Depth Psychology

I spent most of my spare time rereading a couple of books for the past a few weeks. For The Passion of the Western Mind, I did not finish the last one third of the book in my first attempt. Once I was done with whole book I was surprised that the author puts so much weights on the influence of depth pschology like Jung's work(As a matter of fact this is one of the criticism of the book). Since I was also rereading some chapters of Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology , it makes me to want to read a bit more about Jung. So I ordered two new books about Jung: Jung to Live By and Jung: A Very Short Introduction.

I admit that I might have been too much into Jung at this moment, but what the heck, that's usually the way we get to know things: we overshoot and overcorrect, but eventually we will end up with the right spot. We will see how it goes.

Out-growing

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the nessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This "out-growing" on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of his view the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so, did indeed become different. What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotions, viwed from the higher level of personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain-top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is now above it.

This is Jung talking about the goals of analysis.

sleep on it

This is on the list of Harvard Business Review Breakthrough ideas of 2007:

Conscious deliberation, however long and careful, can be a surprisingly crude and ineffective tool.

Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision—but don’t try to analyze the information. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it for a day or two. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.

Neuroplasticity

This is hardly a new idea: the link between mind and brain is bidirectional, our brain determines what we think and feel, and what we think may change the physical structure of our brain as well. But now it starts to become the frontier of neuroscientists.

..[A]ttention can alter the layout of the brain as powerfully as a sculptor's knife can alter a slab of stone. ..[T]he discovery that neuroplasticity cannot occur without attention has important implications. If a skill becomes so routine you can do it on autopilot, practicing it will no longer change the brain. And if you take up mental exercises to keep your brain young, they will not be as effective if you become able to do them without paying much attention.

...[m]onks with the most hours of meditation showed the most dramatic brain changes. That was a strong hint that mental training makes it easier for the brain to turn on circuits that underlie compassion and empathy. ..."This positive state is a skill that can be trained.."

Every Friday our Yoga teacher always ends our session with the following words: "Mentally give your thanks to everyone for being here, mentally give your thanks to the room, mentally extend your good will to everyone, everything, everywhere. Om shanti."

I will pay more attention when I say it in my heart today and onwards.

Happiness and Success

If you are a highly motivated person, probably you will have to accept that your happiness level is below average. To advance human welfare, however, we need a motivational system that is NOT happiness-oriented:

The purpose of the human motivational system, according to psychologists, is not to make people feel happy, but rather to motivate actions that promote successful life outcomes. To be effective, this system should be flexible and adaptive, which it is. For example, people who become disabled typically experience deep depression after their accidents, but often adapt surprisingly quickly, soon reporting a mix of moods similar to what they had experienced before. Lottery winners invariably experience joy on receiving their windfalls, but often describe such feelings as fleeting.

To be happy is to take what you end up with, and to be successful is to get what you desire. When you accept and appreciate what you have, you experience what psychologists call synthetic happiness; When you achieve your goals or get what you really want, you have genuine happiness. The untold truth is that there is really not much difference between these two kinds of happiness: you are about equally well off with either one. But that runs in direct conflict with our motivational system: if we were to believe they are the same, nobody would take the extra effort to excel. As the result our culture makes us believe that genuine happiness is superior to synthetic one so that our society will advance. Or we might be able to explain it from an evolutionary perspective: the more motivated(less happy) tribes just won out in the process of natural selection.

If we do a global survey on happiness, I would not be surprised if most Latin American nations end up above countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Here is the original article from NYT, the main point there is to defend the pro-growth economic policy.