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First Chapter Section 2
Purification is when your mind finds a task noble, purified and virtuous. This happens when you observe other people enjoy doing that task. They have passion for that task or they just do it for the fun of it (intrinsic motivations). A very good example is when you saw your favorite teacher discussed your favorite subject or two dance partners dance to your favorite music. Concentration and imagination are not too difficult to realize. Unification is a bit more complex and will be discussed in more detail in second chapter. If you consider for example surfing as the task, it is not too difficult to purify surfing. If you just watch people surf and you see the joy and excitement on their face, you see what I mean by purification. Concentration is what you must do to learn surfing. We believe you can never learn how to surf if you do not actually imagine or visualize yourself on the surf board. I also believe you must do something creative and unique to yourself to learn surfing. After all we all do things in our own unique ways. The moment you find yourself on the surfboard and surfing we believe you will experience a moment called FLOW which is very satisfying. At that monet you are unified (achieving unification) with the surfboard and we believe you are achieving unification with the ocean itself. It is in unification that one finds FLOW.
I have left out a very important trait or quality innate to creative people that I believe is very vital to our discussion and that is eccentricity. I can not make it to a science and that is why I left it out. But, I touch upon it in the third chapter called After The Incubation Stage, almost at the end. I guess the closest science I find for the eccentrics is the science of professor Deci and the science of autonomy.
David Weeks the author of an excellent book called ECCENTRICS adds:
Given the frequent association of eccentricity with genius, the ability to conceive startlingly original artistic and scientific breakthroughs, it seemed to be an obviously worthwhile subject for psychological research. For the annals of eccentricity include such names as William Blake, Alexander Graham Bell, Emily Dickinson, Charlie Chaplin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention Albert Einstein and Howard Hughes. If we could gain even the barest glimpse into how all those people came to be the way they were, it might just help the rest of us to be more creative, more original: better at being ourselves.
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Eccentrics, Emperor Norton, and his court pose a challenge to the assumption that underlies all modern psychology, that we know more than we used to about the mind, and therefore that we are doing things better now. In fact a strong case could be made that even though nineteenth-century Californians knew nothing about brain-cell synapses or neuro-transmitters, delusional grandiose mania or borderline syndromes, in humanitarian terms they got it much more right than we do now.
In the field of experimental psychology, it is an open secret that we have learned a great deal about how penniless undergraduates perform in narrow and sometimes deliberately deceptive experiments, while psychiatrists, on the other hand, know about every possible variation in the behavior of people who have had mental breakdowns. The rub, from the scientific point of view, is that those two groups rarely overlap, so most of the theoretical knowledge obtained by the experimental psychologists is useless to the psychiatrists who are dealing with patients. Meanwhile, almost nobody is studying adult nonpatients, the vast bulk of humanity.
I am glad David says almost nobody, because if you notice, all of our scientific contributors discuss adult nonpatients.
Eccentricity means uniqueness, finding the freedom to be utterly one's own person (Autonomous?; Science of Professor Deci). What's the opposite, you might ask? Believe it or not, the opposite is Alienation. It might mean that an individual gives up his Self (denying what he knows to be so in favor of what someone else says is so) in order to achieve success and avoid failure.
This alienation results for we do things only as a matter of reaction or just being on auto pilot. James Herndon once said, "we come to this world (or work) each day, as so many others do, getting off the bus or out of our cars. We turn ourselves off as we turn off the car radio just when we happen to find ourselves in the parking lot. Once in the world (work), we dispose of our cans of Pepsi or Coke and our cigarettes or cigars and await the presentation of our daily lives by the boss, and it is to that presentation that we respond or worst we just react."
What would be the opposite of reaction or auto pilot? This book is all about opposite of reaction or auto pilot behavior; the term is called Mindfulness. Mindfulness is what you will learn in this book. Hopefully when we are finished with this book, we are all a bit more eccentrics or more of ourselves.
Jack Kornfield adds:
As E. E. Cummings put it, "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest human battle ever and to never stop fighting."
Even if outwardly we do not appear different, inwardly there is the fearless ability to be wholly the embodiment of yourself.
The painter Georges Braque once exhorted those around him, "It's up to us to be real strong eccentrics, and not to waver." One Zen master called this the culmination of Zen training, its fruition: "To be faithful to yourself and to life."
I strongly suggest the reader to examine the book ECCENTRICS by David Weeks or the section mentioned in our book. I am a big fan of eccentricity myself. I guess an interesting question would be: Are eccentrics more mindful? I believe the answer is yes, very much so and perhaps the mindfulness of eccentrics borders more purity. Why? Because, eccentrics' subjects of passion, even though, to us might be dumb or stupid, are still highly purified subjects. And, that is the essence of this book.
I like to give an example of eccentricity (in my, and only in my, own view) from Professor Deci's book. In his book Why We Do What We Do is an old Jewish fable. Professor Deci uses this fable to show the influence of money as an extrinsic motivation, however, I like to show eccentricity of the tailor. The fable went something like this:
It seems that bigots were eager to rid their town of a Jewish man who had opened a tailor shop on Main Street, so they sent a group of rowdies to harass the tailor. Each day, the ruffians would show up to jeer. The situation was grim, but the tailor was ingenious (eccentric?).
One day when the hoodlums arrived, he gave each of them a dime for their efforts. Delighted, they shouted their insults and moved on. The next day they returned to shout, expecting their dime. But the tailor said he could afford only a nickel and proceeded to hand a nickel to each of them. Well, they were a bit disappointed, but a nickel is after all a nickel, so they took it, did their jeering, and left. The next day, they returned once again, and the tailor said he had only a penny for them and held out his hand. Indignant, the young toughs sneered and proclaimed that they would certainly not spend their valuable time jeering at him for a measly penny. So they didn't. And all was well for the eccentric or ingenious tailor. (Why We Do What We Do; p.26)
I like to make one important comment here. In this book we are sometimes critical of amassing money as an extrinsic motivation. Entrepreneurship does not necessarily mean becoming rich overnight, or making lots of money. If you did, that's great and you deserve it, however, we do not promote entrepreneurship for the purpose of amassing money. We are promoting correct entrepreneurship.
