To The Protectors

Volume 3, Issue 39

It is Veteran’s Day as I write this. On the way to the airport listening to the radio I heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing a special show celebrating America and its war veterans.

Flashback to the 60s when certain protesters sometimes crossed the line to not only condemn the war but also the country itself with the moniker Amerika, sometimes substituting a swastika for the “k”. That saddened me.

We all make mistakes and sometimes they are big ones. This is true not only for individuals but also for groups of people like protesters, countries, corporations, even well-meaning nonprofits and religious institutions.

But the ideals of the Founding Fathers are unique among the articles of constitution for each of the 190+ nations on Earth. The U.S. Constitution is our Mission statement and our collective vision still. Protecting these ideals and this country that seeks to bring about a world based on these ideals is still a sacred trust.

Those who are warriors for any free nation, especially if they take that role voluntarily, are at least in part moved by a very high level of consciousness. The realization of something greater than oneself, and the urge to serve others. This can also be true of cops, firefighters, doctors, and many other vocations, even the oft-criticized paramilitary. Not every individual in these vocations is equally motivated by the idea of service and the will to protect, and that motivation can vary over time. But when one is in that headspace and heart space it is a form of the Flow state and attracts cosmic fire support — at least according to my Theory of the Conscious Universe, which is explored in my soon-to-be-published new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That!

Most if not all of us would like to see an end to war, but this does not mean we should be unappreciative of the warriors. The prerequisites to ending war forever are not forever distant and unapproachable; in fact we are closer than ever to realizing these possibilities:

Psychotechnology and education bring about better self-management and decision-making at an individual level everywhere, engendering sanity, clarity, perspective, menschness, and happiness.
Science and technology release unlimited free energy by which there is plenty of whatever anyone might need or want, as in the “Culture” novels. With free energy we can afford to transport the Earth’s still abundant raw materials from where they are to where they are needed. Nicola Tesla was on the track of unlimited free energy a century ago and it is no further off than unlimited life extension. Perhaps another century will do the trick.
Space travel provides enough room and raw materials to not have to fight over land.
Medical science brings about the ultimate cures. Only a matter of time. Not soon enough to end the heartache in our lives but soon enough to remove great gobs of pain from the lives of our children’s children’s children.

It will all happen. If we don’t blow ourselves up or befoul the environment too much more between now and then.

In the meantime, here’s to the protectors. We still need them, and they deserve to be honored with our gratitude and deepest respect.

In that spirit, I’d like to share the lyrics to a song written by my friend Stan Satlin, who was inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to write songs about the country he loves.

I Am an American

Chorus (repeats after each verse):

I am black and I am white, I'm yellow and brown
I am red white and blue, Yankee Doodle won't you come to town
I am the whole wide planet, rolled into one
I am a citizen of the world, I am an American

Verse 1:

I came from distant lands, to seek a better life
All I owned was on my back, by my side my wife
The work it wasn't easy, in the factory and the farm
But hope in me grew stronger, like the muscle in my arm

Verse 2:

As I sailed across the ocean I was told of gold in the streets
When I arrived I soon found out not everything was sweet
I built the road and cities, from the east coast to the west
I've been tricked and cheated, but the land is still the best

Verse 3:

Some things are much better, some things still need change
I wish I could bring back some things, like buffalo on the range
I don't want to be a master or servant of any man
I just want to go on living my life, doing the best I can

And this, to honor the symbol that inspires our warriors, Old Ragged Flag, as told by Johnnie Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgpp0V7sDbE.

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.

Can Creativity Be Induced?

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Volume 3, Issue 38

Waves booming, the expletives of gulls as they glide like white boomerangs buzzing us, scouting for handouts. I’m sitting with Lalita at breakfast on the terrace at the Malibu Beach Inn, reading The New York Times and I come across a book review reprinted from the Financial Times of London of the new book The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas by David Burkus.

According to Burkus, taking the review at face value, Plato and the other dons of antiquity were deluded and superstitious in believing that creativity was conferred only on certain humans and that moments of inspiration were given to them by the gods; that even today the popular notion that an “Aha!” moment exists is foolishness, and that creativity really comes down to hard work by large numbers of people working together to generate “creative ideas”. To which my first thought is “Why does it have to be one way and not the other, why can’t there be some truth in all of these ideas?”

The author reportedly goes on to point out that the efforts by organizations to instill increased creativity often backfire, instead causing people to conform so as to belong to a new groupthink where they hold back ideas that they fear would rile the comfort of the tribe and thus cause themselves to become treated like outsiders. This part also has the ring of some truth in it, as I’ve been in such situations, though found myself and a few others quite willing to bear the risk of contrarian creativity.

The book deserves to be read before coming to any conclusions about it, and it surely provokes useful thought if even its review does so. Yet all books that take seeming black and white positions from the title forward would in my estimation have low likelihood of portraying the complexity of the real world as it exists. I will apologize in this space if after reading it I must eat those words, for the review is not the book, the map is not the territory, as S.I. Hayakawa liked to say.

In my practice both at Bill Harvey Consulting and at The Human Effectiveness Institute I’ve often been asked to lead workshops aimed at increasing individual and group creativity and performance. My book Mind Magic is specifically tasked at doing that, and one edition of the book was even experimentally titled Freeing Creative Effectiveness. So as you can see I have a dog in this race, and a potential axe to grind. 😀

Can I prove that I’ve ever induced creativity by a book or workshop or any other means? Alas, no scientific proof yet (we’ll do A/B testing at some point), although anecdotal circumstantial evidence abounds in thousands of letters from readers, including this review from Dan Goleman:

“Highly recommended… will loosen your moorings and open you to creative vistas.” — Dr. Daniel Goleman

Science of course considers individual reports subject to placebo effect and various other biases including the desire to be nice.

In group work, there have been similarly non-definitive measurements. When Richard Zackon and I did an ARF creativity workshop last year it got good scores from the participants and many nice emails. Several people even followed up with telephone consultations. And beyond kind words there has been evidence that one day’s worth of a creativity-inducing workshop has had major positive effect on the directions that leaders of major companies took soon afterward.

I was amazed at the creativity I found in high-ranking officers of two different military branches during workshops I led. In one war game I created, a female officer in charge of a powerful group of units took the bait of my scenario to find a solution even more creative than the one I was going to reveal at the end had nobody thought of it.

The placebo effect and its counterpart in groups, the Hawthorne Effect, suggest that false effects can be caused simply by paying special attention to people. And yet why call these effects “false”? If one can remove pain with salt water and the powers of the subconscious why not use it? If one can cause creative behavior with hand waving, why not take all you can get?

Coming back to the Myth of Creativity book, one of its conclusions ascribed by the review is that creativity is best fostered in organizations where it is challenged. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and compressing a spring or irritating an oyster analogies do apply to inducing creativity. I used to tell my team at a certain large agency that the repressive conduct of my boss at the time was an opportunity to be “creative within constraints”.

At the aforementioned ARF creativity workshop, we had the participants anonymously hand in ratings of their own organization on a ten-point scale of creativity repressiveness and siloed confusion. The range of scores we received covered practically the entire range from zero to ten. Take a look at your own organization and see what score you would give it. 🙂

Other than distributing our book and video to your team or doing our workshop, or doing similarly with other interveners from outside the organization, what else can you do? Guard against simulated creativity-inducing exercises, which can backfire. Give people autonomy within the bounds you feel each is equipped to handle and then give a bit more. Give people permission to try new things even if they might fail. When someone screws up, be kind yet honest. Don’t just simulate that, be authentic. Check the effect on target to be sure you’re not kidding yourself to make yourself feel good when you might have actually crushed them.

One way I found it easy to get bollixed organizations to be more creative is to interview the employees and get their creative ideas and then feed those ideas to the top person who can then take credit. That person was always the bottleneck and would only act on creative ideas if he/she could take credit for them. Before the intervention, good ideas had come up in meetings and been shot down, and months had passed until the top person was able to forget that the idea had been mentioned before, then putting it in new garb and “inventing” it as his/her idea. Thus the organization lurched forward, driven by organizational creativity with a delay cycle equal to how long it took the top person’s ego to forget and reinvent.

The notion that the “Aha!” moment is a fiction strikes me as funny. I have had this experience all my life, of ideas putting themselves together in a flash. Carl Jung and William James and many others define the intuition as the mind’s way of suddenly making logical connections among bits of information lying around. Saying that this process does not exist is amusing. Daniel Goleman’s description of the way the brain works at these moments would seem to add further veracity to the existence of “Aha!” moments in fact.

As to Plato’s being superstitious in considering that inspiration can come from levels above human consciousness, please see my new book when it comes out, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, which postulates that all observed phenomena including the paranormal and religious can be accounted for by my Theory of the Conscious Universe, in which we are all one Self living through many avatars, one biocomputer server networked to many clients. In that picture of reality, Plato could easily have been right.

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.

Useful Transcendence Techniques in Mental Wrestling

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Volume 3, Issue 37

Fluttering saffron leaves wave at me through all the windows that surround. It is another ecstatic autumn day here in the Hudson Valley. Inside the house, décor projections of Lalita’s beauty catch my eye as I sit to write to you.

The subject as always is living in the Flow state (the Zone), and employing psychotechnology to get there. My recurring theme: it’s easiest to get there through an earlier state of awareness, the Observer state.

Educators at their best have toyed with the notion of providing courses in Thinking (click and scroll to Majoring in Thinking), allowing students to major in it. The second article at this link uses the term “metacognition” to describe thinking about thinking, and being cognizant of one’s own prior thought. This is exactly the Observer state if one is focused only on the thinking dimension, but instead of thinking out of the box, folks ought to consider getting out of the box called thinking. There is also intuition, perception, and emotion to be cognizant of within oneself. The Observer state then is to be aware of all of this stuff that is going on within, without losing observant attention to the apparently-outside world. So in the end it is all about attention.

Brilliant psychological work has been done by Piaget in recognizing the high abstract level of thinking he dubbed the Formal Operational Level. In my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, I suggest that as a race we reached this level for the first time when cave paintings and then written language appeared, which happened only very recently in our embryonic species career. This triggered such acceleration in information input to each of us that we mostly operate below the Piagetian level due to distraction. More recently other brilliant psychologists and researchers have named a new even-higher level of thinking called Systems Thinking; however, one is still locked into the trap of acting as if thinking is the whole of the self. Flow state and even Observer state require that one is in one’s body feeling the emotions, receiving the perceptions, and attuned to the subtle guidance system of the intuition. In fact the intuition is the most valuable platform in terms of Systems Thinking, where the more precise term might be Systems Perception.

Within the sphere of the emotions there is a crucial dimension called motivation. Here the leading psychological minds of the twentieth century include Maslow and Erikson, each of whom offers a specific set of levels the individual passes through on the ladder to the highest states of consciousness. At Maslow’s highest stage, one is motivated by morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts. This is a very good description of the Observer state, and the spontaneity part of it is suggestive of the Flow state.

In fact it is the lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts that best characterizes the Observer state among Maslow’s list of terms. Below the Observer state one is operating through a distortion lens caused by wounds one has received and habitual defensive patterns one has robotically adopted to cope with these wounds.

Wrestling the angel in transcending the wounded ego self, which is the true/higher inner jihad, one learns the traps one’s opponent (the ego) gets one into, and the escapes by which one extricates one’s higher true self. Incoming gets autoclassified by the ego self and this autotriggers certain reactions —look for these reactions and let them float downstream, disidentifying with and annihilating them. This keeps or gets one into the Observer state, the launch pad from which Flow can occur. Emotional reactions to be on guard against are: anger, negative judgment, unease/fear, envy, and irritation/impatience.

These emotional reactions are signs of the nonacceptance of fact, and the existence of prejudice in oneself. One is projecting a subjective expectation rather than observing objectively. This reduces one’s problem-solving ability, bringing one down below the Formal Operational Level.

Woodstock Roundtable host Doug Grunther, himself a psychologist and dream therapist who has interviewed many deep thinkers, commented in a recent radio interview with me that “higher” states of consciousness ought to really be called “deeper” states of consciousness, because these states come from deep down within oneself. I would agree and add that they come from deep down within the One Self too. So in what sense are they “higher”?

The stated purpose of my nonprofit Human Effectiveness Institute is the improvement of decision making. Our objective in understanding psychotechnology and getting more people into Observer and Flow states more often is so that we can run ourselves and the world better, be more competent, more effective, more creative. “Deeper” may be more descriptive and explanatory, but “higher” illustrates the rise from lower dysfunctional levels.

Takeaway: notice and nullify the prejudicial instant reactions of anger, negative judgment, unease/fear, envy, and irritation/impatience. Accept the facts and get on with finding creative and effective solutions. This will bring more pleasure to you and yours, and radiate outward as positive energy to the ends of the universe.

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.

What Is the Meaning of Life?

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Volume 3, Issue 36

When I was younger, I would ask this question whenever anyone, even a tour guide in a museum, asked me if I had any more questions.

Internally, it’s the question I asked myself multiple times a day all my life until I felt sure of the answer, which occurred sometime in my 30s.

The underlying question is “What is the meaning of ‘meaning’ in this context?” The intent of the question is to understand what life is, what its purpose is (if any), what the universe is, what its purpose is (if any), why we are here, who we are, how we are to behave, what our relation is to one another, is there a God, and why are we compelled to consider any of this relevant/meaningful to our second-to-second management of our personal business of existence. In other words, it’s a packed — if not loaded — question.

The alternative to asking and answering this question to one’s own satisfaction is either to go about life happily without caring about the question (which could be a Zen-like answer in itself, essentially filing the question away into the “Overthinking” file), or to consider life meaningless, which many existentialists did in the last century.

Other than an intuition I had at age 12 that I am God and so is everyone else, which I tucked away as an interesting but unexplained aberration, the meaninglessness of life was my own position for the first 30-odd years of life. Around age 20, as I studied philosophy, I put reasoning around this intuition, deciding that one took positions such as this based solely on aesthetic preference, since knowability of the answer to What Is the Meaning of Life? was apparently out of scope.

In my 30s I had some unusual experiences that also reminded me of similar experiences in my childhood, at which point I felt as I do now — a very strong conviction that I actually know the answer.

As I see it, all that exists is a single consciousness of such great computing power as to know everything that goes on within itself instantaneously at all times (metaphorically speaking since God or the One Self is above time). Depriving its temporary offshoots of this omniscience it plays our roles with more drama and excitement. The meaning of life therefore is to realize and enjoy this game as our true Original Self does, and thereby re-merge into the Original Consciousness.

However, the question is complex and so is the answer. If we obsess about this question as our purpose we automatically miss the point, since obsessing about anything blocks us from higher states of consciousness. This goes back to our earlier point about Overthinking. In the context of this planet at this time, the prefrontal cortex is a new toy that obsesses us, causing overthinking and underuse of the other three Jungian functions of consciousness, namely intuition, feelings, and perception.

In my new book You Are The Universe: Imagine That, I conjecture that the One Self enjoys seven aspects of existence: simply being, pleasure, power, love, creativity, making oneself better, and selfless service. Playing our role down here amidst the vast distraction caused by the Overthinking Culture’s pandemic shock reaction, which I call Acceleritis, each of these over-loved good things becomes an obsessive attachment and blocks the subsequent level of consciousness. Maslow partly perceived this in his Hierarchy of Needs model.

From a practical standpoint, life becomes most meaningful for us to the extent that we realize our own unique gifts, we love doing the things propelled by those talents, we develop a life plan around sharing these things with the rest of us, and then we go forward with that plan without being attached to the outcome.

Thus we have a Purpose, a Mission, which satisfies the thinking mind as to our own meaningfulness. Again this can get in the way of higher states of consciousness (merging back by stages with the Original Self) if it becomes an attachment to certain “success” outcomes. In a recent bookstore talk, I reported that although I go into meetings with awareness of my preferred outcomes, I discard those at the last minute and go with the meeting flow from the standpoint of simply trying to help out everyone else in the meeting as best I can. Pragmatically and empirically, this appears to work best in balancing out the complexities of life.

So “What is the meaning of Life?” Enjoying it, loving it, loving all, and helping others to do the same.

“The greatest thing
You’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return.”

— “Nature Boy”, by Nat King Cole

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.