November 12, 2021

Don’t be afraid to step out of character.

If you play your character the same way every day, you’ll bore everyone, especially yourself.

And that ultra-consistent predictable behavior will keep you out of Flow state.

Flow comes when your pure authenticity is coming out all by itself.

Not when you’re adhering to automatic pilot script.

You may recall that in my psychological theory, the Ego is a construction of a self-protector as a neural net in the brain. A net that was not there at birth.

That construction is what manifests in your mind as Ego. It is a natural AI, a robot. It’s all the programs you wrote growing up, especially at the worst moments in your early life.

These programs tend to be binary, flying to one extreme or the opposite.

Taken together they are a disastrous guidebook to life.

Yet they rule most of us most of the time.

In the Observer and Flow states we rise out of this hysterical self-hypnosis.

We are a warrior race.

And it’s got nothing to do with fitness. Our old and infirm can be just as tough as the rest of us when the chips are down.

And the chips are definitely down.

That’s why our Egos have all run to the angry side of the boat.

Human beings have felt weak and helpless since the beginning of the race. Surrounded by animals much tougher than ourselves.

We sure showed them didn’t we?!

The Ego strives to reassure itself that it is tough enough.

We became a warrior race first by training against edible carnivores, and then driven by the Ego tendency to take as much advantage as possible of others.

This behavior does not lead us to happiness, nor to Flow, and certainly not to self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge comes when we fully realize the wrongness of our actions and pull ourselves out of the Ego back into our Observer, the true self, the me that was born. Pure consciousness without conditioned flinches.

Don’t be afraid to step out of character and let kindness come out of you. People need it now. They are keeping a stiff upper lip because, after all, we are a race of warriors.

Each person you meet now is angry covering scared.

It’s a fruitless uncontrollable reaction until a person becomes self-disciplined about staying above the Ego.

They need your help. Sometimes you can hear them subtly asking for it as they express some wish or sadness. They are subconsciously leaving an opening for something that will encourage them and make them feel that life is still good. You can be creative so long as you stay authentic. Answer them in a way that helps everyone, so they can pass it along in the same spirit to others.

All life is connected. Science has not yet discovered all of the forms of energy that exist in the universe.

Pebbles in the pond radiate and influence the entire pond more than you may realize the power of your own words. Power to heal that is in your heart and hands and eyes, even when your mouth is silent. You just feel an impulse to goodness and do nothing to block it. It will happen of itself and you will feel better for it as will they.

Because humans fear powerlessness they join things. They thus belong to some larger movement in which they believe, and which is stronger than they themselves. Like the United States of America. That gives them a feeling of collective strength, people on their side who will protect them.

If we can bring back that good feeling here in the States, we will actually be justified in feeling a lot stronger!

We also join parties for the same reason. In the two-party system, the binary nature inherent in the system tends to inflame the always-binary Ego.

“Haves and Have Nots” is the form civilization takes when it is driven by the binary Ego.

Individual human beings are a spectrum with infinite diversity in thinking, feeling, creativity, beliefs, worldviews, values, passions. Thank God for that.

When that diversity has to be crammed into a binary model, precious details are lost. The data lose their granularity and all of life seems to depend on simple slogans.

We will know we are decidedly NOT in Flow or even Observer state the next time we say (even to ourselves) ANYTHING that fits the binary model of either party.

If we value Flow more than anger, it would be the thing to do to catch oneself each time about to go over that cliff again. Be patient for the first few months, keep up cutting it short, and you’ll become free. Your mind will truly be freed. You will hear yourself think big thoughts, good advice. You’ll feel your heart open up and let the love in and out. You’ll have will power to cut down on whatever is slowing you down.

The more of us let out the good within us more palpably every moment, the more that will spread faster than Covid.

I seem to be leaving you with a song nowadays. This one applies to more than just man-woman relationships.

Love, Bill

 

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October 8th, 2021

Winston Churchill said, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.” In other words, if you don’t start from courage, how will you always have the courage to state the truth? How will you always have the courage to be objective, to be fair and just, to be kind, to be giving, to forgive, to trust, and to love? What human virtue does not depend upon courage at its base?

Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha is said to have told his son, “Honesty is the fundamental virtue because a person who would tell lies would also be inclined to fake the other virtues.”

These twin foundations form the base upon which all other aspects of integrity depend.

You might say that Love is the highest virtue, as the Beatles did in the song “All You Need Is Love”, which has the feeling of truth to it, and as an emotional pathway into the universally-desired future world, that song is definitely a tool to use. Music has always been a way to help people reprogram the emotions and mind to attain the Good, and so shall it remain forever.

At the same time, the ability to love depends on trust, and trust depends on courage.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the quality which makes us capable of dealing with our fear as one input to the equation we are solving.

As one watches one’s own mind – metacognition – with an eye to improving its functioning so as to obtain the desired outcomes from life – metaprogramming – eventually we realize that negative emotion must be used constructively, or else it uses us, owns us, controls us, and keeps us out of the higher states of consciousness – Observer state and Flow state – in which our effectiveness is maximized.

Fear and anger and all other variations on the theme of negative emotion keep us from solving what is causing those exact same emotions!

If we continue to be childlike all our lives, we give in to that down cycle, whereas if we summon our courage and honesty, we pull ourselves out of it and creatively realize the necessary actions, and take those actions with honesty and courage.

The robotical, conditioned, hypnotized, slavish part of the mind will seek to trick us into deviating in little ways, to get us back and keep us in the same old habitual tracks. We must not let even tiny slip-backs occur. Once the door is allowed to open just a crack, momentum makes it harder and harder to prevent it from widening its opening.

If at first, we find this impossibly difficult, there are positive tricks that can get around this. One of them is acting – Stanislavsky’s famous “Method” acting – in which we act so well we become the character we are portraying not only externally but also internally. Stanislavsky meant this only for the stage, a temporary becoming of the character, but in our methods, we apply the same principle to overcome the robot mind’s evasive maneuvers.

Please experience what we are talking about with this short video exercise:

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You will become who you want to be by always acting like that person. It may not seem to be totally sincere at first – because of the mental/emotional stains that you have accumulated by unassimilated experiences – but your mind will eventually unravel those knots for you and you will become who you really are without those holdouts.

It will always be truly sincere from the standpoint of your true self – the you that was born – so there is no real dishonesty although you may temporarily feel that such acting is duplicitous. It isn’t. That is the real you, internally divided for the time being, but it’s the side of you to which you cling eternally, not the part of you you’re ashamed of. That’s the real sincerity, although under the strained conditions of accelerated life, it feels like you are lying when you act like the person you want to be – the you that was born, who you truly are.

The mind is the most complicated thing we have. In the current historical period of Acceleritis, our minds have wound themselves up in knots. It takes really clear thinking to unwind our mind’s knots. It takes time to attain really clear thinking. I hope this course, my weekly inputs, shorten the time you need to reach dependable, steady equilibrium in the Observer and Flow states.

Love to all,

Bill

Created October 15, 2021

All living things react negatively to prolonged periods of stress. That’s part of the explanation for the dramatic increase in negativity being expressed all around us and in us.

Negativity is catching. The more negativity we hear, the more likely we are to have negative thoughts and feelings, and the more likely we are to go off negatively when we least expect it, at the slightest provocation.

Defeatism is what happens when the challenges multiply and complexify and we feel daunted by the prospect of trying to solve our way out of it.

At such moments, a self-meta-programmed person who is in Observer state or Flow state, may think “It only seems daunting because you choose to make it seem daunting in your mind,” and feels an instant sense of relief, and starts to chunk the problems into manageable pieces as a start to solving them in priority order.

You’ll know when you’re getting into these higher states when you all of a sudden realize you are getting really good advice from what you hear in your mind, and that it all sounds moderate and kind, and not negative but instead, encouraging to your creativity to enjoy solving and conquering what had seemed daunting a moment ago.

There are really two flavors to life, and on a moment-to-moment basis, we may shift from one to the other.

One flavor is unnatural, it’s a pandemic condition we have suffered for a very long time, since the beginning of recorded history. I call it Acceleritis. It’s not having enough time to answer all of the questions that occur to you. It started a long time ago, but it accelerated when we began to use written language, and accelerated again when the printing press became global, and accelerated again and again with each new wave of media technology. Marshall McLuhan defined media as the extensions of Man. All of our media of expression and communication form a network with our own minds and emotions. The media shape the way we form ourselves internally which determines how we act internally and externally.

Today the intensity of our media womb has long passed the PTSD (Post Traumatic Shock Disorder) level. The covert and overt manipulation of those media for political and perverted purposes has heightened the degree of damage each of us does to ourselves, each other, and the planet. Now we will argue over the silliest things at the drop of a hat.

The other flavor of life is natural. In our natural state, before the existence of a ubiquitous media culture, we had time to consider every question until we reached a comprehensive answer, or at least a protocol for behavior based on the best estimate of an answer. When we self-meta-program ourselves we create a feedback loop in our conscious minds where we notice how often our thoughts and feelings go off the deep end, and find ways to rise above those internal self-defeating behaviors. When fully functioning, this brings the individual into the Observer state as an equilibrium condition. Prior to that point one flashes in and out of Observer state.

This graduates in stages to spending time in the Flow state, starting in one’s passion work. A person who has reclaimed their natural state and armored against falling back into the everyday win/lose ego thinking is capable of making objective decisions with care and integrity, patiently absorbing all the relevant information, studying, meditating, contemplating, reaching solutions and carrying them out meticulously.

Today the whole world faces emergencies that add to our stress and aggravate our tendency to fly directly to negativity, do not pass go do not collect $200. Instead of cooperating to overcome the threats we waste time blaming each other and getting no closer to solutions than the day before.

The only way out is for us to go inside and move from the unnatural flavor to the natural flavor. We can’t fix the world mess from the dysfunctional condition. We have to all rise up to our better selves and get our politicians and leaders there too, and quickly. That’s what this course is all about and hopefully you are feeling more girded by the week, and practice the useful ways from post to post. That’s how we can win it, no matter how bad it looks now. We have it in us. We made the mess, we can mop it up. But not by mopping up the floor with each other: that IS the mess.

Please take 101 seconds to experience this video. It’s an attic-cleansing of the old and the beginning of a new you:

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Go forth, knight, to help the world within the experience bubble you bring around you. I see many more of us getting to this point soon, not just from my writings but I also see many around me who are writing too, sharing in other words, images, and languages what I’ve been saying: it’s all in our minds, we can control our minds and spirits, because we ARE them, a shift in perspective is all it takes to break away from those still infected by Acceleritis, or what most people call The Ego. To me they are the same condition, a pandemic stress condition caused by inventing faster than we can assimilate.

The Ego is a defensive stance. We feel threatened and inadequate to fend for ourselves against the impossible odds. The real self hides and deals with the world through a persona designed to achieve the desired ends of the hidden self. But the situation becomes dysfunctional when the persona begins acting on its own desired (robotically programmed) ends. The real self becomes submerged even to itself and the body and mind of the individual is on robot pilot. That is the Ego. It arises as a defense mechanism to the Acceleritis. The Ego is not a natural condition. The natural self likes to cooperate and have everyone win.

We have to recognize chronic ego condition as a mental disorder, a sickness. It could have arisen before Acceleritis but it has thrived under the ascendancy of Acceleritis. It’s what most of us consider to be normal.

Stay in this upper state at all times and feel the inherent joy of being an experiencer, alive and creative.

Cooperate and harmonize. All of us singing a single note forever would get boring. Chords are made of dissimilar notes and aren’t chord changes beautiful?

Have a canary switch that alerts you to any arising negativity in yourself at any given moment. Realize at those times: I AM MORE THAN MY NEGATIVITY.

We all have a survival instinct, it’s natural, and a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to survive, and nothing wrong with appropriate self-defense without over-reacting. But Ego is over-reacting as Standard Operating Procedure. It’s being so self-defensive that it seems like cowardice to a person operating from natural mind.

If you catch yourself acting craven in your own mind, remind yourself of your courage and heroism. Remind yourself of your determination and your Mission in life, whatever that may be. Remind yourself that giving yourself too little credit becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

March forth with self-belief.

Love to all,

Bill

Created September 23, 2021

Dissatisfaction is rampant. It has never been as dominant a theme before in the USA. We descendants of tough colonists and immigrants with the guts to leap into the relative unknown are a hardy breed. We have always overcome, at least until Vietnam. That was kind of a turning point. It wasn’t our fault. We were acting idealistically, continuing the world leadership that had come to us during the world wars. Over the succeeding half century, we learned again and again that our success with force can only be counted upon to work when we use it in self-defense and deterrence. As soon as we project it in other ways – even with the best of intentions – it’s like the tar baby in the Disney classic “Song of the South”: every punch and kick only get us more stuck in the trap.

At an individual level Covid and politics and climate change and “losing world leadership” – if that has really happened – are nothing compared to our own personal life dissatisfactions. Like Edward G. Robinson’s character in the movie “Key Largo”, who always wants “MORE!”, our minds are always comparing what we have now to what we once had or to our dreams of what we must attain or we shall be sad and bitter all our lives (that is the way we blackmail ourselves – one of the negative tricks of the mind discussed earlier in this free Course).

Comparison is one of the negative tricks of the mind we must watch out for. When we stop comparing what is happening in the moment to our expectations, we can really enjoy life.

That doesn’t mean giving up one’s dreams – in fact it makes us more effective so the chances of our dreams coming true are increased. It means to turn down the volume knob on the melancholy that we are not there yet and that we don’t seem to be making fast enough progress – not as fast as so-and-so – there’s those comparisons again.

The positive tricks of the mind are superior in every way to the negative tricks of the mind.

“Tricks” is often used as a pejorative word. Scientists, who tend also to be highly creative people (all of us are much more creative than we typically realize), make up much better words. “Metacognition”, coined by John H. Flavell now of Stanford, means being cognizant of one’s own thinking patterns, and implies the ability to thereby take better control of those thought processes (that taking over was named “metaprogramming” by John Lilly in the same era as Flavell’s coinage – 1960s-1970s).

The job of the Human Effectiveness Institute is to compile empirical generalizations for the most prevalent applications of metaprogramming – or in lay terms, compile positive “mind tricks”. Hence our first book being called MIND MAGIC although it is empirically based science, proven to work (see a small sample of our testimonials to the right on this page). Collectively, our suggestions enable users to become better and better at metacognition and metaprogramming so that they rise into semi-permanent “altered states of consciousness” described by William James and called “peak experiences” by Abraham Maslow.

I say semi-permanent to mean that as we grow into true human maturity – become menschen – we all go through our ups and downs, but the long-term trend is to greater resiliency in the face of upsets, less tendency to dwell upon our dissatisfactions, far greater tendency to make real, positive changes in our lives that remove those dissatisfactions.

In the last few posts of this Course you are taking with me, we talked about finding your own determination, likening it to a hidden switch inside of you. Determination is a constructive judo-ing of your dissatisfied energies. Finding the hidden switch is discovering that you can channel (find a positive outlet for) your dissatisfaction, despair, heartbreak, hate, anger, envy, outrage, passive and active aggressiveness, and all of the other negative emotions into a titanium Will, and you can apply that Will constructively and positively in ways that keep you from sinking into the pits, and make you uplifting to yourself and to the world around you. Reach around inside yourself wordlessly right now for that subconscious hidden switch while you watch, experience, and internalize this 82-second video, please:

I’m not going to take it anymore, go ahead and dish it out, it won’t affect me. I’m going to have my own joy no matter what you do to me… that’s the attitude best suited to going through life – especially through this dramatic period we are now passing through.

Hang on to that joy – if you don’t feel it yet, try counting your blessings, thanking God or the Universe for all the things you possess right now, that you have not lost, that would leave terrible holes in your life and in you if they were to depart. Enjoy those things while you have them! If you are emanating the opposite of joy – as we see people all around us doing right now – you are wasting the good things you have in your life right now. That you take for granted. Revel in the good things in your life whenever you feel yourself slipping back from determination, courage, and the Will to grapple against all odds to do the right thing and to help the world back on course.

Metacognition implies the Will to take over one’s own life. You are always at a perfect age to do that.

Love to all,

Bill