META-MOTIVATION

If your levels of meta-pleasure define the joy, delight, and basic happiness of your life, then do you know how to uncover the meta-pleasures that you already have? And do you know how to begin to spread the pleasure around? That’s what the Meta-Pleasure Pattern in Meta-States is all about, which was the subject of the last Meta Reflection (#13).

Let me unpack that a little further. What this means is that there is a logical level in your mind that we can call pleasure, joy, enjoyment, delight. After all, you have the ability to delight yourself in things, do you not? And that’s a cognitive-affective response. And if you can bring thoughts-and-feelings of delight about something, then you can use this to meta-state many other things with delight. You can access delight as a state of thoughts, feelings, and physiology and set it as a frame on lots and lots of things.

When you come to think of it, isn’t this one of the meta-differences between us? Look around at your family and friends and make a list of all of the things that they delight in which you do not? Does someone delight in jogging every day? In cleaning the house to make it impeccable? Do you have anyone in your family or friends who loves mathematics? Puzzles? Working in the garden? Cooking? Handling receipts? Being licked in the mouth by a dog? — What pleasures do they have which are your tortures? — Which of their pleasures would be your distress? — And vise versa, which of your pleasures would turn them off and be their stress?

Meta-pleasures also show the principle that all of our higher logical levels are but “facets of the same diamond.” What I’m calling pleasures and meta-pleasures can also be viewed through the lens of values, meanings, significances. This explains why Neuro-Semanticists will often use the Meta-Pleasure pattern to uncover a person’s “values,” that is, what a person values as important and significant. Your meta-pleasures are the experiences and meanings that you value; they are your values.

When I now tie this to Self-Actualization Theory as developed by Maslow, we begin with the fact that we humans experience levels of motivation. In the area of the lower needs, our motivation is mostly an away-from motivation. At this level our “needs” are deficiencies. We need, and are motivated, because we lack something essential. If you’ve ever been without food for two-weeks, then you truly know about hunger. It only takes a couples days to feel the need for water. And only seconds for air. We experience these survival deficiency needs with desperation. And when the need it gratified, it goes away.

So with our lower needs for safety and security, love and affection, and esteem and regard.

When we don’t have what we require, our whole organism desperately reaches out to get it. And when the need is gratified, the need goes away. This describes deficiency motivation.

This, by the way, seems to be the motivation that most managers, business owners, politicians, economists, etc. operate from. Assuming Theory X about human nature, they build structures in business, economics, society, etc. that assume people are motivated when they experience a lack or a threat and lose their motivation when there’s no lack or threat. [Douglas McGregor (1965, The Human Side of Enterprise) introduced Theory X and theory Y of human nature in management and business, Maslow later added Theory Z.]

Yet there is a higher motivation. At the top of the hierarchy of need prepotency, Maslow put the growth needs which he also called self-actualization needs, expressive needs, and being needs. These describe a different kind of motivation, abundance motivation. Here we do not “need” in the sense of deficiency, we “need” in the same of expressiveness— we need to express ourselves, grow, self-actualize, and to “be.”

The difference of this motivational level is that here gratification of the need does not make it go away. Gratify the self-actualization needs and you want more! Needs at this level cannot be satisfied. Instead, satisfaction increases capacity! This is a toward-motivation, toward all that we value and toward all that fulfills our highest nature. So unlike the negative addiction that occurs with the lower needs, here we experience a positive addiction that makes us better, more resourceful, more creative, more of who we can be. This is meta-motivation.

And it is meta-motivation, as a high level toward motivation, that truly drives and facilitates the unleashing of potentials. Certainly, we unleash capabilities via deficiency motivation. After all, “Necessity is [still] the mother of invention.” Yet above and beyond it is curiosity, play, experimenting around, stumbling upon fortunate accidents, etc. that unleashes our highest potentials. The fact is that those who persist in creativity and innovation in continuing to create year after year are not those driven to it by lack and need, but those who create for the fun of it, for the curiosity of it, to just explore what is there and what’s possible. At this level, you can never lose your motivation.

Meta-motivation describes living for and pursing the being-values for the sheer joy and experience. When we move to this area, we begin to experience end-values. We experience and enjoy things, events, and people for themselves, without any other motive. Rather than experiencing something as a means-value, as a means to get to somewhere else, we enjoy the experience for itself. In fact, we can then even develop the ability to sacralize anything, that is, transform mean-values into end-values.

At the level of the meta-motivations, the more you devote yourself to one of the being-values and gratify that value, the more you want it. The motivation does not go away. It does not weaken. In fact, it grows stronger. You grow stronger. You develop more capacity for it—truth, love, beauty, synergy, cooperation, collaboration, peace, excellence, goodness, etc. Now your unleashing not only creates a sense of fulfillment, but leaves you with the sense of goodness,

“The world is good.” “Life is good.” “Life is meaningful.” At this level, what we call motivation is no longer a problem. It is just the way we move through life. Whereas once we might have had to “work on our motivation,” motivation is now a given. Now we experience it as life passion, vitality, meaningfulness, inspiration, even “spirit.” So, how’s your meta- motivations? Are you ready to tap and unleash your mea-motivations?