How Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Helps Us Understand the Meaning of Life

Abra­ham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A The­o­ry of Human Moti­va­tion” was “writ­ten as pure psy­chol­o­gy,” notes the BBC, but “it has found its main appli­ca­tion in man­age­ment the­o­ry.” It has also become one of the best-known the­o­ries of human well-being. But whether you first encoun­tered it in an Intro Psych class or a busi­ness train­ing sem­i­nar, you’ll imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize the tri­an­gu­lar scheme of the “hier­ar­chy of needs,” lead­ing upward from basic phys­i­cal neces­si­ties to full self-actu­al­iza­tion.

Maslow’s the­o­ry had great explana­to­ry pow­er, offer­ing what he called a “third force” between ide­al­ism and mate­ri­al­ism. He was in line, he wrote, with the more spir­i­tu­al­ly-mind­ed prag­ma­tists, or what he called “the func­tion­al­ist tra­di­tion of James and Dewey… fused with the holism of Wertheimer, Gold­stein, and Gestalt Psy­chol­o­gy, and with the dynam­i­cism of Freud and Adler.” Against the gen­er­al trend in psy­chol­o­gy to pathol­o­gize, Maslow offered his paper as “an attempt to for­mu­late a pos­i­tive the­o­ry of moti­va­tion.”

His work helped inspire man­agers to “shape the con­di­tions that cre­ate people’s aspi­ra­tions,” says Ger­ald Hodgkin­son, psy­chol­o­gist at the War­wick Busi­ness School,” in order to influ­ence pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and loy­al­ty in their employ­ees. If this seems manip­u­la­tive, per­haps Maslow can be held no more respon­si­ble than can Freud for the use of his work by his nephew Edward Bernays, who almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ed mod­ern adver­tis­ing and pro­pa­gan­da using Freudi­an appeals.

Maslow had in mind some­thing grander than man­ag­ing human capital—“no less,” says Alain de Bot­ton in the School of Life video above, “than the mean­ing of life.” His quest came itself from a per­son­al moti­va­tion. “I was awful­ly curi­ous,” he once remarked, “to find out why I didn’t go insane.” Or, as de Bot­ton says, he want­ed to know “what could make life pur­pose­ful for peo­ple, him­self includ­ed, in mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca, a coun­try where the pur­suit of mon­ey and fame seemed to have eclipsed any more inte­ri­or or authen­tic aspi­ra­tions.”

De Bot­ton walks us through the hier­ar­chy, which divides into two dimen­sions, the material—basic bio­log­i­cal needs (includ­ing sex) and the need for safety—and the psy­cho­log­i­cal. In this last cat­e­go­ry, we find the social needs for belong­ing (“the love needs,” Maslow called them) and esteem, capped with the apex need—self-actualization—the real­iza­tion of one’s true pur­pose. “A musi­cian must make music,” wrote Maslow, “an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ulti­mate­ly hap­py. What a man can be, he must be.”

“How do we arrange our pri­or­i­ties and give due regard to the dif­fer­ent and com­pet­ing claims we have on our atten­tion?” De Bot­ton asks. In an increas­ing­ly dis­em­bod­ied cul­ture, we may ignore or neglect the needs of the body, even if we have the means to meet them, an unsus­tain­able course over the long term. Even those on the path of the “starv­ing artist” will sad­ly have to reeval­u­ate after a time, Maslow argued, giv­ing pri­or­i­ty to their need to eat over their cre­ative aspi­ra­tions. But Maslow’s is not, or not only, a the­o­ry of ratio­nal choice.

On the con­trary, he had a com­pas­sion­ate response to alien­ation and pover­ty of all kinds: “the bold pos­tu­la­tion,” he wrote “that a man who is thwart­ed in any of his basic needs may fair­ly be envis­aged sim­ply as a sick man…. Who is to say that a lack of love is less impor­tant than a lack of vit­a­mins?” The mate­r­i­al needs in Maslow’s scheme must be con­sis­tent­ly met in order to cre­ate a sta­ble base for all the oth­ers. Yet, while self-actu­al­iza­tion may sit at the top, its lack, accord­ing to Maslow, may still affect us as much as much if we suf­fered from “pel­la­gra or scurvy.”

It’s pos­si­ble to read in the hier­ar­chy of needs a psy­cho­log­i­cal elab­o­ra­tion of Marx’s slo­gan “from each accord­ing to his abil­i­ty, to each accord­ing to his needs,” but Maslow was no dialec­ti­cal mate­ri­al­ist. He val­ued spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and if he was “ambiva­lent about busi­ness,” he also held out hope that com­pa­nies would mar­ket prod­ucts to meet con­sumers’ high­er desires as well as their needs for food, shel­ter, and phys­i­cal com­fort. Maslow died in 1970, and in the ensu­ing decades, his wish has become a huge­ly prof­itable real­i­ty.

From reli­gious broad­cast­ing com­pa­nies to social media to dat­ing and med­i­ta­tion apps, mar­keters find ever-new ways to sell promis­es of belong­ing, esteem, and self-actu­al­iza­tion. Per­haps Maslow would see this as progress. In any case, com­merce aside, his the­o­ry con­tin­ues to address press­ing soci­o­log­i­cal and exis­ten­tial prob­lems. And as an aid to per­son­al reflec­tion, it can help us notice how we “haven’t arranged and bal­anced our needs as wise­ly and ele­gant­ly as we might,” says de Bot­ton. We may have denied our­selves, or been denied, impor­tant expe­ri­ences we need in order to become who we tru­ly are.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Course on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: Watch 30 Lec­tures from the University’s Extreme­ly Pop­u­lar Course

The Caus­es & Preva­lence of Sui­cide Explained by Two Videos from Alain de Botton’s School of Life

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch 21 Animated Ideas from Big Thinkers: Steven Pinker, Carol Dweck, Philip Zimbardo, David Harvey & More

The Roy­al Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures and Com­merce, bet­ter known as the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Arts, and best known sim­ply as the RSA, was found­ed in 1754. At the time, nobody could have imag­ined a world in which the peo­ple of every land, no mat­ter how far-flung, could hear the same talks by well-known schol­ars and speak­ers, let alone see them ani­mat­ed as if on a con­fer­ence-room white­board. Yet even back then, in an era before the inven­tion of ani­ma­tion and white­boards, let alone com­put­ers and the inter­net, peo­ple had an appetite for strong, often coun­ter­in­tu­itive or even con­trar­i­an ideas to diag­nose and poten­tial­ly even solve social prob­lems — an appetite for which the RSA Ani­mate series of videos was made.

We can’t under­stand what goes right and what goes wrong in our soci­eties with­out under­stand­ing how we think. To that end the RSA has com­mis­sioned ani­mat­ed videos based on talks by psy­chi­a­trist Iain McGilchrist on our “divid­ed brain,” for­mer polit­i­cal strate­gist (and cur­rent RSA Chief Exec­u­tive) Matthew Tay­lor on how our left and right brains shape our pol­i­tics, psy­chol­o­gist Steven Pinker on lan­guage as a win­dow into human nature, philoso­pher-soci­ol­o­gist Rena­ta Sale­cl on the para­dox­i­cal down­side of choice, psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bar­do on our per­cep­tion of time, “social and eth­i­cal prophet” Jere­my Rifkin on empa­thy, philoso­pher Roman Krz­nar­ic on “out­ro­spec­tion,” jour­nal­ist Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich on “the dark­er side of pos­i­tive think­ing,” and behav­ioral-eco­nom­ics researcher Dan Ariely on dri­ve and dis­hon­esty.

Eco­nom­ics is anoth­er field that has pro­vid­ed the RSA with a sur­feit of ani­mat­able mate­r­i­al — even of the kind “econ­o­mists don’t want you to see,” as the RSA pro­motes econ­o­mist Ha-joon Chang’s talk on “why every sin­gle per­son can and SHOULD get their head around basic eco­nom­ics” and “how eas­i­ly eco­nom­ic myths and assump­tions become gospel.”

Freako­nom­ics co-authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dub­n­er make an appear­ance to break down altru­ism, and “eco­nom­ic geo­g­ra­ph­er” David Har­vey attempts to envi­sion a sys­tem beyond cap­i­tal­ism. And on the parts of the intel­lec­tu­al map where eco­nom­ics over­laps pol­i­tics, the RSA brings us fig­ures like Slavoj Žižek, who “inves­ti­gates the sur­pris­ing eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing.”

As, in essence, an edu­ca­tion­al enter­prise, RSA Ani­mate videos also look into new ways to think about edu­ca­tion itself. Edu­ca­tion­al­ist Car­ol Dweck exam­ines the issues of “why kids say they’re bored at school, or why they stop try­ing when the work gets hard­er” by look­ing at what kind of praise helps young stu­dents, and what kind harms them.

Edu­ca­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty expert Sir Ken Robin­son explains the need to change our very par­a­digms of edu­ca­tion. And accord­ing to the RSA’s speak­ers, those aren’t the only par­a­digms we should change: Microsoft Chief Envi­sion­ing Offi­cer Dave Coplin argues that we should re-imag­ine work, and tech­nol­o­gy crit­ic Evge­ny Moro­zov argues that we should rethink the “cyber-utopi­anism” that has exposed harm­ful side-effects of our dig­i­tal world.

httvs://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&list=PL39BF9545D740ECFF&index=11&t=0s

But it is in this world that the RSA pro­motes “21st-cen­tu­ry enlight­en­ment,” a con­cept fur­ther explored in anoth­er talk by Matthew Tay­lor — and one of which you can get a few dos­es, ten min­utes at a time, on the full RSA Ani­mate Youtube playlist. Watch the com­plete playlist of 21 videos, from start to fin­ish, below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Decline of Civilization’s Right Brain: Ani­mat­ed

Dan Ariely’s Ani­mat­ed Talk Reveals How and Why We’re All Dis­hon­est

The Pow­er of “Out­ro­spec­tion” — A Way of Life, A Force for Social Change — Explained with Ani­ma­tion

The His­to­ry of Music Told in Sev­en Rapid­ly Illus­trat­ed Min­utes

48 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

Each of us has a nor­mal state of mind, as well as our own way of reach­ing a dif­fer­ent state of mind. As the School of Life video above reminds us, such habits go back quite deep into record­ed his­to­ry, to the eras when, then as now, “Hin­du sages, Chris­t­ian monks and Bud­dhist ascetics” spoke of “reach­ing moments of ‘high­er con­scious­ness’ – through med­i­ta­tion or chant­i­ng, fast­ing or pil­grim­ages.” In recent years, the prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion has spread even, and per­haps espe­cial­ly, among those of us who don’t sub­scribe to Bud­dhism, or indeed to any reli­gion at all. Peri­od­ic fast­ing has come to be seen as a neces­si­ty in cer­tain cir­cles of wealthy first-worlders, as has “dopamine fast­ing” among those who feel their minds com­pro­mised by the dis­trac­tions of high tech­nol­o­gy and social media. (And one needs only glance at that social media to see how seri­ous­ly some of us are tak­ing our pil­grim­ages.)

Still, on top of our moun­tain, deep into our sit­ting-and-breath­ing ses­sions, or even after hav­ing con­sumed our mind-alter­ing sub­stance of choice, we do feel, if only for a moment, that some­thing has changed with­in us. We under­stand things we don’t even con­sid­er under­stand­ing in our nor­mal state of mind, “where what we are prin­ci­pal­ly con­cerned with is our­selves, our sur­vival and our own suc­cess, nar­row­ly defined.”

When we occu­py this “low­er con­scious­ness,” we “strike back when we’re hit, blame oth­ers, quell any stray ques­tions that lack imme­di­ate rel­e­vance, fail to free-asso­ciate and stick close­ly to a flat­ter­ing image of who we are and where we are head­ing.” But when we enter a state of “high­er con­scious­ness,” how­ev­er we define it, “the mind moves beyond its par­tic­u­lar self-inter­ests and crav­ings. We start to think of oth­er peo­ple in a more imag­i­na­tive way.”

When we rise from low­er to high­er con­scious­ness, we find it much hard­er to think of our fel­low human beings as ene­mies. “Rather than crit­i­cize and attack, we are free to imag­ine that their behav­ior is dri­ven by pres­sures derived from their own more prim­i­tive minds, which they are gen­er­al­ly in no posi­tion to tell us about.” The more time we spend in our high­er con­scious­ness, the more we “devel­op the abil­i­ty to explain oth­ers’ actions by their dis­tress, rather than sim­ply in terms of how it affects us. We per­ceive that the appro­pri­ate response to human­i­ty is not fear, cyn­i­cism or aggres­sion, but always — when we can man­age it — love.” When our con­scious­ness reach­es the prop­er alti­tude, “the world reveals itself as quite dif­fer­ent: a place of suf­fer­ing and mis­guid­ed effort, full of peo­ple striv­ing to be heard and lash­ing out against oth­ers, but also a place of ten­der­ness and long­ing, beau­ty and touch­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. The fit­ting response is uni­ver­sal sym­pa­thy and kind­ness.”

This may all come across as a bit new-age, sound­ing “mad­den­ing­ly vague, wishy washy, touchy-feely – and, for want of a bet­ter word, annoy­ing.” But the con­cept of high­er con­scious­ness is var­i­ous­ly inter­pret­ed not just across cul­tur­al and reli­gious tra­di­tions but in sci­en­tif­ic research as well, where we find a sharp dis­tinc­tion drawn between the neo­cor­tex, “the seat of imag­i­na­tion, empa­thy and impar­tial judge­ment,” and the “rep­til­ian mind” below. This sug­gests that we’d ben­e­fit from under­stand­ing states of high­er con­scious­ness as ful­ly as we can, as well as try­ing to “make the most of them when they arise, and har­vest their insights for the time when we require them most” — that is to say, the rest of our ordi­nary lives, espe­cial­ly their most stress­ful, try­ing moments. The instinc­tive, unimag­i­na­tive defen­sive­ness of the low­er con­scious­ness does have strengths of its own, but we can’t take advan­tage of them unless we learn to put it in its place.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

The Neu­ronal Basis of Con­scious­ness Course: A Free Online Course from Cal­tech

The Unex­pect­ed Ways East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Can Make Us Wis­er, More Com­pas­sion­ate & Bet­ter Able to Appre­ci­ate Our Lives

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Benefits of Boredom: How to Stop Distracting Yourself and Get Creative Ideas Again

Here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, we have con­quered bore­dom. Impres­sive though that achieve­ment may be, it has­n’t come with­out cost: As with many oth­er con­di­tions we’ve man­aged to elim­i­nate from our lives, bore­dom now looks to have been essen­tial to full human exis­tence. Has our real­i­ty of on-demand dis­trac­tions, tai­lored ever more close­ly to our impuls­es and desires, robbed us of yet anoth­er form of every­day adver­si­ty that built up the char­ac­ter of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions? Per­haps, but more impor­tant­ly, it may also have dried up our well of cre­ativ­i­ty. The frus­tra­tion that descends on us when try­ing to come up with new ideas; the itch we feel, when­ev­er we start doing some­thing, to do some­thing else; our inabil­i­ty to go more than a few min­utes with­out look­ing at our phones: we can hard­ly assume these mod­ern prob­lems are unre­lat­ed.

“When you’re bored, you tend to day­dream, and your mind wan­ders, and this is a very, very impor­tant part of the cre­ative process,” says psy­chol­o­gist San­di Mann in the ani­mat­ed BBC REEL video at the top of the post. “If you find that you’re stuck on a prob­lem, or you’re real­ly wor­ried about some­thing and can’t seem to find a way out, take some time out. Just be bored. Let your mind wan­der, and you might just find that a cre­ative solu­tion will pop into your head.”

But we’ve fall­en into the habit of “swip­ing and scrolling our bore­dom away,” seek­ing “a dopamine hit from new and nov­el expe­ri­ences” — most often dig­i­tal ones — to assuage our fears of bore­dom. And the more such stim­u­la­tion we get, the more we need, mean­ing that, “para­dox­i­cal­ly, the way to deal with bore­dom is to allow more of it into our life.”

“Once you start day­dream­ing and allow your mind to real­ly wan­der,” Mann says, “you start think­ing a lit­tle bit beyond the con­scious, a lit­tle bit into the sub­con­scious, which allows sort of dif­fer­ent con­nec­tions to take place.” She says it in “How Bore­dom Can Lead to Your Most Bril­liant Ideas,” a TED Talk by jour­nal­ist Manoush Zomoro­di. Like the pub­lic-radio pod­cast­er she is, Zomoro­di brings in inter­view clips from not just Mann but a range of experts on the sub­ject of bore­dom and dis­trac­tion, includ­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Lev­itin, who warns that “every time you shift your atten­tion from one thing to anoth­er, the brain has to engage a neu­ro­chem­i­cal switch that uses up nutri­ents in the brain to accom­plish that.” And so the “mul­ti­task­ing” in which we once prid­ed our­selves amounts to noth­ing more than “rapid­ly shift­ing from one thing to the next, deplet­ing neur­al resources as you go.”

We’ve become like the exper­i­ment sub­jects, described in the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, who were asked to sit alone in an emp­ty room for a few min­utes with noth­ing in front of them but a but­ton that they knew would shock them. In the end, 25 per­cent of the women and 60 per­cent of the men chose, unasked, to shock them­selves, pre­sum­ably out of a pref­er­ence for painful stim­u­la­tion over no stim­u­la­tion at all. How much, we have to won­der, does that ulti­mate­ly dif­fer from the dis­trac­tions we com­pul­sive­ly seek at every oppor­tu­ni­ty in the form of social media, games, and oth­er addic­tive apps? And what do these increas­ing­ly fre­quent self-admin­is­tered jolts do to our abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy promis­ing avenues of thought and fol­low them all the way to their most fruit­ful con­clu­sions? As the old say­ing goes, only the bor­ing are bored. But if our tech­no­log­i­cal lives keep going the way they’ve been going, soon only the bored will be inter­est­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Take Advan­tage of Bore­dom, the Secret Ingre­di­ent of Cre­ativ­i­ty

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Morals That Determine Whether We’re Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian

An old friend once wrote a line I’ll nev­er for­get: “There are two kinds of peo­ple in the world, then there are infi­nite­ly many more.” It always comes to mind when I con­front bina­ry gen­er­al­iza­tions that I’m told define two equal­ly oppos­ing posi­tions, but rarely cap­ture, with any accu­ra­cy, the com­plex­i­ty and con­trari­ness of human beings—even when said humans live inside the same coun­try.

Vot­ing pat­terns, social media bub­bles, and major net­work info­tain­ment can make it seem like the U.S. is split in two, but it is split into, if not an infin­i­ty, then a plu­ral­i­ty of dis­parate ide­o­log­i­cal dis­po­si­tions. But let’s say, for the sake of argu­ment, that there are two kinds of peo­ple. Let’s say the U.S. divides neat­ly into “lib­er­als” and “con­ser­v­a­tives.” What makes the dif­fer­ence between them? Fis­cal pol­i­cy? Edu­ca­tion? Views on “law and order,” social wel­fare, sci­ence, reli­gion, pub­lic ver­sus pri­vate good? Yes, but….

Best-sell­ing NYU psy­chol­o­gist Jonathan Haidt has con­tro­ver­sial­ly claimed that morality—based in emotion—really dri­ves the wedge between com­pet­ing “tribes” engaged in pitched us-ver­sus-them war. The real con­test is gut-lev­el, most­ly cen­tered on dis­gust these days, one of the most prim­i­tive of emo­tion­al respons­es (we learn in the hand-drawn ani­ma­tion of a Haidt lec­ture below). Haidt argues that our sense of us and them is root­ed, irrev­o­ca­bly, in our ear­li­est cog­ni­tions of phys­i­cal space.

Haidt sit­u­ates his analy­sis under the rubric of “moral foun­da­tions the­o­ry,” a school of thought “cre­at­ed by a group of social and cul­tur­al psy­chol­o­gists to under­stand why moral­i­ty varies so much across cul­tures yet still shows so many sim­i­lar­i­ties and recur­rent themes.” Anoth­er moral foun­da­tions the­o­rist, Peter Dit­to, pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy and Social Behav­ior at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Irvine, uses his research to draw sim­i­lar con­clu­sions about “hyper­par­ti­san­ship” in the U.S. Accord­ing to Dit­to, as he describes in the short video at the top, “morals influ­ence if you’re lib­er­al or con­ser­v­a­tive.”

How? Dit­to iden­ti­fies five broad, uni­ver­sal moral cat­e­gories, or “pil­lars,” that pre­dict polit­i­cal thought and behav­ior: harm reduc­tion, fair­ness, loy­al­ty, authority/tradition, and puri­ty. These con­cerns receive dif­fer­ent weight­ing between self-iden­ti­fied lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives in sur­veys, with lib­er­als valu­ing harm reduc­tion and fair­ness high­ly and gen­er­al­ly over­look­ing the oth­er three, and con­ser­v­a­tives giv­ing equal weight to all five (on paper at least). Dit­to does step out­side the bina­ry in the last half of the seg­ment, not­ing that his stud­ies turned up a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple who iden­ti­fied as lib­er­tar­i­ans.

He takes a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in this cat­e­go­ry. Lib­er­tar­i­ans, says Dit­to, don’t rank any moral val­ue high­ly, mark­ing their world­view as “prag­mat­ic” and strik­ing­ly amoral. They appear to be intense­ly self-focused and lack­ing in empa­thy. Oth­er strains—from demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism to anar­chism to fascism—that define Amer­i­can pol­i­tics today, go unmen­tioned, as if they didn’t exist, though they are arguably as influ­en­tial as lib­er­tar­i­an­ism in the strange flow­er­ings of the Amer­i­can left and right, and inar­guably as deserv­ing of study.

The idea that one’s morals define one’s pol­i­tics doesn’t seem par­tic­u­lar­ly nov­el, but the research of psy­chol­o­gists like Haidt and Dit­to offers new ways to think about moral­i­ty in pub­lic life. It also rais­es per­ti­nent ques­tions about the gulf between what peo­ple claim to val­ue and what they actu­al­ly, con­sis­tent­ly, sup­port, and about how the evo­lu­tion of moral sen­si­bil­i­ties seems to sort peo­ple into groups that also share his­tor­i­cal iden­ti­ties, zip codes, and eco­nom­ic inter­ests. Nor can we can­not dis­count the active shap­ing of pub­lic opin­ion through extra-moral means. Final­ly, in a two-par­ty sys­tem, the options are as few as they can be. Polit­i­cal alle­giance can be as much con­ve­nience, or reac­tion, as con­vic­tion. We might be right to sus­pect that any seem­ing political—or moral—unity on one side or the oth­er could be an effect of ampli­fied over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale’s Free Course on The Moral Foun­da­tions of Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: Do Gov­ern­ments Deserve Our Alle­giance, and When Should They Be Denied It?

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Do Ethi­cists Behave Any Bet­ter Than the Rest of Us?: Here’s What the Research Shows

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Older, and How to Slow It Down: A Scientific Explanation by Neuroscientist David Eagleman

The Bud­dha, it’s said, strug­gled might­i­ly with three specters of adulthood—aging, sick­ness, and death—when reflec­tions on mor­tal­i­ty harshed his hedo­nis­tic life as a prince. His “intox­i­ca­tion with life entire­ly dropped away,” the sto­ries say, when he reflect­ed on its pass­ing. Noth­ing cured his fatal unease until a mem­o­ry from child­hood arose unbid­den: of stop­ping time by qui­et­ly sit­ting under a rose-apple tree.

In anoth­er ver­sion of this sto­ry, Mar­cel Proust dis­cov­ered time­less­ness baked in a cook­ie. His potent mem­o­ries of madeleines also came from child­hood. As he recalled “the taste of tea and cake,” he writes, “at once the vicis­si­tudes of life had become indif­fer­ent to me, its dis­as­ters innocu­ous, its brevi­ty illu­so­ry …. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, acci­den­tal, mor­tal.”

Neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Eagle­man also invokes a child­hood mem­o­ry in his dis­cus­sion of time and aging, in the BBC video above. It is also a mem­o­ry res­o­nant with a remark­able phys­i­cal detail: red brick pave­ment hurtling toward him as he falls from the roof of a house, expe­ri­enc­ing what must have been a ter­ri­fy­ing descent in slow motion. Quite a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence from com­muning with trees and eat­ing tea cakes, but maybe the con­tent of a child­hood mem­o­ry is irrel­e­vant to its tem­po­ral dimen­sions.

What we can all remem­ber is that along with impa­tience and dis­tractibil­i­ty, child­hood seems rich with care­free, absorp­tive lan­guor (or moments of slow-motion pan­ic). Psy­chol­o­gists have indeed shown in sev­er­al stud­ies that adults, espe­cial­ly those over the age of 40, per­ceive time as mov­ing faster than it did when they were chil­dren. Why?

Because time is a “psy­cho­log­i­cal con­struct,” says Eagle­man, and can vary not just between ages and cul­tures, but also between indi­vid­ual con­scious­ness­es. “It can be dif­fer­ent in your head and my head,” he says. “Your brain is locked in silence and dark­ness inside the vault of your skull.” In order to “fig­ure out what’s going on out­side,” it’s got to do “a lot of edit­ing tricks.” One trick is to con­vince us that we’re liv­ing in the moment, when the moment hap­pened half a sec­ond in the past.

But we can notice that gap when we’re faced with nov­el­ty, because the brain has to work hard­er to process new infor­ma­tion, and it cre­ates thick­er descrip­tions in the mem­o­ry. All of this addi­tion­al pro­cess­ing, Eagle­man says, seems to take more time, so we per­ceive new expe­ri­ences as hap­pen­ing in a kind of slow motion (or remem­ber them that way). That includes so many expe­ri­ences in our child­hood as well as emer­gency sit­u­a­tions in which we have to nav­i­gate a chal­leng­ing new real­i­ty very quick­ly.

As writer Charles Bukows­ki once said, “as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You keep see­ing the same thing over and over again.” The brain can coast on famil­iar­i­ty and expend lit­tle ener­gy gen­er­at­ing per­cep­tion. We retain few­er detailed mem­o­ries of recent events, and they seem to have flown by us. The rem­e­dy, says Eagle­man, is to seek nov­el­ty. (You thought he was going to say “mind­ful­ness”?) Wear your watch on a dif­fer­ent wrist, change the way you brush your teeth….

Mun­dane exam­ples, but the point remains: we need new and var­ied expe­ri­ences to slow our sense of time. Rou­tine lack of nov­el­ty in adult­hood may be the pri­ma­ry rea­son that “our ear­ly years,” write psy­chol­o­gists James Broad­way and Brit­taney San­doval write at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can,“tend to be rel­a­tive­ly over­rep­re­sent­ed in our auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal mem­o­ry and, on reflec­tion, seem to have last­ed longer.”

They can also, for that rea­son, seem all the sweet­er. But nos­tal­gia, how­ev­er tempt­ing, can’t take the place of going new places, meet­ing new peo­ple, read­ing new books, hear­ing new music, see­ing new films, and so on and so forth—and there­by effec­tive­ly slow­ing down time.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Secret Pow­ers of Time

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

St. Bene­dict by Fra Angeli­co, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We might imag­ine that life in a monastery is one of the safest, most pre­dictable ways of life on offer, and there­fore one of the least dis­tract­ed. But “medieval monks had a ter­ri­ble time con­cen­trat­ing,” writes Sam Hasel­by at Aeon, “and con­cen­tra­tion was their life­long work!” They com­plained of infor­ma­tion over­load, for­get­ful­ness, lack of focus, and over­stim­u­la­tion. Their jumpy brains, fun­da­men­tal­ly no dif­fer­ent from those we use to nav­i­gate our smart phones, were the cul­prit, though, like us, the monks found oth­er sources to blame.

“Some­times they accused demons of mak­ing their minds wan­der. Some­times they blamed the body’s base instincts.” Giv­en the nature of their restric­tive vows, it’s no won­der they found them­selves think­ing “about food or sex when they were sup­posed to be think­ing about God.” But the fact remains, as Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia pro­fes­sor Jamie Krein­er says in an inter­view with PRI’s The World, monks liv­ing 1600 years ago found them­selves con­stant­ly, painful­ly dis­tract­ed.

It wasn’t even nec­es­sar­i­ly about tech at all. It was about some­thing inher­ent in the mind. The dif­fer­ence between us and them is not that we are dis­tract­ed and they aren’t, it’s that they actu­al­ly had savvi­er ways of deal­ing with dis­trac­tion. Ways of train­ing their minds the way we might train our bod­ies.

So, what did the wis­est monks advise, and what can we learn, hun­dreds of years lat­er, from their wis­dom? Quite a lot, and much of it applic­a­ble even to our online lives. Some of what medieval monks like the 5th cen­tu­ry John Cass­ian advised may be too aus­tere for mod­ern tastes, even if we hap­pen to live in a monastery. But many of their prac­tices are the very same we now see pre­scribed as ther­a­peu­tic exer­cis­es and good per­son­al habits.

Cass­ian and his col­leagues devised solu­tions that “depend­ed on imag­i­nary pic­tures” and “bizarre ani­ma­tions” in the mind,” Hasel­by explains. Peo­ple were told to let their imag­i­na­tions run riot with images of sex, vio­lence, and mon­strous beings. “Nuns, monks, preach­ers and the peo­ple they edu­cat­ed were always encour­aged to visu­al­ize the mate­r­i­al they were pro­cess­ing,” often in some very graph­ic ways. The gore may not be fash­ion­able in con­tem­pla­tive set­tings these days, but ancient meth­ods of guid­ed imagery and cre­ative visu­al­iza­tion cer­tain­ly are.

So too are tech­niques like active lis­ten­ing and non­vi­o­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which share many sim­i­lar­i­ties with St. Benedict’s first rule for his order: “Lis­ten and incline the ear of your heart.” Bene­dict spoke to the mind’s ten­den­cy to leap from thought to thought, to pre­judge and for­mu­late rebut­tals while anoth­er per­son speaks, to tune out. “Basi­cal­ly,” writes Fr. Michael Ren­nier, Bene­dic­t’s form of lis­ten­ing “is tak­ing time to hear in a cer­tain way, with an atti­tude of open­ness, and com­mit­ment to devote your whole self to the process,” with­out doing any­thing else.

Benedict’s advice, Ren­nier writes, is “great… because obsta­cles are all around, so we need to be inten­tion­al about over­com­ing them.” We do not need to share the same inten­tions as St. Bene­dict, how­ev­er, to take his advice to heart and stop treat­ing lis­ten­ing as wait­ing to speak, rather than as a prac­tice of mak­ing space for oth­ers and mak­ing space for silence. “Bene­dict knew the ben­e­fits of silence,” writes Alain de Botton’s School of Life, “He knew all about dis­trac­tion,” too, “how easy it is to want to keep check­ing up on the lat­est devel­op­ments, how addic­tive the gos­sip of the city can be.”

Silence allows us to not only hear oth­ers bet­ter, but to hear our deep­er or high­er selves, or the voice of God, or the uni­verse, or what­ev­er source of cre­ative ener­gy we tune into. Like their coun­ter­parts in the East, medieval Catholic monks also prac­ticed dai­ly med­i­ta­tion, includ­ing med­i­ta­tions on death, just one of sev­er­al meth­ods “Cis­ter­cian monks used to reshape their own men­tal states,” as Julia Bourke writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly.

“A medieval Cis­ter­cian and a mod­ern neu­ro­sci­en­tist” would agree on at least one thing, Bourke argues: “the prin­ci­ple that cer­tain feel­ings and emo­tions can be changed through med­i­ta­tive exer­cis­es.” No one devis­es numer­ous for­mal solu­tions to prob­lems they do not have; although their phys­i­cal cir­cum­stances could not have been more dif­fer­ent from ours, medieval Euro­pean monks seemed to suf­fer just as much as most of us do from dis­trac­tion. In some part, their lives were exper­i­ments in learn­ing to over­come it.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics

In the app-rich, nuance-starved cul­ture of late cap­i­tal­ism, we are encour­aged to con­flate two vast­ly dif­fer­ent con­cepts: the sim­ple and the easy. Maybe no bet­ter exam­ple exists than in the mar­ket­ing of meditation—the sell­ing of an activ­i­ty that, in essence, requires no spe­cial­ized equip­ment or infra­struc­ture. What medi­a­tion does require is a good instruc­tor and encour­age­ment. It is sim­ple. But it is not easy. It’s true, you’ll hear teach­ers rue­ful­ly admit, they don’t print this on the brochures for retreat cen­ters: but sus­tained med­i­ta­tion can be dif­fi­cult and painful just as well as it can induce seren­i­ty, peace, and joy. When we sit down to med­i­tate, we “feel our stuff,” to para­phrase David Byrne.

Next to the host of phys­i­cal com­plaints and exter­nal stres­sors clam­or­ing for atten­tion, if we’ve got per­son­al bad vibra­tions to con­tend with, they will ham­per our abil­i­ty to accept the present and relax. This is why, his­tor­i­cal­ly, those wish­ing to embark on the Bud­dhist path would first take eth­i­cal pre­cepts, and prac­tice them, before begin­ning to med­i­tate, under the pre­sump­tion that doing good (or non-harm) qui­ets the mind. “It is true that med­i­ta­tion is impor­tant in the Bud­dhist tra­di­tion,” writes Tibetan teacher Yongey Mingyur Rin­poche at Lion’s Roar. “But in many ways, ethics and virtue are the foun­da­tion of the Bud­dhist path.”

Of course, there are non-Bud­dhist med­i­ta­tion tra­di­tions. And the mind­ful­ness move­ment has demon­strat­ed with great suc­cess that one can carve most of the reli­gion away from med­i­ta­tion and still derive many short-term ben­e­fits from the prac­tice. But to do so is to dis­pense with thou­sands of years of expe­ri­en­tial wis­dom, not only about the dif­fi­cul­ties of sus­tain­ing a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice over the long term, but also about med­i­ta­tion’s inher­ent simplicity—something those of us inclined to over­com­pli­cate things may need to hear over and over again.

Tibetan teach­ers like Mingyur (and teach­ers from every Bud­dhist lin­eage) are gen­er­al­ly hap­py to expound upon the sim­plic­i­ty and joy of medi­a­tion, with the good nature we might expect of those who spend their lives let­ting go of regrets and fears. Some­times their mes­sages are pack­aged for eas­i­er con­sump­tion, which is a fine way to get a taste of some­thing before you decide to explore it fur­ther. But the point remains, as Mingyur says in the video at the top from The Jakar­ta Poet, that “med­i­ta­tion is com­plete­ly nat­ur­al.” It is not a prod­uct and does­n’t require any acces­sories or sub­scrip­tions.

It is also not an altered state of con­scious­ness or a nihilist escape. It is allow­ing our­selves to expe­ri­ence what is hap­pen­ing inside and all around us moment by moment by tun­ing into our aware­ness. We can do this any­where, at any time, for any length of time, as the monk fur­ther up tells us. “Even three sec­onds, two sec­onds, while you’re walk­ing, while you’re hav­ing cof­fee and tea, while you’re hav­ing a meet­ing… you can med­i­tate.” Real­ly? Yes, since med­i­ta­tion is not a vaca­tion from your life but an inten­si­fied expe­ri­enc­ing of it (even the meet­ings).

We get a celebri­ty endorse­ment above from the man who plays the angri­est man on tele­vi­sion, Gor­don Ram­say. The chef takes a break from his abu­sive kitchen rages to meet with a Thai monk, who says of his deci­sion to enter the monastery, “I’ve been to many dif­fer­ent places, I’d trav­eled around, but the one place I hadn’t looked at was my mind.” West­ern­ers may hear this and think of far out states—and there are plen­ty of those to be found in Bud­dhist texts, but not much talk of them among Bud­dhist teach­ers. Gen­er­al­ly, the word “mind” has a far more expan­sive range here than the fir­ing of synaps­es: it includes move­ment of the stom­ach lin­ing, the ten­sion of the sinews, and the beat­ing of the heart.

One of the most trag­ic mis­un­der­stand­ings of med­i­ta­tion casts it as a men­tal dis­ci­pline, split­ting mind and body as West­ern thought is wont to do for cen­turies now. But the aware­ness cul­ti­vat­ed in med­i­ta­tion is aware­ness of every­thing: the sens­es, the body, the breath, the space around us, our cog­ni­tion and emo­tion. Every Bud­dhist tra­di­tion and sec­u­lar off­shoot has its way of teach­ing stu­dents what to do with their often-ignored bod­ies while they med­i­tate. The dif­fer­ences between them are most­ly slight, and you’ll find a good guid­ed intro­duc­tion to begin­ning med­i­ta­tion focused on the body just above, led by Mingyur Rin­poche.

The hap­pi­ness one can derive from a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice does arrive, accord­ing to med­i­ta­tors world­wide, but it is not a soli­tary achieve­ment, Bud­dhist teach­ers say, a prize claimed for one­self like a prof­it wind­fall. It is, rather, the result of more com­pas­sion, and hence of more humil­i­ty, bet­ter rela­tion­ships, and less self-involve­ment; the result of strip­ping away rather than acquir­ing. Bud­dhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who left a career in cel­lu­lar genet­ics in his twen­ties to study and prac­tice in the Himalayas, hasn’t shied away from mar­ket­ing as a way to teach peo­ple to med­i­tate. But he is also upfront about the impor­tance of ethics to begin­ning medi­a­tion.

In addi­tion to being a “con­fi­dante of the Dalai Lama,” notes Busi­ness Insid­er, Ricard is also “a viral TED Talk speak­er, and a best­selling author.” His mes­sage is the impor­tance of compassion—not as a goal to achieve some time in the future, but as the very place to start. “There’s noth­ing mys­te­ri­ous” about it, he says in an inter­view on Busi­ness Insider’s pod­cast. He then goes on to describe the basic prac­tices of “Met­ta, ”among oth­er things a way of train­ing one­self to have kind and lov­ing inten­tions for oth­ers in an ever-widen­ing cir­cle out­ward. In the video above, Ricard talks about the prac­tice, and the sci­ence, of com­pas­sion at Google.

Many peo­ple balk at this kind of sen­ti­men­tal stuff, even from a man Google describes as “the world’s best bridge between mod­ern sci­ence and ancient wis­dom.” But if we can hear any­thing in the ancient wis­dom dis­tilled by these Bud­dhist teach­ers, per­haps it’s a sim­ple idea fast-med­i­ta­tion apps and util­i­tar­i­an pro­grams gen­er­al­ly skip. No, you do not need to put on robes, become a monk or nun, or take on a set of ancient tra­di­tions, beliefs, or rit­u­als. But as Amer­i­can Bud­dhist teacher Jack Korn­field says below, “if you want to learn to be wise and present, the first step is to refrain from harm­ing your­self or oth­ers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion: A Time-Test­ed Way to Stop Think­ing About Think­ing

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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