Sermon: Flow, Part 2

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Jack Kramer is a welder. He works in a South Chicago plant where they assemble railroad cars. He’s in his sixties and he works with about 200 other people in a room full of noisy machines raising and lowering giant metal plates all day, surrounded by sprays of sparks. In the summer it’s roasting in there and in the winter, freezing cold. But Jack loves his job – so much so that he has worked there for 30 years and has turned down numerous offers of promotions. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s boss – he wants to weld. And he is extraordinarily good at it. Everyone knows him and thinks of him as the MVP of the plant. They say that without Jack, they might as well shut down right now. Jack has mastered every part of the plant’s operation. If someone is out sick, he can do their job; if something breaks, he can fix it.

How is it that Jack is so singularly happy and so good at what he does? So many of his coworkers are just punching the clock and counting the days till retirement. And so many people in jobs that are more prestigious and supposedly more challenging – surgeons and lawyers, for example – can find themselves bored and miserable. In my experience as a minister talking with people, so many of us feel a vague sense of stuckness — a grating, dragging resistance as we try to move through our day. We feel like we can’t quite get the momentum to really get going in the work of our lives. What is Jack’s secret sauce?

When Jack works, he gets into a state known as “flow.” Flow is an experience that hopefully all of us have at least occasionally. It’s where you get completely lost in what you’re doing. You are 100% focused on it; you lose track of time. You are bringing your full focused energy and skill to an activity that requires exactly that amount of energy and skill. In other words, you are having to try as hard as you can and you’re succeeding. You can experience flow in just about any activity – not something passive like taking a bath, but anything where you’re actively doing something. Flow can happen in playing basketball, it can happen at work solving problems, it can happen in playing the piano or singing or performing surgery. It can happen through intense conversation. It can happen in teaching. It can happen in cooking dinner or cleaning the house. It can happen in sex. It can happen, as we’ve seen, in roller-skating. In can happen playing video games. And it can definitely happen through meditation, ritual, or prayer. I experience flow sometimes when I’m writing and I used to experience it when I was rock climbing. The whole world would vanish except for the warm rock face in front of me – its tiny cracks and bumps and little bugs and weeds drifting downward as I slowly worked my way up the cliff. It was amazing.

The most important aspect of flow from a spiritual standpoint is that in flow you lose yourself. You become completely absorbed. If you think about a sponge absorbing liquid, you are the liquid. The sponge soaks up a spill on the kitchen table and the liquid vanishes and dissipates into the fibers of the sponge. The liquid is still there, but it’s no longer a discrete entity. When Jack Kramer is asked how he learned to repair complex machinery, he explains that he’s been fixing things from the time he was a little kid. If his family’s toaster was broken he would get a screwdriver, open the toaster up, look at all the parts, and ask himself, “If I were this toaster, what would be wrong with me?” He would then become able to see the problem and repair it. He had to empathically identify with the toaster, lose himself into the being of the machine, in order to access flow and fix it.

The guy who coined the term “flow” is a Hungarian psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You can see the spelling of that name in the attribution of the quote at the top of your order of service. He built a career on researching the experience of flow – what it is, what it does for us, and what we do that either supports it or blocks it. He tells the story of Jack Kramer in his book. On the topic of losing oneself Csikszentmihalyi makes a distinction. He says that you don’t actually lose yourself, you lose the awareness of your self. The self, in his view as a psychologist, actually gets stronger through flow experiences. But I would say that something even more profound is happening there. If you invite in the insights of Buddhism, there is no self outside of our awareness of self. There is no self as a free-standing invisible entity. I don’t really exist in any absolute sense. I exist in my own perception and I exist, differently, in other people’s perception. But that’s it. When I am not self-aware, that self is gone.

So when we enter into flow and lose self-awareness – become absorbed in something or someone else – the self literally dissolves. The distinction between self and other vanishes and we become one with the universe. Some traditions call this “non-duality.” We call it Unitarianism. We are all ultimately one and in flow, we get to access that truth. For many of us that experience can be ecstatic. Drugs can be a shortcut to it; spiritual practices can be a long-cut to being there all the time. But generally, your individual self isn’t gone forever. In flow, just like with the sponge, the liquid elements of you are still there and when you squeeze the sponge, the flow ends, the universe spits you back out, and you re-congeal. And then, just as Csikszentmihalyi says, “the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.” The new, reconstituted self after is a little expanded. It’s a little fuller, deeper, richer as if we carry some of the whole universe back with us into our ordinary consciousness.

The experience of flow changes us. It spreads to other dimensions of our lives. In his spare time, Jack Kramer likes to work in his garden. He has created a whole Garden of Eden with rock sculptures and flowers and bushes and intricate pathways and patios. And when he was installing a sprinkler system for it, he decided he wanted rainbows. He did some experimenting with different sprinkler heads. None of the sprinkler heads in the stores was just right so he made one in his basement. It produced just the perfect fine mist that makes a dozen small rainbows all over his garden whenever he turns it on. But there was one problem. He works so much during daylight hours that he didn’t have a lot of time to enjoy the rainbows. But Jack was not deterred. He did some research and found floodlights that have just enough of the sun’s spectrum to form rainbows. He installed a few small ones in his garden and presto! Rainbows now bloom day or night.

Flow teaches us something about how to live life in general. Flow requires a perfect balance of action and allowing; doing and surrender. In this culture, we tend to be pretty good at the action part. Our economy is based on the idea of the ego going out into the world and altering it in some way, even competing with other egos to do it faster and better. Getting a better job, higher pay, results-oriented. I am going to dream and then I am going to achieve. I alone can get this done. It’s the American Dream – if I have ability and work hard, I will be successful. It comes from in here. It comes from me. It’s my ability, my intelligence, my strength. Mine. And in fact there is some real value to that kind of energy. It’s the proactive vitality that fuels so much of life.

But that kind of self-aggrandizing energy also runs the risk of blocking flow. It so often includes either self-consciousness or self-centeredness. Self-consciousness is where we’re worried about what other people think – how we appear. How do I look in these pants? Will my kid’s friend’s parents think I give my kid too much screen time? What will my neighbors think about me making this crazy garden with rainbows? That’s self-consciousness. Self-centeredness is where we judge everything in our life according to its value to us. Is this painting useful to me? Is this new person I’ve just met going to help me meet my goals? Is this rainbow in my garden going to accomplish anything? Nothing is allowed to be valuable just for its own sake. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “Although a self-conscious person is in many respects different from a self-centered one, neither …[can]… enter easily into a flow experience… too much psychic energy is wrapped up in the self.”

While we certainly need that American Dream self-fueled energy, we also need a different kind of energy: the energy of surrender. Sometimes to be the person that we want to be, we have to get our self out of the way. Religious mystics from many traditions are in touch with this kind of energy and the ecstatic joy that it brings. The bumper sticker version is, “Let go and let God.” The poem by Hafiz that we read earlier captures it perfectly:

What is the difference Between your experience of Existence And that of a saint?

The saint knows That the spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy

And bursting out in Laughter And saying, “I Surrender!”

Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think You have a thousand serious moves.

We all walk around thinking that we still have a thousand serious moves. We think we’re going to control our lives or die trying. We think we can figure it all out and arrange our pieces just right and orchestrate what they’re all going to do. But how often does it happen that we think we know what’s going to be good or bad for us and it turns out that we don’t know squat. How often does the careful plan fall apart. We think something is going to turn out one way and it turns out another, we think we have someone figured out and they surprise us, we think we can only be happy if x, y, or z happens and then a, b, or c happens and it turns out to be the best thing ever. Or vice versa. And at some point we just have to laugh because it really is like a chess game and our opponent has made a fantastic move and it’s just so brilliant and so surprising, we just have to say, “Okay! I give up! I surrender. I can’t fight the flow.” And at that moment, a new way of being opens up.

I believe that flow has a lesson to teach us: Flow is not just about the great feeling of being immersed in one particular activity. Flow is a way of being in the world. It’s a way of being that embodies action and surrender at the same time. Where everything we do, we do with both our intent and strength and intelligence and creativity and at the same time, complete yielding to the great chess master of the cosmos. So I invite all of us to notice where we may be trying to push our own rivers, efforting our way through our days. Instead, look for where we can find flow; the letting go that gives up the fight without giving up the impulse to act. Try to let our egos quiet a bit and instead become conduits for the energy of the universe. Let our power come from within and beyond us. Once we can plug into that flow of power, there is nothing we can’t do. We can find enough love for everyone in our lives. We can become laser focused in our work for justice. We can create joy in the simplest of tasks. We can even make rainbows shine at night.