THE ANATOMY OF CONSCIOUSNESS ■ 39He was lucky that after the breakdown his parents realized the predica
ment and sought help for themselves and their son, reestablishing a
stable enough relationship with Jim to allow him to go on with the task
of building a sturdy self.
Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bear
ing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is
it neutral? News of the fall of the stock market will upset the banker,
but it might reinforce the sense of self of the political activist. A new
piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by
getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals,
thereby freeing up psychic energy.
Order in Consciousness: Flow
The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal
experience. When the information that keeps coming into awareness is
congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. There is no need
to worry, no reason to question one’s adequacy. But whenever one does
stop to think about oneself, the evidence is encouraging: “You are doing
all right.” The positive feedback strengthens the self, and more atten
tion is freed to deal with the outer and the inner environment.
Another one of our respondents, a worker named Rico Medellin,
gets this feeling quite often on his job. He works in the same factory as
Julio, a little further up on the assembly line. The task he has to perform
on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three
seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times
in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon.
But Rico has been at this job for over five years, and he still enjoys it.
The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic
athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record? Like the runner
who trains for years to shave a few seconds off his best performance on
the track, Rico has trained himself to better his time on the assembly
line. With the painstaking care of a surgeon, he has worked out a private
routine for how to use his tools, how to do his moves. After five years,
his best average for a day has been twenty-eight seconds per unit. In part
he tries to improve his performance to earn a bonus and the respect of
his supervisors. But most often he does not even let on to others that
he is ahead and lets his success pass unnoticed. It is enough to know that
he can do it, because when he is working at top performance the
experience is so enthralling that it is almost painful for him to slow
down. “It’s better than anything else,” Rico says. “It’s a whole lot better