Finding Flow Near Death

Augie White
Nov 4 · 7 min read

On April 13th 2016 I was lying immobilized from pain, on top of a table in a remote Bolivian medical clinic, when a doctor told me I had eight hours to live. I was in this situation thanks to a ruptured appendix that had caused a lethal infection throughout my abdominal cavity, triggering an immune response known as severe sepsis. As a result my blood pressure had dropped to an extremely low level and I had multiple organs on the verge of failure. Laying there processing what the doctor had told me, the reality began to sink in, I was actually alive.

The dilapidated health clinic was no stones throw away from hope. In order to get there I had taken a rattly old chicken bus 24 hours from the city of La Paz to a town on the outskirts of the Amazon called Rurrenabaque. From there I took a Jeep through six hours of mud roads into the jungle, where I then hopped on a wooden boat and traveled four hours up the river to a small indigenous village. Clearly an ideal place to be in need of an immediate emergency surgery.

As time passed and no solution as to how I would get to a hospital presented itself, thoughts of my mortality raced through my head. Fear and sadness consumed me as I thought about how I would never see my family or friends again and how there were so many things I still wanted to do. Tick… tock.

I never thought I’d be thankful for the cocaine industry, but without it I’d be a goner. After a couple hours passed, word got out around the village that their was a young gringo on the verge of dying. Eventually a group of random guys, who we later learned were Coca traffickers, popped out of the jungle and offered to fly me to the nearest hospital if I would pay them. I enthusiastically agreed and after a few terrifying flights in an overloaded four seater Cessna, and a highly unsanitary, 80 year old surgical operation, my life was saved.

In the months I spent recovering from that incident, I was the happiest I’d ever been. Hyper aware of being alive, I took in every sensation deeply, breathing in the present moments with a newly developed gratitude for them all. I wanted to feel fully immersed in everything. But as time passed, that state of being began to fade and in order to access it, I had to start actively seeking it out. Unknown to me at the time, this was the beginning of my pursuit of flow.

Author Steven Kotler defines flow state as An optimal state of consciousness, a state where you feel your best and perform your best. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption, when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Your sense of time distorts (either, typically, speeds up; or, occasionally, slows down). And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. Flow state’s emergence varies. To name some examples of situations in which it arises: one can experience it brainstorming at the workplace, while doing mundane chores, meditating, participating in athletic activities, and in it’s strongest form in the midst of a dangerous situation.

Flow state is nowhere more evident than in the world of extreme sports. When someone is diving off of a cliff into a wingsuit flight, or dropping into a 70 ft wave, the emergence of flow is essential for the person involved to successfully execute what they are doing, and to fail is likely fatal. This raises the question, is there a correlation to flow state and proximity to death?

Before the tragic passing of visionary extreme sports athlete Dean Potter, he described his experience of flow by saying, “I perceive things much more clearly, and much more slowed down than normal. The only reason I put myself in harms way is for the heightened awareness.” Dean was known for pushing the limits of what was humanly possible in the world of free solo rock climbing (no ropes, one mistake and you die) and wingsuit flying. He was a master of these activities and considered them to be both an art form and spiritual experience. Eventually a wingsuit flying accident took his life.

As my own near death experience in the jungle became more and more a thing of the past, I sought out new ways to evoke that sense of being alive. One spring day while climbing Mt. Shasta, I regained it. It happened while I was unroped making my way up an exposed 200 meter Ice slope towards the summit. With every kick of my crampons and swing of my ice axe, I was hyper aware that a slip or fall could kill me. Terrified, half way up the forty-five degree slope my shaky legs were burning, and I was exhausted. I was nearing my limit, when at some point my brain switched modes of operation. All thoughts disappeared, my sense of self dissolved, and all that there was, was right in front of me. My breath, my motion, the elements, it all slowed down and became rhythmic. Kick, step, swing, breathe, repeat. Before I knew it I was up. Standing safely on top of the snowy ridge, gusts of wind hit my face as I looked down at the valley thousands of feet below me, and for the first time in a long time I felt that deep gratitude for life and was able to soak up every sensation the present moment had to offer. No inhibitions, no distractions, just the fluid transfer of energy from the universe into the entity that was me.

In analyzing flow state on a deeper level its assemblage is illustrated. Research from the Flow Genome Project has determined an emergence of biological responses and mechanisms that accompany people in flow. Chemicals like Norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin become more abundant, as well as an increase in production of endorphins. In psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology he Identifies a series of things that act as catalysts for flow state: Complete Concentration in the Present Moment, Immediate Feedback, Clear Goals, and Challenge that stretches ones skills to the utmost level. We can see here that certain sensory inputs activate responses in the human brain that create outputs leading to the emergence of flow.

Scanning the broader networks of flow science, one area in which we can see correlations is in Journalist Michael Pollan’s research on psychedelics. His book How to change your mind, illustrates how recent studies have shown similarities between the brain functioning on psychedelic mushrooms and the brain in a state of flow. He discusses studies where researchers have determined through monitoring brain activity that the default mode network shuts down and lets other less common cognitive operating systems take over both in flow state and when under the influence of psilocybin (the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms). This decrease in brain activity is seen in the prefrontal cortex, and is associated with the part of the brain that helps us separate self from other.

The work of Jonathan Haidt and Nathaniel rivers discusses the relationship between decision making and our gut reactions or intuition. The central idea shared between these two psychologists is that our process for decision making is dominated by the emergence of an immediate internal response, more so than by reason. This is an interesting idea to contemplate in regards to individuals operating in flow state. When an extreme skier is charging down a 3000 ft. line scattered with cliffs, decisions must be instantaneous. The rational brain to some extent must shut down, and more primal cognition mechanisms must take over.

It’s in the activities with close proximity to danger where demand for rapid, intuitive, focused mental operation is mandatory. The stark contrast between life and death is illustrated by an unavoidable awareness in these moments. The world becomes simplified, and in a way the philosophy of Latour comes to life. No thing is being reduced or deduced to something else, actions and the physical world morph with consciousness as actants mediate each other on an equal plane. Here we find flow.

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