Your H I Mind
Humanity in Action.
The Nature of Being Human.
Motivational Drivers
There are, I believe, a number of types of motivational driver that we can become aware of. Compulsions seem to involve potentially overwhelming urges. Emotions present as combinations of feelings and directed-awareness. Additionally, I describe a further significant driver that operates at just below the level of conscious thinking.
Compulsions
Compulsions are generally stronger than emotions and force us to attend to the needs of our body. Examples include hunger, thirst, lust, and pain.
Compulsions are generally non-conscious and can undermine our conscious intentions and thoughts.
Compulsions can also be used, by our subconscious, to drive habitual and addictive behaviour. In this second case, compulsions can be thought of as associated with some cultural influence, or opportunity, but plays out not through conscious choice but as a learned subconscious response to trauma or discomfort.
Emotions
These are processes/experiences that seem vitally involved with our subconscious but will impact our consciousness, very strongly at times. Emotions can combine feelings and urges with quite specific thoughts, or other cognitions.
The functional purpose of emotion seems evident to me but is often ignored in popular discourse. Simply put, I describe emotions as collections of feelings that influence our thoughts in order to drive our behaviour. We can identify emotions as a combination of feelings that may seem to be associated with our body and thoughts that direct our focus of attention.
For example, love connects us to possible opportunities, fear has us avoid danger, and anger drives us to deal with dangers and problems that cannot be avoided. Contentment in varied forms can provide us with feelings of appreciation and reward.
Imperatives
Each Focus has its own specialist job to do. I am aware of certain themes that play out in my own motivations that I suggest are intrinsic, genetically-supported, and different to compulsions and emotions.
Examples of imperatives include:
An assumption that it is best to 'get on' with others.
A desire to 'belong' to our society in some meaningful way.
An insistence to 'get things right'.
A tendency to play.
A drive to explore.
A wish to leave a legacy.
Imperatives seem to work in a similar way to cognitive guiding beliefs; they guide our behaviour though they are not readily recognised through our conscious thinking, which may imply that they are pre-verbal.
I believe that these Imperatives will be expressed differently in each of us, both in magnitude and interpretation, and that they will vary from situation to situation.
Imperatives can also be interpreted as the equivalent of algorithms that drive our motivations and priorities. Our Focuses are pre-programmed to give us human instincts, which drive what some people recognise as human nature and perhaps what some might call inherent value-systems.
Notice that even our Core Consciousness (when considered as contained within the Planning Focus) has Imperatives, which gives another clue about what we experience as consciousness.