Part one: Happiness Revisited

This is a summary from the book 《Flow》, which mainly presents concrete examples and general principles to transform boring and meaningless lives into ones full of enjoyment.

Content

We often ask ourselves the similar questions like:How could we have more enjoyable life? When do we feel most happy?

Author Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi lists the examples to show that it does not depend on outside events, but,rather, on how we interpret them. Also we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it.Because it is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. But there is a circuitous path that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness.

Our perceptions about our lives are the outcome of many forces that shape experience,each having an impact on whether we feel good or bad. Most of these forces are outside our control, such as our looks, our temperament, or our constitution and so on. Yet we can do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished, which is optimal experienceMihaly called. Optimal experience is something that we make happen in the moments, which usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Of course, such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. For example, the swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race yet this could have been the best moments of his life. The theory of Optimal experience is based on the concept of flow ( joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life) -the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind, in other words, the universe is simply indifferent. It is prudent not to expect that efforts to change external conditions will immediately improve the quality of our lives. Another reason is that we always hope rising expectations. Over the course of human evolution, each group of people developed myths and beliefs to transform the random, crushing forces of the universe into manageable, or at least understandable patterns. These religions provided satisfying goals for people to spend their lives pursuing. But today it is more difficult to accept the truths the religions have presented as definitive, because the forms no longer compels belief in an era of scientific rationality. A vital new religion may one day arise again but it is not now.

Today, to overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life with material splendor and astonishing variety of ills, apart from the goals others use to bribe us with, individuals should improve the content of experience and develop a set of our own. The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces. It is no longer necessary to struggle for goals that always seem to recede into the future, to end each boring day with the hope that tomorrow, perhaps, something good will happen. But it is not by abandoning ourselves to instinctual desires that we become free of social controls. We must also become independent from the dictates of the body(We cannot deny the facts of nature like eating or sexual intercourse, but we should certainly try to improve on them), and learn to take charge of what happens in the mind. Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there. To the extent that a frown from the boss spoils the day, we are not free to determine the content of experience. Since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.

All in all, the way is through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience. Then there is a question, how consciousness works and what it actually means to have experiences? The answer will be in Part Two .