FLOWING: the experience of a state where identification with a particular other (material and non-material object, person, event, idea, concept, belief, etc.) ceases. With the cessation of identification there appears an awareness without judgment, without attachment, without the constant movement of evaluation, approval and disapproval, without comment... immediate, timeless, sensual, personal...
What makes flow and direct experience so fleeting, so difficult to maintain? What prevents us from connecting with something that, when we are in that state, is absolutely familiar, intimate, simple, free of doubt and resistance?
The answer is as obvious as it is banal: habit, habit of living in the separation of subject and object, habit of experiencing through the dualism of opposites, habit of believing that polarity implies division, habit of fundamental resistance to the recognition that you are already complete, that you are already unique and indivisible, that you are already ALL that you are.
When faced with the question WHO ARE YOU? The answer is I AM and there is nothing to add or subtract and every definition has disappeared, then every object that limits I AM disappears becoming part of the being that is affirmed. That objectless I AM is then empty, full of presence. And then I disappear too.
But let's get back to the technique: how do we consciously enter the void? How do we move our attention from compulsive habit to identification with objects, form and limitation, definition? How do we consciously shift our attention from the obsessive and stressful pursuit of "something" to the flow?
Let me tell you some of the experiences that have brought me to where I am today and how a thread has unraveled over time, a thread of introspection and search for intimacy with myself that, like Ariadne's thread, has led me out of the labyrinth.
When I was eleven, I decided that the only competition I cared about was the one with myself.
That decision was the result of fear and frustration: I was often the youngest and the competition with others was not pleasant. It was also the flowering of the intuition that I was "different" (in those days I didn't have the concept of "uniqueness") and that it wasn't worth losing myself in the comparison... A natural movement towards INSIDE began to manifest itself with the first steps of self-inquiry. Somehow still unconscious the question WHO AM I? began to bloom within...
Drugs! Ah, drugs! Exactly, and without remorse or psychological or emotional justification. For millennia, drugs have been ways of exploring the mystery: guides and accelerators.
Magic mushrooms, peyote, LSD, MDMA and so on, helped to open doors to the perception (see A. Huxley, Walter Benjamin, etc.) that I was ready to open, that I was ready to cross and willing to find myself in unknown yet familiar territories, without the usual primary resistance, without the usual automatic defenses, without the Jiminy Cricket and the sense of guilt... I recognize the fundamental nature of the mystery in which I am immersed. I recognize that I am a fish that already swims in it and is part of it. I recognize that I have neither the ability nor the need to control the world in which I live. Time and space become my friends, support, surprise, adventure...
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