The River Knows

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them -- that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

— Lao Tzu

The Dark Side of Mental Advancement

The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book,  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is always on my coffee table. It offers great practical advice on recentering your mind and reenergizing your life.

The Dilemma of Consciousness

“The consequence of forging life by purpose and resolution is a sense of inner harmony, a dynamic order in the contents of consciousness,” wrote psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 

“But, it may be argued, why should it be so difficult to achieve this inner order? Why should one strive so hard to make life into a coherent flow experience? Aren’t people born at peace with themselves — isn’t human nature naturally ordered?

“The original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self-reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain and danger. The forms of psychic entropy that currently cause us so much anguish — unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, guilt — are all likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They are by-products of the tremendous increase in complexity of the cerebral cortex and of the symbolic enrichment of culture. They are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness.”

Beyond Reward and Punishment

“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments,” wrote Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

“To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present.”

In Control of Consciousness

“Despite its great powers, attention cannot step beyond (its) limits,” observed Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  “It cannot notice or hold in focus more information than can be processed simultaneously. Retrieving information from memory storage and bringing it into the focus of awareness, comparing information, evaluating, deciding — all make demands on the mind’s limited processing capacity. For example, the driver who notices the swerving car will have to stop talking on his cellular phone if he wants to avoid an accident.

“Some people learn to use this priceless resource efficiently, while others waste it. The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.”

Now consider what digital media has done to shorten the human attention span in the decades since this was written. What does that imply about the ability “to enjoy the normal course of everyday life?”

The Flow of Frankenstein

"There is no occupation in the world so absorbing as trying to paint. Everything, every worry, is for the moment forgotten in the effort, however unsuccessful, of creating a masterpiece. To the surprise of many and the horror of some, I have also found great pleasure in needlework, which, after all, is only another way of making pictures."

— Ernest Thesiger, Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein. He understood the concept of Flow long before it had been defined.

Inner Harmony, Not Outer Control

“It is important to do as much as we can to prevent nuclear war, to abolish social injustice, to eradicate hunger and disease,” wrote psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “But it is prudent not to expect that efforts to change external conditions will immediately improve the quality of our lives. As J.S. Mill wrote, ‘No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes places in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.’

“How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experience.”

Experiencing the Autotelic

“The term autotelic derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is not done with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. 

“Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in order to prove one’s skill at forecasting future trends is — even though the outcome in terms of dollars and sense is exactly the same. 

“Teaching children in order to turn them into good citizens is not autotelic, whereas teaching them because one enjoys interacting with children is. 

“What transpires in the two situations is ostensibly identical; what differs is that when the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on the consequences.”

— Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Csíkszentmihályi interviewed artists and musicians in order to understand what flow felt like,” Robert Genn noted. “Their reports — 7000 of them — were staggeringly similar: each described a feeling of total immersion and intrinsic enjoyment, a loss of a sense of time and other needs, and an almost out-of-body experience, where the activity was automatic, without much conscious effort. Think of a clarinetist observing her own fingers, letting the instrument play itself.

“The most important thing about flow is that it only happens when a person is nestled in a psychological state between challenge and control; immersed in an activity with which she already possesses a fair amount of skill and evolved technique. One cannot lose herself in a concerto, after all, until she has long practiced her scales.”

Csíkszentmihályi noted, “Some things we are initially forced to do against our will turn out in the course of time to be intrinsically rewarding.”

Why We’re Wrong Without Writing

 

“In today’s world we come to neglect the habit of writing because so many other media of communication have taken its place,” wrote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 

“If the only point to writing were to transmit information, then it would deserve to become obsolete. But the point of writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along. 

“In the past, educated persons used journals and personal correspondence to put their experiences into words, which allowed them to reflect on what happened during the day. The prodigiously detailed letters so many Victorians wrote are an example of how people created patterns of order out of the mainly random events impinging on their consciousness. 

“The kind of material we write in letters and diaries does not exist before it is written down. It is the slow, organically growing process of thought involved in writing that lets ideas emerge in the first place.”

“(W)riting gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled, and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them.” 

Surfing Your Brainwaves

Art by Wade Koniakowsky

Jiro Taylor: “The Alpha-Theta border area of around 8 Hz is recognized as being the signature wave state for flow states. This is unsurprising given that one of the standout hallmarks of flow is the absence of conscious thought. Many people have defined their ‘flow state’ experience as a zone where things happen automatically, so it stands to reason that it occurs at the Alpha-Theta brain wave, the border between the conscious and the subconscious.

“Alpha and Theta are also the brain waves most commonly associated with meditation, and as many people have noted before, flow sometimes feels like meditation. It’s fascinating that the voice of intuition has been linked to this same alpha-theta border, and it confirms my belief that synchronicity and flow are extremely connected.”

Dharana and Flow: Getting into 'the Zone'

Consider the similarities between Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow and the ancient yogic concept of Dharana, which is the meditative practice of constraining conscious thought to one object.

“This concentration is not forced, like when an analyst concentrates on working out a difficult problem in a computer program,” wrote Nancy Wasserman. 

“The concentration experienced in Dharana is more passive and occurs in a state of relaxed awareness… The meditator creates a deeper compartment that allows the mind to flow more rapidly in that one particular direction.”

Intense, effective focus through relaxed awareness is also, of course, the definition of flow. 

Wasserman quoted a relevant remark by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended, “…the stopping off decisively our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our force on one or a few points; as the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, instead of suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of twigs.”

Rechanneling that sap could be akin to flow, which Csikszentmihalyi described as “…a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

Csikszentmihalyi said this comes easiest to those who possess what he called the “autotelic personality” — the internally driven people who have a tendency to engage in an activity for its own sake.

Those who have an autotelic personality are said to experience less stress during their complete absorption in flow. 

For me, writing and art can slip easily and almost imperceptibly into a flow state. The feeling is unselfconscious and immensely gratifying. 

But any number of activities can be translated into flow.

Vladimir Drkulec said, “I have experienced flow when playing chess, dancing, at a party, in karate class, in aikido class, in a fight when attacked by two people, in tense situations where a fight seemed imminent, while out in nature, when walking. The compression or expansion of time seemed to happen so that you perceived yourself to be moving slow as molasses while the other people around you were moving even slower. 

“In one case, I played a chess game that lasted almost 13 hours and was barely conscious of the passage of time. Only when the game was over did I realize that I had skipped lunch and was well past the dinner hour.”

Mike Oppland observed, “It’s important to note that one can’t experience flow if distractions disrupt the experience. Thus, to experience this state, one has to stay away from the attention-robbers common in a modern fast-paced life. A first step would be to turn off your smartphone when seeking flow.

“Also, the balance of perceived challenges and skills are important factors in flow. On the one hand, when a challenge is bigger than one’s level of skills, one becomes anxious and stressed. On the other hand, when the level of skill exceeds the size of the challenge, one becomes bored and distracted.

“Since the experience of this state is just in the middle, the balance is essential.”

What Survivors Have in Common

The Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high) regards this trait as a key element of the autotelic personality — those internally driven people who have a tendency to engage in an activity for its own sake.

Those who have an autotelic personality are said to experience less stress during their complete absorption in an activity, the state he called “flow.”

Bored With Everything

“One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment,” wrote psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow. 

“Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did.

“Opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them. And we need to know how to control consciousness — a skill that most people have not learned to cultivate.

“Surrounded by an astonishing panoply of recreational gadgets and leisure choices, most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated."

Finding the Freedom of Flow

Flow: “The state of concentration and engagement that can be achieved when completing a task that challenges one's skills. The theory was formulated when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed dozens of experts, from composers and artists to tradesmen and chefs.”

In his book Awakening Your Ikigai, Ken Mogi wrote, “Csikszentmihalyi testifies that one source of inspiration for his  work on flow came when he observed a painter friend working on his artwork for hours on end, without any prospect of selling the work or getting financial reward for it. This particular state of mind, or work ethic, where you just immerse yourself in the joy of being in the her and now, without asking for immediate reward or recognition, is an integral part of the Japanese concept of Ikigai.”

“Ikigai” is a Japanese word that translates as a raison d'être, a reason to get up in the morning.