Category Archives: Positive Thinking

How Can We Hold the Feeling of Unity?

Leave a reply

Created February 1st, 2021

I had cautioned that habits are going to be hard to break when I began to write about all of us getting a fresh start. We’ve all now seen a lot of backsliding to the partisan bickering here at home, and one evidently cannot lay aside cold war feelings overnight in making a new beginning with other nations we’ve chastised in the past.

We really do need the luxury of rethinking everything from a clean sheet of paper. Band-aids on the past ways of doing things are not going to save the human race from itself. Far better ways have always been available and the nature of them is no secret needing extensive research. “Live and Let Live” covers a lot of it.

My friend who is slightly to right of center and who sees me fairly accurately as slightly left of center, and I, quickly resolved our political differences by recognizing the validity of both viewpoints and helping each other to gather facts and create hypotheses about what might be tested going forward. But then after our shared optimism about unity after the Inauguration, the articles I find interesting now because of glimmers of promising new ideas, I hesitate to send to him because they often contain jabs at the past or even present actions of Republicans.

Sure, it’s easy to see why after four years of sucking it up, Democrats might naturally feel the need to vent now that they can. But it can undo all the good that was done by the noble unity intention set down by President Biden at the outset. We have to give unity a chance, which means laying off pot-shots. That goes both ways. Reopen our minds to kindness and respect. It’s possible we all have a lot of good to bring to the new unity party – meaning all of us. Let’s think of it as a meta-party. The United States of America.

George Washington was right to warn us not to allow political parties but they are part of us now and let’s simply try to improve the way we use them rather than try to disband them. We don’t have a lot of time to go off on long term high risk windmill tilting right now. Mutations in Covid could make our war against Covid a longer term affair than any of us are prepared to even think about right now. That plus the environment, international tensions, thermonuclear biological chemical and psychological warfare weapons “improvements”, racism and other ancient vendettas, world debt, robotics replacing jobs, are a nitroglycerine puzzle that needs kid gloves rather than mailed fists.

Our objective as human beings has to be to twist that Rubic’s Cube so that all those threat vectors fade away and what is left is an equilibrium in which everyone is having a good time, and feels okay about the rest of the people in the world. Where we can all be world travelers and bring out our own individuality via positive creative outlets that delight others as well as ourself.

The only radical thing we need right now is love thy neighbor and the Golden Rule. Otherwise, small dial setting changes would be far less risky than wild card moves from far left or far right fields.

One of the first things we need to establish is that Democrats do not want any more socialism than the way the government has been taking care of non-rich people during the economic contraction, except that job can be done better so all who need, receive, without making non-needy people into needy ones. Nobody really wants true communism any more, not even the communists. They have adopted capitalism bigtime and although we have not “converted them” to what we call “democracy” we have converted them to our real way of life which is capitalism. Now that they rival us in capitalist skills we’re not so sure we’re happy to have converted them. Be careful of what you wish for.

We do have the best democracy the world has ever seen. It’s got some loopholes that can be exploited by people who fundamentally misunderstand what democracy means, and we shall be making laws that close those and other loopholes in our Noble Experiment, the one nation whose very meaning is to risk everything to prove that utopia is achievable by human beings on Earth. That’s us. Naturally a nation that is an experiment, is a nation of change agents, and therefore is going to serve up some individuals who are lunatic fringe. We have to do a better job of helping those folks back on the path sooner in their divergence from reality.

Changing hats now to my persona as a marketing consultant. What would I advise the Republican party now if I ran its advertising agency? December Gallup data show 25% Republican, 31% Democrat, 44% Independent is the way Americans think of themselves lately – but the Republicans have been concerned about being the minority party for some time now. They calculate a bad future for the party unless they stand behind Trump no matter what – because of those 70 million voters who voted for him in November.

But that would be a defensive strategy. Defensive strategies have rarely worked in advertising. The Republican party stands to gain – and to give – the most by harking back to the achievements and ideals of past Republican presidents, and to uplift its party back to that level. To do its job to conserve the valid improvements of the past, to minimize waste, to minimize risk, to do the things a conservative party is expected to do – its objective function.

The Republican party should speak to its devoted followers of Trump and clarify for them what happened. The man made some good moves and some bad ones. “We Republicans all liked him because he seemed like an average Joe like us, not boring like so many other choices, and with balls to stand up for us. But he lied to us. He equated Democrats with Communists – an awful lie that infected millions of us and has nearly wrecked our country. He did not really stand up for us, he just made a convincing act of it. He incited us to dividing and thus weakening the nation and leaving ourselves prey to cyberspying and psychological warfare in the social media, which he himself got so caught up in he was an unintended puppet of other nations. This has to be taken as an important lesson not to get carried away like a cult into loyalty to one person, what we need is loyalty to the whole country, and to consider the rest of the world to be vital partners in conquering Covid and the rest of the problems we’ve created for ourselves by this incessant aggression toward one another.” Or words to that effect.

We’ve fallen into the trap of threatening the stick all the time with very little show of the carrot, in our dealings internally and internationally. We tell other nations what we want them to stop doing. It would be more likely to succeed if we painted attractive pictures of what we DO want them to do – which is to succeed like us, and play nice like we used to and must go back to immediately, or none of this will work. Then we can go back to traveling to see the world and be in it and enjoy the growing we experience by inputs from people very different from ourselves but on the inside identical.

This tilt toward rage was fanned by the partisan news channels and by Trump and his devoted followers. And it found fertile ground in an American minority happy to go brawling into the streets causing harm to others and undermining America at its roots and around the world. The Republican party should most definitely address this part of its base, explaining that such behavior will no longer be tolerated, there will be new laws continuing to allow free speech, but with swift justice against threatening or hurting other people or property based on ideologies fundamentally at conflict with America’s ideals for itself. New ethics laws that apply also to civil servants at all levels which prohibit seditious and/or hate speech. And which regulate social media such that free speech which is oriented to hate is removed as quickly as possible.

If there are some who would rather leave the country than stay in the USA when these laws are instituted, that is their right. The majority will determine where the lines are drawn to preserve free speech but end bullying, intimidation, and domestic terrorism. Most Americans wish to not have to live in fear. For a small minority who embrace fear and get off on it, if they choose to leave, most Americans will not mind them being further away.

The Republican party in the last Century and a half has never had to resort to such demeaning ways to gather its members as we saw in the past four years. It has always had its share of geniuses and visionaries able to see and embrace better ways for the future. That is what it should focus on. Making the country better and stronger, making life here safer and more pleasant than ever before.

That’s what we should all focus on, almost half of us are not even in a party. Let’s dial down the importance of which party we are in and dial up the importance of making all of our working and non-working lives more like a party.

You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum

Bring gloom down to the minimum

Have faith or pandemonium

Liable to walk upon the scene

—Johnny Mercer,

Accentuate the Positive

 

We can do it.

One takeaway for recommended explicit action/non-action based on MIND MAGIC:

Don’t speak unnecessary negative thoughts. “Don’t Bring Them Down”.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

What Does the Real You Want?

Leave a reply

Created January 21, 2021

As I started to write this, Sammy Davis Junior simultaneously began singing “I Gotta Be Me” on the Sinatra Channel. This is the kind of synchronicity that occurs in peak experience.

This series of posts entitled “On the Road to Flow” started out aimed at helping you stay in the peak experience states (Flow and Observer) for more of your life. That’s still our aim. But the world events stirring during the past 5 weeks has reminded me that the aim of all of my writings since I was 30 has been to help people free themselves of their conditioning, so that they become clear in their own decision making for themselves.

The conditioning has come down on all of us from well-intentioned parents, others who care about us, teachers, media, politicians, celebrities of all kinds, and from thinkers and writers who influenced us. And more.

In the Normal Waking State of consciousness which I also call “The Robot”, all of these memories and predispositions vie and the result is the action we take. Some of it comes from the You That Was Born – the real you – and some of it comes from the conditioning.

In this post we focus on one of the most important decisions any of us faces in life: deciding what we really want. Not what we have come to assume we want, but stripping away conditioning, what does the original me want.

This does not invalidate valuable learning you gained between birth and now, things you discovered for yourself to be true, based upon evidence that could be called scientific or at least empirical, and could stand up in court. That’s part of the real you. Each of us is constantly changing, hopefully growing emotionally, ethically and intellectually. I’m not intentionally glorifying the condition of your mind at birth. My repeated reference to the original you, is a reference to you when you are in the peak experience states. This reflects my hypothesis that peak experience states are our natural states, we are born into those states. Life’s events are what bring us down, by getting us to become dependent on bringing about conditions over which we have only partial control. What I’ve called an AI – the Ego circuit in our minds – is the accumulation of those addictions.

So, separating out the wants your true self wants, from your addiction wants, is not an easy thing to do. Chapter 5 of MIND MAGIC at this free link contains a procedure that makes it much easier. It’s like a Wizard that takes you through the process step by simple step:

  1. Listing things you think you want
  2. Remembering when you started to care about each want, and who/what else had been involved
  3. How much happiness and how much unhappiness this want has caused you?
  4. Do you want to be the sort of person who wants this thing?
  5. How to deal with bodily wants
  6. How to deal with the wanting the approval of others
  7. How to deal with wanting self-approval
  8. Considering certain higher wants you might not have listed
  9. Prioritizing the wants of your deepest, truest self
  10. Setting goals and making plans based upon the new set of wants and goals.

Quotes from MIND MAGIC Chapter 5:

“Listen respectfully therefore to every communication,

Whether from inside or outside of you,

And evaluate its cause;

Strive to understand its cause; respond accordingly.”

“Be gentle with all who communicate with you,

Including your own mind.”

“Give each part of the universe

The respect you give the whole.”

“Listen with respect, then make your own decisions.”

What the Real Bill Harvey Wants

I want to do everything in my power to share whatever is right about my methodology, and to accomplish this more by staying in Flow and Observer states more.

Although I’m not attached to achieving my wished-for outcome, it’s to see all of us thinking clearly and for ourselves, reaching empathy with each other, so as to bring about a Flow state culture where we are all empowering each other constantly.

In that Empathutopia the designations “far right” and “far left” will cease to be badges of honor, as they work against consensual freedom for all. Instead, conservatives and progressives will value each other’s inputs as complementary and incrementally additive, inputs for even more perfect holistic solutions. When the Ego circuit is not suffering and the rugged individualist is in peak experience states, it’s easy to give credit and respect to people who have different views than one’s own.

It’s virtually impossible when locked in identification with one’s own Ego AI to not see vast numbers of other people as enemies. The Ego phenomenon has classically been linked to neurosis, but this is just a word. The word psychosis might also be applied. Sanity and insanity are not perfectly defined words. But the current state of the world has veered much more into the red zone than its average state across recorded history. Many people nowadays use the word “crazy” to describe what is going on. It may be technically a correct term.

All I can say is that the techniques of careful self-discussion do work for me, and thousands of readers have told me they work for them too. Over 35,000 copies of MIND MAGIC have been sold, mostly for $20, and today until we lick this pandemic you can still get the same book free. I hope you take it and use it and that the world moves inward toward its holy spiritual universally empathetic center.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

Observerness

Leave a reply

Created December 11, 2020

Happy Chanukah, commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the one that Jesus loved! Wishing you a glorious Festival of Lights!

This continues from the prior post. We are discussing how you can reach and stay longer in the higher states of consciousness, real states whose existence have been reported throughout history, and by distinguished scientists such as Abraham Maslow and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

In the chart above I immodestly put myself on the same page as two of the greatest psychologists of all time. Not to seek to elevate myself to their class, but simply to compare what developed in my own worldview from my own experiences during a period in my life when I had heard of neither of these wonderful people.

To me what is interesting is how similar the three worldviews are!

As an applied scientist in the field of marketing and media science, such consilience is a suggestor that some objective truth is out there underlying three such similar although independently developed models. There is a higher state of consciousness, and probably a ladder of them, although the ladder idea is implicit in Maslow, and not mentioned in Mihaly’s work (or I missed it).

Maslow had said that the highest state available to humankind is self-actualization. And then, later in life he amended that to state that there was a higher level of self-transcendence. Peak experiences he said are the moment to moment manifestations of being in those upper states. For the average human, in the average moment, life was not a peak experience but a relatively drab one, laboring at tasks not selected by one’s own passionate interest but which pay the bills, and rescue one from penury, disdain, rejection and a sense of failure and worthlessness. The needs the average person experiences in the average moment are driven by the desire to avoid unwelcome outcomes and are pervaded by a sense of needing to compensate for one’s own deficiencies.

What does this mean for you? It points to a simple way you can check on your own state, as often as it occurs to you. The more your heart yearns for peak experiences and a life of fulfilment, the more often you will naturally check in on your own state. These states can fluctuate very rapidly, as you may have experienced yourself.

Maslow took the long view whereas both Mihaly’s work and my own are phenomenologies rather than typologies in that we focus on moment to moment changes. For example, the moment when one realizes one is in Flow state, can be the moment that kicks one immediately out of Flow state, so it is important to not let that happen by avoiding the reflex of gloating.

Mihaly focuses on how Flow arises when there is an equilibrium between the challenge and one’s own skill set. Psychologists Yerkes and Dodson found that the degree of arousal (how much one cares about winning) when at a midpoint causes maximum performance. Mihaly and these other folks were on the same page. In my own self-taught methods I found that I performed best when I had “burnt out” attachment to winning and was just watching to see what would happen when I just played the game for its own sake.

Takeaways so far from this post:

  • Check in on your own state.
  • If you find yourself having a Flow state experience beware of patting yourself on the back and just keep focused on what you are doing.
  • If you are in a situation where you would like the highest performance from yourself, remember to focus on the doing and not on whether you will score high or low.
  • Prepare yourself for this neutral, detached state starting well before the event, if possible. Visualize how you will act nobly whether you win or lose, literally visualize each outcome separately, and how you will behave if that moment comes.

As you can see from the chart above, my model is a bit more complex than the other two. I suspect that what Maslow referred to as spiritual or self-transcendent experiences, I refer to as Spiritual Flow. Under that the next level down in my model is Flow, where one is performing at one’s best effortlessly and without attachment to how well or poorly one is performing. Next step down is the Observer state, the doorway to the states above it.

You know when you are in the Observer state, not when the kibitzing narrator mind turns off, but when you can observe its workings and its fears and angers, without getting sucked into them, as if they are outside oneself.

In the state of normal waking consciousness, one tends to play tapes, say the same things over a lifetime, like a mechanical robot, and to be subject to irremediable lifelong pain depending on how others react to us – Maslow’s reference to “deficiency”, what I have always thought of as defensiveness or self-protectiveness.

Added takeaway:

  • Note when you are in the Observer state. You may not be doing everything perfectly as in the Flow state, but you are keeping your detached witness identity and seeing what your lower mind is doing without be carried away by it. It’s highly conducive to Flow to happily remain in the Observer state for longer and longer periods of time.

You’ll also note that in the schema above I introduce the work of another philosopher of psychology by using the word “Ego” in the context of normal waking consciousness. Let’s start there in the next post.

My best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

Seeing the Miracles in Life

Leave a reply

Updated November 25, 2020

Be grateful for all the miracles in your life.

Isn’t it wonderful that we set aside a national holiday just for giving thanks?

And we have SO much to be thankful for. The Center Held. America came to its senses. The election is finally over. Half of us are unhappy with its outcome, but we are on the road to recovery now on every front and we shall overcome. It’s a Miracle! The miracle we call “the American system”, once again showing that it is forever working, we just had to give it time.

Prayer works.

Interparty and sub-party differences will go on probably forever but not with the same degree of lethality.  As we cooperate together more and more now, those old habits of respect and civility will return, like getting back on a bicycle after all those years. Aisles will be crossed. The good deeds of rivals will be graciously acknowledged with gallant chivalry as the standards were set by the inspired Founders and by the wise Abe Lincoln.

Sometimes the miracles in our lives are more obvious than at other times. While the world is always miraculous, sometimes we see the miracle and sometimes we don’t.

Babies, kittens, flowers, stars, the moon, the ocean, mountains, trees, falling in love together, family, friendships — these are among the more obvious miracles.

We’re often unaware of the improbability of certain events that occur in our lives. Not being statisticians, we don’t realize how long the odds are of these events happening and we just go along, taking it all for granted, feeling that if it is happening it can’t be miraculous, it must all be mundane.

By tuning out our appreciation for experiencing all that is life, we may be radiating very little gratitude for all of the miracles in our lives. The Universe may respond by turning the dial on the lesson machine so that it bumps us a bit more roughly to get our attention, since we seem to be missing the polite subtle hints.

How can we feel gratitude at times that are trying us to the breaking point? By comparing the situation to one even worse. What if we had never existed at all? The Universe has created us, we are alive — is this not justification for gratitude?

All mystery schools and religions teach acquiescence, trust and gratitude as three sides to the same coin — the acceptance of what is. In Islam, it is called the Will of Allah. In Taoism it is called getting into the rhythm of the Tao, linking into the underlying force of the universe. The word religion itself comes from the Latin religare, meaning to link up. The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit, meaning to yoke up, like yoking an ox to a cart.

Let’s all practice replacing negative emotion with positive emotion — which means remembering what we have to be grateful for and what we have to look forward to and be excited about. There may be challenging (even heartbreaking) trials ahead but we need to welcome them as opportunities to show what we’re really made of and how we can rise to the challenges individually and together.

If you don’t already do this every day, take some time to count your blessings. Happy Thanksgiving!

Wishing you much personal experiencing of the miracle you
are in, and much personal experiencing of the miracle you are.


Grateful written by John Bucchino, performed
by Ann Hampton Callaway and John Bucchino.

Gratefully,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.