Order is Beauty
Still working on my "Christian Aesthetics" class, I spent the day reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Why, you may ask, am I reading Flow in preparation for a class in Christian Aesthetics? Flow is a study of experience, and one of the things I'm interested in is religious and aesthetic experience. In my reading, I won't go so far as to say I found what I was looking for: I found stuff that was even better.
Here's the big point: in the Csikszentmihalyi's description of the anatomy of consciousness, he calls "attention" psychic energy and goes on to say that psychic energy determines our conscious life, applied in "remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions." He then says something that made me think of Dallas Willard.
"We create ourselves by how we invest this energy." (p. 33)
Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy defines spirit as "unembodied personal power," and argues - much as Csikszentmihalyi does - that the thought-life, what Csikszentmihalyi calls psychic energy, is the determining factor in a person's life, or as in Flow, in one's "quality of experience." Csikszentmihalyi goes on to say that entropy - a degenerating inner state moving toward disorder, or chaos - is the natural process of the unattended mind, and that the way to improve "quality of life" is not an unfettered following after instinct - which he says will simply lead you deeper into chaos - but is instead the process of bringing order to thought-life through controlled attention and meeting increasingly difficult challenges, which will require and lead to the acquisition of greater skills and greater complexity.
In other words, in Flow, you grow.
Thomas Merton said some of the same things, albeit differently. Here's a quote of his I came across a long time ago, from The New Man.
"The mark of true life in man is therefore not turbulence, but control- not effervescence but lucidity and direction..."
Reading Csikszentmihalyi lead me to a renewed conviction that "cosmos from chaos" is a principle that flows from the heart of God into the mind of humanity. Csikszentmihalyi went so far as to say this is why the positive attitude works - it's fighting back the entropy, holding hope, making sense of what to the pessimist appears to have no sense at all.
So resolve, perseverance, long attention paid...
...all this is beautiful, too...
11:37:50 PM
