Becoming New

Evolving on Purpose (Part 5)

GOING WITH THE FLOW

I can’t remember when I encountered my first Rube Goldberg machine, but I do know that I have always been fascinated by chain reactions and domino runs. The comics of American cartoonist Rube Goldberg often pictured unnecessarily complicated and ill-suited devices carrying out simple tasks. As early as 1928, his name became associated with all sorts of contraptions that use chain reactions to entertain by performing rudimentary functions in highly complex and impractical ways. Now, Rube Goldberg machines are ubiquitous and have been seen in movies, television shows, and in advertising. One of the most famous is Honda’s commercial for their Accord motor vehicle. Known as ‘The Cog’, the advert features a Rube Goldberg machine made of various car parts, that runs for two minutes and ends with an Accord rolling down a ramp and releasing a flag displaying the car’s name, while a voice over says, “Isn’t it nice when things just work?”

We are all familiar with experiences that feel like a well-designed Rube Goldberg machine. We derive great pleasure when our intentions and efforts become so synchronised and fluid that we produce results far beyond our expectations with unexpected ease. For artists, athletes, and others whose work requires great skill and focus, this state of flow, as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi named it, is highly coveted. The physical, psychological, and financial resources that these experts expend in the quest to achieve it are immeasurable.

After winning his first Wimbledon Championship in 2013, Andy Murray was asked how much he remembered of the last point in the match. This question was asked not days or weeks after the tournament, but while he was still on the court, minutes after he had clinched the title. His response reflects the flow state he must have been in on that day: “I have no idea what happened. I really don’t know what happened. It was…I don’t know how long that last game was. I don’t know. But…I can’t even remember. I’m sorry.”

In his best selling book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Dr. Csíkszentmihályi described ’flow’ as “a state of mind, a level of concentration in which outside stimuli, even time itself, seem to fall away.”¹ Research has shown that flow states are not reserved for highly skilled performers, but are part of our universal human experience—which is evidenced by how common the language of flow has become in our world. We may call it being “in the zone” or, particularly for musicians, “in the groove”, but we’re all talking about this same altered state of consciousness which feels transcendent, fluid, and deeply content.

SPIRITUAL FLOW

Flow states are usually associated with exceptional accomplishments, but many experiences that are described in the realm of spirituality have a remarkably similar quality. Most spiritual practices invite practitioners to overcome their limited and ego-centred ways of thinking and being in order to attain a ‘higher’ level of consciousness—one that recognises our union with all things and that empowers us to find contentment and connection, and make a contribution to the world. Like flow, it is all but impossible to live permanently in such a transcendent state, but it is very good for our health to practice entering these states on a regular basis. As Sam Harris writes:

The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of well-being that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained…The purpose of meditation is to recognize that you already have such a mind. That discovery, in turn, helps you to cease doing the things that produce needless confusion and suffering for yourself and others. Of course, most people never truly master the practice and don’t reach a condition of imperturbable happiness. The near goal, therefore, is to have an increasingly healthy mind—that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction.²

The important thing to realise about both flow states and transcendent spiritual states of mind, is that they are both accessible through training. They are not illusive experiences that happen by accident when the stars align. But it is also important to remember that flow or transcendence are never the goal. They are both a means to an end: to flourish in this human life in some way.

We now know that human beings have the capacity, personally and collectively, to choose our own evolution. But to do so, we need to abandon illusory ways of thinking and being in the world. We need to see more clearly and behave in more intentional and positive ways—and that is the work of spirituality. While well-being may be “intrinsic to the nature of consciousness”, as Sam Harris describes it,³ living in a state of openness to the beauty, truth, and goodness that will lead us to well-being does not come naturally to most of us. We need to practice—hence the term spiritual practice—in order to learn how to live and love in the most creative, positive, and healthy ways.

The transformation required to have an “increasingly healthy mind” moves through the fairly predictable, but uncontrollable process that Richard Rohr calls the Wisdom Pattern of order, disorder, and reorder. In previous articles, I have suggested that disorder has two parts, and so I have described a four part journey that moves from catalyst, to chaos, to clarity, and now to a kind of flow state that I like to call cohesion. We move into the cohesion phase when we have given time and attention to become clear about the new self and the new world toward which we are aiming.

BECOMING A NEW YOU

Professor of Neurology, Patrick McNamara describes the process of transformation as taking our sense of self ‘offline’ and placing ourselves into a “possible worlds box” (catalyst) where we can acknowledge the discrepancy between our current selves and the ’ideal’ (or better) self we long to be. We then search our memories for models or examples that represent the ideal self we seek to be (this is the work of the chaos phase). When we find a model that fits our aspirations (clarity) we then need to integrate that new sense of self into the old. And “if all goes well, that new identity is larger and more complex than the older Self, and thus it is more unified.”⁴

As James K.A. Smith suggests, the new self we seek is defined and motivated by our picture of human flourishing, by what we might call ‘the good life.’ When this vision of flourishing becomes clear and captures our hearts, it changes us.

Thus we become certain kinds of people; we begin to emulate, mimic, and mirror the particular vision that we desire. Attracted by it and moved toward it, we begin to live into this vision of the good life and start to look like citizens who inhabit the world that we picture as the good life. We become little microcosms of that envisioned world as we try to embody it in the here and now.⁵

This embodying of our vision of the good life is a living into a new self. It is the last step in the process of conscious evolution. In the language of the Christian Scriptures, it is the fulfilment of our repentance. It is when we our hearts and lives have been changed, and we have begun to truly believe that God’s reign is, not just near, but here—within us, in our world, and in the relationships between us and others. We might also call it the process of being ‘born again’ (John 3:3). To be born again is not, as is often assumed, a one time experience. It is not to pray a “sinner’s prayer” and have our eternal destiny secured. It is an ongoing process, in this life, of learning to “see God’s reign”—to have our beliefs and behaviours altered so that we embody the vision and values of Jesus and live intentionally toward a good life, not just for ourselves, but for others. Sam Harris is right when he claims that:

Given our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be compatible with an ethical concern for other people—even for complete strangers—otherwise, violent conflict becomes inevitable.⁶

Conscious evolution, then, is the constant and intentional quest to grow into our best selves—to be “born again” over and over throughout our lives—not just so that we can flourish, but so that we can make a positive contribution to the flourishing of our world and all of its human and non-human inhabitants.

TRANSFORMATION AS LEARNING

The process of constantly moving toward more compassionate, connected, and contributing versions of ourselves, of learning to show up more fully, authentically, and courageously in our lives and relationships, can, to some extent, happen as a natural part of our daily lives. It is, after all, the nature of our human existence to constantly move us through sequences of catalyst, chaos, clarity, and cohesion. This is why, as Patrick McNamara notes, we change over time (although not always in a positive direction).⁷ But if we truly want to live as fully and freely as we can, we need to embrace (spiritual) practices that enable us to facilitate these transformational journeys for ourselves, deliberately and purposefully.

There is a sense in which spiritual practices can be thought of as learning tools. I often like to speak of spiritual practices as the practice court for life. Andy Murray did not win Wimbledon by deciding to show up for the final one day. He spent years, hidden from view, on practice courts with a coach. The purpose of all this training was so that championship level tennis skills would become second nature to him. While I was, obviously, not present at his first tennis lessons, I suspect that he had no clue about how to hold a racquet, where to place his feet, and how to execute the prefect forehand. It took years of conscious and intentional practice for him to evolve into a champion.

This learning process is often described in terms of four phases.⁸ In the first phase, unconscious incompetence, we do not know what we do not know and so don’t know where to begin in our quest for mastery. We may experience this state before any kind of change process begins, but it can also correlate with the first part of the chaos phase when we are faced with an old reality that has gone and a new one that is not yet visible.

When I was learning to play guitar, I demonstrated my hesitant and undeveloped skills for a friend by playing a popular song of the time. Although he had less musical training than I did, he was clearly unimpressed and asked me to give him my guitar so that he could correct my technique. It only took a couple of failed attempts before he gave the instrument back to me, muttered something about knowing how the song was supposed to be played, and left. This friend’s guitar ‘lesson’ was a classic example of unconscious incompetence.