This month's comments have generated an interesting range of experiences. Vicki can ride into a kind of flow by reading, and Maura can get there in the right kinds of meeting with people who share stories and ideas. Also, Maura says, by following a pride of lions at "another animal's pace." All these strategies contain the seed of the idea Isak Dinesen hints at in post 1A—that there can be pleasure in entering other worlds, where "things happen without any interference from" one's own side, "and altogether outside his control."
 
Pat's comment about having neither time nor interest in entering the kind of drift that might lead to flow has something in common with what Arthur Koestler says about himself just after he has written the sentence quoted in post 1C: Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. . . . The I had ceased to exist.
 
Koestler says, "It is extremely embarrassing to write down a phrase like that when one has read The Meaning of Meaning and nibbled at logical positivism and aims at verbal precision and dislikes nebulous gushing." But his experience "floating in the universal pool" convinced him that "'mystical' experiences, as we dubiously call them, are not nebulous, vague or maudlin—they only become so when we debase them by verbalization."
 
"When I say 'the I had ceased to exist'," he continues, "I refer to a concrete experience that is verbally as incommunicable as the feeling aroused by a piano concerto, yet just as real—only much more real. In fact, its primary mark is the sensation that this state is more real than any other one has experienced before." Although Pat is too busy at the moment to find a way to explore this state, journalist Koestler's experience and psychologist Csikszentmihalyi's research suggest that someday finding flow might come as a pleasant surprise.
 
Rachel's idea that "determined will" tends to precede the dissolution of an artist's self-awareness and self-consciousness in the creative act matches well with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's findings about the state of creative flow in general. Adequate skills to cope with challenges at hand, he says, and a general goal plus feedback about whether progress is being made seem to be part of what helps people arrive at the intense concentration imbued with a sense of harmony that characterizes creative flow.
 
Nevertheless, creativity is as diverse as creators, and Koestler's point is well-taken—that any experience with flow can be muddied when we try to put it into words. As the cliché goes, You had to be there. Still, words are what we use on this website, and Mary's story of dreaming beautiful curtains evokes a lovely sense of how "attention open and diffuse" can help us enter other worlds. Clearing out intention or expectation, she suggests, can open an individual's "creative energy to that which is beyond any individual."
 
Arthur Koestler would likely agree. He writes that "verbal trancriptions that come nearest" to describing his experience beside the window of cell no. 40 in Spain (see post 1C) are "the unity and interlocking of everything that exists, . . . The 'I' ceases to exist because it has, by a kind of mental osmosis, established communication with, and been dissolved in, the universal pool. It is this process of dissolution and limitless expansion which is sensed as the 'oceanic feeling', as the draining of all tension, the absolute catharsis, the peace that passeth all understanding."
 
Whether we arrive there by reading, sharing, painting, writing, dreaming, or floating in a dinghy, connecting with other worlds in this way is an experience to cherish.

In The Invisible Writing, the second volume of his autobiography, journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler describes being "dissolved in the universal pool." This experience came under dramatic circumstances.

at Koestler's experience with feeling dissolved in something greater than his own life came in 1937. He was a journalist, arrested at a friend's home by Franco's troops and held as a political prisoner during the Spanish Civil War.
 
"I was standing at the recessed window of cell No. 40," he writes. With a piece of iron-spring extracted from the wire mattress, he was scratching mathematical formulae on the wall and recalling a proof that "had always filled me with a deep satisfaction that was aesthetic rather than intellectual. Now, as I recalled the method and scratched the symbols on the wall, . . . I suddenly understood the reason for this enchantment: the scribbled symbols on the wall represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means. . . . The significance of this swept over me like a wave. . . . I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that 'this is perfect — perfect'; until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind. . . . Then I remembered the nature of that irrelevant annoyance: I was, of course, in prison and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be: 'So what? is that all? have you got nothing more serious to worry about?' — an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud. Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Then there was no river and no I. The I had ceased to exist."
 
For me, being dissolved this way in Life's greater flow is what brings Isak Dinesen's sense of "infinite freedom," where "destinies are made round you" (including your own), while all the time what contains you is so all-encompassing that "it is none of your concern.”

​In the early 1990s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In his first chapter, he says, "'Flow' is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake." Perhaps there is some connection here with what Dinesen feels in her dreams and the African night. But as he goes on, Csikszentmihalyi identifies other aspects of creative flow that are different, as well.
 
In his chapter called "The Conditions of Flow," he lists common characteristics mentioned when people talk about flow: "A sense that one's skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing. Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems."
 
Many of those features are absent from important aspects of flow that I have experienced, especially when surrounded by birds, water, and trees outside. When I feel "in the flow" in nature--for example, drifting in a rowboat in the wide world of wind and water--I feel that hopes and plans drop away. Rather than concentrating on anything (like finishing a project), my attention is open and diffuse. Problems become irrelevant, not from intense concentration, but rather from absorption by a world much larger than mere human concerns.

In its connection with concentration and goal-directed skills, perhaps creative flow is different from the freedom of Dinesen's dreams and from another kind described by journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler, presented below as an addendum to this post.

       In her book Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen (aka the Baroness Karen Blixen) writes about freedom in an early section of "The Shooting Accident" chapter:
 
       "People who dream when they sleep at night, know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will.  The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this:  that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of. . . .  All the time the feeling of immense freedom is surrounding him and running through him like air and light, an unearthly bliss.  He is a privileged person, the one who has got nothing to do, but for whose enrichment and pleasure all things are brought together. . . .
 
        "The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night.  There too is infinite freedom:  it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.”