Each year I see hundreds of books published with advice on how to stay trim, how to grow rich, or how to develop self-confidence. While these self-help books may help a reader in the short term, they are likely to be unsatisfying, for they do little to enhance the quality of experience. But what really does make people glad to be alive? What are the inner experiences that make life worthwhile?

For more than two decades I have been travelling through the world studying states of happiness – those experiences when people tell stories about feelings of concentration and deep enjoyment. These stories in Italy have revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness they call – la dolce vita – and the rest of us call them happiness or flow. Which is a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity whether it is painting, eating, having a conversation, playing sports or making love. Everyone experiences flow from time to time and will recognize its characteristics: People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Both the sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear, and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence.

This seminar reveals how this pleasurable state can, in fact, be controlled, and not just left to chance, by setting ourselves challenges – tasks that are neither too difficult nor too simple for our abilities. With such goals, we learn to order the information that enters consciousness and thereby improve the quality of our lives.

Happiness is expected to become one of the most productive areas of research during the next decade. The Hero’s Journey: the Pursuit of Happiness is the ideal introduction to this remarkable subject taking you on a journey to discover the true richness of everyday life.

Join Peter for a truly transformational vacation for the mind.

Practical Info

The price of this two day hero’s journey in Paris with Peter de Kuster is Euro 1295 excluding VAT for one or two travellers. There are special prices when you come with three or more travellers.

You can reach Peter for questions about dates and the program by mailing him at peterdekuster2023@gmail.com

About Peter de Kuster

Peter de Kuster is the founder of The Heroine’s Journey & Hero’s Journey project,  a storyteller who helps creative professionals to create careers and lives based on whatever story is most integral to their lives and careers (values, traits, skills and experiences). Peter’s approach combines in-depth storytelling and marketing expertise, and for over 20 years clients have found it effective with a wide range of creative business issues.

Peter is writer of the series The Heroine’s Journey and Hero’s Journey books, he has an MBA in Marketing,  MBA in Financial Economics and graduated at university in Sociology and Communication Sciences.

Introduction

Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness. While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal – health, beauty, money or power – is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy. Much has changed since Aristotle’s time. our understanding of the worlds of stars and of atoms has expanded beyond belief. The gods of the Greeks and Romans were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield. And yet on this most important issue very little has changed in the intervening centuries. We do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did, and as for learning how to attain that blessed condition, one could argue that we have made no progress at all.

Despite the fact that we are now healthier and grow to be older, despite the fact that even the least affluent among us are surrounded by material luxuries undreamed of even a few decades ago (no Roman emperor could turn on a TV set when he was bored), and regardless of all the stupendous scientific knowledge we can summon at will, 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.

Is this because it is the destiny of mankind to remain unfulfilled, each person always wanting more than he or she can have? Or is the pervasive malaise that often sours even our most precious moments the result of our sekking happiness in the wrong places? The intent of this journey is to use some of the tools of modern psychology and the great stories of Italian Dolce Vita to explore the very ancient question: When do pepole feel most happy? If we can begin to find an answer to it, perhaps we shall eventually be able to order life so that happiness will play a larger part in it.

Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outer events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness in fact is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and fended privately by each person. People who learn to control their experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, said .J. S. Mill and you cease to be so. It is by being fully involed with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarizws ir beautifully in the preface of his book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. 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’.

So how can we reach this elusive goal that cannot be attainted by a direct route? There is a way. It is a circuitous journey that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness.

Our stories about our lives are the outcome of many forces that shape experience, each having an impact on whether we feel good or bad. Most of these forces are outside our control. There is not much we can do about our looks, our temperament or our constitution. We cannot decide -at least so far – how tall we will grow, how smart we will get. We can choose neither parents nor time of birth, and it is not in your power or mine to decide whether there will be a war or a depression. The instructions contained in our genes, the pull of gravity, the pollen in the air, the historical period into which we are born, these and innumerable other conditions determine what we see, how we feel, what we do. It is not surprising that we should believe that our fate is primarily ordained by outside agencies.

Yet we have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

This is what we mean by the optimal experience of happiness. It is what the painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. Or it is the feeling a father has when his child for the first time responds to his smile. Such events do not occur only when the external conditions are favorable, however; people who have lived through near-fatal physical dangers often recall that in the midst of their ordeal they experienced extraordinarily rich epiphanies in response to such simple events as hearing the song of a bird in the forest, completing a hard task or sharing a crust of bread with a friend.

Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times – although such experiences can be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually o ccur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experienced happiness is thus something that we make happen. For a violionist it can be mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.

Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding and he might have been dizzy with fatigue – yet these could have been the best moments of his life. Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences of happiness add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can coneivably imagine.

In my search for stories of heroes and heroines the past years I tried to understand how creative people felt when they most enjoyed themselves, and why. My thousands of interviews of artists, musicians, designers, writers, actors – in other words people who seemed to spend their time in precisely those activities they preferred. From their stories of what it felt like to do what they were doing. What makes them happy. You can see the Hero’s Journey – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. The concept of The Hero’s Journey has been found useful by psychologists who study happiness, life satisfaction and intrinsic motivation; by anthropologists who are interested in the phenomena of collective effervescence and rituals. Some have extended the implications of flow to attempts to understand the evolution of mankind, others to illuminate religious experience. The concept of the Hero’s Journey has inspired the creation of school curricula, the training of business executives, the design of products and services. The concept is used to generate innovative new ideas and practices, the design of museum exhibits. All this has happened within a dozen years after columns were published and indications that the impact of the theory is going to be even stronger in the years to come. ​

OVERVIEW

What follows is not a ‘how – to’ book. There are literally thousands of such volumes or on the remainder shelves of book-stores, explaining how to get rich, powerful, loved or slim. Like cookbooks, they tell you how to accomplish a specific limited goal on which few people actually follow through. Yet even if their advice were to work, what would be the result afterward in the unlikely event that one did turn into a slim, well-loved, powerful millionaire? Usually what happens is that the person finds himself back at square one, with a new list of wishes just as dissatisfied as before. What would really satisfy people is not getting slim or rich but feeling good about their lives. In the Hero’s Journey partial solutions don’t work.

However well -intentioned books cannot give recipes for how to be happy. Because it depends on the ability to control what happens in consciousness moment by moment, each person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual efforts and creativity. What a book can do, however, and what this hero’s journey will try to accomplish is to present examples of how life can be made more enjoyable, ordered in the framework of a theory, for readers to reflect upon and from which they may then draw their own conclusions.

Rather than presenting a list of dos and don’ts., this hero’s journey intends to be a voyage through the realms of the mind, charted with the tools of science. Like all adventures worth having it will not be an easy one. Without some intellectual effort, a commitment to reflect and think hard about your own experience, you will not gain much from what follows.

We will examine the journey of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner story. We shall begin by considering how your conscious storytelling works and how it is controlled because only if we understand the way subjective states are shaped can we master them. Everything we experience – joy or pain, interest or boredom – is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to control this information, we can decide what our lives will be like.

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in our conscious story. This happens when psychic energy – or attention – is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. 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. A person who has achieved control over their story, their psychic energy and has invested it in conscious chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more authentic, complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.

To understand why some things we do are more enjoyable than others , we shall review the conditions of the Hero’s Journey. Happiness is the way people describe their state of mind when their story is harmonieusly ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake. In reviewing some of the activities that consistently produce the happiness experience – such as sports, games, art, and hobbies – it becomes easier to understand what makes people happy.

But one cannot rely solely on games and art to improve the quality of life. To achieve control over what happens in the mind, one can draw upon an almost infinite range of opportunities for enjoyment – for instance, through the use of physical and sensory skills ranging from athletics to music to Yoga or through the development of symbolic skills such as poetry, philosophy or mathematics.

Most people spend the largest part of their lives working and interacting with others, especially with members of their families. Therefore it is crucial that one learn to transform their creative work into happiness-producing activities and to think of ways of making relations with parents, spouses, children and friends more enjoyable.

Many lives are disrupted by tragic accidents, and even the most fortunate are subjected to stresses of various kinds. Yet such blows do not necessarily diminish happiness. It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable. We will encounter in this journey ways in which people manage to enjoy life despite adversity.

And finally, the last step will be to describe how people manage to join all experience into a meaningful story. When that is accomplished and a person feels in control of life and feels that it makes sense, there is nothing left to desire. The fact that one is not slim, rich, or powerful no longer matters. The tide of rising expectations is stilled; unfulfilled needs no longer trouble the mind. Even the most humdrum experiences become enjoyable.

Thus The Hero’s Journey will explore what is involved in reaching these aims. How is it ordered so as to make experience enjoyable? How is happiness achieved? And, last, how can a meaningful story be created you tell yourself about yourself? The way to achieve these goals is relatively easy in theory, yet quite difficult in practice. The rules themselves are clear enough, and within everyone’s reach. But many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way. It is a little like trying to lose weight: everyone knows what it takes, everyone wants to do it, yet it is next to impossible for so many. The stakes here are higher, however. It is not just a matter of losing a few extra pounds. It is a matter or losing the chance to have a life worth living.

Before describing how happiness is attained, it is necessary to review briefly some of the obstacles to fulfillment implicit in the human condition. In the old stories, before living happily ever after the hero had to confront fiery dragons and wicked warlocks in the course of a quest. This metaphor applies to the exploration of the psyche as well. I shall argue that the primary reason it is so difficult to achieve happiness centers on the fact that, contrary to the myths mankind has developed to reassure itself, the universe was not created to answer our needs. Frustration is deeply woven in to the fabric of life. And whenever some of our needs are temporarily met, we immediately start wishing for more The chronic dissatisfaction is the second obstacle that stands in the way of contentment.

To deal with these obstacles, every culture develops with time protective stories – religious, philosophies, arts – that help shield us from chaos. They help us believe that we are in control of what is happening and give reasons for being satisfied with our lot. But these shields are effective only for a while; after a few centuries sometimes after only a few decades, a religion or belief wears out and no longer provides the spiritual sustenance it once did.

When people try to achieve happiness on their own, without the support of a strong story, they usually seek to maximize pleasures that are either biologically programmed in their genes or are out as attractive by the society in which they live. Wealth, power, and sex become the chief goals that give direction to their strivings. But the quality of life cannot be improved this way. Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.

THE ROOTS OF DISCONTENT

The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind. It is almost immeasurably huge, and most of it is hostilely empty and cold. It is the setting for great violence, as when occasionally a star explodes, turning to ashes everything within billions of miles. The rare planet whose gravity field would not crush our bones is probably swimming in lethal gases. even planet Earth, which can be so idyllic and picturesque is not to be taken for granted. To survive on it men and women have had to struggle for millions of years against ice, fire, floods, wild animals and invisible microorganisms that appear out of nowhere to snuff us out.

It seems that every time a pressing danger is avoided a new and more sophisticated threat appears on the horizon. No sooner do we invent a new substance than its by-products start poisioning the environment. Throughout history, weapons that were designed to provide security have turned around and threatened to destroy their makers. As some diseases were curbed, new ones become virulent; and if, for a while mortality is reduced, then overpopulation starts to haunt us. The for grim horseman of the Apocalypse are never very far away. The earth may be our only home, but it is a home full of booby traps waiting to go off at any moment.

It is not that the unverse is random in an abstract mathematical sense. The motions of the stars, the trasnformations of energy that occur on it might be predicted and explained well enough. But natural processes do not take human desires in account. They are deaf and blind to our needs, and thus they are random in contrast with the order we attempt to establish through our goals.

Chaos is one of the oldest concepts in myth and religion. It is rather foreign to the physical and biological sciences, because in terms of their laws the events in the cosmos are perfectly reasonable. For instance ‘chaos theory’ in the sciences attempts to describe regularities in what appears to be utterly random. But chaos has a different meaning in psychology and the other human sciences, because if human goals and desires are taken as the starting point, there is irreconcilable disorder in the cosmos.

There is not much that we as individuals can do to change the way the universe runs. In our lifetime we exert little influence over the forces that interfere with our well-being. It is important to do as much as we can to prevent nuclear war, to abolish social injustice, to eradicate hunger and disease. But it is prudent not to expect that efforts to change external conditions will immediately improve the quality of our lives.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe. Certainly we should keep on learning how to master the external environment, because our physical survival may depend on it. But such mastery is not going to add one jot to how good we as indiviuals feel, or reduce the chaos of the world as we experience it. To do what we must learn to achieve mastery over our story and our consciousness itself.

Each of us has a story, however vague, of what we would like to accomplish before we die. How close we get to attainting this goal becomes the measure for the quality of our lives. If it remains beyond reach, we grow resentful or resigned; if it is at least in part achieved, we experience a sense of happiness and satisfaction.

For the majority of pepole on this earth, life goals are simple, to survive, to leave children who will in turn survive, and if possible, to do so with a certain amount of comfort and dignity. But as soon as these basic problems of survival are solved, mereley having enough food and a comfortable shelter is no longer sufficient to make people content. New needs are felt, new desires arise. With affluence and power come escalating expectations, and as our level of wealth and comfort keeps increasing, the sense of well-being we hopend to achieve keeps receding into the distance.

This paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

Though the evidence suggest that most people are caught up on this frustrating treadmill of rising expectations, many individuals have found ways to escape it. These are people who, regardless of their material conditions, have been able to improve the quality of their lives, who are satisfied, and who have a way of making those around them also a bit more happy.

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 that they are in control of their life stories. We shall see later how they have manged to reach this state. But before we do so, we need to review some of the devices that have been developed over time as protection against the threat of chaos, and the reasons why such external defences often do not work.

THE SHIELDS OF CULTURE

Over the course of human evolution, as each group of people became gradually aware of the enormity of its isolation in the cosmos and of the precariousness of its hold on survival, it developed myths and beliefs to transform the random, crushing forces of the universe into manageable, or at least understandable, patterns. One of the major functions of every culture has been to shield its members from chaos, to reassure them of their importance and ultimate success. All have taken for granted that they live at the center of the universe, and that they have a special dispensation that puts them on the fast track to the future. Without such trust in exclusive privileges, it would be difficult to face the odds of existence.

This is as it should be. But there are times when the feeling that one has found safety in the bosom of a friendly cosmos becomes dangerous. An unrealistic trust in the shields, in the cultural myths, can lead to equally extreme disillusion when they fail. This tends to happen whenever a culture has had a run of good luch and for a while seems indeed to have found a way of controlling the forces of nature. At that point it is logical for it to begin believing that it is a chosen people who need no longer fear any major setback. The Romans reached that juncture after several centuries of ruling the Mediterranean.

This cultural hubris, or overweening presumption about what we are entitled to from a universum that is basically insensitive to human needs, generally leads to trouble. The unwarranted sense of security sooner or later results in a rude awakening. 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. As they realize that what they had believed in is not entirely true, they abandon faith in everything else they have learned. Deprived of the customary supports that cultural values have given tem, they flounder in a morass of anxiety and apathy.

Such symptoms of disillusion are not hard to observe around us now. The most obvious ones relate to the pervasisve listlessness that affects so many lives. Genuinely happy individuals are few and far between. How many people do you know who enjoy what they are doing, who are reasonably satisfied with their lot, who do not regret the past and look to the future with genuine confidence?

This general malaise is not due directly to external causes. Unlike so may other nations in the contemporary world, we can’t blame our problems on a harsh environment, on widespread poverty, or on the oppression of a foreign occupying army. The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power. The shields that have worked in the past – the order that religion, patriotism, etnic traditions, and habits instilled by social classes used to provide – are no longer effective for increasing numbers of people who feel exposed to the harsh winds of chaos.

The lack of inner order manifests itself in the subjective conditioins that some call ontological anxiety, or existential dread. Basically, it is a fear of being, a feeling that there is no meaning to life and that existence is not worth going on with. Nothing seems to make sense. In the last few generations, the specter of nuclear war has added an unprecedented threat to our hopes. There no longer seems to be any point to the historical strivings of humankind. We are just forgotten specks drifting in the void. With each passing year, the chaos of the physical universe becomes magnified in the minds of the multitude.

As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they sooner or later face an increasingly nagging question: ‘Is this all there is?’ Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing, but for most people, behind it all there is the expectation that after one grows up, things will get better. During the years of early adulthood the future still looks promising, the hope remains that one’s goals will be realized. But inevitably the bathroom mirror shows the first white hairs, and confirms the fact that those extra pounds are not about to leave; inevitably eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body. These intimations of mortality plainly communicate the message: Your time is up, it’s time to move on. When this happens, few pepole are ready. ‘Wait a minute, this can’t be happening to me. I haven’t even begun to live. Where’s all that money I was supposed to have made? Where are all the good times I was going to have?’

A feeling of having been led on, of being cheated, is an understandable consequence of this realization. From the earliest years we have been conditioned to believe that a benign fate would provide for us. After all, everybody seemed to agree that we had the great fortune of living in the richest period that ever was, in the most scientifically advanced period of human history, surrounded by the most efficient technology,. Therefore, it made sense to expect that we would have a richer, more meaningful life than any earlier members of the human race. If our grandparents, living in that ridiculously primitive past, could be content, just imagine how happy we would be! Scientists told us this was so, it was preached from the pulpits of churches and it was confirmed by thousands of commercials celebrating the good life. Yet despite all these assurances, sooner or later we wake up alone, sensing that there is no way this affluent, scientific and sophisticated world is going to provide us with happiness.

As this realization slowly sets in, different people react to it differently. Some try to ignore it, and renew their efforts to acquire more of the things that were supposed to make life good – bigger cars and homes, more power on the job, a more glamorous life-style. They renew their efforts, determined still to achieve the satisfaction that up until then has eluded them. Sometimes this solution works, simply because one is so drawn into the competitive struggle that there is no time to realize that the goal has not come any nearer. But if a person does take the time out to reflect, the disillusionment returns; after each success it becomes clearer that money, power, status, and possessions do not, by themselves, necessarily add one iota to the quality of life.

Others decide to attack directly the threatening symptoms. If it is a body going to seed that rings the first alarm, they will go on diets, join health clubs or undergo plastic surgery. If the problem seems to be that nobody pays much attention , they buy books about how to get power or how to make friends, or they enroll in assertiveness training courses and have power lunches. After a while however, it becomes obvious that these piecemeal solutions won’t work either. No matter how much energy we devote to its care, the body will eventually give out. If we are learning to be more assertive, we might inadvertently alienate our friends. And if we devote too much time to cultivating new friends, we might threaten relationships with our spouse and family. There are just so many dams about to burst and so little time to tend to them all.

Daunted by the futility of trying to keep up with all the demands they cannot possibly meet, some will just surrender and retire gracefully into relative oblivion. They will give up on the world and cultivate their little gardens. They might dabble in genteel forms of escape such as developing a harmless hobby or accumulating a collection of abstract paintings or porcelain figurines. Or they might lose themselves in alcohol or the dreamworld of drugs. While exotic pleasures and expensive recreations temporarily take the mind off the basic question ‘Is this all there is?’ few claim to have ever found an answer that way.

Traditionally, the problem of existence has most directly been confronted through religion and an inceasing number of the disillusioned are turning back to it, choosing either one of the standard creeds or a more esoteric Eastern variety. But religions are only temporarily succcesful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers. At some moments in history, they have explained convincingly what was wrong with human existence and have given credible answers. For hundreds of years these religions provided satisfying goals for people to spend their lives pursuing. But today it is more difficult to accept their worldviews as definitive. The form in which religions have presented their truths- myths, revelations, holy texts – no longer comples belief in an era of scientific rationality, even though the substance of the truths may have remained unchanged. A vital new religion may one day arise again. In the meantime, those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about how the world works.

Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed – of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humandkind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.

RECLAIMING EXPERIENCE

There is no way out of this predicament except for an individual to take things in hand personally. If values and institutions no longer provide as supportive a framework as they once did, each person must use whatever tools are available to carve out a meaningful, enjoyable life. One of the most important tools in this quest is provided by psychology. Up to now the main contribution of this fledgling science has been to discover how past events shed light on present behavior. It has made us aware that adult irrationality is often the result of childhood frustrations. But there is anoter way that the discipine of psychology can be put to use. It is in helping answer the question: Given that we are who we are, with whatever hang-ups and repressions, what can we do to improve our future?

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present. And before all else, achieving control over experience requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not

We grow up believing that what counts most in our lives is that which will occur in the future. Parents teach children that if they learn good habits now, they will be better off as adults. Teachers assure pupils that the boring classes will benefit them later, when the students are going to be looking for jobs. The company director tells junior employees to have patience and work hard, because one of these days they will be promoted to the executive ranks. At the end of the long struggle for advancement, the golden years of retirement beckon.

Of course this emphasis on the postponement of gratification is to a certain extent inevitable. As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires. It would be impossible to maintain any kind of social order, any complex division of labor, unless society’s members were forced to take on the habits and skills that the culture required, whether the individuals like it or not. Socialization, or the transformation of a human organism into a person who functions successfully within a particular social system, cannot be avoided. The essence of socialization is to make people dependent on social controls, to have them respond predictably to rewards and punishments. And 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.

In making us work for its goals, society is assisted by some powerful allies: our bioilogical needs and our genetic conditioning. All social controls, for instance, are ultimately based on a threat to the survival instinct. The people of an oppressed country obey their conquerors because they want to go on living.

When they do not rely on pain, social systems use pleasure as the inducement to accept norms. The ‘good life’ promised as a reward for a lifetime of work and adherence to laws is built on the cravings contained in our genetic programs. Practically every desire that has become part of human nature, from sexuality to agression, from a longing to security to a receptivity to change, has been exploited as a source of social control by politicians, churches, corporations and advertisers.

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 personal advantage. The pleasure we take in eating is an efficient way to ensure that the body will get the nourishment it needs. The pleasure of sexual intercourse is an equally practical method for the genes to program the body to reproduce and thereby to ensure the conitinuity of the genes. When a man is physically attracted to a woman, or vice versa, he usually imagines – assuming that he thinks aobut it at all – that this desire is an expression of his own individual interests, a result of his own intentions. In reality, more often than not his interest is simply being manipulated by the invisible genetic code, following its own plans. As long as the attraction is a reflex based on purely physical reactions, the person’s own conscious plans probably play only a minimal role. There is nothing wrong with following this genetic programming and relishing the resulting pleasures it provides, as long as we recognize them for what they are, and as long as we retain some control over them when it is necessary to pursue other goals, to which we might decide to assign priority.

The problem is that it has recently become fashionable to regard whatever we feel inside as the true voice of nature speaking. The only authority many people trust today is instinct. If something feels good, if it is natural and spontaneous, then it must be right. But when we follow the suggestions of genetic and social instructions without question we relinquish the control of consciousness and become helpless playthings of impersonal forces. 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.

The ‘liberated’ view of human nature, which accepts and endorses every instinct or drive we happen to have simply because it’s there, results in consequences that are quite reactionary. Much of contemporary ‘realism’ turns out to be just a variation on good oldfashioned fatalism: people feel relieved of responsibility by recourse to the concept of ‘nature’. By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we not try to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively agressive. Does that mean they should freely express violence? We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.

Submission to genetic programming can become quite dangerous, because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. Instead of deciding how to act in terms of personal goals, he has to surrender to the things that his body has been programmed (or misprogrammed) to do. One must particularly achieve control over instinctual drives to achieve a healthy independence of society, for as long as we respons predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for – rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires. He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires. What matters is not what he has now, but what he might obtain if he does as others want him to do. Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands. In a complex society, many powerful groups are involved in socializing, sometimes to seemingly contradictionary goals. On the one hand, official institutions like schools, churches and banks try to run us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save. On the other hand, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufacturers,, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them. And, finally, the underground system of forbidden pleasures run by gamblers, pimps and drug dealers which is dialectically linked to the official institutions, promises its own rewards of easy disssipation – provided we pay. The messages are very different, but their outcome is esentially the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for their own purposes.

There is no question that to survive, and especially to survive in a complex society, it is necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications. But a person does not have to be turned into a puppet jerked about by social controls. 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. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.

The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. 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 falles from one’s shoulders. Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces. It is no longer necessary to struggle for goals that always seem to recede into the future, to end each boring day with the hope that tomorrow, perhaps, something good will happen. Instead of forever straining for the tantalizing prize dangled just out of reach, one begins to harvest the genuine rewards of living. But it is not by abandoning ourselves to instinctual desires that we become free of social controls. We must also become independent from the dictates of the body and learn to take charge of what happens in the mind. Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there. As long as we obey the socially conditioned stimulus-response patterns that exploit our biological inclinations, we are controlled from the outside. To the extent that a glamorous ad makes us salivate for the product sold or that a frown from the client spoils the day, we are not free to determine the content of the experience. Since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world. ‘Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them’, said Epictetus a long time ago. And the great emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote; ‘if you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now’.

PATHS OF LIBERATION

The simple truth – that the control of your conscious story you tell yourself determines the quality of life – has been known for a long time; in fact, for as long as human records exist. The oracle’s advice in ancient Delphi ‘know thyself’implied it. All different techniques in the ages from east to west had the identical intended result: to free inner life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from the rigid conditioning of biological urges, on the other, and hence to become independent from the social controls that exploit both.

But if it is true that people have known for thousands of years what it takes to become free and in control of one’s life, why haven’t we made more progress in this direction? Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge – or wisdom – one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. 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, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practiciing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires.

Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. Control over consciousness cannot be institutionalized. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be. Routinization, unfortunately, tends to take place very rapidly. Freud was still alive when his quest for liberating the ego from its oppressors was turned into a staid ideology and a rigidly regulated profession.

In each new epoch – perhaps every generation, or even every few years, if the conditions in which we live change that rapidly – it beecomes necessary to rethink and reformulate what it takes to establish autonomy in consciousness. Early Christianity helped the masses free themselves from the power of the ossified imperial regime and from an ideology that could give meaning only to the lives of the rich and the powerful. The Reformation liberated great numbers of people from their political and ideological exploitation by the Roman Church. The philosophes and later the statesmen resisted the controls established by kings, popes and aristocracy. When the inhuman conditions of factory labor became the most obvious obstacles to the workers’ freedom to order their own experience, as they were in ninenteenth century industrial Europe. The insights of the Gospels, of Luther, of Marx and Freud – just to mention a very few of those attempts that have been made in the West to increase happiness by enhancing freedom – will always be valid and useful, even though some of them have been perverted in their application. But they certainly do not exhaust the problems or the solutions.

Given the recurring need to return to this central question of how to achieve mastery over one’s life, what does the present state of knowledge say about it? How can it help a person learn to rid himself of anxieties and fears and thus become free of the controls of society whose rewards he can now take or leave? As suggested before, the way is through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience. Any small gain in that direction will make life more rich, more enjoyable, more meaningful. Before starting to explore ways in which to improve the quality of experience, it will be useful to review briefly how your conscious story you tell yourself works and what it actually means to have ‘experiences’. Armed with this knowledge, one can more easily achieve personal liberation.

THE ANATOMY OF YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS

At certain times in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn’t fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings. In Republican Rome people were held responsible for keeping a tight rein on their emotions. Anyone who indulged in self pity, who let instinct rather than reflection dictate actions, forfeited the right to be accepted as a member of the community. In other historical periods, such as the one in which we are now living, the ability to control oneself is not held in high esteem. People who attempt it are thought to be faintly ridiculous., ‘uptight’, or not quite ‘with it’. But whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do live a happier life.

To achieve such mastery it is obviously important to understand how consciousness works. In the present part of this journey, we shall take a step in that direction. To begin with, and just to clear the air of any suspicion that in talking about consciousness we are referring to some mysterious process, we should recognize that, like every other dimension of human behavior, it is the result of biological processes. It exists only because of the incredibly complex architecture of our nervous system, which in turn is built up according to instructions contained in the protein molecules of our chronosomes. At the same time, we should also recognize that the way in which our consciousness works is not entirely controlled by its biological programming – in many important respects that we shall review, it is self-directed. In other worlds, consciousness has developed the ability to override its genetic instructions and to set its own independent course of action.

The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. In this sense, it functions as a clearinghouse for sensations, perceptions, feelings and ideas, establishing priorities among all the diverse information. Without consciousness we would still ‘know’ what is going on, but we would have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive way. With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. And we can also invent information that did not exist before: it is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories.

Over the endless dark centuries of its evolution ,the human nervous system has become so complex that it is now able to affect its own states, making it to a certain extent functionally independent of its genetic blueprint and of the objective environment. A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside’ just by changing the concepts of consciousness. We all know individuals who can transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of their personalities. This ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks is the quality people most admire in others, and justly so; it is probably the most important trait not only for succeeding in life, but for enjoying it as well.

To develop this trait, one must find ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts. It is best not to expect that shortcuts will do the trick. Some people have a tendency to become very mystical when talking about consciousness and expect it to accomplish miracles that at present it is not designed to perform. They would like to believe that anything is possible in what they think of as the spiritual realm. Other individuals claim the power to channel into past existences, to communicate with spiritual entities, and to perform uncanny feats of extrasensory perception. When not outright frauds, these accounts usually turn out to be self-delusions – lies that an overly receptive mind tells itself.

After all, mystical explanations are not necessary to account for the performance of a great violinist, or a great athlete, even though most of us could not even begin to approach their powers. The yogi, similarly, is a virtuoso of the control of consciousness. Like all virtuosi, he must spend many years learning, and he must keep constantly in training Being a specialist, he cannot afford the time or the mental energy to do anything other than fine-tune his skill at manipulating inner experiences. The skills the yogi gains are at the expense of the more mundane abilities that other people learn to develop and take for granted. What an individual yogi can do is amazing – but so is what a plumber can do, or a good mechanic.

Perhaps in time we shall discover hidden powers of the mind will allow it to make the sort of quantum leaps that now we can only dream about. There is no reason to rule out the possibility that eventually we shall be able to bend spoons with brain waves. But at this point, when there are so many more mundane but no less urgent tasks to accomplish, it seems a waste of time to lust for powers beyond our reach when consciousness, with all its limitations, could be employed so much more effectively. Although in its present state it cannot do what some people would wish it to do, the mind has enormous untapped potential that we desperately need to learn how to use.

Because no branch of science deals with consciousness directly, there is no single accepted description of how it works. Many disciplines touch on it and thus provide peripheral accounts. Neuroscience, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology are some of the most directly relevant fields to choose from; however, trying to summarize their findings would result in an account similar to the descriptions the blind men gave of the elephant: each different, and each unrelated to the others. No doubt we shall continue to learn important things about consciousness from these disciplines, but in the meantime we are left with the task of providing a model that is grounded in fact, yet expressed simply enough so that anyone can make use of it.

Although it sounds like indecipherable academic jargon, the most consise description of the approach I believe to be the clearest way to examine the main facets of what happens in the mind, in a way that can be useful in the actual practice of everyday life, is ‘a storytelling model of consciousness’ This representation of consciousness is stoytelling in that it deals directly with events – phenomena – as we experience and intepret them, rahter than focusing on the anatomical structures, neurochemical processes, or unconscious quests that make these events possible. Of course, it is understood that whatever happens in the mind is the result of electrochemical changes in the central nervous system, as laid down over million of years by biological evolution. But storytelling assumes that a mental event can be best understood if we look at it directly as it was experienced.

With this storytelling framework in mind, what, then, does it mean to be conscious? It simply means that certain specific conscious events (sensations, feelings, thoughts, intentions) are occurring, and that we are able to direct their course. In contrast, when we are dreaming, some of the same events are present, yet we are not conscious because we cannot control them. In dreams we are locked into a single scenario we cannot change at will. The events that constitute consciousness – the ‘things’ we see, feel, think and desire – are stories that we can manipulate and use. Thus we might think of consciousness as intentionally designed stories.

This dry definition, accurate as it is, does not fully suggest the importance of what it conveys. Since for us outside events do not exist unless we are aware of them, consciousness corresponds to subjectively experienced reality. While everything we feel, smell, hear or remember is potentially a candidate for entering consciousness, the experiences that actually do become part of it are much fewer than those left out. Thus, while consciousness is a mirror that reflects what our senses tell us about what happens both outside our bodies and within the nervous system, it reflects those changes selectively, actively shaping events, imposing on them a reality of its own. The reflection consciousness provides is what we call our life: the sum of all we have heard, seen, felt, hoped and suffered from birth to death. Although we believe that these are ‘things’ outside consciousness, we have direct evidence only of those that find a place in it.

As the central clearinghouse in which varied events processed by different senses can be represented and compared, consciousness can contain a famine in Africa, the smell of a rose, the performance of a football team, and a plan to stop at the store to buy some bread all at the same time. But that does not mean that its content is a shapeless jumble.

We may call quests the force that keeps information in consciousness ordered. Quests arise in consciousness whenever a person is aware of desiring something or wanting to accomplish something. Quests are also bits of information, shaped either by biological needs or by internalized social goals. They act as magnetic fields, moving attention toward some objects and away from others, keeping our mind focused on some stimuli in preference to others. We often call the manifestion of quests by other names, such as intentioins, instinct, need, drive or desire. But these are all explanatory terms, telling us why people behave in certain ways. Quest is a more neutral and descriptive term; it doesn’t say why a person wants to do a certain thing, but simply states that he does.

The quests we either inherit or acquire are organized in hierarchies of goals, which specify the order of precedence among them. For the protester, achieving a given political reform may be more important than anything else, life included. That one goal takes precedence over all others. Most people, however, adopt ‘sensible’goals based on the needs of their body – to live a long and healthy life, to have sex, to be well fed and comfortable – or on the desires implanted by the social system – to be good, to work hard, to spend as much as possible, to live up to other’s expectations. But there are enough exceptions in every culture to show that goals are quite flexible. Individuals who depart from the norms – heroes, saints, sages, artists, and poets, as well as madmen and criminals – looking for different things in life than most others do. The existence of people like these shows that consciousness can be ordered in terms of different goals and quests. Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality.

THE LIMITS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

If it were possible to expand indefinitely what consciousness is able to encompass, one of the most fundamental dreams of humankind would come true. It would be almost as good as being immortal or omnipotent – in short godlike. We would think everything, feel everything, do everything, scan through so much information that we could fill up every fraction of a second with a rich tapestry of experiences. In the space of a lifetime we could go through a million, or – why not? – through an infinite number of lives.

Unfortunately, the nervous system has definite limits on how much information it can process at any given time. There are just so many ‘events’ that can appear in consciousness an be recognized and handled appropriately before they begin to crowd each other out. Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot run, sing and balance the checkbook simultaneously, because each one of these activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.

At this point in our scientific knowledge we are on the verge of being able to estimate how much information the central nervous system is capable of processing. It seems we can manage at most seven bits of information – such as differentiated sounds, or visual stimulie, or recognizable time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second. By using these figures one concludes that it is possible to process at most 126 bits of information per second, or 7.560 per minute, or almost half a million per hour. Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come – every thought, memory, feeling or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far. ​

The limitation of consciousness is demonstrated by the fact that to understand what another person is saying we must process 40 bits of information each second. If we assume the upper limit of our capacity to be 126 bits per second, it follows that to understand what three people are saying simultaneously is theoretically possible, but only by manaing to keep out of consciousness every other thought or sensation. We couldn’t, for instance, be aware of the speakers’ expressions, nor could we wonder about why they are saying what they are saying, or notice what they are wearing.

Of course, these figures are only suggestive at this point in our knowledge of the way the mind works. It could be argued justifably that they either underestimate or overestimate the capacity of the mind to process information. The optimists claim that through the course of evolution the nervous system has become adept at ‘chunking’ bits of information so that processing capacity is constantly expandded. Simple functions like adding a column of numbers or driving a car grow to be automated, leaving the mind free to deal with more data. We also learn how to compress and streamline information through symbolic means – language, math, abstract concepts and stylized narratives. Each biblical parable, for instance, tries to encode the hard-won experience of many individuals over unknown eons of time. Consciousness, the optimists argue, is an ‘open system’; in effect, it is infinetely expandable, and there is no need to take its limitations into account.

But the ability to compress stimuli does not help as much as one might expect. The requirements of life still dictate that we spend about 8 percent of waking time eating, and almost the same amount taking care of personal bodily needs such as washing, dressing, shaving and going to the bathroom. These two activities alone take up 15 percent of consciousness, and while engaged in them we can’t do much else that requires serious concentration. But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious ‘leisure’ time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible. The largest part of free time – almost half of it – is pent in front of the television set. The plots and characters of the popular shows are so repetitive that although watching TV requires the processing of visual images, very little else in the way of memory, thinking or volition is required. Not suprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency at home are only a litlle more demanding. Reading most newspapers and magazines, talking to other people, and gazing out the window also involve processing very little new information, and thus require little concentration.

So the 185 billion events to be enjoyed over our mortal days might be either an overestimate or an underestimate. If we consider the amount of data the brain could theoretically process, the number might be too low; but if we look at how people actually use their minds, it is definetely much too high. In any case, an individual can experience only so much. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life.

ATTENTION TO STORIES

Stories enters consciousness either because we intend to focus attention on it or as a result of attentional habits based on biological or social instructions. For instance, driving down the highway, we pass hundreds of cars without actually being aware of them. Their shape and color might register for a fraction of a second, and then they are immediately forgotten. But occasionally we notice a particular vehicle, perhaps because it is swerving unsteadily between lanes, or because it is moving very slowly, or because of its unusual appearance. The image of this unusual car enters the focus of consciousness, and we become aware of it. In the mind the visual story about the car (e.g. it is swerving) gets related to stories about other errant cars stored in memory, to determine into which category the present instance fits. Is this an inexperienced driver, a drunken driver, a momentarily distracted but competent driver? As soon as the event is matched to an already known class of events, it is identified. Now it must be evaluated: Is this something to worry about? If the answer is yes, then we must decide on an appropriate course of action: Should we speed up, slow down, change lanes, stop and alert the highway patrol?

All these complex mental operations must be completed in a few seconds, sometimes a fraction of a second. While forming such a judgment seems to be a lightning-fast reaction, it does take place in real time. And it does not happen automatically: there is a distinct process that makes such reactions possible, a process called attention. It is attention that selects the relevant bits of stories from the potential millions of stories available. It takes attention to retrieve the appropriate references from memory, to evaluate the event, and then to choose the right thing to do.

Despite its great powers, attention cannot step beyond the limits already described. It cannot notice or hold in focus more stories than can be processed simultaneously. Retrieving stories from memory storage and bringing it into the focus of awareness, comparing stories, evaluating, deciding – all make demands on the mind’s limited processing capacity. For example, the driver who notices the swerving car will have to stop talking in his cellular phone if he wants to avoid an accident.

Some people learn to use this priceless resource efficiently, while others waste it. The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be obvlivious to distractions to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.

People can allocate their limited attention either by focussing it intentionally like a beam of energy or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested. The names we use to describe personality traits – such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid – refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention. At the same pary, the extrovert will seek out and enjoy interactions with others, the high achiever will look for useful business contacts, and the paranoid will be on guard for signs of danger he must avoid. Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life either rich or miserable.

The flexibility of attentional structures is even more obvious when they are compared across cultures or occupations. A musician structures her attention so as to focus on nuances of sound that ordinary people are not aware of, a stockbroker focuses on tiny changes in the market that others do not register, a good clinical diagnostician has an uncanny eye for symptoms – because they have trained their attention to process signals that otherwise would pass unnoticed.

Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events – such as remembering, thinking, feeling and making decisions – happen there, it is useful to think of it as your inner stories. Attention is like stories in that without them no work can be done, and in doing work they are dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest our energy in the stories we tell ourselves Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how we use our stories. And stories are under our control, to do with as we please; hence our attention and the stories we tell ourselves are our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

ENTER THE SELF

But what do those first-person pronouns refer to in the lines above, those we’s and our’s that are supposed to control attention? Where is the I, the entity that decides what to do with the psychic energy generated by the nervous system? Where does the captain of the ship, the master of the soul, reside?

As soon as we consider these questions for even a short while we realize that the I, or the self as we shall refer to it from now on, is also one of the contents of consciousness. It is one that never strays very far from the focus of attention. Of course my own self exists solely in my own consciousness; in that of others who know me there will be versions of it, most of them probably unreconizable likenesses of the ‘orginal’ – myself as I see me.

The self is no ordinary piece of information, however. In fact, it contains everything else that has passed through consciousness: all the memories, actions, desires, pleasures and pains are included in it. And more than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years. The self of the political activist may become indistinguisable from his ideology, the self of the banker may become wrapped up in his investments. Of course, ordinarily aware of only a tiny part of it, as when we become conscious of how we look, of what impression we are making, or of what we really would like to do if we could. We most often associate our self with our body, though sometimes we extend its boundaries to identify it with a car, house, or family. Yet however much we are aware of it, the self is in many ways the most important element of consciousness, for it represents symbolically all of consciousness’ other contents, as well as the pattern of their interrelations.

The patient traveller who has followed the argument so far might detect at this point a faint trace of circularity. If attention, psychic energy, is directed by the self, and if the self is the sum of the contents of consciousness and the structure of its goals, and if the contents of consciousness and the goals are the result of different ways of investing attention, then we have a system that is going round and round, with no clear causes or effects. At one point we are saying that the self directs attention, at another, that attention determines the self. In fact, both these statements are true: consciousness is not a strictly linear system, but one in which circular causality obtains. Attention shapes the self and is in turn shaped by it.

Example

At this point, almost all the components needed to understand how conscousness can be controlled are in place. We have seen that experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy – on the structure of attention. This, in turn, is related to goals and intentions. These processes are connected to each other by the self, or the dynamic mental representation we have of the entire system of our goals. Our story. These are the pieces that must be maneuvered if we wish to improve things. Of course, existence can also be improved by outside events, like winning a million euro’s in the lottery, marrying the right man or woman, or helping to change an unjust social system. But even these marvelous events must take their place in consciousness, and be connected in positive ways to our self, before they can affect the quality of life.

The structure of consciousness is beginning to emerge, but so far we have a rather static picture, one that has sketched out the various elements, but not the processes through which they interact. We need now consider what follows whenever attention brings a new bit of information into awareness. Only then will we be ready to get a thorough sense of how experience can be controlled, and hence changed for the better.

DISORDER IN CONSCIOUSNESS: PSYCHIC ENTROPY

One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder – that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preference. Psychic energy becomes unwieldly and ineffective.

Example

Consciousness can become disordered in many ways. Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganizaton of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.

Example

Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is it neutral? News of the fall of the stock market will upset the banker, but it might reinforce the sense of self of the political activist. 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.

ORDER IN CONSCIOUSNESS: FLOW

The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. There is no need to worry, no reason to question one’s adequacy. But whenever one does stop to think about oneself, the evidence is encouraging: You are doing all right’. The positive feedback strengthens the self, and more attention is freed to deal with the outer and the inner environment.

Example.

Example.

These examples illustrate what we mean by optimal experience. They are situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve a person’s goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against. We have call this state the flow experience, because this is the term many of the people interviewed had used in their descriptions of how it felt to be in top form> it is the oppostie of psychic entropy in fact it is sometimes called negentropy – and those who attain it develop a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy has been invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen to pursue.

When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve, because even the usually boring routines of work become purposeful and enjoyable. In flow we are in control of our psychic energy and everything we do adds order to consciousness.

A rock climber explains concisely the tie between the avocation that gives him a profound sense of flow and the rest of his life. ‘It’s exhilarating to come closer and closer to self-discipline. You make your body go and everything hurts; then you look back in awe at the self, at what you have done, it just blows your mind It leads to ecstasy, to selffulfillment. If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.

The battle is not really against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle for the self; it is a struggle to establishing control over attention. The struggle does not necessarily have to be physical, as in the case of the climber. But anyone who has experienced flow knows that the deep enjoyment it provides requires an equal degree of disciplined concentration.

COMPLEXITY AND THE GROWTH OF THE SELF

Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its oppostie: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.

The self becomes more differentiated as a result of flow because overcoming a challenge inevitably leaves a person feeling more capable, more skilled. As the rock climber said, ‘You look back in awe at the self, at what you’ve done, it just blows your mind. ‘ After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills.

Complexity is often thought to have a negative meaning, synonymous with difficulty and confusion. That may be true, but only if we equate it with differentiation alone. Yet complexity also involves a second dimension – the integration of autonomous parts. A complex engine, for instance, not only has many separate components, each performing a different function, but also demonstrates a high sensitivity because each of the components is in touch with all the others. Without integrating, a differentiated system would be a confusing mess.

Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings and all the senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more ‘together’ than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and the world in general. n the words of the climber ‘There’s no place that more draws the best from human beings… than a mountaineering situation. Nobody hassles you to put your mind and body under tremendous stress to get to the top… Your comrades are there, but you all feel the same way anyway, you’re all in it together. Who can you trust more than these people? People after the same self-discipline as yourself, following the deeper commitment…. A bond like that with other people is in itself an ecstasy’.

A self that is only differentiated – not integrated – may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.

The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows. Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.

The rest of this guide will explore more thoroughly what we know about optimal experiences how they feel and under what conditions they occur. Even though there is no easy shortcut to flow, it is possible, if one understands how it works, to transform life – to create more harmony in it and to liberate the psychic energy that otherwise would be wasted in boredom or worry.

ENJOYMENT AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE

There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. For instance, feeling secure is an important component of happiness. The sense of security can be improved by buying a gun, installing strong locks on the front door, moving to a safer neighborhood, exerting political pressure on city hall for more police protection or helpoing the community to become more conscious of the importance of civil order. All these different responses are aimed at bringing conditions in the environement more in line with our goals. The other method by which we can feel more secure involves modifying what we mean by security. If one does not expect perfect saftey, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great a chance of marring happiness.

Neither of these strategies is effective when used alone. Changing external conditions might seem to work at first, but if a person is not in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties. One cannot create a complete sense of inner security even by buying one’s own Caribbean island and surrounding it with armed bodyguards and attack dogs.

The myth of King Midas illustrates the point that controlling external conditions does not necessarily improve existence. Like most people, King Midas supposed that if he were to become immensely rich, his happiness would be assured. So he made a pact with the gods, who after much haggling granted his wish that everything he touched would turn into gold. King MIdas thought he had made an absolutely first rate deal. Nothing was to prevent him now from becoming the richest, and therefore the happiest man in the world. BUt we know how the story ends: Midas soon came to regret his bargain because the food in his mouth and the wine on his palate turned to gold before he could swallow them, and he died surrounded by golden plates and golden cups.

The old fable continues to echo down the centuries. The waiting rooms of psychiatrists are filled with rich and successful patients, who in their forties or fifties suddenly wake up to the fact that a plush suurban home, expensive cars is not enough to bring peace of mind. Yet people keep hoping that changing the external conditions of their lives will provide a solution. If only they could earn more money be in better physical shape, or have a more understanding partner, they would really have it made. 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.

Wealth, status, and power have become in our culture all too powerful symbols of happiness. When we see people who are rich, famous or good-looking, we tend to assume that their lives are rewarding even though all the evidence might point to their being miserable. And we assume that if only we could acquire some of those same symbols, we would be much happier.

If we do actually succeed in becoming richer, or more powerful, we believe, at least for a time, that life as a whole has improved. But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent. And 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.

This is not to say that money, physical fitness or fame are irrelevant to happiness. They can be genuine blessings, but only if they help to make us feel better. Otherwise they are at best neutral, at worst obstacles to a rewarding life. Research on happiness and life satisfaction suggests that in general there is a mild correlation between wealth and well being.

Given these obsrvations, instead of worrying about how to make a million euro’s or how to win friends and influence people it seems more beneficial to find out how everyday life can be made more harmonious and more satisfying, and thus achieve by a direct route what cannot be reached through the pursuit of symbolic goals.

PLEASURE AND ENJOYMENT

When considering the kind of experience that makes life better, most people first think that happiness consists in experiencing pleasure: good food, good sex, all the comforts that money can buy. We imagine the satisfaction of traveling to exotic places or being surrounded by interesting company and expensive gadgets. If we cannot afford those goals that slick commercials and colourful ads keep reminding us to pursue, then we are happy to settle for a quiet evening in front of the television set with a glass of liquor close by.

Pleasure is the feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The taste of food when we are hungry is pleasant because it reduces a physiological imbalance. Resting in the evening while passively absorbing information from the media, with alcoholo or drugs to dull the mind overexcited by the demands of work is pleasantly relaxing.

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostatic experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and casuse psychic entropy to occur. But they do not produce psychological growth. They do not add complexity to the self. Pleasure helps to maintain order but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.

When people ponder further about what makes their lives rewarding they tend to move beyond pleasant memories and begin to remember other events, other experiences that overlap with pleasurable ones but fall into a category that deserves a separate name: enjoyment. Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps somehting even unimagined before.

Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement; by a sense of novelty of accomplishment. Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one’s ability is enjoyable, as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light, as is having a conversation that leads us to express ideas we didn’t know we had. Closing a contested business deal, or any piece of work well done, is enjoyable. None of these experiences may be particularly pleasurable at the time they are taking place but afterward we think back on them and say, ‘That really was fun’ and wish they would happen again. 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.

Experiences that give pleasure can also give enjoyment, but the two sensations are quite different. For instance everybody takes pleasure in eating. To enjoy food, however is more difficult. A gourmet enjoys eating, as does anyone who pays enough attention to a meal so as to discriminate the various sensations provided by it. As this example suggests, we can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention. A person can feel pleasure without any effort, if the appropriate centers in his brain are electrically stimulated, or as a result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.

It is for this reason that pleasure is so evanescent, and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasurable experiences. Complexity requires investing physic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging. It is easy to see this process in children: during the first few years of life every child is a little ĺearning machine trying out new movements, new words daily. The rapt concentration on the child’s face as she learns each new skill is a good indication of what enjoyment is about. And each instance of enjoyable learning adds to the complexity of the child’s developing self.

Unfortunately the natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time. Perhaps because ‘learning ‘ becomes an external imposition when schooling starts, the excitement of mastering new skills gradually wears out. It becomes all too easy to settle down within the narrow boundaries of the self developed in adolescence. But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good chance of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enjoying life, and pleasure becomes the only source of positive experience.

On the other hand many individuals continue to go to great lengths to preserve enjoyment in whatever they do. Without enjoyment can be endured, and it can even be pleasant. But it can be so only precariously, depending on luck and the cooperation of the external environment. To gain personal control over the quality of experience, however, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.

The rest of this part of the journey provides an overview of what makes experience enjoyable. 2500 interviews with artists, writers, entrepreneurs, innovators, scientists, dancers, actors, professors, athletes, musicians. On the basis of these interviews I can now describe what makes an experience enjoyable and thus provide examples that all of us can use to enhance the quality of life.

THE ELEMENTS OF ENJOYMENT

The first surprise I encountered was how similarly very different activities wre described when they were going especially well. The second surprise was that regardless of culture, stage of modernization, social class, age or gender, the participants described enjoyment in very much the same way. What they did to experience enjoyment varied enormously – but they described how it felt when they enjoyed themselves in almost identical terms. Moreover, the reasons the activity was enjoyed shared many more similarities than differences. In sum, optimal experience and the psychological conditions that make it possible, seem to be the same the world over.

The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger afther the flow experience is over. Finally the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes,and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

We shall take a closer look at each of these elements so that we may better understand what makes enjoyable activities so gratifying. With this knowledge, it is possible to achieve control of consciousness and turn even the most humdrum moments of everyday lives into events that help the self grow.

A Challenging Activity That Requires Skills

Sometimes a person reports having an experience of extreme joy, a feeling of ecstasy for no apparent good reason. But by far the overwhelming proportion of optimal experiences are reported to occur within sequences of activities that are goal directed and bounded by rules – activities that require the investment of psychic energy, and that could not be done without the appropriate skills. Why this should be so will become clear as we go along; at this point it is sufficient to note that this seems to be universally the case.

Any activity contains a bundle of opportunities for action, or challenges that require appropriate skills to realize. For those who don’t have the right skills the activity is not challenging, it is simply meaningless. Setting up a chessboard gets the juices of a chess player flowing, but leaves cold anyone who does not know the rules of the game.

One simple way to find challenges is to enter a competitive situation. Hence the great appeal of all games and sports that pit a person or team against another. In many ways competition is a quick way of developing complexity. 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. Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one’s skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun.

But challenges are by no means confined to competitive or to physical activities. They are necessary to provide enjoyment even in situations where one would not expect them to be relevant. In other words, even the passive enjoyment one gets from looking at a painting or sculpture depends on the challenges that the work of art contains.

Activities that provide enjoyment are often those that have been designed for this very purpose. Games, sports, and artistic and literay forms were developed over the centuries for the express purpose of enriching life with enjoyable experiences. But it would be a mistake to assume that only art and leisure can provide optimal experiences. In a healthy culture, productive work and the necessary routines of everyday life are also satisfying. In fact one purpose of this journey is to explore ways in which even routine details can be trasformed into personally meaningful games that provide optimal experiences.

Few people bother inventing ingenious and complex diversions to improve the quality of their experiences. But all of us have more modest versions of the same. Everybody develops routines to fill in the boring gaps of the day, or to bring experience back on an even keel when anxiety threatens. These are the microflow activities that help us negotiate the doldrums of the day. But how enjoyable an activity is dependes ultimately on its complexity. The small automatic games woven into the fabric of everyday life help reduce boredom, but add little to the positive quality of experience. For that one needs to face more demanding challenges and use higher-level skills.

Enjoyment comes at a very specific point: whenever the oportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities. Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, where the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.

The golden ratio between challenges and skills doe snot ony hold true for human activities.

The Merging of Action and Awareness

When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed by the activity. There is no excess psychic energy left over to process any information but what the activity offers. All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli.

As a result, one of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes place: 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.

It is for this reason that we called the optimal experience ‘flow’ The short and simple word describes well the sense of seemingly effortless movement.

Although the flow experience appears to be effortless, it is far from being so. It often requires physical exertion or highly disciplined mental activity. It does not happen without the application of skilled performance. Any lapse in concentration will erase it. And yet while it lasts consciousness works smoothly, action follows action seamlessly. In normal life, we keep interrupting what we do with doubts and questions. Why am I doing this? Should I perhaps be doing something else? Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, beause the action carries us forward as if by magic.

Clear Goals and Feedback

The reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate.

Of course, if one chooses a trivial goal, success in it does not proivde enjoyment. If I set as my goal success in it does not provide enjoyment. If I set as my goal to remain alive while sitting on the living-room sofa, i also could spend days knowing that i was achieving it, just as the rock climber does. But this realisation would not make me particularly happy, whereas the climber’s knowledge brings exhilaration to his dangerous ascent.

Certain activities require a very long time to accomplish, yet the compnonents of goals and feedback are still extremely important to them.

The goals of an activity are not always as clear as those of sports, and the feedback is often more ambiguous than the simple ‘I am not falling’ information processed by the climber. A composer of music, for instance, may know that he wishes to write a song, or a flute concerto, but other than that, his goals are usually quite vague? And how does he know whether the notes he is writing down are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ The same situation holds true for the artist painting a picture, and for all activities that are creative or open-ended in nature. But these are all exceptions that prove the rule: unless a person learns to set goals and to recognize and gauge feedback in such activities, she will not enjoy them.

In some creative activities, where goals are not clearly set in advance, a person must develop a strong personal sense of what she intends to do. The artist might not have a visual image of what the finished painting should look like, but when the picture has progressed to a certain point, she should know whether this is what she wanted to achieve or not. And a painter who enjoys painting must have internalized criteria for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ so that after each brush stroke she can say: ‘Yes, this works; no, this doesn’t’. Without such internal guidelines, it is impossible to experience flow.

Sometimes the goals and the rules governing an activitiy are invented, or negotiated on the spot.

What consitutes feedback varies considerably in different activities. Some people are indifferent to things that others cannot get enough of.

The kind of feedback we work toward is in and of itself often unimportant: What difference does it make if I hit the tennis ball between the white lines, If I mobilize the enemy king on the chessboard, or if I notice a glimmer of understanding in my patient’s eyes at the end of the therapeutic hour? What makes this information valuable is the symbolic message it contains: that I have succeeded in my goal. Such knowledge creates order in consciousness, and strengthens the structure of the self. Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable, provided it is logically related to a goal in which one has invested psychic energy.

Concentration on the Task at Hand

One of the most frequently mentioned dimensons of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life. This feature of flow is an important by-product of the fact that enjoyable activities require a complete focusing of attention on the task at hand – thus leaving no room in the ind for irrelevant information.

In normal everyday existence, we are the prey of thoughts and worries intruding unwanted in consciousness. Because most jobs, and home life in general, lack the pressing demands of flow experiences, concentration is rarely so intense that preoccupations and anxieties can be automatically ruled out. Consequently the ordinary state of mind involves unexpected and frequent episodes of entropy interfering with the smooth run of psychic energy. This is one reason why flow improves the quality of experience: the clearly structured demands of the activity impose order, and exclude the interference of disorder in consciousness.

But it is not only the temporary focus that counts. What is even more significant is that only a very select range of information can be allowed into awareness. Therefore all the troubling thoughts that ordinarily keep passing through the mind are temporarily kept in abeyance.

The Paradox of Control

Enjoyment often occurs in games, sports and other leisure activities that are distinct from ordinary life, where any number of bad things can happen. If a person loses a chess game or botches his hobby he need not worry; in ‘real’ life, however, a person who mishandles a business deal may get fired, lose the mortgae on the house, and end up on public assistance. Thus the flow experience is typically descrbied as involving a sense of control – or, more precisely, as lacking the sense of worry about losing control that is typical in many situations of normal life.

What participants are actually describing is the possibility rather than the actuality of control. This sense of control is also reported in enjoyable activities that involve serious risks activities that to an outsider would seem to be much more potentially dangerous than the affairs of normal life. People who practice hang gliding, spelunking, rock climbing, race-car driving, deep sea diving and many similar sports for fun are purposefully placing themselves in situations that lack the safety nets of civilized life. Yet all these individuals report flow experiences in which a heightened sense of control plays an important.

It is usual to explain the motivation of those who enjoy dangerous activities as some sort of pathological need: they are trying to exorcise a deep-seated fear, they are compensating, they are compulsively reenacting an Oedipal fixation, they are ‘sensation seekers’. While such motives may be occasionally involved, what is most striking when one actually speaks to specialists in risk, is how their enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, but from their ability to minimize it. So rather than a pathological thrill that comes from courting disaster, the positive emotion they enjoy is the perfectly healthy feeling of being able to control potentially dangerous forces.

The important thing to realize her is that activities that produce flow experiences, even the seemingly more risky ones, are so constructed as to allow the practitioner to develop sufficient skills to reduce the margin of error to as close to zero as possible.

What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control.

This sense of being in a world where entroopy is suspended explains in part why flow-producing activities can become so addictive. Novelist have often written on the theme of chess as a metaphor for escape from reality.

When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness. Thus 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 ambituities of life.

The Loss of Self-Consciousness

We have seen that when an activity is thoroughly engrossing, tere is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli. One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much thinking about it: our own self.

The loss of the sense of a self separate from the world around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment. Preoccupation with the self consumes psychic energy because in everyday life we often feel threatened. Whenever we are threatened we need to bring the image we have of ourselves back into awareness, so we can find out whether or not the threat is serious, and how we should meet it.

But in flow there is no room for self-scrutiny. Because enjoyable activities have clear goals, stable rules and challenges well matched to skills, there is little opportunity for the self to be threatened. There is no way for anything or anybody to bring into question any other aspect of his self. Whether his face is smudged makes absolutely no difference.

The absence of the self from consciousness does not mean that the person in flow has given up the control of his psychic energy, or that she is unaware of what happens in her body or in her mind. In fact the opposite is usually true. When people first learn about the flow experience they sometimes assume that lack of self-consciousness ahs something to do with a passive obliteration of the self , a ‘going with the flow’. But in fact the optimal experience involves a very active role of the self. A violinist must be extremely aware of every movement of her fingers, as well as the sound entering her ears, by note, and holistically, in terms of its overall design.

So loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self , and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self. What slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of self, the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are. And being able to forget temporarily who we are seems to be very enoyable. When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have no chance to expand the concept of who we are. Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forward.

This system takes its form occurs only if the interaction is an enjoyable one, that is, if it offers nontrival opportunies for action and requires a constant perfection of skills. It is also possible to lose oneself in systems of action that demand nothing but faith and allegiance.

There is one very important and at first apparently paradoxical relationship between losing the sense of self in a flow experience, and having it emerge stronger afterward. It almost seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept. Why this should be so is fairly clear. In flow a person is challenged to do her best, and must constantly improve her skills. At the time, she doesn’t have the opportunity to reflect on what this means in terms of the self – if she did allow herself to become self-conscious, the experience could not have been very deep. But afterward, when the activity is over and self-consciousness has a chance to resume, the self that the person reflects upon is not the same self that existed before the flow experience: it is now enriched by new skills and fresh achievements.

The Transformation of Time

One of the most common descriptions of optimal experience is that time no longer seems to pass the way it ordinarily does. The objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity. Often hours seem to pass by in minutes; in general, most people report that time seems to pass much faster. But ocassionally the reverse occurs: Ballet dancers describe how a difficult turn that takes less than a second in real time stretches out for what seems like minutes. The safest generalization to make about this phenomenon is to say that 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.

But here, too, there are exceptions that prove the rule. An outstanding open-heart surgeon who derives a deep enjoyment from his work is well known for his ability to tell the exact time during an operation with only half a minute margin of error. But in his case timing is one of the essential challenges of the job.

It is not clear whether this dimension of flow is just an epiphenomenon – a by- product of the intense concentration required for the activity at hand – or whether it is something that contributes in its own right to the positive quality of the experience. Although it seems likely that losing track of the clock is not one of the major elements of enjoyment, freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.

THE AUTOTELIC EXPERIENCE

The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding.

The term ‘autotelic’ derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done with the expectation of some future benift, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. 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 its consequences.

Most things we do are neither purely autotelic nor purely autotelic nor purely exotelic (as we shall call activities done for external reasons only), but are a combination of the two.

Some things we are initially forced to do against our wil lturn out in the course of time to be intrinsically rewarding.

An autotelic experience is very different from the feelings we typically have in the course of life. So much of what we ordinarily do has no value in itself, and we do it only because we have to do it, or because we expect some future benefit from it. Many people feel that the ttime they spend at work is essentially wasted – they are alienated from it and the psychic energy invested in the job does nothing to strengthen their self. For quite a few people free time is also wasted. Leisure provides a relaxing respite from work, but it generally consists of passively absorbing information, without using any skills or exploring new opportunities for action. As a result life passes in a sequence of boring and anxious experiences over which a person has little control.

The autotelic experience, or flow, lifts the course of life to a different level. Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control and psychic energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of being lost int he service of external goals. When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified in the persent, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain.

But one must be aware of the potentially addictive power of flow. We should reconcile ourselves to the fact that nothing in the world is entirely positive; every power can be misused. Love may lead to cruelty, science can create destruction, technology unchecked produces pollution. Optimal experience is a form of energy, and energy can be used either to help or to destroy. Fire warms or burns; atomic energy can generate electricity or it can obliterate the world. Energy is power, but power is only a means. The goals to which it is applied can make life either richer or more painful.

The flow experience, like everything else, is not ‘good’ in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self. But whether the consequence of any particular instance of flow is good in a larger sense needs to be discussed and evaluated in terms of more inclusive social criteria. The same is true, however, of all human activities, whether science, religion or politics.

It would be senseless, however, to ignore a source of energy because it can be misused. If mankind had tried to ban fire because it could be used to burn things down, we would not have grown to be very different from the great apes.

THE CONDITIONS OF FLOW

We have seen how people describe the 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 how well one is performing. Concentration is so intense that there is not 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 what they will get out of it, even when it is diffficult or dangerous.

But how do such experiences happen? Occassionally flow may occur by chance, because of a fortunate coincidence of external and internal conditions. While events may happen spontaneously it is much more likely that flow will result either from a structured activity, or from an individual’s ability to make flow occur, or both.

Why is playing a game enjoyable, while the things we have to do every day – like working or sitting at home – are often so boring? And why is it that one person will experience joy even in a concentration camp, while another gets the blahs while vacationing at a fancy resort? Answering these questions will make it easier to understand how experience can be shaped to improve the quality of life. This part of the journey will explore those particular activities that are likely to produce optimal experiences, and the personal traits that help people achieve flow easily.

FLOW ACTIVITIES

There are a set of activities which are conductive to flow because they were designed to make optimal experiences easier to achieve. They have rules that require the learning of skills, they set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible. They facilitate concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from the so-called paramount reality of everyday existence.

Such flow activities have as their primary function the provision of enjoyable experiences. Play, art, pageantry, ritual and sports are some examples. Because of the way they are constructed, they help participants and spectators achieve an ordered state of mind that is highly enjoyable.

Games offer opportunities to go beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience in four different ways. In agonistic games, the participant must stretch her skills to meet the challenge provided by the skills of the opponents. The roots of the word ‘compete’ are the Latin con petire, which meant ‘to seek together’ . What each person seeks is to actualize her potential, and this task is made easier when others force us to do our best. Of course, competition improves experience only as long as attention is focused primarily on the activity itself. If extrinsic goals – such as beating the opponent, wanting to impress an audience, or obtaining a big professional contract – are what one is concerned about, then competition is likely to become a distraction, rather than an incentive to focus conscousness on what is happening.

Every flow activity, whether it involves competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience has this in common: it provides a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.

A simple diagram might help explain why this should be the case. Let us assume that the figure below represents a specific activity – for example, the game of tennis. The two theoretically most important dimensions of the experience, challenges and skills are represented on the two axes of the diagram. The Letter A represents Alex, a boy who is learning to play tennis. The diagram shows Alex at four different points in time. When he first starts playing A1 Alex has practically no skills, and the only challenge he faces is hitting the ball over the net. This is not a very difficult feat, but Alex is likely to enjoy it because the difficulty is just right for his rudimentary skills. So at this point he will probably be in flow. But he cannot stay there long. After a while, if he keeps practicing, his skills are bound to improve, and then he will grow bored just batting the ball over the net A2. Or it might happen that he meets a more practiced opponent, in which case he will realize that there are much harder challenges for him than just lobbing the ball – at that point, he will feel some anxiety A3, concerning his poor performance.

Neither boredom nor anxiety are positive experiences, so Alex will be motivated to return to the flow state. How is he to do it? Glancing again at the diagram, we see that if he is bored (A2) and whishes to be in flow again, Alex has essentially only one choice; to increase the challenges he is facing. (He also has a second choice: which is to give up tennis altogether – in which ase A would simply disappear from the diagram). By setting himself a new and more difficult goal that matches his skills – for instance, to beat an opponent just a little more advanced than he is – Alex would be back in flow (A4).

If Alex is anxious (A3) the way back to flow requires that he increase his skills. Theoretically he could also reduce the challenges he is facing, and thus return to flow where he started in (in A1) but in practice it is difficult to ignore challenges once one is aware that they exist.

The diagram shows that both A1 and A4 represent situations in which Alex is in flow. ALthough both are equally enjoyable, the two states are quite different in that A4 is a more complex experience than A1. It is more complex because it involves greater challenges and demands greater skills from the player.

But A4 although complex and enjoyable,does not represent a stable situation either. As Alex keeps playing either he will become bored by the stale opportunities he finds at that level, or he will become anxious and frustrated by his relatively low ability. So the motivation to enjoy himself again will push him to get back into the flow channel, but now at a level of complexity even higher than A4.

It is this dynamic feature that explains why flow activities lead to growth and discovery. 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 pushes us to stretch our skills or to discover new opportunities for using them.

It is important, however not to fall into the mechanistic fallacy and expect that, just beause a person is objectively involved in a flow activity, she will necessarily have the appropriate experience. It is not only the ‘real’ challenges presented by the situation that count, but those that the person is aware of. It is not skills we actually have that determine how we feel, but the ones we think we have. One person may respond to the challenge of a mountain peak but remain indifferent to the opportunity to learn to play a piece of music; the next person may jump at the chance to learn the music and ignore the mountain. How we feel at any given moment of a flow activity is strongly influenced by the objective conditions; but consciousness is sstill free to follow its own assessment of the case. The rules of games are intended to direct psychic energy in patterns that are enjoyable, but whether we do so or not is ultimately up to us.

During the course of human evolution, every culture has developed activities designed primarily to improve the quality of experience. Even the least technologically advanced societies have some form of art, music, dance, and a variety of games that children and adults play.

While these activities may serve other purposes as well, the fact that they provide enjoyment is the main reason they have survived. Humans began decorating caves at least thirty thousand years ago. These paintings surely had religious and practical significance. However it is likely that the major raison d’etre of art was the same in the Paleolithic era as it is now – namely, it was a source of flow for the painter and for the viewer.

One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is the great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment. Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did. Opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them. And we need to know how to control consciousness – a skill that most people have not learned to cultivate. Surrounded by an astounding panoply of recreational gadgets and leisure choices, most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated.

This fact brings us to the second condition that affects whether an optimal experience will occur or not: an individual’s ability to restructure consciousness so as to make flow possible. Some people enjoy themselves wherever they are, while others stay bored even when confronted with the most dazzling prospects. So in addition to considering the external conditions, or the structure of flow activities, we need also 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. While the remainder of this journey will continue to explore the phenomenon of optimal experience, which in turn should help the reader to become more familiar with it, we shall now consider another issue: whether all people have the same potential to control consciousness; and if not, what distinguishes those who do it easily from those who don’t.

Attentional disorders and stimulus overinclusion 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 and 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.

The impediments to flow considered thus far are located within the individual himself. But there are also many powerful environmental obstacles to enjoyment. Some of these are natural, some social in origin. For instance one would expect that people living in the incredibly harsh conditions of the artic regions, or in the Kalahari desert would have little opportunity to enjoy their lives. Yet even the most severe natural conditions cannot entirely eliminate flow.

The social conditions that inhibit flow might be more difficult to overcome. One of the consequences of slavery, oppression, exploitation, and the destruction of cultural values is the elimination of enjoyment.

Two terms describing states of social pathology apply also to conditions that make flow difficult to experience: anomie and alienation. Anomie- literally, ‘lack of rules’ – is the name Emile Durkheim gave to a condition in society in which the norms of behavior had become muddled. 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. Anomic situations might arise when the economy collaspes, or when one culture is destroyed by another ,but they can also come about when prosperity increases rapidly, and old values of thrift and hard work are no longer as relevant as they had been.

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, for endless bureaucratic clearances. When a society suffers from anomie, 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.

It is interesting to note that these two societal obstacles to flow, anomie and alienation are functionally equivalent to the two personal pathologies, attentional disorders and self-centeredness. At both levels the individual and collective what prevents flow from ocurring is either the fragmentation of attentional processes or their excessive rigidity. At the individual level anomie corresponds to axiety while alienation corresponds to boredom.

Without interest in the world, a desire to be actively related to it, a person becomes isolated into himself. Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosphers 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’. There could be no better short description of how to build for oneself an autotelic personality.

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 unselfconscious individuality. But it is an ability open to cultivation, a skill one can perfect through training and discipline. It is now time to explore further the ways this can be done.

CHEATING CHAOS

Despite everything that has been said so far, some people may still think that it must be easy to be happy as long as one is lucky enough to be healthy, rich and handsome. But how can the quality of life be improved when things are not going our way, when fortune deals us an unfair hand.? ONe can afford to ponder the difference between enjoyment and pleasure if one doesn’t have to worry about running out of money the end of the month. For most people, such distinctions are too much of a luxury to be indulged in. It is okay to think of challenges and complexity if you have an interesting, well-paying profession, but why try to improve a job that is basically dumb and dehumanising? And how can we expect people who are ill, impoverished or stricken by adversity to control their consciousness? Surely they would nee dto improve concrete material conditions before flow could add anything appreciable to the quality of existence. Optimal experience in other words, should be regarded as the frosting on a cake made with solid ingredients like health and wealth; by itself it is a flimsy decoration. Only with a solid base of these more real advantages does it help make the subjective aspects of life satisfying.

Needless to say, the whole thesis of the journey arguest against such a conclusion. Subjective experience is not just one of the dimensions of life, it is life itself. Material conditions are secondary: they only affect us indirectly, by way of experience. Flow, and even pleasure, on the other hand, benefit the quality of life directly. 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.

Conversely, many individuals who have suffered harshly end up not only surviving, but also thoroughly enjoying their lives. How is it possible that people are able to achieve harmony of mind, and grow in complexity, even when some of the worst things imaginable happen to them? That is the outwardly simple question this chapter will explore. In the process, we shall examine some of the strategies use to cope with stressful events, and review how an autelic self can manage to create order out of chaos.

TRAGEDIES TRANSFORMED

It would be naively idealistic to claim that no matter what happens to him, a person in control of consciousness will be happy. There are certainly limits to how much pain, or hunger, or deprivation a body can endure.

Rather incredible examples of how people achieve flow despite extreme handicaps have been collected by Professor Fausto Massimini of the psychology department of the University of Milan. One group he and his team studied was composed of paraplegics, generally young people who at some point in the past, usually as a result of an accident have lost the use of their limbs. The unexpected finding of this study was that a large proportion of the victims mentioned the accident that caused paraplegia as both one of the most negative and one of the most positive events in their lives. The reason tragic events were seen as positive was that they presented the victim with very clear goals while reducing contradicory and inessential choices. The patients who learned to master the new challenges of their impaired situation felt a clarity of purpose they had lacked before. Learning to live again was in itself a matter of enjoyment and pride, and they were able to turn the accident from a source of entropy into an occasion of inner order.

Examples

COPING WITH STRESS

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. If the second road is taken, the tragedy is not necessarily a detriment to the quality of life. Indeed what objectively seems a devastating event may come to enrich the victims lives in new and unexpected ways. Even the loss of one of the most basic human faculties, like that of sight, does not mean that a person’s consciousness need become impoverished; the oppostie is often what happens. But what makes the difference? How does it come about that the same blow will destroy one person, while another will transform it into inner order?

Psychologists usually study the answers to such questions under the heading of coping with stress. It is obvious that certain events cause more psychological strain than others: for example, the death of a spous is several orders of magnitude more stressful than taking out a mortgage on a house, which in turn causes more strain than being given a traffic ticket. But it is also clear that the same stressful event might make one person utterly miserable, while another will bite the bullet and make the best of it. This difference in how a person responds to stressful events has been called ‘coping ability’ or ‘coping style’.

In trying to sort out what accounts for a person’s ability to cope with stress, it is useful to distinguish three different kinds of resources. The first is the external support available, and especially the network of social supports. A major illness, for instance, will be mitigated to a certain extent if one has good insurance and a loving family. The second bulwark against stress includes a person’s psychological resources, such as intelligence, education, and relevant personality factors. Moving to a new city and having to establish new friendships will be more stressful to an introvert than to an extrovert. And finally, the third type of resource referes to the coping strategies that a person uses to confront the stress.

Of these three factors, the third one is the most relevant to our purposes. External supports by themselves are not that effective in mitigating stress. They tend to help only those who can help themselves. And psychological resources are largely outside our control. It is difficult to become much smarter, or much more outgoing, than one was at birth. But how we cope is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress will have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control.

There are two main ways people respond to stress. The positive response is called ‘mature defense’ or ‘transformational coping. The negative response to stress would be a neurotic defense or regressive coping. People do differ in their abilities to use one or the other strategy. The paraplegic who became a champion archer, or the blind chess master, visited by misfortunes so intense that they are off the scale of stressful life events, are examples of individuals who have mastered transformational coping. Others however when confronted by much less intense levels of stress, might give up and respond by scaling down the complexity of their lives forever.

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’. Whatever we call them, it is generally understood that they are exceptional people who have overcome great hardships and have surmounted obstacles that would daunt most men and women. In fact, when average people are asked to name the individuals they admire the most, and to explain why these men and women are admired, courage and the ability to overcome hardship are the qualities most often mentioned as a reason for admiration. They stood for what they believed in, and didn’t let opposition daunt them. They had courage, or what in earlier time was known simply as ‘virtue’ – a term derived from the Latin word vir, or man.

It makes sense, of course that people should look up to his one quality more than to any other. 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. To admire this quality means that we pay attention to those who embody it, and we thereby have a chance to emulate them if the need arises. Therefore admiring courage is in itself a positive adaptive trait;those who do so may be better prepared to ward off the blows of misfortune.

But simply calling the ability to cheat chaos ‘transformational coping’ and people who are good at it ‘courageous’, falls short of explaining this remarkable gift. We fail to illuminate matters if we say that effective coping is caused by the virtue of courage. What we need is not only names and descriptions, but an understanding of how the process works. Unfortunately our ignorance in this matter is still very greeat.

THE POWER OF DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES

One fact that does seem clear, however, is that the ability to make order out of chaos is not unique to psychological processes. In fact, according tosome views of evolution, complex life forms depend for their existence on a capacity to extract energy out of entropy = to recycle waste into structured order.

Human beings have also managed to utilize waste energy to serve their goals. Like fire for example. Unless men learned various tricks for transforming the forces of disorder into something they could use, we would not have survived as successfully as we have.

The psyche, as we have seen, operates according to similar principles. The integrity of the self depends on the ability to take neutral or destructive events and turn them into positive ones. Getting fired could be a godsend, if one took the opportunity to find something else to do that was more in tune with one’s desires. In each person’s life, the chances of only good things happening are extremely slim. The likelihood that our desires will always be fulfilled is so minute as to be negible. Sooner or later everyone will have to confront events that contradict his goals: disappointments, severe illness, financial reversal, and eventually the inevitability of one’s death. Each event of this kind is negative feedback that produces disorder in the mind. Each threatens the self and impairs its functioning. If the trauma is severe enough, a person may lose the capacity to concentrate on necessary goals. If that happens, the self is no longer in control. If the impairment is very severe, consciousness becomes random, and the person ‘loses his mind’ – the various symptoms of mental disease take over. In less severe cases the threatened self survives, but stops growing; cowering under attack, it retreats behind massive defenses and vegetates in a state of continuous suspicion.

It is for this reason that courage, resilience, perseverance, mature defense, or transformational coping – the dissipative structures of the mind – are so essential. Without them we would be constantly suffering through the random bombardment of stray psychological meteorites. On the other hand, if we do develop such positive strategies, most negative events can be at least neutralized and possible even used as challenges that will help make the self stronger and more complex.

The peak of the development of coping skills is reached when a young man or woman has achieved a strong enough sense of self, based on personally selected goals, that no external disappointment can entirely undermine who he or she is. For some people the strength derives from a goal that involves identification with the family, with the country, or with a religion or an ideology. For others, it depends on mastery of a harmonious system of symbols, such as art, music or physics.

Why are some people weakened by stress, while others gain strength from it? Basically the answer is simple: 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 main steps that seem to be involved in such transformatons:

1. Unselfconscious self-assurance. The common attitude shared by such people was the implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands. They did not doubt their own resources would be sufficient to allow them to determine their fate. In that sense one would call them self-assured, yet at the same time, their egos seem curiously absent: they are not self-centered; their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously. This attitude occurs when a person no longer sees himself in opposition to the environment., as an individual who insists that his goals, his intentions take precedence over everything else. Instead, he feels a part of whatever goes on around him, and tries to do his best within the system in which he mest operate. Paradoxically, this sense of humility – the recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer – is a hallmark of strong people.
2. Focusing attention on the world. It is difficult to notice the environment as long as attention is mainly focused inward, as long as most of one’s psychic energy is absorbed by the concerns and desires of the ego. People who know how to transform stress into enjoyable challenge spend very little time thinking about themselves. They are not expending all their energy trying to satisfy what they believe to be their needs, or worrying about socially conditioned desires. Instead their attention is alert, constantly processing information from their surroundings. The focus is still set by the person’s goal, but it is open enough to notice and adapt to external events even if they are not directly relevant to what he wants to accomplish. Achieving this unity with one’s surroundings is not only an important component of enjoyable flow experiences but it is also a central mechanism by which advertsity is conquered. In the first place, when attention is focused away from the self, frustrations’s of one’s desires have less of a chance to disrupt consciousness. To experience psychic entropy one must concentrate on the internal disorder; but by paying attention to what is happening around oneself instead the destructive effects of stress are lessened. Second, the person whose attention is immersed in the environment becomes part of it – she participates in the system by linking herself to it through psychic energy. This in turn, makes it possible for her to understand the properties of the system, so that she can find a better way to adapt to a problematic situation. In a threatening situation it is natural to mobilize psychic energy, draw it inward, and use it as a defence against the threat. But this innate reaction more often than not compromises the ability to cope. It exacerbates the experience of inner turmoil, reduces the flexibility of response, and perhaps worse than anything else, it isolates a person from the rest of the world, leaving him alone with his frustrations. On the other hand, if one continues to stay in touch with what is going on, new possibilities are likely to emerge, which in turn might suggest new responses, and one is less likely to be entirely cut off from the stream of life.

3. The discovery of new solutions. There are basically two ways to cope with a situation that creates psychic entropy. One is to focus attention on the obstacles to achieving one’s goals and then to move them out of the way, thereby restoring harmony in consciousness. This is the direct approach. The other is to focus on the entire situation, including oneself, to discover whether alternative goals may not be more appropriate and thus different solutions possible.

Almost every situation we encounter in life presents possibilities for grwoth. As we have seen, even terrible disasters like blindness and paraplegia can be turned into conditions for enjoyment and greater complexity. Even the approach of death itself can serve to create harmony in consciousness, rather than despair.

But these transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities. Most of us becom e so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning taht we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well But the moment biological or social goals are frustrated – which in the long run is inevitable – a person must fomulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will waste hie energies in inner turmoil.

But how does one go about discovering these alternative strategies? The answer is basically simiple: if one operates with unselfconscious assurance, and remains open to the environment and involved in it, a solution is likely to emerge. The process of discovering new goals in life is in many respects similar to that by which an artist goes about creating an original work of art. If you hold on the preconceived notion of what the painting should look like, without responding to the possibilities suggested by the forms devleoping before her, the painting is likely to be trite.

We all start with preconceived notions of what we want form life. These include the basic needs programmed by our genes to ensure survival – the need for food, comfort, sex, dominance over other beings, They also include the desires that our specific culture has inculcated in us – to be slim, rich, educated, and well liked. If we embrace these goals and are lucky, we may replicate the ideal physical and social image for our historical time and place. But is this the best use of our psychic energy? And what if we cannot realize these ends? We will never become aware of other possibilities unless, like the painter who watches with care what is happening on the canvas, we pay attention to what is happening around us, and evaluate events on the basis of their direct impact on how we feel, rather than evaluating them exclusively in terms of preconceived notions. If we do so we may discover that, contrary to what we were led to believe, it is more satisfying to help another person than to beat him down, or that it is more enjoyable to take with one’s two year old than to play golf with the company president.

THE AUTOTELIC SELF: A SUMMARY

In this part of the journey we have seen it demonstrated repeatedly that outside forces do not determine whether advertsity will be able to be turned into enjoyment. A person who is healthy, rich, strong and powerful has no greater odds of being in control of his consciousness than one who is sickly, poor, weak and oppressed. 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 a threats or as opportunities for action.

The ‘autotelic self’ is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony. A person who is never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on, and in flow most of the time may be said to have an autotelic self. The term literally means ‘a self that has self-containted goals’ and it reflects the idea that such an indiviaul has releatively few goals that do not originate from within the self. For most people, goals are shaped directly by biological needs and social conventions, and therefore their origin is outside the self. 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. Therefore the rules for developing such a self are simple, and they derive directly from the flow model. Briefly, they can be summarized as follows:

1. Setting goals. To be abe to experience flow, one must have clear goals to strive for. A person with an autotelic self learns to make choices – ranging from lifelong commitments, such as getting married and setteling on a vocation, to trivial decisions like what to do on the weekend or how to spend the time waiting in the dentist office – without much fuss and the minimum of panic. Selecting a goal is related to the recognition of challenges. As soon as the goals and challenges define a system of action, they in turn suggest the skills necessary to operate within it. And to devleop skills one needs to pay attention to the results of one’s actions – to monitor the feedback. One of the basic differences between a person with an autotelic self and one without it is that the former knows that it is she who has chosen whatever goal she is pursuing. What she does is not random, nor is it the result of outside determining forces. This fact results in two seemingly opposite outcomes. On the one hand, having a feeling of ownership of her decisions, the person is more strongly dedicated to her goals. Her actions are reliable and internally controlled. On the other hand, knowing them to be her own she can more easily modify her goals whenever the reasons for preserving them no longer make sense. In that respect, an autotelic person’s behavior is both more consistent and more flexible.

2. Becoming immersed in the activity. After choosing a system of action, a person with an autotelic personality frows deeply involved with whatever he is doing. He invites attention in the task at hand. To do successfully one must learn to balance the opportunities for action with the skills one possesses. Some people begin with unrealistic expectations, when their hopes are dashed most become despondent and their selves wither from the loss of psychic energy expended in fruitless attemps. At the other extreme, many people stagnate because they do not trust their own potential. They choose the safety of trivial goals, and arrest the growth of complexity at the lowest level available. 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. Involvement is greatly facilitated by the ability to concentrate. People who suffer from attentional disorders, who cannot keep their minds from wandering, always feel left out of the flow of lie. They are at the mercy of whatever stray stimulus happens to flash by. To be distracted against one’s will is the surest sign that one is not in control. Yet it is amazing how little effort most people make to improve control of their attention. If reading a book seems too difficult, instead of sharpening concentration we tend to set it aside and instead turn on the television, which not only requires minimal attention , but in fact tends to diffuse what little it commands with choppy enditing, commercial interruptions and generally inane content.

3. Paying attention to what is happening. Concentration leads to involvement, which can only be maintained by constant inputs of attention. Having an autotelic self implies the abilityto sustain involvement. Self-consciousness , which is the most common source of distraction is not a problem for such a person. Instead of worrying about how he is doing, how he looks from the outside, he is wholeheartedly committed to his goals. In some cases it is the depth of involvement that pushes self-cousciousness out of awareness, while sometimes it is the other way around: it is the very lack of self-consciousness that makes deep involvement possible. The elements of the autotelic personality are related to one another by links of mutual causation. It does not matter where one starts – whether one chooses goals first, develops skills, cultivates the ability to concentrate or gets rid of self-consciousness. One can start anywhere because once the flow experiences is in motion the other elements will be much easier to attain.

A person who pays attention to an interaction instead of worrying about the self obtains a paradoxical result. She no longer feels like a separate individual, yet her self becomes stronger. The autotelic individual grows beyond the limits of individuality by investing psychic energy in a system in which she is included. Because of the union of the person and the system, the self emerges at a higher level of complexity. This is why tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

The self of a person who regards everything from an egocentric perspective may be more secure, but it is certain to be an impoversihed one relative to that of a person who is willing to be committed, to be involved and who is willing to pay attention to what is happening for the sake of the interaction rather than purely out of self-interest.

4. Learning to enjoy immediate experience

The outcome of having an autotelic self – or learning to set goals, to develop skills, to be sensitive to feedback, to know how to concentrate and get involved – is that one can enjoy life even when objective circumstances are brutish and nasty. Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy. To achieve this control, however, requires determination and discipline. Optimal experience is not the result of a hedonistic, lotuseating approach to life. A relexaed, laissez-faire attitude is not a sufficient defense against chaos. As we have seen from the very beginning of this journey, to be able to transform random events into flow, one must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one become more than one is. Flow drives individuals to creativity and outstanding achievement. The necessity to develop increasingly refined skills to sustain enjoyment is what lies behind the evolution of culture. It motivates both individuals and cultures to change into more complex entities. The rewards of creating order in experience provide the energy that propels evolution – they pave the way for those dimly imagined descendants of ours, more cmplex and wise than we are, who will soon take our place.

But to change all existence into a flow experience, it is not sufficient to learn merely how to control moment by – moment states of consciousness. It is also necessary to have an overall context of goals for the events of everyday life to make sense. If a person moves from one flow activity to another without a connecting order, it will be difficult at the end of one’s life to look back on the years past and find meaning in what has happened. To create harmony in whatever one does is the last task that the flow theory presents to those who wish to attain optimal experience; it is a task that involves transforming the entirety of life into a single flow activity, with unifed goals that provide constant purpose.

THE MAKING OF MEANING

It is not unusal for famous soccer players to be deeply committed to their game, to take pleasure in playing, but off the field to be morose and hostile. It is a reminder that having achieved flow in one activity does not necessarily guarantee that it will be carried over to the rest of life.

If we enjoyed work and friendships, and faced every challenge as the opportunity to develop new skills, we would be getting rewards out of living that are outside the realm of ordinary life. Yet even this would not be neough to assure us of optimal experience. As long as enjoyment follows piecemeal from activities not linked to one another in a meaningful way, one is still vulnerable to the vagaries of chaos. Even the most successful career, the most rewarding family relationship eventually runds dry. Sooner or later involvement in work must be reduced. To approach optimal experience as closely as is humanly possible, a last step in the control of consciousness is necessary.

What this involves is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony and the separate parts of life will fit toegether – and each activity will make sense in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life.

But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? Life can be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to ceate a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying.

From the point of view of an individual it does not matter what the ultimate goal is – provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to find a cure for cancer. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life.

WHAT MEANING MEANS

Meaning is a concept difficult to define, since any definition runs the risk of being circular. How do we talk about the meaning of meaning itself? There are three ways in which unpacking the sense of this word helps illuminate the last step in achieving optimal experience. Its first usage points toward the end, purpose, significance of something as in ‘What is the meaning of life? This sense of the word reflects the assumption that events are linked to each other in terms of an ultimate goal; that there is a temporal order, a causal connection between them. It assumes that phenomena are not radom, but fall into recognizable patterns directed by a final purpose. The second usage of the word referś to a person’s intentions: She usually means well. What this sense of meaning implies is that people reveal theirpurposes in action; that their goals are expressed in predictable consistent and orderly ways.

Creating meaning involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating one’s actions into a unified flow experience. The three senses of the word meaning noted above make it clearer how this is accomplished. 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. We may refer to this process as achieving purpose. to experience flow one must set goals for one’s actions: to win a game, to make friends with a person, to accomplish something in a certain way. The goal in itself is usually not important; what matters is that it focuses a person’s attention and involves it in an achievable, enjoyable activity. In a similar way some people are able to bring the same sharp focus to their psychic energy throughout the entirety of their lives. The unrelated goals of the separate flow acitvities merge into an all-encompassing set of challenges that gives purpose to everything a person does. There are very different ways to establish this directionality.

The answer to the old riddle ‘What is the meaning of life?’ turns out to be astonishingly simiple. the meaning of life is meaning:whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life.

The second sense of the world meaning refers to the expression of intentionality. And this sense also is appropriate to the issue of how to create meaning by transforming all life into a flow activity. It is not enough to find a purpose that unifies one’s goals; one must also carry through and meet its challenges. The purpose must result in strivings; intent has to be translated into action. We may call this resolution in the pursuit of one’s goals. 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. Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it.

The third and final way in which life acquires meaning is the result of the previous two steps. When an important goal is pursued with resolution and all one’s varied activities fit together into a unified flow experience the result is that harmony is brought to consciousness. Someone who knows his desireds and works with purpose to achieve them is a person whose feelings, thoughts and actions are congruent with another and is therefore a person who has achieved inner harmony. Someone who is in harmony no matter what he does, no matter what is happening to him, knows that his psychic energy is not being wasted on doubt, regret, guilt and fear, but is always usefully employed. Inner congruence ultimately leads to that inner strength and serenity we admire in people who seem to have come to terms with themselves.

Purpose, resolution and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience. Whoeever achieves this state will never really lack anything else. A person whose consciousness is so ordered need not fear unexpected events, or even death. Every living moment will make sense, and most of it will be enjoyable. This certainly sounds desirable. So how does one attain it.

CULTIVATING PURPOSE

In the lives of many people it is possible to find a unifying purpose that justifies the things they do day in, day out – a goal that like a magnetic field attracts their psychic energy, a goal upon which all lesser goals depend. This goal will define the challenges that a person needs to face in order to transform his or her life into a flow activity. Without such a purpose, even the best-ordered consciousness lacks meaning.

Throughout human history innumerable attempts have been made to discover ultimate goals that would give meaning to experience. These attempts have often been very different from one another.

Every human culture, by definition, contains meaning systems that can serve as the encompassing purpose by which individuals can order their goals. Probably the most satisfying way to unify life into an all-embracing flow activity is through the idealistic mode. But setting challenges that involve the improvement of material condition while at the same time pursuing spiritual ends is not easy, especially when the culture as a whole is predominantly sensate in character.

Another way to describe how individuals order their actions is to focus on the complexity of the challenges they set for themselves rather than on their content. Perhaps what matters most is not whether a person is materialist or ideational, but how differentiated and integrated are the goals he or she pursues in those areas. A well thought out sensate approach to life, one that was responsive to a great variety of concrete human experiences and was internally consistent, would be preferable to an unreflective idealism and vice versa.

FORGING RESOLVE

Purpose gives direction to one’s efforts but it does not necessarily make life easier. Goals can lead into all sorts of trouble, at which point one gets tempted to give them up and find some less demanding script by which to order one’s actions. 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.

No goal can have much effect unless taken seriously. Each goal prescribes a set of consequences and if one isn’t prepared to reckon with them, the goal becomes meaningless. This is true of all flow experiences: there is a mutual relationship between goals and the effort they require. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal.

All things considered, it cannot be said that humankind has lacked the courage to back its resolutions. Billions of parents in every age and in every culture have sacrificed themselves for their children and thereby made life more meaningful for themselves. Probably as many have devoted all their energies to preserving their fields and their flocks. Millions more have surrendered everything for the sake of their religion, their country, or their art. For those who have done so consistently, despite pain and failure, life as a whole had a chance to become like an extended episode of flow: a focused, concentrated, internally coherent, logically ordered set of experiences, which, because of its inner order, was felt to be meaningful and enjoyable.

But as the complexity of culture evolves, it becomes more difficult to achieve this degree of total resolve. There are simply too many goals competing for prominence, and who is to say which one is worth the dedication of an entire life? The wealth of options we face today has extended personal freedom to an extent that would have been inconceivable even a hundred years ago. But the inevitable consequence of equally attractive choices is uncertainty of purpose, uncertainty, in turn, saps resolution, and lack of resolve ends up devaluing choice. Therefore freedom does not necessarily helps developing meaning in life – on the contrary. If the rules of the game become too flexible, concentration flags, and it is more difficult to attain a flow experience. Commitment to a goal and to the rules it entails is much easier when the choices are few and clear.

This is not to imply that a return to the rigid values and limited choices of the past would be preferable – even if that were a possibility, which it is not. The complexity and freedom that have been thrust upon us, and that our ancestors have fought so hard to achieve, are a challenge we must find ways to master. If we do, the lives of our descendants wil lbe infinitely more enriched than anything previously experienced on this planet. If we do not, we run the risk of frittering away our energies on contraditory, meaningless goals.

But in the meantime how do we know where to invest psychic energy? There is no one out there to tell us, ‘Here is a goal worth spending your life on’ Because there is no absolute certainty to which to turn, each person must discover ultimate purpose on his or her own. Through trial and error, through intense cultivation, we can straighten out the tangled skein of conflicting goals, and choose the one that will give purpose to action.

Self-knowledge – an ancient remedy so old that its value is easily forgotten – is the process through which one may organize conflicting options. ‘Know thyself’ was carved over the entrance to the Delphic oracle, and ever since untold pious epigrams have extolled its virtue. The reason the advice actually implies for each individual. And to do that it is useful to express it in terms of current knowledge and envision a contemporary method for its application.

Inner conflict is the result of competing claims on attention. Too many desires, too many incompatible goals struggle to marshal psychic energy toward their own ends. It follows that the only way to reduce conflict is by sorting out the essential claims from those that are not, and by aribtrating priorities among those that remain. There are basically two ways to accomplish this: what the ancients called the vita activa, a life of action and the vita contemplativa, or the path of reflection.

Immersed in the vita activa, a person achieves flow through total involvement in concrete external challenges. If the arena for action is challenging enough, a person may experience flow continuously in his or her calling, thus leaving as little room as possible for noticing the entropy of normal life. In this way harmony is restored to consciousness indirectly – not by facing up to contradictions and trying to resolve conflicting goals and desires, but by pursuing chosen goals with such intensity that all potential competition is preempted.

Action helps create inner order, but it has its drawbacks. A person strongly dedicated to achieving pragmatic ends might eliminate internal conflict, but often at the price of excessively restricting options. Or the goals that have sustained action over a period turns out no to have enough power to give meaning to the entirety of life.

This is where the presumed advantage of a contemplative life comes in. Detached reflection upon experience, a realistic weighing of options and their consequences, have long been held to be the best approach to a good life. It involves reviewing one’s actions one or more times each day to check whether what one has been doing in the past hours has been consistent with long-term goals, self-knowledge can be pursued in innumerable ways, each leading potentially to greater inner harmony.

Activity and reflection should ideally complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent. Before investing great amounts of energy in a goal, it pays to raise the fundamental questions: is this something I really want to do? Is it something I enjoy doing? Am I likely to enjoy it in the foreseeable future? Is the price that I – and others – will have to pay worth it? Will I be able to live with myself if I accomplish it?

These seemingly easy questions are almost impossible to answer for someone who has lost touch with his own experience. If a man has not bothered to find what he wants, if his attention is wrapped up in external goals that he fails to notice his own feelings, then he cannot plan action meaningfully. On the other hand, if the habit of reflection is well developed, a person need not go through a lot of soul-searching to decide whether a course of action is entropic or not.

It is relatively easy to bring order to the mind for short stretches of time; any realistic goal can accomplish this. A good game, an emergency at work, a happy interlude at home will focus attention and produce the harmonious experience of flow. But it is much more difficult to extend this state of being through the entirety of life. For this 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. If goals are well chosen, and if we have the courage to abide by them despite opposition, we shall be so focused on the actions and events around us that we won’t have the time to be unhappy. And then we shall directly feel a sense of order in the warp and the woof of life that fits every thought and emotion into a harmonious whole.

RECOVERING HARMONY

The consequence of forging life by purpose and resolution is a sense of inner harmony, a dynamic order in the contents of consciousness. But it may be argued, why should it be so difficult to achieve this inner order? Why would one strive so hard to make life into a coherent flow experience? Aren’t people born at peace with themselves – isn’t human nature naturally ordered?

The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow. But this becomes possible only if one keeps in mind more than one goal at a time being aware at the same time of conflicting desires. It can happen only when the mind knows not only what is but also what could be. The more complex any system, the more room it leaves open foralternatives, and the more things can go wrong with it. This is certainly applicable to the evolution of the mind: as it has increased its power to handle information the potential for inner conflict has increased as well. When there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious; when too few, we get bored.

When we can imagine only few opportunities and few possibilities, it is relatively easy to achieve harmony. Desires are simple, choices clear. There is little room for conflict and no need to compromise. This is the order of simple systems. It is a fragile harmony; step by step with the increase of complexity, the chances of entropy generated internally by the system increase as well.

However, once the fruit is plucked from the tree of knowledge, the way back to Eden is barred forever.

THE UNIFICATION OF MEANING IN LIFE THEMES

Instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice. Psychologists have used terms like life themes. These concepts identify a set of goals linked to an ultimate goal that gives significance to whatever a person does.

The life theme, like a game that prescribes the rules and actions one must follow to experience flow, identifies what will make existence enjoyable. With a life theme, everything that happens will have a meaning – not necessary a positive one, but a meaning nevertheless.

When a person’s psychic energy coalesces into a life theme, consciousness achieves harmony. But not all life themes are equally productive. Existential philosophers distinguish between authentic and inauthentic projects. The first describes the theme of a person who realizes that choices are free and makes a personal decision based on a rational evaluation of his experience. It does not matter what the choice is, as long as it is an expression of what the person genuiely feels and believes. Inauthentic projects are those a person chooses because they are what everybody else is doing, and therefore there is no alternative. Authentic projects tend to be intrinsically motivated, chosen for what they are worth in themselves; inauthentic ones are motivated by external forces. A similar distinction is that between discovered life themes, when a person writes the script for her actions out of personal experience and awareness of choice and accepted life themes, when a person simply takes on a predetermined role from a script written long ago by others.

Both types of life themes help give meaning to life, but each has drawbacks. The accepted life theme works well as long as the social system is sound; if it is not, it can trap the person into perverted goals. Discovered life themes are fragile for a different reason: because they are products of a personal struggle to define the purpose of life, they have less social legitimacy; because they are often novel and idiosyncratic, they may be regarded by others as crazy or destructive. Some of the most powerful life themes are based on ancient human goals but freshly discovered and freely chosen by the individual.

There are several common characteristics of how people forge discovered life themes. In the first place, the theme is in many cases a reaction to a great personal hurt suffered in early life – to being orphaned, abandoned or treated unjustly. But what matters is not the trauma per se: the external event never determines what the theme will be. What matters is the intepretation that one places on the suffering.

So the next question is, What kinds of explanations for one’s suffering lead to negentropic life themes? Finally, a comoplex, negentropic life theme is rarely formulated as the response to just a personal problem. Instead the challenge becomes generalized to other people or to mankind as a whole.

What makes some people able to develop a coherent purpose while others struggle through an empty or meaningless life? There is no simple answer, of course, because whether a person will discover a harmonious theme in the apparent chaos of experience is influenced by many factors, both internal and external. It is easier to doubt that life makes sense if one is born deformed, poor and oppressed.

If there is a strategy shared by people who succeed in building meaning into their experience it is one so simple and obvious that it is almost embarrassing to mention Yet because it is so often overlooked, especially nowadays, it will be valuable to review it. The strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will help avoid disorder in one’s own mind. There is much knowledge – or well-ordered information – accumulated in culture, ready for this use. 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.

To do so is like trying to build up material culture from scratch in each generation. No one in his right mind would want to start reinventing the wheel, fire, electricity and the million objects and processes that we now take for granted as part of the human environment. Instead we learn how to make these things by receiving ordered information from teachers, from books, from models as to benefit from the knowledge of the past and eventually surpass it. To discard the hard won information on how to live accumulated by our ancestors, or to expect to discover a viable set of goals all by oneself is a misguided hubris. the chances of success are about as good as in trying to build an electron microscope without the tools and knowledge of physics.

People who as adults develop coherent life themes often recal that when they were young, their parents told them stories and read from books. When told by a loving adult whom one trusts, fairy tales, biblical stories, heroic historical deeds, and poignant family events are often the first intimations of meaningful order a person gleans from the experience of the past. In contrast, we found in studies that individuals who never focus on any goal, or accept one unquestioningly from the society around them, tend not to remember their parents having read or told stories to them as childeren.

Whatever one’s background, there are still many opportunities later on in life to draw meaning from the past. Most people who discover complex life themes remember either an older person or a historical figure whom they greatly admired and who served as a model, or they recall having read a book that revealed new possiblities for action.

At its best literature contains ordered information about behavior, models of purpose and examples of lives successfully patterned around meaningful goals. Many people confronted with the randomness of existence have drawn hope from the knowledge that others before them had faced similar problems, and had been able to prevail. And this is just literature, what about film, music, art, philosophy?

Lately i had a seminar for entrepreneurs on the topic of how to handle the midlife crisis. I began the seminar with a quick review of Dante’s Divina Commedia. After all, written over six hundered years ago, this was the earliest description I knew of a midlife crisis and its resolution. ‘In the middle of the journey of our life’, writes Dante in the first line of his enormously long and rich poem, ‘I found myself inside a dark forest, for the right way I had completely lost. What happens afterward is a gripping and in many ways still relevant account of the dificulties to be encountered in middle age.

First of all, wandering in the dark forest, Dante realizes that three fierce beasts are stalking him, licking their chops in anticipation. They are a lion, a lynx and a she wolf – representing, among other things, ambition, lust and greed. Dante’s nemesis turns out to be the desire for power, sex and money. To avoid being destroyed by them, Dante tries to escape by climbing a hill. But the beasts keep drawing nearer and in desperation Dante calls for divine help. His prayer is answered by an apparition: it is the ghost of Virgil, a poet who died more than a thousand years before Dante was born, but whose wise and majestic verse Dante admired so much that he thought of the poet as his mentor. Virgil tries to reassure Dante: The good news is that there is a way out of the dark forest. The bad news is that the way leads though hell. And through hell they slowly wend their way, witnessing as they go the sufferings of those who had never chosen a goal, and the even worse fate of those whose purpose in life had been to increase entropy – the so called ‘sinners’.

I was rather concerned about how the harried business executives would take to this centuries-old parable. Chances were, I feared, that they would regard it as a waste of their precious time. I need not have worried. We never had as open and serious a discussion of the pitfalls of midlife, and the options for enriching the years that would follow, as we had after talking about the Commedia. Later, several participants told me privately that starting the seminar with Dante had been a great idea. is story focused the issues so clearly that it became much easier to think and to talk about them afterward.

Dante is an important model for another reason as well. Although his poem is informed by a deep religious ethic, it is very clear to anyone who reads it that Dante’s Christianity is not an accepted but a discovered belief. In other words, the religious life theme he created was made up of the best insights of Christianity combined with the best of Greek philosophy and Islamic wisdom that had filtered into Euopre. At the same time, his Inferno is desely populated with popes, cardinals and clerics suffering eternal damnation. Even his first guide, Virgil, is not a Christian saint but a heathen poet. Dante recognized that every system of spiritual order, when it becomes incorporated into a worldly structure like an organized church begins to suffer the effects of entropy. So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest.