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how their enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, but from their ability to minimize it.
the positive emotion they enjoy is the perfectly healthy feeling of being able to control potentially dangerous forces.
When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are.
The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself.
self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, 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 exotelic
cruelty is a universal source of enjoyment for people who have not developed more sophisticated skills.
It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful;
is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self.
The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people’s chances to enjoy theirs.
Occasionally flow may occur by chance, because of a fortunate coincidence of external and internal conditions.
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 consciousness on what is happening.
Any activity that transforms the way we perceive reality is enjoyable, a fact that accounts for the attraction of “consciousness-expanding” drugs of all sorts, from magic mushrooms to alcohol to the current Pandora’s box of hallucinogenic chemicals.
too much psychic energy is wrapped up in the self,
Under these conditions it is difficult to become interested in intrinsic goals,
lose oneself in an activity that offers no rewards outside the...
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investment of attention actually seemed to decrease mental effort.
people who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment.
for people who have learned to control consciousness focusing attention is relatively effortless, because they can shut off all mental processes but the relevant ones.
teenagers who had certain types of relationship with their parents were significantly more happy, satisfied, and strong in most life situations than their peers who did not have such a relationship.
clarity: the teenagers feel that
they know what their parents expect from them—goals and feedback
second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be...
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choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules—as long as the...
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commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses, and become unselfconsciously i...
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“autotelic family context,”
what makes some people able to achieve this internal control, while most others are swept away by external hardships?
the most important trait of survivors is a “nonself-conscious individualism,” or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking.
intrinsically motivated in their actions, they are not easily disturbed by external threats. With enough psychic energy free to observe and analyze
they have a better chance of discovering in them new opportunities for action.
How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more complex.
how to keep love relationship fresh
even till the final stage of liberation, the yogin must maintain control over consciousness. He could not surrender his self unless he was, even at the very moment of surrender, in complete control of it.
Music, which is organized auditory information, helps organize the mind that attends to it, and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when random information interferes with goals.
Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed,
We don’t usually notice how little control we have over the mind, because habits channel psychic energy so well that thoughts seem to follow each other
Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts,
curiosity, careful observation, a disciplined way of recording events, and finding ways to tease out the underlying regularities
Yet unless one learns to tolerate and even enjoy being alone, it is very difficult to accomplish any task that requires undivided concentration.
it is essential to find ways to control consciousness even when we are left to our own devices.
When they are asked to list pleasant activities that improve their mood for the entire day, the kind of events most often mentioned are “Being with happy people,” “Having people show interest in what I say,” “Being with friends,” and “Being noticed as sexually attractive.”
while chemicals do alter the content and the organization of consciousness, they do not expand or increase the self’s control over its function.
they do so without adding to our ability to order them effectively.
What they fail to do is develop any of the attentional habits that might lead to a greater complexity of consciousness.
although painful, is at least controllable—since we are the ones causing it.
The way to grow while enjoying life is to create a higher form of order out of the entropy that is an inevitable condition of living.
When physical vigor fails with age, for example, it means that one will be ready to turn one’s energies from the mastery of the external world to a deeper exploration of inner reality.
regardless of what is happening externally, then one has learned how to shape the quality of life.
