Exotic Chicks

Back to my new eBook for a moment, now out through Barnes & Noble online and published through the excellent Smashwords. Its full title is: 'A Digital Kumquat. Exotic Hyper-Sexual Psychodynamics For Bored Rich People.'

Psychodynamics... Now what does that mean?

It just means the subconscious forces that move us, that secretly make us react in certain ways to things, or that make us (or allow us to) have an inner emotional involvement with people or things.

Exotic psychodynamics. Well now I suppose this might be a phrase that can mean to imply some sort of strange subconscious forces - or, it could mean very unusual ways in which we might be able to influence our own inner, hidden, thoughts and subconscious processes.

A lot of recent and contemporary Western academic or mainstream philosophical tradition – or fashions of thinking, let's say - makes much of 'science' and logical or objective congitive choice and decision. In a twist of that, modern American West Coast 'pop psychology' and 'pop philosophy' tries to create an attractive fusion of Eastern and Western ideas and regularly comes up with variations of 'The Secret,' which is really only the latest in a line of magical thinking fads – a bit like the 'ideas version' of yo-yos and hula hoops. Both the apparently 'logical' and the 'fusion' approaches deny the hidden biases humans often have deep in the subconscious territories of their mind: the supposedly logical is often hiding a state of denial of self, and the 'fusion' is often no more than ludicrous wishful thinking bordering on unrestrained fantasy.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced 'chick sent me high...' and why not!) is a very serious, also very mainstream, and I would say a very great modern psychologist whose ideas centre on something called positive psychology. This is an optimal experience state or condition for people, wherein they feel as if everything is flowing for them. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter, and the experience itself (of the activity) is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great costs, just for the sake of doing it. When they are thus fully immersed, their energy is focused, and they feel a full involvement and success in the process of the activity.

(The pic is 'Kronsteen' in 'From Russia With Love'...A bit of a psychologist trope, really).

This idea stands in contrast to something like 'The Secret,' in which a certain 'wish-fulfilling' actual material outcome or object gained, is the ultimate or even the fundamental aim.

Optimal experience states, or the positive psychology approach, are methodologies of intelligent action that are able to be systematically carried out using extremely mainstream psychology techniques, and even 'entrained' in a subject, or by an individual devising and conducting such a plan for themselves.

'The Secret' is unlikely to produce any empirical results of actual success. Whereas Csikszentmihalyi's optimal experience states through positive psychology certainly will, and with the collateral positive consequences that go along with things when there is 'positive psychology' at play: physical well-being and organic benefits, radical stress reduction, and improved personal relationships. There is nothing magical about it, other than the impression it gives that it is magical. Material success is a guaranteed eventual result of such sustained performance and experience states, however. And that is why all the top sports coaches and athletes have always stressed the psychology-side of things, and the current highest knowledge - the 'leading edge' – of these understandings and undertakings is in the area of Csikszentmihalyi's positive psychology optimal experience states.

In my eBook “A Digital Kumquat” I detail through a fictionalised story, techniques and devices of the very latest kinds that are used in very high circles today to exploit Csikszentmihalyi's research for a variety of purposes. Some of which are indeed extremely, exotic.

Regards to All,

Incognito 2011