Going with the Flow

The Russian philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) pictured time as a horizontal flow—and eternity abruptly intersecting it from above like the strike of a lightning bolt. I think I read that in The Beginning and the End. I’ve always appreciated near-poetic imagery in place of abstract expressions. Here Berdyaev captures the almost ungraspable dimensional differences between this world and another by using a vivid image. Not surprisingly, Berdyaev was also a philosopher of creativity. We can better picture it, but there is also a way to experience that difference in our ordinary here and now.

The Naqshbandi order of the Sufis has long taught eleven rules or practices intended to advance human development. Of these the ninth is called “Temporal Pause” or “Pause of Time.” In more abbreviated form it is known as “Stop.”  What the practice intends is that, for a moment, long or short, we remove ourselves from that much-lauded activity, going with the flow. That last phrase is used to describe pleasurable spontaneous activity, but in truth we’re always going with the flow. We’re creatures of habits and impulses, impulses arising from associations and habits guiding their satisfaction. Examining a whole day will reveal just how automatic all of our actions have been, no matter how complex and “intellectual” they might have been in content. Even when we are engaged in quite purposive activities, the purposes themselves are part of our habituation. We might look long and hard before we encounter a “temporal pause,” and if we meet it at all, it will itself have been caused by some (usually negative) news. The “pause in time,” however, to be effective, must be deliberate. Another aspect of it is that it should, for all intents and purposes, be unwelcome to our personality, our habit self, what the Sufis call the Commanding Self. It is nothing other than our programming. It might have elements within it introduced by actual deliberate effort long ago, but these have been, as it were, automated.

We shouldn’t want to do it—but we do it anyway. When I’m engaged in something (e.g., writing this) and the telephone rings—that irritates me; I feel an inner violence I have to bring under control; that too, of course, becomes habitual, sublimated into a sigh. It is an unwanted Stop. But when I get up from the keyboard to take a sheet of paper at my desk and settle to half-an-hour’s diary writing, my personality is still resistant—but not quite in the same way. After all, it is the boss who wants to do this boring thing. Other forms of the temporal pause are prayer, meditation, going on walks (especially when these are of some duration and it’s hot or cold), other forms of strenuous exercise, and, for some people, sitting down and reading a book.

That pause in time, when the necessary conditions are present, thus when I’d rather be doing something else, when my motive is precisely to interrupt the flow, then it yields unusual results. Can such things become habitual? Not if I don’t really want to do them. The paradox is that the pause only works when it is resistance to the flow. The results show that.

Stopping time—and this sort of action is actually stopping time—because what we call time is the flow—suddenly changes our usual perspective. In a while the body begins to reflect this new state. It calms down. Anxieties recede. Important things become less so. The boredom we anticipated dissipates. We’re still in time, but no longer of it. The exercise, in various forms, does something for me, always positive. Whereas three or four days spent in the flow exclusively produces quite different atmospherics; therefore I know that it is time to Stop. We don’t have the eyes to let us see what actually happens when we remove ourselves from time into eternity. But there is a feeling there. Years ago, trying to find a word for it, I began to call it sovereignty. All genuinely deliberate thought and action arises from this central something. The flow temps us incessantly, but we shy from making use of a great gift that is entirely within our grasp.