View, Awareness, and Conduct
As with any other action, when we begin to practice meditation, it is essential to be sure about our motivation. For it is our motivation—altruistic or self-centred, vast or limited—that will provide a positive or negative direction to our journey and influence its results. When effecting any real change, there will be challenges and obstacles. True transformation requires continuous effort and commitment. We cannot just wish to have better self-awareness, clarity and inner strength. That is no more than wishful thinking and will not translate into real change.
It is important to generate a clear vision and recalibrate one's motivation, and we definitely need to put our aspiration into practice. They enable us to make everyday choices based on a clear idea of one's own possibilities.
It is important to generate a clear vision and recalibrate one's motivation, and we definitely need to put our aspiration into practice. They enable us to make everyday choices based on a clear idea of one's own possibilities.
What is your vision of a good life?
We invite you to incorporate your own vision of the path with the Conative Intelligence and Flourishing course.In four sessions, we contemplate four questions:
- What is your vision of a good life, your vision of what would truly bring you happiness, a sense of fulfilment, satisfaction and meaning?
- In order to realize your own vision, your own aspirations for genuine happiness and fulfilment, what would you love to receive from the world around you?
- What tendencies, habits, hold you back, perhaps harming yourself and others? What qualities would help you on the path of your own genuine happiness?
- Your own happiness is intricately intertwined with others' happiness. In order to lead the most meaningful life possible, what would you love to offer to the world?
The course will help you connect the dots between where you are today and accomplishing this path.
What would you love to offer to the world so that when you come to the end of your life, and you're looking back, you will do so with the certainty that you've offered your best?
—Alan Wallace, Conative Intelligence and Flourishing course
Useful Definitions
- Conation: the mental faculty of purpose, desire, and volition;
- Conative intelligence: the ability to discern which desires and intentions truly lead to one’s own and others’ wellbeing and to then adopt them, while releasing desires and intentions that undermine one’s own and others’ wellbeing.
- The Perfection of Conative Intelligence: Having the wisdom to desire only that which is truly beneficial to oneself and others in this life.
- Psychological Flourishing: A sense of well-being that is not contingent on external or internal stimuli, and is qualified by serenity, joy, and contentment, rather than excitement and arousal. Derives from conative, attentional, cognitive, and affective balance.
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