a narrowing of the focus of consciousness on a clearly delimited stimulus field.The flow experience is characterized by the following phenomenological dimensions: The subsequent experience is 'ecstatic' in that it is characterized by a sense of clarity and enjoyment that stands out from the blurred background of everyday routine. In other words, states of optimal experience in a wide variety of context, including meditation, prayer, and mystical union, are described in terms of very similar subjective parameters. This subjective state has been reportedly experienced by creative artists when working, by athletes at the height of competition, by surgeons while performing difficult operations, and by ordinary people in the midst of their most satisfying activities. Perhaps the state of consciousness that most closely resembles accounts of religious ecstasy is the 'flow experience,' so named because many people have used the word flow in describing it. The task for the scholar is to describe the experiential state precisely, and to explain why it occurs in the context of religious practice. It is assumed that there is no qualitative difference between the unusual states of consciousness occasionally experienced in religious contexts and analogous states reported in a variety of secular contexts. Is the ecstasy reported in religious practices and rituals unique to religion, or is it a species of a broader genus of experiential states? At least since the writings of William James, psychologists have supported the latter hypothesis. Prayer, meditation, satori, sam ādhi, despite the tremendous variety of cultural differences represented in their settings, are all mechanisms for providing a sense of mystic union with a sacred, transcendent force. But the great religious traditions have become gradually less dependent on sensory means, while at the same time they have developed the ability to induce ecstasy through cognitive disciplines. The use of music, chanting, lighting, and scent in liturgy and of fasting and ritual feasting clearly derive from earlier methods for producing ecstasy. Remnants of such direct sensory means for inducing altered experiential states can still be found in the major religions. In cults and sects such experiences are often induced by chemical substances ingested in ritual contexts by fasting by various hypnotic trances, or by what Émile Durkheim called 'collective effervescence,' a condition engineered by rhythmic music, dance, and ritual movements. Such experiences constitute for many believers one of the main attractions of religion, if not a proof of its ability to mediate the supernatural. All major world religions, as well as most sects and tribal cults, are said to produce on occasion, among their faithful, states of ecstasy or altered states of consciousness.

The flow experience does not occur when