Category Archives: Flow State

The L-Offense in the Room

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Volume 4, Issue 4

Caring too much about something makes you unrealistic, distorts your judgment. Stuff you would easily and correctly get instantly, now you’re unsure about because you care too much. You either are too optimistic or too pessimistic or somehow both at the same time or they flip-flop. Your degree of caring interferes with reason. The gravity of the caring distorts, bends the light of your internal Reason signals around the blazing stars that attract you.

Western psychology would say that you are too far to the right on the Yerkes-Dodson Scale. If this persists, psychologists classify you as neurotic in the behavior involved: stuck. In the Acceleritis™ cloud where we live, it is easy for this to happen. We are already off balance from Acceleritis. It is the distraction of Acceleritis that makes it easy for our caring loving center (in the East they would say “heart”) to start to care too much about one thing or another, or in fact many things. When we are distracted, we make more mistakes.

It is also possible that the allocation of your caring is less than optimal. Could it be that you are caring too much about certain things, and perhaps not caring enough about other potentially even more important things? Perspective at its widest point recognizes that one is playing this local current game but in fact is oneself the same One that plays all these games. This moment of recognition and widest perspective attenuates excessive caring and stuckness and attachment to outcomes specific to the current Mission passion in the incarnation. The highest and best in oneself comes out. The caring allotments fall into the optimal allocation. Attention follows love and so the attention deployment becomes optimized. We call this Flow state.

Everything starts from Love. So if you want to trace back how you got to where you are so you can deal with it better, trace back to the Love that started the series of events. What was the Love for? What was your first Love, and your second, and where did these Loves all lead you in Life?

Some might say that our Loves could have been carried over from earlier Lives. There is no scientific reason why this or any other Eastern notion should be crossed off the list as impossible. That is not the spirit of true science but a mere epiphenomenon of reductionist scientism (the quasi-religious dogmatic ideology of Occam’s Razor Accidental Materialism Meaninglessness) of the last few centuries. It is no more in the spirit of true science than poesy is poetry.

Meanwhile, in our distracted Acceleritis-ridden state, something in you is sending out the wrong messages to everybody else and so the net Universe response to your actions brings you not what you want. These wrong signals are the ones you are least aware of sending. You are not purposely sending them from the workaday mask control system that you wear. In most cases the unconscious signals are the opposite of the ones you intentionally send. This out of synchness arises from a suboptimal deployment of Love. You are still too attached to certain things and are not even aware of how in Love with them you still are.

There would need to be a certain component in the Universe if One were an infinitely conscious Self hanging out devising a worthy Game to play for eternity. That component is the challenge. Without challenge there is no game, no fun. Without challenge the trajectory of a story does not exist. There has to be a function within the Universe that continually adjusts the challenge slope and type to maximally teach the player how to bring out the highest and best in himself/herself. Call it karma, destiny, kismet, the gods, angels, any name you prefer or no name at all.

So one must wake up each day in Love with the challenges that wait to pounce as soon as you are awake, and in fact while you were sleeping too. Recognize how you created them with what you Love, and accept that these are the jokes and enjoy them.

I love to create complex games. Then when they become overly complex and the email breaks down at the same time, if I am not in my highest and best place, I can get frustrated. That would be too much Loving the many people I see myself helping, and too much Loving time and efficiency, too attached to getting a lot more Good done in one day than just a few little sprinkles of Good. An L-Offense in the room that everyone can see better than me if I tumble down to narrow perspective.

Trusting the One wants each of us to win, learn, grow, becoming the higher and better self we can see in ourselves. Trusting this is the key to setting the heart at its highest and best place. Love will flow to everything from this perspective.

Next week, more about Love and the heart, which rule attention and therefore control the turning on and off of the Flow state.

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S.

  1. Bill is speaking at the ARF Monday at 1:50PM on Addressable Commercials.
  2. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming in April.
  3. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might watch my video interview on the unconscious decisionmaking of consumers with Bob Lederer on Research Daily Report this week . You also might want to check out this collection of videos.
    Bill Harvey interviewed on March 19, 2014 on Research Business Daily Report online

4. Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

We Suddenly Know What Heaven We’re In

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Volume 4, Issue 2

In his song “Begin the Beguine”, Cole Porter describes that miraculous moment in time when you really experience being in a heavenly realm, even though you are still on Earth. It is one of the higher levels of the Flow state.

Lovers can sometimes shift into that place together, as if tuning across to a parallel universe of bliss just a dimensional twist away from this universe where we assume a defensive stance against endless trials and challenges whose humor we can no longer see. Rarely are the lovers intending that shift consciously, although Tantric Yogis populate much of this rare group.

Just as often it is one person alone making the shift. Again it occurs by itself without conscious intent sometimes, though great numbers of people on Earth engage in practices long ago discovered to have the effect of potentiating and bringing on that state and other levels of Flow. Yoga is the science of those practices, its purpose being the realization within inner experience of connection with divinity.

Yoga, from Sanskrit, means to yoke up, as an ox is yoked up to a wagon, or an attention node of the One Consciousness is consciously yoked up to the whole of which it is a part. The corresponding linguistic root in Latin is religare (verb), or religio (noun), meaning to bind, very similar semantically with the additional connotation of a debt or duty to repay righteously. All religions are forms of practice designed to accomplish this shift in inner state. These inner states actually exist, as has long been obvious to common sense, and as is now beginning to be validated by the skeptical reductionist science dominant in Earth thinking for the last four centuries.

The word “religion” today is not as useful in a conversation like this as it might have been. Organized religions have let people down on too many occasions due to corruption and wars and torture and molestation and God knows what else that is the obvious opposite of what religion must stand for if and when pure. The subtext of the word is therefore poisoned with that long history of going off course. The term I prefer to use as a result of that baggage is “Spiritual”.

I use the word “spiritual” in the context of the classical perspective that within what we can perceive of the whole of reality, there are two palpable aspects: matter and consciousness. We experience both and therefore common sense accepts that both exist. The remaining question is simply, “What is the relationship between these two aspects of reality?”

In that context, “experience”, “consciousness”, and “spirit” all mean the same thing to me. They are the names of the domain of reality that is not matter.

More about these thoughts — the levels of Flow state, the meaning of the spiritual levels of Flow, the practices of yoga and other spiritual methodologies, the meeting ground between the spiritual domain and science — in our next exciting installment.  🙂

My best to you all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.

For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this video. Or this collection of videos.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Answering Any Question

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Volume 3, Issue 47

To continue what we’ve been saying about the alone space you need each day, one of the things you can do, if you really feel like it, is to play a game where you practice Flowing.

Discrimination is a function that comes into play at a micro level of our moment-to-moment decision-making. The more time we apply to making the discrimination among inner impulses to actions, the more delayed our impulsive actions. Even taking on and expressing a feeling that has meekly inched out of the wings seeking approval, is an action. We can eschew owning a provisional feeling, and we can treat all feelings as provisional until inspected to make sure we still agree with the logic that led to that feeling. This is the Observer state.

Although discrimination helps prevent actions we might regret, it also impedes the Flow state. In Flow state, we let our training and practice operate, as if instinctively, without hesitation. Yet even in moments of Flow, one senses there is a choice to be made, and hesitates while staying in the Flow state — the hesitation may be fractional until instinct causes movement before the time loss exceeds the action quality gain.

Ideally one could spend long hours each day for a lifetime training oneself at precisely the games that one loves the most. Acceleritis temporarily dwarfs the human race (in a sense by giving us too many stimuli too fast, a side effect of giving us too much brainpower too fast). In this dwarfing, the culture falls short of optimizing the delivery of people who love X to the task of X, although Google could fix that. In the dystopia created by Acceleritis, we also find ourselves in probably one of the most challenging games the Universe has ever devised, so who’s complaining? Rise to the challenge, recognizing that alone space is needed each day.

One of the fun things you can do whenever you feel like it, in your alone space, is to let yourself do automatic writing without editing — for no one will ever see that page except you unless you decide otherwise. Automatic writing of whatever comes into your mind, as if taking dictation from someone else, is an amazing experience and a doorway into the Flow state. Once you get going with whatever your mind wants to say, you can also ask any question that you may have always or just recently wanted the answer for — the key most challenging questions of your life or facing your company, whatever. As if having a crystal ball, you let yourself actually put down on paper whatever is the first thing that pops into your head.

Don’t let yourself go into long internal debates – like saying to yourself, “There’s no way I can be coming up with the right answers so easily to these questions!” Just do it. It’s a game. The thing is not the answer but the Flowing without discrimination at all. Life may not have handed you a built-in way to get into Flow through practice, but everyone can use automatic writing to get into Flow.

Not that all automatic writing is the Flow state. It might be flowing easily and that’s good but is not in itself a sign of Flow state or even Observer state. That’s not the point. Don’t be rating yourself each second (“Am I in the Flow state now?”) because that is one of the biggest blocks imaginable to getting into the Flow state. Everything you do in your alone space is for your own enjoyment, not for any other goal. The side effects of realizing higher states of consciousness are something to gratefully enjoy as they happen, not to wistfully hope for. So have the fun now.

Wishing everyone a lot more fun in 2014. 

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That!, coming in February

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

What’s Your Kryptonite?

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Volume 3, Issue 26

Who among us does not sometimes hold himself/herself to an excessively high standard, like playing Iron Man or Superwoman? Believing one’s own press releases, as they say in showbiz?

A client recently said he wanted to be more like me — always smiling, always happy, able to leap tall challenges in a single bound. Fact is, recently I’ve started to take this press release too much for granted and discovered that bits of a kryptonite-like substance can still knock me out of the sky.

In my case it’s an absurd perfectionism that grouses if a conversation with a client goes by without a Big Idea and a client aha moment. Silly, right?

Always wanting to top oneself is an attachment like any other. All attachments are kryptonite, robbing you of your superpowers, even when they are supposedly idealistic and positive.

Okay, time to get back to basics. Getting enough sleep is one. Days of treating the body as if there’s another one hanging in the closet (Len Matthews once told me that’s what I tend to do) — sleep and dream deprivation takes its toll. The quest for infinitely extended Zone or Flow state performance requires attention to such mundane details.

What’s your kryptonite? I imagine that since you read this blog, you too are on the quest for Flow state day in and day out, getting there a lot of the time and not getting there too. Flow tends to happen in the thing that is your métier, the thing you do, whatever you do best, that which it makes sense to make your life’s work, the thing you love to do the most. A day is not made only of that activity — there’s always a lot of other stuff to do, and Flow might not come as easily in those peripheral activities. At those times, if you focus on staying in the Observer state, the jump back to Flow will be much easier.

It’s useful to assume that whatever is happening, if it’s happening, it might be good enough, so long as you’re not bringing anybody else down. If it feels like you’re coasting now and then, don’t assume you’re not hitting it out of the park, or that you have to do something so you’re always hitting it out of the park.

The Wilhelm/Baynes edition of the I Ching says somewhere “He hastens to that which supports him”, having to me essentially the same meaning as John Lennon’s line “whatever gets you through the night”. This would be your own personal anti-kryptonite — meditation, sleep, yoga, working out, running, solo car karaoke — erasing whatever is tumbling through the washing machine of your mind and emotionarium.  Use whatever trick you find works to back you out of your own self-imposed hell, whenever you find yourself imposing it. Maybe something as simple as asking yourself, “What’s the hidden assumption causing this irruption of displeasure?”

Best to all,

Bill 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.