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Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person.
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”
flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
In the quest for happiness, partial solutions don’t work.
The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.
As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires.
it becomes necessary to rethink and reformulate what it takes to establish autonomy in consciousness.
consciousness has developed the ability to override its genetic instructions and to set its own independent course of action.
Attention shapes the self, and is in turn shaped by it.
experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy—on the structure of attention.
Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.
Without integration, a differentiated system would be a confusing mess.
it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.
Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met.
Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment.
what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations.
When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness.
‘If I were that toaster and I didn’t work, what would be wrong with me?’”
“The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.”
It is difficult to imagine that a system of beliefs such as this will not be based, at least to some degree, on what science has revealed about humanity and about the universe. Without such a foundation, our consciousness would remain split between faith and knowledge. But if science is to be of real help, it will have to transform itself. In addition to the various specialized disciplines aimed at describing and controlling isolated aspects of reality, it will have to develop an integrated interpretation of all that is known, and relate it to humankind and its destiny.
