Tag Archives: Flow State

Going Through the Worst to Get to the Best

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Volume 3, Issue 10

The two biggest blocks to the Zone/Flow state are distraction and attachment.

Attachment is also the only block to happiness, joy, delight, fun, ananda (from Hinduism, Buddhism, Extreme happiness, one of the highest states of being.) — the natural (built-in) target state of all experiencers. An experiencer is any entity that experiences consciousness through which an apparent inner/outer world is engaged. In this condition of experiencing, the automatic preference is for positive self-reaction.

This is because experiencers are driven by motivations that exist in the emotional dimension of experience (the other dimensions being intuitive, intellectual and perceptual). And happiness is the off-the-scale self-evidently best state one can experience in the emotional dimension.

Attachment blocks happiness because one is fearful of losing the things one associates with happiness and tacitly assumes are requirements for happiness. One is also angry at whatever agencies are suspected or known to be removers of those precious happiness-causing things.

“I am really attached to Pippin” (one of my cats) is a true statement for me because I love her. To experience love is not necessarily to be attached. So it is possible to get lost in word games about whether attachment is a good or bad thing because the word “attachment” is associated with the word “love”. To avoid confusion and getting lost in wordplay, I am using the term attachment to mean the inability to separate love from attachment and therefore the anger/fear syndrome.

The difference is the importance given to keeping the “things” that give us happiness. If one truly appreciates the joy that has been created by one’s loves, joy that has been creating other good things through spontaneous Flow state creativity — which emerges naturally from joy and from love — it is still possible to not worry about losing any of those “things”. In fact, when one is in that state of non-fearing loss, one is truly free, and true freedom does not exist up to that point, even in a pure democracy. This is because one is not free from one’s lower self — the ego software we built in our heads since birth (the Theory of Holosentience) — until Enlightenment, the lightening up (Fred Klein) that sets in once one has seen through the self-trickery of attachment.

A powerful contemplation technique in Mind Magic is burning out one’s attachments by intensely imaginarily experiencing the loss of each separate thing to which one is attached. This requires setting aside Alone Time, without a sense of time pressure. It requires immersion, concentration, patience as you go over the same material again and again. You can only do it for one object of your attachment at a time. It can take weeks to fit it in and spend the necessary time.

Give your imagination free reign like in a daydream. See yourself go through the experience of the moment the loss takes place, visualize how it might happen. See it vividly from the inside the way you experience life. Feel the feelings. Watch yourself in the daydream, the things you say in that situation, and the way you say them, and how the other person responds (if the particular attachment involves another person). Let yourself actually feel the loss as if it is really happening.

In your later iterations of the exercise you start to act like the hero you are in the daydream of the loss. You give the situation a more intelligent response. You realize that this is now how you will respond if that ever happens, or when it happens if it is inevitable. You feel differently about yourself from that moment on — more confident, more self-respectful, more courageous, in fact less prone to fear, and also harder to make angry.

It can take much longer than weeks for you to feel the effects of this internally due to the interconnections among various ego circuits in your head. It’s best to be removing all of the attachments during the same period of time — the perceptual, cognitive, intuitive/spiritual, and emotional parts. This is what the manual called Mind Magic is designed to do.

Happiness to all,

Bill

Flow Genes

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Volume 3, Issue 9

Thanks to Steven Kotler and the Flow Research Collective for their metaphor of the Human Genome Project as the kind of thing we need even more to facilitate Flow state. Now that thousands and maybe millions of us are experimenting and getting into this state, it has to become a world priority like the environment and the economy. In fact it can solve those and any other challenges we face, whereas the reverse is not true. If we start with the symptoms we will never reach the cure. Flow is where it all starts. Flow means better decision making and more creativity. If that is not exactly what we need, what is?

Love you say? Glad you added that. Love is actually the best pathway for the average person to reach Flow most quickly. Loving communication is the way for the masses to realize Flow state in our lifetimes — maybe the only way.

It starts with people we already love. We find Flow ways to communicate with them. They notice and appreciate the difference. We notice the stuck keys inside us that we get past to allow us to talk lovingly about another’s stuck keys in a way that feels good to everyone.

Getting back to the metaphor of genes, what could Steven and his colleagues mean? If I take it to mean that brain states and methods are the two ways of looking at the components within Flow, this metaphor has objective and subjective levels:

  1. Understanding what goes on in the brain in getting to and through Flow and the post-period and recycle — this is the scientific objective level that corresponds most exactly to the Human Genome Project, which decoded what information each gene carries;
  2. Understanding the methods we can each use to take advantage of this prior scientific understanding, where each method is a gene — this is the subjective interior method each individual takes by acts of will or automatically in order to experience Flow and maximize it. The subjective is operationally more important to us than the objective level, because it is only through willful inner experience shaping that we exercise any power to bring on one state or another.

The Human Effectiveness Institute has discovered numerous genes/methods for bringing on Flow more often. The Aha! Cultivation process is one of them that the Institute shares with Steven Kotler and his colleagues, who revealed only that one method at the ARF conference; we assume there are more methods/genes in the Flow Genome Project so far, and more to be discovered by cross-fertilization with other researchers like ourselves. Aha! is only one way in which Flow can be experienced — other methods get you there too. The book Mind Magic is a compendium of Flow genes/methods, not exhaustive of the entire long list. The book is focused on stimulating Flow state through the Observer state by the use of “inner head” language, which some see as poetry, to evoke moods that evidently change brain chemistry and shift energy patterns within different brain parts.

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi who coined Flow, lists quite a few genes/methods such as the balance between skills and challenges, the autotelic enjoyment-driven way the individual comes to the game or métier, and a number of other great insights available in his books.

Daniel Goleman has also contributed genes/methods to the list. His dictum that a person needs about 10,000 hours of practice in something in order to become a candidate for Flow in that endeavor is illuminating. This is a gene that can guide us to selection of activities in which to attempt and monitor our success. Anything that guides the individual to use specific methods that actually work to get to Flow is a gene in the way I take, or perhaps take liberties with, the seminal metaphor Steven and the Flow Genome Project have cooked up.

The work of many people led to the discovery of the gene of previsualization, which is widely recognized to increase Flow.

The genes that our work has contributed include, to mention a few top of mind:

  1. Getting to the Flow state by getting to the Observer state first
  2. Thinking without words
  3. Burning out attachments
  4. Vigilant action to vitiate the power of distraction
  5. Unconditional Omnidirectional Love
  6. Fun
  7. Can-do attitude

I hope that someday when all the genes have been listed someone will organize them into something that looks like a space age version of Mendeleyev’s (periodic) table of the elements so we can see the relationships among the genes/methods/brain states and thereby have a better understanding of how each method works to change the brain state.

Best to all,

Bill

Flow State — How Can I Know It Will Work for Me?

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Volume 3, Issue 8

In the last episode about the recent ARF Re:THINK 2013 conference, I left off at the point where Bob Barocci was about to relate a conversation with Steven Kotler, a thinker and writer on Flow state (in other words, another “me” 😀 who was twice on the conference docket as luncheon speaker.

Bob’s question to Steven was framed by him first saying in effect that Flow was for athletes and Bob didn’t think it was for him. The question then was how could you test this and tell for sure if it makes a real difference in performance?

Steven said that the 4-stage Aha! Process could be disrupted, and the results measured. In other words, performance would be lowered, proving that Flow state can be blocked, and thus logically “proving” that it can also be fostered by not interfering with the natural process as companies might unknowingly be doing by current business practices e.g. people popping into one’s office. Bob appeared unswayed, so I sent him a copy of my book Mind Magic suggesting that he could tell if it worked using this questionnaire on himself after reading the book. So far no word back from Bob as to effects.

Having thought about the question of testing and validation of Flow for most of my life, starting long before I knew the word Flow in this context, I have some ideas as to how to actually do it. In one instance I presented to a client, a group of senior U.S. military officers in a strategic unit, the idea of two combat units currently performing at equal levels. A Flow induction intervention is applied to one but not the other.

Flow induction interventions that have been considered in the past across the planet (not all necessarily effective) can be specific forms of mental focus i.e. meditation concentration contemplation, books, blog posts, videos, podcasts, tweets, persuasive speakers, chemicals (the military has tested some of these for example), several other people acting but you think it’s a real situation you’re in, being put into a life- threatening simulation but you think it’s real, psychotronics, etc.    

Within a company, two teams performing equally well and doing similar jobs, perhaps in different geographies but similar work cultures, matched in as many other ways as possible, would be the way to test the efficacy of any purported Flow intervention.

Companies and every other working grouping of people owe it to themselves to test Flow induction by any means they are attracted to. In the next post, some “genes” of Flow that the Human Effectiveness Institute has discovered, and the nature of the Flow inductions we recommend and offer.

Best to all,

Bill

The Flow Genome Project

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Volume 3, Issue 7

At ARF’s Re:THINK 2013, Steven Kotler was the luncheon speaker on two days, the second time accompanied by his colleagues Jamie Wheal and Dave Stanton in the Flow Genome Project, which is aimed at helping us become a race of “supermen” through a scientific understanding of what Flow is and how to cultivate it — exactly the purpose of the Human Effectiveness Institute, and increasingly the interest of Daniel Goleman. Naturally I spoke with Steven and offered that the Institute would pitch in in any way.

He came to Flow through a near-death experience and I through stage performances beginning at age 4. He presented an excellent depiction of Flow with breathtaking pictures of mountain climbers, surfers and other types of Flow state performers well documented and obvious in their beingness in Flow. Surely people can realize that this is another state of consciousness, and will become interested through the efforts of many of us in attaining this state, now that they know we can all do it.

But do they believe it? Neither Steven nor I have proven yet that “ordinary people” can become superbeings. Nobody has. Elite military trainers will contend that they do this in a narrow but useful field, and this leads to the larger obvious point that Flow exhibits differently in different people. We all observe it most commonly in sports, which could explain a large part of why sports is such a dominant interest. We see it in great violinists and every other type of musician including those using natural instruments.

Creatives of all kinds including artists and scientists and improvisational performers experience Flow internally and it is only “seen” to a degree by others around them, who may largely misunderstand, distort and resist the content of the Aha! Vision if it is shared prematurely.

The average person when in Flow is unaware of it. It occurs during sex, and in loving communication among human beings all the time. This is the real proof that we can all get into Flow. As we let go into engaging with a loved one without any inner blocks, turned on and driven and focused by love we shift into a state of menschness and rise above every ignoble impulse. We do it out of love. This is ethical Flow, ethics being the instrument we are playing. It is one we can all play.

The Aha! Moment is in fact the one “gene” (component, method) that Steven and his colleagues shared. The Flow Genome Project leaders correctly state that the creative process leading up to and including the Aha! Moment — which is the natural creative process as manifested in humans — involves four stages:

Stage 1: Absorb the firehose of information about the challenge

Stage 2: Go away and have fun, forget all about the garbled mountain of info now doing things to itself in your subconscious

Stage 3: The Aha! Moment

Stage 4: Organize and communicate, carry through to real-world implementation validation success of the Aha! Vision

Outgoing ARF CEO Bob Barocci opened the third day’s session by reporting a conversation he had with Steven. I’ll relate that in the next post. Before I go however I want to say that Bob has done more for the ARF than anyone else. His predecessors were all giants in that field of applied communications psychology we call marketing, advertising and media research. Bob is a Renaissance Man.

His predecessor Jim Spaeth had opened up the ARF to whole new ways of thinking and Bob took that to a beautiful extreme inspiring a coalescence of researchers from across traditional, digital, and social, putting the ARF on a firm financial footing for perhaps the first time in its long history. Bob’s successor, the former Chief Research Officer at General Mills, Gayle Fuguitt inherits a solid base and forward momentum to guide in the directions she feels are best for the industry/scientific sub-community, and for society.

With Flow and authentic social motives on the agenda, the ARF can lead more than the research industry in the years ahead. There’s an Aha! Vision for you.

Best to all,

Bill