Carl Rogers and the fully functioning person

I recently came across a famous quote from Bruce Lee (the noted neurosocialpsychologist): 

“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

This reminded me of Carl Rogers essay on the fully functioning person who is living “the good life.” When I hear about mindfulness I am often reminded of this essay by Rogers.    

Carl Rogers was one of the 20th century’s most influential psychologists. His essay on the Fully Functioning Person was “an attempt to spell out the picture of the person who would emerge if therapy were maximally successful.” Rogers wrote he “was somewhat frightened by the fluid, relativistic, individualistic person who seemed to be the logical outcome.(1)” 

This was based upon his observations of patients whose therapy was successful and who had subsequently made good progress towards, or were living, what he calls a good life. Rogers was surprised and a bit concerned to observe that these people never reached a particular state of being, a homeostasis. This was in contradiction to many influential psychological theories of his time. Instead, he writes:

If I attempt to capture in a few words what seems to me to be true of these people, I believe it it will come out something like this.
“The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction, not a destination. 
The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.  

This strikes me of a pretty good description of someone who is living mindfully. 

Rogers found The characteristic qualities of this “process of movement” which “crop up in person after person” were:

• An increasing openness to experience. 
• Increasingly existential living. 
• An increasing trust in his or her organism. There is a wonderful description of decision-making which foreshadows the work of Kahnemann and Teversky and dozens of books since then such as Blink and The Righteous Mind.  

——  Notes ————-

(1) This was the inspiration for his original paper, which he never published but circulated among friends and colleagues for feedback. Later when he considered the paper for a collection of essays and speeches titled On Becoming a Person, he found “many of its most central themes had been absorbed, and perhaps better expressed, in other papers.” So he used a later paper on “the good life” which “expresses its essential aspects in briefer and more readable form.”