Every grown-up person consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all. Georges Gurdjieff     Home Page: acourseinGreatness.com

The Five Habits of Integral Self-Actualization

The purpose of the opening course "The Four Faculties of Happiness" is to habitualize the fundamental power-unleashing faculties of our mind. It is through these faculties that we then establish the five habits that support you in living at the level of 'Great'.

Wisdom teaches us that it is our ethos or our internal character that attracts to us the good life on the outside. Therefore, in a very practical way, habitualization sets in place this change. As stated by Aristotle previously in an article on the power of habits, 'we are what we repeated do - greatness, is not an act, but comes about as a result of habit'.

Ultimately, our natures are very much alike. Innately, we have quite similar capabilities, with just fractional advantages built in from one another. What separates the good from the bad, and the good from the great throughout life, is their habits.

Strength of character is created by simply developing the habits of the Greats. In fact, the root of the word of ethos or character itself, is êthê - which literally means habitual character. (Êthê, is also the root word of 'ethical', while in Latin, habit is stated as 'mores' - root word of moral.)

Put another way, it is by our habits that we manifests our highest self, and in turn our dream life. Change without, begins from change within. Habitualizing the practices that harmonize with our best life - our ultimate ends - is the then master-key to Greatness. It is the most practical means for how to fulfill Gandhi's maxim of 'becoming the change we want to see in our world'.

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.
John Dryden

So what habits harmonize with our best life?
What habits create total life fulfillment?

The logic for the choice of habits that 'a course in Greatness' helps you to develop, comes from our nature - that is, who we are. Fulfillment, as the word itself implies, means 'fully filling' all of our self - all of our needs. So what is required to be addressed throughout a course of habitualization, are the means for holistically fulfilling our life.

Abraham Maslow categorized the entire human needs into a simple and comprehensive set and placed them in his now famous hierarchy of motivation. Succinctly put, he observed that on most part, people proceed from one level of development to another, beginning with their base physiological needs and working their way up to higher needs - all the way to self-actualization/ self-transcendence.

The spectrum of human needs and the actions they lead to, can be summed up as:

• 1. The physiological and survival need: leading to actions that ensure we have all the necessary ingredients to live and be safe - like having adequate food, clothing, shelter, justice
• 2. The social, love and belonging need: leading to actions that create loving emotional relationships with others - from friendships, to intimate connections, to building a family or community
• 3. The self-esteem/ the need to be valued: leading to actions that give us a sense of contribution, acceptance and importance in our world - usually realized through our work/ labor
• 4. The self-actualization need: leading to actions to become everything that we can potentially be - i.e. the development our unique strengths and our personal self / our unique, individual personality
  • 4B. The self-transcendence need: leading to actions that connect with our 'unitive consciousness'/ the profoundly serene and contemplative states of being / enlightenment - i.e. the development of our Universal Self / Christ Consciousness/ Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed like nature... et al.

Habits are safer than rules; you don't have to watch them.
And you don't have to keep them, either. They keep you.
Frank Crane

Looked from another perspective, these needs are really but the expression of the four dimensions of self. They represent the needs of our physical self, our social-emotional self, our mental self and our spiritual self, accordingly. As such, complete fulfillment is in having all these aspects of ourselves fully actualized, fully healthy, fully functioning.

'The Five Habits of Integral Self-actualization' present you with ways to positively grow in these dimensions of self. As part of 'a course in Greatness', these five short courses help you put into habitualization the practices that proactively expand and support the fulfillment of our five core needs:

• Habitual Health: for the development of our physical self, whose end point is in realizing a state of rich vitality and energy for life
• Habitual Passion: for the development of our social-emotional self, whose end point is in realizing a state of beautiful harmony in our relationships
• Habitual Diligence: for the development of our mental self, whose end point is in the effective realization of our legacy and thereby, abundance
• Habitual Leadership: for the development of our unique personal self, whose end point is in realizing the power to influence ourselves and others, in the pursuit of the highest good
• Habitual Detachment: for the development of our universal self, whose end point is in realizing a fundamental peace of mind that comes when uniting with a power greater than our ego

Cultivate only the habits that you are willing should master you.
Elbert Hubbard