Category Archives: Consciousness

What Is Conservatism?

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Created May 14, 2021

The GOP did not start out to be a conservative party, but in our memories it has always been associated with conservatism. What is conservatism? It is conserving the value we have already created, and not risking it unnecessarily by taking steps believed to be progressive which might have hidden flaws.

In principle, it’s a good idea, and so is the idea of making things better. Ideally, if you have to have political parties at all (the US Constitution didn’t think so), lining the two parties up with conservative and progressive philosophies is a very sensible dichotomy. One can imagine them working together to produce an optimally balanced result.

But today, most of the leadership of the Republican party – about 4251 people – have moved away from conservatism. They are in fact much more radical than conservative. Radicalism can happen on the conservative end or the progressive end of the spectrum. The new radical right is even more dangerous to us and to our democracies than neoliberalism. The radical right is virtually a return to monarchy, the same kind of monarchy that was the enemy of the American Revolution: One Man Rule. It is an undoing of democracy as a failed experiment.

The more the world sees us quibbling with each other and paralyzed by filibuster, the more believable is the idea that democracy can never work.

Hitler kept the trains running on time. The cost of that benefit was the lives of 75 million people.

Yet today many of us are willing to set all that aside and go for a leader who can get things done, or at least convince millions of us that things are getting done.

The filibuster stalling during the Obama administration was the beginning of a breakdown that proved the system was not working. Filibuster and gerrymandering were largely the cause of that. Which only went downhill under Trump.

And yet Trump, the TV performer who used social media as mindlessly as millions of us, locked in on the basis of that gross rapport, a core following that today consists of 4251 people with enough power to retake the country plus (my estimate based on Pew and Gallup) 34 million Republicans who want Trump back. 34 million out of 239 million eligible voters. Definitely a minority.

We need philanthropists to sponsor an all-media education campaign to make sure that everyone understands what filibuster is, what gerrymandering is, and the voting rights issues behind today’s State-level rush to “fix” all future elections by making it harder to vote for people who are less likely to vote for the far-right Republicans, who are a minority.

Allowing mechanisms not in the Constitution which have demonstrated they can paralyze a government for an entire administration to continue is unacceptable. But until those “keep me in power” mechanisms are dismantled, they are a very large obstacle to their dismantlement!

Therefore, to let The People Speak For Themselves, those same philanthropists can help grassroots efforts toward referendums, and continuous State by State polling, to compare the wants of the citizens of each State, with the legislation being passed today in that State. These referendums (and polls where the referendums are thwarted at the State level) will demonstrate that a self-serving minority has gamed the system and is our new dictatorial government in the States where voting rights are today being set back after more than a half century of progress.*

This will expose States passing laws opposed by the majority of the people that they are supposed to be representing.

It is the 34 million slavish followers of Trump (and any radical kneejerk no-compromise people on the blue team) that need to be educated and to learn to think for themselves, and not echo the pronouncements of any one man (other than the sayings of great saints) or even the party line (multiple people), but to study the issues and reach their own independent conclusions.

An educational campaign can achieve those effects especially if it is in bite sized pieces and done with the quality that can be achieved by entertainment and advertising creatives and their research support.

Perhaps the federal government and the courts can achieve the restoration of order that is needed, but philanthropists who like to live in the USA, for reasons of enlightened self-interest ought to give money to support an educational campaign across all media to get people to think for themselves and study the facts not just believe what a politician tells them.

Especially focused around voting, filibuster, and gerrymandering, the three areas that radicals on both sides have abused for too long after creating filibuster and gerrymandering in the first place, none of that was what the Founders wrote into the Constitution.

The campaign needs to also explain what referendums are and how they work differently in each State.

A citizenry uninformed in relation to these foregoing subjects is easy prey for unscrupulous actors in high places.

It’s easy to just follow one man, it takes some of your time to study complex subjects, and millions of us are not disposed that way. Hence using the media to teach (in a non-partisan way and) in potent droplets is a logical communications strategy that is not being used enough today.

May the Middle Hold. May the extremes move toward the Center.

Best to all,

Bill

 

*True conservatives, by definition, would want to preserve progress made in the past. Someone who wants to erase past progress is a reactionary, one type of radical.

Feeling Happy

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Created March 19, 2021

The Pursuit of Happiness. It’s one of our inalienable rights.

But do we exercise it enough?

What percent of our thoughts does happiness get?

Before Covid, probably our own happiness did not get much of our attention at all on the average day.

Since Covid, I hear from my friends that the constant video calls are keeping them busier than ever, and I’m certainly experiencing that myself. That might mean that we are giving even less thought to happiness, our own and that of others.

Those of us on the front lines, still moving around outside the home, may have even less time to self-contemplate. Although there are times in everyone’s day that can be stolen moments, when the priorities are remembered.

The trick is not just to remember to think creatively about how to make oneself and others happy. It’s also, even more importantly, to simply remember to be happy.

Not that we all can turn that off and on like a switch. Most of us have little talent for switching over to being happy. But with practice, like with everything, it actually is something that all of us can learn to do.

The way it works with me is:

  1. First, I create a minute or two of alone space. No one can interrupt or distract me. That may require slipping away and locking oneself in a bathroom.
  2. Long slow breaths help establish a certain calmness.
  3. I’m prepared to take notes with pad and pen in pocket. Just in case I get a flow of inspiration.
  4. Am I happy? If not, why not, what activity can I undertake when I rejoin the world that I’d rather be doing, and can I put off what else I’ve been doing, and if so, to when? I’ve written here before about the importance of working on what you feel like working on at the moment – it’s conducive to Flow state, on top of making yourself happy.
  5. I put on a smile to help others and leave my hideout.

You might find other ways to switch yourself to the happy channel. If there are seriously painful things going on, that’s a whole different situation. Still requiring creativity, alone space to focus. The only constructive question is always What can I do about it? You can’t control the outcome of certain painful situations but you can identify where you can exert creative effort to make a positive difference. Sometimes the only thing you can control is the impression you make on others, showing how a mensch can stand up to anything, supporting others, still able to have an apropos type of smile on your face, calm and working toward the good every moment.

All of us can be refreshed and reinvigorated by a daily dose of a few minutes’ contemplation on our happiness. Or the whole day, it’s the one thing worth double-tasking. While you go about your day, remember that you are responsible to yourself to enjoy every moment of the gift of life.

Bring able to keep that criterion within every moment is one of the most important priorities of life.

It might seem selfish but on a practical basis it is not. Your being happy will actually make people around you happier than they would be if you are unhappy instead.

All my best,

Bill

Don’t Fight Yourself

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You may not realize it but sometimes you fight yourself. You are desirous of one type of outcome but your actions force you to the opposite outcome.

This is caused by mental-emotional processes that are built in.

How do you know when you are doing this to yourself?

One sure sign is negativity.

Negative emotions are a dead giveaway that you are fighting yourself. You want something very badly and your actions are going to work towards denying you that outcome.

The negativity is impossible to fully hide even if you are a great actor. And when the other person senses your negativity, they are less likely to be persuaded by whatever you say.

Negativity lowers your effectiveness. You are picturing yourself failing and that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is one sense in which negative emotions are a useful tool. Like an alarm clock, they wake you up to a problem needing to be addressed. Just like an alarm clock, to be at your best and most effective, you turn off the alarm before doing anything else.

However, most people find it is virtually impossible to turn off their negative emotions.

Chapter 11 of MIND MAGIC (free links during the pandemic) provides a battery of tools which can enable you to turn off negative emotions, while getting down to creative solution thinking, that will aid you in whatever your outcome quest happens to be at the time.

The first thing to do is to understand where and why you are experiencing negative emotions.

The easiest case is fear. It will be fairly easy to figure out what you are afraid of.

Anger is another type of negative emotion that is a little more difficult to diagnose in terms of the cause. But the secret is to ask yourself what you are afraid of losing or not getting that is making you mad. Anger is always the result of fear of loss of something you have or are trying to get.

Depression or disheartenment are the most difficult types of negative emotions to figure out the cause of. If you feel a dull vague sense of negative emotion it could take a while to determine the cause.

Your feelings might be hurt. You could be frustrated at how long some things are taking. It could simply be the aftereffects of a bad dream.

When it takes more than a couple of minutes to see the cause of your negative emotions, the best approach is to stop trying to figure it out, and to take a break from work, get into an alone space (outdoors in nature is the best), and just goof off. Yoga or meditation would be ideal if you do those things. Otherwise goofing off is a perfectly acceptable proxy. Goofing off is very close to meditation. The main point when you don’t know why you are sulking, is to stop trying to get through your TO-DO LIST. Goofing off is a wonderful cure, because it allows the subconscious mind to send you messages. Ones which would almost never get through while you are enmeshed in your TO-DO LIST.

Once you find out the cause, then a useful tool is drawing schematics of action options, circles with captions indicating what they represent, and arrows indicating what you are feeling the cause and effect relationships would be if you took those actions. Keep going until you feel that you have a plan and a sense of inner clarity.

There is much more useful technique in the chapter at the link above. Here’s a sample:

Transform worries into tasks

 

by distinguishing

the variables you can control

from the variables you cannot control;

 

then set out to control the former variables

and essentially ignore the latter variables.

 

Worrying is negative input

once you have identified the controllable variables

and have set yourself to controlling them.

 

Worrying under such conditions

implies that you should concern yourself

with phenomena beyond your control;

such concern is misplaced,

since you will always have quite enough to think about

as regards phenomena that are under your control.

 

That which is beyond your control

is not your responsibility;

 

whatever happens that is beyond your control

can only be accepted as necessary.

 

Wishing you alignment with yourself and the much-admired capability to keep on smiling through whatever life throws at you.

All my best,

Bill

Identify With The Wisest Voice In Your Mind

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Created February 19th, 2021

The average person is controlled by their own mind. This might seem like a very good thing, if we interpret it to mean that the average person acts autonomously, guided solely by their own independent view of things.

Unfortunately, the ruminations of words, images, feelings, and action impulses that we experience as our minds, does not typically represent our own viewpoint, but a mélange of viewpoints that we have been washed in for a very long time, which have worked out their own dissonant coexistence with each other in our memory banks.

In order to get from there to autonomy requires careful weighing of all of what we think we know or believe. That is a wonderful process. Most people succeed in avoiding it all their lives.

And so, the typical mind rambles on, being taken ultra-seriously by its owner. Often it causes us to do something we regret. Sometimes it can literally drive us crazy. All too frequently it exercises its power to make us feel bad, in the midst of a day which could otherwise make us very happy.

When one introspects with concentration, avoiding hasty closure, this brings on a state I call the Observer state. From this state one is able to discriminate between valuable thoughts and counterproductive ones. By filtering the stream, one is panning for gold, and is no longer a slave totally controlled by the inner wordstream.

In MIND MAGIC, Chapter 9 “Disidentifying With The Thought Senate” is filled with phrases that help bring on and maintain the Observer state during introspection and when in action, specifically by remembering the subordinate role of the talking-to-oneself mind and the sovereignty of the generally-upspeaking self who is the observer, the one who experiences.

The chapter starts out:

Visualize the mechanism

which sends you verbal thought messages

not as one speaker,

but as a vast senate of many different speakers.

Each experience you have had

creates a separate viewpoint

from which comments may be made.

Therefore, the first step to take

in analyzing any thought sent to you,

is to determine who is speaking:

which set of experiences that you have had

is expressing its viewpoint to you?

Do not identify with your thoughts. 

You are not the thinker of the thoughts;

 

you are the hearer of the thoughts.

 

The thinker of your thoughts

is a subsidiary mechanism within you,

which attempts to put some of your feelings

into words;

you must then assess the way you feel about these words.

Not looking at the matter this way,

most individuals tend to identify themselves

as the author of the words in their head,

and consequently are biased in favor

of believing and defending these thoughts

In fact, each thought you have

is merely a trial balloon,

a draft from your speechwriter

sent to you

so that you can decide whether you agree or disagree

In many cases, you will realize

that the speaker of the last thought sent to you

is representing the viewpoint

of some other individual(s) you have known,

often in the exact words and tone of voice

used by these other individuals.

Obviously, accepting such viewpoints as your own

would be submitting to mental slavery.

Yet this is precisely what most individuals do,

by identifying with their thoughts.

After you have identified the last speaker,

engage him or her in a dialog

in which you ask the speaker to defend his or her position

by asking the speaker specific questions

which illuminate possible flaws in his or her position.

In this way,

you will always be questioning your own last thought

in a search for objective truth,

 

separated from the conditioning effects

of your experience

and from the influence

of communications you have received.

Recently I was excited to read an article about a psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Kross, who is developing ways of advising people how to deal with their inner dialogue.

It’s interesting to compare one’s own work to the work of others taking different routes up the mountain. Ethan whose work I respect and appreciate is not distinguishing the different voices in our mind, many coming from ego, the AI, and some precious few coming from The Me That Was Born.

My theory is that we have an unerring compass within us, our highest self, that which came into this world, that says very little in our mind, but when it speaks, what it says has the ring of truth, and turns out to work in the real world. Such events of inspiration occur in the Flow state, where the organism is functioning optimally, a state even higher than the Observer state.

My experiences with Flow and Observer states, as well as spiritual and ESP experiences, form the difference between my work and that of most mainstream psychologists and neuroscientists. I’m glad that as a chorus we psychologists and introspectionists of all kinds are focusing more on where the real leverage to save the human race lives: our individual inner lives.

We live in challenging times. It’s up to each of us to help pull us through and bring us to our highest positive potentials. Whatever works for you, use it. Test my advice, test the advice of others, seek your own inner wisdom most of all. But follow that which works for you in the real world, which makes you and the people around you happy.

One way or the other, it’s undeniable that now is the time to strengthen your self and your mind and body in all the ways that you can. We have chosen leaders who have taken us down paths which are not going to be so easy to switch out of, even with new and better leaders we have now. The one family we were coming out of WWII, the free peoples of Earth, those who believed in Democracy, somehow have of their own choice taken us back into a world in which force and threat rule. It will affect each of us. We have to be our best, better than we ever were.

You can do it. We will do it.

Best to all,

Bill