The Basal Motivations
AEC Episode 03 — To create and to experience
At the root of all life are two fundamental motivations: to create (express) and to experience (perceive). Understanding these and their balance is essential for effective choice-making at every scale.
The Plane of Perception
Imagine an envelope drawn around your body — a plane separating self from world:
Experience
Perception, sensing, receiving. Information flowing inward through sight, touch, feeling.
Creation
Expression, choosing, making. Information flowing outward through action, speech, art.
This is a primal concept. Anywhere there's a notion of self — any creature, any identity — these two flows are fundamental to existence itself.
Maximizing Both Together
You can't just maximize one:
- Hedonism trap: Focus only on experience, trade off creative bandwidth
- Workaholism trap: Focus only on creation, stop listening, miss breakfast, burn out
As you get more skillful:
- You perceive in more dimensions
- You express with more nuance
- Channels become more diverse, integrated, coherent
- Greater return on investment — skill begets skill
What Life Requires
For any self (individual, community, ecosystem) to continue having creativity and experience:
Sustainability
Sameness, continuance, endurance
Evolution
Difference, adaptability, change
Consciousness
Arbiter between sameness and difference
If you don't have sustainability, creativity and experience end. If you don't adapt to change, you can't maintain integrity. Consciousness reconciles the dynamic between the two.
Surface vs. Deep Desires
Like Internal Family Systems: the child self, the adult self, the work self, the friend self — each may have different desires.
Ineffective choices come from lack of clarity between these aspects. Surface desires may appear to conflict.
Resolution: Connect surface desires back to deeper desires. The arbiter is: which choice affirms the deeper level that makes all surface expression possible?
💗 The Core Principle
"Love is that which enables choice."
If you learn only one thing from all this philosophy, let it be this.
Why This Matters
This definition is functional, not sentimental. It lets you:
- Discern love from control: Are you enabling their choice, or making choices for them?
- Detect manipulation: Are they trying to enable you, or extract from you?
- Practice love skillfully: Affirm the most vital, alive version of the other
💡 Cooperation vs. Competition
For life to flourish — for cells to become organisms, for people to become communities — cooperation must be slightly stronger than competition.
This is literal: healthy ecosystems show this pattern. It's what enables the "multicellular transition" at every level.
Working things are transparent; broken things are visible. We must be careful not to overcount competition and undercount cooperation.
Applications
Cells enabling cells: digestion cells provide energy, immune cells protect, nerves coordinate. All enabling all.
Result: you can look up at the sky and experience awe.
People enabling people. If the community enables its members, and members enable the community, then collective capacities emerge that no individual could achieve.
The job of government: protect and assist the land and the people to thrive. (Land first — without healthy land, no healthy people, no nation.)
If governance doesn't enable, it ceases to be effective governance.
Friendship Revisited
All six dimensions of friendship are ways of enabling choice:
- Sharing — enabling discovery and experience
- Celebration — enabling joy
- Support — enabling through difficulty
- Encouragement — enabling persistence
- Learning — enabling growth
- Values — enabling orientation
"When someone says 'I love you' and means it: I affirm within you the most healthy, vital, alive version of yourself. Anything I can do to enable you to become more fully realized — I want that."
Summary
- Two basal motivations: Experience (world→self) and Creation (self→world)
- Maximize both together — balance is essential
- Life requires: Sustainability + Evolution + Consciousness
- Love is that which enables choice — the most essential distillation
- Cooperation > Competition (slightly) — this is what allows life to scale
📜 Full Transcript
[Transcript available in full episode recording]