Illusion, Storytelling, Flow, and GROUP 3 :)

Today we talked about illusion. The discussion of stories/happiness is particularly interesting to me. I wrote a research paper last year on "Movies, Flow, and the Art of Storytelling." I'm actually taking a class this semester called, "The Art of Storytelling."

In his book, Flow, Csikszentmihalyi  states, “the normal state of the mind is chaos”. People try to avoid or remedy this chaos by “fill[ing] their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings”. This reminds me of the Louis CK video we watched today in class (which I enjoyed very much, thanks for sharing, Dean!).

When we are capable of controlling “inner experience” or “consciousness”, we are able to shape the quality of our lives (Flow). This theory is built on the principle that happiness “does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them”

It’s my opinion that the story world is something like a playground for our mind, helping us extend our perspectives, stepping outside of ourselves, and making sense of our messy, chaotic lives.

Here is a quote from Jonathan Gottschall’s book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human, he states:

[T]he imagination is an awesome mental tool. While our bodies are always locked into a specific here and now, our imaginations free us to roam space-time. Like powerful sorcerers, all humans can see the future—not a clear and determined future, but a murky, probabilistic one (11).

To wrap this up, here’s a quote from a TED talk by film director Shekhar Kapur:

"We tell our stories, and a person without a story does not exist. So Einstein told a story and followed his stories and came up with theories and came up with theories and then came up with his equations. Alexander had a story that his mother used to tell him, and he went out to conquer the world. We all, everybody, has a story that they follow. We tell ourselves stories. So, I will go further, and I say, "I tell a story, and therefore I exist." I exist because there are stories, and if there are no stories, we don't exist. We create stories to define our existence. If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad. I don't know; I'm not sure, but that's what I've done all the time."

http://www.ted.com/talks/shekhar_kapur_we_are_the_stories_we_tell_ourselves.html

Also, we had some much-needed group time today.

We’ve got “Less stuff, more happiness,” “Flow, the secret to happiness,” and “The habits of happiness”. We’ve found that these three topics fit together quite nicely. J

If you are not sure what mini-group you are supposed to be a part of or what your role is in that mini-group, please post in the comments here below. Also, will someone from each of the other two mini-groups please send me/post/or bring to class Thursday a summary of your mini-group’s presentation as well as the duties of each person in your mini group (we can put this all together on Thursday so we can turn it in)?  Also, once I get done summarizing our research on Flow, I will send a condensed version of that to the other two groups so we can all understand how the three topics are interrelated. Thanks, you guys are awesome~ :) Sorry for the long post! >.<