Unexploited Potential: Imagination

Are you sure you're the one who gets to decide what you allow into your consciousness? 

In this episode, I continue to discuss the book Flow, and study the ways to control consciousness, and the way we process information. I take a look at schizophrenia, and the disadvantages of self-consciousness. I focus on concentration, learning disabilities, and attentional disorders and how they can be traced to family dynamics, lack of parental attention, and child abuse. Identity is developed in childhood, and if a child can cultivate unselfconscious individuality, he or she will be able to live according to a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking.  Intrinsic vs. extrinsic actions. I talk about daydreaming, dissociating, and the benefits of imagination. Here are some ideas that can give you more autonomy, give meaning to the things you do, and help change your habits.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Crystal Quiet Podcast. I am your host, Adriana Montenegro, and this is episode four of the Crystal Quiet Podcast, the Autotelic Life Part 2. So I'm just gonna pick it back up from where I left off last time. We will continue discussing the book Flow by Mihay Chick Sent Me High. And this is part two, the Autotelic Life. Mahaley states that although average Americans have plenty of free time and ample access to leisure activities, they do not as a result experience flow often. Potentiality does not imply actuality, and quantity does not translate into quality. For example, sitting in front of a screen, the single most often pursued leisure activity in the United States today, leads to the flow condition very rarely. In fact, working people achieve the flow experience, which is deep concentration, high balance challenges and skills, a sense of control and satisfaction, about four times as often on their jobs proportionately as they do when they are sitting in front of a screen. We need to know how to control consciousness, a skill that most people have not learned to cultivate. Surrounded by an astounding panoplay of recreational gadgets and leisure choices, most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated. I can attest to that. So in addition to considering external conditions or the structure of flow activities, we also need to take into account the internal conditions that make flow possible. The autotelic personality. It is not easy to transform ordinary experience into flow, but almost everyone can improve his or her ability to do so. Do all people have the same potential to control consciousness? And if not, what distinguishes those who do it easily from those who don't? Psychiatrists describe schizophrenics as suffering from anidonia, which literally means lack of pleasure. This symptom appears to be related to stimulus over inclusion, which refers to the fact that schizophrenics are condemned to notice irrelevant stimuli, to process information whether they like it or not. The schizophrenic tragic inability to keep things in or out of consciousness is vividly described by some patients. I am attending to everything at once, and as a result, I do not really attend to anything. Unable to concentrate, attending indiscriminately to everything, patients who suffer from this disease not surprisingly end up unable to enjoy themselves. Among school children, a great variety of learning disabilities have been reclassified under the heading of attentional disorders, because what they have in common is lack of control over attention. Although attentional disorders are likely to depend on chemical imbalances, it is also very likely that the quality of childhood experience will either exacerbate or alleviate their course. Attentional disorders not only interfere with learning, but effectively rule out the possibility of experiencing flow as well. When a person cannot control psychic energy, neither learning nor true enjoyment is possible. A less drastic obstacle to experiencing flow is excessive self-consciousness. I am guilty of this. A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive him or her, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression or of doing something inappropriate is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment. So are people who are excessively self-centered. A self-centered individual evaluates every bit of information only in terms of how it relates to his or her desires. For such a person, everything is valueless in itself. A flower is not worth a second look unless it can be used. A man or woman who cannot advance one's interests does not deserve further attention. Consciousness is structured entirely in terms of its own ends, and nothing is allowed to exist in it that does not conform to those ends. Both the self-conscious and the self-centered individual lack the attentional fluidity needed to relate to activities for their own sake. Too much psychic energy is wrapped up in the self, and free attention is rigidly guided by its needs. Under these conditions, it is difficult to become interested in intrinsic goals, to lose oneself in an activity that offers no rewards outside the interaction itself. Attentional disorders and stimulus over inclusion prevent flow because psychic energy is too fluid and erratic. Excessive self-consciousness and self-centeredness prevent it for the opposite reason. Attention is too rigid and tight. Neither extreme allows a person to control attention. Those who operate at these extremes cannot enjoy themselves, have a difficult time learning, forfeit opportunities for the growth of the self. Paradoxically, a self-centered self cannot become more complex because all the psychic energy at its disposal is invested in fulfilling its current goals instead of learning about new ones. When it is no longer clear what is permitted and what is not, when it is uncertain what public opinion values, behavior becomes erratic and meaningless. People who depend on the rules of society to give order to their consciousness become anxious. Alienation is in many ways the opposite. It is a condition in which people are constrained by the social system to act in ways that go against their goals. A worker who, in order to feed himself and his family, must perform the same meaningless task hundreds of times on an assembly line is likely to be alienated. In socialist countries, one of the most irritating sources of alienation is the necessity to spend much of one's free time waiting in line for food, for clothing, for entertainment, or for endless bureaucratic clearances. When a society suffers from anami, a lack of rules, flow is made difficult because it is not clear what is worth investing psychic energy in. When it suffers from alienation, the problem is that one cannot invest psychic energy in what is clearly desirable. In a research study by Dr. Jean Hamilton, students who did and did not report flow experiences were asked to pay attention to flashes of lights or tones in the laboratory. Her findings showed that subjects who reported only rarely experiencing flow behaved as expected. When responding to the flashing stimuli, their activation went up significantly above their baseline level. But the results from subjects who reported flow frequently were very surprising. Activation decreased when they were concentrating. So instead of requiring more effort, investment of attention actually seemed to decrease mental effort. A separate behavioral measure of attention confirmed that this group was also more accurate in a sustained attentional task. The most likely explanation for this unusual finding seems to be that the group reporting flow was able to reduce mental activity in every information channel but the one involved in concentrating on the flashing stimuli. This in turn suggests that 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. While paying attention ordinarily involves an additional burden of information processing above the usual baseline effort, for people who have learned to control consciousness, focusing attention is relatively effortless because they can shut off all mental processes but the relevant ones. It is this flexibility of attention, which contrasts so sharply with the over-inclusion of the schizophrenic, that may provide the neurological basis for the autotelic personality. Early childhood influences are also very likely factors in determining whether a person will or will not easily experience flow. There is ample evidence to suggest that how parents interact with a child will have a lasting effect on the kind of person the child grows up to be. In a recent study by Kevin Rathund conducted at the University of Chicago, he observed that teenagers who had a certain types of relationship with their parents were significantly more happy, satisfied, and strong in most life situations than their peers who did not have such a relationship. The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity. The teenager feels that they know what their parents expect from them. Goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering or the children's perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is choice. Children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses and become unself-consciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally, there is challenge or the parent's dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children. The presence of these five conditions makes possible what is called the autotelic family context, because they provide an ideal training for enjoying life. Children who know what they can and cannot do, who do not have to constantly argue about rules and controls, who are not worried about their parents' expectations for future success always hanging over their heads, are released from many of the attentional demands that more chaotic households generate. They are free to develop interests in activities that will expand themselves. It stands to reason, however, that a child who has been abused or who has often been threatened with the withdrawal of parental love, and unfortunately, we are becoming increasingly aware of what a disturbing proportion of children in our culture are so mistreated in this way. We'll be so worried about keeping his sense of self from coming apart as to have little energy left to pursue intrinsic rewards. So the teenager will be so worried about keeping his sense of self from coming apart as to have little energy left to pursue intrinsic rewards. The traits that mark an autotelic personality are most clearly revealed by people who seem to enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable. Lost in Antarctica or confined to a prison cell, some individuals succeed in transforming their harrowing conditions into a manageable and even enjoyable struggle, whereas most others would succumb to the ordeal. Richard Logan, who has studied the accounts of many people in difficult situations, concludes that they survived by finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience. When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of extreme forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person must still seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free. Logan concludes that the most important trait of survivors is a non-self-conscious individualism or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking. People who have that quality are bent on doing their best in all circumstances, yet they are not primarily concerned with advancing their own interests. Because they are intrinsically motivated in their actions, they are not easily disturbed by external threats. With enough psychic energy free to observe and analyze their surroundings objectively, they have a better chance of discovering in them new opportunities for action. If we are to consider one trait, a key element of the autotelic personality, this might be it. Narcissistic individuals who are mainly concerned with protecting their self fall apart when the external conditions turn threatening. The ensuing panic prevents them from doing what they must do. Their attention turns inward in an effort to restore order in consciousness, and not enough remains to negotiate outside reality. Bertrand Russell 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. In part, such a personality is a gift of biological inheritance and early upbringing. Some people are born with a more focused and flexible neurological endowment, or are fortunate to have had parents who promoted unself-conscious individuality. But it is an ability open to cultivation, a skill one can perfect through training and discipline. When we are unhappy, depressed, or bored, we have an easy remedy at hand to use the body for all it's worth. Most people nowadays are aware of the importance of health and physical fitness, but the almost unlimited potential for enjoyment that the body offers often remains unexploited. What gives the body a preciousness beyond reckoning is the fact that without it there would be no experiences and therefore no record of life as we know it. Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable. Yet many people ignore this capacity and use their physical equipment as little as possible, leaving its ability to provide flow unexploited. The simple act of moving the body across space becomes a source of complex feedback that provides optimal experience and adds strength to the self. The mind is always involved as well. To get enjoyment from swimming, for instance, one needs to cultivate a set of appropriate skills, which requires the concentration of attention. Each modality offers an almost unlimited amount of enjoyment, but only to persons who work to develop the skills they require. To those who do not, the body remains indeed a lump of rather inexpensive flesh. The purest form of athletics and sports in general is to break through the limitations of what the body can accomplish. And you do see this whenever you try your hand at uh dancing or ice skating or any specific sport or activity that involves body. The closer you get to a limit, or the more you actually push yourself to the limits of what you thought was possible, the more enjoyment and fulfilling it is to see yourself break those limitations and go beyond what is imaginable, what you thought was possible for yourself. Sometimes, yes, there are standards and I guess accomplishments and what set the standard of like what is humanly possible. And yet these world records have often gotten broken by new people, people who determine they come at it and they decide they're just going to keep working on themselves to get better until they actually break the world record of whatever it is they're doing, whether that's in track and field or swimming. We've all seen it happen at the Olympics or you know, in any other context. And so it's exciting, and I think I do love what it says about we all have this capacity, we can all move our body, and we get the chance to explore how we'd like to move the body. There's rock climbing, there is swimming, there is hiking, there's running, there's all sorts of activities, and you don't have to like all of them. You can just pick and choose and try them out. See which one actually works for you. The point is to explore the sensations and the body and and how he says, how Mihale says that you can actually get enjoyment. From any activity. Because it really is a state of mind and just putting your attention towards anything and being curious about it. To wonder about what can I learn from this? How can I get better by trying something I've never done before? Or by honing a skill that you do know how to do, an activity that you already know. It's just about your state of mind and the attitude that you bring towards any activity. He mentions every person, no matter how unfit he or she is, can rise a little higher, go a little faster, and grow to be a little stronger. The joy of surpassing the limits of the body is open to all. Enjoyment, as we have seen, does not depend on what you do, but rather how you do it. People are happiest when they are just talking to one another, when they garden, knit, or are involved in a hobby, any hobby really. All of these activities require few material resources, but they demand a relatively high investment of psychic energy. Leisure that uses up external resources, however, often requires less attention. And as a consequence, it generally provides less memorable rewards. I think that's a very important point to pause on and explore because that's something we actually don't take into account most of the time when we're doing any sort of activity, how expensive or how many resources it requires to do an activity. Like let's just say I want to go ride a motorcycle. Well, I need to have a motorcycle if I want to ride it. And if that's the case, I have to invest in getting a motorcycle, a license, helmet, all of it, gear to wear. If you want to go scuba diving, it's investing in the gear and in lessons and training or just the travel expenses to get to places where you can actually go scuba diving. But what he mentions is that a lot of the time there are so many activities that we actually don't take into consideration that are free. Walking, you can take a very long walk that does involve concentration, that does involve exploration, you can dance, you can not everything requires so many resources. Even if it does cost some money, what he's talking about is actually how much attention it requires. And sometimes we fall back on activities that involve less attention because when we think of leisure, what we're actually thinking about is relaxing and resting. Whereas I think that if we use our free time in a manner where we could challenge ourselves, we would be choosing activities that would require a lot of psychic energy and attention, such as learning a new skill, whether that's learning a new language or learning an instrument, reading a book, knitting, if you don't know how to knit, learning how to knit. Even gardening, you know, it requires putting other things away, you're putting your phone away and focusing all that psychic energy and attention to the one task at hand. But as he says, that that is so much more rewarding and memorable. He also mentions that most of our deeds are impelled, either directly or indirectly, by sexual needs. We wash, dress, and comb our hair to be attractive. Many of us go to work so as to afford keeping a partner and a household. We struggle for status and power in part so as to be admired and loved. But he later goes on to explain that the same sexual act can be experienced. I think it's interesting that he brings up this point because yes, it goes back to what Darwin stated about how it is based on the continuation of our species, and yes, sex drives a lot of people's actions. But on the other hand, you also see very memorable, well-known philosophers, authors, artists, scientists, and thinkers who did things just for the sake of doing them, who explored ideas and concepts and theories, who further advanced human knowledge just based on curiosity alone and wanting to to explore a certain train of thought. And I do believe that those are intrinsic actions and they were most likely not necessarily driven by sex. It's it is just interesting to see how a lot of materialistic deeds are based and impelled by the sexual needs, but to see how other actions and goals are driven by by needs that are interior needs that find fulfillment through these challenging activities or acquisition of skills that you do not yet have that are fulfilling for their own sake. He brings up a point in the same chapter about the body, that the same sexual act can be experienced as painful, revolting, frightening, neutral, pleasant, pleasurable, enjoyable, or ecstatic, depending on how it is linked to a person's goals. A rape may not be distinguishable physically from a loving encounter, but their psychological effects are worlds apart. It is safe to say that sexual stimulation in and of itself is generally pleasurable, that we are genetically programmed to derive pleasure from sexuality is evolution's rather clever way of guaranteeing that individuals will engage in activities likely to lead to procreation, thus ensuring the survival of the species. But like other pleasures, unless it is transformed into an enjoyable activity, sex easily becomes boring with time. It turns from a genuinely positive experience into either a meaningless ritual or an addictive dependence. Fortunately, there are many ways to make sex enjoyable. But the real cultivation of sexuality begins only when psychological dimensions are added to the purely physical. A third dimension of sexuality begins to emerge when, in addition to physical pleasure and the enjoyment of a romantic relationship, the lover feels genuine care for his or her partner. There are then new challenges one discovers to enjoy the partner as a unique person, to understand him or her, and to help him or her fulfill her goals. With the emergence of this third dimension, sexuality becomes a very complex process, one that can go on providing flow experiences all through life. 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. To discover these, they must invest attention in each other so that they can learn what thoughts and feelings and what dreams reside in their partner's mind. This in itself is a never-ending process, a lifetime's task. He then brings up yoga, since we are talking about the body. He mentions that the perfect society would be able to strike a healthy balance between the spiritual and material worlds. But short of aiming for perfection, we can look toward Eastern religions for guidance on how to achieve control over consciousness. In Sanskrit, yoga means yoking, which I did mention in episode two, which refers to the method's goal of joining the individual with God. First by uniting the various parts of the body with one another, then making the body as a whole work together with consciousness as part of an ordered system. Patanjali, about fifteen hundred years ago, prescribed eight stages of increasing skills. The first two stages of ethical preparation are intended to change a person's attitudes. For example, a straightening out of consciousness. They attempt to reduce psychic entropy. In practice, yama requires that one achieve restraint from acts and thoughts that might harm others, falsehood, theft, lust, and avarice. The second step Ni Yama involves obedience or the following of ordered routines in cleanliness, study, obedience to God, all which help to channel attention into predictable patterns, and hence make attention easier to control. The next two stages involve physical preparation or development of habits that will enable the practitioner to overcome the demands of the senses and make it possible for him to concentrate without growing tired or distracted. The third stage consists of practicing various asanas, ways of sitting or holding postures for long periods without succumbing to strain or fatigue. The fourth stage is pranayama or breath control, which aims to relax the body and stabilizes the rhythm of breathing. The fifth stage is called pratyahara, withdrawal. It involves learning to withdraw attention from outside objects by directing the input of the senses, thus becoming able to see, hear, and feel only what one wishes to admit into awareness. Sixth stage dharana or holding on is the ability to concentrate for long periods on a single stimulus, and the seventh dhyana, in which one learns to forget the self in uninterrupted concentration that no longer needs the external stimuli of the preceding phase. Finally, the yogi can achieve samadhi, the last stage of self-collectedness, when the meditator and the object of meditation become one. Those who have achieved it describe samadhi as the most joyful experience in their lives. Music. It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening. As with anything else, to enjoy music, one must pay attention to it. Before the advent of sound recording, a live musical performance retained some of the awe that music engendered when it was still entirely immersed in religious rituals. One approached the event with heightened expectations, with the awareness that one had to pay close attention because the performance was unique and not to be repeated again. The very conditions of live performance help focus attention on the music and therefore make it more likely that flow will result at a concert than when one is listening to reproduced sound. And I agree with this because when I would do my performance art, the reason I even started experimenting with doing performance art was for this exact reason. I think all my art has centered around being present and presence. And I noticed that even though you can sit at home and watch a film or listen to a record or music, it does not connect you to the artist in the same way as when you are in front of the performer. And you not only you feel you are a participant in the art form and in whatever is going on, you just become, as he says, very similar to the yogic experience, you become one with the music or with the musicians and or with the artists, the performers or actors doing a live performance of a play. You become one with them. And it is this exchange of energy that is happening on stage or even just between the audience and the artist, or the audience and the musician, and the music itself. Something is happening. There is an exchange of energy and and life, I think, that goes beyond what can happen when you are listening at home. And I don't say this to take away from work that is recorded or a movie that is being watched at home, because I do think they do have their separate value, and that those art forms have their own way of reaching and connecting to the the viewer or the listener, just as it happens when someone is reading a book. I do believe that has been one of the oldest forms of expression through writing. And we have had books and we have been reading books for forever. And therefore, I there is a connection that happens between the person reading and the person who wrote it, whether that person is dead or not. There is an exchange happening. It is just felt at a greater level of intensity when it is happening right in front of you during a live performance. And so I do agree with him. He then goes on to talk about the silence between sounds, which is lovely. That's one of my favorite things about performances or music itself, is what isn't being said is its own language. And he says, if listened to closely, that can be very exhilarating. Listening to music usually starts as a sensory experience. The next level of challenge music presents is the analogic mode of listening. In this stage, one develops the skill to evoke feelings and images based on the patterns of sound. The most complex stage of music, listening, is the analytic one. In this mode, attention shifts to the structural elements of music instead of the sensory or narrative ones. Listening skills at this level involve the ability to recognize the order underlying the work and the means by which the harmony was achieved. Plato believed that children should be taught music before anything else. In learning to pay attention to graceful rhythms and harmonies, their whole consciousness would become ordered. But even when children are taught music, the usual problem often arises. Too much emphasis is placed on how they perform and too little on what they experience. Parents who push their children to excel at the violin are generally not interested in whether the children are actually enjoying the playing. They want the child to perform well enough to attract attention, to win prizes, to end up at Carnegie Hall. By doing so, they succeed in perverting music into the opposite of what it was designed to be. They turn it into a source of psychic disorder. Learning to produce harmonious sounds is not only enjoyable, but like the mastery of any complex skill, it also helps strengthen the self. When I was little, I I was put into the piano lessons, and at some point I played a recital and I remember messing up and I froze, and instead of just continuing, I think I tried to continue and I just realized I I couldn't concentrate in the same way. I had completely been taken out of the moment. I guess due to the awareness that other people were watching, and some level of self-consciousness crept in, and I just froze and I couldn't finish. I don't remember if I finished or not. I probably didn't. I don't know. Maybe I got up, walked off, or maybe I tried to finish. I don't remember. I remember losing my relationship with playing piano and music had changed because it when it is forced on you, or when you feel you need to achieve some level of goals or success, it no longer becomes pleasurable or enjoyable. I do remember that for years I just stopped playing, and then later in college I I went back to it, and I would just go late at night into the music room. And it was usually when I would feel a lot of when I was going through some emotional thing or situation, it was a release, and that's still the dynamic I have with it now. Not just piano, but guitar and other instruments. I I pick it up when I have a lot of things I'm sorting out in my heart or head. It's pleasurable for me when I'm just doing it for myself, when I notice that I can pick up the guitar and just play what I'm feeling, and just play because I want to hear the sounds that I'm creating and making and jumbling together and and that it doesn't come from this necessity to achieve any sort of goal. I have taken some lessons, some guitar lessons and music theory, but I think that um is driven by intrinsic goals. I was just curious, I was very curious about music and why I liked certain sounds and how they work together. Uh, like the flamenco sound, I was always very curious why I'm drawn to very Eastern and Middle Eastern sounds and rhythms and odd time signatures, and I I was just very curious about it. So I would research and I would read about different modes, Phrygian and all other types of um Locrian and just interesting ones that I just found just based on curiosity, I wanted to explore and just read about and just understand so that I could better enjoy when I do sit with the guitar, and I could actually, I don't know, even come up with stuff that is in that modality and just play around and but it never came from an extrinsic source, which is great. It was as an adult, it was never forced on me, and therefore my dynamic with music as an adult has been very pleasurable because I know I do it when I want to, and it feels great when I do it, and I enjoy. Whereas as a child it felt forced on me. And it felt like I I had to do it well and I had to please my parents. And I don't know, more so based on achievement, not so much just doing something for the sake of doing it. So, which is just stressing Mahaley's point about how when you really enjoy something, nothing else matters, you know. It's it's not about any of the other things. It really is just the process of doing the activity itself. The cultivation of taste only leads to enjoyment if one takes control of the activity. The other danger in becoming involved with culinary delights, and here again the parallels with sex are obvious, is that they can become addictive. It is not by chance that gluttony and lechery were included among the seven deadly sins. The fathers of the church well understood that infatuation with the pleasures of the flesh could easily drain psychic energy away from other goals. But repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason. If a person learns to control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, then he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted. In the metaphorical language of several religions, the body is called the temple of God or the vessel of God, imagery to which even an atheist should be able to relate. The integrated cells and organs that make up the human organism are an instrument that allows us to get in touch with the rest of the universe. It is through the body that we are related to one another and to the rest of the world. As Sir Francis Bacon noted almost 400 years ago, wonder, which is the seed of knowledge, is the reflection of the purest form of pleasure. In reality, to achieve such an ordered mental condition is not as easy as it sounds. Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training and without an object in the external world that demands attention, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time. It is relatively easy to concentrate when attention is structured by outside stimuli. And this you can see in today's society clearly with our very short attention spans on social media, TikTok, and all of that stuff, which I don't even know anything about. It is extremely hard to focus your attention and to train yourself to give your attention to something for more than a few minutes. And therefore, it does take a lot of discipline. And in today's society, it it is really hard not only to achieve that or to do it, but not to get distracted, as well as find reasons to do it, to find meaning in what we are giving our attention to, and even being aware of what we allow into our mind. I think that's a skill that can be developed and cultivated more by every person. We don't usually notice how little control we have over the mind, because habits channel psychic energy so well that thoughts seem to follow each other by themselves without a hitch. But when we are left alone with no demands on attention, the basic disorder of the mind reveals itself. With nothing to do, it begins to follow random patterns, usually stopping to consider something painful or disturbing. Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the time, at the moment. It will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations. Entropy is the normal state of consciousness, a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. This was a very interesting point. As soon as I read it, I thought that's very true. Our brain is usually in disorder. And if we allow it to just go its own way, it will just take on any train of thought, as Mihale mentions, usually something painful or disturbing or negative. As you can tell, I do think that a lot of mental illnesses derive because of things like this. And it's most likely due to a lack of order or a lack of meaning, a lack of goals. And it is this inability to structure consciousness in a way that is meaningful, that provides an environment that is just like rife with disorder and randomness, as it says. And that's when your thoughts just I just remembered that um there was a point in my life when it was a very low point in my life, and I would get very anxious, my thoughts would race. Not for the life of me could I stop any of those thoughts. I didn't know how to. It was only through substances or extreme activities, more so like dangerous activities, where my mind could focus and be present when I guess I was forced to do something that was life-threatening or dangerous, where I had to pay attention, if not something would really go wrong. I do think that these are all habits. And at the moment I didn't realize that I could on my own just start to pay attention to how my mind is structuring itself or is choosing these thoughts because I d as I've mentioned in one of the episodes, there is a part of the mind that is an observer and a part that is the observed. And I do think that a part of our mind can stop and notice what the other part of the mind is doing. And so these thoughts that are erasing or in disorder can at least be noticed and observed. And I do think that's the very first step because before being able to stop them or change them in any way, any habit is hard to change or stop unless it's recognized as a habit or pattern. So the very first step is to notice and observe and pay attention each time it happens. And so I do love that that he mentions entropy is the normal state of consciousness, which sometimes we we forget, I forget that. And then when my brain is in disorder, even now when I have done some work on myself to where I think I have attempted to try my best to be in the moment and present, I still catch myself in situations where my brain is like I'm just suddenly focused on some imaginary pain that I think will happen, or a real pain that is either on my body or mentally, or as he says, recent grudges, long-term frustrations, things that I could change about my life, or they come back and they just keep eating away at you. And I notice that when I am in a state of flow, when I am at my happiest and most pure form, is when I'm fully engaged with whatever it is I'm doing. So I'm working on cultivating, on spending more time doing activities where I'm not just letting my mind roam and wander in the disorder, but I've actually consciously chosen activities that fully engage my mind and fully engage my body and my mind, both, as he says, in this pursuit of a goal that challenges me and puts me in this state of flow, so that my consciousness is in order and is suddenly somehow put in order as soon as there is a concrete goal in my mind and an activity that makes sense not just because it is coming from a point of self-centeredness, but more so I know that this is not just for me, but perhaps for the betterment of others, or could potentially serve humanity in some way. That is when it feels I am the most at peace and connected and I feel like I am one with whatever I am doing, and I am one with the universe, and you know, all that stuff that they mention in Eastern traditions when they talk about yoga or nirvana or achieving some kind of mental state where there is nothing, mostly because you are fully present and you are here in the now. So going back to the book, he says to avoid this condition of entropy, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings. This explains why such a huge proportion of time is invested in watching television, despite the fact that it is very rarely enjoyed. Compared to other sources of stimulation, like reading, talking to other people, or working on a hobby, TV can provide continuous and easily accessible information that will structure the viewer's attention at a very low cost in terms of psychic energy that needs to be invested. Jerome Singer, the Yale psychologist who has studied daydreaming and mental imagery, has shown that daydreaming is a skill that many children never learn to use. And he discusses the you know the different ways it can be beneficial, not just to children, but later even as adults, um, but for children in particular. Daydreaming is a way a children can use as a coping mechanism when facing a difficult situation in reality. It is a way of escaping into your imagination and creating different scenarios than the ones that actually happen to you in real life. And another beneficial factor of daydreaming is, and another beneficial factor of daydreaming is that it provides a way of imagining not just the future or future options or ways of thinking or even pathways that a child can imagine and therefore different courses of action that they could take in different situations and they can learn from. And so I do think that daydreaming can be very beneficial. And for me, that was the case when I was growing up. My childhood was not one of the happiest. And therefore, my reality, I experienced reality as a nightmare. I escaped into my imagination a lot of the time. I think most of my time awake, I was in my imagination because reality was pretty unbearable. I think, I do think that over the years, my dynamic with daydreaming and my imagination, it took a a turn that I did not expect and that was actually negative in my life. And it turned into something that became an obstacle. My imagination, my dynamic with my imagination became problematic to where I would rely on that as if I was a child to deal with my reality instead of facing some issues that were actually necessary to face head on in a very raw, present manner by dissociating, which it's a form of psychologically detaching and going into your imagination is a way of dissociating. And I did that too often, I think, even as a teenager, as a young adult, and then later, even as an adult, I would have the tendency to just escape into my imagination to make myself feel better. So it was a coping mechanism, but then I would stay there and live there. I would let reality just like crash and burn and things in my life just become chaotic because I was choosing to live in my head and in my imagination instead of facing the uncomfortable issues that were coming up in reality. It wasn't till I did, you know, some work through AA and therapy and have done some healing that I think my dynamic with my imagination has gotten healthier, but for a really long time. And and don't get me wrong, I love my imagination. It's I think one of my most treasured and valuable gifts and things in my life, and I view it as one it's like my best friend, you know, as my my buddy, my little buddy. And so it was more about changing the dynamic with my little buddy and my imagination so that it wasn't hurting me in the long term, and it was more about finding a more mature way and healthier way of relating to my imagination and utilizing it as an as an adult would, when I actually needed my imagination, and not just depending so heavily on it when I shouldn't be, when it came to interacting with others or finding solutions to real problems, just using my imagination as a cocoon or as a cave I could escape into that would take me away from real life. I feel that um just like a butterfly, my imagination, I couldn't just stay in the cocoon, I had to get out of the cocoon. It has been very nice to see that dynamic with my imagination change recently, and now I can rely on it when I need to use it in this adult manner and not so much as a child would, a wounded child would, where I could just escape into it and lock myself in to escape. And so I just mentioned that in case anyone needs to hear that, because when I read this, I mean, he mostly mentioned positive stuff and how beneficial daydreaming and imagination is to a child, and and it really is, you know, imagination is the biggest gift, I think, for mankind. And even for me as a child, I don't think I would have wanted to be alive if I had not had my imagination and imaginative powers to create and to live in my head when I did. But I also do see its negative implications as well. And it's just as with everything, as with any tool, you know, and as with anything, it's just a matter of how you use it, how you utilize it, and not so much that it in itself is a a bad thing or a good thing. It can be a wonderful, magnificent thing. It was my dynamic with it that ended up becoming toxic or um unhealthy because I relied on it in a way that I don't think was helping me in any way. So going back to the book, it is valid to consider memory the oldest mental skill from which all others derive. For if we weren't able to remember, we couldn't follow the rules that make other mental operations possible. All learned information had to be transmitted from the memory of one person to that of another. A person who cannot remember is cut off from the knowledge of prior experiences, unable to build patterns of consciousness that bring order to the mind. It is kind of mind-blowing to think of the very first human being and how consciousness began, and even how information passed down from one human to their offspring, and then from that person to their offspring, and over thousands of generations that have continued, it is pretty mind-blowing. But here we are. He also mentions a quote by Luis Punuel, who said that life without memory is no life at all. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing. All forms of mental flow depend on memory, either directly or indirectly. To remember a long list of elders going back a dozen generations is particularly enjoyable in that it satisfies the need to find a place in the ongoing stream of life. To recall one's ancestors places the recaller as a link in a chain that starts in the mythical past and extends to the unfathomable future. And it's true if we didn't have memory or if we didn't have the ability to pinpoint ourselves in this giant stream of life, where our ancestors came, what part of the world, what helped to shape who we are now, we would have no sense of context. It would be very hard to make sense of who we are, where we came from, what we're doing here. And so I think it adds meaning to our life. Lists of edible herbs and fruits, health tips, rules of behavior, patterns of inheritance, laws of geographical knowledge, rudiments of technology, and pearls of wisdom were all bundled into easily remembered sayings or verse. As far back as there are records or human intelligence, the most prized mental gift has been a well cultivated memory. While others need external stimulation, TV, reading, conversation, drugs, to keep their minds from drifting into chaos, the person whose memory is stocked with patterns of information is autonomous and self-contained. If you decide what you would like to have in memory, the information will be under your control. And the whole process of learning by heart will become a pleasant task instead of a chore imposed from outside. The reason he brings this up is because he talks about how important it was to recite things from memory. So he brings up like poetry, the long, long form verse, you know, the Iliad, the Odyssey, a lot of those um ancient texts that were actually written down but were oral traditions and were told orally. These were stories that were passed down, and it's interesting to see how humans have evolved and how even the way we process information and pass down information has changed over time. He then goes on to talk about it is less likely that one will become a bore when one is intrinsically motivated with a genuine interest in the material and a desire to control consciousness rather than in controlling the environment. I realized I have this tendency to want to control situations or people, and it takes away it takes away my anxiety to be able to kind of have things play out the way I think would work best. But in life that's just not the case, and it's actually healthier to focus on yourself in most cases, in almost every moment, instead of shifting your attention on controlling what is outside of you, because clearly most of what is outside of you you cannot control. And that is something they repeat in the rooms of AA a lot. It is the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And I think that the reason that serenity prayer works and is so vital to the program, and not just the program, but similar ideas have helped other people because it is based on that idea that you can change yourself, but you cannot change other people. You cannot change someone's intentions, motivations, decisions, actions most of the time. People are gonna do what they're gonna do because they have a will of their own, but you can focus on yourself and see what you can change in yourself to better accept your reality and work with what is happening. And usually this means, you know, to better accept your reality without feeling like you need to control or force or change some aspect of the situation or some person because usually there is something we can do, whether it's changing our attitude, changing a reaction, changing our state of mind, what we are focused on, that can help in those moments to deal with it in a better way. Mahaley goes on to talk about how it is important to stress here a fact that is all too often lost sight of. Philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable. Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than by the material rewards that could be gained by it. Democritus stated, it is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new. Happiness does not reside in strength or money, it lies in rightness and many-sidedness. Some of his more enlightened contemporaries claim that Democritus called confidence, which is a mind devoid of fear, the highest good. I really like that idea because lately, for me personally, that is something I am trying to cultivate within myself, um, not just self-confidence, but confidence in others, and it is this idea of trying to remove fear from the mind and noticing that the actions we take don't have to be based on fear, that they can be based on this idea of the highest good, I guess that is faith, you know, taking action even without knowing where it can take you. Playing with ideas is extremely exhilarating. Not only philosophy, but the emergence of new scientific ideas is fueled by the enjoyment one obtains from creative and new ways of describing reality. Whenever the outside world offers no mercy, an internal symbolic system can become a salvation. People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media. They are easily manipulated by demagogues, pacified by entertainers, and exploited by anyone who has something to sell. If we have become dependent on television, on drugs, and on facile calls to political or religious salvation, it is because we have so little to fall back on, so few internal rules to keep our mind from being taken over by those who claim to have the answers. And what he means by internalized symbolic system, it can be an example would be poetry. So the structure, the rules of poetry. Or he uses an example of like word puzzles, math is another symbolic system. But just the knowledge of any of these symbolic systems, it changes you and it provides something that you can have access to at all times that can give meaning to your life, even in situations that have no meaning. Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness. It is within each person's power to decide whether its order will be restored from the outside in ways over which we have no control, or whether the order will be the result of an internal pattern that grows organically from our skills and knowledge. And I think here he also points out the differences and makes the distinction between when you do allow other people's opinions and other so-called experts to give you that information and not just that, but to provide the meaning in your life and provide that order to establish the order of your consciousness, or whether you on your own decide what information you are putting into your consciousness and organically structure order out of your consciousness from what you pick and choose that is already in it. Utilitarian ideologies in the past two centuries have convinced us that the main purpose of talking is to convey useful information. As a result, people have become almost unable to talk to each other outside of narrow topics of immediate interest and specialization. It could be argued that the main function of conversation is not to get things accomplished, but to improve the quality of experience. The point of writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along. It is the slow, organically growing process of thought involved in writing that lets the ideas emerge in the first place. Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet or essayist. Nowadays, if one does not make some money, however pitifully little, out of writing, it's considered to be a waste of time. And I think this goes for any activity, not just writing. If you start playing music, if you start drawing, if you start painting, if you start doing any sort of hobby, some people will say, well, if it's not making you money, you know, why are you doing it? Like it is actually taken as downright shameful for a man past 20 to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it. And unless one has great talent. It is indeed useless to write, hoping to achieve great profit or fame. But it is never a waste to write for intrinsic reasons. First of all, writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them. Writing becomes a therapy for shaping some order among the confusion of feelings. New discoveries still come to people as they did to Democritus, sitting lost in thought in the market square of his city. They come to people who so enjoy playing with ideas that eventually they stray beyond the limits of what is known and find themselves exploring uncharted territory. It is often under such unassuming circumstances, with people dedicated to playing with ideas that breakthroughs in the way we think occur. Breakthroughs in science will depend primarily on the resources of a single mind. It is important to realize that for centuries, great scientists did their work as a hobby because they were fascinated by the methods they had invented rather than because they had jobs to do and fat government grants to spend. Gregor Mendel was a clergyman, and his experiments that set the foundations of genetics were the results of a gardening hobby. Can you believe that? Einstein wrote his most influential papers while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. These and many other great scientists were not handicapped in their thinking because they were not professionals in their field. Recognized figures with sources of legitimate support. They simply did what they enjoyed doing and continued to do so no matter what. The mental framework that makes science enjoyable is accessible to everyone. It involves curiosity, careful observation, a disciplined way of recording events, and finding ways to tease out the underlying regularities in what one learns. It also requires the humility to be willing to learn from the results of past investigators, coupled with enough skepticism and openness of mind to reject beliefs that are not supported by facts. What keeps many of these people from developing their skills further? Here he's talking about people, amateur scientists or laymen who on their free time will do some scientific experiments or work on research on their free time. But there is no better reason for doing science than the sense of order it brings to the mind of the seeker. 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. Philosophy used to mean love of wisdom, and people devoted their lives to it for that reason. Nowadays, professional philosophers would be embarrassed to acknowledge so naive a conception of their craft. As in all other branches of learning, the first step after deciding what area one wants to pursue is to learn what others have thought about the matter. By reading, talking, and listening selectively, one can form an idea of what the state of the art is in the field. If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain. But if the decision is to take the same route because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable. If one records ideas in response to an inner challenge to express clearly the major questions by which one feels compelled or 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 of life. Some individuals prefer to specialize and devote all their energy to one activity, aiming to reach almost professional levels of performance in it. They tend to look down on anyone who is not as skillful and devoted to their specialty as they themselves are. Others prefer to dabble in a variety of activities, taking as much enjoyment as possible from each without necessarily becoming an expert in any one. An amateur or dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally, amateur from the Latin verb amare, to love, referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly, dilettant from the Latin dilettare, to find delight in, was someone who enjoyed a given activity. The earliest meanings of these words, therefore, drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments. They describe the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitude towards the value of experience as the fate of these two words. Increasingly, the emphasis has been to value behavior over subjective states. What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience. Consequently, 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 provides. The bad connotation that the terms amateur and dilettant have earned for themselves over the years are due largely to the blurring of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. The point of becoming an amateur scientist is not to compete with professionals on their own turf, but to use a symbolic discipline to extend mental skills and to create order in consciousness. The moment that amateurs lose sight of this goal and use knowledge mainly to bolster their egos or to achieve a material advantage, then they become caricatures of the scholar. Without training in the discipline of skepticism and reciprocal criticism that underlies the scientific method, lay persons who venture into the fields of knowledge with prejudiced goals can become more ruthless, more egregiously unconcerned with the truth than even the most corrupt scholar. Many people give up on learning after they leave school because 13 or 20 years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom. But a person who foregoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of the media. He will be at the mercy of quote unquote experts. Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point, the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one's experience is all about. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one's experience is all about. From that will come the profound joy of the thinker. As described by Plato, the young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom. He is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to listen. This quotation is about twenty-four centuries old, but a contemporary observer could not describe more vividly what happens when a person first discovers the flow of the mind. I think all that he spoke about towards the end of this chapter, the you know, the two terms amateur and dilettante, and how he how much they've changed over time, the connotation has changed over time. It's it's interesting to see it even just as you know, human nature and as a society. And I don't know if it is tied to this consumer and capitalistic society where we have learned to place value on things more so than experiences because they aren't quantifiable. It's hard to put value on experience. And I do think that that is what makes them more beautiful is that it can never be replicated, it can never be the same, it can never be extracted in a way that it can't be exploited either. Experiences is just in that moment, they happen and never happen again. And yet the reason that these two terms have changed so much, as he says, I mean we are giving value to behavior more so than quality of experience, but I think it does tie into the fact that we don't spend enough time observing ourselves and being aware of our own thoughts, of how something makes us feel. We don't spend enough time asking ourselves if we are actually enjoying what we are doing, if we enjoy the people we We are with. And this is something that even personally in therapy, I've talked about that I hadn't noticed until recently is that a lot of the time I'm just going through life. And I just kind of let I'm kind of experiencing life as it happens to me, more so than having any autonomy and making choices that further express who I am or help me in some way understand aspects of who I am. And I have noticed that that a lot of the time I don't ask myself how I'm feeling. If I'm in a place or at an event or even at work or in a situation, I don't ask myself how did this make me feel? How do I feel about this person or this situation or this thing, this tool, or this place? I am more so focused on the environment or other people and what they're thinking or what they're feeling. I just recently have gotten a little bit more aware of this just because my therapist brought it up to me to notice. And this is something that I think is important to ask ourselves to pause, you know, and reflect at different moments throughout our day and to ask ourselves am I doing this one thing because I actually enjoy it? And if not, why? And it's okay if I'm not enjoying something and if I hate whatever it is I'm doing or the people I'm with, or I recently discovered that all emotions are valid, and all emotions are even anger, sadness, hate, all of these things are okay to experience as a feeling and to observe it does not mean you have to act on any of them, but just as feelings, it's okay to notice them because that is how we get to know ourselves. And I do think that when I do stop and write down what I think about certain things or how I'm feeling about a certain situation or place or person, it does give me more insight as to who I am. I get a more concrete picture of what I want or what I don't like, what I do like. And it makes it a little bit easier to relate to others when I have a clearer picture of myself. We could optimize our experiences if we start paying more attention to those things that fulfill us and that make us feel better, or that we just enjoy more, and maybe less of the things that we don't enjoy, or even or maybe changing our perception around it, or trying to make a situation better, if there's anything we can do on our part to shift our perspective. But in all cases, it just shows that if we were to focus more on the experience itself, as opposed to just hitting the marks. If we went through life just hitting the marks, what a boring existence that would be. And that might be the cause of a lot of people's misery, I think. It was for a long time in my life. So I can definitely see how this would be problematic. Our state of mind and our inner peace, I think, is one of the most important aspects of life. It doesn't so much depend on what we achieve and how much money we make and the material success and any recognition. I think it's more so how we carry ourselves through life. Our attitude, our state of mind, our state of being, how content are we as we go through life, how fulfilled are we when we get up in the morning, when we go to sleep. I think these are the things that matter the most. And so I do love that he brings that point up. And especially how he uses that last quote to talk about how happy thinking can make you, and just experiencing the flow of the mind, how it can just be rapturous. And I will end it there because I think that's a beautiful place to end it. So thank you for listening. I will see you next time.