Try to imagine being in a flow state without actually doing anything other than observing. It’s something I experience at times when I’m in a beautiful natural environment. I try to bring this feeling into my everyday life.
I think you explained this very clearly and beautifully. I think I know exactly what you mean.
I used to find a lot of comfort in being able to get myself into this state of mind easily, usually, like you, by just calmly observing natural surroundings in environments that are special to me.
That was in my late teens and early twenties. I’m now about 15 years older and find it so much harder.
I think it has something to do with living a hectic adult life, and I really hope I’ll be able to find back to that some time.
Part of me really believes that to experience life in this way is what we’re here for and modern life’s way of distancing us from this experience is something we need to be very wary of.
Clipping
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web > The flow state of nothing but observing
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103753]
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web > We change by tricking ourselves into new story
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103203]
Lately, I’ve had this intuition that we change by sort of tricking ourselves. The mechanism for that change is by settling on like this one kind of character, like someone out of a movie that’s playing in your head, and acting like that person. Then, as time passes, we simply forget who we were before we started acting and the only way we know how to act is as this one character.
You say you’ve lost your ‘story’ and your ‘character’, that you don’t ‘act’ anymore.
But, it just feels like you’ve made another story and another character for you to fit into. You’ve got a new aesthetic, a new ideal, and your appreciating sunsets and nature is another thing you do because that’s what the ‘character’ you try to fit would do.
And by acting like that person in your head would, you start to feel the same way too.
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web > 5-HT1A vs 5-HT2A receptors and passive vs active coping
[https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2024-03-01-5-meo-dmt.html]
One can imagine a wolf which lives off salmon in the local river. Perhaps our wolf suffers an encounter with a bear down at these hunting grounds and develops an aversion to water. This maladaptive behavioural pattern continues for some time, during which the passive coping mechanism helps it manage the stress of hunger. But this is insufficient for survival, and eventually the animal is driven to the point of starvation, at which point a pivotal mental state is triggered. If it’s lucky, the creature overcomes its behavioural aversions, and it learns to feed itself once again.
We propose that passive coping (i.e. tolerating a source of stress) is mediated by postsynaptic 5-HT1A receptor signalling and characterised by stress moderation. Conversely, we argue that active coping (i.e. actively addressing a source of stress) is mediated by 5-HT2A receptor signalling and characterised by enhanced plasticity (defined as capacity for change).
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books > Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising T (Pierce Brown)
I wish he believed as firmly in the afterlife as I once did, as Ragnar did. I’m not sure when I lost my faith. I don’t think it’s something that just happens. Maybe I’ve been worn down bit by bit, pretending to believe in the Vale because it’s easier than the alternative. I wish Roque would have thought he was going to a better world. But he died believing only in Gold, and anything that believes only in itself cannot go happily into the night.
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books > Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising T (Pierce Brown)
In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them.
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books > Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising T (Pierce Brown)
Forget a man’s name and he’ll forgive you. Remember it, and he’ll defend you forever.
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books > Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising T (Pierce Brown)
I’ve never been a man of joy or a man of war, or an island in a storm. Never an absolute like Lorn. That was what I pretended to be. I am and always have been a man who is made complete by those around him.
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books > I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box (Jason Pargin)
From the blog of Phil Greene: What must be understood is that the parasite manipulates with pleasure. When Euhaplorchis californiensis infects the California killifish, it need not inject venom or mind-altering chemicals to subdue its victim; it merely tickles the dopamine receptors until the fish thrashes and splashes with what to it must feel like rapturous joy, a behavior that quickly attracts predators, allowing the fish to be eaten and the parasite to spread. The mechanism is simple and the operation identical in the micro or macro, in animals or humans: a burst of short-term pleasure will blind the subject to its long-term well-being and cause it to function as little more than a puppet. Our old religions created strong societies by cultivating humans who could delay gratification, building a tolerance for suffering that would see them through the hard winter, the invading army, the totalitarian usurper. The modern religion of consumerist instant gratification, on the other hand, serves only the masters for whom the zombified subjects make perfect cattle, relinquishing their freedom and individuality in exchange for the next paltry release of soothing opiates. The effects wear off sooner with each dose, each time leaving the subject hungry and ashamed, a sort of post-ejaculate clarity that in the moment reveals the true state of its abject slavery, making the victim all the more eager to submit fully to the only source of pleasure and comfort it has ever known. The question is not how to save mankind but if what we are attempting to save can even still be called mankind.
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books > I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box (Jason Pargin)
Did you know that placebos still work even if you tell the patient it’s fake? I feel like that says something really important about humans, that performing a belief in something is the same as believing it.
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books > I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box (Jason Pargin)
Sure, you don’t want to do the work right now, during the hard part. Nobody does! But the real ‘you’ doesn’t exist in the moment; you exist in the long term. That you, the whole you, will be glad you did this.”