Tag Archives: Consciousness

“Your Last Day on Earth” Lens

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Volume 3, Issue 30

Whether we realize it or not, we are always managing our Selves. I’m capitalizing the word “Self” (and variants) for emphasis — to draw attention to the concept of Self, which may be of greater significance than any other concept in any language. To meditate on the Self and to penetrate to a deep understanding of our own Self confers the highest level of consciousness, the greatest happiness, the Zone/Flow state, creativity and peak effectiveness.

Our skill at Self-management varies. Sometimes we are in the Zone, though mostly not. Sometimes we are in a living hell. Whichever way it is, we are always doing it to ourselves. As the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers and Buddhists knew, whatever happens to us is not what makes us unhappy, it is our attitude toward it that makes us unhappy, and the latter can be controlled. Managed. It is a skill, one that can be learned.

As one studies and trains oneself and grows up to become a mensch (“stand-up guy”, “grownup”), it becomes apparent that:

  1. The most important thing to the Self is to know one’s purpose in life, and this gives meaning to life. One’s purpose is closely tied to one’s true work, which one must love or it is not one’s true work, one’s calling. One will not experience much Flow state if one is working at something else. However, I knew a truck driver who experienced Flow by his enjoyment of the travel adventure and camaraderie of the job, so as always in life there are no hard and fast rules.

     

  2. Distraction is the main barrier to Self-realization. Distraction is exacerbated by the Acceleritis-ridden culture we live in, and by attachment to outcomes driven into our psyches by conditioning, fear, and other-directedness. In a distracted state, little things having no bearing on our purpose in life become a big dramatic deal and we cannot think clearly because we keep obsessing over this peripheral stuff. It brings us down, making us weak, dependent, and fearful. We project failure, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We attract to us all the things we are fearful of.

In one of the methods described in our book Mind Magic, one does not “believe” anything, but instead takes an empirical approach to testing different strategies and carefully observing results to prove to oneself what works and what doesn’t. Lenses are used as trial strategies, that is, one temporarily adopts a lens or way of looking at things to see if this way gets one into the Zone more often, or not.

Here’s a lens for today: look at your life as if right now, today, it is your last day on Earth. This lens keeps you focused on what you are here to accomplish in this life — on meaning and purpose, and not on the little dramas that usually take all our attention.

In one’s last day on Earth, how you do things becomes the most important thing. Every little thing you do is done with quality. You are in the moment, present, with every person you interact with. You let out the hero inside. You exemplify grace under pressure, Hemingway’s and Churchill’s definition of courage. Churchill said that courage is the key virtue because all the others stem from it.

You find that the usual distracting dramas melt down in perspective to what they are, no big tzimmis.

By this lens one stays focused on the true priorities.

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. 

Positive Thinking and Mindfulness Merged Method

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Volume 3, Issue 27

In my theory of everything, we are all one Self. The consciousness of the universe is a single processor so intelligent it can pay attention while looking out through all our eyes at once.

Whether or not my theory is right, it has certain benefits as a working hypothesis, or lens. Maybe it’s a useful fiction.

I say this because when you look at things this way, it’s much easier to turn off negative feelings and turn on positive thinking. Most negative feelings involve other people in some way. Whether you experience the negative feelings toward yourself or toward them, it is not a solution-oriented use of your energy. The situation just sits there, with you feeling bad.

Let’s take a case where the negative feelings are directed at someone else. Someone frustrates you, let’s say. Makes you mad because you have a great idea and they are blocking it. For most of my life this evoked some inner dialog along the lines of mental name-calling, becoming very colorful during teenage years and increasingly inventive over time. I must say I enjoyed such inner venting but it wasn’t very useful in the consensus reality.

If your mindset is that we are all one Being, as soon as you have a negative feeling about someone else, it sort of turns itself off. Or at least that’s what happens after years of going through a process of slowly realizing, each time such a negative feeling arises, that if we are all one Being there is hardly an iota of utility in being mad at another part of your Self.

So nowadays for me the mad happens then fades. I go on to the next logical step which is figuring out what actions to take to move closer to the goal. Creativity flows effortlessly once there are no blocks such as negativity.

This approach to conflict resolution tends to see all parties as having energies to contribute, and finds solutions where all instruments harmonize in the orchestra. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a company or any team that employs this lens.

Now the other case is where you experience negative feelings but they are directed at yourself. You are beating yourself up over something. Again this doesn’t really get you anywhere. Except negativity has utility to the lower self, the ego, which likes negativity because it helps to rationalize behaviors you’d otherwise block with your self-discipline. Such as letting yourself have another drink, smoke, fattening food, or whatever else you do when you rationalize indulging yourself. Negativity as a context is effective in lowering your own internal self-discipline so as to allow self-indulgence, which is a powerful self-defeating factor.

If you’ve got this One-Being lens, you can’t sustain anger at yourself, since that means you’re mad at the ruler of the universe, which seems unwise. He/She living through you is the one that goofed up. Although omniscient in composite, the shard coming through you is still learning and while doing its best, goofed up. What to do to win now is the point to be focused on, not wasting time with unsophisticated self-flagellation about the past even if it is the immediate past.

So, while I can’t currently offer proof that my theory depicts the true nature of reality, wearing the lens as an experiment appears to have tangible and verifiable benefits.

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. 

A Method of Increasing Luck, and the Sweetness of Life

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Volume 3, Issue 22

One rainy day I was driving a little too fast plus the cruise control was on. I got onto I-84 East and as I reached the highway itself I must have hit an oily patch for the next thing I knew I was going backwards Eastbound, staring straight at Eastbound traffic bearing down on me at high speed — a truck passing a car, both coming right at me with many cars and trucks behind them.

Reflexively I righted the car and pulled off on the grassy median just as the honking truck and cars rushed past, missing me. A car pulled off and drove up alongside to see if I was all right. He said he was a Navy fighter pilot and complimented me on my reflexes, then drove off while I sat for a minute breathing.

I bet you know what I was feeling because we have all felt it at one time or another — grateful for being alive. Life was suddenly so sweet. Every second was precious. The average workday that lay ahead was an exciting prospect filled with interesting possibilities. The rain hitting the windshield was beautiful and I could see rainbows in each drop. The air tasted delicious.

Authentic gratitude is a very healthy emotion that I am sure increases immune response and is conducive to Flow state. As I grow older and hopefully wiser I find myself more often being grateful simply for this life, for life itself and especially for the interesting and fun life I have had so far. But any life is better than the alternative of never having existed. Even a life of pain is more interesting than eternal unconsciousness, never having a sense of self, never having even one experience.

As long as one is alive, there is the chance to fix or accept anything that is disturbing. That’s what creativity is for. Troubles can be overcome in a flash of inspiration. Life is filled with endless possibilities.

Over time I’ve noted that during periods of gratitude my luck runs high. This in itself is not conclusive proof of a conscious universe nor that having a gratitudinous relationship with the Overconsciousness pays off in being given more, a basic tenet of Kabbalah, but it is suggestive evidence that the idea deserves more serious attention.

By luck I mean opportunities for feeling love, deeply personal good things happening involving other people. I doubt that a good experiment could be set up in Vegas where variations in gratitude attitude could be related to winning money. Recently I was playing games of chance with my granddaughter who was trouncing me game after game, getting fabulous hands while mine were terrible, yet all through it I was feeling very grateful for the time together. So luck and gratitude are not linked in the sphere of winning at games of chance, but I continue to observe that they are linked in winning at the game of life.

If you’re going on vacation soon, when you’re on a beach chair staring at the ocean or at a lake or sitting by a stream or at any quiet moment, it will be easy to get in touch with the gratitude you have within you. It’s always there, like a carrier wave on which there are overlays of more temporary modulations of feeling in reaction to the event stream. You’ll detect the experiential neural pathways that will make it possible for you to always contact your gratitude no matter what is happening, especially when you are angry or depressed — this refocus on basic gratitude for living gives you immense power to supervene over any negative emotion. Finding that switch inside that you can use at any moment will give you great strength. Use it well and enjoy yourself. Joy is the most likely reason The One Consciousness is doing all this and expressing itself as you and me.

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.

Applying Game Theory to the Largest Questions

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Volume 3, Issue 21

Recently a great friend sent me this link and these questions:

http://nyti.ms/12a3BJz

NY Times: A Quantum of Solace

Is time an illusion? Is there a universe, or multiverse? Finite or infinite? Will we ever know, and does it matter?

All of these are interesting questions. Let’s however focus on the last one — does it matter?

It matters because one’s view of the universe shapes one’s thoughts, feelings and actions.

If one is betting there is a multiverse and that individuals tune into certain branches and experience different lives as universes branch off into variations on themselves, one is always careful to tune one’s mind to the universe one wants to be living in. Such a person probably would have not built a bomb shelter following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because that degree of concentration on the universe in which the missiles would come could switch one into that branch, which — if multiverse theory is accurate — probably really exists having branched off back in the 60s.

If one is betting there is a single universe that happened by accident, such a person might have built that bomb shelter. If the person is wrong and it’s a multiverse, despite being wrong that person would be lucky enough to be living in this branch in which WWIII did not happen in the 20th century.

We are not saying one is right and the other is wrong — merely that there are reasons why it does matter which view of reality one is betting on. Because our view influences our decisions, implying that all of us should spend at least a little time reaching one’s own position on the largest questions — something that Aristotle advised a long time ago.

If one is truly betting there is a God that is benevolent and likes Good acts, one is more likely to perform those even at self-sacrifice. If one is betting that life is a free-for-all then one is more likely to take care of number one first.

Given the pragmatic importance of a view of reality, it is amazing how little conversation there is about the nature of reality, and how infrequently there are articles like the one in The New York Times that started this post. 

If one has no proof one way or the other about the nature of reality, what are the implications for optimal action and decision making?

Game theory dictates that one should adopt the position offering the greatest chance of success regardless of what reality turns out to be. In other words, if one had an optimizer running in one’s head, there would be a spreadsheet for every contemplated action in which the columns were the alternative possible natures of reality — Benevolent God, Accidental Materialism, One Self Living Many Lives at Once, Two Gods One Good One Evil, We Are All Gods in a Free-for-All, etc. The rows would be the alternative actions one could take in a given situation. Each cell in the table would contain a best guess about how well each action would fare in each type of universe. Calculations done instantaneously on the table would indicate the action with the greatest chances of serving one’s true long-term goals the best regardless of which type of universe we are living in.

This seems pretty far-fetched. Not only have people given up thinking about the largest questions, they have even given up self-observational/critical thinking about their own true long-term goals. This is the nature of the I Have No Time Culture.

Nevertheless it is probable that in the “gut” — the part of the intuition that manifests through the basal ganglia and holds a record of what has worked and not worked for us in the past (see last post) — something very similar to such a table is operating to provide realtime optimal recommendations in the way of gut feel.

Game theory in this case points to not foreclosing on any possible nature of reality. This puts the individual in the strongest position to be able to attune to intuitions, read minds or thought currents, and sense the future, because if one takes the more common assumption of Accidental Materialism (essentially a believed religion like any other), one tends to be shut off from the openness to having these useful experiences.

Now briefly to the other questions my friend posed:

Is time an illusion? I am betting that to the One Consciousness of which we are parts, everything is one instant, and the smaller minds of the slivers (us) have to break the whole down into a sequence in order to delectate it without being overwhelmed. That sequence is time.

Is there a universe, or multiverse? My bet: multiverse — otherwise one is assuming that we are naturally able to sense the entire universe through our instruments and senses — which seems to me to be just one more unwarranted assumption. Any processor capable of launching and sustaining the ornate universe we see is so awesomely powerful in terms of bits per second and other such objective information theory metrics that it is unreasonable to assume limits.

Finite or infinite? I’m with Heinlein on this — whatever is, must be finite, but a very large number so large that it might as well be infinity. Why “must” whatever “is” be “finite”? By definition of the word “is”. My definition is that something “is” if it is perceived by any consciousness. A consciousness alone in its own universe, since it perceives itself, is. A tree that falls in a forest in my view is, because the tree itself is conscious. So is a rock. Being made out of consciousness, everything must have some form of consciousness, no matter how rudimentary. We see evidence of “rudimentary”  or “essential” consciousness in the victims of dementia for example.

Will we ever know?

If your consciousness survives death, there will be a vast increase in your own certainty and knowledge as to which universe descriptions have to be taken off the table. However, those left behind will still be in the dark until they leave this life.

Or is that necessarily the case? Some individuals have unexplainable experiences of contacting the consciousness above, and this convinces them of the existence of an Overconsciousness. Often these are infused with the symbols of a specific religion and as a set these are called “religious experiences”. Others characterize people who have these experiences as having flipped their wigs. This is part of the reason why people don’t talk much about the largest questions any more.

That’s OK with me, I would just hope that people think to themselves about the largest questions some more. Returning to where we began, it matters because one’s view of the universe shapes one’s thoughts, feelings and actions.

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.