Flow State Meditation science: Don't "try"

Trying is failing by definition. Even Obi wan Kenobi knew that. "Do or not do, there is no try."

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Want to achieve a flow state? Maybe give ‘not trying’ a try, says new research

(Fast Company) In one of Don Draper’s more memorable bits of wisdom on Mad Men, the fictional ad exec advised a creatively blocked colleague:

“Just think about it deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.” It turns out he may [likely] have been correct, scientifically speaking.

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  How Ananda reached the goal w/o trying

  This is interesting because this is exactly how Ananda, the Buddha's attendant for 25 years, reached full enlightenment. First, he must have been lax because no one heard more sutras, more instructions delivered to others as they awoke, yet he remained at the first stage of awakening for decades. He did not gain a sense of urgency until the Buddha passed and Ven. Maha Kassapa was organizing the First Council to organize the Buddha's Teaching into a "religion." Ananda was needed as he remembered all of the sutras he heard with his extraordinary photographic memory, part of the reason he was given the position. But everyone participating had to be fully enlightened, an arhat. This form of Buddhism is called the "Teaching of the Enlightened Elders," or Thera-vada. Monastics with ten or more Rainy Seasons in good standing in the Sangha are considered "elders" (theras), but that is no guarantee of enlightenment.

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  Shall I be counted among the saints (arhats)?

  It was odd to everyone, including Ananda, that someone could be so close to the Teacher and net yet have gotten the message, applied one to the practice, and gained the goal. The Council was convening the next day, and Ananda put forward all of the effort he could muster. He failed. He must have been trying to hard because there was so much riding on it. What Buddhism would we have, what sutras (discourses), if not for him? Another monk had memorized the Vinaya or Monastic Discipline, but the central stories used to communicate the Message of Freedom that is the Dharma or Dhamma, that rested within Ananda.
• Having thought about it deeply, he forgot it (let it go), and decided to go to sleep. Between the postures of sitting and going to lie down, an "idea" -- the vision of the paths and fruits of awakening -- jumped up in his face. Before his head touched the pillow, he was awakened, fully enlightened, one of the arhats, experiencing the experience -- the knowledge and vision of things as they really are and internally letting go -- that liberated the Buddha, glimpsing nirvana, extinguishing the defilements with knowledge that they were extinguished, uprooted by wisdom.
• He sat up, happy and free and legitimately able to walk into the Council meeting as one fully qualified to be there. And that's just what he did.
• It is not incidental that it was that opening that came about from relaxing, relenting, forgetting about it, because craving, striving, grasping, desiring a goal such as the determination to "become enlightened" gets in the way. A sense of urgency is great, for it brings one to the meditation mat and keeps one there. Then it becomes an obstruction unless one can let go, let go of everything including the desire, need, urgency to obtain or gain something. It is all about letting go so that, as it falls away, insight is able to arise and do the work of vanquishing ignorance.
• Mindfulness and clear comprehension (sati-sampajjana) keeps the nose to the grindstone but with curiosity rather than neediness or clinginess. Muscling it will never work. The sense of urgency (samvega) must be replaced by contentment (santusita or santosha). The analogy is that we are in darkness, cursing the darkness, having realized how harmful it has been to us. But now wanting and wishing, praying and bargaining (petitioning and pleading) for darkness to lift, it will not. If we but light a candle, there is no reason to hope and wish or curse and argue against the darkness. Ignorance is just the absence of light. And the Buddha has made known how to bring about the light of wisdom, enlightenment, awakening.
• When Siddhartha woke up to become the "Awakened One," that is, the Buddha, he is reputed to have said, "Light arose, knowledge arose." There is a quite literal internal light known as the nimitta or "sign" of progress. There is not just one light one time, but many different kinds that often arise. Of course, it's metaphorical when ignorance is slayed, conquered, vanquished. Where there is knowing-and-seeing (vijja or vidya) there is no more ignorance (avijja or avidya). These are the Pali and Sanskrit terms, which is why there are two.
• It is very clear that for any ordinary insight in life to arise -- or some brilliant act of creativity -- that first we strive with all our effort and then lay off. For instance, like Francis Crick, who is credited with discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, he worked very hard on the issue and could not come up with a structure. When he laid his head down to rest, in sleep in a dream, he saw it. He woke up, worked it out, and realized that that spiral ladder of rungs/alleles was it!
• Work, work, work, then take a break. People will never know how much was gained by calming down so the mind could synthesize the parts to see the whole, overcoming blocks and dead ends.

According to a new neuroimaging study, there is indeed magic in abandoning intentional effort — if we’re already heavily practiced in the task at hand.

As the scientists at Drexel University’s Creativity Research Lab just demonstrated, the key to entering a creative flow state may reside not in hyperfocus and deep concentration but in having experience and letting go.

• The translation of samadhi as "concentration" is therefore very harmful. It misleads countless meditators to think it's all about striving, stressing, and straining like the wandering ascetic Siddhartha did under the Bodhi tree. Anyone who thinks so has not read the story (allegory) of his life story very carefully. He did not succeed because he insisted on succeeding. He succeeded because he realized that he only wanted to practice mindfulness and insight rather than the preliminary practice of the meditative absorptions (jhanas or dhyanas), which require one ot let go, allow, and persist without struggling but rather enjoying the bliss of clarity and just "being" rather than always "doing."
• It is exactly because Siddhartha was trying too hard that he could not succeed. Buddhism (or the Teaching of the Buddha, the Buddha-Dharma) has another name. It's the Middle Way. It is the balance between striving and letting go, efforting and allowing, stiffening against life and radically accepting things just as they are, fueling a sense of urgency and finding contentment, all the while looking on with dispassion, without distorting what is being looked at.

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  Sorry, dopamine surge! I need serotonin.

  Samadhi means "stillness," which purifies the mind and brings about coherence as all parts of consciousness perform their impersonal functions effortlessly and in an undistorted way. (This is why virtue, morality, conscientiousness, or sila is crucial, as it alleviates worry and remorse, so that we can have peace of mind and have the joy of blamelessness descend upon us).
• Then with calm (serenity, tranquility, samatha) like that, one takes up systematic mindfulness of four things -- body, feelings, mind, and mind-objects or dhammas, "things," "phenomena," all spelled out in the Maha Satipatthana Sutta or the "Discourse on the Fourfold Setting Up of Mindfulness."
• It is that temporarily purified mind that makes the breakthrough, not the ordinary, weak, struggling, distracted mind. Effort (trying) as a means of calming does not work. Calming (not trying) as a means of calming does work, but it takes sustain, gentle persistence, not an erratic sprint or spurt of energy.

Time to take a break, to let go and let Brahman.

A flow state is, of course, more than just a eureka moment. It’s a sustained creative breakthrough, a period of such intense immersion in one’s work that it ceases to feel like work at all.

The minutes, or even hours, coast by [absorbed in the joy of one-pointedness, intensifying the mind rather than distracting it or entertaining it with manifold stimuli, because it is content], hardly registering, as a process that typically involves creative problem-solving takes on the texture of play. 

It’s what unflappable athletes having an improbable scoring streak refer to as being “in the zone.”

Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term in his seminal 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

The ideas associated with it have been studied and hotly debated ever since. [Organizational] psychologists and productivity experts continue touting the benefits of working in a flow state, but few can agree on exactly what it consists of or how to achieve it.

Is it through taking on a project that is challenging but achievable? Must it involve something one cares about a lot? And does it require locking oneself in a sensory deprivation tank to remain fully distraction-free?

Where everyone seems to have reached a consensus, however, including Csikszentmihalyi himself, is on the idea that entering a flow state requires intense and focused concentration [or sustained attention not agitated by craving or struggling].

It is this aspect of flow that the scientists conducting the recent study set out to explore.

The scientific study

Now it's time to get objective and dispassionate.

Led by Director of Drexel University’s Creativity Research Lab John Kounio, working with David Rosen, a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, the study used as its subject an unconventional scientific research tool: 32 jazz guitarists.

Some of these guitar players were relative experts, others were far less experienced. All of them allowed their high-density electroencephalograms (EEGs) to be recorded as they noodled away on their axes [musical instruments].

This method of neuroimage recording, which is often used to detect and study epilepsy, required placing electrodes on the top of each guitarist’s head, in a device that looks like a chainmail headpiece, to monitor the ongoing electrical activity created by the brain’s neurons.

The musicians were instructed to improvise to six jazz songs, backed by prerecorded drums, bass guitar, and piano.

The scientists then gave the jazz recordings to four separate jazz experts, to determine during which segments the guitarists seemed most “in the zone.”

With these segments isolated, the researchers then studied the EEGs taken at those moments, to look for any telling brain activity. They found some.

It turned out the guitarists who were more experienced were the ones who reached a flow state most often. Not only that, but the scientists found that in those moments, the players exhibited increased activity in the areas of the brain related to hearing and touching, and decreased activity in the brain’s “superior frontal gyri, an executive control region.”

In other words, a critical factor in achieving flow for these musicians was reduced control, or letting go. (Think about it deeply, then forget it.)

“A practical implication of these results is that productive flow states can be attained by practice to build up expertise in a particular creative outlet coupled with training to withdraw conscious control when enough expertise has been achieved,” said Kounios about the study.

“This can be the basis for new techniques for instructing people to produce creative ideas.”

[Testing the hypothesis with creative writing]

Want to achieve a flow state? Maybe give ‘not trying’ a try, says new research (Fast Company)

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I decided to test out the practical implications of this study myself, to see whether I could personally enter a creative flow state by letting go. It was unclear whether the lessons of jazz guitar would translate to my own projects, but it seemed worth a shot.

The creative writing I turn to off the clock is much different than what I work on as a professional writer throughout the day. By the time I get to it at night, though, it often feels like just more work to get through.

Rather than embrace the creative process, I try to make it as painless as possible — and often end up just editing whatever I’ve already written, adding nothing to it.

Ideally, that would not be the case. I’d love to flip a post-5:00 pm switch on my brain’s factory settings — to Enjoyment [Contentment] Mode — and bliss out while inflating my word count.

I’d love to take more pleasure in the writing sessions themselves, not just in having written. In short, I’d love to be in flow.

Writing in a Zen center might be a nice not-doing

As I sat down to work on a writing project, I thought about what it would mean to “let go.” It would mean taking a no-wrong-answers approach, not overthinking or second-guessing anything.

If a better idea came to mind after the one I’d just jotted down, I would go back and change it, but I would definitely not spend any time staring at the laptop, trying to invent through sheer force of will a perfect idea ["perfect is the enemy of the good" enough] to top a just-okay one.

(That part would come later on, in a separate editing session.) To try at all went against the spirit of this experiment. Instead, I ran on pure instinct and experience.

The hall pass I’d given myself to freestyle ultimately paid off. By the time I finished writing for the night, I’d logged over a thousand words in a little more than two hours.

Every writer operates at a different pace, but for me, that counts as an incredibly productive session. I don’t know that I ever entered a flow state, exactly, but letting go released all the pressure around eliminating imperfection from the work.

Some of what I wrote will surely end up being a detour, and some of it might actually lead somewhere — but the entire time, I felt like I’d gotten out of my own way.

There was no major eureka moment. But maybe the discovery of what I could accomplish creatively by not being too precious was enough eureka for one day. Source

• Joe Berkowitz, Fast Company via MSN.com, 3/15/24; Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly (interwoven commentary on how this research may be applied to meditation)