Personal Mastery

..if it is true that people have known for thousands of years what it takes to become free and in control of one's life, why haven't we made more progress in this direction? Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge - or wisdom - one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorised and the routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as mature political judgments or refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is applied to modify our own habits and desires.
        Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes [emphasis added]. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time - and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California [or Sydney, or Brisbane, or wherever you live] those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and the seeker is back where he started.
        Control over consciousness cannot be institutionalized. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be. Routinization, unfortunately, tends to take place very rapidly. Freud was still alive when his quest for liberating the ego from its oppressors was turned into a staid ideology and a rigidly regulated profession. Marx was even less fortunate: his attempts to free consciousness from the tyranny of economic exploitation were soon turned into a system of repression that would have boggled the poor founder's mind. And as Dostoevsky, among many others observed, if Christ had returned to preach his message of liberation in the Middle Ages, he would have been crucified again and again by the leaders of that very church whose worldly power was built on his name.
        In each new epoch - perhaps every generation, or every few years, the conditions in which we live change that rapidly - it becomes necessary to rethink and reformulate what it takes to establish autonomy of consciousness.

...Given the recurring need to return to this central question of how to achieve mastery over one's life, what does the present state of knowledge say about it? How can it help a person learn to rid himself of anxieties and fears and thus become free of the controls of society, whose rewards he can take or leave? As suggested before, the way is through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience. Any small gain in this direction will make life more rich, more enjoyable, more meaningful.

Csikszentmihalyi's statement which I highlighted in the above passage: "the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes", sets us a challenge. As Csikszentmihalyi points out, we cannot just adopt methods from bygone ages and different cultural contexts and expect them to work as they did then and there - we must create techniques that are relevant to our own cultural context, our own place on the timeline of human evolution, and relevant to ourselves personally.
     In taking up this challenge, members of the Minessence Group have developed some meta techniques which we believe are relevant to our culture, our epoch, and which enable people to create, for themselves, their own unique strategy. For example:

• The values @ work people have developed the True North process. You can read more about that in Michael Henderson's award winning book, Finding True North.
• You can take an inventory of your values through contacting one of our many AVI Consultants listed at our website. By facilitating the exploration of your values and brain-preference, they can help you create your own unique strategy to make your life more rich, more meaningful and more enjoyable.
• Peter Wallman and Rachael Flower have developed a passion mapping technique. Refer to their book, The Wisdom of Passion: Mapping your Way to vitality and success or you can contact Peter via our AVI Consultants' listing.
• John Loty is working with Appreciative Inquiry techniques.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1992, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, Random House.

Henderson, M. 2003, Finding True North: Discover your values, enrich your life, Harper Business, Auckland.