Altered States to Altered Traits: Hacking Flow

today we're here to talk about how to move from altered states to altered traits hacking the flow state to accelerate human evolution in the last 50 years in particular we have experienced what comparative religious scholar machiya le Oda used to call techniques of ecstasy and in that category which remained more or less constant for thousands of years in the last 50 years we've experienced a step function in increase of potency and efficacy in three major areas technology psychology and pharmacology so think back to the early 60s for a minute think back to Bob Dylan playing an acoustic guitar and the Greenwich coffee shops right now imagine him plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival abled not just to reach dozens and hundreds but thousands and now hendrix channeling the Vietnam War through an upside-down Fender Strat at Woodstock to 80,000 and now a quarter of a million candy flipping high schoolers at Electric Daisy Carnival getting their brainwaves entrained at 140 beats a minute potent unprecedented in the realm of psychology think back to the organization man and Betty homemaker coming out of World War two fast forward to the 60s Fritz Pearl at Esalen Paulo thumping Gestalt sessions 70s radical encounter asked groups 80s and 90s Tony Robbins ioan within make bank and date hot chicks all the way to today with Oprah and eka non-dual awareness beamed out to suburban housewives by the millions we have more room to roam more room to consider who we are who we might and lastly the most obvious pharmacology from the 50s and the realm of mother's little helper are bitchu it's and Valium - today we've entered a world of full-on psychopharmacology choose the person you'd like to be and pop that pill oxytocin prozac nation and despite all of those benefits despite all of that advance right we're no further than we've always been it's easier than ever to get high and it's as hard as it's always been to stay that way so what's up with that what's up why do we keep pulling an Icarus and falling back to earth well the helpful analogy is to think of ourself systems like a colander and when there's enough flow going into that leaky bucket temporarily it fills up for a moment we experience the wholeness we experience the wisdom we experience the insight and we say ah yes I remember what I forgot but when the pill wears off when the workshop ends when the DJ's turn on the floodlights after the final encore and the spicket of that peak experience ceases the perforations in our vessel take precedent and by Monday morning we're back more or less to where we were now what do most of us do most of the time we say ah yeah let me go get some more at that we go try to ring the bell again and again we become bliss junkies we become hooked on the state without ever raising the stage but what if just for a moment we could entertain the project of turning our hollandaise into chalices what if we can use those peak experiences to make us whole to render us wholly what might we do with just one job what could we do with the rest and in Houston Smith's immortal words might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light so for the balance of our time we talked about three quick things if you leave with nothing else I'd love you to remember these the first is that flow is universal it's accessible to all of us everywhere the next is that for the first time in human history it's actually hackable and lastly once we know what to do with it and once we can turn it on we can leverage it to accelerate our learning and to do more good things in a world that sorely needs it part one so the lingo is endless the experience is timeless a Maslow called at peak experience Jim Fixx call it the runner's high Phil Jackson the coach of the Bulls and the Lakers calls it getting in the zone Miles Davis John Coltrane all the other jazz musicians called it being in the pocket all right time slows down the self vanishes action and awareness the beer and the doer merge and you drop into flow it can last seconds it can last a minute it might even last an hour if we're lucky but that blink of time becomes a lodestone becomes our anchor we spend the rest of our lives looking for it again let's cut to the chase how can we hack it how can we get more of it okay so the first thing there's one of the most invaluable qualities of the flow state is the loss of self-awareness our critical waking neurotic inner Woody Allen goes offline hallelujah adjust for that moment we get to breathe and be without thinking and critiquing the technical term for that what's actually going on when they put actually the elite athletes and fMRI machines that is called transient hypofrontality transient meaning is just around for a little while hypo not a lot of and frontality this complex neocortical hardware that's in the front of our dome piece for just a while it goes offline is like shutting a bunch of really complicated programs on our browser the central processor runs smoother runs faster the exact opposite of aldous huxley's doors of perception rather than the nozzle expanding are actually our aperture focuses and we get richer clean their information processing but the problem the paradox is how can we use our complex waking self to get rid of our complex waking self right let's just put a bullet in the narcissistic pop site New Age self-help movement once and for all right and like Brer Rabbit right tangling with that tar baby the more you struggle with it the sucker you get so let's instead lead the witness let's turn the entire biopsychosocial self system up to 11 and then see who's home and what that might look like is if we break down and I don't know how many of you can see this screen but these are essentially levers and knobs we can play with rather than just saying am i are we there yet am i they am i in my happy place right let's just look at the levels of development and the various capacities we have and let's optimize them so for instance rather than me being stressed out with rapid shallow chest breathing Bing cortisol and adrenaline having an erratic heart state and being an unrealized state runnin mental maps and models that are clusters of cul-de-sacs and error messages what if I instead learn to optimize all of them what if I moved my brainwaves into alpha and theta and actually they've done Studies on lead Hamilton and other extreme action sports athletes in this whole 10,000 hours of practice how many of you guys have heard of that lately I blame Malcolm Gladwell for that one right it's it's a fiction okay how many of us can actually stick at something like that for 10 bloody years half a day every day think of think of that I mean we love that story right it's like Protestant work ethic pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of stuff and we tell our kids all about it when you tell her employees and but it's crap right I mean look at look at look at the casualties right littering on side of the ripa to the people who make that trade-off the Tiger Woods and the Lance Armstrong's the tiger moms and the bulimic prima ballerinas the tortured artists right practice is hard it's really hard and if we can use instead ways to optimize ourself system we can have more resources more often and what happens with these action sports athletes that's what separates the good from the great is that the great are actually able to right there in the mall of the biggest wave in the world are able to drop into theta States right meditative states the states that normally see Tibetan Yogi's in they're able to drop their and camp out and wait for these little bursts of gamma waves that render them with the information they need it precisely the right time to shoot the barrel and to stay alive that's the difference so this $10,000 is peddled as a wildly a guy Tirion thing the reality are is the people that win the people that succeed have learned to master states of being first and we can too so lastly the sowhat right I mean it's you know what we've talked about so far is still about my own personal experience but I think the biggest impact and the most exciting possibility we have here is what might we be able to do with flow if we're able to cultivate it intentionally so Steven Kotler is that also a founder of the flow Genome Project and last you he co-wrote the book abundance with Peter Diamandis how many of you have either heard of the book or seen Peter's TED talk great so in a nutshell II they're basically arguing that hey while it looks like there may be a train wreck ahead right and Daniel and others have talked about all of the factors were aware of today there's also a really solid chance that the future is going to turn out better than we think that we're going to have the chance to fix this in time but the reality is is that's not a layup right best-selling books not withstanding right we could catch that wave and we could ride it triumphantly all the way into the shore or that way it could catch us pick us up and dump us on the reefs of unintended consequences so the only way we have a chance of making that drop and catching that wave of abundance is to learn to learn faster and flow helps us do that and here's how so Phil Zimbardo he's a Stanford professor anybody heard of the Stanford marshmallow experiment where the little kids each get a marshmallow and and like you know bird in the hand Jill just bugs that thing straight in but you know you know all work and no play Jack says I'm going to sit on mine I might wait for my double right and all the studies show that Jack does much better in his life but the problem is is neither the ant nor the grasshopper really works they've both got their drawbacks and pathologies if I go with instant gratification Jen I'm never around to build something lasting if I'm never in the present all of the baubles and trinkets I acquire of or not but something that's beautiful about flow states is that they're autotelic and autotelic is just a fancy word for it feels really good it has its own meaning and when we can do that in the present we can follow the instant gratification we can follow our desire to feel most alive and at the same time they can take us on a path to mastery and when we apply that to the rising billion around the world and we take them from caste and class and obligation and we can unlock them to mobility possibility and innovation what might we be able to do then so in closing let this be the beginning of a third Great Awakening in American culture this time balancing the ecstatic with the empiric let us reverse engineer our rarest and most precious moments of Grace and insight and let us harness them to the broader project of innovation collaboration and accelerated evolution we should not ask what the world needs we should ask what makes us come alive and go and do that because what the world needs is more of us all of us to come alive thank you

Channel: Michael Wharton

Views: 36,028

Rating: 4.8917379 out of 5

Keywords: Flow Genome Project, Rise Of Superman, Flow, Ultimate Human Peformance, Flow Dojo

Id: xYTVfF3yY7s

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 08 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Iam_nameless]

I learned nothing.