142 ■ FLOWcally. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade,
earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what
is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of
what one’s experience is all about. From that will come the profound
joy of the thinker, like that experienced by the disciples of Socrates that
Plato describes in Philebus: “The young man who has drunk for the first
time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom;
he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its
ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull
them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger
whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents,
nor anyone who is willing to listen... .”
The quotation is about twenty-four centuries old, but a contempo
rary observer could not describe more vividly what happens when a
person first discovers the flow of the mind.