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 is about our ability to open or close to particularly new experiences, ideas, or activities (see Communicating for openness with others). This ability is innate, but it can solidify out of habit, with many negative consequences. This is why it is important to maintain some conscious control over it.
• Interest covers exploratory (or stimulatory) drive as well as boredom – a signal of insufficiency in this respect. Openness and interest are paired because they (and their opposites, closedness and disinterest) reinforce each other.
• Pleasure refers to our relationship with desirable experiences. We should clarify first that pleasure differs from some other related phenomena: pleasure is distinct from satisfaction (fulfilment of positive expectations), contentment (which is a mood), joy (an emotional reaction) or happiness that primarily relates to inner harmony (which is why happiness does not need to have an external source, while pleasure does). Being clear about these distinctions (especially the last one) is not only of theoretical interest, but 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 many pleasures and are still not happy, while others are happy even if they have few pleasures in life.

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