Rhett Butler on controlling the mind

Does it matter that there is so little awareness and interest in control of the emergence or existence of thoughts in our minds?

We are living in an age of fear and illusion. Fear because our mortal vulnerability and the deep appreciation of the scarcity of time we have to live have been dramatically heightened in the ‘public mind’ from events in the last 6 years. Illusion because our attempts to cope have come in the form of false belief in control. A tremendous industry – both businesses and our own duplicitous cooperation – has sprung up to feed this beckoning call.

We can postpone death (by controlling aging, or just the signs of it). We can control birth (when it happen contraception, if it can happen infertility and even what happens offspring gender). And almost everywhere in between, control comes from a plethora of devices that permeate all aspects of our lives and instantly respond to our command:

* The originally humble but now much more complex TV remote
* The cell phone
* DVRs and Tivo
* Blackberries/Treos
* Remote home lighting and heating systems
* The multiplicity of security devices
* The ubiquity of the internet which allows us unprecedented reach to manage the many areas of our lives.

These ‘tools’ foster the sense not just that we are can influence but control the direction of our day, the situations we find ourselves in.

It makes us feel good but that it missing the point. The fact that it is not working is becoming increasingly evident through the dysfunction that occurs when people find themselves not in control. How quickly people lose their composure nad become hostile is only one expression. In airports, on aeroplanes, in cars, in hotels, In fact, any place where our day and time is not unfolding how we think it should and we are unable to direct it otherwise.

With all this abundant focus outward on mastering all we survey, OFD suggests that greater success lies – where it does with happiness – which is through an inward journey, of understanding, development and progress. Jung and Csikszentmihalyi are in agreement on this matter.

The closing line of Gone With The Wind is an apt sentiment. Frankly, society doesn’t give a damn. It requires too much effort of the wrong kind where the result does not meet our instant gratification craving. We our indifferent to the one true and sustainable domain we have an opportunity to guide: control over internal phenomena rather than external ones.

In a hierarchy of needs happiness is missing

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an intriguing construct. It attempts to capture the nature of human endeavor in the form of a ladder, arranged according to different types of pursuit, reflected by levels. The theory is that the drive for a higher tier of need only exists once the preceding level has been fulfilled. Thus it is only when the most basic survival needs of food, water and air are achieved that an individual is focused on safety needs.


There are two elements worthy of note:

!. It suggests that the drive for better and 'improving one's lot' is fundamental to human nature. This might suggest that our species is destined never to be happy, with an ever-higher level always calling and always our pursuit. OFT's dear friend Mihaly weighs in appropriately and dissents on the matter:

"This paradox if rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no insurmountable problem in our desire to escalate our goals as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people become so fixated of what they are trying to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens they forfeit their chance of contentment,"

2. Where does happiness fit into all this? Given how basic Maslow's ladder of needs appears to be to people's orientation and how they direct their energy, the lack of happiness explains a lot. After all, evidence suggests - as noted in this blog only yesterday - that rising material affluence does not increase happiness, and several poorer, developing countries report a higher average happiness despite lacking further progress up Maslow's hierarachy.

OFD would be intrigued indeed to hear people's thoughts on what form a hierarchy of happiness takes and how it aligns with Maslow's forerunner.

Life, liberty...but the other pursuit continues to elude us

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his highly engaging book Flow comes to a powerful conclusion. While it is a part of human nature to seek happiness, the reason why we are no closer to attaining it than Aristotle was in his day is that we are looking for it in the wrong place.

His basic thesis is that happiness is an inner-engineered not externally dependent experience. Success depends on the control of consciousness - not the variety of circumstances in the external, physical world.

It is precisely why people are able to reach the state of happiness despite being in situations in which outer conditions are - objectively speaking - difficult or threatening. He gives accounts from interviews with people from third world countries as well as incarcerated in concentration camps, in which remarkably some individuals described moments of serenity and deep inner calm, peace and more than well-being, profound happiness.

A casual stroll through that list of adjectives brings to OFD's mind one activity in particular: yoga. It is the act of yoking mind and body, but most importantly its intrinsic value is in bringing control and order to consciousness, to clear and focus the mind, the inner reality.

It leads us to a hypothesis which we shall venture out to explore. Whether people who participate in yoga regularly are any closer to happiness than other people.

That sound was the tent being unzipped. We're stepped forth into the wilderness, clip boards and interviewing questions at hand and ready to explore the realm of happiness amidst the populous.

We shall report back.

Comfort - Part Two

Once one starts rummaging around for things in the fridge one finds more than one expected. The same is true of heightened awareness of an issue, idea, pattern or a word: it starts cropping up with startling frequency.

So it was a discovery -- but not a surprise -- that the issue of 'comfort'(and discomfort), a topic OFD broached a couple of days ago here suddenly started appearing, one connected to a famous Danish filmmaker and the other to a University of Chicago Psychologist.

Escaping the clutches of comfort is what Susanne Bier seems intent on doing. "I have got this fear of becoming comfortable" she says, carefully pronouncing all four syllables and letting her face, her tone and her body language convey complete distaste.

It does not seem a purposeless focus or restlessness, rather she seems keenly aware that for her it represents losing a vital edge and clarity she brings to her works, among them Open hearts (2002) Brothers (2005) and After the Wedding (2007) the last having received an Oscar nomination.


The other context in which comfort came up is an academic study of the pursuit of happiness. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in a great read Flow suggests the underlying function of a variety of pieces of cultural machinery - religion, philosophies, arts, rules of social classes, and comforts - help shield our minds from the tyranny of chaos and, as he puts it "help us believe that we are in control of what is happening and give reasons for being satisfied with out lot."

So there we have it. The pursuit of comfort is an illusion, a device to make us feel connected and secure in an uncertain world and fend of the ontological wolves of anxiety from the door.*


Post script
*This is a turn of phrase not an anthropomorphic reference.