As I put the book down after reading the last page, I felt a sense of accomplishement and yet still wanted more. As I often do, went back and looked at the highlights and notes I had scribbled in the margin. I decided to take the time to go over them one by one particularly since the content has much to do with my own research about what enables people to Bounce Back from the most difficult of circumstance.
I started to write the ideas down and realized many who have followed my work over the last several years can also benefit from the clear concise map this book creates to achieve happiness, which while it often sounds trite, is something we all desire. Happiness, such a simple yet often elusive goal, is not so incredibly difficult to obtain when the concepts set forth by the author are implemented thereby bringing more order and happiness into our lives.
The thoughts and ideas which follow are not meant to replace reading the book, which I strongly recommend. Rather this is a summary of the ideas which jumped out at me as I read them. As is so often the case, my interests are based on this point in time in my life and each person who reads the book will certainly draw their own conclusions as to what is most important. I realize the ideas have seeped into my soul as I now incorporate them into my own writing and work to challenge and test them for validity within my own framework. While the words, except where noted, all come from the Mr. Mihaly, I have taken the liberty to clarify where necessary to make the ideas clear since they do not have the benefit of the context with which they were written in the original text.
Enjoy what follows as much as I have enjoyed putting it together!
May the Bounce be forever with you!
Rob
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
© 1990, Harper Perennial,
A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.
HAPPINESS REVISITED
People often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom.
Happiness is not something that happens. It is no the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather on how we interpret them.
People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” ~ Viktor Frankl from his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
Experience Sampling Method: Involves asking people to wear an electronic paging device for a week and to write down how they feel and what they are thinking about whenever the pager signals.
What really satisfies people is not getting slim or rich, but feeling good about their lives.
The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives.
It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences.
A problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.
Many people have found ways to escape the frustrating treadmill of rising expectations… Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live. They enjoy whatever they do, even if tedious or difficult; they are hardly ever bored, and they can take in stride anything that comes their way. Perhaps their greatest strength is they are in control of their lives. (I believe my father RHM I has achieved this state.)
When people start believing that progress is inevitable and life easy, they may quickly lose courage and determination in the face of the first signs of adversity.
To achieve autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.
As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires.
The essence of socialization is to make people dependent on social controls, to have them respond predictably to rewards and punishments. The most effective form of socialization is achieved when people identify so thoroughly with the social order that they no longer can imagine themselves breaking any of its rules.
It is important to realize that seeking pleasure is a reflex response built into our genes for the preservation of the species, not for the purpose of our own personal advantage.
The person who cannot resist food or alcohol, or whose mind is constantly focused on sex, is not free to direct his or her psychic energy.
… Messages are often different, but their outcome is essentially the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes.
The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.
If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders.
“Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them.”
~ Epictetus
“If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of the. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
The simple truth – that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life – has been known for a long time.
The yogi disciplines in
Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently.
Control over consciousness leads to control over the quality of experience.
THE ANATOMY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do live a happier life.
Consciousness has developed the ability to override its genetic instructions and to set its own independent course of action.
With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly.
** A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening “outside,” just by changing the contents of consciousness.
The yogi is a virtuoso of the control of consciousness.
The events that constitute consciousness – the “things” we see, feel, think, and desire – are information that we can manipulate and use.
Consciousness can be ordered in terms of different goals and intentions. Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality.
People report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feeling of potency when watching television.
The mark of a person who is in control of their consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. The person who can to this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.
Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.
Whenever information disrupts the consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs it effectiveness. (This is what I like to call, “A
Definition of Entropy: The amount of entropy is often thought of as the amount of disorder in a system.
A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals, thereby freeing up psychic energy.
In flow, even usually boring routines can become purposeful and enjoyable.
Overcoming a challenge inevitably leaves a person feeling more capable, more skilled.
When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable.
Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence.
ENJOYMENT AND QUALITY OF LIFE
If one does not expect perfect safety, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great of a chance of marring happiness.
People keep hoping that changing the external conditions of their lives will provide a solution… Even though we recognize that material success may not bring happiness, we engage in an endless struggle to reach external goals, expecting that they will improve life.
The reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us.
To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.
In a survey entitled “The Quality of American Life,” the authors report that a person’s financial situation is one of the least important factors affecting overall satisfaction with life.
Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met.
Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before.
Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment.
After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it.
Enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention.
The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components:
1) The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.
2) We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.
3) The task undertaken has clear goals
4) The task undertaken provides immediate feedback
5) One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
6) Allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.
7) Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
8) The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.
The challenges of competition can be stimulating and enjoyable. But when beating the opponent takes precedence in the mind over performing as well as possible, enjoyment tends to disappear.
Enjoyment comes at a very specific point: whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities.
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
A distinctive feature of Optimal Experience: People become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing.
“Flow” describes the sense of seemingly effortless movement. Yet flow does not happen without the application of skilled performance… But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.
Without internal guidelines (criteria for “good” or “bad”), it is impossible to experience flow.
When in “Flow,” one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.
People enjoy the sense of exercising control in difficult situations.
Enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.
Preoccupation with the self consumes psychic energy… “Is there something wrong? Do I look funny? Is it the way I walk, or is my face smudged?” Hundreds of times every day we are reminded of the vulnerability of our self.
In flow there is no room for self-scrutiny.
When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are.
It almost seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept.
During the flow experience the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.
Freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.
Autotelic: Derived from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal.
An autotelic experience is when the experience is the end itself.
When the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on the consequences.
When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain.
Much of what we label juvenile delinquency – car theft, vandalism, rowdy behavior in general – is motivated by the same need to have flow experiences not available in ordinary life.
THE CONDITIONS OF FLOW
** Common characteristics of optimal experience: a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing. Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for that they will get out of it, even when it is difficult or dangerous.
Aleatory games are enjoyable because they give the illusion of controlling the inscrutable future.
Vertigo is the most direct way to alter consciousness.
Mimicry makes us feel as though we are more than what we actually are through fantasy, pretense and disguise.
We found that every flow activity, whether it involved, competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality… It transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.
One cannot enjoy doing the same thing at the same level for long. We grow either bored or frustrated; and then the desire to enjoy ourselves again pushes us to stretch our skills, or to discover new opportunities for using them.
Art, play, and ritual probably occupy more time and energy in most cultures than work.
No social system has ever survived long unless its people had some hope that their government would help them achieve happiness.
It is inadmissible to apply one set of values to evaluate another.
The evidence suggests that the Industrial Revolution not only shortened the life spans of members of several generations, but made them more nasty and brutish as well.
TV watching, the single most often leisure activity in the United States today, leads to the flow condition very rarely. In fact, working people achieve the flow experience – deep concentration, high and balanced challenges and skills, a sense of control and satisfaction – about four times as often on their jobs, proportionately, as they do when they are watching television.
Surrounded by astounding panoply of recreational gadgets and leisure choices, most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated.
A person who is constantly worried about how other will perceive her, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment.
It is probable that many cultures disappeared… because they were no longer able to provide the experience of enjoyment.
People who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment.
The family context promoting optimal experience can be described as having five characteristics:
1) Clarity
2) Centering
3) Choice
4) Commitment
5) Challenge
Children who grow up in family situations that facilitate clarity of goals, feedback, feeling in control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge will generally have a better chance to order their lives so as to make flow possible.
In less well-ordered families a great deal of energy is expended in constant negotiations and strife, and in the children’s attempts to protect their fragile selves from being overwhelmed by other people’s goals.
When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by fining a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces.
Richard Logan based on the writings of many survivors, including those of Viktor Frankl and Bruno Bettelheim concludes that the most important trait of survivors is a “non self-conscious individualism,” or a strongly director purposes that is not self-seeking.
Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of our century, described how he achieved personal happiness: “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”
THE BODY IN FLOW
When we focused on people who were pursuing leisure activities that were expensive in terms of outside resources required, we found they were significantly less happy than when involved in inexpensive leisure. People were happiest when they were just talking to one another, when they gardened, knitted, or were involved in a hoppy; all of these activities require few material resources, but they demand a relatively high investment of psychic energy.
How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more complex. To become more complex, the partners must discover new potentialities in themselves and in each other – so they can learn what thoughts and feelings, what dreams reside in their partners mind.
Yoga is one of the oldest and most systematic methods of producing the flow experience.
Any information that the nervous system can recognize lends itself to rich and varied flow experiences.
Description of an aesthetic flow experience, “… when you encounter a very great work of art, you just know it and it thrills you in all your senses, not just visually, but sensually and intellectually.
Listening to music wards off boredom and anxiety, and when seriously attended to, it can induce flow experiences.
It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening.
To transform the biological necessity of feeding into a flow experience, one must begin by paying attention to what one eats.
Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason.
THE FLOW OF THOUGHT
Entropy (wasted energy) is the normal state of consciousness – a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
TV can provide continuous and easily accessible information that will structure the viewer’s attention, at a very low cost in terms of the psychic energy that needs to be invested. While people watch television, they need not fear that their drifting minds will force them to face disturbing personal problems.
One of the simplest ways to use the mind is daydreaming.
All forms of mental flow depend on memory, either directly or indirectly.
The person whose memory is stocked with patterns of information is autonomous and self-contained.
The building blocks of most symbol systems, words make abstract thinking possible and increase the mind’s capacity to store the stimuli it has attended to.
Philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable.
Playing with ideas is extremely exhilarating.
In conditions of extreme deprivation poets, mathematicians, musicians, historians, and biblical experts have stood out as islands of sanity surrounded by the waves of chaos.
It could be argued that the main function of conversation is not to get things accomplished, but to improve the quality of experience.
Talking well enriches every interaction, and it is a skill that can be learned by everyone.
* The point of writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along.
Writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them. (44 in a Row, 44 to Go!)
When writing is used to control experience, without letting it control the mind, it is a tool of infinite subtlety and rich rewards.
Every individual is a historian of his or her own personal existence.
Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. It frees us from the tyranny of the present, and makes it possible for consciousness to revisit former times.
It is often under unassuming circumstances, with people dedicated to playing with ideas that breakthroughs in the way we think occur.
If flow, rather than success and recognition, is the measure by which to judge its value, science can contribute immensely to the quality of life.
If one records ideas in response to an inner challenge to express clearly the major question by which one feels confronted, and tries to sketch out answers that will help make sense of one’s experiences, then the amateur philosopher will have learned to derive enjoyment from one of the most difficult and rewarding tasks to life.
It has become embarrassing to be called a dilettante, even though to be a dilettante is to achieve what counts most – the enjoyment one’s actions provide.
WORK AS FLOW
It is true that if one finds flow in work, and in relations with other people, one is well on the way toward improving the quality of life as a whole.
There is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.
Autotelic Personality: The ability to create flow experiences even in the most barren environment.
Enjoyment depends on increasing complexity.
Individuals can transform any job into a more complex activity. They can do this by recognizing opportunities for action where others do not, by developing skills, by focusing on the activity at hand, and allowing themselves to be lost in the interaction so that their selves could emerge stronger afterward.
The more a job inherently resembles a game – with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback – the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.
Work can be either brutal and boring, or enjoyable and exciting.
To improve the quality of work, two complimentary strategies are necessary:
1) Jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities – as do hunting, cottage weaving and surgery.
2) Help people develop autotelic personalities by training them to recognize opportunities for action, to hone their skills, to set reachable goals.
People report flow situations more frequently in work than in leisure.
When challenges and skills were both high people feel happier, more cheerful, stronger, and more active; they concentrate more; they feel more creative and satisfied.
Paradoxically, motivation was low at work even when it provided flow, and it was high in leisure even when the quality of experience was low… On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in leisure.
Whether a job has variety of not ultimately depends more on a person’s approach to it than on actual working conditions.
Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges.
It is common not to run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.
ENJOYING SOLITIDE AND OTHER PEOPLE
The person who is left alone comes to accept the fact that he must be already dead, since no one pays attention to him any longer.
A person who learns to get along with others is going to make a tremendous change for the better in the quality of life.
When people are treated as valuable in their own right, people are the most fulfilling source of happiness.
Adolescents, adults and old people all report that their worst experiences have taken place in solitude.
When external input is lacking, attention begins to wander, and thoughts become chaotic – resulting in the state we refer to as “psychic entropy.”
Although watching TV is far from being a positive experience – generally people report feeling passive, weak, rather irritable, and sad when doing it – at least the flickering screen brings a certain amount of order to consciousness.
Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance.
While psychotropic drugs do provide a wider variety of mental experiences than one would encounter under normal sensory conditions, they do so without adding to our ability to order them effectively.
Even pain is better than the chaos that seeps into an unfocused mind.
A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life.
If a person does not know how to control attention in solitude, he will inevitably turn to the easy external solutions: drugs, entertainment, excitement – whatever dulls or distracts the mind.
Life-styles built on pleasure survive only in symbiosis with complex cultures based on hard work and enjoyment.
Quality of life depends to a large extent on how well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives enjoyable.
To provide flow, a family has to have a goal for its existence.
Positive goals are necessary to focus their psychic energies of parents and children on common tasks.
Differentiation means that each person is encouraged to develop his or her unique traits, maximize personal skills and set individual goals. (To find their own SPECIAL GIFT!)
As with any other flow activity, family activities should also provide clear feedback.
The only way to restore flow to a relationship is by finding new challenges in it.
If parents just talked more about their ideals and dreams – even if these had been frustrated 0 the children might develop the ambition needed to break through the complacency of their present selves.
The family, like any other joint enterprise, needs constant investments of psychic energy to assure its existence.
There are few things as enjoyable as freely sharing one’s most secret feelings and thoughts with another person.
A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to always be true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails.
CHEATING CHAOS
Health, money, and other material advantages may or may not improve life. Unless a person has learned to control psychic energy, chances are such advantages will be useless.
A person who knows how to find flow from life is able to enjoy even situations that seem to allow only despair.
Jesus Christ said, “What does it benefit to man if he gains the entire world, but loses himself.
* A major catastrophe that frustrates a central goal of life will either destroy the self, forcing a person to use all his psychic energy to erect a barrier around remaining goals, defending them against further onslaughts of fate; or it will provide a new, more clear, and more urgent goal: to overcome the challenges created by the defeat.
How does it come about that the same blow will destroy one person, while another will transform it into inner order?
To sort out what accounts for a person’s ability to cope with stress it is useful to distinguish three different kinds of resources:
1) External support (Especially the network of social supports)
2) Psychological resources (Intelligence, education and personality factors)
3) Coping Strategies
External supports by themselves are not that effective in mitigating stress. They tend only to help those who help themselves. Psychological resources are largely outside our control. How we cope is both the most important factor in determining what effect stress will have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control.
The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a very rare gift. Those who possess it are called “survivors,” and are said to have “resilience” or “courage.”
Courage and the ability to overcome hardship are the qualities most often mentioned as the reason for admiration.
Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.
The integrity of the self depends on the ability to take neutral or destructive events and turn them into positive ones.
The chances of only good things happening are extremely thin.
Courage, resilience, perseverance, mature defense or transformational coping – the dissipative structures of the mind – are essential.
If we develop such positive strategies, most negative events can be at least neutralized, and possibly even used as challenges that will help make the self stronger and more complex.
A healthy adolescent stays depressed on the average for only half an hour while and adult takes, on the average, twice as long to recover from bad moods.
Those who know how to transform a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled will be able to enjoy themselves, and emerge stronger from the ordeal. There are three steps that seem to be involved in such transformations:
1) Unselfconscious self-assurance (An implicit belief destiny was in their hands).
2) Focusing attention on the world (People who know how to transform stress into enjoyable challenge spend very little time thinking about themselves).
3) The discovery of new solutions (Almost every situation we encounter in life presents possibilities for growth).
Even the approach to death itself can serve to create harmony in consciousness, rather than despair.
The difference between someone who enjoys life and someone who is overwhelmed by it is a product of a combination of such external factors and the way a person has come to interpret them – that is, whether he sees challenges as threats or opportunities for action.
The “autotelic self” is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges.
Autotelic Self: A self that has self-contained goals.
For an autotelic person, the primary goals emerge from experience evaluated in consciousness, and therefore from the self proper.
The autotelic self transforms potentially entropic experience into flow. The rules for developing such a self are simple, and they derive directly from the flow model:
1) Setting goals – Selecting a goal is related to the recognition of challenges.
2) Becoming immersed in the activity – To achieve involvement with an action system, one must find a relatively close mesh between the demands of the environment and one’s capacity to act.
3) Paying attention to what is happening – Having an autotelic self implies the ability to sustain involvement.
4) Learning to enjoy immediate experience – One can enjoy life even when objective circumstances are brutish and nasty.
THE MAKING OF MEANING
It doesn’t matter what the ultimate goal is – provided it is compelling enough order a life-time’s worth of psychic energy… As long as it provides clear objective, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life.
People who find their lives meaningful usually have a goal that is challenging enough to take up all their energies, a goal that can give significance to their lives.
The goal itself is usually not important; what matters is that it focuses a person’s attention and involves it in an achievable, enjoyable activity.
A unified purpose is what gives meaning to life.
What counts is not so much whether a person actually achieves what she has set out to do; rather, it matters whether effort has been expended to reach the goal, instead of being diffused or wasted.
The price one pays for changing goals whenever opposition threatens is that while one may achieve a more pleasant and comfortable life, it is likely that it will end up empty and void of meaning.
Each person must discover ultimate purpose on his or her own.
It is necessary to invest energy in goals that are so persuasive that they justify effort even when our resources are exhausted and when fate is merciless in refusing us a chance at having a comfortable life.
When there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious; when too few, we get bored.
Every child, before self-consciousness begins to interfere, acts spontaneously with total abandon and complete involvement.
When we can imagine only a few opportunities and few possibilities, it is relatively easy to achieve harmony.
The mind is endowed with the dubious blessing of choice.
The order based on innocence is now beyond our grasp.
Life Theme and Propriate Striving: Identify a set of goals linked to an ultimate goal that gives significance to whatever a person does.
When a person’s psychic energy coalesces into a life theme, consciousness achieves harmony.
Authentic Project: It does not matter what the choice is, as long as it is an expression of what the person genuinely feels and believes.
Inauthentic Project: Those a person chooses because they are what she feels ought to be done, because they are what everyone else is doing.
What matters is the interpretation that one places on suffering.
To find purpose in suffering one must interpret it as a possible challenge.
Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy, and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how harmony can be imposed on chaos. Yet so many people ignore them, expecting to create meaning in their lives by their own devices.
Many people confronted with randomness of existence have drawn hope from the knowledge that others before them had faced similar problems, and had been able to prevail.
Dante’s Divine Comedy is an early description of a midlife crisis and its resolution.
When we understand better whey we are as we are, when we appreciate more fully the origins of instinctual drives, social controls, cultural expressions – all the elements that contribute to the formation of consciousness – it will become easier to direct our energies where they ought to go.
Recognizing limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should eel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual’s purpose merges with the universal flow.