As of today, I have typed up 36 of my 50 pages of notes that I began to accumulate about a year ago. My goal for this year was to catch up to all the reading, thinking, and exploration that I had done related to playing the Feelings Collector. As it stands, I am on track to just about make it across the finish line, if I can stay disciplined and write every week. As it also happens, this week represents a threshold of sorts, where I have now arrived at a subheading in my notes that I have called “connections between the teachers and big take-aways.” Not a very snappy title, but it’s what I’ve got, and, for better or for worse, it captures the essence of what remains to do for this part of my project.
Now is also a good time, I think, to recap the journey that I have been on since I started to play the Feelings Collector in 2020, or at least map out the major through-lines that I have spent the most time thinking about and pursuing. As I wrote back in January, I began playing the Feelings Collector—an existential life game designed to help you learn to identify and realize your desires through inviting a feeling into your life for a year—with “Flow.” I suppose Flow isn’t a feeling exactly, but a state of consciousness characterized by total absorption in an enjoyable activity. The simplest gloss for Flow is “being in the zone.”
I began exploring my relationship to Flow through the work of the world’s foremost scholar of the subject, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and by attempting to follow the examples of the people he studied to turn as much of my life into a flow activity as I could. This was disrupted for several months by the acute crisis surrounding the completion and revision of my dissertation during the early stages of the pandemic—but eventually, I got back on track when I encountered Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Cameron’s writing not only reinvigorated my pursuit of Flow, but also led me to my next Feelings Collector feeling, Creative. In addition, based on the exercises in Cameron’s book, I identified a number of artistic media that I had long been interested in but not explored, principally but not exclusively, sculpture. This gave me a new angle to invite both Flow and Creativity into my life.
Cameron’s work, as those who are familiar with her know, has a strong spiritual bent. Part of it comes from her background as a recovered alcoholic with a strong affinity for the 12-step program. But also, part of it comes from the fact that the feeling Creative, and creativity in general, are widely recognized to involve a kind of spirituality. We speak of the muses or of waiting for inspiration to strike, acknowledging that there is something external out there in the universe that we channel as we create art. There’s a lot more to be said about all of that, and I will certainly get to it in the coming weeks—but, for the time being, it’s enough to say that Cameron and Csikszentmihalyi primed me to develop an interest in the spiritual dimensions of Flow and Creativity. This aspect led me to a renewed interest in altered states of consciousness on the one hand and various contemplative traditions and mysticism on the other, subjects I had been fascinated by as a teenager, but mostly left behind in graduate school.
This, of course, was very much in line with what I was also learning from Tolle at the time as well. What unites Tolle, Cameron, and Csikszentmihalyi is a common focus on what I sometimes refer to as the “arts of attention.” Whether through presence-oriented meditation, artistic practice, or engaging in flow activities, these authors guide us direct our conscious awareness toward various internal and external foci, and in so doing transform ourselves and the world around us. The foundational ideas that I picked up from these three authors regarding how one can learn to more effectively use our attention to enrich our lives and experience of the world can be found in many other works as well, and it is to the elaboration of these connections that I plan to dedicate the rest of this year’s writing.
Major topics and thinkers I want to discuss in these writings include Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jenny Odell, who at first glance would seem an odd pairing and also only tangentially related to Tolle, Cameron, and Csikszentmihalyi, but they all in fact fit quite nicely together with regard to their ideas about the power of attention. I also want to deal with the so-called “Science of Enlightenment” by Shinzen Young, one of the more stimulating books I have read in recent years. I want to connect Young’s work to Michael Pollan and the science of psychedelics, and what the neuroscience of meditation and tripping can tell us about what seems to be happening with the embodied mind and the mindful body when engaged in Flow activities. I also want to write about the relationship between Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle, as the influence of the former on the latter is quite obvious, and also because Watts led me to develop a sustained interest in Daoism as it relates to Flow and Creativity. This topic could very well end up being its own year-long blogging project, however, so I may only convey some preliminary ideas on it in the next two months—for now, suffice it to say that I’m not sure I agree with Ed Slingerland that wu-wei and flow are quite so separate as he would have us believe. Another issue I would like to address that concerns the connection between Watts, Tolle, and Csikszentmihalyi revolves around the relationship between pursuing flow, what the Daoists called “inward training” (nei-yeh), and “the good life.” Namely, this is the project of orienting your life around Flow and/or Presence and different models for the realization of this goal, of which the most interesting is the Japanese concept of ikigai. I would also like to write about the question of stillness as it relates to all of the foregoing, particularly the relationship between different models of “doing nothing” and how they relate to the Rock Tumbler.
Finally, and again perhaps just a hook to hang a future project on, a topic I very much want to take up is the relationship between personal transformation via all of the ideas, exercises, techniques, and philosophies that I have been studying and collective transformation, i.e., the political. Almost all of these thinkers, though some of them would probably deny it, have a political vision, however implicit or explicit it may be in their work. I don’t agree with all of them, but I want to elaborate what I see as the main stakes of the “arts of attention” as a political tool. One of the reasons I think this is important, perhaps even urgent, is that a lot of these ideas are dismissed as “woo-woo” or assumed to be “New Agey” and therefore not worth taking seriously. But I agree with Adam Curtis, there is a kernel of something very, extraordinarily potent in the human potential and personal transformation movements, which was co-opted, diluted, and otherwise lost in the wash as the hippies became yuppies and Esalen a corporate retreat. I aim to (at least attempt to) recover something of this by working backward from the Radical Dharma teachers, Jenny Odell, Robin Wall Kimmerer to Alan Watts and then forward again to Eckhart Tolle and back again to the classical Daoists and ultimately all the way around to Csikszentmihalyi and Cameron.
Lest I sound like I’ve created a John Nash mind-palace here, the payoff is something like this: the situation that confronts us in the world today—the unmitigated human catastrophe that is global capitalism coupled with impending climate apocalypse—demands that we engage in collective action to ameliorate suffering and usher in a new world. The extent to which this collective action will be effective in preventing or recovering from total ecological system cascades and in redressing the current unsustainable levels of inequality and injustice in the world depends on our ability to exercise our creative capacities. The more creative we can be as individuals, the better. The more creative our institutions can be as a collective manifestation of our individual creativity the better. What is needed now is a grand envisioning, a return to fashion of utopianism, an expansive thinking of a world-otherwise. What is needed now is a mass of people willing to at least attempt to create a new earth, with the creative reserves to imagine and implement solutions to increasingly pressing crises. Without this, all things considered, we’re pretty much fucked.
Anyway, we’ll see how much of this I manage to get typed out in the next two months, but even if it’s just the beginning of something that I will keep working on, I’ll be happy.