Engagement Group

All the areas in this group relate to engagement with life. Although closely related, each is unique in some ways:

• Aliveness: what makes us feel alive is our experience. The better the quality of experience, the more alive we feel – which is why this is the main focus of this area. We should clarify, though, that aliveness differs from pleasure. Aliveness can be enhanced with experiences that are not necessarily pleasure-inducing, and not all pleasures heighten a sense of aliveness. This is why they are separate. Aliveness is the root area of this group, as experience is the baseline for all of them.
• Openness refers to regulating the extent to which we are open to an experience. Openness is the divergent aspect of the group, as it is about being receptive to experience as such rather than focusing on something specific.
• Interest is an area that covers our drive for stimulation as well as boredom, which is subjectively perceived as insufficiency in this respect. Unlike openness, interest implies focusing on and connecting with somebody or something specific. So, it is the convergent aspect of the group.
• Pleasure is about relating to desirable experiences. It may be important to clarify here the difference between pleasure and some other related phenomena: pleasure is different from satisfaction (fulfilment of positive expectations), contentment (which is a mood), joy (an emotional reaction) or happiness that primarily relates to inner harmony (thus, happiness does not need to have an object, while pleasure always does). This is why pleasure is an area of its own. Making these distinctions (especially the last one) also has a practical value. For example, we often seek pleasures, assuming they will bring happiness. But this is not necessarily the case. Some people have a lot of pleasures and are still not happy, while others are happy even if they have few pleasures in life.

As these areas relate in some ways to our engagement with reality and our experience of reality, they all belong to the existence mode and the external domain.