, but still includes a continued urgency, comes from Viktor Frankl. He wanted readers to look at a forward thinking form of remorse where one could imagine not having done things one wanted to do, then come back to the present moment and use the energy created by the remorse to act now while there’s still time.
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780671244224/
How To Manifest Anything Using IMAGINATION – Neville Goddard: https://youtu.be/OBBcsbGa-ew
Certainly if one doesn’t like washing dishes, or cleaning the bathroom, which many people have learned to enjoy, it’s important at some point in a meditation strategy to enjoy day-dreams of clean dishes or a clean bathroom so that one can enjoy results FOR THEIR OWN SAKE, and repeated practice of any of these methods will lead to more powerful emotions and motivations to act. Eventually the repeated actions will turn into good habits that can be relied upon, and there will be less need for intense visualizations. Ideally this would great for parenting so that kids can have these habits in adulthood, but if we didn’t get that growing up, we have to parent ourselves and be patient with slow growth. It would also be good for intimate relationships so that people don’t have to command their spouses or be commanded. People are motivated and get things done, absorb themselves in joy, and reduce conflict.
In the application with work, one would have to daydream about work to reduce the feeling of grinding. Even if time pressure may not be totally controlled, there are ways to at least reduce the sense of grind. Similar to the Buddhist Right Effort instructions, one has to curate thoughts in the mind and direct them. Thinking about a beach, and being interrupted all the time at work, is a prescription for resentment and can easily be connected to what we see in radical politics for those stuck in alienation. Probably the most robust daydream would be to wish for processes to improve, because you get to provide some input on the job, and to actively wish for a steaming pile of crap for each project to solve, because you are likely to get it. Maybe a person comes into your office and bends over and leaves a hot mess on your desk. You can then wish to develop skills of using maybe some cleaning powder and a shovel to clean the mess, and then if your mind gets bored as you get better at cleaning messes, you can then move onto hydrochloric acid vomit or toxic waste. These are just facetious examples, but if you work on a line-job or have a lot of rote work, there needs to be some personal goals tied into the work itself to create self-gratification and to stay out of alienation. This is even true if your a Communist that thinks alienation is bad and you work on an line-job and are seeing the same processes.
As you thread daydreams and actions together, there’s less need for defensiveness, resentment, and there is a lot more satisfaction, because many small goals were achieved during the day and mentally celebrated. If you don’t self-sabotage with your daydreams, the only sabotage can come from other people, and then you would have to make plans on how to develop stronger boundaries, or to move to healthier environments. It’s up to bullies to change themselves.
Finally, a Jungian practice involving dream analysis will only provide benefits if out of balance areas in life are addressed, and any feeling tones connected with dreams and imagery that rise up, are used to create more emotional motivation to address goals targeted to out of balance areas. Regardless of your situation, which usually involves relationship problems, financial problems, or health related problems, we all have to start somewhere and begin chipping away at those weaknesses so that a peaceful sense of wholeness can be felt.
I’ll leave you with, Neville Goddard, an earlier proponent of visualization. “Always use your imagination masterfully, as a participant, not an onlooker. Using your imagination to transform energy from the mental emotional level, to the physical level. Extend your senses. Look and imagine you are seeing what you want to see. That you are hearing what you want to hear, and touching what you want to touch. Become intensely aware of doing so. Give the imaginary state all the tones and feeling of reality. Keep on doing so until you arouse within yourself the mood of accomplishment and the feeling of relief. This is the active voluntary use of imagination, as distinguished from the passive involuntary reacceptance of appearances.”
How to speak your desires into reality – Neville Goddard: https://youtu.be/XJTzcdpfHx8
Overview of Flow
I know I covered a lot of Mihaly’s work in the past, but this subject is so important that another survey of it is needed to flesh out some of the logical holes in the above methods. A lot of what Esther talks about regarding The Vortex, Inner Being, or Source Energy, is Flow. Her instructions on how to dodge pain in our goal setting is that navigation between stress, boredom, skills, and challenges that Mihaly studied.
“[Psychic Entropy] is a condition in which attention is incapable of ordering incoming information, making it difficult for the person to act effectively and with integrity of purpose. At a somatic level, severe psychic entropy results in what we call schizophrenia, which involves a loss of control over what we hear, think, or do; less severe forms include a witch’s brew of pathologies ranging from chronic depression to attentional disorders—all of which impair the person’s capacity to use psychic energy for coping with challenges in the environment, or for reducing disorder in consciousness.”
Nlogax – Boards Of Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vHEtin2qsM
Nlogax: https://bocpages.org/wiki/Nlogax
Mihaly wants to avoid psychic entropy and have people experience more Flow, even if it can’t be experienced all the time. One of the primordial ways of achieving this, which can also be seen in animals, is the instinct to Play. “In reading the literature I realized that all the studies of play were explaining it in terms of distal causes—which were perfectly good explanations of why such a practice survived generation after generation. But they were ignoring the proximal causes—namely, the reason why children—and adults—actually bother to spend their scarce psychic energy playing. The reason why they do so seemed obvious to me: play was fun. It was enjoyable. It was what the Greeks called an autotelic activity; namely, one whose goal was simply to be experienced, because the experience was worth it.” The mind wants to be able to demonstrate for itself its skill. In a basic way, it creates a simple goal, and sets out with the current level of skill to attain it. When it is perceived that the goal is attained, there’s pleasure. Without the skills, there’s no attainment and no pleasure. “Across all the activities—playing music, bicycling, bowling, or cooking gourmet meals—one prominent common theme was that the activity presented opportunities for action, or challenges, that were just about manageable given the players’ level of skills.”
To be able to create a goal and to act on it requires concentration, which is the ordering of consciousness, instead of allowing it to fall into passive psychic entropy where anything goes in the consciousness and there’s no direction, like a kaleidoscope. “Optimal experiences are made possible by an unusually intense concentration of attention on a limited stimulus field…In such a state the rest of the world is cut off, shut off, forgotten…Optimal experiences occur when a person voluntarily focuses his attention on a limited stimulus field, while aversive experiences involve involuntary focusing of attention. In other words, the individual’s choice determines the quality of the experience.”
There is also a sense that one is free to choose and when enough skills are present, and the self-esteem is such that it is sure of those skills, the subject is internally motivated to act because of the pleasure of anticipation of success, and then the actual success itself. “When situational challenges balance personal skills, a person tends to attend willingly. For instance, a chess player will concentrate on the game only when the opponent’s skills match his own; if they do not, attention will waver. This relationship between a balance of challenges and skills on the one hand, and enjoyable voluntary concentration on the other, has been found to exist not only in various leisure and creative activities, but in occupations like surgery and mathematical research.”
Excessive risk with complex challenges, and especially social restrictions, can demotivate people to such a level that societal change through revolution is inevitable. People at some point have to have beliefs and personal values that connect with authority figures to make sacrifices feel less like a sacrifice. “But why is voluntary focusing of attention experienced as pleasant? If attention is the means by which a person exchanges information with the environment, and when this process is voluntary—that is, under the person’s control—then voluntary focusing of attention is a state of optimal interaction. In such a state a person feels fully alive and in control, because he or she can direct the flow of reciprocal information that unites person and environment in an interactive system. I know that I am alive, that I am somebody, that I matter, when I can choose to interact with a system of stimuli that I can modify and from which I can get meaningful feedback, whether the system is made up of other people, musical notes, ideas, or tools. The ability to focus attention is the most basic way of reducing ontological anxiety, the fear of impotence, of nonexistence. This might be the main reason why the exercise of concentration, when it is subjectively interpreted to be free, is such an enjoyable experience…It is an interesting fact that people can be forced to do practically anything, but their attention cannot be completely controlled by external means. Even slaves, labor camp inmates, and assembly-line workers cannot be compelled to pay undivided attention to their masters’ goals. The intense concentration required for complex achievement appears to be available only when given willingly. Of course, scientists or artists might be driven to their work by unconscious wishes, the need for money, or by greed of fame; what counts, however, is for the person to think of his compulsion voluntarily to tasks that are against their objective interests, as when workers are turned into their own slave drivers through religious or moral indoctrination. These arguments lead to a second generalization: Voluntary focusing of attention on a limited stimulus field is necessary to achieve socially valued goals.”
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780671244224/
Since concentration in a modern world of distractions and controlled environments where play is little to non-existent, it’s no surprise the value of looking at mental health and concentration, which is now more important than ever. If defects of The Self are more present, we have a moral obligation to figure out what those factors are in parenting, school, and in the workplace. “If people are to lead a satisfying life and if society is to progress, we have to make sure that from childhood on persons will have a chance to develop their ability to concentrate. In schools, at work, and at home there are far too few opportunities for people to get involved in a restricted world of which they can be in control. Even when the opportunities are present—and to a certain extent they are always potentially present—most people do not know how to concentrate except under the most favorable circumstances, and so rarely experience the enjoyment that accompanies the flow experience.”
The Art of Focus – Christina Bengtsson: https://youtu.be/xF80HzqvAoA
One of the prescriptions for improving experiences in day to day life is meditation. For those who are capable of training concentration, and confirming the daydreaming hypothesis above, to daydream about what’s in front of you, instead of wandering elsewhere, helps to improve mood. “When a person is doing something voluntarily, concentration is accompanied by positive moods; when the activity is perceived to be forced, the correlation is negative. When a person is doing something, and focusing his attention on it, that person’s mood is in general more positive than when he is thinking about something else. For instance, a clerk who is paged while filing letters will report more positive moods when thinking about what she does than when her attention is somewhere else. Workers report feeling significantly more creative, free, active, alert, and satisfied when they are thinking about what they are doing, as opposed to thinking about something else, even when they are doing something they would not do if they had a choice…Optimal functioning at the individual and societal levels requires a certain kind of attention structuring; conversely, several personal and societal pathologies seem to involve inability to control attention. Studies of acute schizophrenia, for instance, have revealed a disorder called ‘overinclusion,’ which appears to prevent the patient from choosing what stimuli to attend to.”
New Year’s Day Guided Meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gvmab-new-years-day-guided-meditation.html
In a study that Mihaly references, we get a phenomenological example of what its like to live in psychic entropy all the time. “In a research on the effects of ‘flow deprivation’ we have asked subjects to go through their normal daily routines, but to stop doing anything that was not necessary, any act or thought that was done for its own sake. After only 48 h of this regime subjects reported severe changes in their psychic functioning. They felt more impatient, irritable, careless, depressed. The symptoms were quite similar to those of overinclusion. Performance on creativity tests dropped significantly. The second most often mentioned reason for the ill effects of deprivation by the subjects was ‘the act of stopping myself from doing what I wanted to do.’ Apparently the experimental interference with the freedom of attention may have been one of the causes for the near-pathological disruption of behavior and experience.”
These findings have political implications where any social change has to constantly monitor the damage it does to people’s ability to make their own decisions. A highly regulated environment may be so complex that people will invariably cross lines of a regulation, experience punishment, and then feel stifled to the point of psychopathology. For example, toxic intimate relationships restrict freedom to such an extent that it leads to predictable depression and other stress related illnesses. Voluntary participation in work and intimate relationships is needed, and like in real life, it’s often negotiated, if it is at all, before marriage, for example, but then needs to be renegotiated again and again once people get the actual experience of living with another person, or working in a new job. “It seems likely that the effectiveness of political, religious, and cultural movements depends in part on the amount of flow experiences they make possible. A religious system that fails to provide clearly detailed activities in which the faithful can participate with the understanding that in so doing they are meeting the challenges of life, will not be able to offer- intrinsic rewards to sustain the interest of would-be followers.”
“It is possible, for instance, to reinterpret the notion of alienation developed by Marx in his early manuscripts as referring quite literally to the workers selling out control over their attention to the employer. A wage laborer in effect consents to focus his attention on goals determined by the owner of capital. It is true that the consent is voluntary, but one can argue, as Marx did, that when there are few other opportunities to make a living, the voluntary consent is not perceived as offering much of a choice. For a large portion of his life the worker must concentrate his attention more or less involuntarily on stimuli chosen for him by others. If attention is equated with psychic energy, and if one accepts the premise that experience is determined by what attention can process through consciousness, one is led to taking seriously the conclusion that wage labor indeed results in the worker alienating, that is, relinquishing control, over his psychic energy, his experience—in short, the energy and content of his life. Of course this is an ‘ideal type’ description of wage labor that only an orthodox Marxist would take to be literally true. The task of the researcher is to find out whether, to what extent, and under what conditions the predicted effects are true. It is clear, for instance, that much contemporary manual labor allows workers choice over the directionality of their attention. Blauner, for instance finds subjectively felt alienation to be less among workers in automated chemical plants than among workers on assembly lines, primarily because the former are able to schedule their own work, move around the plant, and change routines with relative freedom…One might say that the survival of social systems depends on the balance in the ledger of attention income and expenditure. Conflicting demands for attention are a common source of stress in interpersonal systems…This is easiest to see in the case of the simplest social system, the dyad. A dyad survives only as long as the two people in it continue to pay enough attention to each other to make their relationship distinctly different from a chance relationship. For example, if two people do not agree to constrain their respective schedules so that they can meet at a common time, their encounters will be random, and hence nonsystemic. Unless two people synchronize their attentional structures to a certain degree by agreeing to common constraints, a relationship will be short-lived. Deciding to be at the same place, doing the same thing together, feeling similar emotions in response to similar stimuli requires restructuring of attention. Without it friends would not be friends, lovers would not be lovers. Even ordinary conversation between two people is only possible because each person abides by a complex set of constraints regulating when and how he should take the turn to speak or to listen. If one were not to pay attention to the cues that structure conversation, that interaction would soon become random, or stop before long.”
Even if society ends up being more or less in lockstep with voluntary intentions, there still is the problem of dealing with complexity and the exhaustion created when there are high levels of mental processing, goal setting, and repeated failure. “Changes in consciousness that require great effort are likely to be those that involve radical restructuring of information, or complex processing of new information. In general, the less predictable an attention pattern is in terms of the genetic programming of man, the more effort its acquisition will require. Patterns required by complex social systems tend to require considerable effort to acquire.” The payoff for tolerating difficult challenges comes when boredom is factored in, and is mirrored below in the section on the Opponent-Process Theory. Always having something to do and a purpose is more conducive to thriving than having easy challenges with huge time gaps in between full of boredom. “The analysis of differences in perception between happy and less happy individuals suggests that in the long run, seeking high challenges in the environment and developing necessary skills to deal with them may be more important. Continual growth and development is a slow but also a more reliable way to bring about subjective well-being.”
So then, how does one learn to be aware of the factors leading to Flow in order to create it voluntarily?
“When an activity is able to limit the stimulus field so that one can act in it with total concentration, responding to greater challenges with increasing skills, and when it provides clear and unambiguous feedback, then the person will tend to enjoy the activity for its own sake. For it’s own sake is the inherent pleasure and other depersonalization experiences like ‘forgetting his or her own problems, and his or her own separate identity,’ at the same time obtaining a feeling of control over the environment, which may result in a transcendence of ego boundaries and consequent psychic integration with metapersonal systems.”
One of the difficulties with this type of knowledge is over-striving, a lack of skill, and excessive self-measurement to the point of interrupting Flow. Having skills practiced to the point of being automatic is what allows Flow to be possible. “It is the state in which action follows upon action according to an internal logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part. We experience it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future…Typically, a person can maintain a merged awareness with his or her actions for only short periods interspersed with interludes in which the flow is broken by the actor’s adoption of an outside perspective. These interruptions occur when questions flash through the actor’s mind such as ‘Am I doing well?’ or ‘What am I doing here?’ or ‘Should I be doing this?’ When one is in a flow episode, these questions simply do not come to mind…For action to merge with awareness to such an extent, the activity must be feasible. Flow seems to occur only when persons face tasks that are within their ability to perform. This is why one experiences flow most often in activities which have clearly established rules for action, such as rituals, games, or participatory art forms like the dance…The addition of spurious motivational elements to a flow activity (competition, gain, danger), make it also more vulnerable to intrusions from ‘outside reality.’ Playing for money may increase concentration on the game, but paradoxically one can also be more easily distracted from play by the fear of losing.” Here the psychology of mastery comes into play. One of the ways to have self-created goals in a reward system is to create learning goals. You create learning goals that help you understand the overall skill, and even if there’s a withdrawal of reward, the mind can then say “at least I learned something that I can use later.” This of course would be in environments where you are allowed to fail and try again.
Part of the reason for desiring Flow in one’s life is also due to our sense of self-narrative, especially if we don’t like it. It becomes possible to escape into Flow experiences to provide relief from worry, rumination, and low self-esteem. It’s also important for work, so that certain personality types can actually find work that remotely matches their Myers-Briggs personality type, to provide a Jungian example, so they can build a better life story. “A ‘flow profile’ might become a dynamic way to describe people for the purposes of finding the best match between their potential and the demands in the environment.”
Off-shoring certain types of jobs and languishing those types of personalities connected with them, will leave them in a state of emptiness, frustration, and alienation with the mismatched choices remaining. People who hate their jobs will align with left-wing or right-wing options with the hope of relief from PTSD, either in more social programs from the left, so that one doesn’t have to rely as much on work, to tax machinery that made areas of work redundant, or tariffs from the right to offset tariffs that invariably other countries impose, and try to produce those industries internally, and consume from within. The tariff cost, if there isn’t a trade war, can be used to offset trade imbalances and to allow a wider variety of personality types to engage in their economy. They will feel less alienated, and they are less likely to join extreme political movements.
One of Mihaly’s main resources to study Flow involves Experience Sampling, where people recount their phenomenological experience. One common example is of rock climbing: “The task at hand is so demanding and rich in its complexity and pull that the conscious subject is really diminished in intensity. Corollary of that is that all the hang-ups that people have or that I have as an individual person are momentarily obliterated… it’s one of the few ways I have found to… live outside my head… One tends to get immersed in what is going on around him, in the rock, in the moves that are involved… search for hand holds… proper position of the body- so involved he might lose the consciousness of his own identity and melt into the rock… It’s like when I was talking about things becoming ‘automatic’… almost like an egoless thing in a way-somehow the right thing is done without… thinking about it or doing anything at all… it just happens… and yet you’re more concentrated. It might be like meditation, like Zen is a concentration… One thing you are after is one-pointedness of mind, the ability to focus your mind to reach something… You become a robot – no, more like an animal. It’s pleasant. There is a feeling of total involvement… You feel like a panther powering up the rock.”
“Rather than an active awareness of mastery, it is more a condition of not being worried by the possibility of lack of control. But later, in thinking back on the experience, a person will usually feel that for the duration of the flow episode his skills were adequate to meeting environmental demands, and this reflection might become an important component of a positive self-concept.”
The irony is that the sense of self has to recede into concentration-absorption to develop the sense of self, but what often happens instead is the sense of self interrupts conscious attention, or the subject celebrates too quickly. “In The Gita, Lord Krishna instructs Arjuna to live his whole life according to this principle: ‘Let the motive be in the deed, and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.'” Yet we could not live without getting paid, and therefore paid work will always have a little tension connected to it because of its possibility of being taken away, essentially an introduction of a lack of control. One then has to just continue immersing oneself, when there are gaps in Flow, until one finds an opportunity for optimum challenges elsewhere. “The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up only to keep the flow going. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self communication.”
Instead of too much stress, if challenges remain at the same level, a subject can experience intense boredom. Instead of climbing up on the same mountain, a person may want to choose a different one, or to add complexity to the current challenge. A mountain climbing example could be to climb without ropes, or to choose another mountain with a sheer face. “An activity is initially absorbing because its challenges match an individual’s ability. With practice, skills improve; unless one then takes on new challenges, the activity becomes boring. To recover the state of flow, it seems that the individual must seek greater challenges, developing an ever more complex relationship with the environment…What makes flow so intrinsically motivating? The evidence suggests a simple answer: in flow, the human organism is functioning at its fullest capacity. When this happens, the experience is its own reward.”
As the skills increase, and it’s not a mystery that people who want to obliterate their negative self-narrative through absorption in Flow activities, the subject can find redemption in their narrative when there are signs of progress. “…Concentration on an activity produces feedback which nurtures the self. This is especially true if the activity is freely chosen, if it presents opportunities for complex interactions and allows the formulation of increasingly unpredictable intentions. As a result of such an activity- and assuming it was moderately successful—the self emerges strengthened from the evidence of its accomplishments. So the self gets lost when we search for it, and reveals itself when we forget it.”
The constantly moving Self also sends signals related to authenticity. Those signals are achievements made through self-chosen goals or socially chosen goals. “To the extent that a person’s actions are not based on self-regulation oriented toward experiential goals one might say that the self is inauthentic. In other words, if a person consistently pursues goals that do not produce positive affect, but are chosen for other reasons, the self that is manifested is one that has been constructed by external forces. An authentic self, by contrast, is one built on goals chosen because they optimize experience. Such goals need not be lofty at all, as long as they reflect the person’s actual experiences.” This is a big struggle for most modern people in a world of shifting jobs, redundancy, and automation. One has to carve out small bits of intrinsic moments out of every day, and include personal goals that harmonize with organizational goals. “By setting goals even as trivial as that of enjoying a nap every afternoon, it is possible to build a self that experiences itself as authentic because it knows that instead of being driven and flogged by external forces, it sets its own rules.”
The ability to create pleasure in socially chosen goals helps to upset the norm of “The Grind.” Enjoying play in the midst of a grind means that long-term goals for acquiring capital and investments doesn’t have to be a masochism with a hope for a payoff of future happiness. “In most cultures, it is assumed that a mature individual is one who can delay gratification—in other words, one who opts for investing energy in future goals in preference to present ones. Yet, it is arguable that the ideal situation is one where there is harmony between future and present goals, and the person is fully functioning and involved in the moment without sacrificing future goals. This happens in those circumstances in which externally motivated behavior that initially did not produce positive affect is later reinterpreted by the person so that the experience is now positive (cf. integrated self-regulation; e.g., Deci and Ryan 1985). There is no distinction between what must be done and what one wishes to do. At that point, one achieves that amor fati, or love of fate, which philosophers such as Nietzsche and psychologists such as Maslow and Rogers have argued constitutes the fullest realization of an authentic self.”
This is a reminder of the importance of the individual self and how people need this ability to have a relationship with one’s life story in order to feel human and alive, but the reason why desire is treated with suspicion by religions is the difficulty of tying one pleasure to another without gaps where people often sin and look for socially unacceptable replacements. If Flow is not steady enough, an inability to tolerate withdrawal symptoms is the risk one is taking if one does not have any spiritual resources to prevent psychological disintegration. “It is the subjective reality that justifies the actions and events of any life history. Without it there would be little purpose in living, and the whole elaborate structure of personality and culture would reveal itself as nothing but an empty shell…Being a pattern, the self requires inputs of energy to keep its order intact. Like consciousness itself, of which it is one of the contents, the self does not keep its shape unless appropriate information is constantly provided to perpetuate its existence. To put it in the simplest possible terms, the self survives by assimilating feedback to intentions. Whenever a desire arises in consciousness and the self identifies with it, turning it into an intention, the stage is set for potential self-building feedback. If the intention is accomplished, the information will be incorporated into the self, which will appear to be that much stronger the next time it shows up in consciousness. Of course, if the intention fails, the feedback will usually result in a weakening of the self.”
The Mice then can’t find their cheese! Just like the psyche disintegrating, whole populations caught in disintegration disintegrate family, cultural, and political structures. Their survivability depends on how much Flow is accessible for people. Systems are now viewed as antiquated, which is regular debate with every political season, and then occasional revolutions rise up and fail for the same reason. No Flow replaced by No Flow. “The founding fathers wrote the Constitution and designed the American political system as a spontaneous, creative act. They were making history. We face the Constitution and the government as external givens; almost as natural forces like the weather or like the force of gravity. Activities that were enjoyable to those who first created its rules may be tiresome to those who feel obliged to follow them.” The challenge for conservatives is to reassess what they are trying to conserve and determine whether it’s worth it, and progressives have to experiment and find evidence of progress before new laws can be accepted. Both sides can fail in the endeavour, though I think the harder job is on the left because they are competing with their past successes. Many social programs that were dreamed about already exist. It’s hard to justify 40% of the GDP in the hands of government being increased to 60 or 70 or 80%.
The Cure – Disintegration: https://youtu.be/BMOlZtpANa0
Once the general public gets better at picking challenges that are at the right level, then society will usher in a new cultural Renaissance where psychological well-being is emphasized the same as how physical comfort is now. “The ability to enjoy challenges and then master them is a fundamental metaskill that is essential to individual development and to cultural evolution. Yet many obstacles prevent individuals from experiencing flow. These range from inherited genetic malfunctions to forms of social oppression that reduce personal freedom and prevent the acquisition of skills. But even in the most benign situations, flow may be difficult to attain. For instance, in our society at present, most parents are determined to provide the best conditions for their children’s future happiness. They work hard, so that they can buy a nice home in the suburbs, get all the consumer goods they can afford, and send the children to the best schools possible. Unfortunately, none of this guarantees that the children will get what they need to learn in order to enjoy life. In fact, a growing number of studies suggests that excessive concern for safety, comfort, and material well-being is detrimental to optimal development. The sterile surroundings of our living arrangements, the absence of working parents and other adults who could initiate young people into the joys of living, the addictive nature of passive entertainment and the reliance on material rewards, and the excessive concern of schools with testing and with disembodied knowledge all militate against learning to enjoy mastering the challenges that life inevitably presents.”
The Opponent-process theory
One of the more interesting theories of pleasure and pain came in the 20th century, researched by Richard Solomon. It measured how actions towards pleasure-stimuli leads the body to counter act it with boredom, and then painful withdrawal symptoms. Continued spoiling leads to a desolate environment where nothing is interesting. When going back to some form of work, the withdrawal symptoms appear and ruin the well-being that happens in a normal peaceful baseline state. An example Richard gives is that of a suckling baby. “When I allowed them to suck for 1 minute and then withdrew the nipple, the obvious of course occurred: The babies started crying with a latency of 5-10 seconds, cried for several minutes, and then went back to sleep. The babies would not have cried at that time had I not introduced the nipple and withdrawn it.- Affective contrast can therefore occur whether or not the positive reinforcer is ‘needed’ at the time. In this experiment, one can infer that the babies went from baseline state – State A —> State B —> baseline state.”
The opposite occurs when there’s a negative reinforcer introduced into State A. “Next is an example of affective or hedonic contrast that occurs when a negative reinforcer is presented and then removed. It comes from Ep-stein’s report of work on the emotional reactions of military parachutists. During their first free-fall, before the parachute opens, military parachutists may experience terror: They may yell, pupils dilated, eyes bulging, bodies curled forward and stiff, heart racing and breathing irregular. After they land safely, they may walk around with a stunned and stony-faced expression for a few minutes, and then they usually smile, chatter, and gesticulate, being very socially active and appearing to be elated. Here again, one sees the affect sequence: baseline state— State A-> State B -> baseline state.”
Inferring from this, an optimal state would be that of doing something that requires some effort first, and then to celebrate afterwards. Many studies on this theory support it, but there are situations where people over-exercise, over-work, and become extremely puritanical, repressed and depressed. When concluding a pleasurable activity, there’s a natural coming down to the baseline that is empty, hollow, boring, and a let down. The opposite happens when you take a cold shower and then warm up, achieve some goal and then celebrate. Part of the interesting connection of this with Flow is how moderation of enjoyment allows for some forgetting and a return to a baseline, and this then can create appreciation for high moments that are lost through time. We look back with fondness. If one wants to continue repeatedly going for a positive stimulus, then periods of abstinence, like in meditation, where one can stay in withdrawal for long periods of time, can be a healthy buffer so that one doesn’t have to be self-flagellating. It also supports the need to find pleasure in work and creative acts so that if the addiction moves higher and higher, with strong boredom tolerances, then it can allow for that increasing complexity that Mihaly talks about. When we are ready for the challenges, and if challenges of one level or another are accessible, then one can continue developing skills, pleasure and complexity to maintain a sense of aliveness through life. Even if skills diminish due to health reasons, then new appropriately chosen challenges can maintain some form of a self. This is why there is a danger when economic situations become chaotic. If one has only one intensified skillset and career, off-shoring, redundancy, and competition, become threats to the person and their only source of pleasure, and identity, at work, will turn into painful withdrawal symptoms.
Any economic systems will always do better when there are lots of replacement jobs, and huge amounts of variety to provide differing levels of challenge. Any forms of Capitalism or Socialism, which in reality will be some hybrid, will have to provide enough wealth so that people can procure the tools needed for hobbies, interests, and work. Any Artificial Intelligence replacements for human work has to provide some replacement endeavours for people to prevent violent unrest and mental illness.
A further warning for people working under powerful Capitalists and Socialists, basically the dangerous ones who want dictatorship and no accountability, the past history has shown that when people are considered superfluous, needy, or dependent, there’s a desire in powerful others to dehumanize and exterminate those people. This can be under the guise of environmental concerns and population control. These threats to a happy society have to be looked at NOW before something comes along that competes with the 20th century. For Capitalists who want to avoid civil war, they would best find a way to make robots be things that people can own so they can directly control and benefit from them, and therefore maintain independence. For Socialists who push for a universal income, they have to set setup legal blocks to tyrannical behavior, which usually is about enslaving dependents, extermination, depopulation, and exploitation. At minimum there’s always an envious attack on pleasure and a great mobilization to eliminate all pleasure from those who are ruled. This creates the pleasure of exclusivity in leaders and a miserable existence like those Biblical stories of slavery in Egypt. It has to be a Socialism that allows for pleasure, not miserliness. There would not have to be strings attached to this money, so people can learn from their own mistakes, and people don’t have to suffer weird forms of torture, like forcing people to have bland diets with fake foods that remind me of old Star Trek episodes. “Eat that blue square! It’s good for you.” It would also reduce hypocrisy, because that desire for exclusivity will always lead to hypocrisy as leaders try to hide that they are enjoying something exclusive that’s not available for those who are ruled. It’s rare for humans to provide better quality experiences for others and repress their need to have better than others. It seems to support the human law that freedom of choice is required for pleasure to be a possibility.
France Flooded with People Fighting for Freedom – Bannon’s War Room: https://rumble.com/vkrhca-france-flooded-with-people-fighting-for-freedom.html
Kristi Noem takes on Bill Gates’ latest environmental demands: https://youtu.be/4KLFbgIV7Zk
[Not as scary] Does saving more lives lead to overpopulation? – Bill Gates: https://youtu.be/obRG-2jurz0
[More scary] Dr. Chant and the “New World Order”: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/australia-new-world-order-conspiracies-b1917082.html
“People always live forever when there’s an annuity to be paid them.” – Sense and Sensibility: https://youtu.be/WX6Iikuz9uI
So much of what allows our society to hang together depends on how we design it. Certainly we can hope for an afterlife that is better, but all we know is of this world for certain, and our projections of Heaven and Hell manifest in our world. We can pray to a great leader to fix it all, but as described above, the energy starts with each person making a voluntary choice. Like George Orwell said, “it’s up to you.”
Ikigai: Giving every day meaning and joy – Yukari Mitsuhashi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780857835406/
Ikigai – Héctor García: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781786330895/
How to Ikigai – Tim Tamashiro: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781633539006/
Awakening your Ikigai – Ken Mogi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781615194759/
Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9789402405514/
The Essential Law of Attraction Collection – Esther & Jerry Hicks: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781401950040/
The Opponent Process Theory of Acquired Motivation – Richard Solomon: https://gettingstronger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Solomon-Opponent-Process-1980.pdf
Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader – Herminia Ibarra: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781422184127/
The Experience of Meaning – Jan Zwicky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780773557437/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/