Embrace Vitality: RsH"-G6

Communal Motivation

There is more to living than staying alive. It's called «living life to the full» —and it requires an active embrace of vitality. The resulting intensity of experience is fundamental to producing goodness.
Remember Gurdjieff?

Gurdjieff (1866–1949) was a spiritual teacher who popularized the notion that people were generally automata, going about life in a mechanical fashion, almost sleep-walking. The title of one of his collections of writings captures this Hexad: “Life is real only then, when 'I am'." He referred to «the work» which meant working on oneself to wake up and be fully alive. Many others promoting enlightenment in more recent times have said much the same thing.

The empathic processes used for attaining equanimity-R"G5 depend on attuning to others, and this will be limited by our life history. Embracing vitality depends on responsibly choosing what to do (or what to do next) and then addressing yourself to that while sharpening and focusing your attention. This will extend and deepen your experiences. It also ensures «going with the flow», and participating fully with others. The end result is to enable a fuller understanding and a better handling of a wider range of situations.

The sense that «life is good» comes from intensifying experiences via attention, and that means being fully alert, open and involved with people and situations. The more vital you are, the more you can do, the more others respond, and the more goodness can be generated. Unless you are emotionally disturbed, it feels good to be alive and you thrive on optimism and positivity. The community is usually supportive because it becomes stronger. However, embracing vitality is not wholly straightforward, as the inner structure of the Hexads will reveal.
More.

While it is impossible to avoid experiencing—which is a constant inner flow of subjectivity shaped by attention—living can be more or less expansive and vigorous or constricted and routine. The couch potato, vegetating on handouts, is physically alive but psychosocially constricted in the extreme, and can do little for humanity. At the extreme a person generates a death-in-life: living by rigid routines, stultifying and stupefying the intellect, becoming a rule-following automaton, embracing dogmatism, closing the mind to what is true and beautiful.

If we experienced nothing, everything would stop. There would be no human relationships, there would be no creativity, there would be no organized social life, there would be no psychosocial reality. If we experienced everything, we would be overwhelmed, traumatized and unable to function.

Embracing vitality and searching for new experiences need never cease until our biological machinery fails.

Submission & Eagerness

We feel lively and full of zip when our personal world flourishes. Making that happen requires deliberate, determined immersion in the flow of imagination and feeling within, and in the flow of events without.

In embracing vitality, we never outgrow the mentality of the eager new-born infant as it simultaneously drinks in and explores the world around. This conscious living can be represented by adding a 6^thVehicle of Goodness to form two Hexads. The function of embracing vitality is to sustain and renew goodness in social arenas.

In embracing vitality, two complementary sources of experience are available:

• Receptivity: R"G6²
• Activity: R"G6¹

The new quality that is proposed to apply here is wholehearted: our personal worlds must be developed wholeheartedly, because any resistance or refusal to submit to situations weakens the potential experience. By being wholehearted we are more likely to end up where our activity or receptivity is wanted.

I Ching

The first two hexagrams in the I Ching are:
1: The Creative and 2: The Receptive.
These hexagrams seem to be close equivalents to the Hexads.

Sources of Experience

Be Receptive: R"G6²

The generality of the notion of being receptive means that it is best to present the internal structure as the only account. All levels are required. Check for yourself whether it fits with your own sense of it.
See.

g6: Being receptive requires wholehearted unification-R"G1⁷with the relevant psychosocial reality—a particular person, group or situation. Being wholehearted, makes it more likely that your unification will be positively received and reciprocated.
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g5: Being receptive requires a creative submission-R"G1⁶ to the situation. So this is not the passive state that it might appear at first sight. Submission includes rising to challenges that need imaginative handling.
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g4: Being receptive requires thoughtful exertion-R"G1⁵ relevant to you and the situation. This may be internal, like attending and re-thinking, or external, like trying and doing. Any work is intrinsically creative and so there may be a second injection of creativity.
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g3: Being receptive requires spontaneous helpfulness-R"G1⁴ in your dealings with the situation and those involved.
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g2: Being receptive requires a conscientious knowing-R"G1³ about whatever is relevant i.e. the person(s), circumstances, history, possibilities and so on.
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g1: Being receptive requires necessary aspirations-R"G1² to perceive and extract the best from people and situations with which you find yourself involved.

Be Active: R"G6¹

The generality of the notion of being active means that it is best to present the internal structure as the only account. All levels are required. Check for yourself whether it fits with your own sense of it.
See.

g6: Being active within a particular social milieu, which may be a person, group, organization or community, requires a wholehearted submission-R"G1⁶ to that psychosocial reality. It may be tempting to use activity to defend yourself or be superior and controlling. Allowing the other's psychosocial reality to be given pre-eminence over your own is asking a lot: but you will never gain new experiences if you avoid this. It is what your character has been built for.
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g5: Being active requires creative exertion-R"G1⁵ within the situation. Work, the rationale for most personal exertion, should be creative in any case. So the emphasis here suggests that all creativity can and should serve a good cause in addition to its practical benefits.
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g4: Being active requires thoughtful helpfulness-R"G1⁴ for those caught up in the situation. Thoughtfulness indicates that the form of help may not obvious. Judicious sharing, support and encouragement are usually beneficial, while pure power-plays are counter-indicated.
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g3: Being active requires a spontaneous knowing-R"G1³ of what is appropriate and good. Laborious approaches before or during any process sap the energy and can drain the life from the activity.
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g2: Being active requires conscientious aspiration-R"G1² in regard to standards and values. Any and every choice should be associated with upholding the best and affirming the highest.
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g1: Being active must be based on a necessary enjoyment-R"G1¹ of the process. Without a base in enjoyment, it is difficult to pursue an activity for long in the positive spirit defined by the higher levels of this structure.

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The embrace of vitality uses energy that comes from our will, the origin of psychosocial potential. Its energies are released and directed by purposes. However, in this case, the vision of a personal and social world that is good, is less like a goal, and more like a great dream.

• We now reach the final and highest point of this framework with the realization that it is essential to entertain great dreams.

Originally posted: 24-May-2013