On ‘flow’ and the distinction between spaciousness and emptiness.

1.

Think of ‘flow states’ not as forebrain-free experiences, but rather as those in which thought, meta-reflection, and action are experienced as integrated. This might not be the right model in terms of neurobiology but experientially I think it makes sense. You act, think, think about thinking, conceptualize — and the different frames of experience seem to align. This is the prize. In flow you’re not just empty: you are spacious.

This superposition of experience is also known as the ‘oceanic’ feeling: borderlessness, fluidity. This is the nature of that specific heightened state, in which imagination is in alignment with outward/physical experience. It’s the (sometimes) poetry of psychogeography.

The setting (the City, say) is a somatic component of the spell; the spell is cognitive in fundamental nature.

2.

The spaciousness/emptiness distinction is an important one. In flow states we don’t experience empty mind, but rather an inexplicable facility — we know where the ball is headed before the opponent hits it, we hear the next phrase before our musical partners play it, we improvise entire stanzas instead of individual verses. This is obviously not empty-headedness! Nor is it as simple as ’emptiness of ego’: we’re aware of our bodies, our minds. We have self-consciousness…but not ego-attachment.

(Recall DFW’s observation about Roger Federer and what it means to be perfectly in command of your instrument, about the tennis ball looking to him like it’s as big as a basketball. The world slows down for you, but it doesn’t hollow out in doing so — you can just take it in, seemingly without effort.)

In a flow state, the world is positively full of spaciousness. What’s ‘missing’ is barrier and imposition. But so much more is present — even as we sense that there’s suddenly so much more room.

Again, note that this is a description of experience, not neurobiology. I’m only talking about the subjective experience of flow. You really do feel perfectly capable, alive to the moment. What you don’t feel is the vestigial attachment to the idea of the moment — or to the past, the self, imagined futures never to be — holding you back from the present. ‘Single-point awareness’ isn’t necessarily simple. The moment is complex, awareness the same.

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All spells are cast on the caster.

Because magic spells fail, magic is widely and incorrectly understood to fail. But all magic spells work on the magician — and on the others in the circle, connected to the working. Parts of (because party to) the transformation.

A magical working is a fiction. (Reader-response!) Is ‘paracosm’ the right word? Ludocosm? Thaumatocosm? Ugh, maybe. It creates a space in which new practice is possible. This is why you wear a mask and practice improvisation: radical listening. Radically intense experience of that private fiction. The privacy it affords makes it possible to explore something deeply, to access impulses and inhabit personae.

The fictionality unthethers the context, the surroundings, from the binding consensus-reality — but also untethers your own actions and their effects. Within the fiction, magic can work. The spell is the fiction.

We keep two sets of books; we can live inside a fiction, many fictions. That’s what fiction is for. It begins with radical acceptance in the reader/listener/magician: agreeing to the premise, the provision, the proffer. Letting yourself be welcomed (answering the Campbellian call to adventure, with the final/ultimate adventure being living toward death). That’s the outset of the Errand, of course — choosing to set out, accepting limitation. Becoming foolish, becoming the Fool. You have to get humble (fuck around!) before you can find out.

All magic spells work on the magician. Which is to say: one way or another, they all work.

‘Git gud’ and the hero-journey, because why not.

‘Getting good’ means having your reality tested, not just by you — putting others in a position to measure you and judge you. Your cosmos is no longer private. That’s horrifying as you’d expect, but necessary: it’s how we become people, real people. It’s the threshold to the imaginal realm, for one thing, the boundary between (1) parochial experience which naively favours the atomized ego and (2) experience that acknowledges, and supports the development of, the macromind. ‘Getting good’ — the gamer-asshole’s ‘git gud’ — is part of heroic development, in other words. The fact that gamers experience this in the lamest, most egotistical possible terms is just one of the bad things about that subculture.

This is why risk and failure are such important parts of adult development: to ‘self-actualize’ you have to strive to be good instead of less bad. ‘Good’ is a quality beyond, straining at category. Heroism is exceptional.

Zen in the art of not being great at anything in particular.

Today I saw a once-‘notable’ blogger refer to his ‘one-on-one coaching practice’ — basically productivity tips and some Marie Kondo shit — and was forcefully reminded that I subconsciously choose to fail…then comfort myself with the idea that I’m an unusually talented failure.

‘Gifted and talented,’ as they used to say.

I wonder what my life would be like if I spent the next year of it trying to become not a good writer but a rich one. I wonder whether I could enjoy that pursuit.