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Obvious Miracles in Our Lives

Volume 3, Issue 52

Sometimes the miracles in our lives are more obvious than at other times. The world is always miraculous, it’s only us that sometimes see the miracle and other times repress it from our awareness.

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

We often do not notice how improbable certain events are that occur within our detected experience bubble. We are not trained in statistics enough to realize how long the odds are of this happening and then it actually happening, and we just go along with it, taking it all for granted. The feeling is that if it is happening it can’t be miraculous, it must be all mundane.

By tuning down the appreciation for experiencing all that is life, we are radiating very little gratitude, and may even radiate to the universe as an ingrate. The universe responds by turning the dial on the lesson machine so that it bumps us a bit more roughly to make its points, since we seem to be missing the polite subtle hints.

Its intent, since it is guiding a blind man's bluff version of itself back to its full Self, is always beneficent. We the Universe are aggregately much too smart to kick ourselves in the groin just for fun.

A relatively new physics darling is the multiverse theory, a new name for what Heinlein called the “universe sheath”. Picture a very large or infinite number of universes all lying very closely side by side like a fat stack of clean paper in a drawer.

Maybe we tune from one to another. Perhaps they are laid out in a heaven-hell continuum and we can tune to the next more heavenly universe and actually make the crossover.

Is that what happened to Ina and me that day we visited Pfeiffer Beach back in the 70s?

Pfeiffer Beach courtesy of Craig Colvin Photography
"Pfeiffer Beach" courtesy of Craig Colvin Photography

My lady friend and I go back to our favorite beach, a well-known beach in California. It is totally different: there are Arabian brown and white striped tents, red flags at their tops fluttering in the breeze, in a row along the sand near the water and at the entrance path onto the beach there is now a mostly-completed wooden Church.

We walk up a few steps, smelling the new wood, and a man greets us at the door and lets us look in at the unfinished interior. We are not yet allowed to come in he says, though he doesn’t say why.

We walk the beach marveling at how amazing it looks. It’s as fine a day as a day can be. We are feeling fit as we walk and our hearts are light.

We come back another day and there is no church, no tents, just the familiar beach. Residents insist there never was anything built in that spot, and indeed there was no sign of anything disturbing the old tangle of sand and roots where we had walked up the steps together.

Needless to say this blew our minds, having both experienced the same thing with no help from our friends, so to speak.

Observer state is ideal for not taking the familiar for granted, for counting the cards and for noticing improbabilities.

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

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.

How to Increase Your Luck

Volume 3, Issue 49

The flock of wild turkeys walks past my window facing the river, heads bobbing forward and back, through the light snow drifting down. Today, whatever guides me to decide to write about a specific thing in these posts has assigned me the subject of luck. My mind, like the snow, drifts through kaleidoscopic memories, recent ones of remarkable luck my two startups seem to be having, and for some reason, a particular moment one day in 1975.

A young lady let’s call Sue regards me as her spiritual coach and is ever eager to ask me questions, which I am happy to answer. Her pattern though is to guess at the answers as I am midway through the first sentence of an answer. I’ve patiently indulged her in this for some months. At times she appears to be reading my mind and at other times just wanting to be the smart one, making ridiculous statements, and I’ve woven whatever she says back into the conversation, playing Socrates and maintaining my own self-amusement. But on this particular day something happens that’s clearly out of the ordinary.

She has asked a question, I have started to answer it, and she interrupts. However, as she speaks, there is a crash of thunder. The sky is cloudless and there is no prediction of rain. She smiles and starts again, and again the thunder interrupts her. This time she waits and looks around kiddingly, seconds go by, and then I go back into giving my answer. She waits only a moment before interrupting, and again the thunder overrules her. This goes on for some time. The exact concurrence of the thunder with her interruptions is unbelievable — the explanation of the concurrence as a random coincidence being the unbelievable part. Somehow when I speak there is no thunder, and when she interrupts, there is.

When these strange synchronicities occur, as they do billions of times a day around the Earth, something has changed the odds. Luck — good or bad depending upon one’s point of view — is not a constant. Some kind of energy has changed the probabilities of things. Like the way the value of pi is theorized to change near a large gravitational source. In my observation, a person in Flow state appears to increase the probability of synchronicities.

Philosophy seems so impractical when one is living through a period of Acceleritis. As if the preconscious mind is saying to itself, while choosing among flitting mental impulses as to which ones to shine the bright light upon, “Cogitating about the nature of reality would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic — I’ve got to stay grounded in fielding all this incoming traffic.”

Unfortunately that’s a suboptimal procedure. The nature of reality has a very practical significance in every decision we make. Putting aside learning about the nature of reality is like deciding to keep playing a game without learning the rules, or like trying to win at cards without taking the trouble to keep track of which cards are already out.

In these posts and in my new book You Are The Universe I have laid out the case for strongly suspecting that consciousness is not a rare happenstance in the universe, but rather the essential nature of every part of it. This (some would say just accidentally) happens to explain the observer effect in quantum physics and relativity, and why Charles Tart’s objective statistical analyses of paranormal phenomena shows that the occurrence of telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing are statistically significant and the odds of a random explanation are billions to one. My theory also explains why sometimes our hunches are uncannily accurate, and explains the highly unlikely synchronicities that happen all the time.

Our culture makes us think that we are alone in our minds, whereas if my theory is correct (I am betting my life on it) we are all pseudopods of one mind, and hence anything but alone. There is a higher level of significance to everything that happens to us, and we are in a constant interactive game of life with a higher part of ourselves, the overall universe in which we are not a separate ball-bearing rattling around in a disparate box, but rather a morphing feature on the apparent surface of one Whole.

What luck is, then, is not a Monte Carlo procedure of random chance, but only appears that way because we do not understand all the purposes and causes impinging on every outcome of every action.

I feel intuitively certain that the next step for science is a subtle shift in point of view that will make everything fall into place, and will lead us to discover new ways of tapping into energy fields that will yield so much power that we can all afford to live like kings and queens. With his magnifying transmitters, Tesla had the start at a system of converting the Earth’s rotational magnetic energy into electricity — free to the masses. That was electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces, and perhaps all four can be tapped into in an analogous way. Will consciousness play a role as a fifth force in future technologies involving energy fields, not unlike the way the observer influences the outcome of quantum experiments?

Wishing you all luck that you consider extraordinarily good. I recommend objectively testing whether such “positive” luck can be attracted by flowing helpfully with every implied or explicit request that anyone makes of you. And that you dissect whatever appears to be “negative” luck so as to detect what the universe seems to be guiding you toward. I’d love to hear how your testing comes out — I do read your Comments, though most come by email.

Happy, lucky Chinese New Year!

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.

Cultivating Your Own Enjoyment

Volume 3, Issue 46

The sky has never been a sharper blue before, it seems, as I stand in the subzero temperature looking at the frozen river. The hopping birds flocking the feeders seem at home in the snow, even sitting in it. Multiply layered and not cold at all I sense my own enjoyment and completeness, at rest-ness. Nothing tugs me away into action. Nothing seems to need doing at the moment for the completion of the Universe’s Mission. The warmth of the heart flows outward encompassing all things, all beings in its love. High warmth within record cold.

The reason it is not selfish for you to cultivate your own enjoyment is that you will give better service that way. Whomever you serve will get the most value from you when you are having a good time, because that is what potentiates the Flow state.

To nurture and develop your own enjoyment so that it stays with you more of the time and eventually always, it will help to schedule daily alone space. The thing about your alone space is that no one can get to you, so you are free to do anything you really want to do.

If there is a very long project you want to turn to, don’t be put off by the fact that you won’t be able to get very far in the 20 minutes or whatever time you have realistically been able to eke out of your day, diking back the ocean of obligations. You may get much further than you thought possible in terms of flashes of a high-level framework. These enjoyable Flow experiences then function as super-powerful rehearsal as you will at some point in the future get into the detailed work, as powerfully as if you spent hours in practice in a normal mundane level of everyday consciousness.

Whatever it is you really want to do, note that. As an observation like “Hmm, I apparently really like to do X.” The cumulative effect of those objective observations of fact about yourself will be valuable even if seemingly Captain Obvious at the outset.

Note if there is absolutely nothing you feel like doing. Is it that there is nothing in your life you consider fun, or is it simply not something you can do alone with yourself in 20 minutes? If you can’t do “it” now, you can daydream about “it” now. Those daydreams can become more than daydreams, they can help program your life with more of “it” because they are rehearsals — these revelries program your very cells, those cute little biocomputers in the massively parallel array of computers constituting the material substrate of our self.

Just finding out what “it” is, is a very valuable use of time. You need to move toward doing what you love the most all of the time, even if you only achieve a fraction of that movement in your lifetime, given Acceleritis and the money system. In utopia we would not have to meet money deadlines hence not have to accept labors unconducive to our enjoyment. We are working toward building that utopia for our heirs, some future generation that finally has free energy and matter in such profusion as to support what Aristotle meant by leisure for every person on the planet.

Meanwhile, back to 2014 Earth. Daydreaming about small moves you can realistically make toward more enjoyment in your life is a good use of time in your alone spaces.

More next week about why we need more enjoyment and how we can get it.

Here’s to more fun for all of us in 2014! Best to all,

Bill

PS: See me on TV today – follow me on Twitter and look at my tweet today.

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.

Inquire of your Feelings and Motivations

Volume 3, Issue 45

Raoul’s face showed no change, while inside he suddenly seethed with impatient anger at his spouse, whom he saw as going off onto a long negative diatribe tape he had heard too many times before without ever saying a word to her about it.

Feelings are expressions of motivation — your own motivation. Thoughts have great value of course but are not necessarily brilliant readers of your own feelings. Thoughts must make extensive effort before truly understanding one’s own motivations. Isn’t that strange? Thoughts and feelings working together can make your motivations more clear to yourself than thoughts alone.

Combining these ideas points to the need to put some effort, and not thought effort alone, into discerning your own feelings and motivations. Else you would not understand yourself completely enough to be in Observer state.

But first, what is the evidence that our thinking is not automatically adept at reading our own feelings? Do we not quickly realize when we are in a bad mood, or good mood, and isn’t it almost always obvious what caused it? Can’t we articulate the explanation in our own mind?

At that level of understanding, this is true. In most cases we are quick and confident judges when we think about what we are feeling. We can categorize the feeling into positive vs. negative, and instantaneously we make a mental thought connection with either an image or an amorphous memory of events leading up to the feelings.

This program loop does not even recognize that it’s worth tying into one’s own motivations and goes on somewhat blind to the actual priorities that determine action even when it is not what you, in your thoughts, necessarily planned to do.

At the Observer level of understanding, one experiences the ability to discern the micro steps that are going on inside as one event leads to another. These events are of the four Jungian types of experience, i.e. thoughts, feelings, intuitions (hunches), and perceptions; or the memory of these four types of experience re-arising.

In Observer state, if you are focused inwardly, you can detect that first there are feelings, then there are guesses being made about those feelings, then there is closure on one guess, the guess usually being a pre-existing category with a name. If the feelings exceed a threshold of arousal there is then gloating over and seeking subconsciously to re-experience and lengthen “good” (upbeat) feelings, or to repress, get angry or afraid or melancholy about, or think objectively about in order to fix “bad” (negative) feelings. Below that level of arousal the mind typically moves on to more important and/or pressing matters.

From the perspective of the Observer state there is a skeptically-objective further questioning of the guess before the feeling of closure is allowed. There is realization that outcomes typically have more than one cause so any classification into a single box is reductionism, leaving out significant parts of the system at work, which is the very thing one is seeking to understand more.

In the Observer state too — if one has been in that state long enough for significant processing to have occurred during these times — one is aware that behind the feelings lay the motivations, which the feelings are merely the expressions of.

Acceleritis has made the Observer state an atypical experience because of the drive toward closure in the avalanche of data falling upon the newly-evolved brain, which has only been in its present configuration for the most recent 20% of the time since we came down from trees, and which only taught itself written language in the most recent 0.6% of the time since we de-arborealized. The printing press was invented in the most recent 0.04% of that time, television in the last 0.0065%, Internet in the last 0.0018%, and mobile/social as we know it now in the last 0.0002%. Notice that the jarring shocks are occurring more frequently, accelerating — hence “Acceleritis”.

In Acceleritis mode we are happy to throw the feelings into a simple bucket, with a simple cause, and move on. We do not grasp the importance of more deeply understanding our own feelings and motivations. This is one of the unfortunate side effects of Acceleritis. We do not grasp the importance of a lot of things.

The key part of the feelings system is the moment at which you name it as good, bad, or neutral. I find that “Bad” tends to get oversubscribed. The very feeling of life in the Acceleritis field is background radiation negative. When in doubt, go negative, is the subconscious mental rule at that logic gate.

Avoid hasty closure is the takeaway. More about that in this excerpt from my book, Mind Magic.

Put off deciding that you are in a bad mood. In my case this universal problem manifests most often as feeling like I am not as happy as I should be. I find that just seeing how ridiculous this is, is enough to make me LOL which invariably ups my mood.

The rest of the sensorium seems to also take a clue from the frontalis and zygomaticus muscles of the face. In a devilish feedback loop, if you are always smiling your body will always assume you must be happy. The song “Smile” is actual psychotechnology. A frown on your face automatically triggers a descending mood spiral.

Less than a second after seething with impatient anger at his spouse, Raoul was observing that seething and trying to see what it was: could he feel it in his body somewhere? The feeling ebbed away into nothingness to be replaced by a faint everyday joy in the moment, mildly curious about its look, feel, and meaning, as his mind let go the memory of the momentary inner process and felt soft emotional receptivity focused on his beloved.

Happy New Year 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.