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. 

What Is Death?

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Volume 3, Issue 35

A great man passed away the other day. Joseph Lambert served his country in Vietnam, never flinching from the dirtiest jobs to protect others from having to do them. It was possibly the latent effects of Agent Orange in which he was once hip deep that ultimately took him. 

Unbeknownst of this loss to mankind, I was in a magical apple orchard in upstate New York watching my granddaughter Gabrielle pick apples, red and gold. A small deer looked at us and ballet’d from the glade. Shifting, slanting spotlights played from the skies through the autumn colors. Gabrielle’s mood changed abruptly seeing the foreleg of a small deer lying in the leaves.

Sex and death: Woody Allen’s favorite themes. We know what sex is, but do we really know what death is?

 Delivering a eulogy at my father’s death years ago I said “We come into this world, we know not from where; we leave, and we really know not to where we go. Science tells us that the universe conserves matter and energy, neither can ever be destroyed. If Nature conserves these things, would she not also conserve something much more valuable — consciousness?”

Since humankind has wondered, there have been two schools of thought about the nature of reality. Accidental Materialists, may be the dominant group today, if not in what people say then certainly in the way they act. This group believes that matter is the primary substance of the universe, and that the universe is an accident, and so is life, consciousness, and love. For about a hundred years until the second half of the 20th century, Western psychology believed that consciousness was an epiphenomenon, that the decisions we think we are making are just rationalizations of the actions we took driven by electrochemical and mechanical causes.

The other group, which in Plato’s time were called Idealists, believes that consciousness is the primary substance of the universe, and matter/energy are representations which exist within consciousness. This position is actually more defensible from an empirical epistemological viewpoint. Since all we truly know exists is consciousness, because it is the only phenomenon we perceive directly, the rest is coming through consciousness to us. In this worldview the universe is not an accident, has always existed, and the Big Bang is a recent local event in a larger picture.

From unusual direct experiences I have had all my life, my conviction is that there is only one Self, and everything in the universe is that Self having fun. However in some of Its manifestations, due to self-misidentification by the local self, that fun is perceived by the local self as suffering.

If I’m right, there is no death. At the end of a song, one might say that the music dies, and yet that song may be sung again and again after that never to be sung exactly the same way.

The local self may then awake in a new place, with the potential to remember the prior place, and to string it all together. If the Original Self as consciousness might be subject to information theory and thus behave the way software does, these avatars could each re-evolve over a series of lives the needed computing power to again inhabit fully the Original Self as a new personality aspect. I develop this idea in more detail in my soon to be released new book You Are the Universe: Imagine That.   

If through unusual experiences one can gain realization of the self as being the One Self, the fear of death evaporates and the way one lives one’s life undergoes a profound change. Attachment to trivia falls away and in living the moment, Flow state (the Zone) becomes one’s natural state.

Joseph
O Nobly Born
Thou art embarked upon the great journey
Once again back in the arms of thy Self
Aiming always toward the Light
You whose great Light hath always shined
Love giver to all you perceive
Constant steady in your saintly support of the All in Each
You are Home.

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. I’ll be reading from and signing the latest edition of my book MIND MAGIC at the Golden Notebook Bookstore in Woodstock, NY on Sunday, October 20 between 2 and 3 PM. Please stop by if you are in the area.

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. 

U.S. Shutdown and Showing the World What We Are Made Of

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Volume 3, Issue 34

Although there have been 17 shutdowns since 1977, this is only the second time in our history that Congress has threatened not to raise the debt ceiling, which would result in a potential default or at least slowdown on paying U.S. debts and could occur as soon as October 17. We all know what happened when Congress came to the edge of this cliff in 2011 — Standard & Poor’s lowered the perfect AAA rating enjoyed by the U.S. since such ratings have been in place — and the stock market took a significant hit (down 20% in the following months).

And that was without going over the cliff — markets reacted to the uncertainty created by a dysfunctional Congress in bringing the U.S. up to that edge.

Yes, we need to get our fiscal house in order, but threatening the full faith and credit of the U.S. is not the way to do it.

That said, something is telling us to balance our budget now, get creative about finding ways to be more efficient. The handwriting on the wall is saying it’s finally time to stop kicking the can down the road.

Meanwhile the first manifestation of our leadership is not to get creative and solution- oriented, but to continue the finger pointing. This just wastes time during an emergency, which seems practically a treasonable offense.

Too bad Congress keeps getting paid while other Federal workers are laid off. The surest way to concentrate their minds on solutions would be to embargo their pay. However, there is no time to consider options that would take too much time to activate; it is a time to be pragmatic about what can realistically be done quickly. Making Congress more accountable is something that should be tackled long range, not now.

This is the kind of challenge that can bring out the best in people. First they have to get past the anger and blame, the natural first reactions. Those with the right stuff will get past those predictable but useless reactions the fastest. And on to solution thinking and creativity. Not just passionate speeches.

Creativity in government is almost an oxymoron. Old ideas are hauled back out again whenever any challenge arises. The print/digital newsweeklies bring to light more creative ideas about what governments can do than government leaders themselves offer, despite hardworking staffs generating some creativity that I suspect runs into walls.

Scenarios that we would like to see, things each of us can do right now to help out in this crisis:

  1. Citizens write to advise each of their representatives that they will not get another vote unless they stop the blame game and start leading with creative solutions. (My great friend and lifelong mentor Norm Hecht writes: “The founding fathers did not foresee professional politicians. [Tighter] Term limits needed, otherwise giveaways get them elected.”)
  2. Citizens set up a website where people could pledge voluntary donations to the Federal government. (Better yet, a highly-visible news or other organization takes on the job of publicizing and handling the compilation of pledges.) I will pledge an extra $2000/year over taxes until the budget is balanced. I would hope richer folk, corporations and even wealthy nonprofits would pledge donations at many higher orders of magnitude. Maybe some people from other countries would pledge too — America is still an important part of many people’s dream for what the world will be someday. If the donations equate to an average of $1000 for every person in the USA, that would be about $300 billion/year extra revenue to help the turnaround happen faster. I’m sure most of us remember the climax of the great Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” where the townsfolk appear out of nowhere with money that had been stuffed in their mattresses to bail out Jimmy Stewart’s hometown bank.
  3. The U.S. does not accept volunteers working without pay because of the potential liability that these people will demand later to be paid for the work they did. This policy should be changed using release forms as the mechanism to remove that liability issue. People who can’t afford to pledge money could pledge their time if they can.
  4. Since a large part of the shutdown is the Republican desire to thwart Obamacare, doctors and other health care professionals who have new health care ideas should step forward and speak up publicly, offering their recommendations for improving the existing Obama law. This could contribute to conflict resolution between the parties. Crystal Run Healthcare in Middletown NY is one example of how doctors are taking the lead in the development of accountable, data-driven, efficient and effective health care. Let’s rechannel the idea of destroying universal health care into refining the plan so that all can support it.
  5. Each department in government should be mandated to write a plan to become more efficient and deliver more for less, and to write this plan in the next week. They need to be given a target e.g. 20% saving, or whatever the economists determine is the needed reduction for year one in order to reach a balanced budget and declining debts by x date. Tax revenues need a shot in the arm too, which realistically can only come from removing tax protections enjoyed only by the people and corporations who need them the least, i.e. by adopting whatever adjustments Warren Buffett might propose. This efficiency activation has been proposed many times before and never implemented except at state and local levels as a result of Federal cuts. But the need has never been as pressing as it is now.
  6. A week later all efficiency plans and voluntary donation pledges should be summed up in the news media, and a government consensus forecast should be issued, showing the year not too far off when the U.S. government is fiscally back on track again, not increasing but paying down debt. Any departments whose plans fail to achieve the targeted percentage will be exposed to criticism, a point which should be made in advance.
  7. Efficiency will probably mean temporarily having higher unemployment as Federal jobs are cut. Plans will be needed for retraining and helping these people find jobs mostly in the private sector, except for urgent infrastructure rebuilds, which can effectively be done by any sector as demonstrated by FDR.
  8. Long-term changes emanating from such a new plan would include using the schools to better prepare individuals to discover the work at which they would excel and be happiest. This would include work-study programs with internships in the summer and at other times during the school year, with the goal of helping people find careers and jobs earlier in life that will make them happier and more successful.
  9. Other long-term implications of the new plan might be to push down many non-military government functions to more local levels where it will be easier to find creative solutions for challenges such as taking people off of Federal welfare rolls by providing local government roles and helping to connect to nongovernment jobs they can usefully perform. This stuff is much easier among neighbors. Plato believed that city-states would lose the ability to manage complexity as soon as the Polis grew to over 1000 people. The degree of built-in inefficiency of trying to manage 300 million people across so many aspects of life demands a more massively parallel approach with distributed tasks rather than centralized ones.
  10. Based on the hopeful soundness of this plan and its wide nonpartisan support, we will have showed the world — and ourselves — once again what we are made of.
  11. With our own confidence restored, we might find it the right move to increase the debt limit slightly right now, but with declining limits over time to ensure that the efficiency plan is followed.
  12. In the context of these positive changes, if it still becomes necessary to delay debt payments slightly, the world should not overreact. The idea of prioritizing certain debts over others has already been criticized by Wall Street as undermining confidence in America forever, and this is the last thing the world needs. The debt ceiling has to be raised, and the only responsible way to do that is with an efficiency plan to turn the whole situation around, a plan that requires the best minds to be heard in an organized and fast process. This should be facilitated by the highest digerati giving up sleep for the next month if necessary to collate all the ideation.

Can something like this be what actually happens?

What is the alternative?

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. I’ll be signing the latest edition of my book MIND MAGIC at the Inquiring Minds Bookstore in New Paltz, NY on Sunday, October 13 between 4 and 5 PM. Please stop by if you are in the area.

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. 

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.