Author Archives: grnthei

Heroes Outnumber Emotionally-Damaged Evildoers

Volume 2, Issue 18

What is it about the beautiful state of Colorado that explains first Columbine and now Aurora? The cowboys and today’s anarchistic militias, fiercely independent, have been associated with the Western frontier that started over 400 years ago in New England and then rolled out across the Rockies to the Pacific shore. Maybe that has something to do with it. Deep sigh.

As always, the tragedy contains a deeply buried profound mystery. How is it that ordinary people turn out to be real heroes when the going gets tough? What are we all made of inside that causes so many of us to unhesitatingly step in front of the bullet to save others?

In my intuitive cosmogony (to be released as a book later this year, entitled Imagine) it is the fact that you and I, all of us, are not who we think we are — separate entities cut off from everything else in the universe, out for ourselves. We are like pseudopods of a giant amoeba of consciousness that is the Universe, itself conscious and divine. Living through each of us is the One Divine Original Consciousness, which is the only thing that exists. What we take to be our own island of consciousness is actually the Universe’s local consciousness cache, temporarily cut off from the consciousness of the whole, for the never-ending adventure of existence.

Why then does the Universe turn bad, becoming so negative in one such pseudopod as to want to destroy complete strangers?

It comes with the territory — where there is free will, there will be error. The Jewish esoteric philosophy of Kabbalah explains that sin, aka evil, is missing the mark. The “mark” is right action for the circumstances. The insight is that no one purposely misses the mark — they are self-deluded into missing the mark.

Acceleritis has been around for as long as the human race has recorded history. According to my theory, the written language (seeable symbolic abstraction) that permits recording history is itself the primal cause of Acceleritis. My colleague Dr. Phillip Romero sets the start of human abstraction 35,000 – 40,000 years earlier than written language, in the cave paintings — when art began — although he does not assert that Acceleritis began with art.

It is Acceleritis that causes error (sin, evil) to be so remarkably widespread, and makes so many people capable of killing wantonly. And yet such people are a miniscule fraction of the human race, and most of us are as heroic as the heroes that populate our movies, TV dramas, and novels.

In the decades and centuries to come, it is my dream that we will conquer Acceleritis by training our minds to deal with the attachment, false ego selves, and emotionally-charged information overload that causes even such a small fraction of us to go so bad as to generate widespread suffering.

May it be so.

Best to all,

Bill

The Importance of Observer State in Relation to the Zone

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Volume 2, Issue 17

We all love to see people performing in the Zone. The Olympics is only one of the more obvious proofs of this. Actors, musicians, singers, athletes — these people are the focus of a large proportion of our time spent in conversation, especially athletes. We tacitly assume it’s just because we’re interested in the sport, or want to dream about having the kind of life they have, and there’s truth to all that — but some unsuspected portion of our interest has to do with an unconscious desire to be in the Zone, the Flow state, ourselves.

The superheroes in cartoons and movies are another manifestation of our ancient dream. Deep down inside we know we have secret powers that come out when we least expect them and are gone in a flash. Or they surface when we face the severest challenges of our lives. Old women are suddenly briefly able to carry people to safety. Within the Flow state are levels that provably increase “psychic powers” as measured by the Rhine card method. Because the Flow state is so dramatic and amazing, we have focused on heuristics to attain and maintain Flow as the prelude to a serious discussion of the Observer state. Now it’s time to turn our attention for a while to the Observer state. Why? Observer state is the precondition for Flow. It’s also a thousand times easier to get into Observer state, which brings with it a highly significant increase in creative effectiveness and a sharp reduction in emotional suffering.

The purpose of our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness is to provide ways of thinking and openness to perceptual information, hunches, and feelings that make it easy and effortless to thereafter slip into Observer state. Our premise is that more Flow state experiences will be created this way than by trying to help people get directly into the Flow state.

Here’s how you will know when you are in the Observer state:

You’ll detect an internal mental toughness that makes you demand proof from yourself about the thoughts you are having, and you find yourself being honest with yourself.
You’ve engaged your fatalism and whatever you would normally be afraid of losing you are now prepared to deal with, regardless of what happens.
Your attention is highly focused and you are too calm to be distractible.

You might find it interesting and useful to keep notes of times you catch yourself in this state, and times when you are brought down from this state (“triggered” as my great new friend Dr. Phillip Romero would say) into what I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), where you are joylessly trying to keep up with tasks in an atmosphere subconsciously charged with dread of failure.

As longtime readers have detected, most of my posts are about how to move from EOP to Observer and Flow states (“the Zone”). Indeed, this is the aim of my life and the purpose of the Human Effectiveness Institute.

Hope you are all keeping cool in the current weather wherever you are.

Best to all,

Bill

Probability of Winning Is Proportional to Acceptance of Losing

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Volume 2, Issue 16

Sharing techniques to attain and maintain Observer and Flow (Zone) states, in earlier posts we described the Yerkes Dodson Law and explained why we perform best when our motivational arousal is moderate rather than extreme, and why ancient Greek and Indian philosophies esteemed nonattachment which we redefined as “losability” the mental/emotional acceptance of outcomes divergent from targeted or desired outcomes.

We also linked motivation to values and therefore recommended a rethink of what you want out of life so as to reset yourself for a fuller life with more capability for creative effectiveness through these two higher states of consciousness, Observer and Flow.

To the degree that you are afraid of losing a match, the more likely you are to lose it; that is the corollary of the title for this week’s post. You get out of this fear by understanding it, the same way you get out of any fear. You might realize in this process before the big game or other big moment that your fear stems from other people’s opinions or judgment of you, and you might decide that it is ignoble for you to be driven by such things. You might then find yourself able to discard such a base motivation and suddenly experience a lasting fearlessness that allows you to win the big game by simply playing it as a game, enjoying the process without attachment to the outcome — the very conditions that cause Flow. This applies to every challenge you face every day, even those you don’t normally think of as challenges.

Perhaps all of us at some point in our lives have gone through the following thought process, which leads one to become motivated by something larger than oneself. This might happen when one has just been called up to be sent to a war zone. One thinks of the option of conscientious objection, running away to Canada (if one is an American), and realizes that some gut feeling inside holds you back. One might then face the possibility of dying on the battlefield. Then comes the thought, well it might be OK if I die, so long as my family is taken care of, and I have prepared for that so they will be. It might be OK if I die so long as America lives and goes on to rekindle its idealism and help lead the world to decency, fairness and justice.

At that stage probably only a few of us — perhaps those who are philosophers — think further down this same track. Well, dying might be OK so long as Earth humanity survives and learns from its mistakes and goes on to a better way of being. And then: well, even if Earth is destroyed, that might be OK if the universe goes on and evolves highly idealistic and kind races. Or even: well, dying might be OK so long as there is a benevolent God and such a God is happy with all outcomes.

There is inherently no operational difference between the first stage of latching one’s motivations to something larger than oneself — e.g. one’s family — and the later stages all the way up to God. In all cases one has already accepted the ultimate losability. I may die, but I’ve set my family up well, they all know I love them, they will grieve and miss me but their lives can be happy with the strength I have imbued in them by example and by loving communication. I can die knowing that my family will be OK — my country will be stronger for what I did while alive — the human race was enhanced by my accomplishments — the Universe and God will certainly be all right with me dead — hopefully I will have added some value along the way, and the universe learned some lessons from my mistakes.

When Bucky Fuller, despondent over a lost love affair, decided to commit suicide he reached the highest realization of his life up until that point: he was now free and could go on living. By agreeing with himself to give up life, he discovered that was harder than giving up the lost woman, and the attitude shift required to decide on suicide had freed him from the cause of suicide. From that point on he had true perspective on what is large and what is small. Perspective is what allows a sense of humor even in the most menacing situations — grace under fire — true courage, the virtue upon which all others are based according to Winston Churchill.

These are the utilitarian values of an attitude of losability.

Best to all,

Bill

The Role of Attention in the Zone

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Volume 2, Issue 15

Our nonprofit organization,The Human Effectiveness Institute, may be unique among nonprofit foundations in providing people with heuristics specifically designed to increase individual experience of the Observer and Flow (Zone) states of consciousness. Books that contain ancient scriptural texts from India, and other psychotechnologies derived from these teachings or rediscovered experientially, also offer such advice, since the samadhi, satori and zazen states are neurological levels within Flow.

In recent posts we have looked at Flow from many different points of view, including the relation to Flow of values, motivations, attachments, matching of skills and challenges, doing something for its own sake not for outcomes, and striving for Flow in the work one does best. In this post we will consider how attention is central to both Observer and Flow states.

ADD and ADHD are two modern symptomologies of Acceleritis, which undoubtedly also existed in the past but were never so prevalent as to warrant being named and studied. With the world culture veering wildly as information overload overwhelms our cortical abilities, our attention tends to be diffuse, unfocused, and constantly hopping from one distraction to another — conditions inimical to Flow.

A terrific book given to me recently by my great new friend and partner in Playshops, Richard Zackon, The Taboo of Subjectivity, by Alan Wallace — which recounts with such authenticity one feels as if Wallace is the reincarnation of William James — describes how James analyzes the most advanced “mystical” contemplative state he himself achieved as being one of alert vivid attention. Furthermore, the state was free of subjective constructs, conceptual thinking, and the singlepointed focus was on the nature of the experience of consciousness itself, thus utterly transcending the usual experience of mindand its incessant chatter. James thus demystified this state by explaining its differentness in purely scientific terms.

So long as one is not master of one’s own attention, none of the other suggestions we have provided or can provide will bear fruit in the way of Flow state. This is why so many of the Eastern traditions start with, and continuously emphasize, concentration training. Such training is no longer optional in the racing world of information overflow in which we now live, it is something we all need almost as much as we need love.

We cannot cover the subject of concentration training fully in this one post. A few key secrets of achieving concentration in current real world conditions will have to suffice for a start:

Focus 100% on one thing at a time.
Be present in the moment.
Do not rush — go no faster than you can with a rational and appropriate degree of perfectionism for the challenge you are facing.

In order to focus on one thing at a time you need:

To ruthlessly block off distractions.
As distracting but important ideas arise, jot them down on a side notepad and put them totally out of your mind until later. At the end of each day, integrate the list of waiting thoughts in priority order in a single list (or a personal list and a core business list). This will enable you to turn away from distracting thoughts without your mind tugging at your sleeve, fearing that important time limits are being exceeded on one or more of these items. Indeed, get done the side-notes in their own needed timeframes.

More on attention in future posts. This one dimension is one of the most important overlooked matters in world culture circa 2012.

Best to all,

Bill

PS – Gian Fulgoni was kind to tweet our last post – Click here.