BC - Abundant Living

Hi, I’m Lee Hayden,  website owner, manager, and author .  Welcome to the Hayden Center For Educational Excellence.  The Hayden Center  offers students a variety of educational programs of study, each  program leading to an opportunity to  experience a unique  form of  lifestyle  enrichment.  Click here to review the available programs of study, courses, durations, and costs.  Contact Lee Hayden at 707-945-1294 if you have questions.

Abundant living is possibly the highest level of living, in the opinion of the SHAL) website, that any person can achieve in  their life.  This Brief Course In Abundant Living introduces and briefly discusses the many aspects associated with living life abundantly This brief course is free and the student may review the discussion for the knowledge obtained but also for the purpose of determining if the associated Short Course would be personally valuable.

The highest style of living promoted on this website is defined to be the “Abundant Living Lifestyle.” Many of its key characteristics are presented in the table below.  The various brief courses and short courses are dedicated to a more complete explanation of the “Living Life Abundantly” lifestyle.  The chart presents  three styles of living  - sideways, re-inventing life, and abundant living - so that the abundant living lifestyle may be  understood as contrast with the other two..

 

Abraham Maslow  examined the human condition and human needs. Human needs are presented below in Maslow’s Hierarchical Chart of Human Needs.

 

Physiological needs are the most fundamental and absolutely necessary for human existence.  In general, physiological  needs must be satisfied before safety needs; however, safety needs often overlap physiological needs.  Such overlap is a general feature of the chart.

It should be noted that love/belonging needs occur below esteem needs. Stated differently, it is difficult to have high self-esteem without first satisfying love/belonging needs.  Thus, taking a short  course in self-esteem would achieve best results if love/belonging needs had been first satisfied.

The top level need is for self-actualization.  A self-actualized person is  authentic, creative, spontaneous, able to solve problems, and lacks prejudice. According to Maslow, this is where we all would like to be.  Becoming a self-actualized person is a very difficult achievement.

Authenticity is a technical term used in psychology as well as existentialist philosophy and aesthetics . In existentialism, authenticity is the degree to which one is true to one's own personality, spirit, or character, despite external pressures; the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures, and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself. A lack of authenticity is considered in existentialism to be bad faith.[

Each of us   lives in our  uniquely individual frame of reference (FOR). Our FOR may be fully within a Maslow level or overlap Maslow levels. When we interact with other people , we are interacting with their unique FORs, which may be in the same or different Maslow level.  Our response is determined by our FOR.    A FOR is like a three dimentional box.  All of our cognitive thinking, emotional thinking, and social thinking occurs within this box. All our actions  result from thinking that occurs within our FOR.    For many psychological purposes, this FOR may be viewed as psychological prison. Sadly, we usually don’t realized that the prison is of our own making.  Further, we realize other people have different FORs, but we believe that our particular FOR is the only possibility for ourself.  .  Even in our most imaginative moments, we can not imagine a new FOR beyond our existing FOR. Addressing our FOR issues is especially difficult when our processing is partially unconscious.   In this sense , we are condemned to live in our own special FOR.  And, there appears to be no exit.

How does a person escape from their  FOR?  Is escape even possible?

Suppose my name is Waldo and I have low self-esteem .  Thus, I am at the self-esteem Maslow need level.  My buddy Tom is self-actualized and is at the Maslow self-actualization level  where self-esteem is high.  Being buddies, Waldo has been aware for many years that Tom has a much higher level of self-esteem but has suffered the associated embarrassment and humilization in quiet desperation.  Waldo was afraid to take calculated risks associated with the many possiblties offered by his environment that could have eventually led to  achieving higher self-esteem and  self-actualization.  A person can not achieve high self-esteem by looking in the mirror each morning and say, “I am great”. Instead, that person must get real-world feedback.

Waldo, Tom, and people in general  necessarily perform many daily physical activities based on mental activities. Each individual task contrains an assortment of imprecise information. For example, a  task consists of a process with inputs and outputs.  Each input contains imprecise information from a previous process, the present process introduces its own imprecise information, and the output contains  compounded imprecise information.  Because of this imprecision,our communication is not as effective.