[Neurons] 2013 "Neurons" --- Meta Reflections #44

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall


Meta Reflections 2013  #44

Oct. 14, 2013


Transcendence #3

 

 

                TRANSCENDENCE AND HAPPINESS

 

 

Transcendence is a mystery.  Yes, transcendence is included and manifested
through the incredible and powerful mechanism of reflexivity by which we can
step back from ourselves and be aware of ourselves (#1).  And yes, your
reflexive self-consciousness is your glory as a human being, it enables you
to rise above yourself to direct yourself, the heart and soul of
self-leadership.  Yet it can also be misused as when you are not kind and
gentle with yourself.  Then you turn your energies against yourself and
create those unresourceful "dragon" states (#2).  And yet it this ability to
transcend yourself is still an incredible mystery.

 

At the heart of our ability to transcend our states and our self and to
develop higher levels of awareness about this experience that we call
"life," is our ability to make meaning of these higher levels.  Making
meaning at the lower levels enables us to identify what we are dealing with
when we encounter the world and all that it offers (identification).
Meaning-making also enables us to figure out how things work, what causes
what, what leads to what (causation).

 

This level of meaning-making has given us the power to control our world.
By it we have figured out how to meet all of the lower level needs: survival
needs-how to create agricultural industries, manufacturing industries,  etc.
We have learned how to meet our safety needs- how to be safe, how to
stabilize the dimensions in our lives, our economies, work, relationships,
etc.  We have learned how to meet our social needs for bonding, love, and
affection, etc.  We have learned how to meet our self needs for importance,
competence, worth, etc.  Coping well with all these needs makes us
successful at this level of need- the animal level.

 

Yet with all of our prosperity, with the standards of living rising all over
the planet, we are still not satisfied.  Human life is not just about
meeting our lower needs.  There's a transcendent area within us that remains
to be satisfied, an area of need for being fully and truly human, for
meeting our self-actualizing needs.  Maslow discovered that we are
biologically organized with a set of drives that are transcendent drives-
the being needs that transcend our doing (achievement) needs.  Here we
strive to be above and beyond our instrumental doing.  And these needs are
not instrumental.  They are not means to some other end.  As
non-instrumental needs, we are motivated to be fully human, to transcend our
animal needs and to become fully human, fully alive.

 

What a mystery!  We are liberated by our prosperity but we are not fulfilled
by it.  Beyond all of that is the transcendent mystery of creating even
higher level meaning- so that we endow our life with a sense of
meaningfulness.  It is here that you can hear the call of transcendence:
What does it mean to be human, fully human?  What is the meaning of our
lives?

In a recent article in The Atlantic, the authors of an article "Meaning is
Healthier than Happiness" explored a new study published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on "happiness."  In first
defining happiness, they distinguished two forms:

1) Happiness as associated with selfish "taking" behavior.

2) Happiness as a sense of meaning associated with selfless "giving"
behavior.

 

The first "happiness" is happiness without meaning and is relatively
shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life.  It is focused solely on
getting one's own needs satisfied.  This kind of "pure happiness" is about
emotion, about "feeling good," about hedonic well-being or pleasure, and not
about helping others in need.  The researchers measured happiness by asking
subjects questions like:

How often did you feel happy?

How often did you feel interested in life?

How often did you feel satisfied?

 

The second "happiness" is about contributing to others.  This happiness is
more like "eudaimonic well-being" rather than an emotion of feeling good.
"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute
to others.  This makes life meaningful, but it does not necessarily make us
happy."  This happiness was defined as an orientation to something bigger
than oneself.  The researchers asked subjects questions like:

How often did you feel that your life has a sense of direction or meaning to
it?

How often did you feel that you had something to contribute to society?

            How often did you feel that you belonged to a community/ social
group?

 

Now what is even more fascinating in the study is that "Cole and Fredrickson
found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in
their lives-proverbially, simply here for the party-have the same gene
expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic
adversity.  That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for
bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response."  Their
conclusion?  "'Empty positive emotions' - like the kind people experience
during manic episodes or artificially euphoria from alcohol and drugs - 'are
about as good for you as adversity."

 

Conversely, the other "happiness" pattern, that of well-being through
life-meaningfulness had a different gene expression pattern.  "On the other
hand, if you are doing well and having a lot of healthy social connections,
your immune system shifts forward to prepare you for viruses, which you're
more likely to contract if you're interacting with a lot of people."

                                                

The point?  Feeling good is not enough.  You and I need meaning to thrive.
We need transcendent meaning that enables us to connect to something bigger
and larger than ourselves.  Feeling good is a by-product of another kind of
good- doing and being good as Aristotle contended. 

 

 

 

 

 




 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


     

    

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