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Inner Imagery Shorthand to Reinstate Flow

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Volume 4, Issue 14

Five hours in an airport. It’s a great way to catch up on work and then relax with a novel of speculative fiction, especially when I’m exhausted. It’s all okay until they start the delaying-the-flight game, which all too often leads to cancellation. Kristin isn’t working (on my clock) but has a little time so she starts researching the hotels nearest the airport and the probable flight alternatives, God bless her. Sure enough the flight is cancelled and I make it to the taxi stand before the horde. Only problem is that I’m going to get at best 4 hours sleep to make the flight heading to a city 1000 miles further away from home in order to change planes and get home by 5PM, right in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend traffic. Really? Ah well.

Next morning, walking through the airport toward my first plane of the day, I sense that I am feeling angry, exasperated and negative, projecting that I will run into further snags all day. Knowing that such projection will cause the snags, keeping me out of Flow, I experience something that I will describe below, laugh at myself and am back in a good mood. My eyes always go back and forth taking in as much as possible when I am in an unfamiliar setting, and on the next leftward sweep I see a flight heading to where I am going – La Guardia – leaving shortly nonstop for home. Why didn’t they put me on that flight, I wonder, and keep walking. A step later I figure I have time, why not at least check if I can get on that flight. Sure enough there is one seat.

In You Are The Universe I talk about Noia, the word I coined to mean the opposite of paranoia: yes, there are personas out there trying to do something to you, but it isn’t harm, it’s gifts. If you perceive the Universe to be a single Self playing all these roles including you, there is every reason in the world why Noia as a lens should work to help you notice these subtle gifts and clues happening constantly. Therein lies the magic. Of course, that kind of observant behavior would also be good to protect you should anyone be out to do you harm, so pragmatically, why not use that lens?

The shortest flight home and my noticing it was a gift that appeared a second after my mood shifted out of negativity, and the feeling I had at that instant was a powerful sense of synchronicity, the Universe giving me my just reward for acceptance of what is.

I said that I would describe the experience I had of shifting out of the lower state (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, or EOP, as I call it), which in fact is my reason for writing this — to share that moment of shift and what it felt like, so that it becomes a shareable psychotechnology.

A long time ago, I had established “trigger words” to remind myself of one folly or another so that when I was later in the same sort of stuckness loop I could spring those triggers to mind and it would restore the clarity and learning to frontal awareness where evasion of the lower state would be easier (despite the chemical insistence of such states).

For the situation as described, what I would say to myself in my youth was something like this: Accept What Is. That would unpack a stream of remembered relevant words that might go something like this: It is what it is. It’s not in your control. So you’re just wasting time and bringing yourself down by railing against it. It’s a useless activity not worthy of you. You’re not a fool any more. Meanwhile, in my mind I would see a goat butting a fence repeatedly. Eventually, the goat (me) calmed down.

In the airport I heard none of those words although a wispy suggestion of the goat image flashed. Another image came with it that is hard to describe. The Universe around me that ended at my skin was a solid substance and then again I too was in that substance, I am that substance. All of it was translucent and One Thing. Without words, the image conveyed that the very fact that it – the substantial Thing, the process of It – was happening, meant that it was real and everything else that could be imagined about it was not in an equal sense real. So logically, It – the happeningness – was all that truly existed., and any emotional reaction to it was a nice-to-have addition layer but not with equal realness and solidity. That image-feeling was what shifted me out of the downcast defeatist mindset.

Consciousness is the substance of the One Thing that is the primal substrate of existence. Science is even coming around to this view. Psychotechnology to guide consciousness is therefore not a crazy idea. Discovering what works and sharing it is something all of us do naturally, although not often enough, due to Acceleritis™. Yet psychotechnology is the very thing that can cure us of Acceleritis. Let’s have more of it! You can start with this excerpt from my book, Mind Magic: Doorways into Higher Consciousness.

Best to all,

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

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.

The Need for Flow State Diplomacy

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Volume 4, Issue 13

The peacefulness of a Saturday morning, left alone to write. Even the animals inside and around the house who consider me Daddy sense the time calls for his isolation. From the back deck the feel is of a tree house. A green thicket of suddenly leafed-out trees exude exaltation in their bloomery. Through their generous expanse the river is now just barely visible as a patch of undulant sun reflection. The brook tinkles merrily downstream into the river. All’s right with the world.

Still a chill in the morning air recalls the aggressive winter, and then the memory is beaten back like a boat against the current. A chill in the back has always felt thrilling to me, as if there is something happening to me that is glamorous and interesting. I felt that way sneaking my first subway ride to Coney Island at age 12. Standing on the platform letting the wind rip through my leather jacket gave me that thrilling chill perhaps for the first time.

Memory jump to 1984. Weston Gavin and I are the only Westerners on the ramshackle bus jammed with Chinese tourists on their way with us to the Great Wall at Badaling, outside Beijing. For some reason in the subzero temperatures the Chinese are hot and have all the windows open. Weston has apples in his pockets and gives me one and I start to eat it. The Chinese man on my right gestures that he wants a bite, so we share it. We have just signed a contract with the People’s Republic Cultural Ministry to co-produce a movie in China. That thrilling chill again…

China, the oldest continuing civilization on Earth, abounds with founts of wisdom from ages of experience. Lao Tzu. Sun Tzu. Confucius. Today China is the fastest growing winner of the derby race called Capitalism. Weston recently visited us from London, arriving at our new (to him) home on May 8. Saturday morning at breakfast he called our attention to a tiny article in The New York Times about China plunking an oil rig just off the coast of Vietnam. The three of us (including my wife Lalita) couldn’t believe that this esteemed paper would bury this story deep in its pages, and Weston wondered if perhaps Washington had put out the word to keep the story at a low profile until it figured out what to do if anything. A recent Forbes article has all of the key information.

Contemplating what ought to be the optimal American response, I remembered how the Chinese always react to meddling, and my first assumed principle was to form a response that could not be knee-jerked with the usual Chinese response, but instead could bring discussions to a higher level. Why bother just going through playing those same old tapes? Another round of that just makes China feel stronger and more contemptuous of the USA. The rest of the kids on the block can only lower their estimate of the USA for running the same losing play again. Yet this is apparently what happened. The State Department’s official statement was that China’s state-controlled oil company Cnooc’s actions were “provocative and unhelpful to the maintenance of peace and stability in the region”. China’s Xinhua news service wrote in response, “The U.S. is in no position to make irresponsible remarks on China’s affairs.” Wu Shicum, head of China’s National Institute for South China Sea Studies, attributed the deployment of the oil rig at this time — despite gradually thawing relations between China and its client nation Vietnam — ironically to the Obama trip around the region. In other words, we stirred up this trouble by continuing to act as if we are the undisputed singular global superpower in all respects, whereas China wants to be an equal to the USA and anyone else. It is these key attitudes in us and in China which draw incidents like this to manifest.

Rather than place blame on individuals or countries, the Flow state way to react to the present situation is to change the game. The old game is not working. The old game is which nation has the most power. That’s testosterone talking. We need frontal lobes talking, not limbic systems. In the 21st century, we don’t need to project our influence into the Pacific in order to have influence everywhere. We’re all digitally interconnected up to the neck. We all have influence everywhere. One tweet is like the proverbial Amazonian butterfly changing the whole Earth’s weather pattern. What then is the highest way to look at what is going on so that we may transcend it?

Territoriality is built into our brains. It goes all the way back in evolution to the earliest creatures. Robert Ornstein refers to the oldest part of our brain as the Reptilian brain because we can see how reptile behavior exhibits similar patterns to those of animals at later stages of evolution such as us. Although most of us associate the term with Dr. Ornstein, the term goes back to 1936 work by Paul D. MacLean who said that the fish started the Reptilian brain and drew this picture of the brain:

Paul D. MacLean's illustration of the reptilian brain

Note that the Reptilian brain is associated with decision making! That’s how important it is. Only in Observer state and Flow state is the individual free to overcome this powerful influence within in order to see things as they are and be clear enough to solve problems such as those between nations.

Before the USA reacted, in my contemplations, I developed a scenario. The USA has a quiet talk with China, not in full public view. The USA says it understands China’s reasoning: in a brief war in 1974 China won the Paracel Islands from Vietnam, and it still feels it owns those islands. The oil rig is within the zone China considers to be the territorial waters of the Paracels, which is China. Others may dispute this claim but we start from acknowledging that we understand China’s position. As fellow stewards of Planet Earth, what guidelines or new ideas or old forgotten good ideas can we together come up with to solve the island disputes here and elsewhere in the next few centuries?

We don’t stop at having that conversation with China, we start there. Then we have the same conversation over and over again with everyone else, respecting the privacy of what we say one-on-one, while going public about our new principles. These really are our Founders’ principles of live and let live, applying reason, kindness, and understanding, giving everyone a chance to be happy.

In my scenario, China and the USA get into the Flow state during their conversation and agree that the better way for China to have played the oil rig hand would have been to talk about it first with Vietnam, agreeing to give them a discount on the oil from that rig just to show that the emotional bond is real. The USA for its part in the Flow state conversation says that in retrospect we should have visited China in that swing through the region.

This is the level at which this conversation should continue so that the two biggest kids on the block get to protect the whole block (Earth) in a way that demonstrates true leadership and how the game is to be played from now on.

“You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.”

                          —John Lennon, “Imagine”

Best to all,

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

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.

 

The Worst Case Scenario

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Volume 4, Issue 12

We are at Mohonk Mountain House looking out over the lake from the terrace of our Victorian room. The crescent moon rises triumphantly over Mohonk Tower and reflects in the still lake.

Mohonk Mountain House, Mohonk Lake and Skytower
Photo Courtesy of Mohonk Mountain House

When life is so good, why bring up downside scenarios? I guess it’s because I get so many emails announcing the collapse of the world economic order. What will happen when the U.S. can’t pay its debts?

Likely we will all sink into one of those depressing worldwide Depressions again. Everything is so linked globally that the sputtering main engine of growth and innovation will instantly cascade.

Those already at the bottom will suffer the most. Those in the middle will put away the dream of retirement, cut back on luxuries, hunker down and work smarter. Those who have been doing something that many other people find extremely useful will not suffer as much as everybody else, but everyone except the billionaires will feel it.

Probably we will waste a lot of time blaming each other for who caused it. Hate-jocks of the airwaves will redouble their audiences until the center gets the anger out of their system, then the ratings will shrink back to the hate core audience.

Most of the people we know will be in the same boat. A deeper camaraderie will develop. We’re all in this together. We’ll all take care of each other, as in a war front.

Hopefully there will come a bounce back in terms of the average person dealing with the situation courageously and putting aside distracting and counterproductive kneejerk chemical reactions inside oneself. This will make us stronger as individuals and thus as society.

The economic system that emerges from a widespread Flow state orientation, under the pressure of a worldwide Depression, will be more sturdy and less given to oscillation. Most of all it will be fair — a true win/win deal where the dissatisfied minority is extremely small and not necessarily rational.

This will come more from education provisioning than giveaways — or to put it another way, a system where lifelong education is guaranteed and is just as important as lifelong physical health. A way of bringing in the private sector to augment the education system, designed to be less painful for those who must and/or cannot get sufficient student loans to continue all the way.

Most importantly, an education system that focuses on bringing out* the gifts of each individual, from the start, and always involving work/study where one is earning something doing some level of real work from the earliest ages. In addition, children who learn about the charitable sector early in their lives, when their hearts naturally go out to other people, makes them more adult and maybe even brings them to Observer or Flow states.

In other words, we will get through it. Civilization will not collapse. We’ve dealt with Depressions before and we have learned something from each one that will help us here, if it indeed comes as it logically ought to. However, the future is being created by our thoughts, and we can still get more creative.

Dreading some specific future is a way of tuning it in to materialization. Dread is an attractive force, as elucidated in You Are The Universe: Imagine That.

Rising to the current and future challenges in the game spirit is a sign that one has “gotten it” about Life.

Best to all,

Bill

*The word “education” is derived from the Latin root “educare”. While education refers to collection of worldly facts, educare is to bring out from within. Education is for a living while educare is for life. ~ Sri Sathya Sai Baba (back)

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

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.

The Cognition Level of Flow State

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Volume 4, Issue 9

We’ve devoted each of our most recent posts to describing a different level of higher consciousness, working our way up the scale higher and higher. We skipped over the seven lowest levels of consciousness, the ones in which most of the human race has spent most of its time during this short sliver of time since the onset of written language 6000 years ago. Those all-too-familiar levels are covered adequately in our new book You Are The Universe: Imagine That.

The higher states commence with the three levels of objective consciousness I call the Observer state. These are followed by the five highest levels that I have experienced and hypothesize to be all of the remaining levels for human consciousness, called the Flow state (the term coined by Csikszentmihalyi). In the prior two posts we described the first level of Flow, in which the body experiences perfect action, as if doing itself, and the Bliss level of Flow, in which joyous emotion is added.

In the next higher level the mind is in Flow, not just the body and the emotions. Deep realizations erupt spontaneously from everything the mind touches upon, whether things that are in the field of the senses, or other more distant things that the mind considers. Intellect is flowing so rapidly it outpaces words, and understanding comes in the flavor of images and feelings with only occasional words in the mind. The words that do come are condensed, as if one is thinking in perfectly lucid poetry where all the allusions and multiple meanings are self-evidently present.

For scientists and creatives, this is the level in which the “Aha!” moment occurs, in which inspiration strikes, in which Kekule had the vision of the benzene ring, and in which Einstein realized that E=mc2. Flow state at any level is what Maslow called “peak experience”. In the Flow level of Cognition, the qualities of the lower Flow levels are still present, as this cumulativity applies throughout the upper states. So where in the Flow level of Bliss the tonality is emotional and brings with it a sense of Hume-ian Sympatico for all people and things, in the Cognition level of Flow one’s aesthetic senses are also at peak engagement. Great inventions and innovations are brought into this world through the window of the Cognition level of Flow state.

Although the written and oral histories of the past 6000 years on this planet are largely a tale of conflict and war, suffering and dishonor, it is highly likely that these are mere growing pains in a multimillion year destiny for the human race of Earth. The lemur ape-monkeys from which we descended came down from trees 5 million years ago, and only attained the present human brain about 200,000 years ago, leaping forward only in the last 6000 years into this present miasma we call the Acceleritis Era, in which written/visual language has unlocked the potential of the human mind to express ideas producing an explosion of inventiveness — largely tools, machines, weapons, and media — and an overload of information falling back into the brains collectively responsible for the overload. The resulting distraction has suppressed the higher states of consciousness by distracting our attention. Through techniques that focus the mind — which we call psychotechnology — individuals can overcome Acceleritis and achieve the higher states. As H.G. Wells said, history is a race between our destroying ourselves or collectively reaching a permanent shift into the higher states of consciousness. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I prefer to think of myself as a self-fulfilling prophet in forecasting that psychotechnology — whether called yoga, meditation, Zen, or any other name — will win the day for humanity and the planet.

Best to all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming next month.

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.