Welcome to Day 29 of the July Intensity Project!
31 Days Toward Living with More Intensity & Creativity
Last week we read Kazimierz Dabrowski’s passage in Personality-shaping Through Positive Integration on how “isolation in peaceful conditions” can help people in the midst of creative tension. Today I want to share more of Dabrowski’s thoughts on the importance of occasional isolation, this time with respect to meditation:
“The fundamental quality shaped by the everyday effort of the individual aiming at personality is the ability to meditate. We have referred to it repeatedly. It has its origin in a form of reflection, a predisposition for deep meditation, the ability to interrupt one’s daily activity, and the need for frank ‘philosophizing.’ The individual may avail himself of the many works of various schools dealing with spiritual life in order to deepen this capacity for meditation. Retrospection and prospection and periodic isolation of oneself give definite results here. They clearly promote all those activities which develop the inner environment and its hierarchy of values…”
Here is where we begin to see how the overexcitabilities can aid in personality development and personal growth. Michael Piechowski writes that one expression of intellectual excitability, for example, is “thinking about thinking,” and that imaginational overexcitability often results in daydreaming.
My guess is that most of you who are reading this enjoy your own thoughts and thinking about your thoughts, and you are able to view yourself, at times, almost as if from another perspective, what Dabrowski termed the “subject-object in oneself.” You also may enjoy daydreaming and fantasy, especially when you are bored.
While “thinking about thinking” can lead to anxiety and angst and self-doubt (the very act of doubting oneself implies that we are viewing ourselves from another perspective), it can also be the basis for intense calm and deep self-knowledge: meditation. While daydreaming can be viewed as being scattered, it can, at the same time, be understood as an intense focus on that which is intangible: meditation.
Do you take seriously your need for meditation, whether it be through spirituality or philosophy or yoga?
Do you have a time and place in your life where you can “interrupt one’s daily activity” and observe your own thoughts and feelings?
Further Resources:
- “The Wonders of Meditation and What It Can Do for Our Kids“
- Meditation and Mindfulness Resources from the Talent Development Website
- Hoagies Gifted Pages: Philosophy Resources for Young People
Photo credit: Cristina Chirtes
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