Book: 20231229 to 20240309, "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

20240103 - 1. Happiness revisited 1

Introduction 1

Overview 5

The Roots of Discontent 8

The Shields of Culture 10

Reclaiming Experience 16

Paths of Liberation 20

The law of entropy is the source of the challenges we meet.

Happiness and pleasure come from our perception and imagination, and this is major based on our expectation.

If what we got is better than expected, or if we expect things will get better, we are happy.

That's why young people are more happy than people in middle age, and why senior people become happy again.

If everyone in the world is Zen master, will Nuclear Power and Compuer chip ever been invented? Yes. Because these inventions help us to adapt to the environment, and increase our probability of the survival of our gene.

When combined with AGI, Neuralink can help everyone to become Zen master. That could be the major benefit of Neuralink.

20240105 - 2. The Anatomy of Consciousness 23

The Limits of Consciousness 28

Attention as Psychic Energy 30

"The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life." p31

Why? Because this person stopped wasting his time. In stead, he/she lives every minute.

Is this the ultimate purpose of meditation?

Enter the Self 33

Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy 36

Order in Consciousness: Flow 39

Complexity and the Growth of the Self 41

It's easy to get into flow status. When playing video games, browsing Tiktok or Youtube, watchting movies......we can easily stay in flow status for hours. And, many people can stay in flow when doing their work or study, but their lives may not go well.

Focus attention at will is extremely hard. That's the critical challenage.

20240106 - 3. Enjoyment and the Quality of Life 43

20240106 - Pleasure and Enjoyment 45

The author think the difference between pleasure and enjoyment is mainly about effort. I doubt it.

It seems more about latency. We can get pleasure instantly, but have to wait for quite a while to get the enjoyment. Enjoyment is more likely the subjective conclusion of our experience. The conclusion is based on our growth of complexity.

Can we enjoy meditation? Only when we realize that we get better control of our mind.

Why teenage eventually stop enjoy daily events? I don't believe it's because of schooling. More likely it's caused by overwhelming distractions, which come to us when we get more and more capabilities. When our mind is flooded with temptations, we cannot concentrate on other objects at will..

20240108 - The Elements of Enjoyment 48
20240108 - The Autotelic Experience 67

From envolvement point of view, Flow use all our brain capacity on the most important and urgent tasks, such as hunting.

Flow is either good or bad. It means the growth of our complexity. However, oligarch can use it to destruct the society.

However, how can we use it to fully enjoy every second of our lives?

20240109 - 4. The Conditions of Flow 71

20240109 - Flow Activities 72

To many people activities like working or raising children provide more flow than playing a game or painting a picture, because these individuals have learned to perceive opportunities in such mundane tasks that others do not see. p76

The cost of chemical drugs(such as ice and heroin) and electrical drugs(such as online games) are getting lower and lower. Time is always limited. If people choose to spend time on drugs to get pleasure, then they are less likely to spend time to achive something to get enjoyment. When they reach 70, they are more likely to regret how they used time in the past decades.

20240109 - Flow and Culture 77
20240109 - The Autotelic Personality 83
20240109 - The People of Flow 90

Curiosity is the most important personality to stay in flow in boring environment. It's at least very useful, which increase our chance to win in competition or survive, and have happy life.

But, how about meditation?

20240110 - 5. The Body in Flow 94

20240110 - Higher, Faster, Stronger 96

However, enjoyment, as we have seen, does not depend on what you do, but  rather on how you do it. p99

20240112 - The Joys of Movement 99
20240112 - Sex as Flow 100
20240112 - The Ultimate Control: Yoga and the Martial Arts 103
20240112 - Flow through theSenses: The Joys of Seeing 106
20240112 - The Flow of Music 108
20240112 - The Joys of Tasting 113

What we got through our body is pleasure, not enjoyment.

There is nothing with pleasure, just need to be sensitive to enjoy it, and be careful not to be addicted to them.

The key is to keep our mind empty.

A cup full of water cannot be used to hold milk.

We need to keep our mind empty to make it sensitive.

20240202 - 6. The Flow of Thought 117

20240202 - The Mother of Science 120
20240202 - The Rules of the Games of the Mind 124
20240202 - The Play of Words 128
20240202 - Befriending Clio 132
20240202 - The Delights of Science 134
20240203 - Loving Wisdom 138
20240203 - Amateurs and Professionals 139
20240203 - The Challenge of Lifelong Learning 141

Philosophy, history, science.

If we don't occupy our mind with meaningful activities, chaos would take it over.

Enjoyment is critical to maintain long-time attention. The flow of thought is triggered by curiosity. The flow experience is the reward

Why screen games are so attractive and addictive? They materialised our internal world instantly. They make flow dangerous.

20240211 - 7. Work As Flow 143

20240211 - Autotelic Workers 144
20240211 - Autotelic Jobs 152

What drive our actions? Once we meet our basic requirements, such as food, cloth, security and sex, for most people, it's what we hate decides what we do. For example, we hate doing hard work, taking risk, and boredom. That's why drugs, videos, internet and games are so popular.

How to avoid boredom? Find more meaningful things to do, and do it quickly.

20240213 - The Paradox of Work 157
20240213 - The Waste of Free Time 162

Flow needs challenging. What challenge does meditation bring to us?

Consuming time passively is fine, I guess. The point is, whether it let us grow. Our gene must be happy when we grow.

True. Leisure doesn't necessarily bring more pleasure to us than work.

20240214 - 8. Enjoying Solitude and Other People 164

20240214 - The Conflict between Being Alone and Being with Others 165
20240214 - The Pain of Loneliness 168

The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. p171

Can I just enjoy breathing? Did Budda actually grew his capapcity through meditation?

20240218- Taming Solitude 173
20240218 - Flow and the Family 175
20240218 - Enjoying Friends 185
20240218 - The Wider Community 190

How to get into flow? No matter in solitude or with other people, we need to give ourselves challenges, but not too much. That means, get out of comfort zone.

However, relying on those challenges still means relying on external factors. To some extent, this is all right. Juesus did that too.

Should we follow Budda?

20240303 - 9. Cheating Chaos 192

20240303 - Tragedies Transformed 193
20240303 - Coping with Stress 198

The goal of our lives should be increasing our internal and external complexity. This is not related to our lifestyle.

For example, computer chips are great. They are very complicated. Chess grand masters are great, as they mastered some very complicated skill.

Then how about the Zen masters who live in simple lives? They are in flow all the time, but that doesn't guarantee meaningful life. Everyone needs to do something very hard and enjoy it to increase his/her complexity.

20240304 - The Power of Dissipative Structures 201

Unless men learned various tricks for transforming the forces of disorder into something they could use, we would not have survived as successfully as we have. p201

Not just men do this. All living things do this. The meaning of life is to slow down entropy increase.

1. Unselfconscious self-assurance (implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands) p203

2. Focusing attention on the world (instead of our own emotion) p204

3. The discovery of new solutions (the result of 1&2) p207

Admit that we are part of the environment, part of the world(天人合一). Be objective all the time to minimize the impact of subjectiveness)

20240305 - The Autotelic Self: A Summary 208

To be distracted against one's will is the surest sign that one is not in control. p211

Self-consciousness is the most common source of distraction. p211

To me, the major problem is how to enjoy every moment.

20240306 - 10. The Making of Meaning 214

20240306 - What Meaning Means 215

Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. p217

Sounds like talking about me.  :-(

20240308 - Cultivating Purpose 218
20240308 - Forging Resolve 223

Reviewing one's actions one or more times each day to check whether what one has been doing in the past few hours has been consistent with long-term goals. p226

This could help a lot to stay in flow!

20240309 - Recovering Harmony 227
20240309 - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes 230

Finally find some error in this book. The author overestimated the importance of parents, but underestimated the importance of gene and peers. For normal people, peers are way more important than their parents.

Animals are in flow most of time. We are not. Options bring chaoes to our mind.

But options is also the consequences of our ability to build orders.

So our ultimate goal is to create more orders and at the same time keep ourselves in flow.

Power, sex and money are three major hinders to most of people. Are they major hinders to me?

How can I stay in flow in daily life?