What keeps you going in life? What do you do when you're in a rough patch?
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bumpity bump will answer later -
What motivates me in no particular order:
Success & Prestige
While more money and higher status are appealing, I define success as one's life purpose, values, and interests are aligned with each other. Once I get other stuff out of the way, I'll eventually directly work towards a career that's more in line with who I am and what I want from life. I'm debating between two paths: mortician or pursuing a PhD in the humanities. The former consolidates my practice and interest in the hard sciences, art, psychology, and philosophy, and not to mention the time and freedom in pursuing other interests. The latter, however, will take my interest in the humanities turn it into something more fruitful. It's also more prestigious, especially if I can get tenure in a good university. Out of the two, the PhD option would be the harder path to take due to how consuming it is - the pressure to write papers in order to get grants and garner more money and recognition for the university, the time taken away from other interests and hobbies, and balancing life and work. Plus, it's too social for my liking (both in the interpersonal sense and the enneagram sense). I prefer to work on my own and to be a law onto myself - my autonomy and space are extremely important to me.
I find work and career to be extremely important in one's life, especially a career that you chose to pursue. We all technically chose what jobs we have, but we're presented with a range of choices and options, some more limited than others. But choice of career is interesting since, like with political beliefs, is a distillation of your values and what's meaningful to you. I'd almost say that you are what you work as (to a degree). With that being said, I want a career that expresses what I value and who I am. The prestige comes in by way of living the life you see fit, in a way that garners respect, admiration, and envy from others. Deep down, I ultimately want to be respected, admired, and envied. I want my ego to be manifested onto the world, a testament to my skill, will, and the importance of my agenda. That's why these past two-four months I had an acute existential crisis. What have I truly accomplished? At this juncture in life, what has my life been a testament to? Knowing that deep down I'm a failure, that I failed to live up to my own standards, that my image is neither admirable nor enviable, shattered my self-esteem and the foundations of who I am. I felt like a husk of a person.
Knowledge & Wisdom
I have a voracious desire to know and see. But knowing things is not enough. It's the internalization and pattern-weaving and discovering of this knowledge that I seek. In another post, I described the World and Universal Mind (https://archetribe.com/forum/cosmos/...universal-mind). I ultimately want to commune with the Universal Mind, and be in tune with the fundamental fabric of reality. Rational investigation is one way to uncover it, but it's not sufficient. Meditation, disciplining of the mind and body (which is difficult for me so that makes it of paramount importance), and mind-altering substances are a few conduits to the UM (or at the very least an omnipotent vision of the World Mind). Books, articles, and schooling are not enough; a type of openness to the universe is required, a boundariless communion with the universe that's initially scary and messy. I could imagine people thinking that it would be similar to looking into the Void, a boundless nothingness and silence that loudly consumes everything in its path. The scariest, yet most enticing, part is the terror of losing one's sense of self, especially with something that seems to ethereal and beyond our understanding. But we're filtering our understanding through common human experiences, and filling in the blanks because we ultimately don't know.
Control & Power
I think this is the underlying sentiment that covers the other two categories. It's not control and power over others (though when I'm at my unhealthiest this true), but a type of self-determination and mastery. With mental illness, there's an inward focus of the psyche and its discontents. These misalignments eventually get externalized. It feels like one is pulled by more primordial forces that are out of your control. My trap was that if I can present the image of control over these impulses then I might just ultimately have true control over them. That never happened. While I'm very aware, and to a degree, accept my shadow, I was in the thrall it. It was a toxic relationship, one where I acknowledged its existence and influence, yet I couldn't directly express it because of its destructive power. So I had to put it on a leash, but I was never truly in control of it. With CBT, I am given the tools and inner resources to have more control over my own thoughts and how I respond to events (and a pathway to get closer to the Universal Mind). With genuine control over my mind and emotions, I'm able to have a more open attitude towards the universe, with its undulations, patterns, and secrets being more easily revealed to me, and thus having some mastery over it. My shadow would no longer be an insidious force, but an asset to consolidate power through mastery and knowledge.Last edited by Mahat; 03-07-2020, 11:02 AM.Comment
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What motivates me, at the end of the day, is freedom.
Personally, I do not believe in fate. I believe in free agency and will. And to create this, the most ultimate thing to know is thyself.
Past this point, freedom requires a sort of trinity between empowerment, realism, and intuition. Know the ground you stand on (realism) - dream or envision the ground you want ("intuition"), and be or become capable to do the work to get there (empowerment).
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I took my sleeping pills and was on my way to bed, and this thread - with an answer - just popped into my head.
I don't have much of a problem staying motivated, so at first, I was unsure how to handle this. It's also different in my situation since after being sick and unable to work for so long, it's easy to feel motivated when I am finally able to do it.
That said, on a deeper level, what keeps me motivated when I'm at a low? These are what get me going: envy, competition, desire to be wanted, the need to make myself immortal, the need to get my power back over someone who rejected me, vengeance, needing to make him suffer or envy me, wanting to win back his attention.
You can say "oh, how unhealthy?" However take note that when I'm relatively average health, I'm motivated already. When I'm hurt and heartbroken, I pick myself up quickly and get to work in many ways - art, the gym, earning money, my health, gaining independence, etc. There are many other things I could do, such as play petty games with people, act out, make a big social scene, yell at people etc. But what I am immediately driven to do is to withdraw and build myself up so that I'm better than them, and so that I know if they don't notice me, they're missing something special. However once I get going, and start getting on track with my motivation, then I stop having these negative feelings and my full-hearted empathy returns. So, to the 'enlightened enneagram people' who believe you should defeat your fixation, I say: scold me for being human all you want. But I have a good relationship with my shadow - I don't deny that it's there, but rather, turn it into beauty.Comment
I definitely agree with you that there's something holy to be found in our type patterns. We just have to learn to dance with our shadows.
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