Groove, Pocket, and Flow
Searching for connectedness in a body/mind/spirit system
©2009 Carlisle Bergquist, MA, LCMFT.
Imagine yourself at a club or concert listening to a favorite band. The lights are flashing with the music; you can feel the driving bass drum’s rhythm pulsates through your body. As your mind skates along the singer’s melodies or the lead guitar, you step onto the dance floor, entraining with the beat as you find your spot through the churning crowd to synchronize with the backstreet ballroom ballet. Then, assuming you don’t have two left feet, you “strut your stuff” around the floor feeling alive and free. You’re in the groove, staying in rhythm with the band, your partner, and every dancer on the floor.
Meanwhile on the stage, the band is playing unusually tight. Members almost seem to read one another’s thoughts spontaneously adding in riffs and licks. Jazz musicians describe this state as being in the pocket. The pocket is more playing their part correctly; it is a state of union and common anticipation. The performance not only captures the spirit of the song, it stretches beyond its original form as if they are collectively arranging on the spot. Simply put, the band is “smokin!”
Good company, good music, and great feelings are the setup for, a self-regulating, self-sustaining feedback loop that forms between the band and the audience, which institutes the next level of magic. The excitement of the crowd uplifts the performance, which in turn uplifts the audience. At times like these, time seems to stop and individual awareness vanishes. Mihaly Csikszentmihali called this state “Flow” in his 1991 book by that name describing the psychological condition of the individuals experiencing it in their personal work. In this example, it’s a collective experience and that takes us to a completely new system level.
So what has this to do with body, mind and spirit you’re asking?
The Groove is the manifest body of creation. Everyday we awaken to a world of vibration, a dance. From the circadian rhythm of night and day to the beat of our own heart, we are resonant beings vibrating in a preset world of form. The Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Kahn, 1983 wrote in The Music of Life:
Man is not only formed of vibrations, but he lives and moves in them; they surround him as the fish is surrounded by water, and he contains them within him as the tank contains the water. His different moods, inclinations, affairs, successes and failures, and all conditions of life depend upon a certain activity of vibration, whether these be thoughts, emotions, or feelings.
A world in constant vibration brings up a question. Why do things appear to remain the same with each morning awakening? Of course, we know they don’t - things change. Everything is in the process of becoming or decaying, beginning or ending, but while it’s here, a tree remains a tree and each of us look pretty much the same from day to day. The same way that we find the beat and entrain to the music to dance, each thing in form entrains with its own groove to strut its stuff in the dance of creation.
The Pocket is the special aspect of mind beyond its ability to impose thought upon energy. (Remember The Secret) Physicist David Bohm, in a broad theoretical cosmology titled Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980, describes the mechanics of creation in terms of information or the “degrees of order” needed to define something. The more complex a system is the more degrees of order or information are required to describe it. Implicate order is unseen, enfolded as potential with an infinite degree of information, explicate order describes form as we know it, the groove. A particular type of order - the generative order - is what unfolds form. As Bohm and David Peat (1987) said, it is a “more inward order out of which the manifest form of things can emerge.” Thus, the generative order is the pocket, the place where energy is consciously unfolded from higher implicate orders into lower ones until form becomes explicate.
We carry precious items in our pockets, close to our being and out of sight. Mind in the pocket as I am using it here, is our most precious gift where we extend beyond ourselves to interconnect in union with all being. It is what Eastern psychologies express as universal mind. It is the place of transfiguration. The pocket, our connection to universal mind, is a generative order where we collectively interpreting and co-create the energy of Spirit into form.
The Flow is where time stands still and we sense the presence of Spirit. “Energy follows thought,” this simple statement is the foundation of esoteric philosophy. It is the secret of The Secret. With a little consideration, it becomes an obvious exoteric truth. We think about opening a door and our hand reaches for the doorknob. In the musical example above, the band’s and the audience’s energy reciprocate one another raising both until individual awareness –personal ego- disappears and thought is no longer required. They have moved into flow. If we are only human beings having an experience then the psychological definition of flow is sufficient. If however, we are spiritual beings having a human experience then flow is something much greater.
In the timeless moment of flow, we transcend thought. We still exist in the explicate world - the groove – but having transcended thought, we rest at the border between the generative order of universal mind – the pocket – and the enfolded implicate order of infinite potential – pure Spirit. Since there is no thought for energy to follow, in the flow we become pure experience: the universe looking back upon itself. In meditation, it would be achieving the state when the mind becomes a still body of water allowing us to look beyond the generative order of ripples and gaze into the heart of creation. In this state groove, pocket, and flow align to express perfection and that’s “Groovy baby.”