The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow.
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 involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
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 as threats or as opportunities for action.
The meaning of life is meaning: whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life. The.
The autotelic self transforms potentially entropic experience into flow.
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.
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.
Of the many causes that shaped St. Francis’s actions, a primary one was the belief that his actions mattered, and that he had a responsibility to change the world around him. This belief, in itself, is a “cause.” The idea of free will is a self-fulfilling prophecy; those who abide by it are liberated from the absolute determinism of external forces. Chance.
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.
Without interest in the world, a desire to be actively related to it, a person becomes isolated into himself.
Our perceptions about our lives are the outcome of many forces that shape experience, each having an impact on whether we feel good or bad.
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.
Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories.
Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. It frees us from the tyranny of the present, and makes it possible for consciousness to revisit former times.
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 reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate.
As Democritus said so simply many centuries ago: “Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.” To swim in this case involves learning to distinguish the useful and the harmful forms of flow, and then making the most of the former while placing limits on the latter. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people’s chances to enjoy theirs.
I am fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period, although of course you don’t know until afterward. I think that it is very important to be idle. I mean, they always say that Shakespeare was idle between plays. I am not comparing myself to Shakespeare, but people who keep themselves busy all of the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.
Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. This.
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.