Attention seeking and 'Flow' and restlessness and 'the textures of experience' / feeling the 'thingness' of things

 "I want to achieve the play attitude. By this I mean concentration in an activity which has no apparent use just for the delight of doing it. [...] I was always full of purposes, always driving myself to do more things – to read more books, to learn more languages, to see more people, not to miss anything."

Marion Milner, A Life of One's Own [pg 63]

"I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to grasp, the more I felt that I was ever outside, missing things. At that time I could not understand at all that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purposes."

Marion Milner, A Life of One's Own [pg 65]

"So I began to wonder whether there were perhaps not many gestures which I must learn in their appropriate places, but only one which really mattered. And perhaps this one offered a third possibility in the control of attention, a possibility which the books had not made clear to me at all. I must neither push my thought nor let it drift. I must simply make an internal gesture of standing back and watching, for it was a state in which my will played policeman to the crowd of my thoughts, its business being to stand there and watch that the road might be kept free for whatever was coming. Why had no one told me that the function of will might be to stand back, to wait, not to push? The lonely policeman who relied on his physical strength to keep back the crowd would soon be swept away; as my will had constantly been by the surging thoughts."

Marion Milner, A Life of One's Own [pg 75]

... on flow[ting] and diving

"... to what should we give our attention, and to what do we give our attention (and who decides)?

[...] What are we doing when we pay attention to the attention people pay to their hobby horses? Hobby horses [meaning] absorption with a view to the stopping of time; a form of arrested development or arrested attention; a refuge from the future.

[...] Attention becomes the form and the medium of our desire, prompted by the felt lack of something. We attend to our felt absences.

[...] All morality depends upon knowing where and how to pay attention. And to pay attention to morality is also always to pay attention to attention.

[...] Attention nourishes us; distraction depletes us. Attention redeems the time. It makes it feel worth living, and living out. Good attention makes a good life."

Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pgs 91, 92, 93]

Devo - Uncontrollable Urge - From Urgh! A Music War HQ

Flow

"In Thomas Mann's preface to The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, he writes that Nietzsche felt "all intelectual isolation and alienation from civil norm, all mental autonomy and ruthlessness, are related to the criminal's mode of life and afford an experiential insight into it. It seems to me that we can go on for ever farther and say that all creative originality, all artistry in the widest sense of the word, does just that. The French painter and sculpture Degas once made the remark that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed." (Dial Press, 1945, p. xii). [Keith McMullen]

Taken from here.

Self Determination Theory / We are wired to care / Motivation

It's no longer about the CEO, it's about the 'Everyday Joe'
It's no longer about fund raising, it's about friend raising.
It's no longer about tags, it's about price less.
What we do for love will always be greater than what we do for money.

"SDT is an organismic dialectical approach. It begins with the assumption that people are active organisms, with evolved tendencies toward growing, mastering ambient challenges, and integrating new experiences into a coherent sense of self. These natural developmental tendencies do not, however, operate automatically, but instead require ongoing social nutriments and supports. That is, the social context can either support or thwart the natural tendencies toward active engagement and psychological growth, or it can catalyze lack of integration, defense, and fulfillment of need-substitutes. Thus, it is the dialectic between the active organism and the social context that is the basis for SDT’s predictions about behavior, experience, and development. [...] research has looked at how controlling versus autonomy-supportive environments impact functioning and wellness, as well as performance and persistence."
Mais, aqui 

Money desensitizes us:



What motivates us:

Investigação:
Paying more, when paying for others. Aqui

Pleasure vs Flow

During flow you can't feel anything. You are one with the music.
Time stops. You have intense concentration.

Diz a estatística:
The pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction.
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.
The pursuit of engagement is also very strong.
Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and meaning. Then pleasure is the whipped cream and the cherry.
The sum is greater than the parts.



Positive emotions, alienated from character can lead to emptiness.
People who lead lives in which they pursue as much pleasure as possible, end up with this feeling that they're fidgeting unto death.

Meaning has to do with using your highest strengths in the service of something larger.

Na sua pesquisa, Martin Seligman conclui que o sucesso tem mais a ver com optimismo do que com talento ou motivação."

Bem aventurados...

A Árvore do Conhecimento, de Ernst Fuchs

"Poucos podem argumentar que uma consciência mais simples, harmoniosa ou não, seja preferível a uma mais complexa. Embora possamos admirar a serenidade do leão quando repousa, a aceitação pacífica do destino por parte do homem tribal, o envolvimento sincero da criança, nenhuma destas situações fornece um modelo que resolva a nossa condição. A ordem com a inocência por fundamento já não está ao nosso alcance. Uma vez colhido o fruto da árvore da sabedoria, fechou-se para sempre o caminho de regresso ao Éden."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Fluir

Entropia psíquica

"As formas de entropia psíquica que actualmente nos causam tanta angústia — desejos não realizados, espectativas falhadas, solidão, frustração, ansiedade, culpa — são provavelmente invasores recentes da mente. São subprodutos do tremendo aumento de complexidade do córtex cerebral e do enriquecimento simbólico da cultura. São a face oculta da emergência da consciência."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Fluir

Quem corre por gosto...

"Nicolau Copérnico aperfeiçoou a sua descrição dos movimentos dos planetas quando era cónego na catedral de Frauenburg, na Polónia. O seu trabalho astronómico não ajudou certamente a sua carreira eclesiástica e, durante a maior parte da sua vida, as principais recompensas que obteve foram estéticas, resultantes da singela beleza do seu sistema em comparação com o pesado modelo Ptolomaico. Galileu tinha estudado medicina e, o que o levou a experiências cada vez mais arriscadas, foi o deleite que sentia em imaginar coisas como a localização do centro de gravidade dos vários objectos sólidos. Isaac Newton formulou as suas principais descobertas muito pouco tempo depois de se ter licenciado em Cambridge, em 1665, altura em que a universidade foi encerrada por causa da peste. Newton teve de passar dois anos no campo, num retiro seguro mas entediante, e ocupou o tempo a brincar com as suas ideias sobre a teoria universal da gravidade. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, fundador da química moderna, era funcionário público da Ferme Générale, o equivalente ao Ministério das Finanças na França pré-revolucionária. Estava também envolvido na reforma agrária e no planeamento social, mas o que mais gostava de fazer eram as suas belas experiências clássicas. Luigi Galvani, que fez investigação de base sobre como músculos e nervos conduzem a electricidade, a qual, por seu turno, levou à invenção da bateria eléctrica, exerceu medicina até ao fim da sua vida. Gregor Mendel foi outro homem da igreja, cujas experiências, resltantes do seu gosto pela jardinagem, constituíram a base da genética. Quando, já no fim da vida, perguntaram a Albert A. Michelson — a primeira pessoa, nos Estados Unidos, a receber um prémio Nobel de ciência — porque tinha dedicado tanto tempo a medir a velocidade da luz, ele terá respondido: <<Era tão divertido>>. E, convém não esquecer, Einstein escreveu os seus ensaios mais importantes quando trabalhava no Departamento Suíço de Patentes. Estes, e tantos outros grandes cientistas que facilmente poderíamos referir, não sentiram a sua capacidade de pensamento diminuída por não serem <<profissionais>> do seu ramo, isto é, figuras reconhecidas com recurso a apoios legítimos. Fizeram apenas aquilo que gostavam de fazer."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Fluir

Fluxo vs entropia

"Na realidade, poucas culturas conseguiram conciliar tão bem as necessidades psicológicas do seu povo com as opções de vida ao seu alcance. Muitas falham porque fazem da sobrevivência uma tarefa demasiado árdua ou porque se encerram em padrões rígidos que sufocam as oportunidades de acção de gerações sucessivas.
    As culturas são construções defensivas contra o caos, concebidas para reduzir o impacto do acaso sobre a experiência."
in Fluir, de Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Famílias e como sobreviver com elas...

Some families are warm and supportive, 
some are challenging and demanding, 

others threaten the self of their members at every turn, 

still others are just insufferably boring.

Elle m'a suivi çà et là aux quatres coins du monde

"But people are not important only because they can help make our goals come true; when they are treated as valuable in their own right, people are the most fulfilling source of happiness."

"A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life."

"Adolescents who never learn to control their consciousness grow up to be adults without a "discipline". They lack the complex skills that will help them survive in a competitive, information-intensive environment. And what is even more important, they never learn how to enjoy living. They do not acquire the habit of finding challenges that bring out hidden potentials for growth."

"If being alone is seen as a chance to accomplish goals that cannot be reached in the company of others,  then instead of feeling lonely, a person will enjoy solitude and might be able to learn new skills in the process."

"Because the family is our first and in many ways our most important social environment, quality of life depends to a large extent on how well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives enjoyable. For no matter how strong the ties biology and culture has forged between family members, it is no secret that there is great variety in how people feel about their relatives. Some families are warm and supportive, some are challenging and demanding, others threaten the self of their members at every turn, still others are just insufferably boring. The frequency of murder is much higher among family members than among unrelated people. "
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Flow

when identity disappeares from consciousness / Flow

WHEN EXISTENCE IS TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED
"You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don't exist. I have experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching it in a state of awe and wonderment and [the music] just flows out of itself."

How does it feel to be in Flow?

1– Completely involved in what we are doing – focused, concentrated.

2 – A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.

3 – Great inner clarity – Knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.

4 – Knowing that the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task.

5 – A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.

6 – Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes.

7 – Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

Mais sobre Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

Flow / Invejo

Who was Jacqueline du Pré? | by AllegroFilms

"I think the greatest impression is one of the impact of being able to give a human being a tremendous amount and seeing that amount return so that you hit back and the tremendous climb had such force and inevitability that, ... I don't know... You can, sort of, see an endlessness in development. It's like hitting a ball against a wall and it always returned because the more you hit, the more it would return, so that you never had a sort of blank."

Meaningful identities / Flow

Não pude deixar de "roubar"



Mais sobre este filme.