Wisdom for Intrinsic Fulfillment

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If their parents fail to inform them of the many challenging, rewarding, incremental steps that led to their success, children may assume -- and parents may reinforce the delusion -- that success is achieved in one easy step and is a function of an inherited, natural, fixed ability. In this worldview, failure reflects poorly on the self or the ego, rather than being seen as an opportunity to learn from experience and persevere Covington, We may want to become winners and we may hope for the same for our children. However, we need to be careful what we wish for.

One problem we need to be aware of is that winners sometimes fail to help others become winners as a consequence of the effect that winning has on their brain and behavior. Being placed in an environment that allows one to win tends to increase testosterone levels, dominance behaviors, and the probability that one will continue winning. The emergence of dominance hierarchies in the animal kingdom is a function of how winning a challenge with one animal increases the probability of winning another challenge with other animals Landau, Winning increases testosterone levels, even amongst apparently coolheaded chess players Mazur et al, Winning and empowerment also increase dopamine levels in the brain, which is associated with increased motivation and positivity in the context of goal pursuit-- people become less cautious, more goal oriented, their sense of control increases, and they become over- optimistic in relation to the time it takes to achieve a goal Weick and Guinote, Wisdom entails that we gain perspective on the factors that empower people and the effects that power can have on behavior.

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Subtle, contextual factors may operate outside of our awareness. For example, soccer players show higher levels of testosterone before a home game compared with an away game Neave et al. Similarly, people who negotiate a sale price in their home office as opposed to an away office strike better deals Brown and Baer, The effects of experience, context, and posture on winning, power, and power-related behaviors may go unnoticed by people much of the time, and yet our sense of power is being constantly shaped, much like when implicit cultural biases lead both men and women to implicitly regard men as more powerful than women Rudman et al.

In a social context, emotions, thoughts and behaviors that empower one group at the expense of disempowering another group can have terrible negative consequences for those who have been disempowered. Similar negative testing conditions can be created which sanction the prejudicial view that older adults are less intellectually competent that younger adults — the consequence of which is worse performance amongst the older adults being tested under these conditions Hess et al.

Manipulations that make people feel like subordinates trigger cortisol stress responses Solopsky, and hyperactivate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in self-monitoring and self-consciousness Zink et al. The social evaluative threat that comes with feeling like a subordinate, feeling judged and rejected, can have a negative long-term impact on health Dickerson et al. These power dynamics play out in all realms of life, but their impact can be hugely magnified in the context of national and international politics and business.

Success in politics and business comes at the risk of the potentially corrupting influence of power. To the extent that an increase in power can result in a decrease in perspective and empathy , an increase in dominance, goal focus, an illusion of control, abstract thinking and risk-taking tendencies, we see a potentially dangerous admixture of brain-behavior dynamics that can potentially destroy the lives of millions of people.

Robertson skillfully describes how power, poor perspective, illusions of control, and brutal dominance has resulted in countless foolish, risky, and aggressive decisions by business executives and politician in recent history. For example, he recounts the public outcry in the U. Robertson also describes how, in comparison with Bill Clinton and other world leaders, an analysis of the speeches of Tony Blair revealed that Blair had a hugely inflated belief that he could control world events Dyson, , which may explain a number of his foolhardy decisions to go to war and his subsequent falling out with Bill Clinton over foreign policy.

Unfortunately, people with a high need for power not only have a drive to win, they also become stressed when they lose Wirth, et al.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Power needy people respond more vigorously to angry faces Schultheiss et al. As such, power needy leaders may reinforce groupthink within close inner circles and force failures of judgment upon a democratic society that strives for open deliberation, critical thinking, and collective intelligence. But power need not always damage our social and moral sensibilities and make us more prone to ballsy, reckless, risky behavior that ignores the needs and perspectives of others.

David McClelland described two types of power needs, p-power power needs for personal goals and s-power power needs focused on goals for an institution, a group or a society. While p-power people tend to see life as a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers, s-power people are regulated by reflective judgment, self control, and social responsibility and are driven to win for wider, social purposes McClelland, Studies reveal that men with exclusively p-power tendencies show double the testosterone levels of men who possess a mixture of both p-power and s-power when imagining winning a contest; furthermore, men with a mixture of p-power and s-power do not show the same dominance-testosterone link to actually winning the contest as do men with exclusively p-power tendencies Schultheiss et al.

Studies also suggest that while women have on average the same levels of p-power as men, they show higher s-power on average than men Chusmir and Parker, , suggesting that women are more motivated than men to control others for the wider benefit of communities and organizations, not just for themselves. Returning to the case of Pablo Picasso and his son Paulo, it is clear that parents need to be particularly careful in the way they wield power in the home.

Researchers have found that the use of assertive and forceful control by parents can lead to more resentful, disruptive and antisocial behavior in their children over time Kochanska et al. However, power does not corrupt everyone. Research suggests that power makes bullies of people who feel inadequate in the role of boss Fast and Chen, We need people to feel empowered and we need people to assume positions of leadership , but Robertson suggests that people with power need to audit themselves for potential distortions in thinking and behavior that power can cause — they need to keep their p-power in check and maintain the social conscience and perspective that derives from their s-power.

Robertson also notes that the temptation in a materialistic society is to become individualistic in our pursuit of power, money, and status, thus compromising our s-power tendencies. The sad reality is that materialism and money can act like a drug that may destroy judgment, degrade morality and make people miserable and unhappy if money is not used for altruistic and social purposes Kasser, They thrive on being able to have an impact and they do not cripple themselves by believing their success to be due to inherited, unchangeable qualities…Winners feel in control of life, and that sense of control will help shield them from stress and help them succeed better and live longer and happier.

But true winners appreciate that, no matter how much of chimera it is, the ego is a dangerous dog. Nor can a visualization perform in the soul what has been described. Just as visualization, when coming in contact with the ordinary outer world, leads to reasoning, so the inner life of a visualization, not lacking direction but amenable to guidance as set forth, leads out beyond the visualization itself and transforms it. It becomes something that may not be a verdict but is at least a visualization fraught with significance and pointing out beyond the soul.

This is what in the true sense of the term we call imagination. When visualization comes in contact with the outer world through perception, it points to reasoning, but through the inner process we have described it points to what we call inner imagination in the true sense. Just as perception is not mere visualization, so imagination is not visualization either.

By means of perception, the life of visualization comes in contact with a primarily unfamiliar outer world. By means of the process described, visualization adapts itself to what we may call the imaginative world. There we have the process that in our imaginative life enriches our conceptions.

There is, however, something that intervenes between imagination and visualizations. Imagination has a way of announcing itself quite realistically the moment it appears. When our soul really attains to imagination, it senses in its life of visualizations something akin to what it feels in its life of perceptions. In the latter the soul feels — well, its direct contact with the outer world, with corporeality; in imagination it feels an indirect contact with a world that at first also appears to it as an outer world, but this is the outer world of the spirit.

When this spirit begins to live in the visualizations — those that really attain to imagination — it is just as coercive as outer corporeality. Just as little as we can imagine a tree as golden when we are in contact with the outer world — just as the outer world forces us to visualize in a certain way — so we feel the compulsion emanating from the spirit when visualization rises to imagination. In that case, however, we are at the same time aware that this life of visualizations expresses itself independently of all the ways and means by which visualizations are ordinarily given a content.

In ordinary life this takes place by reason of our having perceptions through our eyes, ears, etc. In imagination we suffer our visualizations to be filled by the spirit. Nothing must intervene that might become the content of our soul by way of the bodily organs, nothing that enters us through our eyes or ears. We are directly conscious of being free of all that pertains to outer corporeality. We are as directly free of all that as we are — to use a material comparison — of the processes of the outer body during sleep.

For this reason, as far as the total organism is concerned all conditions are the same during imagination as during sleep, except that imaginative consciousness takes the place of the unconsciousness of sleep. What is otherwise wholly empty, what has separated from the body, is filled with what we may call imaginative conceptions.

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So the only difference between a man in sleep and one in imagination is that the parts that in sleep are outside the physical body are devoid of all conceptions in ordinary sleep, whereas in imagination they are filled with imaginative conceptions. Now, an intermediate condition can appear.

It would be induced if a man in sleep were filled with imaginative conceptions but lacked the power to call them to consciousness.

Such a condition is possible, as you can gather from ordinary life. I will merely remind you that in ordinary life you perceive any number of things of which you are not aware. Walking along the street, you perceive a whole world of things that you do not take into your consciousness. This is shown when you dream of curious things, for there are dreams that are indeed strange in this respect.

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You dream, for example, that a man is standing by a lady and the lady says this or that. Well, the dream remains in your consciousness, you remember it, but after you've thought about it you have to admit that the situation actually occurred, only you would have known nothing of it if you hadn't dreamed of the experience. The whole event passed your consciousness by, and not until you dreamed it did the picture enter your consciousness. Thus, perceptions that have occurred can leave consciousness untouched, and imaginations that indeed live in the soul can also leave consciousness untouched so that they do not appear directly.

In that case they appear to consciousness in a manner similar to that of the perceptions we have just described.

They appear to us in semi-consciousness, in dreaming. Imaginations of that sort can shine into our waking day-consciousness and there fluctuate and pass. An imagination of that sort does enter the everyday human consciousness, but there it experiences changes. This is one of the points at which we are able to perceive the direct streaming in of what we can call the spiritual world into our ordinary world.

Now let us examine the other aspect, the emotions. It has already been said that the psychologist under discussion keeps within the soul, that he therefore follows up all that concerns impulses of will only as far as these remain within the soul, and that he stops short at the emotions. Everything that men do is motivated by a desire, a passion, an urge, that is, that element within the region of the soul that must be called emotion. Of course, nothing happens through emotions alone, and as long as we remain within the soul nothing need happen.

No matter how violently we intensify any emotion, we cannot thereby make something happen that is independent of the soul because nothing that remains in the soul is a true expression of will. If the soul never emerged out of itself, but merely kept wanting to experience desires and emotions — anything from the deepest reverence to disgust — nothing would happen that is independent of the soul.

When we recognize will in its true form as a fact, the region of emotions points out beyond the soul as well. The manner in which this sphere of emotions points out beyond the soul is singular.

What does it suggest first of all? Well, if we take the simplest expression of will — if we raise a hand, walk about, strike the table with some instrument or do anything else that involves the will — we see that something takes place in the realm of reality that we can call a passing over of our emotions by way of an inner impulse to the hand movement, to something that is certainly no longer in our soul.

Yet in a certain way it is within us because all that happens as a result of a genuine will impulse when we set our body in motion, and as a continuation of this, something external as well, lies by no means outside the circle comprising the being of man. Here, through emotions, we are led on the other side into an externality, but into a quite different kind of externality, into our own corporeality, which is our own externality.

We descend from our psychic to our bodily self, to our own corporeality, but for the moment we do not know how we accomplish this in external life. Imagine the effort it would cost if, instead of moving your hand, you had to construct an apparatus, possibly worked from the outside by springs or the like, that would produce the same effect as you do in picking up this chalk! Imagine that you would have to be able to think out all that and realize it by means of a machine.

You can't think that out and there is no such machine; yet that apparatus exists. Something occurs in the world that is certainly not in our consciousness, for if it were we could easily build the apparatus. Something takes place, then, that really pertains to us, but of which we have no immediate knowledge. We must ask what would have to take place to make us aware of a movement of the hand, or of any motion of the body obeying the will? Another reality as well, the one that is outside us, would have to be able to enter our consciousness instead of halting before it.

We would need to have before us a process such as takes place in our own body without penetrating consciousness — a process equally external, yet connected with consciousness in such a way that we would be aware of it. We should have to have something that we experienced in the soul, yet it would have to be something like an outer experience in this soul. So something just as ingenious as the picking up of the chalk would have to take place in our consciousness — just as ingenious and just as firmly based on abiding external laws.

Some external event would have to enter our consciousness, acting in accord with prevailing laws, that would have the following effect. All the details of the hand motions would have to occur within consciousness. Now, that is the process that takes place in the case of intuition. We can put it this way. When we can grasp with our own consciousness something that comes to full expression within this consciousness — not merely as knowledge but as an event, a world event — we are dealing with intuition, or more precisely, with intuition in the higher sense, such as is meant in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

Within intuition, then, we are dealing with the governing will. While that shrewd psychologist, Brentano, finds only emotions within the soul, not will, because the will does not exist for ordinary consciousness, it remains for the consciousness that transcends ordinary consciousness to find something that is a higher event.

It is the point at which the world enters and plays a part in consciousness. This transition sets in when we acquire such power of self-observation as to enable us not merely to will something and follow this by the deed, with thoughts and deeds standing dynamically side by side, so to speak, but to start expanding our emotions themselves over the quality of our deeds. In many cases this is even useful, yet it can happen in life that in performing an action we are gratified or disgusted by it.

I don't believe an unprejudiced observer of life can deny the possibility of so expanding the emotions as to include likes and dislikes for one's own actions, but this co-experiencing of them in the emotions can be intensified. When this has been intensified to the point of its full potentiality in life, this transition reveals what we can call the human conscience. All stirrings of conscience occur at the transition from the emotions to intuition.

If we seek the location of conscience, we find it at this transition.

The soul is really open laterally on the side of imagination and on that of intuition, but it is closed on the side where we encounter the impact, as it were, of outer corporeality through perception. It achieves a certain fulfillment in the realm of imagination, and another when it enters the realm of intuition — in the latter case through an event. Now, since imagination and intuition must live in one soul, how can a sort of mediation, a connection of the two, come about in this single soul?

In imagination we have primarily a fulfilled image of the spiritual world, in intuition, an event that impinges out of the spiritual world. An event we encounter in the ordinary physical world is something that leaves us no peace, so to speak. We try to understand it, then we seek the essence underlying it. It is the same in the case of an event in the spiritual world that is to penetrate our consciousness.

Let us consider this more closely. How does imagination first of all penetrate consciousness? Well, we found it first on the side of the emotions, but there, though it enters consciousness, enters the soul, it does so primarily on the side of the emotions, not on the side of visualization.

It is the same in the case of intuition. Intuition can enter the soul life without providing the possibility of being visualized. Intuition, however, is to be found on the side of the emotions. You see, in the whole spiritual life of man intuition is linked with the emotions. I will give you an example, a well-known dream. A couple had a son who suddenly became ill and in spite of all that could be done he died within a day.

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The parents were profoundly affected. The son continually occupied their thoughts, that is, their memory; they thought of him a great deal. One morning they found that during the night both had had the same dream, which they recounted to each other. You can find this dream cited by a certain materialistic interpreter of dreams who turns the most grotesque somersaults in attempting to explain it. They dreamt that the son demanded to be exhumed, as he had been buried alive. The parents made all possible efforts to comply with this demand, but as they lived in a country in which exhumation was not permitted after so long a lapse of time, it could not be done.

How can we arrive at a sort of explanation of the phenomenon presented in this dream? Well, one premise is obvious. The parents' continuous recollection of the son, who was present in the spiritual world as a spiritual being, created a bridge to him. Let us suppose you admit that a bridge to the deceased was built through memory. Instead, there simply came about a contact in the night between parents and son. He did tell them something, or endeavored to instill something into their souls, but since the parents had no way of bringing to consciousness what it was that the son had instilled into their souls, their accustomed conceptions stood in the way of the real events.

What the son manifestly wanted was something quite different because such visualizations could only have been gathered from the visualization substance of their accustomed life. The other part I will explain to you by means of another dream, the dream a peasant woman had.

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