Of Nirvanic Concentration

It has been quite a while since I have first written about what I just called Breathing. It refers to the idea of getting immersed in the logistics of a task in a way that the mind becomes more familiar with it in order to handle it more efficiently. Following the recent analogy I've been making with sea's depth, Breathing is a fit name as the more experience I have with the activity, the more breath I'll have to dive even deeper and explore it further. That is, it also refers to the ammount of familiarity I have with the task and how deep I am comfortable to go.

Sometimes I try to go too deep or stay too time immersed and my mind becomes overwhelmingly overloaded, practically like losing actual breath, as I usually need to go out and grab some fresh air. It's the lack of familiarity with the place (is it the Realm of Uncertainty? Judging by the question alone, probably yes) that seems to produce a near-physical pressure on my brain. It's in moments like this that my writings become probably too hard to understand (as I'm probably not even sure of what I'm talking about).

Anyway, the Nirvanic Concentration is the goal of Breathing. It's the ultimate connection between us and the activity we're performing. This is something that gamers know too well, the moment when their connection with the game they're playing is so intense that there seems to be no boundaries between them and their characters - the buttons and their actions are synergical. One perfect example of Nirvanic Concentration is being able to play that crazy shredded solo in Guitar Hero. When a Nirvanic state of mind is achieved, the mind is trained enough to use intuitive skills for the task, like the use of buttons displayed on the gamepad.

So here I bring back an old concept that has seasoned in my mind since then, and that now I call a Spin. It is how I call the successful attempt to achieve the desired quality in the doing of an activity. Spins start appearing eventually and gradually more often with practice until the chance of attaining it becomes 100%, an uninterrupted spinning state which I also call Fluency. Those first Spins are usually achieved by Nirvanic Concentration.

In a mental level, this Nirvanic Concentration occurs when the level of introspection is really high, so soon thoughts and emotions are working together to produce correlations (heh, it's what I've been calling Mind On Fire, and here I am again giving it another name - the realization keeps charging). This heavenly inspiration seems to protect me from this stunning pressure and lack of breath, so I can go deeper than usual without too much harm. So Nirvanic Concentration can also be thought as a bonus range to the actual skill.

The drawback of the Nirvanic Concentration is that it requires spacing from what I've been calling the Surface Reality. Our job, bills, relationships and other "issues" can detract us from the precious Breathing of the task. In fact, there are several jobs whose undercurrent function is exactly to allow other people to dive deep without Surface interference - Producers, for instance, have this role of softening interference. Also, Nirvanic Concentration doesn't permit multitasking, though music helps focusing.

And this is one of my biggest flaws, I have not yet found a smooth way to deal with this issue of concentration. Not only my personal difficulty to not be distracted, but also there's nothing that incites my irritability more than being brought up to the surface by external means. I am always trying to avoid places whose ambience is prone to distract me because of that, and I think I'll call mindtrap on this, since serenity is needed to achieve Nirvanic Concentration. Irritability usually is there only to prevents me from reattaining it. So this is going to my Inner Constitution: Impatience devours Effort.