I think what you're describing with your eSports experience _is_ 'flow' -- the same as you get when coding. It's a state of focus and immersion you can get into with many different activities, not just coding.
two types of flow. One is called absorbed flow and the other is
called panoramic flow. Absorbed flow is when you're doing a task,
like, minute tasks like taking apart a watch or something. And
you're so focused that you enter the world, and then you look up
and time has flown. All of a sudden, how did an hour go by?
Martial arts has a little of both, but in some ways, to do it, you
actually have to go into panoramic flow. You have to let go of
your mind. You have to trust that the training, the implicit
memories available of the actions, and the physical actions, and
then you have to trust that there's this way of organizing
information that's faster than thought. And by doing that, you
enter into a flow. And that's being done from this awake
consciousness. That's the functional feeling of that. And there in
itself, just like Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book on flow,
and gives these qualities of flow as that activity is in itself a
pleasure, that there's a loss of a sense of ego or self, sense of
timelessness, sense of connection to everything. And so that
state, you're doing that activity to find something that I'm
saying you can find anytime you want. […] Who, what level of mind
is it that can do martial arts at that level? That you that does
that, that's the awake consciousness.
There is also the feeling of being ahead of the flow and showboating like a tourist taking pictures with many "third eyes" on your model of the world as experienced from every angle at once. Kind of like Usain Bolt at one of the Olympics when he broke the world record the first time. Kind of like a window manager with many viewports open on the model.
It’s when we train our subconscious mind to simulate reality so well that it accurately stays ahead of what’s happening in real time.
A smaller example of this is reactively catching something that was knocked off a table and realising what you are doing in the moment without having triggering the reaction consciously.
I’ve had some noticeable success applying the ideas of The Inner Game of Tennis to Rocket League. If I’m in a decent mindset to begin with, I can usually get in the zone within a few rounds, and keep it going for a while. Problem is, I usually keep playing well past that point because it’s just fun, so I keep loosing any gains in rank.
It's interesting that Rocket League was brought up. I used to play RL a lot and every once in a while I physically felt like I was one with the car on the screen. Like my mind became the car. Everything felt more fluid. The jumps were precise and timely. The shots were accurate. It was an insane difference between my regular gameplay. I always wondered if professional gamers somehow end up mastering how to recall this behavior when competing.
Rocket League is one of my all time favorite games because of this feeling. Also echo your feelings on the rank grind. After awhile I made a rule for myself that I would quit playing ranked after a total of two losses in a session.
