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Staying Focused Through Complexity

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Powerful Mind Part 34

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, September 26, 2024.
Created October 27, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 33

By this point in our journey, your priorities are to be your highest self and spend as much time as possible doing your passion work, while avoiding distractions, especially from your own doubts and fears. But there are so many other distractions to deal with, including people you love popping into your life at odd moments. By now your savior faire may include noting that these are assignments from the Universe that deserve your attention even when the timing is frustrating.

Because we have collectively dreamed up this ultra-distracting culture we now live in, in which we are being exposed to multiple media simultaneously for most of our waking moments, and in which emails, texts, phone calls, and innumerable other messages are incoming at all times, these challenges may often overcome our resolve, and make us feel as if we are never going to be able to stay in Flow or even in Observer state. Plus, we may be balancing the work we use to make money with the work that is our passion to which we are ever so gradually transitioning.

The reality is that multitasking is something we all overestimate our own talent for. We are all at our best when we immerse completely in one single-pointed attention stream at a time. The implication: we need to schedule our time in advance, leaving at least twice as much time as needed to complete a given task, but making advance arrangements (like turning phones and email audio notifications off, and closing doors with Do Not Disturb signs) so that we can really focus on one task at a time, enjoying it to the hilt, and treating it as the most important thing in the world for the allotted time.

But the reality is that we will not always have the luxury of controlling our own space. Sometimes we will be out in the world of action mixing with dozens of other people we know. Sometimes we will be doing that while operating heavy machinery (e.g. a car). Let’s take a hypothetical situation in which you are driving a car, involving looking forward, occasionally in the rear view mirror, occasionally in the side view mirrors, and keeping in mind where you are going, which might involve listening to cues from a GPS. You will also be monitoring your own mind and feelings, but your salience network is prioritizing safety above all else.

This means that if you are daydreaming idly in default network, you will switch consciously back into Observer state, where you may detect flash-forwards to the upcoming meeting to which you are driving, and noting useful ideas that you might bring up in that meeting. You may also hear yourself rehearsing specific dialog that suddenly gets you in trouble in your mental picture of the meeting. You also make a mental note to avoid that line of dialog, and perhaps you come up with a good phrase to use if someone else brings up that sensitive topic.

But you do not allow your useful inner predreaming to distract you from primary attention to the movements of cars and the changing of traffic lights, and to intuitions you may have of what another driver is going to do.

Let’s make the situation even more complex. Let’s say you’re driving a fairly large car with one passenger to the side and three more in back. One of these people is your business partner whose apparent main goal in life is to diminish you in the eyes of others, which he does with amazing manipulative powers, projecting boundless self-confidence. The others in the car are important clients. Your partner is leading a discussion about an idea you have had which he is criticizing, and the others are taking his views seriously and asking questions.

You note your ego’s reaction to this and set it aside, merely listening while maintaining safety on the road.

A method which can help in circumstances such as these is the rotation of attention. You might not be able to safely see each person while driving, but you can pay special attention to listening to what each person says, and you might ask for the views of someone who is staying silent. By rotating your surplus attention rather than trying to focus on everything at once, you may find that you can remain in the Observer or Flow state, get everyone safely to your destination, and perhaps, with right timing, make some short statement which restores the awareness of why you brought up that new idea in the first place, and why it still is worthy of testing further.

Better to let the idea rise or fall without intervention and return to it at some apropos later point, than to get emotionally hooked into the game your rival is playing. Safety and staying above your own ego are the natural priorities in the situation.

Key #8


When there is too much going on,
rotate attention to make sure
every workstream is covered.

 

Your own inner world is one workstream. The road ahead and the three mirrors are four other workstreams while driving. Each person in the car with you – or the radio – each of these is another workstream. Your equipment (mind, intuition, perceptions, feelings) is not at its best when dealing with multiple workstreams, and the tactic that optimizes you when multiple workstreams are unavoidable, is rotation of attention focus. At least for brief instants you are taking a full grab of each workstream. But the one or more workstreams which contain existential danger (like when driving) must never be without some degree of attention, even as you grab information from split second peeks elsewhere.

Best to all,
Bill

Embrace the High Path

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Powerful Mind Part 22
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – September 20, 2024
Created August 4, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 21

This begins the introduction to Powerful Mind Key #4.

Don’t Ignore the Ultimate Questions

Why is there a universe at all? Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing here? “What’s it all about, Alfie?” (from the song “Alfie” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the 1966 film Alfie.)


Read “Alfie” lyrics

As little children first realizing these questions for ourselves, we are awed. We might experience an oxytocin rush, with the hair at the base of our neck standing up and chills up and down our spine.

The vast majority of us eventually give up on these questions as unanswerable. We don’t see how those ultimate questions relate to our day to day lives. However, they do relate to our everyday lives. In ways that we are not aware of, the hidden assumptions we make about these ultimate questions leave us with very little motivation to act nobly, and so our lives tend to devolve into a form of quiet desperation (Thoreau) I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).

Coming full circle, returning back to our childhood perspective of awe and wonder, is to be reborn. The benefits will be at least as strong as each of the Keys we have already shared and those to follow.

As a starting point let’s go back to the greatest, most advanced and sophisticated scientists we have ever produced, in all of the recorded history of the only civilization on Earth of which we have present knowledge: Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking.

In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” (I refer to it as “ATOE”) I present a more complete account of the final theories of Einstein and Wheeler, which I’ll therefore only very briefly summarize here.

Einstein felt certain that the universe is evidence of an intelligence far greater than our own. An intelligence that our own intelligence can learn to understand! This gave Einstein those oxytocin thrills all his life through childhood and adulthood.

Wheeler postulated that the universe originally existed as probability waves, and evolved consciousness which collapses the probability waves into the matter energy spacetime universe that we who have consciousness all experience. He coined the term “Anthropic Participatory Principle” to mean that we who have consciousness are participating in the creation of the universe of which we are a part.

Both scientists were comfortable in making the obvious assumption that the universe can be thought of and described as one thing, of which we the observers and co-creators are intrinsic parts. That acceptance by philosophers and scientists that the universe can be cognized as a single thing is a thread running through all history of thought, going back to long before the Rig Veda in the East and Thales in the West.

When considering the ultimate questions, it helps to begin there, letting one’s mind envision the universe as one thing.

“Visualize the whole universe as one thing
Every individual of every species
Every idea
Every event
Every moment of time
Every percept
Every lump of matter and energy
All parts of one thing.”
  —Mind Magic, Page ix

In his last book Brief Answers To The Big Questions, in which he shares his final thoughts, Stephen Hawking writes: “In 1980, I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance that we would discover a complete unified theory in the next twenty years. We have made some remarkable progress in the period since then, but the final theory seems about the same distance away.”

Perhaps this is because we have been averse to considering certain possibilities due to biases we don’t realize we have.

For one thing, except for Wheeler, and to some extent Einstein with his thought experiments involving “the observer” (consciousness in the act of taking measurements), consciousness has been left out of all the proposed unified field theories of the last 100 years.

What if consciousness is the missing piece without which no one will ever discover a complete unified theory of physics?

Wheeler is the one of these three giants who came closest to achieving the inclusion of consciousness in his overarching theory of reality. In his stated view, the universe came first, and consisted of quantum foam in which virtual particles flickered in and out of existence, and then, as if to be appreciated, this universe developed an audience: consciousness in sentient living things.

Hawking refers to the Anthropic Principle a number of times in his final book. He points out that there might be an infinite number of universes, and in our universe, all of the conditions are conducive to the development of intelligent life, but we shouldn’t make too much of that, because we are the intelligent life forms lucky to have been born into one of the universes whose conditions supported the development of intelligent life. So of course to us we would assume consciousness to be a necessary ingredient to achieve a universe of actual hard events rather than mere probabilities. But Hawking wants us to leave open the possibility that other universes might exist too, with intelligence and consciousness never developing in them, perhaps collapsing probability waves into concrete things and determined events by some other means besides consciousness.

What if consciousness came first? This is one direction that has not been sufficiently explored by the greats of physics.

If consciousness came first, to me, everything falls neatly into place. A number of science writers in this 21st Century have written articles asking if we might all be living in a giant computer simulation. This is a very similar idea to my Theory Of The Conscious Universe, which is summarized in ATOE and explained in the most speculative detail in my book You Are The Universe. As Wheeler noted, information appears to be more basic to the universe than matter energy spacetime; he called this his “Bits Before Its” principle. Information is the stuff that goes through computers, and through consciousness.

We may be on the edge of the next great leap in physics, a world in which the universe is accepted to be intelligent, and each of us is an intrinsic part of that universe. This worldview, which I believe will be verified scientifically down the road a bit, will totally change the way we relate to one another. Even having an open mind about this possibility will have positive effects on how people deal with each other, and how well the world works.

When you look inside yourself, you may see that you have already formed certain assumptions contradictory to this view of a unified conscious universe. Living in the times that we are living through right now, with so much divisiveness and violent competition and hatred, the idea that we might all be parts of a single consciousness may seem preposterous, and we have been quick to slap the labels “superstition” and “magical thinking” on all such ideas – except when people like Einstein and Wheeler talk that way.

Opening the mind to such a possibility leads to self-questioning about how does one act if we ourself might actually turn out to be part of one consciousness? We actually have several choices.

  1. “Reject”: reject these ideas entirely and go on with your life as before (you already know this is not my advice from past blogposts).
  2. “Hedge”: continue to follow your past patterns (you already know this is not my advice from past blogposts) but just in case it might turn out to be true that we are all one thing together, try a little harder to get along with others.
  3. “Embrace”: embrace the high path. Act the way you would if you are betting on the One Consciousness Universe. Take yourself seriously. Act with purpose. Leave the world a better place than you found it. Pay close attention to your own subtle hunches. Reconsider everything carefully and mindfully. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Take responsibility. Protect others. Set a good example. Rise above negativity.

Divinity

 What is the meaning of the word “divinity”? The dictionaries give circular definitions, and come close to being more specific by using words like “godlike” and “holiness”, but fall short of explaining what it means to be godlike or holy or divine.

Teleology (from the Greek for “targeting”) is a word which philosophers use to suppose that the universe might have a preferred direction as to where it is going. This presupposes the consciousness and intelligence of such a universe.

Although Wheeler specifically assumed that the universe began without consciousness, his discussion of the Participatory Anthropic Principle (see ATOE) implies that the universe purposely moved toward the development of consciousness. What it seems like Wheeler overlooked is that intelligence and consciousness must have been present from the beginning in the universe, if teleology was evidenced by the universe’s preference for developing consciousness somewhere within its parts later on.

I don’t think Wheeler overlooked that. I think he didn’t want to go up against the orthodoxy to that degree. Science for the last few hundred years has implicitly avoided anything besides a materialistic conception, and this is the main reason why it has avoided dealing with consciousness this long.

What is divinity if not the universe having purpose?

If the universe has purpose, then we as parts of the universe, we too have purpose. We too are divine.

Self Divinity

 Self Divinity is the predisposition to treat oneself with the utmost respect, and to also do the same for all others, including animals and even inanimate objects. This is one facet of taking the High Path.

It’s hard to imagine that having such a predisposition could get us into more trouble on a practical level than we are already in. On the other hand, most of us recognize that we are all already in deep trouble, and perhaps treating others and oneself as divine could help dig us out of the deep troubles we’ve created for ourselves by centuries of rapid weapon advancement and widespread labelling of everything but materialism as superstitious magical thinking.

No course in personal effectiveness could be complete while making a wide detour around these sensitive subjects. And so we will go deeper into this 4th Key.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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What Do You Really Want?

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Powerful Mind Part 27
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – September 6, 2024
Created September 8, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 26

Strangely this is not something we normally think about. The subject usually rises to our conscious mind only at times of great shock, typically the loss of a loved one, a job, or something else we greatly value. At other times most of us appear to assume that all of that has been decided already, we are “obviously” doing what we want to do with our lives, and so we just go along day to day doing our best, mostly guessing or following the path of least resistance in order to not make things any worse.

The species or at least the intelligentsia has finally admitted that homo sapiens are not rational actors, hence the science of behavioral economics. P.T. Barnum could have told us that a hundred years ago. However, some of us may be more rational than others, and for a rational person, it makes the most sense to stop life for a moment or longer while seriously considering what the real you really wants. How else can a rational person guide his or her decisions on a moment-to-moment basis?

As soon as one sets to making an objective fact-finding study of oneself, one finds that there are a great number of things that come up as probable wants, including both material and immaterial things. Page 95 of Mind Magic lists these, for example: “You may want money, specific possessions, status, fame, glory, power, accomplishment, respect, a large family, many lovers, to be loved, to be known, to be happy, health, long life, adventure, travel, certain feelings, certain experiences, etc.”

A more abstract list appears in my work on human motivations through Next Century Media, which discovered 265 psychological variables driving television program choice, and RMT (Research MeasurementsTechnologies), which distilled these into 15 life motivations. In Canada where RMT is already integrated with Vividata (“The MRI/SIMMONS of Canada”), here is the latest snapshot of how these 15 variables rank across the population of Canada:

Motivational States by Ethnicity-vividata

As you can see, wealth/success is the main driver for most Canadians, but there are differences in motivation ranking by different ethnic subcultures in Canada. Culture is definitely a factor in shaping our individual motivations. However, as this book Powerful Mind being serialized here has often pointed out, we as individuals are much better off to be able to discover what we ourselves deep down really want, and to not automatically go along with all of the ways we have been shaped by outside forces.

It’s much better to contemplate our lives to the degree that we can be the ones to decide what we truly want out of life.

Aristotle wrote that the un-contemplated life is not worth living. I would say that slightly differently: one is not living the fullest life possible if one is swept along by external forces from beginning to end.

Life situations also affect our motivations. For example, note how important the motivation of “belonging” is to people who recently moved out of their parents’ home, and how important “security” is to people who recently retired. (These measurements are not based on survey questions asking people what motivates them; it is based on what television programs they report watching, and the method has been validated by seven independent studies.)

Motivational States by Life Events - vividata

If we look across all of the cultures in our hisandherstory (aka “history”), we see that in many of them, great value was placed on self-transcendence (altruism) e.g. the Zhou Dynasty, self-knowledge e.g. Greece in Socrates’ time, creativity e.g. the Renaissance. When we look at our current culture, the situation is quite different. In the cancel culture of today, idealism in any form is something that causes people to “cringe”. Cynicism and snide remarks are the safe harbor for conversations. Science in recent centuries has assumed that the universe is an accident, therefore the culture does not believe that there is meaning and purpose in life, nor is idealism defensible in objective terms. Authoritarians rise to power by promising to remove all of the causes of fear, similar to the protection racket. In our culture therefore it is less likely that you have chosen to want idealistic things, or if you have, it is because you are exceptional.

Wanting the Approval of Others

One of our most ignoble wants is the approval of others. Hence the high ranking of “belonging” among the 15 motivations. In order to “fit in”, one generally is expected to share the same values, pastimes, and sayings of the group. After a while, individuals forget that they are wearing a mask and start to believe that the mask is really them.

Make a study of yourself. Take your time. Write down notes as the spirit moves you. What do you think you really want most out of life today? Was it always that way? What was your dream when you were very young as to what you would do with your life? Did it change? Why did it change?

Assume that in your own case, there was the “Me That Was Born”, who you really were, before the culture and other people started to shape you. Using all of the access to memories which you still have, what did that person want out of life, and where were the change points along the route to now?

If you look at the list of wants and motivations above you may see that you have always wanted all of these things to some degree but today there may be only a couple of them that really energize you. You may see how running after some of the other things took you off into directions you didn’t enjoy and have now processed past those wants. Or, you may find that nothing seems to matter anymore, it’s all falling short, you need something more, but have no idea what it is.

One clue is to think back about the things that you’ve been good at, and that you enjoyed doing. Those are your gifts to the world. Your Mission is to do those enjoyable things that you do so well so as to make as many people and other living things as happy as possible.

If you follow that star it will take you to the Flow state.

My best to all,
Bill

The Patterns of Your Life

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Powerful Mind Part 28
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – August 30, 2024
Created September 15, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 27

Look back over your life and see what you can about what you apparently wanted most at different turning points in your adventure.

Now that we are embarked on Key #6, which focuses you on a deep dive study of what you really want out of life, it will be helpful and fun for you to look back over your life and see what you can about what you apparently wanted most at different turning points in your adventure.

This is a task best approached in an alone space where you have made yourself temporarily invulnerable to interruption and distraction. Now that you have made the commitment to using your mind in the most powerful ways possible, you’ll find that having a daily alone space is almost essential. If others ask why you need to be alone for 20 or more minutes each day, “meditation” is the simplest explanation, although our forms of meditation in the 12 Keys encompass what in ancient India and around the world forever have been known as meditation, contemplation, and concentration – three forms of applying the mind in very special and important ways.

Neuroscience has identified one of the networks of the brain as the Default Network, which is the type of brain pattern most people use most of the time. It is essentially random chatter, and having observed it in myself, most of my life I have called it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), because it avoids deep thinking in favor of following attraction and repulsion impulses. In popular science it is identified with Kahneman’s construct of System1, which Daniel himself admitted might not be an actual system in the brain.

A second real system in the brain (which corresponds somewhat with Kahneman’s System2) is called the Executive Control Network, and it is associated with metacognition and what I call the Observer state. A third is called the Saliency Network, and it is associated with whatever is the most relevant pressing matter to you at the moment, and which will bring on transition to the Executive Control Network in situations in which that will tend to be most useful to dealing with whatever is most salient to you at the moment.

Meditation, contemplation and concentration are modes of cognition that depend mostly on the Executive Control Network. Piaget’s Formal Operational Level is his theoretical stage at which children are able to pick apart problems and systematically pursue and test solutions, and this would appear to be a stage in which the child has begun to regularly employ the Executive Control Network.

Depending upon your physical exercise regimen, it may be possible to combine your alone space with your exercise. This is not always the case because often our mental exercises will work best if you can write down flashes you have, and in some cases doodle something, such as the schematic of your life we are about to describe.

Take a fresh sheet of paper and allow yourself to doodle on it any way you feel like. In this case we are going to be looking back over your life to see what we can infer about what wants motivated you most during certain phases, so you might want to use the pad you are writing on in landscape aspect, so that you have the whole length of the pad for the vector of your life. You might want to add a scale at the bottom showing the ages from birth, and 1 year old, at the left, running up to your present age at the right.

In that framework you will find bubbling up in your mind stuff that would fall somewhere along that trajectory, and you can make an oval with words in it to mark what was going on at a certain age. Before you begin, let’s review the 15 motivations that my own empirical research at RMT (Research Measurement Technologies) has detected in human beings.

The 15 RMT Motivational Types

    1. Security – Feeling safe, rather than insecure; to no longer feel fear
    2. Belonging – Being part of a group; know that one is not alone in the world; to have support
    3. Achievement – A sense of accomplishment; to do something significant in one’s life
    4. Aspiration/Learning – Wanting to know more; to reach a higher level of understanding
    5. Competency – Wanting to be really good at something
    6. Fitness – Wanting to have a strong and attractive, healthy body
    7. Status/Prestige – Recognition from others; consensus validation of one’s own importance
    8. Wealth/Success – Affluence; freedom to spend on whatever one wants; ignore others’ criticism
    9. Heroism/Leadership – Acting heroically anytime; to speak up and take responsibility for situations
    10. Experience/Sex/Good Life/Hedonism/Epicureanism – Wanting interesting and fun experiences; to have a good time, enjoy the best of life, and see the world
    11. Power – Being able to control other people and situations to one’s liking
    12. Love – Wanting to love someone and be loved by the same person
    13. Creativity – Being creative in arts, business, crafts, nonprofits, sciences, technologies, or any field
    14. Self-Knowledge – Knowing oneself — who you are deep inside; mastery of one’s mind and emotions
    15. Self-Transcendence/Service to Humanity/Enlightenment/Spiritual Awakening/Nobility – Making a positive difference in the world; to take care of other people.

Taking my own life as an example, during my pre-school years I can recall incidents suggesting these motivations: Security, Belonging, Achievement, Aspiration/Learning, Competency – the first five on the list – plus Love, Creativity, and Self-Knowledge. My parents put me on stage and after many robotical performances (motivated by a desire for Competency) I experienced the Flow state, which was a turning point in my life. Aspiration/Learning what Flow state was, became a burning desire.

During kindergarten and elementary school I can see in my own memories that Status/Prestige became more important to me than it had been earlier. Power became important because these were the streets of pre-gentrification Brooklyn at a time of bullies, knives, and zipguns.

I spent a lot of time alone, thinking, and observing my own thinking and feeling. I had early thoughts about how I might help fix the world, which in those years had just used atomic bombs for the first time, and I knew this was the biggest future threat. I had the idea to gain power to effect positive change by going to West Point, becoming a General, surviving and winning WWIII, and then being elected President, where I felt I could right the many wrongs I saw, heard about, and read about, implying that I had begun to manifest the motivation of Self-Transcendence (Altruism).

At age 12, with a knife to my throat, I told the kid with the knife “I don’t believe you’re crazy, so I don’t believe you’d cut me, so I’m not scared.” That turned out to work. I feel that Heroism/Leadership was motivating me then, and perhaps earlier.

At the same age I had two out of body experiences and the onset of puberty. As if these were not enough, I also heard a voice in my mind say “I am God and so is everyone else.” This made no sense since I was in my own mind an atheist dedicated to pure science. Experience/Sex/The Good Life bloomed motivationally, I wanted to have a wide range of experiences and see the world.

By 16 I had graduated high school and my father had obtained for me two Congressional recommendations to West Point, but I was a year too young to be admitted. I went to Brooklyn College for a year and joined the Air Force ROTC. Leadership spiked as one of my top motivations for a while. However the ROTC turned me off as regards West Point and so I changed course and studied philosophy and psychology, the two subjects I had thought about every day of my life from my earliest memories. I also began to care about Fitness and got into the best shape of my life.

Graduating and taking the first job offer (Grey Advertising) Wealth/Success leapt up as a priority motivation. Aspiration/Learning and Competency once again became predominant motivations as I sopped up all the lore of marketing and advertising and media as fast as I could.

That’s probably enough about me, to give you an idea of how you can look at your own life through the lens of what motivated you at each stage. This will give you more grist for the mill to figure yourself out today, and where you go from here, what you want out of life now, and how you are going to get it. Enjoy the journey inside!

Love to all,
Bill