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Inner Head Language

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Volume 3, Issue 33

My daughter Nicole and I were at a book fair today, ostensibly selling my book Mind Magic from our table alongside other local authors at their tables. I say “ostensibly” because my real motivation for attending these events is to see if and how people can be helped to reach higher levels of consciousness. Everything is reconnaissance with readiness to engage with any seeker. The average seeker today has seen it all and has the t-shirt.

My great friend Stanford Silverman, who came from 25 miles away to buy yet another copy of Mind Magic, summed the answer up as “99.9% actually get no benefit from books.” He went on to say, “when the supreme reality is not understood, the reading of books/scriptures is useless, and the study of books/scriptures is useless when the supreme reality has been realized.” This is the viewpoint of a person who has found a Living Master and has devoted his service thereto, for its own sake and also to receive the kind of grace that has been observed to effect great positive changes in people.

Nicole later questioned this pessimism about our work and I repeated the stats I had shared with Stan, that out of 35,000 books sold we’ve received over 2000 letters/emails/cards from readers saying the book changed their lives in a way they wanted to thank us for. That’s 5.7% — in a considerably higher ballpark than the 0.1% stat Stan offered. And 5.7% only counts the hand-raisers, not those who got benefit but didn’t let us know. I also told her we are not doing this to see a complete world change as a result (though that outcome would be nice and was my initial vision) but rather we are doing it because it’s the right thing to do, sharing this stuff based on the 2000+ hand-raisers. Whatever effect it will have, it will have.

A man asked what the book was about and Nicole answered “It’s about you,” and I explained that “the way the language speaks to your subconscious, it brings out your own higher Self.” The language in the book is my own “inner head language” — it came unbidden and I didn’t put it into the King’s English — and as a result, coming from my subconscious, it seems to absorb directly into the subconscious layer of the reader.

One reader said it like this: “The communication so transformed and met me as to feel as though it was clearly mind-to-mind.” (Jordan Salison, Insight Meditation Society, Barre, MA)

And this, from a review in New Age Journal, “resonates with the higher aspects of our beings and is experienced as truth…”

You can get a flavor of Mind Magic here.

I am always curious to hear what I will say when a person asks me what the book is about because something different always comes out. In a bookstore I don’t want to rattle on any more about the brain, Observer state and Flow state (the Zone), I want to relate to daily life, not its underlying science.

“It’s a mood, an attitude, the book gets you into. You see opportunities to take elements in the situation and move them around in ways you actually can, to be a win for everybody. Including stuff inside yourself, which you can move around to create a win/win inside yourself.”

The most useful answer we found was to suggest, “Open a page at random and see if it speaks to you.” This worked 4 out of 4 times, at which point I fled to write this column, leaving Nicole for a hostage. One woman said it understood her, that it was exactly what she had been thinking about. The others got absorbed and read for quite a while.

In the 70s, when the human potential movement got that name it was rediscovered that intellect alone does not change behavior, emotion and/or the subconscious, something deeper than the rational mind, must be involved. This goes back to even before the Eleusinian Mysteries, before the cave paintings, as old as homo sapiens ourselves, 200,000 years. The shaman was wise by definition, understanding at a gut level that someone not-yet-wise needed certain stimuli and experiences to become wise, and so he/she did the needful. Sometimes it worked. Maybe it nearly always worked a little.

Emotion, imagination, and/or the subconscious are engaged by the “inner head language” in Mind Magic in much the same way that these beyond-rational faculties are brought into play by art, poetry, music, theater. It is this linguistic subtlety as much as the insights that make it possible to move people into the higher states of consciousness with a book — not just Mind Magic but also other books whose neurolinguistic approach engages with the deeper levels of self.

This form of linguistic communication with more than just the rational mind could be more deeply investigated by brain researchers in order to optimize the psychotechnology. This is one of the goals of the Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI).

Best 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. 

Atonement

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Volume 3, Issue 31

Writing this on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish religion. The day to atone for one’s shortfalls, forgive oneself for them, forgive everyone for whom one is still carrying a grudge.

A perfect Jew, which I am not, would probably not be writing on this day. My friend Stan Silverman calls us HinJews. Even that does not quite encapsulate it — I am faithful to the common core of all religions, not as religions, but as scientific truth. My hypothesis and conviction is that there is only One of us.

This of course makes it easier to forgive. If there is only One spark of being populating all of us, then a person who has offended us has done so because his or her experiences have led that originally perfect tabula rasa into a condition in which giving offense is possible and perhaps inevitable. At-One-ment makes atonement easier.

If my friend, whose mother belittled him because of her own childhood conditioning, has become carping, surely on this day I can understand and forgive that. I myself am him, living a different life with different experiences that have made me less carping than him but perhaps imperfect in lots of other ways. I can forgive everyone including myself for all the influences that drive us all to become what we perhaps only temporarily are. Knowing this may free us from having to continue to be exactly the same today as we have always been.

Pragmatism again. There is utility to oneself to stop blaming others. Blame is an investment of mental/emotional energy that pays no return. That same energy can be redeployed to deliver a positive return. Solutions are better investment instruments than blame.

As Mind Magic says on page 229:

Do not be critical of that which has happened; do decide what should have happened and seek to bring it about in similar situations in the future.

What has already happened could not have been otherwise; all events are merely the resultant of their causes, which are themselves events dependent on the constellation of prior causes.

You can make yourself a more potent cause of future events by deciding how to act differently the next time the same kind of situation arises; you can do nothing about the past.

Do not be critical of what any individual, including yourself, has done: all actions are merely the resultant of their causes.

Again, seek only to set new policies for similar future situations.

Honesty and gentleness are essential tools in this endeavor.

Guiding others to adopt more useful new policies requires special gentleness; often it is best to simply ask the right questions to have the desired effect.

Best 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. 

 

Not Problems, Think of Them as Challenges

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Volume 3, Issue 28

The way the Game works is that the One Self living through each of us assigns optimal challenges to evolve each mini-self based on the Mission chosen to be embodied in that mini-self. At least that’s how I see the Game.

The One Self I am sure has heard this old joke before, even though I thought I made it up: He (She) calls the Game Cosmopoly. Other mini-selves who have played Monopoly must have also thought of it, and everything to the One Self is something that has been seen before.

This is why the Game involves mini-selves who have to relearn everything, in the first place. The One Self quickly realizes that a delicious drama factor is added to existence as soon as He (She) immerses in a new role, purposely forgetting true identity. Not so very different than watching a movie or TV show and losing oneself in the protagonist, just a lot more intense.

Leading the protagonist in Life back to his (her) true identity is how the Game works. The universe is always giving clues to the protagonist and handing out assignments — challenges — optimized to get the mini-self back into true identity. This is The Guru Principle.

My term “noia” is defined as the suspicion that someone’s out to do something good for you. Noiacally, one is sensitive to decoding messages contained in events occurring around us. Knowing how the Game works. Not getting ensnarled into the dreaded feeling of problems when, really, they are creative opportunities. Thinking of them as challenges and always remembering the Game is either a useful fiction, or the absolute truth. One way or the other, noia is a performance enhancer.

Thinking of it this way, there is nothing unscientific about God. What we have learned about information processing from building and using computers leads directly to the rationality of imagining a consciousness that is not dependent upon a physical body. We know that in computer science there is a principle called partitioning, which allows certain computational spaces to be separated from one another. Nothing in my theory requires anything that computers cannot do. So if there happened to exist a consciousness like us but immeasurably greater, why could it not be living through each of us, and if it were, why not give it an affectionate and respectful name like God? We would treat our father/mother affectionately and respectfully, and the One Self is closer to home than even our father/mother is — the One Self is the same self you consider to be yourself. You’re lookin’ in the mirror baby. All the time.

That’s my theory. Try it and see if you don’t experience increased performance. And if you do, ask why.

Best 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. 

A Method of Increasing Luck, and the Sweetness of Life

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Volume 3, Issue 22

One rainy day I was driving a little too fast plus the cruise control was on. I got onto I-84 East and as I reached the highway itself I must have hit an oily patch for the next thing I knew I was going backwards Eastbound, staring straight at Eastbound traffic bearing down on me at high speed — a truck passing a car, both coming right at me with many cars and trucks behind them.

Reflexively I righted the car and pulled off on the grassy median just as the honking truck and cars rushed past, missing me. A car pulled off and drove up alongside to see if I was all right. He said he was a Navy fighter pilot and complimented me on my reflexes, then drove off while I sat for a minute breathing.

I bet you know what I was feeling because we have all felt it at one time or another — grateful for being alive. Life was suddenly so sweet. Every second was precious. The average workday that lay ahead was an exciting prospect filled with interesting possibilities. The rain hitting the windshield was beautiful and I could see rainbows in each drop. The air tasted delicious.

Authentic gratitude is a very healthy emotion that I am sure increases immune response and is conducive to Flow state. As I grow older and hopefully wiser I find myself more often being grateful simply for this life, for life itself and especially for the interesting and fun life I have had so far. But any life is better than the alternative of never having existed. Even a life of pain is more interesting than eternal unconsciousness, never having a sense of self, never having even one experience.

As long as one is alive, there is the chance to fix or accept anything that is disturbing. That’s what creativity is for. Troubles can be overcome in a flash of inspiration. Life is filled with endless possibilities.

Over time I’ve noted that during periods of gratitude my luck runs high. This in itself is not conclusive proof of a conscious universe nor that having a gratitudinous relationship with the Overconsciousness pays off in being given more, a basic tenet of Kabbalah, but it is suggestive evidence that the idea deserves more serious attention.

By luck I mean opportunities for feeling love, deeply personal good things happening involving other people. I doubt that a good experiment could be set up in Vegas where variations in gratitude attitude could be related to winning money. Recently I was playing games of chance with my granddaughter who was trouncing me game after game, getting fabulous hands while mine were terrible, yet all through it I was feeling very grateful for the time together. So luck and gratitude are not linked in the sphere of winning at games of chance, but I continue to observe that they are linked in winning at the game of life.

If you’re going on vacation soon, when you’re on a beach chair staring at the ocean or at a lake or sitting by a stream or at any quiet moment, it will be easy to get in touch with the gratitude you have within you. It’s always there, like a carrier wave on which there are overlays of more temporary modulations of feeling in reaction to the event stream. You’ll detect the experiential neural pathways that will make it possible for you to always contact your gratitude no matter what is happening, especially when you are angry or depressed — this refocus on basic gratitude for living gives you immense power to supervene over any negative emotion. Finding that switch inside that you can use at any moment will give you great strength. Use it well and enjoy yourself. Joy is the most likely reason The One Consciousness is doing all this and expressing itself as you and me.

Best 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.