The most important insight of my life.
What is flow?
I've come to this state of mediation and after many similar evenings of insights I've finally understood what is flow (or matrix, heaven, nirvana, etc.) and how it probably relates to the high-level function of brain, stress, amount of incoming information. This insight is breath-taking for me. Probably the most important idea in my life.
Basically there's an incoming stream of information to the brain (our senses) and stream of information generated by the brain itself (hallucinations). The information is filtered and the rest is visible to our attention. The threshold of filtering is variable.
In case of too much information (eg. being in city, surfing web, studying university) or high level of stress (eg. being hunted by a tiger, being hunted by a deadline) the threshold is set high, so that only vitally important information gets to the attention.
But when there's lack of senses and low level of stress (eg. meditating in a black cave), the filter is set low. Then more information from senses passes through (we are more aware of the present moment) and also more hallucinations pass through. The latter is the source of inspiration - for artists, scientists, everybody.
Some call it flow, matrix, heaven, nirvana, awareness, god, trip, whatever. It's still the same thing. It's not supernatural. It's in our head. We all experienced it once - in our childhood. Thus the deja vu feeling.
The nice thing is this state of mind is full of happiness, creativity and is very pleasant. Thus we're trying to search for it. The thing is we have it in our head a just need to calm down to come there.
When thinking about it more. It's certainly nothing new under the sun. But for me to realize it it was really awesome feeling.
An amazing article about research of psilocybin: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment
There's a passage about "default-mode network" in brain which orchestrates other parts, filter their communications and acts as the "ego". In the mystical state it's suppressed - the filter level is decreased. So the hypothesis is actually consistent with results of some research using fMRI. Nice. :)