Tag Archives: Emergency Oversimplification Procedure

How to Tune the Mind

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Volume 2, Issue 34

In my theory of Holosentience, neuron clusters are formed by experiences both assimilated and non-assimilated. The non-assimilated experiences generate cascades of ego-protective distortions in the perceptual/feeling lens of consciousness. The energy in this endless waterfall of Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (where reality distortion becomes the feedback control loop to maintain self-comfort) draws so much attention to this locus that it is able to masquerade as the self and take over completely.

In that mode the true observer self is ignored and ignores itself, because it is swept into identification with the robotic self as a result of the process described above.

When the observer wakes up we call it Observer state.

The power of self-deception is so strong for two main reasons:

  1. The perceptual aspect of consciousness, which includes the inner perceptions we call feelings (sometimes conflated with emotions, the actual physical correlates of feelings that exist in the phenomenological or experiential realm of consciousness). Feelings are very strong because of their physical correlates; in effect, the machine injects itself with powerful serums not unlike sodium pentathol in their hypnotic effects.
  1. The neuron clusters are living tissue in the physical brain so they have a self-protective urge of their own at the cellular programming level i.e. the operating system of the cell. They act so as to self-sustain. When they speak in the senate of the mind, each cluster grabs the mike and says something while the observer is being further hypnotized by a jack-up needle directly into the bloodstream that hits the brain quickly, so the observer tends to assume “I am the one speaking to myself”. In fact the observer is being offered different viewpoints by different clusters and the observer is in the least biased position to synthesize wisdom from the many viewpoints.

The other night I was sitting on a plane coming back from San Francisco. Window not aisle seat so not my favorite position. Laptop battery spent, no interest in TV or in the two books or notes in my backpack. Not sleepy. Not disposed to strike up conversation. Having just written something before shutting down, I was in Observer state and noted the different selves that were being offered to me to be at that time. There was the grumbly bored character who wanted me to put him on and wear him like a heavy mantle, and there was another one who was pleased with everything. I tuned to the pleased character.

The bored persona would sneak in from time to time and each time it would take active remembering of the whole process to reset back into the pleased persona. After a few iterations of this, the pleased persona settled in and did not need any further work to maintain its turf.

The older couple next to me were now reading The New York Times and having an intelligent conversation. Right in front of me a very small boy peeked through the seats at me and smiled. There was something mildly interesting happening on each of the three TV screens in front of us, and on the other TV screens I could see between the seats in near forward rows there was mildly interesting material there too. There was nothing wrong with sitting here and taking it all in. I remained in that state simply observing for a few hours and was not bored nor feeling guilty about not working. Not working being unusual, except when I am with my lovely Lalita.

Remembering the observer self and tuning among the debating voices in the senate of your mind without instantly caving to the drugs they are giving you — therein is the path of the hero and heroine. The size of the prize is Flow state when the observer is optimizing.

Through this pebble-tossing mechanism called our blog, we seek to share techniques and ideas that have worked for us. Simply, when more of the population is acting from the Observer state, the human world will fix itself. We are on the rising curve, let’s enjoy every second of the playing out of this movie.

Best to all,

Bill

Being Amused by the Accelereality Comedy of Errors

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Volume 2, Issue 12

Have you experienced being in a meeting where someone shoots down your idea dismissively and then presents a longwindedly crude expression of the same idea, without seeing that it is the same idea?

Have you pitched something to a company that is so clearly what they need, and then have them take a pass based on the strength of frozen ritual processes that no one believes can ever be changed?

Impossibility thinking, dream state management, “Earth must be God’s sitcom channel”, and other amusingly cynical thoughts pass through my head as I encounter these events daily. Still, I remain ever hopeful that in time the race will learn to use its prefrontal cortex, and see how the psychotechnology techniques such as those of the Human Effectiveness Institute do push back against the tide of information overload, i.e. Acceleritis, which causes the pandemic EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure) exhibited in these funny behaviors.

It’s healthy and pragmatically useful to take these things as amusing rather than become frustrated by them since that negative emotion brings us down to the EOP level. If Observer state and Flow state are the objective and the answer, then the sense of humor is a major ally in the game. Humor and perspective are closely related, which is why comedians are actually philosopher/poets who express profound truths in an artistic and therefore pleasantly diverting form that cleanses the emotions of negativity or sublimates the negativity to a less harmful species of it.

The prefrontal cortex is a radical evolution. Once it was empowered by seeable (written) language starting about 6000 years ago — a mere eyeblink in human history — this triggered an acceleration process that manifests as a fall from grace, a submersion in self-dwarfing pettyism, a loss of the sense of connectedness to divinity and our numinous birthright. Acceleritis as we call it. Written 2190-2070 BC, much earlier in the accelerating information overload period we are still living in, the Lamentations of Ipou-our recall the spiritual culture that Egypt had already lost by that time.

Prior to the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the Nag Hammadi library was found in Upper Egypt in 1945. Whereas the Dead Sea Scrolls appear to be early drafts of the Old Testament, the Nag Hammadi scrolls contain what appear to be early drafts of the New Testament. One muses that the wars perennially fought over the Holy Land might have something to do with the findings of these materials — which cast such revealing light on our early Western spiritual beginnings. Not exactly a grail, the scrolls near Nag Hammadi were found in a large jar. The aspect I find particularly interesting about them is the many writers who groped to explain why, if there is God, the world has gone so wrong. These explanations are all variations on a theme of error-ridden/evil early offspring of the original Spirit creator, bad demiurge gods/archons aka the Devil. The early Christian church edited out these heresies (while retaining Satan) probably wisely as they are so negative and paranoia inducing. Also, the far simpler and perhaps more logical explanation is information overload and the time it takes for information-processing beings to learn to manage their own internal resources after such a powerful mutation (evolution of the prefrontal cortex) and its cascading effects.

The most important work each of us does is the work we do on ourselves, which the Human Effectiveness Institute calls psychotechnology — the broader field containing Buddhism, psychoanalysis, Zen, and a host of other specific methodologies springing up in different regions of the world. Psychotechnology is what propels us out of the Acceleritis-driven EOP state. Many of us, with the coming of maturity, reach a permanent equilibrium in the Observer state that allows us to laugh at ourselves and to appreciate the humor in the challenging, maddening conditions of our historical period. Jews call this being a mensch. This is definitely a hopeful sign, of which many abound all around us. Perhaps in a millennium or two, we will emerge from Acceleritis on a global basis — or maybe we are even closer. What can we do to (at least begin to) make it happen in our own time?

Best to all,

Bill

Go for Flow in Your Métier First

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Volume 2, Issue 7

Valuable lessons from two great scientists — one of the mind, the other of marketing

The Human Effectiveness Institute defines Flow as the state of autotelic perfect action. It is a brain/mind state where all parts of you are in synch, and is now popularly known as the Zone. “Autotelic” means you are doing the action for its own sake, not for its outcome, and it feels to you as if it is doing itself, because you are going with the flow (“automaticity”). This however is different from your robotic Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) state where you run off at the mouth, for example, without all your mental/intuitive gears meshing and thus you constantly undo yourself.

A subtle state indeed. Most people can remember having at least one experience of being in the Zone, but are not quick to agree that one can learn to spend more time in Flow. Most people consider it something accessible to top athletes, musicians, artists and other performers, but to no one else. The Institute’s mission is to change that perception.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, former Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, coined the term “Flow” and has written the definitive books about the phenomenon. His theories were developed while working to successfully improve the performance of the school’s lacrosse team. He created the accompanying schematic,

presented a few years back at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, which shows that you are not going to get into Flow unless you are doing something in which you are already highly skilled. Flow happens when high skill and high challenge meet.

This means that to truly train yourself to attain Flow more often, you need to practice it within your own personal métier — the thing you do best.

For those of my readers who work somewhere in the broad field of marketing, I recommend Al Achenbaum’s new book. This will be a way for you to practice your skills at an even higher level, by absorbing the 1500 pages of lessons that must be the single most valuable treasure trove of marketing learning in existence, given where Al has been and what he has accomplished.

When I was a rookie at Grey, Al and his estimable right hand at the time (another luminary, Russ Haley) were moving the industry away from sole reliance on judging the value of an ad based on its memorability. They introduced the difficult new concept of attitude shift into a field that at the time was as auteur-dominated by creatives as Hollywood, and therefore just as hard to present science to. Yet they succeeded, with help from FCB’s Frank Gromer and his Study of Brand XL, which established that attitude shifts actually preceded buying changes (the only extant copy I know of is the one I donated to Ed Papazian’s library).

Back in those days Grey had assembled a brain trust of Al Achenbaum, Russ Haley, and Betty Coumbe on the research side, and on the media side Hal Miller, Larry Deckinger, Howard Kamin, Helen Johnston, and Norm Hecht — and me at the bottom of the food chain. These incredible mentors encouraged me to roam the halls at 5AM reading from all the unlocked files on the 11th floor at 445 Park — like a monk in the Alexandrine Library. This is how I absorbed Al’s teaching, as well as that of other luminaries. Plus Hal had his personal training program for two lucky pups, one of whom was me.

Al’s book is called (“and may I say, not in a shy way”*) Marketing Lessons From a Living Legend and is available from BarnesandNoble.com on their eBook platform, the Nook. Al is truly one of the all-time original Mad Men and he will help your quest for Flow even if you’re not in marketing but have an interest in how scientists have improved that art.

Best to all,

Bill

*From the song “I Did It My Way”.

You Are a World Changer

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Start activating change where you are now

What’s my evidence that you’re a world changer? You read my stuff. That’s my evidence.

I get an interesting if fuzzy picture of who reads this blog from the people who thank me for it. And from some indirect measures, such as how rarely people leave public comments, instead emailing me; what does this tell us: private types who read in this blog information that is also kind of private. It’s about the inner life. Inner, not outer, means that it isn’t something people talk about. If they’re going to talk to me about it, they don’t want to do it publicly.

Aristotle considered the inner life the most important thing to Humanity. If he saw what Acceleritis has done to shrink the inner life down to the smallest part of one’s existence, he would become depressed.

But somehow in my readers that inner life is strong. Why else read about it?

Another indirect measure is how I picked the list I started with when I launched this blog. Out of some 8000+ people in the contact list I culled about 1600 whom I see as game-changing people. People who have already visibly changed the industries I touch. People I resonate with because they too are on another plane, looking in at life from angles that are open to change every instant, to triangulate all the hidden corners. This is what the Flow State is like. People like us who flash through the Flow State spend a lot of time getting back there from the lower states that capture us, usually through distraction and attachment coming at us both at once. One of the universe’s trickier sparring partner moves.

So, given that you’re a world changer, what to do about it? It’s not as if you haven’t been asking yourself this continuously all your life. Therefore my answer may not be new, as you may have already said it yourself. Wherever you are now, whatever job you are doing or trying to get, that’s where to change the world first.

Pretty much the only way to do it anyway. Getting out of your current situation into one that affords you more power to do good is as you know an uphill battle. Where you are is where you are. Change things there. Make it better there.

Then it can roll out as a sphere of integration, all the 3D iron filings working together in harmony around a magnetic intention, a plan, a feedback loop, through moment-to-moment Flow State actions. Get that to work in your company — or even your department — first.

How do you do that?

  1. Start to take notes as if you’re seriously going to do this thing. You are serious.
     
  2. The first notes — all will flow naturally, no need to push, just wait and be ready to jot — will be problem/challenge conditions you’re out to fix. Don’t attach the usual negative emotions — you’re the consultant here, the cure, not part of the bad weather. Just write trigger phrases — a small number of words, often just one or two — that will remind you of a whole train of thought and the feelings and images that go with it.
     
  3. Later make a clean table with the smallest cluster of problems organized to the left and large spaces to the right to fill in approach directions toward the solutions of each challenge cluster. You don’t have to rush to jot down the approaches; just let them come naturally and write them in.
     
  4. When the time is right, contemplate the filled-in table. Be alone and uninterruptible. Critique the solution approaches and note their weaknesses and strengths because this is a springboard to fresh ideation. Add more ideas as they come. Start a new clean table and fill it in with the high points of the new ideas that come to you at this step in the process. Let the old ideas fall away — you can add them back later if merited.
     
  5. While on the private front you are undergoing this process with notes and ideas, in your public self, become unpredictable.

Is that all there is in the way of technique? No, there’s a rich body of technique to convey; the universe — life — is the most complex game ever invented. But that’s enough to start.

What does being unpredictable mean? And why be unpredictable?

Within your organization you have found a certain footing, a certain platform. It is your basis for leverage and it limits your leverage, which is held in place, i.e. limited, by the perceptions others have of you.

If they can predict what you are going to say next, it has limited throw weight. If you’re going to change the world you have to become unpredictable. You have to look past the answer you always give. Include those ideas in what you finally do say, but go to the next level. What other factors are relevant that you could include in your response to a situation?

As you become unpredictable, your perceived biases will stop being your driver, and so people will notice that and think more carefully about what you said. Right now they apply Kentucky Windage to what you say based on what they think your bias is in the situation. Remove the Kentucky Windage factor and you can move people and the world further each day.

Becoming unpredictable is only one principle, which has to be balanced with all the other principles on a situation-by-situation basis. There are no black-and-white rules. Every principle has situations that are exceptions to the rule. You can’t let your company make a wrong move, for example, just because you’re changing your image.

Then, follow your plan, and evolve it with changing circumstances and new information. Don’t get stuck in the first plan. Let it be the plan du jour until there is such solidity to the success trend that you know it’s the right plan.

If the success trend is not there, you have to keep varying the inputs — try new stuff, start the ideation process described above, all over again from scratch.

If you don’t feel the world changing around you within 30 days, email me and let me help. Let’s face it, the world needs changing. We see world-class threats at all levels — military, economic, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, environmental… In my 9-5 life, I see the first solution in 50 years to make companies more profitable — yet it can only in the most brilliantly-led companies make it quickly through the thicket of confusion and lack of communication. This is all due to Acceleritis. Changing the world means tackling Acceleritis. Getting people to think more clearly and to reach the right decisions more quickly, scraping aside the emotional historical perceptual baggage.

This requires releasing people from Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) so they can spend more time in the Observer state, where they can slip through into Flow.

Perhaps you want to change the world in ways that seemingly have nothing to do with changing people’s effectiveness levels, but I submit that your desired change will occur all the more easily if your audience of co-workers is at a higher level.

If they are in EOP, scared to come out of the meeting having lost something, good luck getting the best decisions.

How do you get your colleagues out of EOP? One on one. Take them to lunch or coffee or drinks and just talk — but mostly listen. You’ll find out what they really want and what you have that can help them. You’ll also see how certain of your ideas are not yet covered on some particular flank, which is pivotally helpful. Are you doing enough reconnaissance? Are you doing it in the right spirit — nurturing, guiding, mentoring, listening, being a friend and/or ally?

The number one thing everyone is feeling is fear. One of the biggest fears is that the game is going too fast to keep up effectively. This is a rational fear, because it is true that the game is going too fast. That’s Acceleritis for you.

However it is not rational to hold onto that fear. Fear is an alarm clock, and you turn off the alarm clock once you get its message. Move on from fear to dealing with the challenge slope such as it is. Fear only degrades your performance on that slope. Rationality therefore dictates removing the fear as a preliminary step to functioning at all.

A contemplation for burning out fear is to dwell on it until you hit bottom. Since this doesn’t usually happen overnight, schedule times for this contemplation over the course of days, preferably when you are alone. Visualize the worst possible outcome in the most complete detail possible, actually feel it as if it is happening. When the “so what?” feeling comes over you, you know you have burned out that circuit. If the feared scenario ever happens that way, you won’t seem to care as you simply deal with it, and you will have a great chance of turning the whole thing around just by your state of being in that moment.

You won’t be able to talk to all of your associates about the inner life, as some will not be ready. Follow your intuition. You don’t have to address these subjects directly to communicate the essence of attitude adjustment — people see it in you. Just hanging out and being a friend is more than enough to get the entire process to work perfectly.

You certainly don’t want to become manipulative and try to brainwash people. That’s what got us here. We’re trying to go the other way now.

Ultimately you want everyone to make up their own mind. You just want them to do it in the Flow State.

As we all work together to change the world, one situation at a time.

Best to all,

Bill