Flow leads to integration because thoughts, intentions, feelings and the senses are focused on the same goal. After a flow episode, one feels more together than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and the world in general.
Differentiation promotes individuality while integration facilitates connections and security. To improve the quality of life, we can try to make external conditions match our goals and also change how to experience external conditions. Both are needed. Each by itself is insufficient. Some individuals are constitutionally incapable of experiencing flow, eg: schizophrenics.
They notice irrelevant stimuli and get side tracked. Some people find it difficult to concentrate psychic energy. Others are too self conscious. Self centered people also find it difficult to reach flow.
Alienation, a condition which forces people to act in ways that go against their goals, is also an impediment to flow.
Another impediment is anomie where the norms of behaviour in the society become muddled. When it is no longer clear what is permitted and what is not, behaviours may become erratic.
People who require a lot of information to form representations of reality in consciousness may become more dependent on the external environment for using their minds.
They have less control on their thoughts. By contrast, people who need only a few external stimuli to represent events in consciousness, are more autonomous from the environment. They have a more flexible attention that allows them to restructure experience more easily and therefore to achieve optimal experiences more frequently. People who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations can screen out unwanted stimuli and focus only on what is relevant for the moment.
But there is no permanent genetic disadvantage. Learning can compensate for any inherent weaknesses. People who achieve flow more regularly pay close attention to the minute details of their environment, discover hidden opportunities for action, set goals, monitor progress using feedback and keep setting bigger challenges for themselves.
The most important trait of people who find flow even during adversity is non self conscious individualism, i. Because of their intrinsic motivation, they are not easily disturbed by external events.
Yet many people ignore this capacity. If one takes control of what the body can do and learns to impose order on physical sensations, entropy leads to a sense of enjoyable harmony in consciousness. Sports, dance, sex, yoga, the martial arts, music, fasting, can all help produce enjoyment.
The skills necessary to become athletes, dancers, etc are demanding. But it is possible to develop sufficient skills to find delight in what the body can do. The Mind Some of the most exhilarating experiences we undergo are generated inside the mind, triggered by information that challenges our ability to think. These activities that order the mind directly are primarily symbolic in nature.
They depend on natural languages, mathematics or some other abstract system like a computer language to achieve ordering of the mind.
Like in the case of physical activities, there must be rules, a goal and a way of obtaining feedback. The normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training and without an object in the external world that demands attention, people cannot focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time. It is relatively easy to concentrate when attention is structured by outside stimuli and we place ourselves on automatic pilot.
But when we are left alone, the basic disorder of the mind reveals itself. With nothing to do, it begins to follow random patterns, usually stopping to consider something painful or disturbing. The mind will usually focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long term frustrations.
So it is important to gain control over mental processes. Leveraging Memory Memory is the oldest mental skill. Remembering is enjoyable because it entails fulfilling a goal and so brings order to consciousness. For a person who has nothing to remember, life can become severely impoverished.
A mind with some stable content is much richer than one without. The author emphasizes that creativity and rote learning are not incompatible. A person who can remember stories, poems, etc often finds it more easy to find meaning in the contents of her mind. The Philosophy A fact often lost sight of is that philosophy and thinking were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable. Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than the material rewards that would be gained by it.
Indeed, playing with ideas can be exhilirating. Not only philosophy but the emergence of new scientific ideas is fueled by the enjoyment one obtains from creating a new way to describe reality. Communication Conversation is another way of enhancing our lives by improving the quality of experience.
Writing also provides important benefits. Writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It is a way to analyse and understand experiences. It is a self communication that brings order to them. Writing Observing, recording and preserving the memory of both the large and small events of life is one of the oldest and most satisfying ways to bring order to consciousness. Having a record of the past can free us from the tyranny of the present and make it possible for consciousness to go back to older times.
Lifelong Learning Many people stop learning after they leave school. The long years of education often leave behind unpleasant memories. Their attention manipulated by text books and teacher, they look at graduation as the first day of freedom. So the end of formal education should be the start of a different kind of education that is motivated intrinsically. The Job A job can also provide opportunities for flow.
Jobs can always be made more enjoyable. Another problem is that many people consider their jobs as something they have to do, a burden imposed from the outside. So even if the momentary on-the-job experience is positive, they tend to discount it, because it does not contribute to their own long range goals.
Solitude If we learn to make our relations with others more like flow experiences, our quality of life will improve. But the fact is the average adult spends about one third of his or her working time alone. So one must also learn to tolerate and enjoy being alone. We must learn to control consciousness even when we are alone. Most people feel a nearly intolerable sense of emptiness when they are alone, especially with nothing specific to do.
Indeed, the ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention.
It is relatively easy to become involved with a job, to enjoy the company of friends or to enjoy a movie in a theatre. A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life. If being alone is seen as a chance to accomplish goals that cannot be reached in the company of others, then instead of feeling lonely, a person will enjoy solitude and might be able to learn new skills in the process.
People respond to stress in two main ways. The positive response is called a mature defense. The negative response is called neurotic defense or regressive coping. The ability to make something good of a misfortune is a very rare gift. No trait is more useful, more essential for survival or more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. Such people have unconscious self assurance.
They believe destiny is in their hands. They are self assured but not self centered. They do not doubt that their own resources would be sufficient to determine their fate. They recognize their goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity. Such people spend little time thinking about themselves. They are not focused on satisfying their needs. They are alert, constantly processing information from the surroundings.
Instead of becoming internally focused, they stay in touch with what is going on. So new possibilities and new responses emerge. One can cope with new situations either by trying to remove the obstacles or by focusing on the entire situation and asking whether alternative goals may be more appropriate. The moment biological or social goals are frustrated, a person must formulate new goals and create a new flow activity. The autotelic self transforms potentially entropic experience into flow.
All life must be turned into an unified flow experience. It is not enough to find a purpose. One must also carry through and meet its challenges. When an important goal is pursued with commitment and focus, and all the varied activities fit together into an unified flow experience, the result is harmony that is brought into consciousness.
Purpose, resolution and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience.
A person whose consciousness is so ordered, need not fear unexpected events. Every living moment will make sense. By and large, life will become enjoyable.
Conflicting Claims on attention The availability of too many choices today has increased uncertainty and led to a lack of resolve among competing claims. Inner conflict is the result of competing claims on attention. We should learn to sort out essential claims from those that are not.
There are two ways of doing this — a life of action and a life of reflection. Action helps create order but it has its drawbacks. For one, options may become restricted. Sooner or later, postponed alternatives may reappear as doubts and regrets. The goals that have sustained action over a period do not have enough power to give meaning to the entirety of life. This is where a path of reflection scores. Detached reflection, a realistic weighing of options and their consequences are generally considered to be the best approach to a good life.
Activity and reflection should complement each other. Action is blind, while reflection is impotent. The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.
This becomes possible only if one keeps in mind more than one goal at a time, being aware at the same time of conflicting desires. When there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious. When there are too few, we get bored. The inner harmony of technologically less advanced people is the positive side of their limited choices and of their stable repertory of skills, just as the confusion in our soul is due to unlimited opportunities.
Consciousness has become more complex over time, because of the biological situation of the central nervous system, the development of culture, technologies, specialization and exposion to contradictory goals. Instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society, the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice. But not all life themes are equally productive. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator.
We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to psychology, non fiction lovers.
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