But how does one forget the self? Certainly not by trying. That would be like trying not to think of a white elephant: the more you try, the more insistent the thought becomes. One forgets the self, Zen teachers say, by becoming one with the task at hand. At such moments, released from the burdens of selfhood, one glimpses, however briefly, a state of spiritual wholeness that underlies and supports one’s everyday consciousness.
The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “CHICK-sent-me-high-ee”) has, for more than three decades, devoted himself to the patient and rigorous study of the kind of blessed moments that Tolstoy describes. In 1963 as part of his research for his doctoral dissertation on creativity, Csikszentmihalyi spent hundreds of hours observing artists at work and interviewing them about the nature of their experience. He became intrigued by how they became totally immersed in their labors. In time he realized that it was the activity itself—the work of painting-and not, as he had thought, the anticipation of its outcome, that so enthralled his subjects. The work was worth doing—though often not consciously—for the sake of simply doing it.
The observation that people do things for no other reason than that they bring enjoyment is hardly earth-shattering. But its simplicity can obscure the richness of its implications. For Csikszentmihalyi, it pointed directly to the deep and elusive question of human happiness. What, he wondered, do people feel when they are most happy? Why do certain activities bring enjoyment and others do not? What can we do to enhance our capacities to find enjoyment throughout the events of daily life? After receiving his doctorate, Csikszentmihalyi eventually joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he was able to pursue these questions systematically and thoroughly.
In the course of his investigations, he identified a dimension of human experience that is common to people the world over. Elderly Korean women, Japanese teenage motorcycle-gang members, Navajo shepherds, assembly line workers in Chicago, artists, athletes, surgeons—all described the experience in essentially the same words. Its characteristics include joy, deep concentration, emotional buoyancy, a heightened sense of mastery, a lack of self-consciousness, and self-transcendence. Employing an image used frequently by his subjects, Csikszentmihalyi named this optimal human experience flow.
Based on their research into flow, Csikszentmihalyi and his associates over the years produced dozens of articles for scholarly journals. In the late 1980s, he gathered twenty-five years’ worth of findings on the subject and presented it in a form accessible to the lay reader. The resulting book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, was released in 1990 and was an immediate and critically acclaimed national bestseller.
Flow abounds with rich accounts, culled from the author’s research, of the experience in question. Some of the accounts are highly dramatic; others are noteworthy for their ordinariness. But whatever the case, these curious moments of inner freedom entail a “merging of action and awareness,” and it is this unified consciousness that Csikszentmihalyi regards as “the most telling aspect of the flow experience.”
As Csikszentmihalyi himself is the first to point out, the “discovery” of flow is not a discovery at all, “for people have been aware of it since the dawn of time.” Indeed, the idea that, in the words of T. E. Lawrence, “happiness is absorption” is so consistent a theme in discourse on the inner life that one might well say that the condition it names is a primary feature of human nature.
Absorption in a task frees up psychic energy that would otherwise be constrained by the myriad concerns and perceptual habits of the quotidian ego. This brings a sense of enjoyment and a more vital relationship to the world. Whether the experience is felt as a moment of simple clarity or an epiphany that rattles one to the core of one’s being, whether it occurs while deep in meditation or while pruning the roses, the principle—that happiness is absorption—is the same. Although we humans have devised countless means for eliciting self-transcendence, the impulse toward that experience is a constant. We are, it seems, possessed of a transcendent imperative.
Granted, there are important distinctions to uphold here. The experience of a Trappist monk lost in contemplative prayer and that of a pitcher focused on keeping his sinker low and outside can hardly be called identical. But self-forgetting concentration—the merging of action and awareness—is an essential ingredient to the experience of each. It is the precondition-the noetic springboard, if you will—from which they move forth toward their very different objectives.
It is common when discussing transcendent experience to portray the self, the ego, as some kind of villain, or at least a bad sport. But the Freudian mythology puts the matter better. For Freud, the ego was a tragic figure, at once the reality principle and the seat of anxiety. Being saddled with the responsibility of mediating conflicting demands, controlling instinctive impulses, withstanding the superego’s perfectionist recriminations, and negotiating the endless travails on the path of life is no picnic, even in the best of circumstances. And the best of circumstances never really obtain anyway.
Like any conscious entity, the self seeks to maintain and enhance its existence, yet that very existence is a burden from which it craves relief. It’s enough to drive one to drink, literally. Indeed, it was in recognition of this state of affairs that Freud called alcohol the “universal solvent” for the anxious ego. Jung, as was his way, carried Freud’s insight further, into the realm of religion, by locating in the roots of alcoholism a distorted expression of an innate spiritual impulse.
Throughout human history, religion has been the primary repository of the wisdom of self-transcendence. Religion has provided not only the ritual forms for eliciting transcendence but also the conceptual and social contexts in which such experiences are given rich elaboration and tied to a virtuous and purposeful life. But while the transcendent imperative has always been an essential concern of religion, it has never been exclusively defined by religion. It is something that is religious in itself. Indeed, for adherents of the world’s esoteric traditions—Christian mystics or Islamic Sufis, Buddhist meditators or Hindu yogis—the transcendent imperative is the foundation upon which the doctrines and institutions of religion must rest, the inner core around which they must cohere.
Today, more than at any other time, we have greater and more ready access to humankind’s rich and diverse legacy of wisdom about what Aristotle called the “virtuous activity of the soul.” But such wisdom cannot truly be said to be cumulative; neither is it easily passed from one culture to another. Its expression must be worked out in accordance with the particulars of the cultural and historical milieu in which, inevitably, it is embedded. If wisdom about the the means and meaning of transcendent experience is to remain vital, if it is to address, as it must, our deepest sensibilities, the body of insights developed in one cultural context must, as conditions change, be adapted to the exigencies of another.
Our traditions need, from time to time, to be revitalized. During periods when changes in our world and worldview are especially profound, that need becomes more acute. The religious historian Karen Armstrong writes that, when traditions cease to address adequately a society’s spiritual needs, people will find “new ways of being religious.” It is in our nature to pursue and, just as important, confer meaning upon the transcendent imperative. But as Armstrong and others have observed, we in the modern period have yet to articulate comprehensively a religious approach that is equal to and definitive of the unique challenges of our times.
Today, science has replaced the traditional cosmologies with an indifferent universe, and social systems and institutions have been shown to be the creation of human beings and not expressions of divine will or natural order. We postmoderns, having experienced what Saul Bellow calls “a housecleaning of belief,” cannot rely on the certainties of the past, for most of them have lost their power. But, if we wish to live full and good lives, neither can we ignore the wisdom that the past affords. These are the two horns of the dilemma upon which modern religious consciousness is perched.
It is against this backdrop that Csikszentmihalyi’s work is most instructive, both for its merits and its shortcomings. His is an attempt to find through science a basis for a virtuous and purposeful life. Using the tools of science, Csikszentmihalyi abstracts an essential and defining human experience—flow—from the countless activities that elicited it. In addition, he discerns the conditions, internal and external, that are most likely to give rise to the experience and the factors that obstruct it. Further, he interprets his findings in such a way as to address convincingly the place of flow in matters of meaning, value, and purpose in human affairs. Toward this latter end, he seeks to affirm and to integrate the wisdom of the past with “our most trustworthy mirror of reality”—that is, with scientific knowledge. He is trying, one might say, to work out a response to the problem of modernity T. S. Eliot poses in The Rock: to find the knowledge that is lost in information, and to find the wisdom that is lost in knowledge. And like Eliot, Csikszentmihalyi’s ultimate concern is perennial and, in a generic sense, religious: to find that secret life that is lost amid the concerns of living.
As with any worthy scientific endeavor, as work on flow proceeded, new questions arose, two of which were particularly significant. The first was moral. Optimal experience is morally neutral. In applying his skills to a challenging break-in, a burglar is likely to experience flow, as is a grifter working out the details of an elaborate con or an assassin taking aim at an unsuspecting victim. Adolf Eichmann, writes Csikszentmihalyi, “probably experienced flow as he shuffled the intricate schedules of trains, making certain that the scarce rolling stock was available where needed, and that the bodies were transported at the least expense. He never seemed to ask whether what he was asked to do was right or wrong. As long as he followed orders, his consciousness was in harmony.”
The second problem followed from just this point. This is the problem of meaning. One might experience a high degree of flow in one of life’s domains and yet be hopelessly boorish in every other. One need only pick up a newspaper or open a book to be made aware of artists, athletes, intellectuals, and other persons of accomplishment whose virtuous activity fails to extend beyond the parameters of their chosen field of expertise. This calls to mind a caution, often a criticism, arising from within religion, which has long been aimed at those who pursue gnosis, or transcendent knowledge. For mystics, yogis, and contemplatives of any stripe, single-minded focus on the transcendent imperative can become so compelling a force that those garden-variety virtues that make for an ethically sound life suffer by neglect.
For the Stoic philosophers of antiquity, no virtue could stand alone. Each virtue needed others to be complete. The term for this was antakolouthia, or the mutual entailment of virtues, and we might well apply this notion to optimal experience. To realize its potential as a virtuous activity of the soul, flow must be experienced wisely and in connection with other traits of a positive character. But to make wise choices, one must have faith in a framework that gives purpose and coherence to individual acts and decisions.
To place optimal experience in a meaningful and moral context, Csikszentmihalyi turned to the idea of evolutionary complexity. Complexity, he believes, can serve as the foundation for a viable faith at a time when the traditional religious frameworks no longer can. In his 1993 book The Evolving Self, he writes, “Understanding how evolution works, and what role we may play in it, provides a direction and purpose that otherwise is lacking in this secular, desacralized world.”
Csikszentmihalyi subscribes to the view held by many, but hardly all, evolutionary thinkers that evolution proceeds in the direction of increasing complexity—that is, toward continuous differentiation and integration—and that the realization of complexity is, therefore, the benchmark for measuring evolutionary success.
Differentiation refers to the degree to which a system (i.e., an organ such as the brain, or an individual, a family, a corporation, a culture, or humanity as a whole) is composed of parts that differ in structure or function from one another. Integration refers to the extent to which the different parts communicate and enhance one another’s goals. A system that is more differentiated and integrated than another is said to be more complex.
Both these tendencies are evident in optimal experience. Finding new challenges, developing new skills and refining old ones, opening oneself to novel experiences—these are all differentiating functions. Through them, different aspects of one’s being, and one’s very individuality, are given expression and definition. The incorporation of skills and experiences into the wholeness of one’s being brings order to consciousness and harmony to actions—that is, it enhances integration. Given this, the enjoyment that flow brings can be thought of as the manifestation in experience of our evolutionary predilection for complexity.
The development of complex structures—whether biological, psychological, or social—takes place against the backdrop of entropy, the tendency of any and all systems to decay and dissolve into randomness. To maintain order and harmony, a system must appropriate and expend tremendous energy. Speaking in more human terms, the virtuous activity of the soul must be attended to if it is to flourish.
It is precisely because complexity is so tenuous that its cultivation and sustainment can serve as a meaningful basis for ethical action. For Csikszentmihalyi, this means that the ethics of flow require that it not be pursued solely as an isolated, individual event but as something that enhances complexity throughout one’s life and extends through the expanding circles of one’s relatedness with the larger world. Csikszentmihalyi’s idea that through flow one can become an active participant in the great unfolding drama of evolution recalls Aristotle’s word for the well-lived life: eudaimonia, the state of being both content within oneself and blessed in one’s relation with the divine.
With The Evolving Self, Csikszentmihalyi joined the tradition of “grand theorists”—those thinkers who attempt to work out a comprehensive understanding of human nature and human goals that is grounded in the very structure of life. More specifically, he joined with those grand theorists—from Henri Bergson to Teilhard de Chardin to Ken Wilber—who see in evolution the basis for an epic narrative infused with religious significance, one capable of speaking to the contemporary world in a manner akin to how the mythical cosmologies and histories spoke to human beings of the past.
