Tag Archives: Acceleritis

What Can Be Done When You Are Experiencing Emotions You Don’t Want?

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Volume 2, Issue 41

Such as when you are unhappy, anxious, scared, feeling guilty, mad at yourself, ashamed, bored, depressed, or not enjoying simply being alive and who you are? Measured against the alternative, just being alive is an amazing opportunity one must logically be grateful for, except perhaps during rare cases such as physical torture.

Nor is the Vulcan alternative really desirable. We do not espouse the strategy of killing off all emotions. Emotions are part of what makes life life. Being a robot and repressing all emotion not only shrinks life it also cuts one off from valuable information that helps optimize actions. Without an operating emotional center one becomes cut off from sensing and deeply grokking the emotions of others. Observer and Flow states become impossible or less likely with a goodly part of the sensorium (psyche, experiential panoply) edited out.

The word “control” has negative connotations, as in “mind control”, which raises specters of brainwashing, hidden persuaders, subliminal advertising, Nazism and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Yet we admire people who exhibit cool self-control when the average person would either fly off the handle, blush, show fear, or surrender to intimidation, so in that sense “control” is not always such a bad thing. In other words, as with most of life, there is always a balance point, a grey scale, where some amount of a thing is “good” (pragmatically valuable), and then too much of it is “bad” (counterproductive). Here we are speaking of being able to mediate, to a degree, the emotions we feel so as to make the whole of us more happy, creative, effective, and successful in the moment. And more likely to be in Observer or Flow.

A general “solution” to the types of negative emotions listed in the first paragraph above relies upon a better understanding of the causes and the phenomena themselves. If we can recall that the brain contains parts such as the limbic system, which can assert and draw energy to themselves, causing chemicals to flood our bodies during moments of unwanted emotion, this realization has the effect of giving us some degree of a more detached perspective. We may then become less stuck, less trapped in and overwhelmed by those feelings.

Many negative emotions are the result of one’s own ego. My Acceleritis theory is that the ego (software in the brain, built from proteins after birth, which is sort of one’s own built-in press agent, politicking with the outside world for a better deal) is made more powerful relative to the rest of our sense of self, by information overload — itself the result of visible language invented only about 300 generations ago, a relative eyeblink in evolutionary time. This is my putative explanation for the excessive competitiveness (e.g. continuous intraspecies war going on somewhere on Earth at all times) that has characterized us as a species since the dawn of written language.

When I feel negative emotions, I go after answering the question: what do I want so badly that I either fear I will not get or am angry that I have not gotten? Then I look inside to see why that thing is so darned important to me emotionally and whether having it is worth these tormented feelings. Typically (now after decades of such practice) I am able to rise above the attachment and negative emotion fairly quickly. What I value (Flow state) is something I would rather have than those other attachments, which when inspected are self-evidently ignoble motivations like wanting praise.

What is life after all? In my view (my Theory of the Conscious Universe) each of us is a microcosmic mask of the One Intelligence, which is all that truly exists. In Flow, one can actually contact that Original Self and feel fully one with it, in which perspective all annoying matters dissipate instantly with no effort whatsoever. One can be happy simply being Bill Harvey or whatever your name happens to be this time round. It’s more than enough just to be alive. This is what I intuit is the original meaning and intent of the Jewish toast “L’Chaim” (“To Life”).

Hoping these thoughts are useful in making your life more continuously blissful,

Bill

Setting the Mood for Conflict Resolution

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Volume 2, Issue 39

With Better Data and Analytics for World Class Solutions

Two posts ago for the first time in this blog’s history, I retracted an idea from the article within 24 hours of its posting. In a quick series of blunt emails a dear friend thoroughly convinced me that even raising the possibility of any form of debt cancellation is a terrible idea.

Why terrible? Because:

  1. Anything that could reduce even an iota of faith in the notion of the United States of America as the most stable country on Earth could panic people. This is not because people are rational, quite the opposite — it is because they are under the sway of Acceleritis, and are operating in mental shortcut Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).But a fact is a fact. Bad idea to bring up. Speak of debt conversion, debt service renegotiation, and especially get the top economists into a creative mood and talk about any other out-of-the- box ideas that they want. Just not the idea of debt cancellation.
     
  2. It plays right into the hands of the current severe polarization between those who hold it to be virtuous that the strong should always protect the weak (we call that the Left) and those who believe this but to a lesser degree, and are most focused on individual independence and freedom including the minimization of laws restricting individual decision making (we call that the Right). Nothing should be done to further exacerbate the hatred that has snuck up on us and suddenly become harsh and rigid on both sides. This is a far worse threat than the fiscal cliff, which is a temporary aberration and will be solved one way or the other so as to minimize suffering, although there will still be plenty of that. Legislators the world around will perform better in making the tough decisions ahead to put the economy of the world back on a firm sustainable footing, to the degree that they start in a creative mood and not in this mood of vendetta that appears to grip at least half of us, enough of us to bring everything to a grinding halt (aka gridlock).

On a world scale, if we cannot balance Severity (the Right) with Mercy (the Left) (these are called Geburah and Chesed in Kabbalah), in the very long run what are the possible scenarios? These two mammoth groups around the world could between them set off the first (and perhaps last) World Civil War. Not based on borders, the Blues everywhere would fight the Reds everywhere. Those in the middle would try to keep peace but that would just make it a three-way civil war once peacekeepers got killed en masse for the first time.

Hitler’s deranged mind wandered over these mental landscapes in somehow believing that killing off the Jews would make the planet work better. The hatred we hear and read today from both sides of the Left/Right debate conjures images of one side launching a war of extermination to wipe out those who think oppositely about the degree to which the strong should protect the weak.

On what basis is there a feeling that the strong should protect the weak? It comes from many sources: intuition, love, kindness, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, noblesse oblige, simpatico, pragmatism, my theory that we are all manifestations of the same single Being, all flavors of the same intuition or instinct for supporting others that we all naturally have except when a person is damaged emotionally during upbringing.

Conflict Resolution processes that worked in Northern Ireland could be imported into the US situation and mass media campaigns could be sponsored by top advertisers, with the Ad Council leading the way with a pro bono campaign.

Fact-based communications must be made to drive out the current meaningless level of babble that passes for debate. New parliamentary rules need to be instituted to eradicate time-wasting sneering language and j’accuse statements that do not move toward solutions with any creative new ideas in them. Every legislator should demand quantification on statements made. Here we are debating how to deal with $120 trillion in unpayable debt, and yet we cannot easily find even with the Internet, a coherent and definitive input-output table of the world economy from which an observer can run simulations, optimizations, do sensitivity testing, and otherwise move toward reducing the decisions that need to be made to mathematics, where optimization can prove exactly what has to be done in order to achieve whichever objective one sets.

For example, in my not-so-productive idea two weeks ago, I wasn’t talking about the US cancelling only its own debts and doing so unilaterally. I was talking about a UN-level group using factual data to brief each country’s negotiators to discuss and advance the common good.

For example, there are loops that could cancel out debt with no injury, such as where someone owes money to himself/herself. One of these loops is that 49% of the total US debt is owed to the Social Security Fund, Federal Reserve, or State and Local Governments. Not sure that these entities all consider themselves one US entity so perhaps these loops don’t change anything.

My point is that in marketing we have tons of data and in general are looking at it and can answer questions and make decisions with it. How could it be that in running the world we are under-using data? Yet it seems to be true. We have to fix this right away. We need to pool efforts to create an open architecture input-output economic model using agent-based modeling i.e. bottom-up not aggregate level. We need to be able to simulate, so there need to be transition probabilities from state to state for each agent, region, and country. All the historic data need to be poured into the model and harmonized. The optimizer must allow the setting of objectives in terms of the weight to give protecting the poor vs. protecting the strong, so that many optimizations with different settings can be run. Then the output actions determined by each optimization run can be fed into the simulator to see how the scenario plays out by time periods, whether an optimized scenario validates or not according to this gauge.

Who is going to do this?

Because the Human Effectiveness Institute’s Mission is to engender Observer and Flow states in as many people as possible everywhere as the most primal, direct and effective means to improve decisionmaking, we are going to continue to focus on this primary mission in this blog. Ideas about fixing the economy shall move out of this blog into the new sister site, The Democracy Channel, to launch here early in 2013. TDC will contain not just my ideas but the ideas of many people. The commentary will be edited to exclude negativity and partisanship as much as possible while letting through all verified factual content, new ideas, and solution suggestions, so that readers can also vote on other people’s solution ideas.

A friend of mine who passed along to me wisdom and moods he had acquired in India, pointed to the greedheads who were holding the world back. It was not consistent with his forgiving mood. He excluded the rich, including top politicians and largest corporations — some of you will recognize this as the 60s. Rachel Carson, Vance Packard, and others had shown some dark side and the present conspiracy theorist culture began to balloon outward into the hinterlands.

When I went into the advertising industry, my friend assumed I was going to try to cure the ills from the inside. That was part of it. The other part was that I was not looking for ills. So far, over the course of decades in the world of large corporations in 34 countries, including their C-level execs, I have yet to find any evidence of evil bad guys. As the sides have drawn apart, they have lost touch as people with one another, they avoid each other’s company, and so they are unable to feel the reassuring inner sensations of “this person is OK” one often gets after getting to know someone even a little. Everyone has reasons that have led them to their own personal convictions. Frontal confrontation with their convictions is obviously the least indicated communications strategy for conflict resolution. If you indulge in demonizing the other side, you are not only wasting time, you are chasing away the Flow state (Zone) which is not going to come over you while you are processing distracting negative emotions. You need to bootstrap yourself into the Observer state where you can edit out insulting catchphrases in discussing solutions with people from the other side of the aisle. Once operating consistently in the Observer state, in a conflict resolution mood of forgiveness, we can, together, bring us all back together again.

Best to all,
Bill

PS — "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. 

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. "
— Charles Darwin*

* Thank you Philip Romero for the Charles Darwin quote.

Extending Stay in Flow State

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Volume 2, Issue 32

Flow state aka the Zone is when you are functioning perfectly without effort. Everything is flowing along as if doing itself and the reaction at large to your performance is ideal.

When you are there, what often happens is that you let out the clutch a little bit too far on the edit rate for your impulses — and out pops an action that fails in the real world and suddenly you are not in the Zone any more.

Anger at self then impulsively arises, ensuring that re-entry to Flow will be impeded.

The way to re-optimize this edit-slackening program is for you to realize that you are going strong so you have naturally started to assume that every arising in your mind is certain to be brilliant and so you should do it right away. Staying stoically unattached to your great performance without letting it go to your head or bring you into a state of overconfidence is a delicate balancing act that should go on as automatic background menschness. This can be aided by a sense of humor and loving distance from your own ego.

All of this head action is optimally executed sans words in the head. To the extent that you hear inner vocalization you might be in Observer state but not Flow. Observer state is the valuable entry state for Flow, characterized by vivid inner attention so you see your ego for what it is and can reprogram your own actions rather than acting robotically — to some extent.

When that lens is operating one can easily slip into the Zone doing something in which one is well practiced, so long as there is no attachment to outcome, and so long as you are doing the thing because you like to do that thing, it’s your thing.

Attachment to other people’s opinions of you can keep you out of both these states, especially Flow. Yet even people with high detachment — fatalists resolved to take whatever comes stoically — give up this attachment last. We are social beings. Death is not as poignant as shame.

The lens of utter detachment can be put on and worn. It doesn’t just sit lightly on your nose, it sinks into your being, you feel it bodily, your breathing is easier, you’re comfortable in your skin, secure, liking your self, the character you play on the stage of life.

This is effortful today. Acceleritis did not exist in Jesus’ day or he might not have gotten to such a high level (leaving aside divinity for the sake of argument).

Every time a challenge to your sense of self arises you need to write it down and come back to it in contemplation until it is solved. You take action items and implement them. Doing this systematically leads to a sense of being secure with who you are. It is essentially the methodological root of stoicism. One cannot muster the strength to embody stoicism (not just being stoic in one’s mind) unless one has worked out the antagonistic voices in one’s head that pull you down. This unglamorously cannot be done without lists. And time alone for contemplation. Blank pads laying around come in handy for drawing automatic situational schematics and jotting trigger words.

Negative outcomes one is desperately trying to avoid can lose their force if one vividly imagines those outcomes actually happening and how one would ideally deal with them. This contemplation of the corpse* burns out fear of dreaded outcomes. In knowing oneself and relative fearlessness, one can act in freedom, whereupon the Flow state is just the natural next stage in the process.

Best to all,

Bill

*Contemplation of “horrible” things is an ancient technique for “burning out” their apparently (but not truly) inherent “horribleness”.

P.S. Have you heard about “Giving Tuesday”? It follows Black Friday and Cyber Monday and is much more uplifting.  On Tuesday, November 27, charities, families, businesses and individuals are coming together to transform the way people think about, talk about and participate in the giving season.

“Join a national celebration of our great tradition of generosity” at http://givingtuesday.org/.

Set Yourself Up To Cultivate “Aha!” Moments

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Being a creative being you are constantly having “Aha!” moments. In the Acceleritis cloud, however, like everyone else you may rarely notice your own “Aha!” moments.

These insights often go by unnoticed simply because they are obvious to you and you have heard them before. However, your subconscious continues to present them to you because some aspect of the insight has still not been fully realized. There is another layer there your subconscious wants you to get.

Give yourself permission to have “Aha!” moments. Give proper inner recognition to “Aha!” moments. Expect these moments to try to sneak by. Jot down even one-word fragments your mind seems to have some reason to offer you. These may be words and/or they may be images, feelings, or a cluster of all of these in a jumble. What do they mean? What action is indicated?

One test of the relevancy of what seems to be an old idea is, if it is so obvious, have you fully acted on it? If not, what is stopping you?

The day starts with dream wisps fast fading. Assume there is an encoded message that some part of you is communicating to some other part of you. Jot down the content in the fewest words that will bring back the original dream. We call these trigger words because they trigger whole thought-streams and/or other memories encapsulated in the most condensed code-words that capture the essence of the meaning the content has for you.

The shower is another place where ideas seem to come to everyone. Perhaps it is the negative ionization created by the water stream evoking a physical brain process. Develop memory discipline to count the number of ideas you have had in the shower and string together the keywords for those ideas into one funny picture. Have paper or electronics or whatever you use to jot notes close by at all times including right outside the shower and next to the bed and in fact wherever you might happen to be.

Clearing the mind is conducive to getting new ideas. A change of scene helps, especially stepping outside into nature and away from the work you have been doing. A sense of goofing off, not working on anything, just taking a break, a mini-vacation, giving yourself permission to just veg out, deeply enjoying just breathing — this often leads to the highest quality ideas of the day.

As the mind tries to continue what it has been obsessed with, gently cut off any words in midstream. The fewer words the more likely the subtlest parts of the self will be able to get an “Aha!” idea in edgewise.

A large sheet of blank paper can evoke automatic writing and/or drawing, e.g. a freeform diagram with trigger-word ideas or entities or processes in balloons connected by arrows or lines to other balloons with trigger words in them.

Meditation with eyes closed either on a chair sitting up straight, or face down on the backs of your hands on the floor stretched out (Sphinx position), just breathing and waiting and listening can summon a Master voice that speaks only deep truth to you, sometimes when you least expect it.

If you give presentations, creative Flow can occur if you prepare and rehearse but then avoid referring to any notes — just have fun with it, and take the tack “I can’t wait to hear what I’ve got to say.”

Just have fun with every moment and everything else will work itself out.

Best to all,

Bill