Answering Any Question

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Volume 3, Issue 47

To continue what we’ve been saying about the alone space you need each day, one of the things you can do, if you really feel like it, is to play a game where you practice Flowing.

Discrimination is a function that comes into play at a micro level of our moment-to-moment decision-making. The more time we apply to making the discrimination among inner impulses to actions, the more delayed our impulsive actions. Even taking on and expressing a feeling that has meekly inched out of the wings seeking approval, is an action. We can eschew owning a provisional feeling, and we can treat all feelings as provisional until inspected to make sure we still agree with the logic that led to that feeling. This is the Observer state.

Although discrimination helps prevent actions we might regret, it also impedes the Flow state. In Flow state, we let our training and practice operate, as if instinctively, without hesitation. Yet even in moments of Flow, one senses there is a choice to be made, and hesitates while staying in the Flow state — the hesitation may be fractional until instinct causes movement before the time loss exceeds the action quality gain.

Ideally one could spend long hours each day for a lifetime training oneself at precisely the games that one loves the most. Acceleritis temporarily dwarfs the human race (in a sense by giving us too many stimuli too fast, a side effect of giving us too much brainpower too fast). In this dwarfing, the culture falls short of optimizing the delivery of people who love X to the task of X, although Google could fix that. In the dystopia created by Acceleritis, we also find ourselves in probably one of the most challenging games the Universe has ever devised, so who’s complaining? Rise to the challenge, recognizing that alone space is needed each day.

One of the fun things you can do whenever you feel like it, in your alone space, is to let yourself do automatic writing without editing — for no one will ever see that page except you unless you decide otherwise. Automatic writing of whatever comes into your mind, as if taking dictation from someone else, is an amazing experience and a doorway into the Flow state. Once you get going with whatever your mind wants to say, you can also ask any question that you may have always or just recently wanted the answer for — the key most challenging questions of your life or facing your company, whatever. As if having a crystal ball, you let yourself actually put down on paper whatever is the first thing that pops into your head.

Don’t let yourself go into long internal debates – like saying to yourself, “There’s no way I can be coming up with the right answers so easily to these questions!” Just do it. It’s a game. The thing is not the answer but the Flowing without discrimination at all. Life may not have handed you a built-in way to get into Flow through practice, but everyone can use automatic writing to get into Flow.

Not that all automatic writing is the Flow state. It might be flowing easily and that’s good but is not in itself a sign of Flow state or even Observer state. That’s not the point. Don’t be rating yourself each second (“Am I in the Flow state now?”) because that is one of the biggest blocks imaginable to getting into the Flow state. Everything you do in your alone space is for your own enjoyment, not for any other goal. The side effects of realizing higher states of consciousness are something to gratefully enjoy as they happen, not to wistfully hope for. So have the fun now.

Wishing everyone a lot more fun in 2014. 

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

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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

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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.

Your Bucket List for 2014

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Volume 3, Issue 44

Why have bucket lists for the rest of your life without having one for the upcoming year? Forming a strong intention to do something in 2014 that you’ve always wanted to do is so much more concrete and action-oriented than simply hoping you’ll get around to doing it someday. The probability of actually having that wish come true goes up when you put a time frame around it.

There is a solid benefit to just making a bucket list and then assigning one or more items on that list to 2014. That benefit is self-knowledge. Anything that helps you contemplate yourself from a new perspective is going to provide serendipitous actionable insights.

What if you find that you have outgrown your bucket list? The connotation of a “bucket list” is fun stuff you would like to do once. Perhaps when you contemplate such amusements in the context of your life and/or the next year, you discover that instead of caring about such idle pleasures, what you really would like to focus on making happen is something much more important, like making a transition to the kind of work you’ve always wanted to do. If not your vocation then an avocation that you’ve always desired but never made time for. Surely 2014 is the time to make a substantive move in resurrecting that dream. What’s more important?

A writing partner and lifelong friend of mine is now following his dream. Somehow he has kept the wolves at bay monetarily and has managed to concentrate on writing and researching his scripts every day of his life. It was not always like that.

Like most people he felt he was going to get around to that someday but first he had to put himself on a solid economic footing. The quest for that stability seemed never ending. His confidence in ever getting around to his real work was gradually shrinking, a little bit every day, without him at first noticing what was happening until it was almost too late. One day he woke up and realized he was no longer sure he could do it anymore.

Has that ever happened to you?

Trying to inspire him out of that state of mind, Socrates being one of my heroes, I asked him lots of questions. Let’s call him James. James had been a character actor in big box-office movies and quality television shows, and a singer/songwriter as well. He gradually began to realize he had a gift for writing, which attracted him more than performing. He wrote a script that was a page-turner. He had one project that he really wanted to make happen right away and even had an idea about how to market it. It started with seeing an actor he knew who was in a position to help him: Robert Duvall.

It hit me that we all have dreams we want to make come true and ideas about how to break into some field — maybe someone we know who is highly placed can help us. Often we hesitate and maybe never make that phone call or send that email or letter. It depends on how far our confidence has slipped, how much we have become resigned to our fate of the economic survival treadmill being the only reality.

To motivate him — and myself — I coined a phrase. I told him that every day he must remember to “Do his Duvalls” — meaning to actually do the things that would advance his real lifelong aspirations. Today he is doing his Duvalls and finally so am I.

Wishing you a 2014 in which you wake up each morning, remembering to do your Duvalls, and actually doing them.

Best to all and happy New Year!

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.