Motivational States

A word tool for the whole set of primordial drives latent in a human being — the energies that animate us, each of which will take the whole person if nothing above it is holding them together.

The drives are few and familiar: fear, aggression, sexuality, curiosity, interest, anxiety, happiness, acquisition, belonging, learning, feeling. They animate and energise, aim at particular goals, persist until the goal is reached, and rise and fall in relative strength depending on the state of the body and the state of the surroundings. They are not faults. They are the motive power a person actually has.

The canon offers two places to see them plainly. Look at the gods in any culture's pantheon: each is a drive given a face, which is why the pantheons of unrelated peoples rhyme. And watch a two-year-old, who cycles through them one at a time — whichever state has them, has them entirely. That second picture is the whole teaching in miniature, because an adult who is possessed one hundred per cent by a single drive is a two-year-old with more capability (Archetype · Mastery Of Emotions · Addiction).

The developmental claim is the load-bearing part. Maturing is not the suppression of the drives but their integration — bringing them into a Higher Order Functional Unity inside a whole personality that is moving toward a single overriding aim. Practically, that means modulating an innate lower-order drive against an abstract higher-order goal: the drive is not denied, it is placed. Fear becomes vigilance in service of something; acquisition becomes provision; aggression becomes the capacity to stand in front of what you love (Aligned Will · Discipline · The Threefold Capacity · Warrior).

This is why the canon puts a Goal above everything else rather than a rule. A rule fights a drive and usually loses; a genuinely higher aim reorganises the drives beneath it, which is the only arrangement that holds under pressure (One Purpose Above All · Purpose · Meaning · Integration).

It also explains a common capture. Anything that can reliably trigger one drive — a feed, a market, a war party — can take a person's whole energy without ever engaging them above it, which is exactly what much of the surrounding world is built to do (Associative And Dissociative Energy · Manufactured Dependency · Distortion).

Also called: primordial drives · the basic motivations Stands on: Consciousness · Embodiment · Word Tools Opens onto: Mastery Of Emotions · Higher Order Functional Unity · Fear · Anger · Joy · Belonging · Addiction · Discipline · Archetype · Pillar V — Sacred Health and Wellness In play: the daily practice — noticing which state is running, and what it is being placed beneath Sources: Motivational States (root page, draft — declares itself a Word Tool, enumerates the eleven drives, names the pantheon and the two-year-old as observation methods, and states the integration claim) · Primordial Drives (root page, a redirect) · Higher Order Functional Unity (root page) · lionsberg.wiki: Motivational States Open: The eleven are offered without a source and mix drives with feelings; happiness and feeling are not the same kind of thing as acquisition. · The canon names State Of Embodiment and State Of Environment as the two modulating factors and writes neither.