I am committed to living the best life I can possibly experience and finding out what my full potential is. I desire to live a life of excellence and not be constrained to the doll-drums of normal average boring mediocrity. Here are some thoughts I want to share on to how you can start doing this too.
As Joseph Campbell explains in The Power of Myth what everyone is after is the experience of feeling alive. Richard Heart in this book Scivive explains it like this: Life is a collection of experiences and memories, their Quality multiplied by their Intensity. If you want to maximize your experience of life, this may be a formula worth looking into.
Today let’s explore a couple ways as to how to increase the Quality and Intensity of your experiences, thereby increasing the enjoyment you get out of your life?
In order to do that we must first attempt to understand what Quality is and what Intensity is.
Quality is inherently subjective. Though many people would tend to agree on certain types of quality. I will define quality as a rich experience both from a sensory perspective and perceptual point of view.
What is Intensity? I would qualify this as being your sensitivity to incoming information. What type of data are you able to process? Are you constrained to hearing only low frequency sound waves or can you also hear the high pitched frequencies? How wide is your sensory apparatus and how sensible is it to incoming information? There is also an emotional aspect to Intensity, it’s about the way it makes you feel.
Do you hear monotone noise all day or do you hear the rich vibrant timbre of that magical music playing all around you?
The music is always playing. The music is called life. The only question is how attuned to it are you?
The next question is how do you increase your attunement to your environment?
When you first came into this world you didn’t know much about it so you had to learn and adapt. You were highly attuned to what was going on around you, there was so much information and you had to make sense of it all to survive.
Thankfully at birth you were equipped with highly sophisticated and advanced technology, selected for by millions of years of Evolution, that allows you to sense your environment in the most effective way. With time your body learns to filter what is useful from what is not. You go through phases of neurological pruning where the body gets rid of anything that is using unnecessary energy. You develop neural pathways that imprint useful behaviour for your survival.
Your brain and body process all the information and come up with meaning so that you can start to understand and function in your environment. You will notice that everything that has ever happened to you has happened through your perception of your environment. Everything is based on what you have perceived, what you have felt and understood. It is entirely subjective.
Your environment shapes your feelings. Your feelings shape your thoughts. Your thoughts shape your beliefs. Your beliefs shape your actions and behaviours. Your behaviours influence your environment and the loop reinforces itself.
And yet, despite having some of the best technology we somehow loose touch with our natural state of attunement from childhood and find ourselves in situations of pain and confusion.
From a neurological perspective your tech looks something like this: you have a sense organ, sensory messengers, sensory highways, and sensory processors that integrate the signals then give it meaning and try to contextualise the information properly.
We can try to change our bodies or we can simply figure out how to optimise what we already have and profit from it, using it the way it was designed to be used.
There are 4 main types of changes we can make to improve the final product; i.e. your experience:
- Increase the sensitivity of the sensors
- Increase the data processing speed
- Decrease the amount of noise coming into the system
- Increase the quality of the processing
Increasing The Sensor Sensitivity
This type of dynamic is most evident in people who loose a particular sense. Blind people are a good example of this. When they loose their vision other senses gain in sensitivity. A scientific hypothesis for this phenomena is that the brain space allocated to vision is redistributed to other senses. Blind people are much more spatially aware than most people. They are aware of much more stuff than your average Joe. This is so because their survival depends on it.
It should be said that in the case of the body the receptors don’t actually get more sensitive but the density of the sensors increase and the brain areas dedicated to processing that type of information expand.
How can you leverage this principle in daily life?
For starters, you can experiment with different sensory deprivation tactics. Closing your eyes and trying to do stuff you are used to doing on a regular basis, like dressing, eating, moving around in a room is a good example. Deliberately suppressing a sense for a short period of time makes the renewed experience that much more vivid.
It is said that nothing is sweeter to a man dying of thirst than a glass of water. I’m not suggesting you put yourself into unsafe and extreme situations. I am however trying to illustrate my point.
Try easy things like, temporarily fasting, or eating only one kind of bland food like rice for a couple days, or periodically closing your eyes to do habitual stuff in a controlled environment. You can also try taking only cold showers for a week or two and then see how much you start appreciating warm ones. Or you could sleep on the floor and then return to a comfortable mattress.
Stay away from continuous monotonus routines, add some twists and unusual aspects. Spice it up! Add a little discomfort from time to time to keep your senses sharp and your appreciation high.
Increasing The Processing Speed
This is most useful for physical movements and repetitive patterns. As can be observed while learning to ride a bike. At first you really struggle synchronising your legs and keeping balance. You have to focus a lot and expend enormous amounts of energy just not to fall off. Then with practice you’re able to focus on where you’re going. You don’t really have to think about peddling anymore. The processing is no longer conscious but subconscious and it frees up space to process other stuff. Now you can think about things without really paying attention to where you’re going because you already know where you’re headed. You get to enjoy the ride and focus on the beautiful nature around you.
The more you repeat something, the easier it is to do it. Repetition is the mother of skill, as Aristotle put it. Scientifically this is called the process of myelinisation. The building of fatty isolation around neurones to increase electrical current conduction and transmission speed.
Your brain is designed to make repetitive stuff easy. You get to choose what that is.
Decreasing The Noise In The System
To decrease the amount of noise you have to stop multitasking and focus. You have to be present to the moment and pay attention to your experience intentionally. Try eating a meal while closing your eyes and only focusing on the experience of eating that meal. Watch how intense that experience becomes. Try just focusing on the thing you are doing. If you wash the dishes, actually wash the dish, don’t think about what you’re gonna do afterwards. Focus.
In a culture of No Pain No Gain, and Work-As-Hard-As-You-Can and Persevere-Through-The-Pain, what I’m gonna say may sound controversial. To me such a mindset sounds like an awful lot of resistance and sensory overload if your goal is to experience and enjoy the richness of life.
If all you feel at this moment is pain and resistance, how in the world are you supposed to smell that delicately scented flower over there or feel the way the breeze caresses your face? Those two realities are not compatible.
If you live a life of resisting things the only thing you’re gonna feel is the resistance. But if you decide to go with the flow you now get more choice as to what you get to experience.
Increasing The Processing Quality
Processing is mainly what goes on in your mind. It’s the stories you tell yourself, the things you believe and the meaning you assign to neutral events.
Improving processing quality means examining your beliefs and consciously choosing beliefs that serve you. It means letting go of things that don’t serve you. It means becoming more aware of your inner experience. It means becoming overall conscious about your life and not letting yourself be run by unconscious behaviours.
Learn how beliefs work. Learn how to identify beliefs and how to choose beliefs. This is all about becoming more conscious about what you want and why you want it.
What if you could detect when something wasn’t right in your body in the infancy stages? Would you not deal with it then and there, instead of waiting for a huge ugly dangerous and potentially lethal diagnosis to wake you up and tell you something might be wrong?
Living a great life, a life you want to remember is a life that takes effort. It’s a life you get to choose to build in a conscious way. Life is all about the experiences you have and the memories you make. It’s about the Quality and Intensity of those experiences. How are you gonna choose to live your life?
Go and create your life consciously.
What was your biggest take away message?