KARMA IN ITS EFFECT ON CHARACTER

Swami Vivekananda

The word Karma is derived from the Sanskrit Kri, to do; all action is Karma. Technically, this word also means the effects of actions. In connection with metaphysics, it sometimes means the effects, of which our past actions were the causes. But in Karma-Yoga we have simply to do with the word Karma as meaning work. The goal of mankind is knowledge. That is the one ideal placed before us by Eastern philosophy. Pleasure is not the goal of man, but knowledge.

Pleasure and happiness come to an end. It is a mistake to suppose that pleasure is the goal. The cause of all the miseries we have in the world is that men foolishly think pleasure to be the ideal to strive for. After a time man finds that it is not happiness, but knowledge, towards which he is going, and that both pleasure and pain are great teachers, and that he learns as much from evil as from good.

As pleasure and pain pass before his soul they have upon it different pictures, and the result of these combined impressions is what is called man's "character". If you take the character of any man, it really is but the aggregate of tendencies, the sum total of the bent of his mind; you will find that misery and happiness are equal factors in the formation of that character.

Good and evil have an equal share in moulding character, and in some instances misery is a greater teacher than happiness. In studying the great characters the world has produced, I dare say, in the vast majority of cases, it would be found that it was misery that taught more than happiness, it was poverty that taught more than wealth, it was blows that brought out their inner fire more than praise.
Now this knowledge, again, is inherent in man.

No knowledge comes from outside; it is all inside. What we say a man "knows", should, in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what a man "learns" is really what he "discovers", by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

We say Newton discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere in a corner waiting for him? It was in his own mind; the time came and he found it out. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in your own mind.

The external world is simply the suggestion, the occasion, which sets you to study your own mind, but the object of your study is always your own mind. The falling of an apple gave the suggestion to Newton, and he studied his own mind. He rearranged all the previous links of thought in his mind and discovered a new link among them, which we call the law of gravitation. It was not in the apple nor in anything in the centre of the earth.

All knowledge, therefore, secular or spiritual, is in the human mind. In many cases it is not discovered, but remains covered, and when the covering is being slowly taken off, we say, "We are learning," and the advance of knowledge is made by the advance of this process of uncovering.

The man from whom this veil is being lifted is the more knowing man, the man upon whom it lies thick is ignorant, and the man from whom it has entirely gone is all-knowing, omniscient. There have been omniscient men, and, I believe, there will be yet; and that there will be myriads of them in the cycles to come. Like fire in a piece of flint, knowledge exists in the mind; suggestion is the friction which brings it out.

So with all our feelings and action — our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames — every one of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are.

All these blows taken together are called Karma — work, action. Every mental and physical blow that is given to the soul, by which, as it were, fire is struck from it, and by which its own power and knowledge are discovered, is Karma, this word being used in its widest sense. Thus we are all doing Karma all the time. I am talking to you: that is Karma. You are listening: that is Karma. We breathe: that is Karma. We walk: Karma. Everything we do, physical or mental, is Karma, and it leaves its marks on us.

There are certain works which are, as it were, the aggregate, the sum total, of a large number of smaller works. If we stand near the seashore and hear the waves dashing against the shingle, we think it is such a great noise, and yet we know that one wave is really composed of millions and millions of minute waves.

Each one of these is making a noise, and yet we do not catch it; it is only when they become the big aggregate that we hear. Similarly, every pulsation of the heart is work. Certain kinds of work we feel and they become tangible to us; they are, at the same time, the aggregate of a number of small works. If you really want to judge of the character of a man, look not at his great performances.

Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be.

Karma in its effect on character is the most tremendous power that man has to deal with. Man is, as it were, a centre, and is attracting all the powers of the universe towards himself, and in this centre is fusing them all and again sending them off in a big current. Such a centre is the real man — the almighty, the omniscient — and he draws the whole universe towards him.

Good and bad, misery and happiness, all are running towards him and clinging round him; and out of them he fashions the mighty stream of tendency called character and throws it outwards. As he has the power of drawing in anything, so has he the power of throwing it out.
All the actions that we see in the world, all the movements in human society, all the works that we have around us, are simply the display of thought, the manifestation of the will of man. Machines or instruments, cities, ships, or men-of-war, all these are simply the manifestation of the will of man; and this will is caused by character, and character is manufactured by Karma.

As is Karma, so is the manifestation of the will. The men of mighty will the world has produced have all been tremendous workers — gigantic souls, with wills powerful enough to overturn worlds, wills they got by persistent work, through ages, and ages. Such a gigantic will as that of a Buddha or a Jesus could not be obtained in one life, for we know who their fathers were.

It is not known that their fathers ever spoke a word for the good of mankind. Millions and millions of carpenters like Joseph had gone; millions are still living. Millions and millions of petty kings like Buddha's father had been in the world. If it was only a case of hereditary transmission, how do you account for this petty prince, who was not, perhaps, obeyed by his own servants, producing this son, whom half a world worships? How do you explain the gulf between the carpenter and his son, whom millions of human beings worship as God? It cannot be solved by the theory of heredity. The gigantic will which Buddha and Jesus threw over the world, whence did it come? Whence came this accumulation of power? It must have been there through ages and ages, continually growing bigger and bigger, until it burst on society in a Buddha or a Jesus, even rolling down to the present day.

All this is determined by Karma, work. No one can get anything unless he earns it. This is an eternal law. We may sometimes think it is not so, but in the long run we become convinced of it. A man may struggle all his life for riches; he may cheat thousands, but he finds at last that he did not deserve to become rich, and his life becomes a trouble and a nuisance to him. We may go on accumulating things for our physical enjoyment, but only what we earn is really ours.

A fool may buy all the books in the world, and they will be in his library; but he will be able to read only those that he deserves to; and this deserving is produced by Karma. Our Karma determines what we deserve and what we can assimilate. We are responsible for what we are; and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.

You will say, “What is the use of learning how to work? Everyone works in some way or other in this world.” But there is such a thing as frittering away our energies. With regard to Karma-Yoga, the Gita says that it is doing work with cleverness and as a science; by knowing how to work, one can obtain the greatest results. You must remember that all work is simply to bring out the power of the mind which is already there, to wake up the soul. The power is inside every man, so is knowing; the different works are like blows to bring them out, to cause these giants to wake up.
Man works with various motives.

There cannot be work without motive. Some people want to get fame, and they work for fame. Others want money, and they work for money. Others want to have power, and they work for power. Others want to get to heaven, and they work for the same. Others want to leave a name when they die, as they do in China, where no man gets a title until he is dead; and that is a better way, after all, than with us. When a man does something very good there, they give a title of nobility to his father, who is dead, or to his grandfather.

Some people work for that. Some of the followers of certain Mohammedan sects work all their lives to have a big tomb built for them when they die. I know sects among whom, as soon as a child is born, a tomb is prepared for it; that is among them the most important work a man has to do, and the bigger and the finer the tomb, the better off the man is supposed to be. Others work as a penance; do all sorts of wicked things, then erect a temple, or give something to the priests to buy them off and obtain from them a passport to heaven. They think that this kind of beneficence will clear them and they will go scot-free in spite of their sinfulness. Such are some of the various motives for work.

Work for work's sake. There are some who are really the salt of the earth in every country and who work for work's sake, who do not care for name, or fame, or even to go to heaven. They work just because good will come of it. There are others who do good to the poor and help mankind from still higher motives, because they believe in doing good and love good. The motive for name and fame seldom brings immediate results, as a rule; they come to us when we are old and have almost done with life. If a man works without any selfish motive in view, does he not gain anything? Yes, he gains the highest.

Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to practice it. It is more paying from the point of view of health also. Love, truth, and unselfishness are not merely moral figures of speech, but they form our highest ideal, because in them lies such a manifestation of power. In the first place, a man who can work for five days, or even for five minutes, without any selfish motive whatever, without thinking of future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant.

It is hard to do it, but in the heart of our hearts we know its value, and the good it brings. It is the greatest manifestation of power — this tremendous restraint; self-restraint is a manifestation of greater power than all outgoing action. A carriage with four horses may rush down a hill unrestrained, or the coachman may curb the horses. Which is the greater manifestation of power, to let them go or to hold them? A cannonball flying through the air goes a long distance and falls. Another is cut short in its flight by striking against a wall, and the impact generates intense heat.

All outgoing energy following a selfish motive is frittered away; it will not cause power to return to you; but if restrained, it will result in development of power. This self-control will tend to produce a mighty will, a character which makes a Christ or a Buddha. Foolish men do not know this secret; they nevertheless want to rule mankind. Even a fool may rule the whole world if he works and waits. Let him wait a few years, restrain that foolish idea of governing; and when that idea is wholly gone, he will be a power in the world.

The majority of us cannot see beyond a few years, just as some animals cannot see beyond a few steps. Just a little narrow circle — that is our world. We have not the patience to look beyond, and thus become immoral and wicked. This is our weakness, our powerlessness.

Even the lowest forms of work are not to be despised. Let the man, who knows no better, work for selfish ends, for name and fame; but everyone should always try to get towards higher and higher motives and to understand them. "To work we have the right, but not to the fruits thereof:" Leave the fruits alone. Why care for results? If you wish to help a man, never think what that man's attitude should be towards you. If you want to do a great or a good work, do not trouble to think what the result will be.

There arises a difficult question in this ideal of work. Intense activity is necessary; we must always work. We cannot live a minute without work. What then becomes of rest? Here is one side of the life-struggle — work, in which we are whirled rapidly round. And here is the other — that of calm, retiring renunciation: everything is peaceful around, there is very little of noise and show, only nature with her animals and flowers and mountains.

Neither of them is a perfect picture. A man used to solitude, if brought in contact with the surging whirlpool of the world, will be crushed by it; just as the fish that lives in the deep sea water, as soon as it is brought to the surface, breaks into pieces, deprived of the weight of water on it that had kept it together. Can a man who has been used to the turmoil and the rush of life live at ease if he comes to a quiet place? He suffers and perchance may lose his mind.

The ideal man is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert. He has learnt the secret of restraint, he has controlled himself. He goes through the streets of a big city with all its traffic, and his mind is as calm as if he were in a cave, where not a sound could reach him; and he is intensely working all the time. That is the ideal of Karma-Yoga, and if you have attained to that you have really learnt the secret of work.

But we have to begin from the beginning, to take up the works as they come to us and slowly make ourselves more unselfish every day. We must do the work and find out the motive power that prompts us; and, almost without exception, in the first years, we shall find that our motives are always selfish; but gradually this selfishness will melt by persistence, till at last will come the time when we shall be able to do really unselfish work.

We may all hope that some day or other, as we struggle through the paths of life, there will come a time when we shall become perfectly unselfish; and the moment we attain to that, all our powers will be concentrated, and the knowledge which is ours will be manifest.

From Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. 1

Random Thoughts...

The universe is only as big as your imagination, and a problem, as big as your thinking - Anonymous

Thank You Lord!

I thank You for Your blessings
That You've always given me
You've given me a love of life
And eyes that I might see.

I look to see the beauty
Of everywhere You touch
I'm deeply filled with gratitude
And I thank You Lord, so much.

The gifts You give go on and on
Each day brings something new
Peace and joy and happiness
I can always count on You!

~ Charlotte Anselmo ~

Principles of Transformation

Each individual on Earth is exploring in a physical body new ways of experiencing life. Through this process of discovery, each of us is developing a deeper level of understanding of life and a greater ability to express our divine essence. This divine essence is the fullest expression of each individual's soul, and most closely exemplifies the Divine's capabilities therein.

Divine essence is a level of divine awareness that was inherent in each soul when it was initially conceived by the Divine. It is also the natural state of the soul that has removed itself from the controlling aspects of hierarchical belief systems through the complete awakening of its sacred intentions. All souls are in various stages of transformation, and all people are destined to attain a level of conscious awareness of divine essence as their sacred intentions are fully awakened.

Profound personal transformation is initiated by the realization that you are capable of direct access to the Divine. This is the realization that the wisdom of the Divine is discovered deep within your own soul. In other words, your body, complete with its physical, mental, and emotional capabilities, is not the repository of your sacred intentions. Nor is your mind able to reach out and access this divine inner calling which tirelessly beckons, inviting you towards the glorious joy of ever deeper connection with All That Is. It is the soul that is the harbor of your divine essence. And it is the soul that is the vehicle of access to the awakening of your sacred intentions, which opens the door to profound transformation through the integration of your body, mind, heart, and soul.

Through opening to meaningful connection not only with your own divine essence, but with that of all living beings, the experience of profound personal transformation eventually triggers the realization that perceived reality is the Divine personified in the form of individual preferences. Thus when your sacred intentions are fully awakened, divine reality and your perception of reality become inseparable as the wind and the air. This confluence is only completely realized through the full transformation experience, which is unlike anything known within human experience.

There have been those upon Earth who have ventured into the shallows of this boundless ocean. Some have called it ascension; others have attributed names like illumination, enlightenment, nirvana, and cosmic consciousness. While these experiences are profound by human standards, they are only the initial stirrings of divine essence as it becomes increasingly adept at touching and awakening the remote edges of its existence. What most would define as the ultimate bliss is merely an impression of their divine essence whispering to its outposts of form and nudging them to look within to the roots of existence, and to unite with the formless and limitless divine intelligence that pervades all.

The full transformation experience is far beyond the scope of the human drama, much like the stars in the sky are beyond the touch of Earth. We can see the stars with our human eyes, but we will never touch them with our human hands. Similarly, we can dimly foresee the full transformation experience as humans, but we cannot experience it through being human. It is accessed through the wholeness of the soul, for it is only in wholeness that the soul's sacred intentions and their catalytic effect of divine perception can be fully experienced.

This level of wholeness is attained only when the individual consciousness has separated from time and is able to view its existence in timelessness. Nevertheless, the human stage of existence is essential in facilitating personal transformation and causing it to trigger—like a metamorphosis—the integration of your formful identities into divine essence.

Self-mastery through personal transformation is the next stage of perception and expression for your soul. It is initiated when you choose to design your life based upon principles that are symbolic of the Divine. As you become increasingly responsive to the Divine, you naturally gravitate towards life principles that symbolically express the formative principles of divine creation.

The below principles are divine templates of creation. They are designed to help you experience life from the perspective of divine essence. They are principles that construct opportunities for the integration of your formless and formful identities. They are bridges through which you can access the experience of wholeness by perceiving with your divine essence.

There is a wide range of means that can facilitate self-mastery through personal transformation and disengage the soul from external controls. Inasmuch as the means may vary, the intent behind the means is quite narrowly defined as the intent to expand into a state of integration whereby all aspects of your conscious self become increasingly aligned with your divine essence.
There are three particular life principles that help to align your perspective with the perspective of divine essence and thus inspire profound transformation.

They are:

1) Seeing the Divine in all

2) Nurturance of life

3) Gratitude

When you apply these principles, a deeper meaning will be revealed to the seemingly random events of your life experience—both in the personal and universal contexts.

Seeing the Divine in All

This is the principle that the Divine is present and can be seen everywhere and in all manifestations of life. It is interwoven in all things like an intricate mosaic whose pieces adhere to the same wall, and are thus unified. However, it is not the picture that unifies the mosaic, but the underlying wall upon which its pieces adhere. Similarly, the Divine paints a picture so diverse and seemingly unrelated that there appears to be no unification. Yet it is not the outward manifestations that unify. It is the inward center of divine energy upon which the pieces of diversity are layered that unifies all life.
This centerpiece of divine energy is the collective storehouse of all life within the universe. It is the full expression of the Divine, which invests itself in all forms through the projection of its divine intelligence into all manifestations of life. Thus, divine intelligence—acting as an extension of the Divine—is the unifying energy that is the "wall" upon which all the pieces of life's mosaic adhere.

Seeing the Divine in all is the principle that all manifestations of life convey an expression of All That Is. It does not matter how far the unifying energy has been distorted or corrupted; the Divine can be observed. It is the action of perceiving the unification of energy even when the outward manifestations appear random, distorted, or chaotic. It is the realization that all life flows from one divine energy source that links all to One and one to All.

When every manifestation of life can be genuinely perceived as a fragmentary expression of All That Is, the vibration of equality that underlies all life becomes perceptible to you. You realize that life initially emerges as an extension of the Divine, and then, as an individuated energy frequency invested within a form. This individuated energy vibrates, in its pure, timeless state, precisely the same for all manifestations of life. This is the common ground that all life shares. This is the tone or vibration of equality that can be observed within all life forms that unifies all expressions of diversity to the very foundation of existence. If you are able to look upon any and all forms of life with the outlook of equality, then you are seeing the Divine in all.

While this may seem like an abstract concept, it is actualized through the practice of looking for the outward and inward manifestations of the Divine. In a very real sense, you expect to observe the workings of divine intelligence in every facet of your experience.
The principle of seeing the Divine in all is the unassailable expectation that everything is in its rightful position, performing its rightful function, and serving its purpose to activate the fullest expression of its life in the present moment. It is the outlook that all life is in a state of optimal realization and experience regardless of condition or circumstance. It is the perception that life is perfect in its expression because it flows from perfection, and that no matter how divergent its manifestations are, all life is an extension of the Divine.

In light of the obvious turmoil and destruction that are apparent on Earth, this is an outlook or perception that may seem naive. How can life—in all its forms and expressions—be perceived as optimal or perfect? This is the great paradox of life, and it cannot be reconciled with your mental or emotional capabilities. It can only be understood in the context of the soul, which is deathless, timeless, and limitless. Paradoxes exist because the human drama is too limited in scope and scale to allow a perception of wholeness to illuminate how the pieces of the puzzle are unified in perfect relation.

The human drama is circumscribed by the dimensions of time and space and the elements of energy and matter. It is played out upon the stages of survival and dysfunctional behavior because of the methods of controlling information and manipulating conditions used by those operating within the hierarchical paradigm. The soul within the human body is largely unexpressed and underutilized in this human drama, and therefore, life's apparent perversions and imperfections are seen in isolation as impediments to perfection rather than perfection itself.

Life is perfect in its resolve to expand and express an intelligence that is limitless. This is the fundamental purpose of life in all its diverse manifestations.

The presence of the Divine expressing itself as a vibration of equality can be seen in all things. Sensory input derived from the human body is limited to frequencies in specific ranges that only convey an echo of this divine vibration. The divine resonance of all life is understood only through deliberate and focused contemplation of the equality inherent in all things, and through the ability to penetrate beyond the image of a thing to the origin of the image. Calling forth the divine perceptions of the soul within your own being is the ideal method to access lasting sensitivity to the divine vibration. This is how you develop the ability to see the Divine in all.

It is not only that the Divine is found within you and within every individual manifestation of life; it is also in itself the wholeness of all life. Thus, this principle calls for seeing the Divine in all its diverse forms of manifestation, as well as in the wholeness of life itself.
These insights stimulate a new sensory system beyond the five senses that rule the physical world.

These new senses are an outgrowth of the awakening of your sacred intentions. They are manifestations of the first stage of profound personal transformation. With this new perceptual ability, you will be capable of sensing not only the presence of the Divine, but also the timeless divine essence that exists at the core of every living being.

Nurturance of Life

Life, in this definition, is an individual's sovereign reality. It is subjective and impressionable. Life is the wholeness of experience flowing past the individual's field of perception in the present moment. There is never a closure to life, nor a final chapter written. It is eternal, not only in the abstract sense of never ending or beginning, but also in the real sense that life is ever expanding in order to express divine intelligence in all realities within the universe.

Nurturance of life is the principle whereby an individual is in alignment with the natural expansion of intelligence inherent within all life. This alignment enhances the life energy that flows past the individual with the clear intent of gentle support. It is the action of opening to the highest motive in all people and in all life and supporting the flow of this highest intention towards its ultimate expression. In so doing, the action is performed without judgment, analysis, or attachment to outcome. It involves simply nurturing the highest energy that flows from all people and all beings, and thus supporting the fullest expression of their deepest essence.

This is a departure from the normal perception that nurturing support can only be granted when others are in alignment with your personal will and desires. When, instead, you view everything in your life as an integrated energy flowing as an expression of ever-expanding divine intelligence, all life is honored as an extension of the Divine. In this context, there is no energy that is misdirected or unworthy of support and nurturance. While this may seem contrary to the evidence of abusive energy upon the Earth, even energy that is laden with "evil intent" is nevertheless energy that is flowing outward in search of a higher expression.

All people and all forms of life can be nurtured and supported to their highest expression. This is the fundamental purpose of this principle. It is greatly facilitated by the intention to perceive the original motive and ultimate expression of life energy as it passes through your field of awareness.

Energy is an element of life that is so subtly interwoven with form that it is one, in much the same manner as space and time are inextricably linked in union. Energy is a motive. It is intelligent beyond the mind's ability to reason. While it is a force that can be subject to applications that deny its highest expression, energy is always imbuing life with the motive to expand and evolve.

Life energy is always in a state of becoming. It is never static or regressive in its natural state. You are very capable of nurturing this natural expansion of energy to forge new channels of expression and experience. In fact, it is your primary purpose to expand the life energy that encircles your personal reality, and to transform it to new levels of expression that more clearly reflect the perspective of divine essence.

There are many specific actions that can be taken to nurture life. Each soul has the innate ability to transform energy through a tremendous variety of means. Working through your body, your soul is able to collect and store energy and redirect its purpose or application. This transformation of energy can occur on both personal and universal levels of expression. That is, within an individual's field of awareness, energy can be transformed to conform to a vision of personal welfare, or aligned with a vision of universal welfare and goodwill, or a combination of these two.

One of the best methods to transform energy is through one's belief system. All beliefs have energy systems that act like birthing chambers for the manifestation of your perceived reality. Within these energy systems are currents that direct life experience. Your soul is aware of these currents either consciously or unconsciously and allows them to carry you into the realm of experience that exemplifies your core belief system.

By cultivating beliefs that expand and transform energy, you are able to engage energy systems that are nurturing to life in all its myriad forms. When your beliefs are clearly defined as intentions—as preferred states of being—your life energy engages fully in the present moment. Your energy system becomes inseparable from your being and woven into your spirit like a thread of light. Clarity of intention is essential to engaging the energy system of your core beliefs, and to allowing the nurturance of life to prevail in all activities.

So again, the nurturance of life is essential to both personal and collective realities within the universe, which contains all realities that are interlinked like threads of an infinitely expanding fabric. Thus, as you awaken to your own creative power to transform life energy outside of yourself and enhance it with the clear intent of gentle support, you naturally experience ever-unfolding transformation within yourself as well. You become an increasingly clear beacon of the Divine and an architect of a new paradigm based upon the intention to nurture all life in the universe.

Gratitude

This principle is based on the understanding that the universe represents a collective intelligence that can be personalized as a single universal soul—a composite expression of the Divine. Thus, in this perspective, there are only two souls in the entire cosmos: the individual soul and the universal soul. Inasmuch as the individual is impressionable and constantly changing to adapt to new information, so is the universal soul, which is a dynamic, living template of collective energies and experiences that are coherent and as knowable as a friend's personality and behavior.

The universal soul is responsive to the individual soul and its beliefs and perceptions. It is like a composite omni-personality that is imbued with divine intelligence and responds to the perceptions and belief systems of the individual like a pool of water mirrors the image that overshadows it.

Everyone is indeed, at their innermost core, an enlightened soul that can transform themselves into an instrument of divine essence. However, this transformation is dependent on whether the individual chooses to project an image of divine essence upon the "mirror" of the universal soul, or to project a lesser image that is a distortion of its essential state of being.

The principle of gratitude is primarily concerned with consciously designing your self-image through an appreciation of the universal soul's supportive mirror. In other words, the universal soul is a partner in shaping reality's expression in your life. If you choose to project a transformed image upon the mirror of the universal soul, reality gradually becomes an internal process of creation that is increasingly free of external controls and conditions.

This process involves an interchange of supportive energy between the individual and the universal soul. This energy is best applied through an appreciation of how perfect and exacting this interchange occurs in every moment of life. If you are aware—or at least interested in having the awareness—of how perfectly the Divine, as expressed in the form of the universal soul, supports your sovereign reality, there is a powerful and natural sense of gratitude that flows from you to the Divine. It is this wellspring of gratitude that opens wide the channel of support from the Divine to the individual and establishes a collaboration of purpose to transform the individual soul into a pure expression of divine essence.

It is principally gratitude—which arises naturally through appreciation of how the relationship between the individual and the universal soul operates—that opens you to connection with your divine essence, and to your eventual transformation into the state of perception and expression of divine essence. The relationship of the individual with the universal soul is essential to cultivate and nurture, because this relationship, more than anything else, determines how accepting each individual is of life's myriad forms and manifestations.

When you accept changes in your sovereign reality as the shifting persona of the universal soul, you live in greater harmony with life itself. Life becomes an exchange of energy between you and the universal soul that is allowed to play out without judgment, and is experienced without fear. This is the underlying meaning of unconditional love: to experience life in all its manifestations as a single, unified intelligence that responds perfectly to the projected image of each soul.

It is for this reason that when you project gratitude, regardless of circumstance or condition, life becomes increasingly supportive in opening you to further awakening your sacred intentions. This feeling of gratitude coupled with the mental concept of appreciation is expressed like an invisible message in all directions and at all times. In this particular context, gratitude is the overarching motive behind all forms of expression to which humanity aspires.

Every breath, every word, every touch, every thought is centered on expressing this sense of gratitude; a gratitude that you are sovereign and supported by a universal soul that expresses itself through all forms and manifestations of life with the sole objective of creating the ideal reality to fully awaken your sacred intentions and transform your entire being into divine essence. It is this specific form of gratitude that accelerates the awakening of your sacred intentions and their inherent ability to integrate your body, mind, heart, and soul, and to transform your ability to perceive and express from the place of divine essence.

Time is the primary factor that distorts the otherwise clear connection between the individual and the Divine. Time establishes separation of experience. This creates doubt in the Divine's system of fairness and overarching purpose. This doubt, in turn, creates fear that the universe is not a mirror but rather a chaotic, whimsical energy. Time intervenes to create pockets of despair, hopelessness, and abandonment. However, it is these very "pockets" that often motivate awakening the sacred intentions of your soul, as they cause you to seek a more intimate and harmonious relationship with the Divine.

When you are aligned with divine essence and live from this perspective as part of an ever-unfolding reality, you attract a natural state of harmony. This does not necessarily mean that your life is without problems or discomforts; rather it signifies a perception that there is an integral purpose in what life reveals. In other words, life experience is meaningful to the extent that you choose to live in natural harmony with divine essence. When your personal reality flows in alignment with divine essence, you create lasting joy and inner peace.

Gratitude is an essential facet of love that opens you to acknowledge the role of the universal soul and to redefine your purpose as a supportive extension of the Divine, rather than the whimsical outreach of fate or the exacting reaction of a mechanical, detached universe. Establishing a relationship with the universe through the outflow of gratitude attracts life experience that is deeply transformative—experience that is richly devoted to uncovering life's deepest meaning and most formative purpose.

The Emergence of Divine Essence

Through the ongoing application of these principles of transformation, divine intelligence increasingly permeates your soul, and your soul becomes the identity of your entire being. Thus, identity is transformed, and in the wake of this transformation, divine essence unifies your entire being with your soul, and your soul with divine intelligence. It is this unification and shift of identity that is the explicit purpose of these life principles. If there is any other intention or objective, these principles will remain misunderstood and their catalytic powers will remain dormant.

It is the perspective of divine essence that all life is pure love in its fullest expression, and that in this single concept, all life is conceived and forever exists. This becomes the core belief from which all other beliefs arise. And as these beliefs expand outward, this core belief system emerges with a clear intent of supporting a fundamental perspective of seeing, nurturing, and appreciating the universe as the divine cradle from which all life is created and evolves.

These principles of transformation are merely symbols represented in words and served to you as a potential recipe to stir awake the embers of light that tirelessly burn within. There are no specific techniques or rituals that are required to invoke their power. They are simply perspectives. In a real sense, they are sacred intentions that attract experience that expands consciousness. They do not provide quick fixes or instant realizations.

They are amplifiers of personal will and intention that clarify how one lives. Their transformative power is contained exclusively in the intent of their application.
Through these principles, you can become a master of empowering your deeper self. In the past, boundaries were set, secrets were kept, and your light was subdued simply because your perception of external, hierarchical controls created in you fear of the unknown and of the mystical practices of transformed souls.

Now, if you choose to apply these life principles with clear intent, you have the tools to accelerate the emergence of divine essence. You can awaken the perspective, insights, and empowered abilities of your divine essence to create new realms of possibility and shape them as learning adventures that liberate and expand your consciousness. This is the underlying purpose of these principles, and perhaps the best reason to explore them.

This is the first of a two-part essay, for part two:http://www.weboflove.org/consciousnessparadigms

For a two-page summary of Principles of Transformation:http://www.weboflove.org/transformation

The Principles of Reiki

JUST FOR TODAY

1. Do not anger

2. Do not worry

3. Earn your living honestly

4. Honor every living being

5. Live with the attitude of gratitude

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Just for today...

It expresses the importance of undertaking to do everyday things, without anxiety or hurry, concentrating on the moment's reality and intensely living it. Here and now are the coordinates of the present, what is past does not exist any longer and it slows down our way, what still has to happen does not really exist and it departs us from bringing all our energy in what we are doing. Past very often brings with it anger and grudge while future brings worry...

Do not anger and worry...

Anger rises from received wounds or from the sensation that someone is doing something bad to us. Renouncing anger means first of all to recognize and to express it, to express our feelings clearly and decidedly, to learn how to protect our space, our life and our relationships. Renouncing anger does not mean to forget or to remove it because doing that it would express itself through the body and through physical troubles such as: stomachache, ulcer, digestion problems, liver problems, irritability and inability to communicate. The meaning of this principle is to eliminate the causes of the anger, recognizing who or what hurts me and acting consequently, talking about and expressing what we think and what we feel. And even if we cannot do anything to change a situation, we can consider the possibility to get out of a vain pain in time. The ways to renounce anger are forgiveness, to let go and comprehension: these are the qualities we have to develop through Reiki.
Worry rises from unsureness, from the fear of what we are and of what is expecting us, from thinking about an event and its unpleasant consequences. Worry and anxiety denote lack of trust and abandonment; it is as if we should always keep everything under control in order to foresee every event. Renouncing worry means to enjoy life moment by moment, believing that everything happens for my best good, to let force and consciousness rise inside me together with the sensation that everything is going well, everything is going as it has to go and that I have simply to let me go and enjoy life.

Earn your living honestly...

Kahlil Gibran writes that "Work is love made visible". This principle reminds us the importance to be right with our conscience, to be loyal and honest first of all with ourselves in any thing we do, it reminds us that the more important work is building our same life day by day. How could we have a healthy and strong body if our mind is full of deceits, lies and subterfuges? How can we think to be happy if we cause sufferings to others? It is written in the Gospel: "You will love your neighbour like yourself". And also "Do not do to others what you do not want to be done to you". These are the keys to open our life to light and to feel in peace with ourselves. Work is a marvellous opportunity to offer our contribution to life, to show our gratitude and thankfulness to the Spirit, to be proud of ourselves when we obtain a result.Without honesty and integrity which satisfaction would it be?

Honor every living being...

In order to maintain healthy and strong your body, you have to love it.In order to love it, you have to take care of it as if it was a child, to ask it often how it is, what it would like to do, where it would like to go and so on. In order to take care of someone, you have to respect him deeply and to have a deep comprehension for his needs. That's why you desire to thank him for all what he did and is doing for you. Love, care and gratitude put together form the verb "To Honour". Honouring our mother and father for giving us life means honouring ourselves and our choice of living. Honouring the teachers and the elders means to open humbly to the learning and the knowledge and to recognize the value of wisdom and of experience. Honouring every form of life means to celebrate praises to the Creator and to thank him for the great variety and magnificence of forms and colours and to thank ourselves to share all it. The world belongs to you but you have to nourish a deep sense of responsibility, you cannot kill and destroy without making this action backfiring against yourself.

Show gratitude...

Those who practice Reiki discover the importance to say "thank you". Thanking means to accept all what surrounds us and ourselves in an only embrace, thanking is a sweet moment of fragility and privacy which connects you to the universe. Every day we receive our daily bread, every day the Spirit generously gives us his gifts in form of air, water, love, sunsets, starry skies, seas and mountains, food and life energy. We sometimes forget to be alive, we forget about all the love we received, we get lost in the meanders of suffering and we forget about all the joy we felt in our life. We become hard and detached, cool and disappointed. Thanking for the received gifts makes us feel human again and let the life warmth enter inside us.


INTRODUCTION

Reiki is an old discipline of oriental origin which aim is to harmonize heart and mind using the spiritual endowments that the human beings are gifted with since their birth: love, compassion, bravery, sympathy, brotherhood, confidence... The purpose of Reiki is to help people to keep their body in good health and lead a peaceful life. All the activities of the Cultural Association "International Reiki Center" are addressed to both physically and psychically independent, self sufficient, mature and healthy people who are looking for a deep sense of their own life and who yearn for an interaction with other human beings or with nature in its every display. The word "healing", if one makes use of it, has to be considered as a synonym of happiness, accomplishment, and illumination. Reiki has no ideological or political purpose; it does not contrast either with any religious confession or claims to take the place of the western medicine or the medical sanitary therapy. The activities of the association are solely addressed to its members and the Reiki International Center does not take upon itself any responsibility for the activities which might have been undertaken by single operators or centers out of its institutional center.

Flow with Soul

An interview with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
by Elizabeth Debold

Introduction

Creativity—his own, others', and that of life itself—has been the entry point into evolution for Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high-ee"). Truly an international renaissance man, born in Hungary, a graduate of the classical gymnasium "Torquato Tasso" in Rome, and an artist, Csikszentmihalyi earned his Ph.D. in psychology in 1965 from the University of Chicago, where he would eventually teach.

Yet the bounds of psychology could contain neither his creativity nor his desire to find a greater order: "Somehow I always gravitated to the people in various disciplines—whether it's psychology, sociology, anthropology—who saw a certain unity in their field, who were not what later became known as postmodern reductionists," he explained, speaking on the telephone from his office at the Claremont Graduate University.

Influenced by Carl Jung and reading widely in religion, Csikszentmihalyi found himself intrigued by "people who kind of stepped back and tried to say, 'What is it that's going on in this messy and confusing pattern of human behavior over time?'
And I was influenced greatly, for instance, by Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who developed this notion of evolution." Even his current position as a professor at Claremont's Drucker School of Management is a new evolutionary turn in a life lived with passion and curiosity.

Csikszentmihalyi is most well known for his bestselling 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defined and explored the concept of "flow"—as in "in the flow"—as our experience of optimal fulfillment and engagement. Flow, whether in creative arts, athletic competition, engaging work, or spiritual practice, is a deep and uniquely human motivation to excel, exceed, and triumph over limitation. Csikszentmihalyi describes his life's work as the effort "to study what makes people truly happy."

The emphasis here is on the word "truly"—because to him, happiness is not simply flow nor an emotional state nor even the experience of pleasure. The happiness he points to involves the continual challenge to go beyond oneself as part of something greater than one's own self-interest.

What compelled us to speak to Dr. Csikszentmihalyi was his constantly evolving understanding of individual human development in the context of evolution. Ever the empiricist, he has systematically explored what it means to bring the laws of material evolution into both human and cultural development.

In his books The Evolving Self and Finding Flow, he develops a moral and ethical perspective on flow as a force of evolution. Integrating the concept of flow with a contemporary understanding of ancient wisdom teachings, he offers a new paradigm for human living rooted in his recognition that human beings now have the unique opportunity—and obligation—to become conscious participants in evolution. In the following interview, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi invites us to join in creating an evolutionary psychology founded in a deeper understanding of human motivation and an attention to our inescapable interconnectedness.

interview

WIE: In your books The Evolving Self and Finding Flow, you speak about evolution, particularly about human evolution. Could you define what you mean by "evolution"?

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: At the most abstract level, what I mean by "evolution" is the increasing complexity of matter, which results in increasing possibility for consciousness. Here I'm differing from the view of [French Jesuit paleontologist] Teilhard de Chardin. He thought that rocks had a consciousness appropriate to their own material organization.

I don't know whether they do or not, but his view was that whenever there is matter organized in some system, there is a commensurate level of consciousness, which reaches its apogee in the human nervous system being as it is the most intricate system, where you can code and store information of all different kinds.

Smells, sights, inner feelings, and thoughts can all get stored because there is enough space, and the units are connected so that you can begin to draw parallels and see similarities and develop cause-and-effect relationships and so forth.

So you have this system that is very complexly organized, very intricately differentiated, and very integrated. Those are the two dimensions of complexity that you always see in evolution: differentiation and integration. Differentiation allows you to use different parts, for instance, different cells in your brain, different neurons to store information.

And at the same time, these differentiated cells are connected to each other, or integrated, so that they can talk to each other, so to speak. Okay? They can exchange information. This is one way to talk about evolution: the process by which matter becomes more complex, allowing for more complex consciousness.

Then, of course, we see the results of humans becoming conscious begin to extend outside the body. And that's where we begin to see the evolution of culture, where we are able to store information not just in the brain but also in cave paintings and buildings, and then books and computers, etcetera. That begins to enlarge the amount of information about the universe that we can, in principle, deal with.

But I don't think the direction of evolution is laid down in any sense. We, having become aware of what is going on, have to decide for ourselves to what end this information should be directed and where it should be going. And I think that from the abstract level, the signposts for those decisions are again differentiation and integration.

You want a future where people are free to develop whatever unique blueprints they carry in their genes, and you want that freedom to blossom as much as possible, but at the same time, you want each person to see that they are part of something much greater. That's where the integration comes in—it starts with feeling that you belong to a family, to an ethnic group, to a church and to a nation.

But unless you realize that you're also part of all the living systems and the planet—that there is something beyond all of this that we can sense—unless you're part of that, then evolution would not be very successful, as far as I can tell.

WIE: What kinds of things catalyze evolution?

MC: That's a good question. In the past, of course, there have been random changes like asteroids hitting the earth, which killed off a certain type of species and then allowed another one to take over. There's also an explanation that would say that it's really entropy that runs evolution, in the sense that all species try to get as much out of the ecosystem as they can, with the least amount of effort.

And that would fit with the second law of thermodynamics [that all systems tend to disorder over time]. If there was no entropy, in other words, if things did not tend to decay and dissolve in competition with other forms, then a better form would not necessarily stand out and become widespread. Okay?

You could claim, therefore, that it is because this constant competition for survival eliminates the worst forms that better forms are able to be recognized, endorsed, and developed.

For example, here comes someone who, instead of having to run after a deer, can go on a horse. They are expending much less energy getting their deer meat, so the horse becomes suddenly very popular. The Plains Indians in America adopted horses within a relatively short time of when the Spaniards introduced them.

They saw how useful they were, how much energy they could save. And the same with rifles. This principle, I think, applies mostly to technological evolution, to the evolution of tools, the evolution of technologies that are adopted because they defeat entropy to a certain extent. They save you energy; that's why you adopt them.

And then, if there is any species that can find a way of getting more energy out of the environment than others with less effort, then that is the species that will have an advantage for a certain period. This is probably the most reductionistic view—that evolution would be based on entropy itself.

I believe in Occam's razor* however, I'm not endorsing this view. I'm just saying this is one way that people have explained how evolution is catalyzed.

WIE: Are there other views that you endorse more?

MC: Well, I can see entropy as being the original impetus for adopting different things, but I think that when we come to humans, who have this consciousness, then a different set of rules begins to apply. And those are the rules that come out of actually reflecting on experience, reflecting on history, on what happens around humans. And that reflection tells you, "Wait a minute, this is not all we can be, this is not all we can do. There are better ways of doing it." And at that point, you have the possibility of getting beyond what you learned before. A lot of art, literature, religion, and philosophy is born out of this need to go beyond what you were before.

Some people say we have been able to reflect on our own thinking for only about three thousand years. Once that happened, the old rules of evolution began to change. We're no longer subject to the determining influence of the genes as much as we were. We are no longer subject to the determining influence of our social/cultural environment as much as we were before.

We are no longer determined by entropy as much as we were before. This is a fairly recent step in evolution. Very recent, considering how long it took us to get, let's say, from Lucy [our early Cro Magnon ancestor] to Homer's writing of The Odyssey—it was millions of years. Then suddenly, bingo. So this is a very new game. And there are lots of mistakes that we made, that our species is making, but I think it's a tremendous opportunity, too.

WIE: So this new catalyst for evolution is inherent in humans?

MC: I think it's inherent in this particular being that has this way of processing information, that has this very complex brain. And so yes, it is inherent in humans. I don't think anybody put it in us.

That's how I would differ from, let's say, a religious interpretation where the assumption is that we have been infused with some form of a soul from outside. Whereas I think what we call "soul" is generated by the complexification of our body, essentially our brain.

When you look at the pre-Christian version of "soul," you see that what they meant wasn't so much a soul that was a different substance infused or injected into the body. It referred to a quality in a person who was able to use surplus energy for the benefit of others, not needing to get it all for himself.

I came to the conclusion that "soul" is really our way of thinking about not devoting all of one's psychic energy to maximize oneself in any form, whether it's getting comfortable, rich, famous, or wealthy. Some of that energy is also devoted to somebody else's or something else's well-being, or advantage, or goal. So that kind of thing is "soul" as far as I'm concerned.

That's the leading edge of evolution, where you don't need to consume all your energy for your own purposes, but you can devote some of that energy for something that will benefit others, including the planet.

Flow for Evolution

WIE: In your research, you have explored what you call "flow," or optimal human experience, as having an important relationship to evolution. Could you explain this?

MC: My hunch is—and, of course, there is no proof of this—that if an organism, a species, learns to find a positive experience in doing something that stretches its ability; in other words, if you enjoy sticking your neck out and trying to operate at your best or even beyond your best, if you're lucky enough to get that combination, then you're more likely to learn new things, to become better at what you're doing, to invent new things, to discover new things.

We seem to be a species that has been blessed by this kind of thirst for pushing the envelope. Most other species seem to be very content when their basic needs are taken care of and their homeostatic level has been restored. They have eaten; they can rest now. That's it. But in our nervous system, maybe by chance or at random, an association has been made between pleasure and challenge, or looking for new challenges.

WIE: So we have a relationship between pleasure and the desire to be challenged further?

MC: Yes. Like most species, we have developed connections in our nervous system between eating and pleasure and between sex and pleasure. If we didn't have these connections, we probably wouldn't eat as much or reproduce as much. Survival to a certain extent depends on finding pleasure in those things that are necessary for survival.

But when you begin to enjoy things that go beyond survival, then there's more of a chance to transform yourself and to evolve. And since the state that I call "flow" depends on increasing skill and increasing challenge, then it leads toward complexification, which means greater differentiation and integration, of the organism.

WIE: Let's go back to "flow." Could you explain what it is?

MC: I did my doctoral dissertation, back in the early sixties, on young students at the Chicago Art Institute. One thing that I noticed—and I knew also from my own experience—is that when they started painting, they almost fell into a trance. They didn't seem to notice anything, and they just moved as if they were possessed by something inside themselves.

When they finished a painting, they would look at it, and they'd feel good for about five or ten minutes and then they'd put the painting away and not look at it much after that. What became important was the next canvas.

And so, obviously, there is something in the process of getting involved with the painting that is so attractive that it overrides almost everything else, except maybe the need to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom. So I tried to understand what psychologists have written about this kind of thing, this state of complete involvement.

And there really wasn't much. So I saw that this was something about human behavior that psychologists have largely neglected. And when they have studied it, they have essentially interpreted it as a means to an end, without looking at it as a motivation in itself.

In the early seventies, I spoke with chess players, rock climbers, musicians, and inner-city basketball players, asking them to describe their experience when what they were doing was really going well. I really expected quite different stories to emerge. But the interviews seemed in many important ways to focus on the same quality of the experience.

For instance, the fact that you were completely immersed in what you were doing, that the concentration was very high, that you knew what you had to do moment by moment, that you had very quick and precise feedback as to how well you were doing, and that you felt that your abilities were stretched but not overwhelmed by the opportunities for action.

In other words, the challenges were in balance with the skills. And when those conditions were present, you began to forget all the things that bothered you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what was going on—you felt you were a part of something greater and you were just moving along with the logic of the activity.

Everyone said that it was like being carried by a current, spontaneous, effortless like a flow. You also forget time and are not afraid of being out of control. You think you can control the situation if you need to. But it's hard because the challenges are hard.

It feels effortless and yet it's extremely dependent on concentration and skill. So it's a paradoxical kind of condition where you feel that you are on a nice edge, between anxiety on the one hand and boredom on the other. You're just operating on this fine line where you can barely do what needs to be done.

Since then, colleagues have interviewed by now ten thousand people around the world—women who weave tapestries in the highlands of Borneo, meditating monks in Europe, also Catholic Dominican monks, and so forth.

They all said these same things. So "flow" seems to be a phenomenological state that is the same across cultures. What people do to get into that state varies enormously, but the experience itself is described in very similar ways.

WIE: So do you see flow as a positive force for evolution?

MC: From the point of view of the individual, it's a very positive experience because it does provide the most memorable, intense enjoyment in life. But, it's not a simple story because there are two dangers with flow in terms of development or evolution. One is that at the individual level it can become addictive to the point that a person becomes increasingly dependent on one set of challenges, and when those challenges are exhausted, the person is left helpless.

For instance, one thing that has always struck me is how many of the great chess masters broke down into various forms of neurosis after they beat everybody else in the world and there was nowhere else to go. So that's one danger, at the individual level—that you stunt your development as a person.

At the social level, the danger is that you end up finding flow in challenges that are zero sum, that is, that somebody has to lose for you to win. For instance, war can produce flow if you are on the front line, and everything is clear, everything is focused, and you know exactly what you want to do, and so forth. So many people come back from war to find civilian life very boring and dull compared to their front line experience.

WIE: So how does flow work to further evolution?

MC: In a sense, flow is what drives this human need for going beyond what we have. In creativity or optimal experience, I have found that it is always a struggle, and the struggle has to do with essentially opening yourself up and yet delving deeply into yourself. Here are these two processes—differentiation and integration—which have to go hand in hand for complexity to evolve.

So I see flow as a very important dynamic in the evolution of complexity. It gives you the incentive, the motivation, the reward for going beyond what you have. But it does not give you an ethical direction, so I would say it has to be flow with soul.

*Occam's razor: The philosophical and scientific rule stating that the simplest of two or more competing theories or explanations is preferable.


Evolving Complexity

WIE: You speak about the goal of evolution as greater complexity. Can you say more about what that means?

MC: Yes. That's a very contested point because some people say, "Wait a minute. Yes, it's true that complexity does increase with time, but then so do a lot of simple things, and maybe in the next turn of the dice it will be cockroaches that will survive, because we will annihilate ourselves," and so forth.

WIE: Yes, that's the view presented by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and others—

MC: Right. I'll make two points. First, it's certainly not the case that complexity across the board is necessarily increasing because complexity is not like a tide that lifts everything up. But if you take a cross section of life on this earth, let's say every few hundred thousand years, the more recent the slice is, the more you will find some complex animals or organisms there.

So you ask: What is the pattern of change over time? Looking at these cross sections, the only thing that you can clearly say is that you find more complex organisms at each cross section. Not that every organism is more complex, not that every organism is always successful, but somehow, over time, you find that this type of complexity is evolving.

But there is a second point that is probably the more important one. Now that we are conscious of evolution, now that we are aware of what the heck is going on, and we know what entropy is like and we know what complexity of consciousness is like, then we naturally have to make a choice.

If we had to determine a goal for our evolution, I think that complexity would be the goal that we would endorse. And by virtue of this very fact, complexity would be the goal of evolution.

WIE: Why do you have faith in complexity as being the way to evolve?

MC: Because I like Mozart, I like Villard's sketches of Chartres, I like to understand what the scientists are finding out about the world, I like hot and cold running water. I may be wrong, but for whatever reason, through all experience, and through looking at the alternatives, this seems to me a more exciting way to go, more interesting, more satisfying—or maybe not more satisfying, but more enjoyable.

I spend four months a year in Montana. We don't have television; we don't have newspapers. It took us three weeks to find out that Princess Diana died. So I'm very aware of the beauty of simplicity, of being able to live with the bare minimum and with none of the excitements of living in the big city, of not being in the swim of information constantly. But at the same time, I don't think I would ever give up what humanity has accomplished.

I just want to make sure that it's going to be improving rather than falling. I mean, there is still brutality going on that is unprecedented, partly because our technology allows what, in the past, would have been just a scuffle among people to become a possibility of destroying thousands and thousands. So all of this is scary, but at the same time, if I had a choice, I don't think I would want to go back to anything less complex.

WIE: And what kinds of things impede evolution?

MC: Well, I think the great religions were all pretty good at pointing this out, whether we're talking about the five precepts of Buddhism or the capital sins of Christianity.

You find that those are pretty much on target, in the sense that they all have to do with things like greed—whether it's gluttony or envy—with wanting things for yourself, trying to get things for free from others by stealing, robbing, cheating, or depriving others of their opportunity to lead a good life.

So all these things psychologically go against the development of the soul or the development of complexity because they reduce the person back to his or her biological needs or the conventions of the culture, and they don't allow growth.

WIE: In The Evolving Self, you introduce, in a contemporary context, what you called the "veils of Maya" as an impediment to our individual evolution because these "veils" distort our sense of reality. Could you speak about that?

MC: Well, we all tend to take our experience, the surface experience that's presented to consciousness, as essentially being ultimate reality. There's a good reason for that. I mean, we can't examine every experience we have and ask, "Is this right or wrong? Is this good or bad?"

But there has to be a certain ability to distance yourself, for instance, from your needs. If every time you're hungry you have to eat, if every time you feel sexual stimulation you want to act it out, if every time somebody tells you to do something you say, "Yes, sir" without thinking about it, then you live a tremendously restricted life.

Suppose you are a Nazi, and you're told to take Jews to camp or to do something else like that—and you say, "Yes, sir" because this is what you're told, and this is reality and you feel you cannot do anything about it. If that's how you live, you'll never break out from these conditions, these programs that genes set up over millions of years, or that the culture sets up for us before we were born, or before we grow up. We are born with certain instructions to act, and then we are told by the culture how to act.

And while we have to honor the reality of these things, at the same time, we have to reflect on the implications that carrying out these instructions would have.

There is the Hindu notion of karma, which should also be translated in modern terms, because it's true that everything you do, in a sense, has an impact on everything else. We are part of a system, and if we act in a certain way, it doesn't stop there. It will have an effect both now and through time.

It will have an effect. So once you realize both that you're part of a system and that you are all these instructions, then you recognize that you have the responsibility of either endorsing all these instructions or trying to break out from them. And that way, you have to begin to pull away these veils of Maya.

WIE: You also use the term "transcendence" in your work. What do you mean by that?

MC: Essentially I think it follows on from your prior question. I think transcendence basically means being able to pull aside these veils and say, "Okay. These are the conditions under which I am operating. These are my genetic instructions. These are my cultural instructions, programs.

Now, what do I do?" When someone comes out and says, "Yes, everything pushes me in these directions, but given that, I try to understand the consequences of my action to the whole system I live in, including animals, plants, water, air, and all that—and given all that, I'm not going to go along with this program. I'm going to try to take a stand," to me that's transcendence, because it goes beyond the determining forces that the person is seemingly controlled by.


The Cutting Edge

WIE: You seem to imply in what you write that we need to make an evolutionary shift, collectively and as individuals. Could you talk more about that shift?

MC: Yes. You know, I see parts of it. I can't see the whole thing. I don't know what will be there. I don't like top-down pronouncements like "Everyone should do this" or "Everyone should do that." I think we each should reflect on what we can do individually, what our responsibility may be for our community, for our family, or just for ourselves personally—all the way from personal responsibility to what we can do for the nation or the planet.

There are so many levels on which one could make a choice that would either enhance or derail evolution. And so my attempt is just to make people aware that they are responsible—they are at the cutting edge of evolution. We all are at the cutting edge of evolution. By our actions we are going to implement the future. And that is where your responsibility is.

And let's forget huge plans—let's each think of ourselves as being an instrument, or not an instrument but, in a sense, almost a pseudopod of evolution. We are the evolution to ourselves.

WIE: Can you say a little more about what it means to be on the cutting edge of evolution?

MC: Stretching back to this notion of karma, it means that your actions have repercussions all over. You can act in a way that makes evolution more likely to proceed toward complexity, whether by being nice to your spouse or to your children, by trying to teach people, by being a better worker, by getting people to see that good work is more important than what you get for it.

By essentially endorsing complexity—looking for ways to enhance differentiation or uniqueness and to encourage integration or connection with something greater—at each choice point that you encounter in your life, you become evolution. You are then the embodiment of complexity advancing into the future.

WIE: And all those things that you mentioned—taking responsibility for each other, for our work, for the earth—are very life-affirming. So, does evolution have a purpose?

MC: Evolution doesn't have a purpose in the human sense, as far as I know. But because we are human, we can give it a purpose. We are now in the position of being responsible for evolution, for life. It's no longer just a mindless universe. I mean, it is a mindless universe, which has generated through complexity a mind that now has to decide where we want to go.

So, in that sense, now it has a purpose, it seems to me. It's our purpose. And we have to decide what that purpose is. What I'm trying to claim is that complexity, which in the past was what evolution generated—whether intentionally or not—has given us the opportunity to say, "Yes. This is what we want to make happen, this is what we want to become the conscious agents of."

WIE: Two leading spiritual thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, Sri Aurobindo, the Indian spiritual master, philosopher, and poet, and Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, spoke about the purpose of evolution from a spiritual perspective. Aurobindo saw evolution's purpose as divine, already "involved" in matter as well as in human consciousness. God is gradually realized or manifested through evolution. He wrote:

The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is. . . . If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the Divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.

MC: Yes. Yes, I think that is essentially very well said. I also like the fact that he seems to be putting most of this in a kind of questioning form—is it not? should it not? Because it's true that there is no reason not to look at things that way. In fact, maybe that is the best way to look at it.

I find my own responsibility at the edge of what can be known within the terms of my understanding at the moment. And I can posit that there is a lot more beyond that. But what may be there, and what is likely to be there, is not revealed to me. So I don't see positing that as my task.

If I were to do that, I would become a religious seer or a guru or something like that. And that's not what I am. So, I don't do that, even though I think it's probably true.

The Secret of Happiness!

Flow: What's worth living for? - by :Rob Jellinghaus

In late 1994, I read a book named Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by one Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The book has had a lasting effect on me, and the concept of flow has worked itself deeply into my thinking. This page explains the basic idea of flow, and touches on some of the reasons it's a powerful concept. The page contains:

Flow, explained

Csikszentmihalyi is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, who has been studying human enjoyment since 1963. The question he posed himself was simple: What is fun? What makes some experiences enjoyable, and other experiences not?

It is a surprisingly deep question, considering all the varieties of fun. Some people enjoy painting, others rock climbing. Some consider parenting one of life's most stimulating activities; others are galvanized by the corporate whirl. Some enjoy whittling, others hiking. Are there any common threads that tie these experiences together?

As it turns out, there indeed are. When Csikszentmihalyi interviewed all the kinds of people listed above, he discovered a common thread to their stories. The following is taken from his book The Evolving Self, pages xii-xiv, and is hopefully brief enough to be readable yet long enough to explain the key idea. Csikszentmihalyi is describing some of the painters he interviewed:

When a painting was beginning to get interesting they could not tear themselves away from it; they forgot hunger, social obligations, time, and fatigue so that they could keep moving it along. But this fascination lasted only as long as a picture remained unfinished; once it stopped changing and growing, the artist usually leaned it against a wall and turned his or her attention to the next blank canvas.

It seemed clear that what was so enthralling about painting was not the anticipation of a beautiful picture, but the process of painting itself. At first this seemed strange, because psychological theories usually assume that we are motivated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear, or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige.

The idea that a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working, lacked credibility. But if one stops to reflect, this behavior is not as unusual as it may seem at first.

Artists are not the only ones who spend time and effort on an activity that has few rewards outside itself. In fact, everyone devotes large chunks of time doing things that are inexplicable unless we assume that the doing is enjoyed for its own sake. Children spend much of their lives playing.

Adults also play games like poker or chess, participate in sports, grow gardens, learn to play the guitar, read novels, go to parties, walk through woods--and do thousands of other things--for no good reason except that the activities are fun.

Of course, there is always the possibility that one will also get rich and famous by doing these things. The artist may get a lucky break and sell her canvas to a museum. The guitarist may learn to play so well that someone will offer him a recording contract.

We may justify doing sports to stay healthy, aand go to parties because of possible business contacts or sexual adventures. External goals are often present in the background, but they are seldom the main reason why we engage in such activities. The main reason for playing the guitear is that it is enjoyable, and so is talking with people at a party.

Not everyone likes to play the guitar or go to parties, but those who spend time on them usually do so because the quality of experience while invovled in these activities is intrinsically rewarding. In short, some things are just fun to do.

This conclusion, however, does not get us very far. The obvious question is, Why are these things fun? Strangely enough, when we try to answer that question, it turns out that contrary to what one would have expected, the enormous variety of enjoyable activities share some common characteristics.

If a tennis player is asked how it feels when a game is going well, she will describe a state of mind that is very similar to the description a chess player will give of a good tournament. So will be a description of how it feels to be absorbed in painting, or playing a difficulat piece of music.

Watching a good play or reading a stimulating book also seems to produce the same mental state. I called it "flow," because this was a metaphor several respondents gave for how it felt when their experience was most enjoyable--it was like being carried away by a current, everything moving smoothly without effort.

Contrary to expectation, "flow" usually happens not during relaxing moments of leisure and entertainment, but rather when we are actively involved in a difficult enterprise, in a task that stretches our mental and physical abilities.

Any activity can do it. Working on a challenging job, riding the crest of a tremendous wave, and teaching one's child the letters of the alphabet are the kinds of experiences that focus our whole being in a harmonious rush of energy, and lift us out of the anxieties and boredom that characterize so much of everyday life.

It turns out that when challenges are high and personal skills are used to the utmost, we experience this rare state of consciousness. The first symptom of flow is a narrowing of attention on a clearly defined goal. We feel involved, concentrated, absorbed. We know what must be done, and we get immediate feedback as to how well we are doing.

The tennis player knows after each shot whether the ball actually went where she wanted it to go; the pianist knows after each stroke of the keyboard whether the notes sound like they should. Even a usually boring job, once the challenges are brought into balance with the person's skills and the goals are clarified, can begin to be exciting and involving.

The depth of concentration required by the fine balance of challenges and skills precludes worrying about temporarily irrelevant issues. We forget ourselves and become lost in the activity. If the rock-climber were to worry about his job or his love life as he is hanging by his fingertips over the void, he would soon fall. The musician would hit a wrong note, the chess player would lose the game.

The well-matched use of skills provides a sense of control over our actions, yet because we are too busy to think of ourselves, it does not matter whether we are in control or not, whether we are winning or losing. Often we feel a sense of transcendence, as if the boundaries of the self had been expanded.

The sailor feels at one with the wind, the boat, and the sea; the singer feels amysterious sense of universal harmony. In those moments the awareness of time disappears, and hours seem to flash by without our noticing.

This state of consciousness... comes as close as anything can to what we call happiness....

That is flow. When I read this description, I knew immediately what he was talking about. Do you?

More about flow

- "People seem to get more flow from what they do on their jobs than from leisure activities in free time." It turns out that watching TV is not at all a flowful activity. People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV's main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.

- Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not "wasting time".
Some activities lend themselves to flow. Immediate feedback, commensurate challenges and skills, and clear goals are all precursors to flow. Lack of these makes flow difficult to achieve.

- Some people are inclined to flow. They set goals even when apparently doing nothing, and are able to focus their attention easily. These sorts of people can experience flow even in difficult situations--prison camps and harsh jobs being two examples Csikszentmihalyi studied.

- Flow tends to result in personal growth. By engaging in flow, your skills develop, requiring greater challenges to maintain the balance needed for flow.

Flow and society

I always was convinced, for some reason, that it was more or less all right to do whatever you liked, as long as you truly loved doing it. I still believe that, but now I know why: if you love doing it, it's a way for you to achieve flow.

Perhaps it's coming of age in the 90's, but I've never had the impression I would have only one career. I have known for years that computer programming was a flow activity for me, and working on these pages is also turning out to be a considerable source of flow. Netsurfing can be flow, if directed and focused, but if you're idly drifting in channel-surf mode, it is as mind-addling as TV.

You can be happy without a million things. Mystics and saints have always known it; this is why. And what relief, to know that flow can potentially come from anywhere! Knowing it is not the same as creating it, of course, but I have found that just understanding the premises of flow has helped me achieve it more often.

I believe that TV is an inherently anti-flow device; it is almost impossible to produce a state of flow via TV. Computers are inherently more flexible, and can be used to achieve or enhance flow. Computer programming is a new form of flow. But computers can also be used for shallow, mind-stuffing content, which may produce momentary flow while bringing no lasting growth. Just because a computer game keeps you up all night doesn't mean you're really learning anything.

Not all flow is good. Some veterans have said that their war memories are dramatically more vivid than any of their other memories... those life-and-death experiences can be consummate flow episodes. Wartime in general is a demanding, challenging, flow-prone experience, which explains much of the appeal of gangs in inner cities. When you have nothing else to occupy you and no guidance in creating your own challenges, hunt-and-be-hunted is appealing. Likewise, being a corporate raider can be flowful, even if you are doing major damage in the process. Bereaucracies are not flowful. Startups are flowful.

Kids raised in a home where they are challenged yet secure will be more able to achieve flow. If home life is too erratic and unpredictable, kids can't focus their energy; if home life is too sedate and boring, with no challenges, kids will take the path of least resistance and veg out. Parents who push their kids, while setting firm boundaries and giving lots of support, will find their kids eager to flow.

Freedom--to speak, to write, to read, to live as one chooses--is not essential to flow. But a free society enables more different kinds of flow experiences, and more outlets for flow, than an unfree society.

Religion can be a powerful aid to flow. If you believe you know why the universe ticks, and if you believe that your actions somehow affect the balance or at least your own fate, then almost everything can become flow. This is the messianic urge which drove the Crusades... believing God is on your side can transform your consciousness completely. Conversely, without some core set of beliefs to make sense of the universe, flow can be difficult to achieve at all. Combine this with the point above about freedom, and you see why modern culture is currently struggling with these ideas.

Can you rank societies, and perhaps even religions, based on how much opportunity for flow they create among all segments of the population? What would such a ranking look like? Where would the U.S. fall?

It is crucial to remember that flow is about finding life enjoyable for its own sake, rather than about structuring life so there are more external rewards. This makes flow a very difficult thing to think about.in conventional terms. We are used to thinking of our lives in terms of how much income we have access to, or how many partners or children we have. It's hard to internalize that those are not the important parameters of how happy--how flowful--your life is... they are just the objective terms, the ones which can be independently measured. You cannot quantify flow--at least not yet.

Flow and the Future

The best of all possible worlds, I think, would be a world in which just about everyone could find a way to live in a state of genuine, sustainable, expansive flow.

This may well be the biggest challenge humanity has yet faced: how to create a world in which everyone can be challenged and involved?

Long ago, all life was a struggle to survive, continuously demanding. More recently, we learned to create some measure of security for ourselves, but still we were each responsible for providing for ourselves. Now, most of what we create is over and above what we need to survive, and we are increasingly distant from the (relatively few) people who provide for our needs. Briefly: we are creating a world where the few can produce all that the rest need to live. ***

In our modern world, the old patterns of occupations no longer apply. In the future, even fewer people will be "working" in the sense of producing goods needed for survival. What will this mean, when fewer people need to work, and hence when fewer people have an external context in which to feel challenged--in which to feel flow?

Will our highest flow responses always come from challenges to our survival? And if so, will we find that if our survival is no longer at stake, we experience less flow?

How can one help someone else experience flow, if it is so personal? How can even the preconditions for flow be disseminated through society? Flow is intrinsically enjoyable... how can we use this to promote flow universally?

The darkest scenario: humanity comes up with no good answer, and most of the humans on the planet wind up living off welfare and watching hyper-TV, amusing themselves to death, never experiencing flow. Or: most humans are so desperately struggling to survive that war becomes the most common type of flow in the world.

The brightest scenario: everyone in the world realizes that the challenge before us is to reduce our impact on the planet, and to create new possibilities for human expression (that don't involve more damage to the world). This becomes an endeavor that provides meaning and structure to everyone's life: this becomes the greatest opportunity for collective, global flow--and the best object of that flow--that has ever been. Humanity comes out the other side with a better sense of itself and its potential in the universe than it has ever had.

Which do you prefer?

Research on Happiness

Academics at Gothenburg University in Sweden have come up with an interesting proposition: hard work is the only path to happiness. Their research, conducted over three years, shows that money, love and success bring only temporary joy, whereas the effort taken to achieve a goal provides lasting satisfaction. The researchers have pitted their finding against the claims of the tourism industry, which tells potential customers that a break from work is the best way to be happy.

You need not be an Einstein or a Max Weber to know that the Swedes have got it absolutely right. Happiness can't be bought with cash. Neither can the leisure industry sell it. Happiness has to be earned by pursuing it in meaningful ways, and what is meaningful varies from person to person. For a scientist, the engagement with a scientific problem is the most meaningful aspect of his existence. In the case of a writer, it is his struggle with words, plots, images and ideas that defines happiness. A musician discovers joy when he manages to express himself in his music. In each case, the journey is what matters and not the destination.

Work becomes tyranny for a person when it becomes a chore, forced by external factors and conditions. It then ceases to be a pursuit of happiness. In our times, the dialectic between work and happiness is very often misunderstood. When the link between the two is ruptured, we try to find a solution elsewhere. We try to heal the symptom while leaving the cause unattended.

The idea of holiday as a break from work refuses to recognize that happiness can be found in work. Tourism industry plays on this confusion and offers leisure as a solace to those in pursuit of happiness. Could Kalidasa have preferred an idle weekend in the Himalayas to chasing the cloud in his imagination while writing Megha Sandesa? Or would Michelangelo have traded his love for marble with sailing on the Adriatic?