Seeking Paradox

Jaak Panksepp in his encyclopedic “The Archeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins” discusses

Seven Primary Affective (intense emotional) Systems:

Affects

1. SEEKING or expectancy

2. RAGE

3. FEAR

4. LUST

5. CARING

6. PANIC/GRIEF

7. PLAY

The seven systems are not theoretical. Panksepp studied them for years through triangular research methods in his lab. He coined the term “affective neuroscience.”

Bottom Up

These seven emotional systems are bottom-up, meaning originating in subcortical regions of the brain. The systems are studied in animals that lack the ability to think about their primary affects (strong emotional feelings) and to inhibit their emotional behaviors. Animals provide good scientific data because an animal’s emotional behaviors are accurate reflections of these subcortical primary affective experiences. Humans filter and alter their primary affective experiences through higher neocortical cognition.

All but the first system, SEEKING (I”ll capitalize as Panksepp does) are self-apparent. Panksepp defines the SEEKING system as a persistent exploratory inquisitiveness. The animal probes into the nooks and crannies of interesting places as it explores and engages with its world.

The SEEKING system is the brain source of eager anticipation, desire, euphoria. It is the quest for everything. SEEKING arousal inspires animals to enthusiastically search for food, water, and shelter. It inspires them to seek mates or if young, seek their mothers.

But in humans, the SEEKING system remains alert even when these needs are met. The system engenders excessive activities like overeating, alcoholism, gambling, and ill-advised sexual activities. The SEEKING system can too easily urge us to indulge in a wide range of activities without our stopping to carefully consider the repercussions. If conditioning is strong enough, the higher mind does not resist the temptation that the lower mind wants to pursue.

Overstimulation

Overstimulation of the SEEKING system can cause the thinking neocortex to think obsessively about the world around and how it is organized. This can result in seeing causal and meaningful links where there are only causal ones. SEEKING can run wild, resulting in erroneous conclusions, even delusions of grandeur.

Drugs like amphetamines and cocaine are effective stimulants of the SEEKING system because they increase the availability of dopamine in the synaptic clefts, the communication channels between neurons.

Attempting to Lift Yourself Up from Your Bootstraps

Years before Panksepp’s work, in “Become What You Are” Alan Watts discusses the ego as a “result seeking mechanism.” The system works well when it seeks food or shelter. But when seeking is for states of itself such as happiness, Watts says it is like trying to lift oneself up by your own bootstraps. “Looking for results in terms of itself is like working purposely for no objective purpose.  It is looking for results in terms of itself, to get results from the process of looking for results. This is a hopelessly and wild fouled-up feedback mechanism.”

Only Way Out

The only way out, Watts says, is to realize “the whole round circuit of the trap in which it lies. It can see the entire futility and self-contradiction of its position. And it can see that it can do nothing whatsoever to get itself out of it.

At this moment, there is a sudden shift in the center of gravity of one’s whole personality. You simply find yourself outside the trap, outside the result-seeking mechanism, which now appears as a sort of object which has purposes all to no purpose. You see yourself as a purpose-seeking creature, but realize that there is no purpose for the existence of such a creature.

In relation to everything except your own preservation, you are marvelously futile. Your aim is to preserve and perpetuate yourself, but in the larger context of the universe, there is no reason, no purpose for this pain … You no longer find yourself identified with this absurd mechanism of purposeless purpose . . . When the shift has taken place, when he finds himself outside of himself, outside of the teleological (study of ends or purposes) trap, the trap unwinds, the result-seeking mechanism straightens out and no longer seeks itself, or states of itself.

Watts is discussing the Chinese philosophy of Tao. Victor Frankl came to much the same paradoxical truth in his Logo Therapy:

Self-Actualization from Self-Transcendence

“What is called self-actualization is and must remain, the unintended effect of self-transcendence;  it is ruinous and self-defeating to make it the target of intention. And what is true of self-actualization also holds for identity and happiness. It is the very “pursuit of happiness” that obviates happiness. The more we make it a target, the more widely we miss.”

Maslow also arrives at the same conclusion late in life, that we experience the highest level of development, self-transcendence, by focusing on some higher goal outside ourselves.

Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.

Self-actualization means fulfilling your potential. Mazlow and Frankl are saying you can’t reach this stage without first transcending yourself by serving something greater than yourself. So you fulfill your potential by putting your needs aside, the ultimate paradox.

When you see so many “successful” people unsatisfied you begin to understand this paradox as having real meaning. Some of these successful people leave what they have been doing and enter teaching or philanthropic programs. Paul Allen and Bill Gates, founders of Microsoft come to mind and George Soros in the financial world.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body