immersed, embodied awareness that is entirely fluid

Here’s Jay Garfield from his book Losing Ourselves:

… the focused attention of the expert is entirely on the task at hand and on the goals to be accomplished through that task. It is immersed, embodied awareness, and awareness that is entirely fluid, adjusting to the ever-changing demands of the task at hand. Nothing resembling a self is ever present in this kind of consciousness.

– Jay Garfield (2022) Losing ourselves: learning to live without a self.

Compare this with meditation teacher and psychotherapist Loch Kelly‘s effort to describe the difference between flow states and selflessness (nonduality):

I divided [flow] into two […] what I call absorbed flow and panoramic flow. And they’re always talked about as if they’re one thing, but they’re actually two. [In] absorbed flow, you literally are in almost a Jhana absorbed concentration where you are so involved in a task that everything else is gone and you look up and two hours have gone by. And a panoramic is more like an athletic or being in the wood walking in the woods, you feel everything … your time slows down, you’re in the now, you know, you’re not in your ego, your ego is dropped away, you feel connected to everyone and everything around you.

– Loch Kelly in Kelly, L. and Harris, S. (nodate) Meditation vs. Flow States. [online] available from https://app.wakingup.com/theory/questions-answers/loch-kelly-and-sam-harris#crC81CE1 [10 January 2024]

Kelly gets a bit bogged down (because he’s talking live as opposed to presenting an edited text), but goes on to make the point that in panoramic flow people do not use metacognition to look back to recognise that this experience is your “natural condition” and that “what you discover is that which you already are that’s here”. In panoramic flow there is the illusion of chasing something — perhaps a ‘state’ — when in reality it is the natural condition of consciousness.

There’s much more to consider here about the differences and overlap between nonduality and flow but I’m intrigued by Kelly’s effort here to disambiguate two types of flow as if nonduality is one form of flow.