Category Archives: Happiness Now

Moving Beyond Fear to Happiness

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updated May 8th, 2020

The worldwide calamity has increased our tendency to live in fear. Fear is like an alarm clock, designed to alert us to make apt decisions soon. We don’t let the alarm keep ringing in the morning when it wakes us up, and the best reaction to fear is to focus objectively on what we can do. Fear is always linked to attachment, something we are afraid of losing, such as our lives, our loved ones, our livelihood, our lifestyle. But the real question is What action can we take that is the heroic and best response to the current moment? With the right self-observational techniques you can edge into a state of ultimate competency in meeting each moment, what scientists call the Flow state and athletes call the Zone – where you want to be at all times, but most especially in the present crisis. One way to achieve happiness in the present moment is to let it all go, assume that the worst will happen, but picture yourself standing strong and smiling through the worst that can happen. Distraction is always a problem but much moreso today when we are always crowded together at home (if we’re lucky to not be alone). This post delves into practical ways you can take yourself in hand and use your strengths to enjoy every second of life, otherwise what’s the point of wanting to live?

The two biggest blocks to the Zone/Flow state are distraction and attachment.

Release Attachment - Let it go. - Bill Harvey

Attachment is also the only block to happiness, joy, delight, fun, ananda (or bliss, from Hinduism and Buddhism) — the natural built-in target state for all of us.

Attachment blocks happiness because one is fearful of losing the things one associates with happiness and tacitly assumes are requirements for happiness. When we are attached, we are also angry at whatever is suspected or known to threaten or take away those precious happiness-causing things.

“I am really attached to Pippin” (one of my cats) is a true statement for me because I love her. To experience love is not necessarily to be attached, though. To avoid confusion and getting lost in wordplay about whether attachment is a good or bad thing (because the word “attachment” is associated with the word “love”), I am using the term attachment to mean the inability to separate love from attachment and the resulting anger/fear syndrome.

The difference comes from the importance we give to keeping the “things” that give us happiness. If we truly appreciate the joy that has been created by our loves, joy that has been creating other good things through spontaneous Flow state creativity (which emerges naturally from joy and from love) it is still possible to not worry about losing any of those “things”. In fact, when we are in that state of not fearing loss, we are truly free.

A Process for Releasing Attachment

A powerful contemplation technique offered in Mind Magic (download free PDF here) involves burning out one’s attachments by intensely envisioning and feeling the loss of each separate thing one is attached to. This requires setting aside alone time, without a sense of time pressure. It requires immersion, concentration, patience as you go over the same material again and again. It’s probably best to focus on one object of your attachment at a time.

Give your imagination free reign like in a daydream. Imagine and see yourself go through the experience of the moment you lose something you are deeply attached to and visualize how it might happen. See it vividly from the inside, the way you experience life. Feel the feelings. Watch yourself in the daydream, the things you say in that situation, and the way you say them, and how the other person responds if the particular attachment involves another person. Let yourself actually feel the loss as if it is really happening.

Each time you go over the same imagined loss experience, you give the situation a more intelligent response. In your later iterations of the exercise, you will start to act like the hero you are in the daydream of the loss. You will begin to feel differently about yourself from that moment on — more confident, more self-respectful, more courageous, in fact less prone to fear and anger.

Through this process, you realize you are no longer attached to a particular outcome because you now know how you will respond if what you had feared ever happens.

Release attachments. Let them go. Happiness is the off-the-scale self-evidently best state one can experience in the emotional dimension.

 

Alone Space VideosWatch short videos on cultivating Alone Space Contemplation.

 

Happiness to all,

Bill

P.S. It can take some time for you to feel the effects of this technique internally, due to the interconnections among various ego circuits in your head. Be patient and persevere. And be happy. smiley

Read the latest post at my media blog, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com

Are you getting enough pleasure out of your life?

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Originally posted April 14, 2015

If you’re not, you’ve got to fix that. No one else is going to do it for you.

ability to re-create ourselves

All that exists is now, this moment, so you can’t be putting off fun to some hoped-for future. If you’re not getting it right now, this very day, you’re not playing to win at the game of life; you’re trapping yourself in illusion and accepting second best.

What’s stopping you from seizing the day and living your dreams, right this very moment? Very likely it’s the deep dark repressed (or expressed) belief that you don’t have the power to change your life into the ideal vision you had for it. Especially now, when so much time has passed, and you’ve got negative momentum leading away from the goal.

If everybody sees you one way, how could it ever be even imaginable that the consensus reality could ever change that dramatically? It’s a deep and true intuition we feel in our gut that when so many minds are tuned to one way, getting all those minds to change very much is literally unthinkable. Yet it is truly miraculous how much those minds can change once you’ve changed your own.

The Ouroboros, a Greek symbol that Carl Jung said was the first symbol used by humanity, is a snake holding its own tail in its mouth, forming a circle. It has many meanings, some “good”, some “bad”. The positive meaning is that we have the ability to constantly re-create ourselves.

The “bad” interpretation refers to the fact that when we have a mental block, like believing we cannot live our dream, the belief comes true only because of the belief itself. The intellect alone cannot get itself out of such traps by understanding them. The whole self working together has to turn the great ship in the water with ever building strength and momentum. Without unity among all parts of oneself, the negative belief will unfortunately be borne out.

You get to unity inside through the Observer state, which makes you more creative and effective at changing the conditions that cause negative emotions or perceptions.  To get to the Observer state you meditate on your own self, observing your mind’s machinations in minute detail perhaps for the first time with such sustained energy. This causes a breakthrough in which the Observer state becomes second nature and you find yourself slipping in and out of the even higher Flow state — higher in the sense of higher performance, greater effectiveness and more creative thinking.

In these higher states you can unravel the Ouroboros and make sure the energy is flowing in the right direction, consuming minutiae thoughts and low-level feelings as they arise, like a rising phoenix burning the worthless dross to reveal the gold of your inner genius.

Best to all,

Bill

Read the latest post at my media blog, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com

Ten Minutes in a Life

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Originally posted December 20, 2012
Volume 2, Issue 36

He looked up from the gas pump to where a moment before he had an intimation she would be, and high in the sky was the moon behind a pale shimmer of cloud, one day past full. Down and to the left was an American flag. Trees were all around. He suddenly realized the time was pretty good now. There was nothing to be concerned about that he could feel at the moment, no time pressure, everything was going fine. Then it came to him that he always assumed there was something wrong, some unrightness he would constantly have to steer against. He was thrilled at having uncovered a bad lens he could discard.

A minute later, starting up the car, the lyrics of a song on the radio triggered a vision.“The dearest thing in all the world is waiting somewhere for me” (“Waiting Somewhere For Me” by Rodgers and Hammerstein). He saw a scene of indescribable beauty, something between a fractal and a huge mural, a panorama of infinite detail and intense color, the parts in constant unfolding and rotational movement everywhere. He couldn’t hold it all — it was overwhelming, filled with light, luminous, numinous. The words “Oh my God” began in his mind but all wording was pressed out by the overwhelming emotional wave enveloping him in awe, love, victory, beauty. His feelings united with the scene so that he was the scene, the beauty, the happiness, the realization that not “he” — now “it” — was past the need for words forever, past the possibility of unhappiness forever.

He contemplated the vision as he drove to catch his train. Several minutes later on the cold train platform he watched himself hurriedly extract a mint, his body still assuming time pressure, always assuming the need to get done an important job that had to be done at top speed because suffering would be relieved for more people faster that way. He knew this assumption was also a bad lens to be removed. More good would be done without that lens, too. And besides, in his day job he was not relieving suffering directly, more like paying for the time spent in nonprofit work.

That was the ten minutes.

An hour and forty minutes later in Manhattan he wondered if the shock — that is, the heightened sensitivity — he was feeling would incapacitate him. Being in Manhattan with its concomitant information pressure could pull him into some ineffective state of consciousness if his skills were not all available. He did not worry yet as he was merely curious about it at this point. Next he automatically told the cab driver where to go before he could miss a beat. The rest of the morning unfolded that way, with actions being taken in natural confidence. Soon he stopped being concerned that he might be in a degraded effectiveness state.

What was it that he had seen? It couldn’t be the whole of what the consciousness of the universe sees, since that perspective would include what was going on inside each of the parts he had seen from the outside. He had been seeing some abstraction of the whole of what there is to be seen, but he had seen people striving, other life forms striving, the very cosmos striving, its movement the necessary means to some end. The dimensions of error/evil had been visible as wrong turns taken out of synch with the rest of the whole, there were great movements in history explained by the turnings of the wheels inside the driving bio-mental Platonic Forms gearbox whose meshing appeared to be a higher reality underlying the explicate order visible to human eyes.

Would science classify this as an hallucination? It was a vision, its complexity and the intelligence of its designs far beyond the negative connotations of the word “hallucination”. Also it was not seen with the external eyes, so if it were a hallucination, it would have to be classified as an interior one. Is that what science thinks a vision is? Or did I actually see something real?

Perhaps cutting-edge science would say that ideas long evolving in my head combined intuitively by themselves to present me with a visual representation. If so, this is a testament to the power of our subconscious minds, and to the function we call intuition, when for ten seconds we find ourselves in Flow state.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers .

If You’re Not Getting Enough Pleasure out of Your Life, You’ve Got to Fix That

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Volume 3, Issue 12

No one else is going to do it for you.

All that exists is the Now, so you can’t be putting off fun to some hoped-for future. If you’re not getting it right now, this very day, you’re not playing to win at the game of life; you’re trapping yourself in illusion and accepting second best.

What’s stopping you from seizing the day and living your dreams, right this very moment? Very likely it’s the deep dark repressed (or expressed) belief that you don’t have the power to change your life into the ideal vision you had for it. Especially now, when so much time has passed, and you’ve got negative momentum leading away from the goal, and everybody sees you one way so how could it ever be even imaginable that the consensus reality could ever change that dramatically?

It’s a deep and true intuition we feel in our gut that when so many minds are tuned to one way, getting all those minds to change very much is literally unthinkable. Yet it is truly miraculous how much those minds can change once you’ve changed your own.

The Ouroboros, the Greek symbol that Carl Jung said was the first symbol used by humanity, is a snake holding its own tail in its mouth, forming a circle. It has many meanings, some “good”, some “bad” — really all of them good but most of them bring you at first through stuff that appears bad. The “bad” interpretation is the fact that when we have a mental block, like believing we cannot live our dream, the belief comes true only because of the belief itself.

The intellect alone cannot get itself out of such traps by understanding them. The whole self working together has to turn the great ship in the water because its momentum is so strong that without unity among all parts of oneself the belief will unfortunately be borne out.

You get to unity inside through the Observer state, in which you meditate on your own Self, observing its machinations in minute detail perhaps for the first time with such sustained energy. This causes a breakthrough in which the Observer state becomes second nature and you find yourself popping in and out of the even higher Flow state — higher in the sense of higher performance, greater effectiveness.

In these higher states you can unravel the Ouroboros and make sure the energy is flowing in the right direction, where its meaning is the consuming of minutiae thoughts and low feelings as they arise, like a rising phoenix burning the dross to reveal the gold of your inner genius.

Best to all,

Bill

PS I am doing a book signing and talk on Thursday, May 16 from 5 to 7 PM at Forest Books, 182 Birch Hill Rd., Locust Valley, New York 11560 in Long Island. Please join me if you are in the area.