When I was growing up, people told me pretty often, “You will be able to do whatever you want to,” in reference to the opportunities in America and a relatively high intelligence. In one way, that was really affirming to have that positive feedback. When I asked, “But what should I do?”, the answers were simply not forthcoming. People might respond, “Well, what do you want?” I’d ask, “What is there?” Maybe they were looking for something more concrete than what I needed. Maybe I was looking for something more concrete than what I needed. But “whatever you want” was not concrete enough. Whatever.
Rather than complaining about it all, it’s easy enough, after 28 years of questioning, to see the freedom some of those folks were trying to hint at. But if they were more familiar with embracing that freedom themselves, they might have offered different answers. Maybe...whatever...it’s up to me now.
Part of what results from the questioning is the recognition that, although information or customs or training are concrete, that doesn’t make any of those things necessarily limiting. If you want relative freedom in an economic situation, you’d better train yourself to marketable skills. If you want existential freedom from suffering in this lifetime, you’d better train yourself in attentional skills. Now, this doesn’t mean that the skills are the freedom itself, but they can lead to awareness of freedom. This is like looking for happiness. You can’t give someone else some concrete thing “happiness” in a box for Christmas, but if you don’t give anything, something is felt to be missing.
While many people intimated at a process of how to figure out what to do, no one really laid out such a process. It comes down to learning something specific, trying it in detail, improving, trying something new, improving, and connecting the different endeavors and skills learned. Repeat as necessary, and when something new presents itself, learn (...practice, try, improve...). As that happens, you begin to see how everything is networked, how everything flows, how internal experience or phenomenology also flows. (We can all experience that, at least in dreaming.) The problem is that, if you don’t work with real things in the world rather than just an abstract and general idea of “whatever you might want”, the internal flow of experience doesn’t seem to really connect with the rest of the world, the possibility in dreaming and the real world don't seem to meet up.
If I were to design a way to encourage disengagement, this generalizing method of relating to children (“you can do whatever you want”) might be an excellent way to go. As an overreaction to my grandparents’ generation’s parenting, it may be understandable that my parents didn’t want to force me into a small box, but I am not looking to pass something equally unworkable to the next generation. While the result of all of this may be that I feel fairly self-sufficient, I believe it is possible to improve the process, including the amount of social connection we feel as kids and as adults. If this seems like complaints on my part so far, then know that we are moving towards how that is not so–critique is important where progress is concerned in the same way that specific engagement is not freedom but it may lead to an experience of increasing awareness of freedom.
One of the new things that some American hippies and social entrepreneurs tried in the 1960s and 70s was Zen. Zen is a good example of what my grandparents’ generation’s culture didn’t fully embrace, so it’s an interesting example. (No, that earlier generation is not to blame either.) Zen is one of those “things” that I tried, messed around with, and worked to connect to other aspects of life. I liked Zen from a fairly young age for a couple of reasons. The teachers offered specific recommendations about sitting, posture, breathing, etc. Kapleau’s THE THREE PILLARS OF ZEN was especially helpful to me for a couple reasons. The first has to do with Yasutani Roshi’s incorporation of Soto and Rinzai methods. Yasutani, as one of the early teachers who brought Zen to America, may have offered one of the most complete and adaptable approaches for Americans. The second reason is that Kapleau was very open in what he discussed in his book. While people my age often take this openness for granted, just two generations ago, it took real courage to present this sort of transparency. As another great example, Ajahn Chah was very open to Westerners, very willing to adapt to each moment it seems, each person.
So my desire to get somewhere worthwhile, do something worthwhile, and live a happy life fed into my curiosity concerning these strange, mostly skinny, little Asians’ interactions with Americans. It was very curious to attempt to understand differences between someone called Shunryu Suzuki and someone called Yasutani Roshi from a distance, without meeting them. Like reading classics from Plato and Aristotle, but knowing that these Japanese folks had been in America recently and set up institutions to pass on what they had shared. I knew, then, that I could follow their lineages even if I couldn’t actually meet these men. And all of the cultic happenings from Jim Jones and the People’s Temple to Timothy Leary and LSD to Patty Hearst warned me against going head-over-heels into embracing these lineages without question. There were plenty of problems in the San Francisco Zen Center, in Chogyam Trungpa’s lineage, in Seung Sahn’s, to warn any intelligent person. And yet the draw, the pull, remained, and I have learned especially from Trungpa's writing and Seung Sahn's.
At this point, then, what is American Zen to me? It is at least as curious as the world economy. Sometimes, in order to understand one thing, you have to see how three things or more interact. I choose economy, Zen, and my experience as an American as those three for this essay, this story. If it seems like my writing is all over the place from here on out, you can be assured that I am relating each sentence to these three: economy, Zen, my American experience.
In my words, I would say that Zen nurtures an experience of freedom right here. I mean that Zen does not teach avoidance of what is real, what is occurring, what is here. Neither does Zen profess being trapped. It’s true that my definition and understanding of Zen may change over time or be different with different audiences, but hopefully, this definition shows people where I am to some extent. If I am correct enough, Zen focuses more on a spontaneous vitality and clear sight/experience/interaction than on absorptive meditative states. In this way, Zen offers a constant challenge to the idea of personal actualization as something that leads people away from being present and bright wherever they are in the world. It cannot really be said to be transcendent (only or primarily) but it is also impossible to say that it is merely training in experiencing life as mundane or prosaic–it is not just technique.
In one way then, Zen seemed to support the freedom inherent in the idea of doing whatever I’d want, but in a different sense, it added the idea that you must be disciplined or that you must be capable of embracing whatever freedom you want. (Maybe the people around me also offered some sort of discipline or training, and I just didn’t hear it. I don’t believe that’s the case, but I’m willing to admit that I certainly did not always hear well.)
By trying to tie personal storyline into economy, I want to include my professional training. Thinking about the interaction between culture and economics, it stands out that my professors (as a whole) seemed to indoctrinate the idea that I was entitled to a job. I don’t believe this was particular to my field of study, but it may be more prevalent (?) in counseling psychology than in other fields. They focus a lot on positive reinforcement and being supportive, but I wondered if the jobs existed and whether they might be satisfying. There seemed to be a continuation of the idea, during my graduate years, that I could do and get what I want, that things would work out for me and people like me. I looked for ways of measuring my progress, but it was hard for me to recognize critique that I could feel as connecting between what I produced (projects, etc.) and the economic “real world” beyond the college doors. The best professional advice I’ve received so far was when, in my last year of study, my third or fourth “advisor” in three years told me that I should have been in a doctoral program rather than in our masters’ program. It was accurate advice if not really actionable advice at the time.
Maybe this is evidence of my own naivety, but I was as surprised by the general anti-business attitude of the people I met in this field as I was in their seeming difficulty in measuring direct personal results. I actually had to refuse to do half of a project in order to receive my only grade of A-. Professors seemed willing to take any excuse from individuals and from whole classes as long as we could all still get along. That makes it difficult to discern the difference between words of praise and criticism that mean anything and hot air. While I worked hard in almost all my classes, I don’t know whether I actually produced valuable results in any of them. Not surprisingly, beginning an internship was a welcome change.
Again, this is not complaint. It sets up a context for discussing a psychological economy. My professors and parents are very well-intentioned, but I am not sure whether they understand the difference between paving the road to hell with those intentions and going somewhere else. Also affecting my experience of graduate school was the fact that I had chronic back problems the whole way through, so I am willing to chalk up all of my uncertainties and dissatisfaction to personal causes (physical and character-based). But because those causes or circumstances are real, because we are not living in an ostensibly perfect situation physically and psychologically, I want to include all of these influences in the following discussion of a psychological economy. In other words, the crying and personal storying is mostly finished, and I am moving onto a broader discussion at this point. Much of what I have learned comes from being exposed to the lack involved in what has been presented. But I also understand that what seems like lack to me may have been progress for my parents or grandparents or great-grandparents, as if my complaints look like a luxury to older generations. Moving on...
I hope I’ve given a decent personal definition of Zen, and the next step is to speak about psychological economy. Zen, economy, and my history all fit together in the sense of asking, “Given where I have come from and where I am, what supports me in feeling a sense of freedom right here in a way that allows a sense of accountability and direction?” The sense of accountability is important. Without accountability, we might ignore what previous generations have done for us. We might seek a sense of freedom that is disconnected from a past or future, disconnected from the people around us, entitled and deluded. The amount of abstraction and dislocation in my life has convinced me that I want a feeling of accountability, of judgment. I want to know if I’ve earned the grades I’ve received, I want to know if I’ve earned the physical comforts I’ve received, I want to know–if I haven’t earned them–what should be done about it. I’m not scared; I’m floating. This degree of dislocation has been noticeable and obvious at least since Albert Camus and the French existentialists started jabbering about meaninglessness and absurdity. I am not sure whether it has been adequately addressed outside of America, but I have not seen consistent answers here.
To speak about a psychological economy adequately, I believe we have to speak in terms of attention. When psychologists speak of self esteem, feelings, etc., I have a hard time reconciling their generally nice focus with the economic realities of being lower class in America or being worse off in other places. There is a certain pragmatic simplification that occurs when it doesn’t matter whether your body aches, but you must go to work regardless–if you want to feed yourself and your children. The ache may have, initially, little to do with esteem or identification and a lot to do with working a job that is physically demanding, exhausting, and destructive to your body (for those who have jobs). What has been practiced as psychology in the past often looks likes luxury to me–different than what most people deal with on a daily basis, and different even from the reality of graduate internships in which the interns are faced with class realities, basic realities, they are often not prepared for. I think that adequately situating these luxuries involves an inclusion of possibilities not generally recognized (like those presented in Zen) as well as physical and economic realities which are generally not addressed (at least within middle to upper class assumptions).
Rather than bogging down in the pointless masturbation of identity politics, I will be dealing in the rest of this essay with more basic physical realities that affect people from bushmen in the Kalahari to executives who lead multinational companies. I do not believe that we can adequately speak in cross-cultural terms without dealing in attention and agency. The cultural values for a bushman may shape self-identity and esteem differently in the Kalahari than those which affect business executives around the world, but the human body is universally human. In other words, we deal with a phenomenally wide variety of influences with the same basic, physical potential. The ways in which we experience, develop, and deploy that potential are temperamentally and culturally influenced. So we don’t all have exactly the same potential, but we have a similar context or base (the human body) for developing that potential. Because the human body gives rise to, well, humanity, we cannot act as if the human body does not give rise to psychological and spiritual possibilities as well. We must further be willing to recognize that every single culture that has ever existed has not fully developed every aspect of human potential. Ideologically, this may be a quagmire, but this is practically inarguable. If any culture had fully developed every aspect of human potential, we’d have one culture and very little argument about it. The fact that the arguments remain also means that no superiority in general exists. But specific superiorities exist, and I am willing to learn from any of them I come across. I can eventually do “whatever I want”. (But what should we be doing?)
The basics of attention closely mirror economics. Like capital, attention is a limited resource even if this resource can be deployed in ways that are qualitatively superior to average investment. Economically, some investments produce better results than others; attentionally, some investments produce better results than others. Most people can easily understand this point when we think of self-fulfilling prophecies and learned helplessness; if you believe you will fail at what you attempt, whether or not you might have been successful with a healthy attitude, you will look for ways to prove that you are right–by manufacturing your own failure in one way or another. A simplistic understanding of this point may result in “positive thinking”, as if you can make something true just by believing in it and having positive feelings about the belief. (This oversimplification is hard to sustain in the face of poverty when the poor folks involved have tried multiple ways of earning and succeeding.) A superstitious belief in positive thinking can lead to blaming the victims, even including the belief that cancer victims choose or cause their cancer. If such a perspective is accurate, I wish the positive thinking folks would think more positive thoughts about the overall population.
But what do I mean that certain attentional “investment” is more likely to produce beneficial results than others? Once again, learned helplessness is important. If we believe in our own inabilities, we will not find solutions even when they exist because we’ve already convinced ourselves the search is pointless. Such belief is pointless. So while positive thinking may be insufficient on its own, cynicism as an attitude and doctrine–rather than just seeming idealistically exaggerated–seems truly stupid. Let’s assume that we have already degraded the overall environment so far that the destruction of the human race is inevitable, that there is nothing that any or all of us could do to prevent wholesale destruction. If we have already destroyed ourselves, how would you choose to live out the remainder of the time? I’m headed for California to see my baby, and I’m thinking of ways to tell her it’s all been worthwhile. But what if we only had moments to live? What would you do? How would you want to feel? And, perhaps more importantly, could you feel the way you choose to feel? My point with this line of questioning is that it may be less important in a near future that actually includes imminent death; we’d be dead soon enough, so it may not matter that much. But, if we are going to live beyond the next few moments, it may be much more important whether we can directly affect how we feel. Partially, it is important because what we believe to be possible affects what we do.
Now, if you want to feel a certain way while you are alive, why are you not doing it? Maybe some people are, and good for them. But most people I’ve met wish for something different. Are you unable to feel the way you choose? I am unable some of the time, but some of the time, I can feel the way I intend to. Sometimes, I can just feel happy or peaceful or free. This is what I mean by a psychological economy; feelings are involved and some feel better than others. Without feelings, even if there were a point to life, we couldn’t feel it. So feelings count. But feelings are not all there is to it. You can wish for whatever feelings, but whether or not you actually experience them depends largely on whether you can intentionally affect your attention. Intentional control of attention is what makes us human. I don’t care whether you believe in souls or evolution or something else. Do your thing. But the ways and extent to which we can choose to affect what we pay attention to (and, therefore, do) is what makes us human.
So what makes us better humans, better people? This is different than asking what might make us perfect people. If perfect people exist, I have no idea what they’re like; I don’t even know if I’d know it if I met them. But I have something to say about improvement. When people start realizing more about themselves, they start to feel connected to more in the world. This is one of the movements involved in intentional influence–feeling more connected. The other movement is that, while we may be more aware (and aware in a feeling sense) we are also more free. We are free to choose to care about more. This is a fascinating equation. Be fascinated. If you could care about everything, would you? Would that be too hard, too much? Would you scale down your attention or awareness in order to make it easy on yourself? Alternatively, would you try to take on more than you could handle? Do you see why I leave perfection aside and focus on improvement?
Feelings power our sense of motivation even if beliefs steer the car. Cynicism is like pouring sugar in our own gas tank and learned helplessness is like driving with the parking brake on. We might still get somewhere with a little of that, but maybe not. It’s better to put good fuel (pragmatic curiosity and creativity lit up with emotion) in the gas tank and only use the parking brake when the vehicle is parked (meaning, feeling accepting when we can’t change things rather than feeling helpless). The same is true with motivation, beliefs, and attention. Some emotions have the effect of producing less power, they’re more mixed or messier. Clarifying emotions, then, is like putting better, cleaner fuel in the gas tank. Beliefs are like what the driver does–choosing to steer one way or another, braking sometimes even when the engine is revving, stepping on the accelerator. Attention, then, is harder to describe. It is like your experience of driving: what do you notice, what do you remember, is your noticing bright, accurate, dull? Some people, you can put them in a real potato and they will still enjoy driving it. Others can be riding high in the back of a Mercedes limo and feel like shit. There are different influences, then, on how we experience attention. Beliefs and feelings are two of those influences.
Intention is hugely influential concerning how we experience attention. Intention is often shaped by beliefs. If I believe something I want will happen when I steer right, I’ll intend to steer right. But intention isn’t everything. If I’m drunk or sleepy, I might not actually do what I intended to do. Besides my internal state, there are also the external influences. If the road is icy and I steer to go in one direction, the car may slide and go in a different direction. All these conditions will affect my experience of driving, but intention actually allows me to influence what happens. Because intention is so important, avoidance is the major psychological problem in life. Ken Wilber has said that suffering is pain plus avoidance. In other words, if we try to avoid what is happening, we can’t intend what happens. While we cannot stop pain from being part of life, we don’t have to add avoidance and suffering on top of pain. But in order to not add suffering on top of pain, we cannot avoid what is happening (we can’t avoid paying attention) and we can’t avoid intending what we want to do about it all. At the root of all psycho-characterological problems is the habit of avoiding. We avoid paying attention to things because we have an at-least-implicit belief that it is better not to know something. So avoiding is like not admitting to oneself that the brakes don’t work when they don’t or like not taking into account how the car drives differently in icy conditions when there is ice on the roads. Dangerous business.
We can think of attention as limited in terms of time management. Life comes at you fast, and you need enough time to make the best decisions and adjustments for some things; for other types of responses, it is better to just respond with what feels natural and may be very fast (we can over-think certain types of situations). We don’t have all the time in the world, so we can say attention is time-limited. We only have as much attention as we have time. We can also think of attention as limited in the sense of focus. This way is usually more effective I think. We can compare awareness and attention to overall vision and focal vision. While our eyes work best within about twelve degrees (or so) of what is central to our field of vision, we also have peripheral vision that is important even if it is less clear. Attention is focused awareness just as focused vision is a central part of our overall vision. From a biological perspective, awareness and attention are built up from how our bodies report and integrate all kinds of stimuli. If certain collections of stimuli are big enough or important enough, we notice them, they arise in our awareness. Some of these things show up in awareness and attention by unintentional processes like instinctual reactions (to threats and opportunities, heat, balance, etc.) and drug effects while other things are noticed because we choose to pay attention to them. We also have the opportunity to pay attention to things which are originally unintentional, so we might be able to notice and mediate instinctual reactions, for instance.
When things arise in our awareness and become noticeable in our attentive focus, they have different characteristics depending on what sorts of things they are and what sort of mental state we’re in. Sometimes what we notice is dull or boring, cloudy, muddled, clear, bright, understandable, confusing, etc. Some of these characteristics mix easily in our attention, but others do not. It is unlikely that we will feel that an experience or moment is both sharp or bright and also dull. I’m using these words in relation to the overall feel, not in relation to the way we image them in our mind’s eye. That’s one of the interesting things about attention, that so much can feed into it. Shamans say that our bodies re-present the universe, and that is definitely true; our bodies present the universe to us through the various methods of collecting, sorting, and compiling information and feeling that they have. In other words, without our bodies being the way they are, we’d experience the universe differently. The same is true with attentional ability, only people are more familiar with thinking about and training their bodies than they are with thinking about and training their attentional abilities intentionally. Our attentional abilities, biologically based, re-present the universe as phenomenological experience.
Besides the instinctual processes around fight, flight, freezing, and sex, we also maintain emotional patterning that works on an outside-in continuum. The outer or most extreme level is when we deal with issues of inclusion and exclusion. When we feel like we might be left out of a group altogether, it often sets off a survival-level response. This happens constantly between groups when leaders or group members act as if the other group in no way can be negotiated with. To maintain these lines of exclusion, it takes a lot of work, a heavy attentional investment. This investment looks like definitions of difference and judgment. We’re better, they’re worse. Because our emotional responses seem most adequate at groups of less than about 150 people, when we deal with groups larger than this (it’s about the size of a group wherein we can become pretty closely acquainted with everyone, including knowing their relationships and friendships), our emotional responses are simply out of their league. We live in emotional leagues of 150, and when we want to interact in “the big leagues”, groups of more than 150 or 200 people, it takes special training. Cultural customs and education into ideology is this training.
When our cultural customs and ideologies teach us that there are other people who we may not know but who are nevertheless part of our group, we may not deal in survival level responses to inclusion/exclusion issues. We are much more likely to try to stand above other people than to kill them off or totally freeze them out when they are part of some in-group. So we compete for power and status. Much of this competition is “legislated” by customs and cultural values. Some of the competition involves innovation and trendiness. If we can innovate some new value or measurement of status, we can pioneer success in this new trend. This means that the wealthiest and more powerful have often been fairly conservative in maintaining the social power bases. As societies become more pluralist and bigger, legislation becomes necessary, and there is a new competition between legislation and tradition and innovation.
If we can do well enough about being included in some viable social group and taking care of survival needs as well as garnering a livable amount of power and status for ourselves–enough to maintain what we consider our expected standard of living–we can relax into intimacy issues, the closest level. The same that occurs at a social level is noticeable in dyadic relationships. When a married couple is considering divorce (mutual exclusion), it is nearly impossible to try and solve status or power disputes and simply not worth addressing intimacy issues. But if both agree to try to make a marriage work (agree on inclusion), it becomes possible to address power issues. If those power issues are reasonably settled, then it becomes possible to successfully address intimacy issues, how to feel closer and more completely or thoroughly related.
As hinted at, we experience the corresponding motivations differently for these three levels: inclusion/exclusion, power/status, and intimacy. At the most extreme, we respond most extremely. At an inclusion/exclusion level, we may feel that our basic physical safety is threatened. This, naturally, has a very strong pull on our attention. At a power/status level, we usually feel our personality threatened with a loss of status and esteem, a loss in the potency of our reputation, and a corresponding loss of ease and respect is expected. This may not be as intensely threatening as survival issues are, but it is still very intense, still has a very strong pull on our attention. Even though both of these types of influences are very strong, we can notice a difference between how motivated we are in life-and-death situations as compared to situations that are merely insulting. It is different to be shot at or to lose a job. Just as we might respond to second-level status problems with a little less desperation than to physical threat, we cannot get into nurturing intimate and subtle relating without some greater degree of safety. We all know that if you do not have enough food to get you through to tomorrow, in one sense, it doesn’t matter if you are beautiful or artistic or intelligent. But, if you have food and if you are not part of a caste that society rejects as untouchable, you have a chance of living in such a way as to enjoy your inclusion, enjoy your status, and begin or maintain intimate relationships.
(Because I am using “intimacy” in a particular and comparative way here, the definition or meaning includes a sense of subtlety. Very powerful bonds often develop between people in survival situations. The point of subtlety is that, in a foxhole, you don’t have to like much about your partner to feel strongly connected under an artillery barrage. But, if you are going to get along after the war, you will have to develop bonds that are somewhat more developed or more subtle than being forced together under pain of death.)
One of the interesting things about people is that we desire intimacy. So we are motivated to improve our inclusion, our power, and our status. When people get power and status without any intimacy, they are consistently disappointed. If they do not realize that they seek intimacy, they act in bizarre ways. Or, if they realize that they desire intimacy but cannot attain it, they might still act in overly extreme ways. We can look at the excesses of the rich, powerful, and famous throughout the ages to see evidence of this. This evidence is another example of the importance of connecting lived experience to the world around us. When Hollywood actors feel cut off and unable to connect in normal ways (excluded), they suffer or innovate. Now, I’m not interested in idealizing being poor and unknown either. Poor folks have their own excesses, often involving violence, drinking, social withdrawal, etc. While all of this is understandable enough, I think we can all get better at dealing with it.
Just as individuals react strangely when subjected to excesses of different kinds, cultures do the same. When individuals do it, we call it addictions or personality disorders or eccentricity. When cultures are extreme and disconnected, the same sorts of results occur. Too much power or fame corrupts, the same as too big of societies set us strangely adrift if we are not trained for the situation. This is where proportion comes in. Hollywood actors are more likely to suffer from too much fame and wealth whereas poor folks are more likely to suffer from too little status and wealth. In one sense, we’re all the same–we look to balance inclusion with status and power with intimacy. While some reductionists may want to deny their need for intimacy, I would say they do so simply because they do not have the amount or quality of understanding and attention to both continue their habitual protective measures and also discover how much phenomenologically richer their futures might be. Because attention is finite in one way or another, we must choose to live based on a survivalist mode and habituations or we must be willing to question whether something more is possible. It literally is a choice. Looking for something better than what we have known is always a gamble. But it is a gamble that is loaded into our DNA, a gamble that we are not satisfied to avoid. Whatever else it means to be human, we want to feel alive, not only be alive. This is the blessing and curse of feelings. Crocodiles do not face the same conundrum, and in that sense they are lucky, but they cannot live like we can live, so I do not envy them their instincts and simplicity. If we try to live more like crocodiles, to live without needing intimacy, that sort of survivalist-reductionist “success” directly measures our failure as human beings. And while crocodiles do not feel living like crocodiles as failure, us living like crocodiles is as ridiculous and impossible as them living like we do. We need food, but we desire intimacy and we aspire. When we get these various motivations all mixed up, we feel mixed up. There is a way for us to be as simple as crocodiles, but in a human way. There is a way for us to be as intimate as the lovers we are and as diverse as the global population we are. Actually, the only way to avoid that is to deny ourselves.
How, then , do we balance our aspirations, desires, status competition, economic demands, etc.? Very carefully. It’s not really possible to balance it all without some sense of confidence or certainty. This doesn’t have to be a sense of confidence based in one person’s sense of themselves, but self identity does need to be included. We know that physical problems or stress can make it harder to pay attention well, relational problems can make it harder, emotional problems, etc. So it all begins or returns to what we do with ourselves physically, but it doesn’t work for us to pretend that is all there is to ourselves. Without a reasonable degree of physical health, our emotions, the feelings that power our activity, get jumbled. I’ve often heard the comment from people that it is the nature of emotions to be messy, but I say beauty–and mess in this instance–are in the eye and mind of the beholder. The fact that people may be reporting mess sincerely does not mean they are accurate. The possibility of them being accurate for themselves doesn’t make jumble the nature of emotionality itself, doesn’t mean their experience is the case for everyone, doesn’t mean that they themselves have no potential for clarity. If they are indeed accurate that their emotions are genuinely messy, that that is life for them so far, it simply means that continuing in that manner will not produce change in this area. Emotions are not the answer; intentional control of attention is.
Now, I can hear readers complaining that control and emotion don’t fit together, that no one wants to just control their emotions. There are two common mistakes behind this objection. The first correction is that I do not advocate controlling one’s emotions. Let your emotions ride, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be addressed. The second mistake is to believe that control must involve the feeling of domination, of repression. I do not advocate repressing emotions or dominating one’s deployment of attention through sheer force of will. (As outlined in the book FLOW, we can come to a familiarity and perhaps even grace.) I advocate balance, proportion, accuracy, engagement, intention, and clarity; physical, emotional, psychological, and relational health; inclusion, confidence and humor, intimacy. The fact that we have not trained ourselves for all of this in a global environment doesn’t mean that we cannot. It is a wonderful world.
While every society to date has indoctrinated its children into certain beliefs and customs, we have never been so closely connected as a global society. We are one society now. In the past, we were only one species, not a singular society, so we could survive by treating each other like animals. I don’t fear or hate that past, but we are not living then or there. The increased interaction between various cultures that prefer and promote different aspects of human potential can be a wonderful renaissance for culture and a flowering of individual inspiration if we can recognize what makes us human and optimize even a small amount of that potential. We have already begun this optimization by improving communications technologies and interactions between ethnicities, tribes, nations, professions, etc. But we have mistakenly learned to think of this optimization in mostly local terms. In the past, that was not a mistake; cultures adapted to educating children in localized ways that made sense then, and we simply need to adapt to raising children in ways that make sense now. This does not lead to a loss of localization but a broadening of horizons.
What we are dealing with now, rather than a single localized culture’s preferred emphasis on human potential, is global human potential. There’s a lot more to it! If we want to only limit ourselves and our children to a small, localized slice of potential, we can continue to struggle in this direction, but children have always recognized how their families and cultures have tried to repress some of their potential, and this will become increasingly obvious. Repression sucks. What’s more, it is a horribly inefficient and distasteful investment of attention. There are three steps then, that we need to explicitly get better at. I mean we in a global sense–everyone has room for improvement. While people like Thomas Friedman have focused on the competitive economics involved in globalization, and more recently on the social aspects, we will not be able to take advantage of these opportunities if we cannot handle the stress involved with this deluge of human potential. When I speak of psychological economy, then, I am speaking about universal improvement in how we embrace and develop individual and global potential.
The first thing we need to learn is how to move beyond our habitual limitations. By limitations, I mean everything you have ever felt to be a limitation about yourself, your local culture, your world. We cannot ignore that limitations exist and we cannot ignore that we constantly recreate these limitations when we believe in them. For example, I might feel that not being able to fly is a limitation. My feelings on this count because feelings affect how we pay attention, which in turn affects what we do. I need to overcome my belief that gravity and my personal lack of wings and levitational abilities is a limitation rather than a circumstance. So I admit my feelings but look to change my thinking. Rather than repressing my desire to fly or denying the reality of gravity (wishing gravity didn’t exist), I begin to observe and study. While I may eventually end up with an understanding of physics and engineering, it all begins with a feeling and a desire.
Desire is good, emotions are good, but we have limiting beliefs about desires and emotions. It makes sense to me to not try to change one’s emotions but to be responsible for one’s responses to them. When we allow our emotions free range, they can feel like infinite energy (in Chogyam Trungpa’s words). They may not be all the energy in the universe right now, but since I have emotions all the time, I always have energy. As long as I’m alive, my energy doesn’t run out. Emotions then, are like capital, I can use them to drive progress. Desires are similar. It used to be taught that people need to learn to “delay gratification” but this is bullshit, repressive. We need to learn to focus our desire and engage with the world–including other people with other desires. When we learn to deal wisely and openly with emotions and desires, they become circumstances rather than limitations, even benefits. Like with flying, we learn to fly based on the rules of physics, including gravity, rather than opposed to the laws of how this world really works. Physics becomes the circumstances that allow us to fly and emotions become the energy that allow us to feel alive at every moment. (I’ll have more to say about emotions later, especially negative emotions and depression.)
Now, I’m sure that this explanation seems a little thin to some people, rather than being brilliantly simple. But it IS brilliantly simple, and I am not the first to describe it. A slightly different, but complementary point, though, is that people’s rejection of this explanation also includes a certain wisdom that must be addressed and included. Neither is the sky falling nor do I find pie in the sky to be satisfying. There are two important parts to people’s rejection. The first is the insistence that anything claimed to be good be presented in such a way as to felt as good by them. In other words, we demand that life seem real to us. That’s a basic aspect of mindful appreciation, so I’m all for it. The second thing that tends to be excellent in rejection is that people want explanations or solutions to be comprehensive, to be whole. So people may be rejecting my simple brilliance out of the recognition that my explanation above does not cover everything in every detail. Good. Two good things: the immediate feel of reality and completeness.
But who wants to feel like they spend their whole life rejecting? Who want to spend their energy, their feelings, their potential on rejection? So while rejection has it’s strong points, it also has its weak points. No one want ONLY rejection. This brings me to the second thing we need to learn: clarifying attention. If you can take what works in any moment and do just what you choose with it, that is fine. Anyone who has not perfected this art can improve in the clarity of their attention. The basic question is: how do I keep the wisdom and feeling of vitality without holding onto the rejection? In other words, keep the pragmatic realism and the idealistic drive for completeness but jettison the rejection. Easier said than done–in the beginning; later on, it becomes easier done than said.
People learn to clarify attention in stages. If we just shoot for immediately doing what we want in any given moment, we retain a great deal of impulsivity, immaturity, and ignorance. That’s like trying to jump off a building, wishing to fly, rather than studying physics. We’ll get to flying, but not if we’re stupid and impulsive. We may only be able to get to a smooth and clear stream of attentive, feeling, applied desire if we practice giving up desire–for moments. This is like practicing the fundamentals of a sport before playing in the world championships. If you can’t put aside your desire to hit a home run and focus on the ball in the pitcher’s hand right now, you will be unlikely to do what it takes to actually hit the ball when it is over the plate. What’s more, if you haven’t practiced and failed at hitting many balls thrown many times, you will be unlikely to have any chance of hitting a world-class pitch over the stadium wall. The same is true with clarifying attention. If you don’t practice, you are unlikely to improve. We practice in stages. First, we learn to concentrate, then to intentionally relax, then to pay mindful attention. Mindfulness, practiced in moments, is like taking your physics problems one at a time. You’re not flying yet, but you’re building the basic steps that may eventually lead up to flying. (The beautiful thing about studying physics is that it leads up to a whole lot more than just flying.)
Mindfulness is a way to keep our attention present. Rather than having a feeling that we want to demand that explanations be brilliant but also present for ourselves, we bring that sense of present awareness to every explanation we encounter. There is no need then to wait or demand. We pay attention now, even if paying attention now shows us that there is more to flying than understanding a few physics problems. We do the physics problems, not grudgingly, but with the feeling of openness, that there is something worthwhile about something out in front of us. But, just as importantly, we do those physics problems with the feeling that there is something valuable about being present at this moment in this context. That feeling of open presence is the attentional equivalent of feeling emotions to be infinite energy.
The third thing we need to learn is maximizing the complexity of potential by optimizing a wide variety of internal states. This third part fulfills the first two. And the first two are not prior to this one in our lives, but they may be easier to describe briefly, so I put them first in my explanation. If we know how to move beyond habitual limitations and we are in the process of clarifying our attention, we run into the salience (present feel/experience) of the external world and the complex variety of our own internal states. This is where a little education about psychology can help us make good decisions concerning psychological economy. Education, along with the training concerning habitual limitations and attention, can help us make attentional investments in an imperfect situation that eventually increase the lived value of our time. Making good investments with attention is similar to making good investments with money; we want to make investments that not only are safe enough, not only that they don’t decrease, but we want investments that continue to pay increasing dividends. It may be impossible to do this with attention if we do not have some understanding of consistent personal growth. While it is a relatively simple thing to measure whether a monetary investment is growing or not, it seems more difficult to do this with attentional investments. That is only because we are more familiar with dealing explicitly and intentionally in monetary investments than in dealing explicitly and intentionally with attentional investments.
Probably the best way to figure out how to optimize a wide variety of internal states is to first learn how to optimize a small variety of internal states. From there, from competence or excellence with a small variety, we can look to expand our expertise. If we look for too wide a variety right from the start, we might end up being dilettantes–jack of all trades, master of none. The question, then, is: which small variety? I think many of these answers can be simpler than the questions may seem. Paul Ekman’s work provides a good, simple, sturdy answer.
In actually speaking to someone, I’d be willing to begin anywhere. In needing to present something without discussion and agreement, I like Ekman’s research. Because it is scientific, everyone who has valid criticism is encouraged to criticize. But because it is scientific, it is presented in such a way that anyone can go through the steps to check whether or not it is valid. I believe it is, but I am willing to entertain criticisms.
Paul Ekman has spent his career studying emotions, facial expressions, and deception. Contrary to some anthropologists’ beliefs that we learn how to facially express basic emotions, Ekman found universal facial expressions of six emotions that I will consider to be universal or basic: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. These emotions and expressions are a good place to begin because they are not only universal emotions (found across cultures) but also universally expressed or communicated. While there are interesting evolutionary considerations that may be implied, I’ll keep to the task at hand and leave evolutionary psychology as an interesting offshooot. I will assume all readers have personally experienced anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. In doing therapy based on emotional openness, this set is effective if not thorough or complete. I believe that, even should someone choose to begin from another small set, the process I will describe is still relevant. In other words, include whatever internal state is important to you, and see if the process fits anyway.
There are some very fundamental reasons for beginning with a small set. I’ll assume everyone can understand why to begin with a few examples rather than trying to talk about everything. I’m beginning with emotions because they tend to be more powerful than unpracticed intention and more easily noticeable than some more fundamental or basic physical stimuli (like heartbeat at times). Emotions are a good mid-point (between intention and autonomic physical stimuli) even if some people have difficulty noticing them or difficulty recognizing that they have emotions but that they are not (just) their emotions.
If we have at least six basic emotional states, what does it mean to “optimize” them? And even if we figure out what that means, how do we do it? I don’t believe we can answer those questions without referring to clarity of attention, which is why I include optimization and clarity of attention in these three things I ‘ve listed above. Clarity of attention is not separate from awareness of emotions and desires. When it is presented as something separate, it has little to do with the integrity and engagement that we want and need in our lives.
In order to optimize an internal state, we have to consider what it might mean to get the most out of it. This is why I began with outlining stages of development (in “Challenges and Abilities” and “Two Points”). Optimizing an internal state means not only being clear with it in the moment but also understanding that it might apply to long-term development. In order to be clear with something in the moment, let’s take anger as an example since I am familiar with anger, we have to put down any habitually limiting reaction to anger (like limiting beliefs), find acceptance of where we are at in this precise moment, keep attention clear, and then decide how to respond intentionally. People have found throughout the ages that it is possible to continually improve one’s responses to one’s internal states regardless of the external situation. Although we may or may not be able to create a sense of consistent improvement in our external situations, we definitely can develop internally. And since we are at a point where the greatest threat to human happiness and progress is humans, it would behoove us to accept our complexity in a clear manner so as to optimize our potential.
Optimizing an internal state such as anger involves recognizing how anger benefits people. As part of the fight/flight/freeze response, anger is an important emotion that goes along with the fight response. In other words, when we feel we are in a situation where fighting is a good response to threat, we will tend to feel anger. Along with that emotion, we also get an increase in heartrate, changes in breathing, muscle tension, focus, etc. Because of how our associations and assessments work (or because our brains and responses are not perfect, although they are adaptable), we sometimes feel anger in situations where it is unlikely to help us, unlikely to help us do what we would choose to do if we were able to fully consider the situation and act. Optimizing an internal state means accepting its value to individuals and human groups but then responding well. So, sometimes it is best if I notice that I feel angry but decide not to act impulsively and aggressively; at other times, it might be most appropriate for me to respond aggressively. In the latter case, aggression is intentional rather than merely habitual. Intention can fit quite nicely with instincts.
Besides fitting with instinctual or biological responses, intention can also fit well with habituation. We learn over time how to drive our cars safely, and as those habits become ingrained, we learn to trust them. We don’t continue to pay as focused attention to driving as when we started learning. This ability saves attention, allows us to be thrifty with attention. When we learn something like driving, as it becomes more familiar, we then learn to direct less attention to the activity. The key is to not get lazy or let that process go to far and lead us into paying not enough attention to driving. So as we get better at paying attention to driving, the key is not overall less investment all the time; the key is not be overly focused but also to be ready to invest total attention immediately if the situation calls for it. We balance our learning or habituation with responsiveness. This is a big part of what I mean by clear attention, and it is outlined nicely in the book FLOW. We pay attention in a relaxed enough way that attention is not stuck but in an energetic enough way that we can quickly adjust. In situations where we feel like we are genuinely interested in investing all of our attention, and when we are capable of investing all of our attention, we experience flow.
Flow is an important aspect of clarity and optimization of internal states. But just as we don’t start off as safe and comfortable drivers, we usually don’t start off able to just get into the flow whenever we want. We can practice by focusing completely on particular details or particular moments. We clarify our attention as we become increasingly able to focus where and how we choose to. Training attention, then, involves learning to focus when I choose. We all know, though, that we sometimes can be so focused on one thing that we miss out on something else. Besides being able to focus my attention then, clarifying attention involves being able to move it flexibly. Optimizing internal states means flexibly and accurately deploying clear attention in accord with my intentions.
Does that mean I have to always be paying attention to feeling in control? Yes and no. Mostly no, but the yes part is crucial. In order to understand how I mean yes and no, it is probably necessary to understand action potentials. We can think of energy as flowing but we can also conceptualize energy as action potentials. For example, if you eat food and digest calories, those calories provide you with energy for potential action. The law of conservation of energy is important here. Energy may change and move but it does not disappear. If you smoke crack, you will feel a noticeable amount of energy or potential for action. Because crack is different than a bologna sandwich, you will also notice the difference between one type of energy or action potential and another. Sometimes we have more energy than we’d wish for and at other times, we have less. But the point is, if you have the energy in your body or mind, it must do something, it must go somewhere, it will play out. If you put smoking crack as a habit into your life, you might be more or less prepared for dealing with that habit, but it will inevitably affect your life. The same is true with diet, exercise, beliefs, etc.
Developing one’s agency–the ability to act in accord with one’s intentions–involves being able to control one’s attention. But this doesn’t mean you always have to try to force some action or another. This is where instincts, the body’s normal responses, emotions, etc. help us out. Your body will digest food you put into it whether or not you intend it to. So, no, you don’t have to always pay attention to digestion. But, if you do not treat your body well enough, if you don’t feed it what it needs, it will raise digestion out of your background awareness into your attention. So, yes, you need to pay enough attention to eating at the critical times. Same as driving. Just as a deer running across the road sets off an instinctual heightening of awareness, we can all trust that hunger will remind us if we go for long enough without food. (There are very rare exceptions to these basic responses not being noticeable.)
Optimization, then, involves quality of attention. Am I paying clear attention at the important times and in critical amounts without feeling too strained by trying too hard too much of the time? When I know how to trust my body (nature), it’s like trusting my driving ability (second nature). If I can trust my body to mobilize action potentials (like the fight/flight/freeze response) when appropriate, I don’t have to spend my life worrying, although I still may spend my money on a car with good safety features. In other words, I might as well trust my instinctual responses but hedge my bets. In situations where instincts are not enough, like flying an airplane, it takes training for me to pair biological action potentials with my intention to do something that must be learned. Because adaptability is so much a part of our biological systems, I don’t have to “overcome my instincts” to learn to fly; I have to develop the intention and abilities my body allows. The same is true when it is time to change a habit that has become second nature; I don’t “unlearn” second nature, but I learn to redirect my attention. The reason I am making what seems to be only semantic arguments here is that the semantics of “delaying gratification”, “overcoming instincts”, and “unlearning” are paired with a type of understanding (a perspective or perspectives) that are too involved with conflict, problem-solving, and looking backwards rather than being invested in challenge, living, being present, and looking forwards. I’m fine with people looking backwards in time much of the time, but my question is whether people do that more than is effective for what they want out of life. I believe it is helpful to learn a progressive way and then deciding when looking backwards is helpful and when looking forwards is helpful and when focusing in the present is helpful. You cannot practice living in the present moment, but you can practice living in the past. The thing is, we learn from what we do. If you practice living in the past, that learning will affect you when you don’t want it to. Unless you develop your attentional clarity. While we can’t practice living in the present, we can learn to feel more alive in the present if we practice clarifying attention.
This talk of progression and development and present vitality might not be an important avenue of discussion except that we tend to experience life as moving us forward. My contention is that when we base our understandings on concepts that are made to look solid, we lose flow. If we didn’t want flow and the inspiration it brings, it would be fine to live in a feudal system where I got enough food and was told how and where to live. But we want inspiration, which means we want continual progress, which means we might as well update our concepts and language to be based on a living, mobile model rather than basing them on a dead, solid, or mechanical model. Are you aware of how many of your concepts have the form of solidity rather than flow? How many times do you “think on your feet”? Is that what learning out of a textbook tends to enhance? Again, I am all for optimizing a wide variety of states. One of those is flow. Another is the mental mode we go into when we are learning from books. I want to be good with both of those and more, and I want to be able to shift where my mind is in accordance with being inspired wherever I am. I want to maximize the complexity of my potential in an inspiring, inspired way.
Concepts are important, but it is also important that we try o make our concepts live rather than trying to live by our concepts as static things. We see this when ideologies obviously go against people feeling more vibrant. For example, if I believe that I am a piece of shit rather than a human being, that idea (and if it is strong, it collects a series of supporting experiences and feelings to become an ideology) works in direct contrast to feeling vital and vibrant. While it is helpful and interesting in many cases to look back at what just happened or why something happened, that method doesn’t always work with how our minds move, how our societies change, how the world moves. Communism in the USSR might have been based on good enough ideals, but if those concepts cannot adjust to this world as it is now and move, then such an ideology is relegated to the past. If people want socialism to live, they must make it responsive. The same is true with capitalism, religions, philosophies, etc. Although stable concepts provide a certain sense of security, we can learn to develop a sense of confidence and balance rather than trying to demarcate secure areas and live within them. How much of your attention do you invest in holding onto something that is no longer present? Just as people do this, and psychologists might diagnose them with personality disorders if that holding on shapes limiting habits or complexes, cultures do this as well.
When we get stuck in old concepts, the future is hard to envision. Ha, ha, ha! When we aren’t stuck in old concepts, the future is still hard to envision. Well, if we can’t see what it’s going to be, what do we do? Just as gymnasts must learn to trust their sense of balance and not always look at the balance beam, we must learn to trust our sense of balance. It takes courage. I’m not very good on a balance beam. But when people do what it takes, they also report that it is exciting to be able to flip, do splits, jump off tumbling, and land on their feet. Because many people much of the time respond to threat more than opportunity, they learn fear-based motivations and hope for good feelings. Based on that method, we remain ignorant about creating and sustaining our ability to feel good consistently. Other folks try to break out of fear-based motivations impulsively. They have moments where they really feel alive, but they may end up like Evel Knievel–lots of broken bones. If we aren’t just rejecting the things we fear or rejecting the method of focusing so much on fear, what can we do? Innovate, of course. The biggest part of moving beyond habitual limitations is moving beyond fear-based motivations. The biggest part of doing that is being willing to face our fears and not avoid them. The second biggest part of moving beyond fear-based motivations is finding a way to move beyond fear and avoidance consistently rather than sporadically. When people respond with a fear-based internal state [flight], their attention focuses in (same as with anger [fight] and anxiety [freeze]). We see the same sort of focus with lust, a deep-based sexual response that works with some of the same limbic brain structures that fight/flight/freeze activates. That action potential is strong and fast. If our concepts are slow and weak rather than mobile and consistently applied, we will tend to react habitually rather than respond intentionally. I like limbic activation, I like energy and feeling, but I don’t want my life to be determined by these reactions any more than I want to believe it’s not “in my nature” to fly. Besides the six universal emotional expressions that Ekman researched, rather than limiting myself to a nonconscious reactivity based on a small number of internal reactions and their aftereffects I choose to maximize the complexity of potential by optimizing a wide variety of internal states.
While fear and anxiety are part of our repertoire, I don’t invest them with a whole lot of belief. I recognize that they are important, let myself feel them when they arise, and decide how I am going to live by intentionally affecting my attention. I believe it is in people’s nature to learn to fly–among other things. While the fight/flight/freeze response is fast, powerful, and intense, I choose whether I find it convincing. I choose when to endorse those habitual responses and when to do something else with that action potential, something other than having my attention both pulled into a small area of awareness and feeling contracted or aggressive. Excitement also comes from limbic activation. I like excitement.
From a fear-based perspective, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. But anyone who works with species that are near extinction may have a different perspective. If you leave a couple of birds in the bush for a few bird-generations, there is a chance there will be many more later on, a chance there will still be birds around when your kids have kids. If we all just try to snatch what we can from “the bush” while we can, we not only impoverish future generations, but we also impoverish our own experience–we stay focused on our fears. Not only do we fear too little, but we also fear too much. Right now, many people fear too much economic competition. Oh my God–there is so much innovation, what will we do? The concepts my culture has provided me from the past do not actually show me how to move forward.
This is where values count. Heuristics count. When we don’t know WHAT will result, we can still be wise about HOW we do things. For instance, if we all fearfully and aggressively try to get as many birds in hand as we can and eat them before anyone else can, everyone loses. Someone loses early on, someone else loses later on. If we raise our kids on competitive violence and fear of lack, they will be pretty likely to respond as if their world is competitively violent and lacking in resources. But the human population continue to expand which is proof that we are not short of basic resources. We have a surplus of food and water, and we are applying our surpluses to overpopulation to such an extent that we are eating and fucking ourselves out of house and home. The aging population in industrialized countries that is seeing slower population growth fears that, as they begin to need increasing amounts of healthcare, the younger generations may not be able to provide it without a continual population expansion. We all fear that some day we might not receive perfect health care and die. In one sense, it’s a reasonable fear, and in another sense, it is ridiculous. Of course we’re going to die. It’s reasonable to believe it will happen to me. It just isn’t reasonable to fear it. Fearing a lion jumping on you may give you the limbic energy (action potential) to fight off that particular lion in that particular moment. You can’t fear your way our of death, consume you r way out of death, plan your way out of death. Fear of an attacking lion is good attentional investment. Fear of death is not only bad attentional investment because it is stupid, but it is also a bad investment because it has a zero chance of getting you anywhere other than chronically stressed and making bad decisions about how you live. It is much smarter, if you must fear, to fear not living well.
Let me repeat myself: when we don’t know WHAT will result, we can still be wise about HOW we do things. There is an important distinction we can make here. Some processes can be planned well. I call these design processes. It makes sense to try to design an approach to these sorts of processes. Other processes are simply too complex to understand, too complex to design. I call these emergent processes. I don’t believe I am the first to make this distinction; it is a valuable distinction. Globalization is an emergent process. Marx couldn’t design it, the USSR couldn’t design it, the Bush administration couldn’t design it, but neither could Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammed, Jesus, or anyone else I have met or heard of. All of those people have tried to benefit mankind but have not succeeded in designing globalization. The keys with design processes are collecting the right information, compiling it in an accurate and actionable manner, and applying it in ways that apply to the real life situation. Emergent processes cannot be controlled, but we can manage our responses within emergent processes.
How de we manage our responses to situations that are far too complex to understand? Because we’re thinking beings, it still makes sense to manage the parts we CAN understand. Proliferation of nuclear weapons won’t help, war won’t help, extremist tribal or ethnic or national xenophobia won’t help. Fear won’t help. Life is an emergent process. We can manage our response in an external situation that we do not control by jettisoning habitual limitations, learning to clarify our attention, and maximizing thecomplexity of our potential by optimizing a wide variety of internal states. See how this works? What applies to one person concerning attention applies to each person and everyone together. It’s quality over quantity when attention is involved. While Marx couldn’t design globalization, he might have added something. While Jesus couldn’t design and direct globalization, he might have added something. While I can’t design globalization, I might add something.
In fact, I will add something whether I intend to or not, whether I am intentional in my contributions or not. I will add the stresses and motivations of one individual on a global culture and a global environment. Without knowing exactly what parts of my potential may be most relevant, it is helpful to maximize a complexity of potential while improving the clarity of my attention (including focus and flow). The same is true of every individual, every state, every corporation, every moment of our lives. You’ve heard the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out”? That is how it goes with people. Feed me garbage and I will be most likely to respond with garbage. If we believe that is how a market should run, we deserve what we get. I’d rather add my intention for progress and inspiration. Our world is still beautiful whether we protect that or not. Our potential is still wonderful whether we nurture it or not.
It is less important whether you feel one emotion or another than how you respond to your emotions. It is less important that a government have one structure or another, less important that a belief system have one structure or another, than that we look to maximize the potential. Because life is not made of chess pieces and rules that don’t change, it doesn’t matter in the long run whether we choose one government or another, whether I prefer one culture or another. Because all these subcultures are bumping into one another, rubbing off, interpenetrating, breaking down, moving on. If we look to optimize each structure, each state, each culture, each personality, each person, rather than trying to tolerate other people, ourselves, this world, this life, we will learn to appreciate in specific ways and in specific contexts. We will also learn how specific temperamental reactions do not work in certain situations, so any living individual or group that does not ossify can grow. We will change whether we grow or not. What do you add? In emergent processes, the how is often more important than what, quality is more important than quantity. Life is present and emergent; what about you? We each only have so much time before we die. What do you contribute? What do we intend to create? What is our action potential? How you feel you have spent your life overall will be largely dependent on how you spend your attention in moments. As Ben Franklin added, “Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.”
Franklin wasn’t against design and control. He did recognize that when we cannot design the process and control the outcomes, you do what you can. In emergent processes, we may not design and control, but we do contribute. Every single contribution influences the context in which the future will play out. The same is true of mindful appreciation as is true with ecological change. The more of an influence we can have over complex processes, the more likely we are to see our hand in it. We are seeing this clearly in environmental change and we see it clearly in social change. If we cannot include play and inspiration in what we do, we will help create a situation devoid of play and inspiration. In such a situation, birds, bushes, emotions, pennies, life itself, all lose their savor. It is crazy to build towards that sort of future in our greatest of endeavors and in our smallest of moments. As the Muslims say, eventually everything will be measured out and judgement will be returned. That’s how I’d say it too. I’m glad for accountability. I know what I do means something. Every moment counts.
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz