What Is Flow Experience? Can We Help Each Other Experience Flow More Often Than What Is Described Here?
When you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, you do not have enough attention left over to monitor how your body feels, or your problems at home. You cannot feel even that you’re hungry or tired. Your body disappears, your identity disappears from your consciousness, because you don’t have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that you exist. So existence is temporarily suspended. This automatic, spontaneous process that is being described can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you cannot be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. Whether it is mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it is better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. This is the flow experience, and it happens in different realms. –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the TED Talk “Flow, The Secret to Happiness.” All quotes in this post are from this TED talk, which can be viewed also at the bottom of this post. Flow Experience for a Poet For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous...
Four Quotes from the Four Horsemen Documentary to Inspire Support, Love, Assistance & Cooperation
1. We Can Be the Best Source of Support, Love, Assistance & Cooperation In any species, in almost any animal, there is always the potential for huge conflict, because with any species, all members of that species have the same needs. So they might fight each other for food, shelter, nest sites, territory, sexual partners, all those kinds of things. But human beings have always had the other possibility. We have the possibility to be the best source of support, love, assistance and cooperation, much more so than any other animal… and so other people can be the best or the worst. You can be my worst rival, or my best source of support. “Four Horsemen – Feature Documentary – Official Version.” 1:07:27 – 1:08:10 2. What Really Makes Us Happy? What’s really suffered is human relationships, family life, the things that really matter to us. In the end, the only thing that makes human beings happy isn’t money, it’s very clear that you only get marginal gains from wealth. What really makes us happy is other people. It’s our relationships with other people that are really being damaged by the last thirty years. We trust them less; we have less interaction with them; we bond less than ever before; we marry less and marriages are under more threat than ever before, and all the associations that represent permanent unconditional human affection are being eroded or damaged. That’s the real legacy of the last thirty years. In some sense, we’ve got to recover and rehumanize our lives, otherwise not only will they be nasty, brutish and short, but they’ll be...
Emerging Humanity
This video, METAPHORmosis, translates a message that was originally put forth by the author/public speaker/creative consultant, Norie Huddle, and further substantiated by the biologist and futurist, Elisabet Sahtouris. Using imagery, music and words it tells the story of a great shift in consciousness and reality that is occurring on planet earth. Following an example from the biological world, this video parallels the transformation that occurs in the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly with the socio-eco-spiritual transformation that is occurring all over the world as we speak....