Dissatisfied with my schooling, one of the first books I read as an early college student that helped ignite my lifelong interest in human potential was Education and Ecstasy, by George Leonard. For me at the time, classes were conducted as a joyless drudge. The Apollonian emphasis on the analytical mind and its logical order fulfilled my desire to learn, but something important was missing: the Dionysian experience of the life of the senses, the wisdom of feeling, and the great joy I experienced in moments of intuitive knowing that seeped through the cracks of my academic studies.
Becoming an artist, however, was a different experience. Here, almost from the beginning I encountered ecstasy, joy, and the magic of the creative process. The creative act contains a blended potion of just the right mixture of the dialectic found in the Apollonian and Dionysian modalities that fulfill both the mind and the body. Myth and magic balanced with structure, logic, and discipline. Inspiration and rationality. Conscious and unconscious. Discipline and freedom. Work and play.
Through creativity, I discovered the many benefits and challenges of the flow state.
Ecstasy and the Flow State
The flow state is a highly prized state of being by artists and writers, musicians, athletes, actors and actresses, and anyone engaged in activities that unfold over time. In the state of flow, you experience an optimum level of functioning, with a clarity of mind and emotional buoyancy, bordering on ecstasy, in which hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine and the endorphins are released in the body helping to provide both fluidity and focus. You are fully engaged in the task to the exclusion of other distractions, with a very low level of self-referential or self-limiting thinking. The state of flow is associated with feelings of happiness and pleasure and a complete absorption with the task at hand, which psychologist Rollo May calls “the intensity of the encounter.” There is a heightened awareness which opens the mind and perceptions, along with the seeming paradox of close and deep focus with an expanded consciousness. As a space for discovery and insight, many creative breakthroughs take place in this state of being.
The flow state was defined and articulated in a book by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, first published in 1990. It represents one of those seminal ideas that changed the way we understand human functioning and psychology. The flow state is three things all at once. It is a volitional effort of focus, a way of gaining attention, and a result or manifestation of an expanded awareness, what some call the “second attention,” or an embracing consciousness of self and your activity that happens in a seamless, spontaneous manner.
Attention is fundamental for entering the creative flow. You simultaneously turn inward and outward with equal focus. An athlete, musician, writer, or painter will often prepare themselves by paying attention to their breathing, their inward and outward posture, and consciously relax and “steel” themselves for their task or performance. They place their potential sources of distraction—cell phones, pets, a noisy audience—whenever possible, out of reach or out of mind. You visualize your task, create a strong and unbending intent to fully engage the moment and process. Success or failure is placed in the back of the mind; this moment is all that matters. All outcomes are secondary. The Bhagavad Gita teaches, “You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction. Self-possessed, resolute, act without any thoughts of results, open to success or failure.”
The flow state has been studied enough by artists, psychologists, athletes, and researchers to create some reliable methods.
Staying with it; Working Against Resistance
You work carefully, persistently. At first and very often, the work or activity feels flat, lacking in energy and certainly in emotion. You stay with it, acknowledging that the discomfort or frustration is merely a necessary step along the way. My personal mantra is: two hours and two months. It often takes me an hour or two behind the pen or camera to loosen up, to become more fully engaged, and to experience the expansive fluidity of the flow state. When a project is new or if I haven’t written or photographed for a while, it may take up to two months of effort before I am deeply connected to the activity or with content of my exploration. Then I become attuned to the task and things flow as if on their own.
Writer Natalie Goldberg recommends timed, free writing (ten minutes or so) about anything and everything as a means of accessing the authentic “wild mind.” Several of her potent pieces of advice are, “keep the pen moving, “don’t think,” and learn to “lose control.” For me, I just start and warm up. I learned from athletics that I would never try to swim the race without warming up first. Pitchers have their bullpens; musicians have their practice rooms; and photographers always have their sketching devices handy, their cell phones. For me, even when I’m writing a book, I try to make my technology work for me instead of against me as a distraction. While at the grocery store or when walking or driving, or even while going to sleep, I often place the content of my writing in the background of my mind, and then use the dictation mode on my Notes app when snippets of insight from the wild mind appear on the forefront of my brain.
In fact, athletics offers one of the most relevant metaphors of the need for staying with it, often working against resistance. In high school and college, I was a competitive swimmer and still swim three-quarters of a mile daily for recreation and exercise, usually in the morning. When I first arrive at the water, I do not want to be there. I am tired and listless. The water is cold and my muscles tight. I begin against the resistance of both my mind and body. I nonetheless persist even though the activity is flat and my body a bit clumsy. After ten laps or so, something changes. The endorphins release and I enter the flow. Suddenly, my body and mind are more fluid, relaxed, and my experience more vivid. My strokes are smoother, my kickturns more precise, and my attention more focused with a paradoxically expanded mind. I feel like I could stay in the water forever in this state. I’m now happy being here. Many insights arise for me while swimming. This phenomenon repeats itself every single day and becomes a teaching tool for me and a potent metaphor for the creative process. We must stay with it to get through the initial resistance. The point here is to warm up and lubricate your mental and creative muscles.
The two levels of attention stand out in sharp relief. The first level is what we call paying attention. We intentionally focus on the task at hand, often against the resistance of the body, the restless mind, or recalcitrant feelings. With this sort of concentration, large parts of us are often proclaiming, “I don’t wanna.” But, and this is key, we need to stay with it regardless of the resistance fighters in our minds. We work in spite of the flatness of the activity or the difficulty. Then, something happens, something new appears. This is the second level of attention. As we work through the difficult resistance, something within widens and opens. The task, and our relationship to it, spring to life with a broader, more inclusive and expanded attention. This is the trickle of the flow state widening to become a river of attunement with both mental and emotional richness, in which discoveries arise from the deeper part of the mind and an emotional connection and passion help fuel the work. It is where we realize more of our human potential and become more fully alive, and the work or activity becomes more individuated, stemming from our deepest selves or cherished concerns. We enter the flow.
Many artists and writers observe the seeming lack of a direct and linear relationship between effort and reward, between the moment of the work and its results. In my experience, the efforts we make, particularly in working against various forms of resistance, generate a force and a subtle energy that manifests in time often when we least expect it. A moment of serendipity or great inspiration is usually the result of previous work we have done, often over long periods of time. And the inspiration may come at moments of relaxation when we step aside from the effort. In a recent project, I went months making photographs on a project with results that were not consistent with my intent or certainly my hopes. I was ready to let go and give up. Suddenly one day with a camera, the dam burst forth and everywhere I looked I found the bright, clear jewels of connection, inspiration, and the discovery of the powerful images I knew in my mind’s eye were possible. In editing the photographs on the computer, I was surprised to find that at least seven or eight seminal images for the project arose within a ten-to-twelve-minute time frame.
Be patient and trust the process.
Suspending Judgment
Neurosis and self-criticism inhibit the flow state. When I was a child in school, I didn’t care so much about good grades as I did about mother’s and father’s approval—and gold stars from my teachers. However, when I would go into the backyard after school and my friends and I would build an elaborate tree fort or create a play space by moving all the furnishings around in the living room, we didn’t care a whit about approval or excellence; we simply and joyously engaged the process with the whole of ourselves—and had great fun. We were often lost in these activities for hours at a time. As I look back now, I would say we entered the flow state.
The creative flow ushers in a state of ecstasy, the capacity for joy and a Dionysian experience, an emotional and instinctive way of being that bypasses the structures and limits of the rational brain. Many of us seem wired to want to be good at what we do. But what about having fun in a joyous and uninhibited way? In the early stages of any activity, notably creative pursuits, excellence remains a potentiality in the future. But what about now? The flow state emerges when you are powerfully, emotionally engaged with something. The creative flow depends upon having a feeling for, even a love for the activity at hand. It is truly a form of beginner’s mind. You play, experiment, and follow your instincts; allow gleeful fun to dominate the activity like in building a tree fort. You meander and encourage the process to take its own form and shape. You pay attention to your joy, your heartfelt questions, and your delight in the process. Ecstasy replaces the search for excellence, for now.
In the early stages of a project or an activity, suspending judgment is good and even necessary. Evaluating or judging the results now would serve to dampen your spirit and destroy your enthusiasm. It would be a mind-killer. For the moment, don’t worry about being good; just learn to be real. Be authentic. Let your actions arise from who you are, deep inside. Engage in free writing, or loose drawing with a sketchpad, or take photographs freely of anything that strikes your fancy. Work from your genuine responses to the world. What delights you? What do you love or hate? What can you learn from? And most importantly, what are your questions? The early stages of any artform or activity you engage represent a form of inquiry into yourself and the world, and an exploration of the nature of the medium itself. As the poet Rilke has observed, “learn to love the questions themselves.”
There is a time for everything, and evaluation comes later. Take joy and find love in what you do. Have great fun. Enjoy the process.
Dynamic Tension
Csikszentmihalyi writes that the flow state is most effectively and reliably entered when you are stretching your limits for just the right amount. Too much challenge can be paralyzing and stop you in your tracks, and too little can be de-energizing, lacking in the need for close attention and effort. We need to find the right balance between challenge and skill. The dynamic tension that results from aspirational effort and the search for excellence balanced against the particular limitations of the medium creates a dialectic between struggle and joy, between diligence and spontaneity.
Here the search for excellence emerges. Finding the right balance between effort and earned skills creates a dynamic tension that carries you forward with your chosen task. Working on the razor’s edge between entropy and aspirational effort creates a highly energizing environment that serves to awaken your mind and senses, and create a demand for a mobilizing attention. Human beings often respond fully, with the participation of the whole person, to clear and present demands. The child crying in a closed room, the unexpected movements of the car in front of you on a busy freeway, and perceived cues given by the work you are deeply engaged in function as a call to respond. Our response then can muster our dormant capacities to strive against real or perceived limitations to effectively answer the needs of the external demand. Limits provide a valuable gift in our evolution as people and artists.
Learn to be yourself; to be authentic and real. The search for yourself and your own voice can create the dynamic tension that serves to locate and keep you in the flow.
Csikszentmihalyi holds a special disdain for television as a medium for what he calls entropy, that keeps individuals locked in a self-enclosed loop of attention-robbing distractions devoid of any challenge. I wonder how he may perceive smartphones and twenty-first-century technologies such as AI? He may ask, as do I, the most important question: Can we effectively use them rather than be used by them?
Look up.
The Depth Mind
Epiphany enhances discovery and delivers meaning. Journalist Ed Bradley interviewed Bob Dylan in 2004 and asked him how he wrote Blowing in the Wind, Like a Rolling Stone, and many of his early songs. Dylan seemed taken aback by the question and said the songs just arose unexpectedly from somewhere within and that he could not identity their source. He would write on slips of paper and napkins whenever these lyrics would appear in this mind. They seemed nonsensical to him at first and, at the time of interview, forty years after their creation, he was still mystified by the power of the mind and the creative process. He said, “They just came… like right out of that wellspring of creativity. I don’t know how I got to write those songs.”
“Those early songs were almost magically written. It’s a … kind of penetrating magic.” Then the first singer-songwriter to ever win a Nobel Prize in Literature made a startling admission: “You can’t do something forever,” he says. “I did it once, and I can do other things now. But I can’t do that.”
It feels like a powerful gift when the deeper layers of mind come through the cracks of the conscious mind, and the flow state seems to considerably widen those cracks. Psychologists refer to specific layers of the mind beyond the rational brain: the subconscious, the unconscious, and the collective unconscious or the “communal mind,” holding universal, inherited content. I tend to resist and dismiss the word unconscious. A central goal of our psychological growth and evolution relates to bringing the deeper layers of mind into conscious awareness or making them visible and tangible through images, prose, and poetry, active imagination, and even music. Only the rational brain thinks in words; deeper layers of the mind often think in form. When the deeper mind emerges, it often comes in the form of an epiphany or inspiration that dramatically expands our understanding and radically transforms our creative efforts. Thus, Dylan calls it “penetrating magic,” Paul McCartney describes it as “miraculous,” and Natalie Goldberg writes of it as the “wild mind.” Miraculous maybe, that is how it feels. Magic yes, when the content of the deeper mind shines through. But in my experience, it is a lawful and expected result of our strivings and efforts.
Entering the flow state is intricately tied to epiphany and inspiration. These moments of breakthrough are both a result and a benefit or manifestation of the flow state. Inspiration needs a branch to light on. As we struggle with understanding a question or work diligently on a creative task, we are searching and preparing the ground, often for long periods of time. The task needs a focus, something we are trying to do or achieve. And that kind of close attention and deep concentration, as we know, can be a widening stream into the flow state. Albert Einstein sensed he was on the verge of a major discovery, seeking to formulate a connection between space and time in the universe. He worked for months on the problem to no avail. Finally, out of frustration, he was ready to give up and let go of the problem, to move on to other things. That very night of his exasperated abandonment of the question, as he was going to sleep, the theory of relativity just appeared in his mind, unbidden, as a visual image.
Insight and understanding, the aha moment, often comes in the space between, the alternation between persistent, diligent work and relaxation or letting go. When I begin to write a book, for example, it often takes me two months of dry work without much result to gather momentum and attune myself to the task, to get into the flow. Once that initial work has been established, the writing becomes freer, looser, more authentic—and then at stray moments of relaxation, insights come and just seemingly appear in the mind.
Attunement
In Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugene Herrigel, the student describes a seminal moment when the bow, arrow, target, and himself become one and boundaries dissolve.
“Do you now understand,” the Master asked me one day after a particularly good shot, “what I mean by: “It shoots, It hits?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand anything any more at all…Is it ‘I’ who draws the bow, or is it the bow that draws me into the state of highest tension? Do ‘I’ hit the goal, or does the goal hit me? Bow, arrow, goal and and ego, all melt into one another, so that I can no longer separate them. And even the need to separate is gone. For as soon as I take the bow and shoot, everything becomes so clear and straightforward and so ridiculously simple…”
“Now at last,” the Master broke in, “The bowstring has cut right through you.”
This state can be best described as attunement, in which we become one with the work, and it is a central characteristic of entering the flow. We become fully synchronized with our intent, the demands of the work, the tools of our medium, and the developing result. Our own energies coalesce around a single task. We become more whole, and less fractured, with the mind, body, feelings working in a coherent way, that opens to intuition and moments of epiphany. What we often experience subjectively is the appearance of a form of magic and extra-sensory states of perception; however, in reality, it is a lawful manifestation of the flow state. Through our persistent work in staying with it, working against resistance, and striving to attend carefully and reverentially, something within uplifts and transforms the activity into a seamless, synchronized flow. While it remains difficult to sustain this special state, we continue to strive towards a greater attunement with the work and its demands.
Here is where novelists report that characters develop on their own, often to the writer’s surprise. Musicians can find melodies and lyrics come into being, whole and complete, as they practice their instrument or in stray moments when they grab napkins or stray paper to record words to songs that arise from a mysterious place within. When I am writing and seeking this form of attunement, I find that whole sentences, sometimes paragraphs, just appear on the horizon of the mind—and they are complete and elegant, often not needing revision or editing. And, as a photographer, I find myself sometimes inexplicably led to this place and this moment that lead to powerful images—and my ordinary mind marvels at the apparent intelligence that guides the process. Sometimes, I feel that more than my usual self is present. What feels like a magician’s hand at work is really a “coming under” a different, more refined set of influences than my usual ego’s longing or the denser vibrations of my highly fractured self.
In these moments, my relationship with time changes. No longer indulging my usual “cramming” activities into time for productivity’s sake, or leisurely and passively “wasting” time, I experience in these rare moments a quality of, what I would call, “fitting into the flow of time.” Synchronizing with time in just the right rhythm for a particular activity is a characteristic of the flow state. Not a moment before or a moment behind, this precision reflects a broad attention to a dance with time leading to unusual synchronicities that mystify my rational mind and that are soul nourishing. They often offer just what is needed at the right moment. A gift of serendipity.
The flow state requires several different conditions to take place at one time: an initial effort of concentration and close focus, the striving to see what is and penetrate the veils of ego illusion and ambitious desire, and the participation of feeling—an emotional connection leading to passion for your chosen task. These conditions can help individuals enter the flow state and experience the ways in which it may fuel your creative efforts and indeed, any pursuit in which you choose to give your generous attention.
Any activity taking place in the flow of time approached with attention, focus, and care can lead you into the creative flow. It is the one ordinary experience in life that can engender peak experience and greatly expanded perception, as well as encouraging an entrance to deeper parts of the mind and to a greater wholeness of being. ◆
Excerpted from an upcoming book, The Creative Eye: On the Work of Seeing and the Power of Attention in an Age of Distraction, by David Ulrich.
This piece is excerpted from the Fall 2024 issue of Parabola, THE WAY OF MAGIC. You can find the full issue on our online store.
