Step.

What is the path to engagement in all aspects of your life?

What does it feel like?

You get up, take a cold shower, meditate, connect to spirit, workout (no music). You feel every stage of every rep. You know the challenge and you feel it within your body, you are called, and you answer the call. You answer it every time you show up to life.

Life is always sending us messages, but mostly we do not hear; why?

The calls are subtle, and we live in a gross world. Gross stimulation, not gross in the sense of sickness or disgust, but gross as in bulky, not subtle. We are too well fed, distracted, and otherwise stimulated to respond to the call, however it comes. How does it come?

One must be alone, to listen to themselves. Ideas can come from talking to others, but guidance is deeply individual. As such, we require the stillness and quietude required for us to hear God when he talks to us.

God’s words to us are part of our intuition. Our typical programming tells us that our intuition is our own, it is deeply human, and it is flawed. But intuition is the voice of God, why? God is within you.

This above critique of intuition as the basis for making decisions has a common argument, with some sense to it: most people are not being a clear channel for God’s will to be done on Earth (as it is in heaven).

Before we go further, I should expand on the idea that creation does not happen in the mind of the human creator, but in the mind of the one Creator. As such, our job is to clear this channel as best we can and let inspiration flow through.

Our intuition is one way we may feel God and know his will for us. Engage in quietude, fasting, abnegation for periods. I should stress that this is for periods! You don’t have to give up pleasures for the rest of your life.

When inspiration comes, it is on you to make a plan to execute the action, otherwise the idea will find someone else. The idea wants nothing more than to be expressed in the world, to make the passage from the platonic realm to the physical realm. It exists as pure noumena until it is made manifest in the world. People are shocked at the level of creativity required to produce such a thing, and that it came from a living, breathing, shitting person who changes his underwear and may pick his nose.

Creators are not a different class of people, though people who are more creative tend to tap into certain states of consciousness more often. I know not of any physical or genetic determinants of this ability.

How does one enter this state? And what is it?

Well, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term ‘flow’ to name these states, states attained by top performers during performance. This has later been popularized by Steven Kotler and his colleague Jamie Wheel who founded the Flow Genome project. Anyways, how can we get flow into our everyday lives, how can we be creative?

In these states, which I have felt in deep conversation, intense and dangerous free rock climbing, or coming out of an Ayahuasca ceremony feel to me as if all possibility has been narrowed to a few options. One funny example of this is coming out from Ayahuasca, I felt I was guided by something; I merely had to surrender to the ride. In this sense, throwing up was one of the most pleasurable and memorable moments of my life. I felt that the ‘right’ move always laid before me.

In Kantian ethics, there is a dictum that “Ought Implies Can” Therefore, you only need worry about what to do only if it is an action available to you. It is useless to worry about other possibilities or contrapositives, the only actions that matter are the ones you do now.

This is difficult, we are awash in a deluge of information: I deal with the tendency to flit between course and course by deciding: what is in front of me now is what I need to be engaging with. This mindset is so freeing. Allowing you to deal with proximal concerns readily. You can only do what you can do, so don’t worry about what you’re not capable of doing yet.

Ironically, the state of flow enhances our learning and productive capacities, such that worries about achieving certain capabilities hinder us from achieving those.

One realization is that you can achieve ambitious goals of any size by devoting total faith and total commitment. Unfortunately, faith is a mental technology that few people see the value in nowadays. Faith is associated with zealous Christians marching off to holy war, or Islamic state jihadists immolating a Jordanian pilot.

Faith gives us the ability to step into the unknown, regardless of where our feet are now. It may seem contradictory to talk about ‘being in the moment’ and planning, but this is the way of meeting providence halfway. Set out a goal and walk to it and various coincidences will support you in your journey, a lucky cash break, a client. God provides us with the opportunity, but it is up to us to just accept it/.

For us to accept it we must take on a mindset of acceptance and receptivity; see each experience, even each sensation as a teacher and you will learn at a vastly accelerated pace. I choose to see everyone I talk with as a unique teacher on life: sometimes they teach us practical stuff, sometimes they teach us about boundaries, love and service. How do their teachings accord with your current reality?

This does get into eh tricky problem of our mental models, and how much of our perception is already mediated by mind, by previous conditioning. It is said that enlightened people experience everything as if for the first time: imagine the excitement that they feel. Imagine the possibilities if life was not bland and kind of boring, but completely novel and exciting: you could explore anything, opportunities would open themselves up to you, life would be an amazing adventure.

This is getting back to that state of flow, that elusive state. We know how to access this state, full engagement with eh task. For this reason, flow constitutes an extra gear that we can tap into at will (though it is difficult). Since flow is a result of total engagement and immersion, one thing we should do is make the task more challenging, so it requires a greater degree of concentration. If you are multitasking, you probably know by now that you are shortchanging your prospects at making transformative work. Lack of engagement gives us the mental bandwidth possible to think about things other than the task at hand. IF we are fully immersed, we can’t check our phone or even think about it, the task in front of us demands our total concentration.

One commitment we have to make to ourselves for this state is that I wish to be nowhere else than here, in this moment there is not something else for me to do but be here and do my work. This commitment brings us to the present; don’t think about that work assignment or that other bullshit: be here.

Finding your edge allows you to get into this state more easily, work just beyond the edge of your capabilities, just beyond what is comfortable. Over time, your capabilities will grow, as will your familiarity with this state.

This requires some lifestyle engineering. Ask yourself: what can I do to access this state? IS my current job providing this? If not, you may need to challenge yourself more.

Oftentimes when we are tired from working it is not because we work too much, and the prescription is less work, more rest, but because we are not doing enough, so we are not engaged enough to actually be present at work so we distract ourselves. This is a quick way to lots of wasted time and regrets, and I know it too well myself. For years, I languished in what was then an unfulfilling M.Sc. program, disengaged from what I was doing. I realize that the solution was not to take a lighter load, but a heavier load, and give myself the opportunity to step up to the challenge.

Setting out a challenge for yourself can be done regardless of where you are. Something that will truly stretch yourself, something that you will feel uncomfortable doing. It could be anything, but choose something for yourself, something which will produce an outcome for you, you are building something, and you are a creator.