“they forget themselves altogether”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi recognized the concept of “flow,” a highly focused mental state (optimal experience) conducive to creativity. An individual in “flow” easily translates “potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony.”[i]
“A person who is never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on, and in flow most of the time may be said to have an autotelic self [True Self]. The term literally means ‘a self that has self-contained goals,’ and it reflects the idea that such an individual has relatively few goals that do not originate from within the self. For most people goals are shaped directly by biological needs and social conventions, and therefore their origin is outside the self. For an autotelic person, the primary goals emerge from experience evaluated in consciousness, and therefore from the self proper.”[ii]
“In terms of Simple Reality, becoming an instrument of God is experiencing the ‘flow’ of the creative process in connection with the Implicate Order in the context of P-A.”[iii]
Insight # 29 comes to us from Walpola Rahula (1907-1997), a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, scholar and writer. In 1964 he became a Professor of History and Religion at Northwestern University, thus the first bhikkhu (male Buddhist monastic) to hold a professorial chair in the Western world.
“All great work—artistic, poetic, intellectual or spiritual—is produced at those moments when its creators are lost completely in their actions, when they forget themselves altogether, and are free from self-consciousness.”[iv]
__________
Additional Reading:
- Flow, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
__________
[i] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow. New York: Harper Collins, 1990, p. 208.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Henry, Roy Charles. “Christ.” The ABC’s Of Simple Reality, Vol 1. May 2018, p. 77.
[iv] Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1959, p. 72.
