Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Worst Case Scenario

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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.

The L-Offense in the Room

Leave a reply

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.

Your Unconscious Is in Control

Leave a reply

That much Science and I can agree upon

Volume 4, Issue 1

I think now that I might have been borderline autistic.

The stage performances, and Ned and Sandy’s social behavior coaching, eventually got me to a place where I could hang out with people. Hanging out led to ultimately receiving data from my mirror neurons, thereby really sensing other people and their feelings. And being able to love people for what I sensed in them.

What I always found most interesting to study, however, was me. Watching myself carefully, I knew from very early on that I the observer was not in total control of this reckless robot. Psychology as a science is only now coming to that realization. If they had only looked inside they would have found out sooner. Instead they were looking outside for measurable phenomena in the subjective consensus reality, the scientific credibility of subjective introspective reality having washed out to sea after William James left us very early in the 20th century.

My room had a red rug, black couch, black furniture. On one wall was a construction I had made with a Fairbairn Fighting Knife hanging under a red plume feather pen. “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Door closed often, I would stand in contemplation for very long periods of time. I would take notes and sketch diagrams of consciousness, my own consciousness.

Later I would write down the distillation of decades of operating this observatory. I could have called it Mining the Unconscious. Mind Magic, as it is actually called, is a way of pivoting your mind that happens as you read the book and gain more transparency between conscious and unconscious.

My brainwaves apparently indicate abnormal amounts of delta waves going on while awake. I happened to be in a terrific mood the day of the measurement and laughed when the psychologist asked if I was extremely depressed. He opined that I must have access to my subconscious mind at all times to have sleep waves going on during wakefulness.

One thing I noticed was that there were many “voices” speaking to me (really thinking to me) in my head. I knew by this point what split personality disorder (schizophrenia) was and studied myself carefully, ruling out that conclusion. I did not seem crazy to me, and there were not two or a few well-defined personas with their own names and such. Instead it was a senate of many speakers, all in effect claiming to be the same person. Me.

This became useful when I learned that I the observer could listen to a speaker in my head acting as me, and objectively consider the message as if it were coming from someone who is not me.

Reporting my results to a strategic government think tank a couple of years ago I shared my working hypotheses:

  • A new neuronal net grows around undigested experiences that impinge on motivations.
  • This involves brain plasticity, i.e. new neuron formation;
  • As well as new patterns of connections among neurons.
  • In effect this is new software, not part of us at birth, therefore not the essence observer self that was born.
  • Each such “senator” or “senatorobot” is able to convince the observer self and moreover the body to follow its commands as if it were the total self speaking.
  • Each senatorobot is a subsentience, i.e. it has a degree of intelligence and a degree of self-reference as its own self.
  • Therefore each senator has a drive to continue to exist even when the observer self wants to discontinue it (for causing undesired behaviors).

Science has now validated certain parts of this theory. I just finished reading one of my Christmas presents from Lalita, Incognito, by noted neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman. Dr. Eagleman refers to senators as “automaticities” and describes the way the unconscious mind runs most of our behavior as “a team of rivals”, which sounds like a senate to me. The number of pages I’ve marked in his book suggests I’ll be writing a book about his book! 😀 

Drinking caffeinated (who knew?) carbonated beverages in great quantities I laid awake nights watching the debates among the senators and feeling how a speaker could ensnare me into fully taking ownership of what he said. I assumed that everybody was doing this.

I am very happy now to see a path to integrate my theories with the latest best-of-breed science, and hopefully add a dimension: how our experience changes when certain things are going on in the neuronal part of our self. That dimension gave me a control surface to work with to metaprogram my brain. Without introspection, neuroscience would have no way to hand the controls over to the patient, except Pavlovian button-pushing to change the chemical mix. David Eagleman’s work is a bold step away from the dominance of reductionism, leaving introspection as a valid part of the testrig. Thanks, David!

Best to 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.