Separation of Ego and Will | Hacker News Reader

Separation of Ego and Will

pkaudio.blogspot.com

22 pointsjemeshsu5 comments

    1 comments:
     Anonymous said...
    LOL.
    September 14, 2011 8:51 PM

Hah, thanks for echoing exactly what I was thinking. It's a thought-proving blurb, and seeing those three little letters hanging down at the bottom of the page made my gut twist a little.

Zen Proverb:

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

Perhaps the commenter was an enlightened soul trying to ensure that readers didn't get too lofty & carried away ;)

This is a useful observation, and I agree with the principle and application.

I'm wondering about the use of the word "will" as he defines it:

'The "Will" is your innate, inner tendency towards peace. It is the subconscious personality that thrives on warm fuzzy feelings, or gives you that incredibly serene sensation of unity that comes on a solo day in the mountains when you could care less about races and glory. The Will is a factor of the "you", if the rest of the world didn't exist.'

If we aren't limited to English words, I would call this the Tao.

As distinguished from the Ego, the Will to me speaks more of desire or inner motivation stripped of fear, and I'm not sure that the Will, in that sense, of necessity tends toward peace, serenity, or "warm fuzzy feelings".

The author is referring to a mental known as "flow":

"Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields"

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

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