Bought some soundtracks that claim to enhance flow. What have I got to lose, right? If they work, I will definitely share the link.
In meditation this morning, I was observing my thoughts arise and then the associated emotion. Turns out, nearly every emotion has to do with something I desire, or am averse to (which is another form of desire). Mostly, these take the shape of judgements. Given that flow demands that the constant inner critic be turned off, this is significant. Evaluating your actions at each stage is antithetical. In a way, there must be a loss of self. Indeed, I think that most peak experiences involve this loss of the ego.
I was going to spend more time on goals in this post, but feel so strongly about this idea that I will not dilute it by switching to another topic.
They say you can only be happy when you are not asking yourself whether you are happy or not. This is not completely true, because we sometimes take a great deal of satisfaction from stepping back, regarding our situation and really appreciating it. However, and this is key, we simply can’t be doing that all the time. When you’re biking a challenging trail, sitting back and admiring how well you’re riding it is a sure way to get your ass on the ground quickly.
Of course, in that situation there is some immediate survival pressure at play. Your brain is putting everything into it, and there are simply no resources left for your “personality”. Which raises the question, is that personality patiently waiting somewhere, or has it been switched off?
My opinion is that personality is not your actual self, and much of modern neuroscience will bear this out. To put it bluntly, you are not your personality. It is only a part of you. And it is such a bothersome part that, when the shit hits the fan, it is often shut off.
As Darrin M. McMahon observes in “Divine Fury (A History of Genius)”:
Divine Fury“And the author known as Longinus, in a treatise on the sublime that would have a major impact on later thinking about genius, describes how writers of great natural talents were in possession of a force that could carry them out of themselves ‘above all mortal range,’ lifting them ‘near the mind of God.'”
Whilst we are probably too secular these days to entertain the idea of a genius or daimon, this metaphor has survived since ancient times for a reason. The highest creative ability still seems to have something of the mystical about it. We try to explain it in terms of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, brain waves, and the like, but that is hardly inspiring. They may help us to deconstruct the process of entering flow, but they’re not the whole story.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes this of Barbara McClintock (Nobel prize-winning scientist) in his excellent book “Rest” – which I’m now rereading:
Rest“As a child, she told her biographer, she discovered that she could focus so deeply on activities that she’d lose her sense of self, to the point of forgetting her own name. As a graduate student, she learned to apply this ferocious capacity for attention to her scientific work and began to learn how to recognize when her subconscious was working through a problem.”
Even as we try to scientifically understand genius and flow, we still create modern myths. We love the mystery of genius. Perhaps a large part of the solution is that we can never aspire to genius, for the self that aspires is forever denied entry to that particular heaven. It is only when we can immerse ourselves so fully that even the concept of self, honours, glory and attainment disappear, that the gates can open.
The Flow Diaries 