FANA · THE PASSING AWAY
On an old word for a documented state — and on the honest limit of borrowing it.
Ask people to describe their best work and listen for the pronoun. It thins out. The account slips into the passive, or into the present tense, or into something about the work doing itself.
People are faintly embarrassed by this and often correct themselves, as though the failure to remember being in charge is a failure of memory.
It is not. The thing that was absent is the commentator — the part that watches you performing and remarks on it — and its absence is the most consistently reported feature of good work across every domain anyone has asked about.
The observer is expensive. It occupies attention that the task wants, it inserts a delay between perceiving and acting, and under pressure it takes manual control of processes that were running better without it.
This is the Not-Two collection’s opening essay and the evidence is the same: explicit monitoring degrades an automated skill, and notably does not degrade a novice’s in the same way.
What this essay adds is the tradition’s word for the absence, and a caution about what that word actually means, which is in the case against.
In the tradition this is a claim about the annihilation of the ego-self in God and what subsists after it. It is theological and it is not a description of concentration.
What I am taking is the narrower observable: that the self-monitoring commentator can be absent, that its absence is associated with better work, and that it cannot be removed by deciding to remove it. The rest belongs to the tradition and I am leaving it there.
Attar’s parable: three moths want to know the flame. The first goes near and returns with a report. The second goes closer, is singed, and returns with a better report. The third flies into the flame and does not return — and it is the third, the parable says, that knew.
It is a teaching about the difference between describing a state and being in one, and it is uncomfortable on purpose.
It is also an argument this essay does not accept. The parable holds that the annihilation is the point and the report is worth less; I am here for the report, because the third moth is not available to somebody using this as a working idea rather than as a religious path. That is a real disagreement and pretending otherwise would be the erasure this collection is arranged against.
I would, until recently, have led this section with the external-focus literature: direct attention to the effect of a movement in the environment rather than to the body producing it, and performance and learning both improve. Seven separate meta-analyses reported that superiority. It was the single most confident claim in this collection.
It does not hold in that form. McKay and colleagues reanalysed those same data using robust Bayesian methods that model publication bias, and found moderate to strong evidence of bias in every analysis.4 After correction the estimated effects were negligible — g = 0.01 for performance, 0.15 for retention, 0.09 for transfer — with the Bayes factors favouring the null. It was published in Psychological Bulletin, the same journal as the comprehensive meta-analysis it reanalysed.
They also found clear heterogeneity throughout, which is the more interesting result: attentional focus appears to do a variety of things depending on context nobody has yet identified. That is consistent with try it and see. It is not consistent with an established technique.
What does survive is a different finding. Explicit attention to the execution of a well-practised skill degrades it, and notably does not degrade a novice’s in the same way.5 That is the choking literature, it is separately supported, and it is what the first two sections of this essay rest on.
So the practice below is a design choice rather than an evidenced protocol: if the observer cannot be removed by force, give it something to attend to that is not the mechanism of your own movement. I would have presented that as established a month ago. It is not, and the schedule that used to follow this section has been removed, because a fourteen-day protocol implies a confidence the evidence does not support.
Two objections, and the second is about the borrowing itself.
The case against
Fana is a term in a religious path with a destination. Using it for the state of a person concentrating well is exactly the substitution — take the vocabulary, drop the theology, keep the glamour — that made Rumi a New Age poet.
I am using it anyway, and the honest defence is thin: it names something real that English names badly, and I have said what I am leaving out. A reader who wants the term should have the tradition rather than this essay.
The second objection is practical. Absorption is neutral: people report it doing things that harm them, and it involves losing track of fatigue and of signals. The tradition has an entire apparatus of supervision around states; this essay has none, and that is a real difference in safety rather than in flavour.
You cannot delete the commentator by force; the attempt is more self-attention. What works is giving attention a legitimate external object.
Try one external cue for the duration of a task — a point, an edge, a sound, the effect rather than the mechanism. Specific enough to hold, dull enough not to become interesting. Run it as an experiment on yourself rather than as a method, because the heterogeneity in that literature says the answer is probably personal.
Move all analysis to afterwards. Any amount you like, none during.
And do not check whether it worked. Checking is the observer, and this essay is about the observer.
The commentator is expensive, its absence is the most consistent feature of good work, and it cannot be removed by deciding to remove it.
What I would have offered as the well-evidenced answer — point attention at the external effect — turns out to rest on a literature with publication bias throughout and negligible corrected effects. It may still be the right move for you. It is not an established one, and this essay has no schedule because of that.
The word belongs to a religious path with a destination this essay is not going to. I have used it because it names something English names badly, and I would rather say that than let the borrowing pass unremarked.
And the tradition supervised states. This essay does not, and that difference is about safety rather than about depth.
Pick one external cue — the effect of what you are doing, not the body doing it — and hold it for the duration of the task.
Move all analysis to afterwards. And do not check whether it worked; the checking is the commentator.
Arabic and Persian terms are transliterated simply. Where a saying is of contested authenticity the essay says so. Modern research is cited by author and publication.