Volume 3, Issue 47

To continue what we’ve been saying about the alone space you need each day, one of the things you can do, if you really feel like it, is to play a game where you practice Flowing.

Discrimination is a function that comes into play at a micro level of our moment-to-moment decision-making. The more time we apply to making the discrimination among inner impulses to actions, the more delayed our impulsive actions. Even taking on and expressing a feeling that has meekly inched out of the wings seeking approval, is an action. We can eschew owning a provisional feeling, and we can treat all feelings as provisional until inspected to make sure we still agree with the logic that led to that feeling. This is the Observer state.

Although discrimination helps prevent actions we might regret, it also impedes the Flow state. In Flow state, we let our training and practice operate, as if instinctively, without hesitation. Yet even in moments of Flow, one senses there is a choice to be made, and hesitates while staying in the Flow state — the hesitation may be fractional until instinct causes movement before the time loss exceeds the action quality gain.

Ideally one could spend long hours each day for a lifetime training oneself at precisely the games that one loves the most. Acceleritis temporarily dwarfs the human race (in a sense by giving us too many stimuli too fast, a side effect of giving us too much brainpower too fast). In this dwarfing, the culture falls short of optimizing the delivery of people who love X to the task of X, although Google could fix that. In the dystopia created by Acceleritis, we also find ourselves in probably one of the most challenging games the Universe has ever devised, so who’s complaining? Rise to the challenge, recognizing that alone space is needed each day.

One of the fun things you can do whenever you feel like it, in your alone space, is to let yourself do automatic writing without editing — for no one will ever see that page except you unless you decide otherwise. Automatic writing of whatever comes into your mind, as if taking dictation from someone else, is an amazing experience and a doorway into the Flow state. Once you get going with whatever your mind wants to say, you can also ask any question that you may have always or just recently wanted the answer for — the key most challenging questions of your life or facing your company, whatever. As if having a crystal ball, you let yourself actually put down on paper whatever is the first thing that pops into your head.

Don’t let yourself go into long internal debates – like saying to yourself, “There’s no way I can be coming up with the right answers so easily to these questions!” Just do it. It’s a game. The thing is not the answer but the Flowing without discrimination at all. Life may not have handed you a built-in way to get into Flow through practice, but everyone can use automatic writing to get into Flow.

Not that all automatic writing is the Flow state. It might be flowing easily and that’s good but is not in itself a sign of Flow state or even Observer state. That’s not the point. Don’t be rating yourself each second (“Am I in the Flow state now?”) because that is one of the biggest blocks imaginable to getting into the Flow state. Everything you do in your alone space is for your own enjoyment, not for any other goal. The side effects of realizing higher states of consciousness are something to gratefully enjoy as they happen, not to wistfully hope for. So have the fun now.

Wishing everyone a lot more fun in 2014. 

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That!, coming in February

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.