Optimal experiences must be actively made, and require work. They require mastery, determination, focus, attention and active participation. Of all of these attributes, attention is key.
The basis for optimal human experience is ordered consciousness. Consciousness itself is inherently limited, and disordered. Without focus, consciousness tends toward entropy. Maintaining order of the self ultimately strengthens the self, and reinforces it.
Growth comes from increasing complexity of the self. When we concentrate on something, the self, and its inherent disorder, disappears. The loss of the self and loss of self-consciousness allows us to transcend our limitations, and ultimately expands our boundaries, mentally and otherwise.
The self must determine what justifies life in the present moment.
Requirements for optimal experiences: rules, goals, challenges appropriate to skill levels, feedback.
Friendship is crucial. It is in time spent with friends that your true self emerges, as friendship provides a place for new kinds of social or individual growth. Communities are about shared goals.
Individuals must pay attention to what is outside of them, what is going on in the world, to have optimal experiences. People must make and set goals for themselves, and make choices. Skills must be developed in order to pay attention to experiences enough to become immersed in them.
Relevant Quotes
"Often children - and adults - need external incentives to take the first steps in an activity that requires a difficult restructuring of attention. Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding." (pg 68)
"This in turn suggests that people who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability ot screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment." (pg 87)
"Music, which is organized auditory information, helps organize the mind that attends to it, and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when random information interferes with goals. Listening to music wards off boredom and anxiety, and when seriously attended to, it can induce flow experiences." (pg 109)
"It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening." (pg 109)
"It is in the company of friends that we can most clearly experience the freedom of the self and learn who we really are." (pg 189)
"A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails. (pg 189)
"Friends are mentioned more often in contexts of excitement, discovery and adventure." (pg 189)
"A person who pays attention to an interaction instead of worrying about the self obtains a paradoxical result. She no longer feels like a separate individual, yet her self becomes stronger. The autotelic individual grows beyond the limits of individuality by investing psychic energy in a system in which she is included. Because of this union of the person and the system, the self emerges at a higher level of complexity." (pg 212)
Music festival-related thoughts:
- Develop feedback music listening skill levels, a way to move listeners up in their skills or in personal complexity
- What are festival or audience skills?
- How can audience attention be focused or developed by or at a festival? (What are the 'hidden' knowledges and understandings of festivals?)
- Something you create or make through being at a festival or through your experience there, through the time spent, distance you traveled, stages you saw, artists you saw, something earned; something you build through participation
- Establish goals or goal-oriented activities at festivals, use of voting or audience input, or how to use and provide feedback (to individuals, en masse, groups?)
- How can repeat or 'advanced' festival-goers be challenged anew?
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