Precis for a Metaphysics of Flow

Rev. Douglas Olds

October 31, 2024

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

Research into so-called "flow states" seeks a key to its golden gate to increase intellectual, commercial, and athletic performance witnessed by those who tell of "experiences where:

• Time dissolves

• Your self-consciousness melts away

• You're completely absorbed in what you're doing — performing at your absolute best" 

(https://x.com/DrJohnVervaeke/status/1851959043884995068)

Positive psychologist Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi led the way to describe Flow as “a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi emph added). In this description, the existential human and its peak states are ever grounded in noesis--epistemology and hedonic productivity measured in formal terms resulting from cause and effect and therefore putatively subject to strategic evaluation.

Contemporary descriptions of flow often remain confined to task architecture: challenge slightly exceeds skill, goals are clear, feedback is immediate, attention narrows, consequences sharpen engagement, and self-consciousness recedes into immersion. These may describe enabling conditions for absorption, but they do not yet disclose its telos. A system can optimize concentration without answering what concentration serves. Indeed, the same architecture could intensify virtuosity, commercial productivity, warfare, gambling, predation, or neighbor-bearing repair. Psychological flow names absorption under certain experiential conditions; metaphysical flow, as proposed here, names the telically ordered bearing of that absorption toward creaturely and neighbor-bearing ends. Absorption is not yet flow in the metaphysical sense, because immersion has no intrinsic moral direction; only the telos borne through it discloses whether concentration becomes creaturely repair or perfected capture through seized time. The metaphysical question therefore begins where the psychological account stops: what is the time-bearer holding through the flow, toward whom is the action directed, and what temporal and ethical field does that bearing open or close?

However, as  I've explicated elsewhere,  human essence emerges through the telic transformation of human nature from cogitation ordered toward egological need into conation ordered toward accountable relation. This transformation is begun in the ear (by hearing wisdom), moves to the heart--meaning intentionality--then the expressive and kinesthetic soul, then to effort that actualizes the transformed intentionality. This is the metaphysical sequence of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Only when this metaphysics is initiated to become integrated into the human person does Jesus add "dianoia" (problem-solving insight) in Matthew 22:37 to the completing wholeness of human essence.

Human flourishing cannot be inferred from intensity of experience, efficiency of performance, or loss of self-consciousness; it has to be judged by the telos borne through the whole person toward God, neighbor, creation, and time.

Excursus: Virtue as the Habitus of Conativity

Virtue names the formed habitus from which conative life can flow without having to be reconstructed as calculation at every moment. It is accumulated discernment embodied as readiness: perception, affection, memory, judgment, intention, and action have been practiced into an orientation toward the good such that the person increasingly moves toward grace-bearing ends with freedom rather than under external compulsion. In this sense virtue is the art of the practical intellect: a lived technê by which grace becomes action and shalom becomes architectonic in community. Architectures of Grace updating…

Yet habitus cannot here mean a closed character-program whose established dispositions determine in advance what every future situation requires. Such closure would reproduce the very formalism this metaphysics of flow resists. Virtuous formation accumulates time while remaining corrigible. What has been heard, suffered, recollected, judged, repented of, practiced, and repaired becomes available to the bearer as greater readiness for truthful action; but actuality, neighbor, consequence, and new testimony can still interrupt the acquired disposition and require its correction. Virtue therefore differs categorically from automation. Habit makes action freer by carrying prior wisdom forward; conativity keeps that habit answerable to what has not yet been encountered.

This is why virtue is not an ornament added to conation after willing has occurred. Virtue is the habitus through which conativity acquires ethically formed direction (Olds 2023). Conation gathers perception, affection, memory, judgment, intention, and action toward an end; virtue forms the bearer so that this gathering increasingly tends toward grace, neighbor, creation, and repair. The will becomes capable of moving readily because prior time has been borne rather than discarded. Freedom thereby gains history without becoming imprisoned by history.

Flow can consequently arise from neither concentration alone nor the frictionless execution of acquired skill. Its deeper condition is a virtuous habitus sufficiently formed to release the bearer from anxious egological calculation while remaining sufficiently open to receive correction. The reduction of self-consciousness reported in psychological flow then need not signify disappearance of the person. It may instead mark the moment in which cultivated conativity has become sufficiently integrated that attention can move outward—toward the work, neighbor, creature, and claim of the moment—without continual return to the strategic self.

Christian virtue gives this conative habitus its particular telos. It is positive freedom exercised in extending grace toward the neighbor, rather than excellence terminating in the flourishing or achievement of the practitioner. Your larger account already makes that distinction explicitly: Christian virtue directs the benefits of flourishing primarily toward the neighbor. Architectures of Grace updating… Jesus therefore supplies more than propositions concerning virtue: his freely purposive ministry manifests divine conatus as a pattern embodied and extended through discipleship.

From this metaphysics it follows that flow isn’t just a psychological state of inner exhilaration or time displacement of ego but includes these toward an ethical mode of mindfulness of others that is harmonious, grace-aligning, and generous (see the discussion of grace's flow by aligning virtues that pacify in Olds 2023). The ethical center of flow is inherently social and flourishing in intent, thus spiritually aligned with proxies of divine accompaniment. In my experience, FLOW has a pronounced ethical center in good will (conation [ibid.]) that neutralizes anxieties that gum up our performance. Ethical closeness with divine accompaniment (ousia) promotes Golden Rule virtues ordered toward relational wholeness, healing, and cosmic repair. Retribution, grudge-holding, and threat-scoping divert the person back toward egological enclosure. This ousia--this seeking of union with Christ the Shema's perfection--encounters every aspect of creation as FLOW of good will, an aligned flowing from and with grace and human attendance to divine companionship that imposes no transactional tension onto the divine, nor expectation of reciprocity as reward, nor seeing others as intrinsically flawed with a limited horizon. Flow bears its fruit to the neighbor—the other—without egological stratagem or expectation, allowing the cosmic metaphysical structure to redeem the moment for eternity.

Flow thus is an experience and manifestation of a person who is moving from nature (and its acquisitiveness) to the human essence that bridges divine grace with the generationally-renewing earth essence. Flow is thus developmental and not an isolated state. Flow is Trinitarian, both metaphysically revealing and metaphysically operating to spread providential blessings that liberate and vivify and bless where deprivation and hegemony are found to deaden FLOW. Flow displaces the biological appetites for personal security, comfort, and recognition to the Trinitarian plane of attending grace, accountability to God and neighbor, and the integration of all virtues into ramifying wholeness that unifies, creatively.