June 14, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Life rushes at you from the first moment. You never can quite catch up. There are always things that you remember later that you forgot to remember for long periods of time. You learn to live with this. You come to accept that things arising within you that seemed very significant for a moment can get lost inside you.
It’s the things that really get to you hurtfully that you cling to. These are the flashing red lights on your inner dashboard and you obsess about them for hours or much longer until you finally come to grips with them in one way or another. When you find the inner method that works to put the hurt aside you keep using it even if you’re not quite sure how you did it. As long as you remember the inner attitude, the inner face you put on to yourself that enables you to shut the hurt away, that’s all you think you need, a little strange inner anesthesia you somehow instinctively come to discover and use. You never even imagine you might actually be able someday to figure out how you yourself work inside.
As you grow up things become a little clearer to you, to the degree that you actually pay some attention to your inner life. This is of course what we now, thanks to Dr. John Flavell in the 1970s, call metacognition.
Dr. Abraham Maslow never actually conducted empirical research and experimentation in order to come to the magnificent intuition of the hierarchy of needs. He might have come across the ancient India chakra system of seven levels which is highly reminiscent of the hierarchy of needs (which originally had five levels and later in his life he added the spiritual sixth level).
What research he did was of the lives of self-actualized people, others like himself who had graduated from being motivated mostly by the esteem of others and self-esteem, to what he called the level of self-actualization, relaxing into the playful outward flow of inner creativity coming from the soul of the individual’s being, simply letting this happen without having any specific outcome goal for where it might all lead, the doing of it being fun for its own sake, autotelic as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it, simply doing something for its own sake.
Maslow also studied himself very closely. He was expert at metacognition, introspection with concentration, meditating on himself. This and studying the lives of other self-actualized people like Einstein and Freud was the way he came to his towering insight into how what drives us evolves as we mature, if we do.
His focus was on motivations, needs, the drivers which are the causes of our behavior, the reasons why we are attracted to X and repelled by Y. And how this magnetic setting shifts over the course of a fulfilled lifetime.
Piaget was not looking at motivations at all. His interest was into the way our use of our cognition apparatus shifts as we go through childhood into adulthood.
Long before I came across these amazing teachers, I was obsessed with studying myself and both what seemed to drive me and how I was using my inner tools. I figured out a lot of it and then started to see that others, like Maslow and Piaget, Csikszentmihalyi and Freud, Jung and Epictetus, and so many others, had come before me had already figured the same things out the same way.
In my outer life, about 25 years ago, while introducing the first set top box data to research standards (measuring the TV audience via the cable/satellite box), I discovered 265 psychological variables which appeared to drive 76% of our television program viewing choices. Then, about five years ago, I was studying those 265 variables and I began to see how I could cluster them based on the semantic proximity between certain words and concepts, first into 86 clusters I called Need States, and then into 15 superclusters I called Motivations. Once I saw the 15 Motivations I realized there was a great unexpected relationship with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
It appeared that whereas Maslow got to the hierarchy of needs by a “top down” approach, we had gotten to the same place by a big data “bottom up” approach. Our bottom-up approach resulted in finding more granularity than Maslow had posited. There was not a single level of esteem, there are several levels of esteem, and also a few levels of self-actualization, and so on. Maslow’s progression inspired the way I present the 15 levels, the sequence in which I envision individuals grow into higher and higher levels of motivation. But what do I mean by “higher”? I mean “more noble”.
Looking at the 15-level version, we can see that the top four levels are different than the eleven lower levels. The bottom eleven are all about taking care of oneself, whereas the top four are also about taking care of others, and are therefore more unselfish, noble, ethical. The highest of the 15 levels which I call Self-Transcendence (and is the sixth level Maslow added toward the end of his life and called the Spiritual level) is the fullest realization of this nobility.
When I say in the title above “Be Your Better Self” what I am saying is —
Be aware of what drives you, and when you can see that it is all of these 15 things but to varying degrees and not always the same weight given to each level, you will realize that you have control over what drives you.
You can catch yourself doing something which you are doing simply to gain status/prestige. Do you want to be someone who is driven by that not-so-lofty goal?
Taking control of your own drivers was given the name Self-Metaprogramming by John Lilly, in a conversation with Oscar Ichazo in the 1970s.
Once you take responsibility and control for determining your own motivations consciously, a flow of ideas begins to open up between your conscious and your subconscious – more of your subconscious is now conscious. The yogic tradition believes that ultimately it can all be conscious, with nothing left below the level of the conscious mind. This is what enables advanced yogis to control even autonomic functions such as metabolic rate. For the definitive analysis of the most advanced states of consciousness read Daniel Goleman’s classic The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience.
As you exercise conscious choice over your drivers, choosing to be driven by the highest motivations, more of your true essence will come out, and the influence of others which built the superfluous superstructure in your mind will recede, you will enter Flow state uninfluenced by the many distracting and contradictory inner voices and concerns about the lower motivations.
We are today at a very unique moment in history where much of human consciousness across the planet is dominated by pessimism, fear, anger, and hatred. And yet most human beings continue about their way doing little acts of kindness for each other every day. The pervasive mindset of world terror doesn’t seem to notice the supply of inner goodness we all keep demonstrating, because if it did notice, it would make the pessimism seem less justified.
Pessimism is its own punishment and it increases the probability of the feared scenario coming true.
When you are your better self you do notice and appreciate the goodness in us, and thereby you bring it out in all of us you connect with.
Give up the hatred of the people in the political party you abhor. They are just people like you.
George Washington warned us not to go with political parties at all. He said they would tear us apart. Let’s listen to his advice and stop making political parties the dominant game, they are just one aspect of the way we self-govern today, and maybe we’ll evolve even better ways to heed the first principles on which our nation was founded.
Recognize that anger and hatred inside is coming from your superfluous superstructure which was conditioned into you from the outside, and seize the moment to override the superstructure from the core essence of your own individuality and beingness. Both anger and hatred are permutations of fear which the superstructure of our mind finds more acceptable than fear. But giving in to such shallow mind games is to let oneself be run as if by autocompletes in a robotic coping system that continues to paint over the divine core of our being.
Choose to bring out the best of yourself. Focus on the top four levels of yourself. If something else bubbles up from the lower levels, don’t express those things right away. Give yourself time to decide about them before sharing them with others. Only express what will be constructive and uplifting.
My best to all,
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