The Zone, Flow, States and Minds

This is a think-piece, intended to help me decide whether I need certain bits of the book as it stands.

In the chapter called Subjective and Objective, there's a section that originated many years ago (over 10), called Subjective and Objective States. The objective state is an ideal, never fully realized, in which a person (or whatever) manages to be perfectly objective. It is what science aspires to. Even though the objective state is unreachable, the concept is implicitly very prevalent, not to say dominant, across British/American philosophy and culture generally.

The subjective state is the same as "the zone" in sports jargon, in which action is spontaneous and performance is optimized, and it is related to elements in some Eastern philosophies, particularly Zen. My hypothesis (to put it no more strongly) is that these two states represent the extremes of a continuum between which we operate at all times, shifting backwards and forwards as circumstances demand and permit. Rationality takes us towards the objective state, for instance, and empathy, towards the subjective. More recently I've come across the concept of flow, which seems very similar if not identical to the zone, ie the subjective state. This view is necessarily a simplified picture of reality, but I think it could be quite useful. The question here is: is it useful within the context of this particular book?

The original intention of this section was to help elucidate subjectivity and objectivity generally. I put a lot of effort over the years into understanding what subj and obj "really" are, and this is that. Except that I no longer cling to such reductionist, or essentialist, tendencies, and I'm now wondering whether this isn't a can of worms, better left unopened. The stuff on the zone and Zen makes it look a bit new-agey. On the other hand, I want both to appeal to, and to enlighten and support, people who tend towards inter/subjectivity, who might not be put off by that, and might even be attracted by it. This is partially, therefore, a marketing issue, but I do need to work out what I get from this set of concepts, exactly what I'd lose by ditching it, before I can make the decision.

At the moment there's a chapter called Conscious and Unconscious Minds, mainly about habits and skills, to show the prevalence and importance of "the unconscious". The link is the unconscious initiation of action in the zone, and my idea that subjectivity always has an unconscious element. It seems likely that, if the states are dropped, the minds would go with them. This unconscious/subjective idea seems a bit essentialist, and even if there's something in it (which I do think there is), that could well be unnecessary and even distracting in the context of this book.

There's an easy way forward here, which is to cut out states and minds but preserve the text carefully (meaning findably), so it can be re-introduced if and when it turns out to fit well with the rest of what I need to say. So I don't really need to work out all the implications first. And that's a decision.