Maybe I’ll have to start the “I think” series. lol

I wanted to write about Flowism today. I initially thought I’d focus on the philosophy, but I’m now considering how it will interface with reality as well. Before I do that… I guess I have to talk about the philosophy a bit. I have some really polished documents with definitions and principles that I worked on for months. Still, I think freestyling on a topic really demonstrates one’s proficiency in it (although there’s no way for you to know if I really freestyled this!)

What is Flowism

This was the original title idea, and I was going to go into more depth. Flowism is a philosophy and, perhaps more importantly, a framework for becoming enlightened… a Flowist kind of enlightened. I’d like to focus on what Flowism does rather than what it is.

Flowist enlightenment is something that is accessible pretty quickly, I believe. It involves aligning your past and future, then using that alignment to refine your present (your Flow). Refining your Flow involves refining the habits, routines, protocols, systems, and other processes. The main difference is that they’re being refined from a place of absolute clarity about your future. Once your Past (Story), Future (Dream), and Present (Flow) are aligned, you can let go of a lot of things. You let go of things and focus on refining your Flow. This refinement isn’t about productivity gains (but it can be if that’s your thing). The refinement is about truly living in the moment. You can’t live in the moment when your mind is constantly running back and forth between future worries and past pains.

I suppose when I said “pretty quickly,” I’m talking about years. Let’s say three (9 cycles). You can’t mystically write down a perfect Story, Dream, and Flow in a day or week. When you make adjustments to one, it affects the others. The Story you have (written by you or not… usually not) directly impacts your Dream, and that impacts your Flow.

Most people are practicing Dreamism. Dreams about a house, a family, a better job, more money, getting into heaven, graduating college, getting a girlfriend, getting a cool car, waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6 to drop, birthday presents, Christmas presents, the new iPhone… You get the idea. People are waiting for something to give them a happiness hit, and are miserable on the way there.

“Living in the moment” isn’t anything new. The problem with that advice is that there isn’t a guidebook for how to do it. The guidebook is aligning your past, future, and present with the goal of having a… hmmm… English appears to be broken here… the goal of having a “contentful” life (guess that’s not a word). Not happy, not joyful, although those things definitely happen and can even be regular visitors. Mastering content in knowing you’re doing the work to get you where you want to be. This supreme alignment can only happen when the past, future, and present are supremely aligned.

How It Will Change The World

Well… my brand of Flowism anyway. If you search the web, you can find references to Flowism here and there. I suppose this is my “secret ingredient” to yesterday’s post. Flowism starts as a personal project. Figuring out who you are, what you want, and how you’re going to get it. You refine the how, such as your habits and routines. No one really notices anything in the beginning. They might know you’re trying some “new” thing, but that’s it. In time, people will see the significant changes you’ve made and want to know how you achieved them. Instead of pointing to some book, program, or Ozempic, you’re going to point to Flowism and the 108. Why Flowism and the 108 and not something specific? Well… specific things don’t work for everyone. The 108 gives you the framework to test new things until you find what works for you. Instead of discussing the thing itself, you focus on the framework that helped you discover it.

Now, people can organize around the framework for change rather than focusing on the specific factors that led to specific changes. Since it’s secular and diverse, it can bring together people from many different paths who are all on the same path of personal refinement. Personal refinement becomes group refinement, and then we can revisit yesterday’s post. The Flow in Flowism is for creating a life where you effortlessly Flow from one thing to the next to the best of your ability based on environmental and personal factors. It also represents how fluid life is. What works for one person won’t work for another, and what works for one group won’t work for another.

Being a secular group focused on personal development (to start), I imagine the diverse group of people that might come together. Bringing two people together who are on extreme sides of some idea or issue, the current Left vs Right split in the US, for example, won’t be very impactful. They won’t have the prerequisites to be able to meaningfully connect. But bringing together people who are closer on the spectrum might lead to some real idea exchange. Huh… took me a long time to get here, but one of the principles in Flowism is compassion. The first place this compassion is exercised is on yourself. Applying it to yourself and then making serious gains in personal development will help you see how others need it as well.

Huh… It’s fun writing like this. I suppose I see it changing the world by first learning to be compassionate, maybe somewhat selfishly, and then seeing that this compassion is what the people close to you need, and maybe you’ll see it’s what everyone needs.

I think I’m very close to having the frameworks to spread this “quickly” (quickly is very slow for a process like this, but I think I have a fast version of this slowness). Oh! One last key component. The goal here also is to create many Compassionate Flowist Influencers. I’m not talking about people with millions of followers either. People with millions of followers can’t really meaningfully impact the people in their “community”. Instead, there needs to be millions of influencers with hundreds or thousands of followers. Just random dudes (and women! ;) ) on the internet like me sharing their progress with Flowism and making solid one-to-one connections that they’re building into solid mesh-communities.