Category Archives: Flow State

Extending Stay in Flow State

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Volume 2, Issue 32

Flow state aka the Zone is when you are functioning perfectly without effort. Everything is flowing along as if doing itself and the reaction at large to your performance is ideal.

When you are there, what often happens is that you let out the clutch a little bit too far on the edit rate for your impulses — and out pops an action that fails in the real world and suddenly you are not in the Zone any more.

Anger at self then impulsively arises, ensuring that re-entry to Flow will be impeded.

The way to re-optimize this edit-slackening program is for you to realize that you are going strong so you have naturally started to assume that every arising in your mind is certain to be brilliant and so you should do it right away. Staying stoically unattached to your great performance without letting it go to your head or bring you into a state of overconfidence is a delicate balancing act that should go on as automatic background menschness. This can be aided by a sense of humor and loving distance from your own ego.

All of this head action is optimally executed sans words in the head. To the extent that you hear inner vocalization you might be in Observer state but not Flow. Observer state is the valuable entry state for Flow, characterized by vivid inner attention so you see your ego for what it is and can reprogram your own actions rather than acting robotically — to some extent.

When that lens is operating one can easily slip into the Zone doing something in which one is well practiced, so long as there is no attachment to outcome, and so long as you are doing the thing because you like to do that thing, it’s your thing.

Attachment to other people’s opinions of you can keep you out of both these states, especially Flow. Yet even people with high detachment — fatalists resolved to take whatever comes stoically — give up this attachment last. We are social beings. Death is not as poignant as shame.

The lens of utter detachment can be put on and worn. It doesn’t just sit lightly on your nose, it sinks into your being, you feel it bodily, your breathing is easier, you’re comfortable in your skin, secure, liking your self, the character you play on the stage of life.

This is effortful today. Acceleritis did not exist in Jesus’ day or he might not have gotten to such a high level (leaving aside divinity for the sake of argument).

Every time a challenge to your sense of self arises you need to write it down and come back to it in contemplation until it is solved. You take action items and implement them. Doing this systematically leads to a sense of being secure with who you are. It is essentially the methodological root of stoicism. One cannot muster the strength to embody stoicism (not just being stoic in one’s mind) unless one has worked out the antagonistic voices in one’s head that pull you down. This unglamorously cannot be done without lists. And time alone for contemplation. Blank pads laying around come in handy for drawing automatic situational schematics and jotting trigger words.

Negative outcomes one is desperately trying to avoid can lose their force if one vividly imagines those outcomes actually happening and how one would ideally deal with them. This contemplation of the corpse* burns out fear of dreaded outcomes. In knowing oneself and relative fearlessness, one can act in freedom, whereupon the Flow state is just the natural next stage in the process.

Best to all,

Bill

*Contemplation of “horrible” things is an ancient technique for “burning out” their apparently (but not truly) inherent “horribleness”.

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“Join a national celebration of our great tradition of generosity” at http://givingtuesday.org/.

A Certain Dislocation in Time

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Volume 2, Issue 29

Flow state is within our reach at any moment. Think for a second how small your average challenge is at any given moment in time. Mostly you are not overmatched — if anything there is too little challenge at any given moment to evoke Flow. As Czikszentmihalyi taught us all, Flow can happen when skills and challenges are well matched in the moment. But that single criterion is not enough. Attachment to outcome also has to disappear.

The way almost all of us live our lives in the present culture rarely escapes attachment to outcome. This is the big Flow blocker.

It is the difference between Being and the peculiar form of existence that characterizes the present civilization. Being is when there is no dislocation in time between stimuli and the flow of our actions. We simply do it. We don’t think about how it will impress other people, or even about how it will impress the internalized judge.

The way we grow up and are taught, we inherit an internalized judge that we check with subconsciously before every action we take. This creates a gap, a dislocation, between simply and trustingly flowing with our being vs. the way we normally behave, which first last and always is constantly checking with the internalized judge, scoring ourselves on everything we do.

In situations big and small, unimportant and important, if we can flip off those safeties and simply trust who we are to do the right thing and enjoy ourselves in a non-self-protective and compassionate way, Flow happens.

If there is negativity present within you, this is unsafe to do — “do not try this at home” — first you must process out the negativity before it makes sense to flip off the safeties. Negativity is a great distorter of actions, so you must then edit impulses discriminatingly. Negativity includes any fear, hurts, and even that faint form of negativity we call attachment to outcome.

When on the edge of Flow, slipping in and out of it, and/or in environments in which the situation is changing rapidly so that from moment-to-moment the challenge slope is unpredictably modulating, there is a subtle inner tweaking of the edit dial that can correct for letting too many impulses into action vs. too few — so that the ego-driven impulses get weeded out and the compassionate and un-self-protective ones get through the filter into the consensus reality for sharing.

Wishing you ever more Flow state in your life.

Best to all,

Bill 

Rooting Out Hidden Fear

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Volume 2, Issue 21

Negative emotion and Flow state cannot happen simultaneously within a person. If the objective is Flow state, the ecstasy of simply being, with freedom in place of fear, then to thine own self be true and use the Observer state to root out things you are hiding even from yourself, and make a deal with yourself to expunge all negative emotion — including fear.

In Flow state, inspirations keep popping even in the middle of a sentence and you incorporate them easefully because you are not afraid you might say the wrong thing. Not because saying the wrong thing is impossible in Flow but because it is irrelevant. If you are communicating in the Flow state, the object is not being right but instead collectively reaching truth and right action — as Socrates pioneered.

Fear has been prevalent since the dawn of recorded history, except for those who have attained Observer and Flow states. We postulate that the recording of history, which occurred as the result of written language, therefore started at the same time as Acceleritis — the pandemic disease of the mind caused by information overload and triggered by written language itself.

Today there is more rational reason for fear than ever before. Practically no one has enough money to not live in fear of losing one’s job. Companies are turning over personnel rapidly and cutting jobs. The average person is keeping his or head down rather than trying to fix things because stepping forward is a risk that could go either way.

Some people are afraid because to their own minds they still have not proven themselves. There might be a hidden senator in their mind such as the taped and aped voice of e.g. their verbally abusive parent. They might feel the need to prove themselves to that mother, father, spouse, critic or rival sibling, or one of the people who has been unknowingly projected into taking over one of those roles. Or they might have achieved a degree of autonomy and do not need anyone else’s approval, but having achieved a degree of nobility and having taken on the world’s problems, they might be afraid they will die before succeeding in some noble cause.

Even in the latter case, hidden fear precludes Flow state. Observer state must be cultivated to remove the hidden blockages within and thus enable Flow state. One may continue to pursue the noble cause but without a fear of failing, with acceptance of whatever the outcome may be, still doing one’s best to make the dream come true. In this manner one will rest within the higher states, often rising to Flow and thereby maximizing the probability of achieving the objective.

Observer state can be used to detect flashes of fear that come and go so fast one would not be aware of them in lower consciousness levels. In Observer state, one is actually observing the mental function of repression taking place. This is an amazing feeling. Observer state is not as dramatically amazing as Flow state but it too has its amazing moments, yours for the taking.

Best to all,

Bill