Mastering The Flow

As you think about it, the world is experienced in many different ways. There is a fast world and a slow world. A world reified by imagination into thought, and a world intimately and dynamically experienced as embodied, fluid, and energized.

These basic dynamical flows control everything about us - from the very beginning, your mothers diet and stress levels became converted into your developing being - your biology! - as signals guiding genetic evolution. As the genes reified, like rock hardening from flowing lava, mothers being and biology trespassed upon us. Her thoughts and feelings obscured the division between mind and matter. Hormones ARE mind. They mean something for the developing nervous system; for the heart, for the nerve cells. All things are shaped and canalized at this primordial juncture.

As adults, we've passed through a panoply of basins of attractions, from pregnancy certain trajectories are already established. Certain states of being are blocked off. The sensitive baby sensitized by his mothers nervousness and depression is utterly responsive and sensitized to it's mother melancholy cues. An evil feedback loop ensues: the baby's biology is built to be reactive, built to enter a world evolution assumes will give us some relevant advantage; why else would the mother be stressed? Why else sensitize the body to its environment? Except in our modern, narcissistic and competitive world, the stress is a misfortune foisted upon those who chance upon a stressful beginning. Chance. All of it just a game of chance. This basically brings into psychological question, why do people talk about the 'self made man'? The whole concept is bull#; a simplistic and dissociatively narcissistic attempt to justify a system which favors those who end up on top; and while on top, they do not, at all, want to give in to those at the bottom.

Think for a second what it means to succeed. Why do some people succeed while others fail? Let me use my own father as an example, as well as his younger brother. My father was born into a family of 8. He was the 7th child, while his younger brother came 3 years later. Why is my father a success while his younger brother is a failure? You can chalk it up, as my dad probably imagines, to his own mystical prowess as a person; a treasured genetic victory over his younger sibling. But the fact is, it was timing, just timing, and the relationships that existed for him versus the relationships that existed for his brother. Timing and context. Chance, in other words. My father had a man named Jack to serve as a role model; my brother being closer to his older sister as a result of bullying by older brothers at a time when the older sister was engaging with the family. Meanwhile, his father had left his mother, so his mother began to baby the youngest one; her last remaining 'strength'. She used him as her own little object to 'transition' to a life as a divorcee. Poor little Gabriel! Things were already being determined by this unfortunate relationship.

Interpersonal forces shape intrapsychic dynamics. It's a bloody rule of nature. The human brain 'picks' up these patterns in the environment, and takes them; meaning is felt - as it is, because human beings build meaning TOGETHER, as inter-subjective units, their minds are patterns to link up with one another. So much so that 'object relations' becomes a default system of relation, as a basic result of our emotional relations to one another, we defend ourselves by splitting good from bad. We become excessively defensive and rigidified, dissociating whats deemed bad, which compromises emotional certainty (belief!), and amplifying emotion - those loveable dopamine systems of the brain! - which is like coc aine, really, in how we chase after this emotion, causing us to act in utterly unself-aware ways.

So why is this thread called 'mastering the flow'? A healthy mind is a mind firmly invested in the flow of embodied existence. Whereas an unhealthy is a mind rigidly stuck in conceptual awareness. Between these poles there's chaos, as we can see in manic states, and depression, or obsession, or anxiety, which are rigid, poorly differentiated dynamical systems.

Flow is really the basic stuff of the universe. Everything is in constant motion, in constant transformation, and what we see - matter - or the concepts in which we think within our consciousness - these are 'remnants' of the flow reified and given a paradoxical 'thingness', but they are still moving. There stillness is an illusion foisted upon us by a mind that can't see the secret movements at the atomic level.

When I play sports, or video games, I notice that my mind reacts in different ways to the experience I am having. First, I just want to mention self-organization, and how uncannily inexplicable it is how different bodies and mind self-organize together and with one another even though each of us are differentiated, separate. As with ants and other horde creatures, when human beings come together and 'play together', as sports, or dance, or music, a weird type of synchrony emerges and ENACTS itself within our minds and through our bodies. None of us our consciously choosing this. We simply stay embodied, and feel fluidly the connection of ourselves within the flow. And out of some cosmic mystery, minds become 'organized' as one, and bodies look completely at one with one another.

It's actually surprising how little acknowledged and appreciated this is, that something beyond each of us legitimately organizes our movements. A transition obviously occurs for each person, a point at which their 'attending' to the game, or the dance, causes each of them to fuse into a superordinate pattern functioning BETWEEN MINDS, who inhabit different bodies with their own explicit awareness, but they are something beyond it all, or between it all, matter and mind, individual personality and body, bringing them all to one-ment with one another.

Mastering the flow is about deepening consciousness in time. To fully 'live' in time, and not leave as were wont to do with our self-reflections, so that time literally 'stretches' itself out, more frames are given, more information becomes available to consciousness, ever more subtle nuances of the art are discovered.

a reply to: Astrocyte

As the old saying goes, "You gotta play the card you were dealt."
I suppose a reincarnationist would say, "Well, bro, play it as good as you can, and maybe next game you may win."

yes its good to live. there is nothing else. enjoy yourself as much as possible. be happy and help others, so we help each other. learn, eat and do what makes you happy.

Like smashing a puzzle piece that doesn't fit? It's a tough task you will still need your alone time me thinks.