Tag Archives: Flow State

Upon Enlightenment, One Stays Infinite All of the Time

3 Replies

Originally posted February 2, 2012

Growing up in a Western culture, one hears and reads the phrases, “seeking Enlightenment” and “the path of Enlightenment”, sees movies like Lost Horizon and The Razor’s Edge, and eventually questions whether maybe there is something real going on.

What is this Enlightenment they speak of so often and so seriously in the East, and which comes up in Western discourse more humorously and as part of entertainment fiction? Is it something real that we in the West ought to wake up and discover?

Enlightenment is a stage in a process. Sages in antiquity observed human beings going through a progression during their lives. Enlightenment is the stage most rarely reached, and self-evidently to those reaching that stage, the final stage in the process.

In other words, the idea of Enlightenment is derived from observation, just like the observation of modern science.

All of the earlier stages in the progression end in dissatisfaction, and are characterized by chasing after a different something in each stage. In this final stage of human personal evolution, Enlightenment, there is no longer any chasing and no longer any dissatisfaction.

Modern Western science in fact has rediscovered the progression. Maslow was the first to crystallize thinking in the West about this built-in human pattern, which he expressed as “The Hierarchy of Needs”. One born in extreme poverty for example seeks satisfaction of his/her physiological needs all of the time, until somehow working oneself out of that extreme poverty. When this happens the physiological needs start to get taken care of easily and the individual begins striving for the next needed thing which is safety and security according to Maslow’s model. Stage three is belonging/social/love needs, then self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. As each need becomes more automatically satisfied in a person’s life, the person expands the sphere of wants to include these new areas, in these various stages.

Maslow was aware of the ancient sources, and his five-stage model was his own intuitive and observation-based attempt at a more scientific reintegration of the seven-stage chakra system of ancient India. Yet it is possible the latter original system could be the more precise. We shall come to it in a moment.

More recently than Maslow, SRI International (originally founded by Stanford University as Stanford Research Institute) used a survey and statistical clustering techniques to discern 23 underlying factors driving human behavior, i.e. values. (The study of human values is called axiology.) From further reclustering they developed a scale similar to Maslow’s but with more levels and two ways to get to self-actualization — a Westernized reduction of Enlightenment — at the top.

One recent interpretation of Maslow’s description of self-actualization lists these words: Vitality, Creativity, Self-Sufficiency, Authenticity, Playfulness, Meaningfulness. These are some of the characteristics that in the East would be attached to Enlightenment, but they are not the essence of it.

The essence of Enlightenment is that one no longer strives for anything. It is no longer necessary. One no longer sees any lack, therefore no need for desire. Love is strongly present, and the intuition is working at such a level as to cause ESP/Psi researchers to note statistically significant above-average accuracy rates. The Enlightened being brings a sense of peace wherever he or she goes, affecting others as iron filings around a magnet. Such a being appears to be continuously in great joy, and this is also infectious to those around. These observations have been replicated time and again by scientific/journalistic/scholarly Westerners who have traveled to the East and have seen and met such Enlightened human beings, some of whom are now in America. Some of us have experienced those states but the condition has not become permanent. That is not yet Enlightenment.

The first known system for reaching Enlightenment, embedded in Hinduism — one of the earliest institutionalized schools of thought — has four stages through which an individual passes as he/she evolves personally. Huston Smith in his classic The World’s Religions  describes these four stages as Pleasure, Success, Duty, and the pursuit of Enlightenment. The latter stages may not be reached in a lifetime, and Hinduism allows for the self to come back again and again to complete this course. Huston significantly describes the fourth stage as the attempt to make oneself “superhuman”. Indeed the Enlightenment stage that is sought appears to be a stage above the human both when one is experiencing it — even if for impermanent flashes — and when one is observing it in someone else.

Flow State as we have described here before has its own sub-stages within it, the highest of which corresponds to Enlightenment. All stages of Flow State appear to be super-human when one is experiencing them. In martial arts, one appears to have become invulnerable. In performing arts as well as martial and athletic arts, everything seems to be happening perfectly without any effort on one’s own part. During Flow State, the Universe appears to be favoring you. More than luck, it feels like the fix is in. This has a supernatural, numinous feel to it.

At the highest stage of Flow State, i.e. Enlightenment, one is no longer seeking Enlightenment, service/duty, success, pleasure, or anything else. All of those are finite and would require stepping down from the infinite, from the sense of letting go, having let go, long past trying to control, stopping oneself from the endless flowing with the Universe in a love relationship, that is Enlightenment. And in fact there is no going back, because by definition Enlightenment is when the world can no longer suck you back down into dissatisfaction with some element of it and re-attach you egoistically to striving to save the world, reduce suffering, one of the last of the finite attachments from which one reaches through to the permanent state of Enlightenment.

Back in the day, I had my own interpretation of the natural stages of personal evolution, which I had based on the seven major chakras. This Sanskrit word meaning “wheel” and “turning” refers to seven intuitively perceived organs of a subtle nonphysical body within each of us. Perhaps the Enlightened sages/saints of ancient India, Tibet, China and the rest of the Far East were actually able to see something that really exists, a body of consciousness within our body of matter, and perceive its organs — and perhaps not. In any case, inspired by this model, I conjectured a progression of personal evolution in, naturally, seven stages.

Those seven steps along the way being: Security (physical safety as well as money), Pleasure (including sex), Power (including consensual validation), Love, Creativity, Self-Knowledge, and Service. When I conceived this model I was not thinking clearly about Enlightenment actually being the eighth stage, and I confabulated it with the seventh or Service stage. But as I’ve since found, trying to be of service to the world is not yet Enlightenment. One still gets caught in EOP while in the seventh stage. The ego still brings you down out of Flow State while you are caught up in the drama of trying to make a positive difference in the world.

There are other esoteric traditions in which I perceive ideas similar to those of Hinduism, Maslow, and SRI, i.e. the idea of there being a characteristic sequential pattern of development for human motivations. Although I’ve not read any other student of Kabbalah as making this same interpretation, in studying the Tree Of Life I see a progression as follows:

  1. Until one gets one’s love and work in balance, one does not rise from the mask/persona/personality/projected image to others (“Yesod”) into one’s essence/truth with oneself (“Tif’eret”).
  2. Until one balances severity and mercy, one is not enabled to have flashes of insight/intuition/inspiration coming as if from above or from some hidden wellspring of wisdom (“Da’at”).
  3. Until one balances wisdom (knowing what’s right) with understanding (forgiveness), one’s consciousness will not be able to rise to transparency with the One Consciousness (“Keter”) — aka Enlightenment.

Recall that these ideas going back thousands of years — and still being reinterpreted and reinvented by new minds today — have also been validated by SRI’s field research: surveys reveal the same underlying axiological structures as predicted by Hinduism and Maslow, and possibly by the Jews in Kabbalah. There are people just motivated to survive physically from one day to the next (“Survivors”), and there are Belongers, Achievers, and Self-Actualizers. This is no longer just theory. In the last century science has rediscovered some ancient principles and validated them. Or perhaps re-validated them, since wise people long ago were convinced by the ability to make good verifiable predictions (“science”) regarding the innate progressive nature of human motivation.

As Huston Smith says, for all the harm religions have done, there is also all the good. And he refers to the wisdom wealth of the world that is stored up in religions. In fact, one does not have to be religious to reach Enlightenment, but it may help, if only by gaining contact with good ideas that are more practical and psychological/philosophical than theological.

We may look back and say that Hinduism for example was not a religion after all, but an observation-based science focused on the life of the self. Hinduism also postulates that the Infinite is within each of us, a statement Logical Positivism declared meaningless gibberish but which The Theory of The Conscious Universe re-words in terms of information theory so as to thwart dismissal by Logical Positivism. We may look back and say that Abraham was in an Enlightened flash of Flow State when he heard the One Self and made a covenant with It. In other words, it may all be true. What all religions believe may actually be real, in a way that denies none of the essentials of any religion, but which reflects the simple fact that there is only One Consciousness, and the rest is detail.

When the One Consciousness fully realizes Itself as The One Consciousness, within the life of one of us, that is what Enlightenment is. It is real, and yes, we ought to wake up and discover it.

Wishing you Stay Infinite,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.

Because the Universe Is Conscious, Everything Happens for a Reason that Makes Sense to Consciousness

6 Replies

Originally posted on December 29, 2011.

We suspect this is what Einstein really meant in his famous quote “God does not play dice with the Universe.”

Think about it for a minute. If you’ve been reading these posts you know what I am saying is that the universe is one infinite field of consciousness at play. The One has sent out parts of Itself to separately experience for a time — that’s us. Everything in the universe is made out of The One’s consciousness. And therefore each part itself is conscious, living The One’s experience through that part’s senses — so looking out our eyes is not who we thought was “me” but actually “ME”.

We sense our experience as being separate because there is a memory plug. It is temporary. When the expeditionary self is fit to be taken back into the Selfhood of The One, that part is re-identified by The One as a personality aspect. There is no longer a memory plug, and in the reabsorption the traveler has a sudden flashback to before he/she was the person he/she knows. Now he/she sees all the way back to being The One, and everything else that happened along the way before the plug was activated.

The One Self in this way endlessly bootstraps itself into ever higher levels of wisdom and understanding, always becoming more than Itself again and again. The game in itself is so much fun — and the only thing to do under the circumstances — that it needs no rationalization.

If The One had not N-furcated Itself into all of us, all of the Universe, it would have been an eternity of boredom.

If The One had not implanted the temporary memory plugs in Itself when out here on walkabout, the fun would be greatly reduced. The One in any creature role would not make mistakes if it were not for the memory plug. And there would be no drama for the tentacle-self as it could not feel any sort of dramatic feelings, knowing it is invulnerable to any lasting harm. Good thing we all don’t know that, so we can have these huge emotional swings up and down all the time. Let’s face it: we actually enjoy them. Life would be dull without them. But it’s hard to realize this when one’s perspective has shrunken to a dwarfed vision of oneself, due to Acceleritis overcoming our natural abilities to rise above our challenges and face them with nobility and grace. The One who is also looking out our eyes — in fact The One is the only being that is looking out, we are that Being — is here to enjoy all this. We form an assumed separate identity that I call the Robot, and the Robot is in defensive mode not enjoyment mode. The Robot’s defensive mode attracts all kinds of trouble to itself.

A fantastic theory, you will observe. Yes, the most fantastic I’ve ever heard. However, I hypothesize it is what is really happening here.

It is logically deduced from certain experiences I have had, experiences all of us have had, that require more explanation than materialist science (even with the latest God Particle) has offered to date. Despite these ideas having sprung as speculation intensely felt to be truth, there is now also scientific validation for the key idea. The most seminal leader of the new physics, John Wheeler, postulates that consciousness and information are the fundamental stuff out of which the universe is made. This substantially validates the core of my theory, and with the further extrapolations that I’ve shown in the Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU)*, everything else in my theory is a logical deduction from Wheeler’s basic statements. For example, I postulate that a conscious being alone in space will create something to occupy His/Her attention and capacity for love. (Capitals seem appropriate for the Only Being in a postulated universe.)

And its predictions work in my life. This has been the strangest part. And the most appreciated.

So, given this is my picture of the universe, what I call the Theory of the Conscious Universe, what does this have to do with the title of this piece, which claims that events make sense on some larger scale. Surely the reader would challenge me to prove that massive suffering is supposed to happen, in Voltaire’s/Candide’s farcical manner.

Alas, The One is the one who receives all that suffering. There is no separate self. There is only The One. You and I think we are separate selves because of the memory plug. To The One these sufferings are drama, because there is no way they can hurt The One except in terms of compassion — ah, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare had Hamlet say of dreams — for each of our lives is as one dream to The One. Our experience offers positive proof that The One can “take it” in terms of our suffering. At the same time, following logical deduction from what is now Wheelerian science, The One has two reasons to want to reduce suffering:

  1. It is not fun for those of us down here, and He/She is the one having these sufferings in a dream — so therefore it is not fun for The One in that dream.
  2. The One is compassionate. Even if someone else were suffering, The One would want to help that being — if there were any other beings — which there are not. The prime realization of intuition is ultimately that there is only One of us. But even if there were a true Outsider — as in the Zoroastrian/Manichean belief — The One would not want that being to suffer either. Why do we say this? Through our own experience of direct intuition of The One. The Flow State makes this direct intuition not only possible but probable.

The problem that causes all suffering is that Acceleritis™ blocks Flow State. This is what makes it probable that we will not have functional intuition, one of Jung’s four behaviors/functions of consciousness (the others being perception, cognition, and feelings; he saw memory as being a subset of each). This is a temporary pandemic aberration due to the slowness of functional integration of the new brain in relation to its physical evolution. The prefrontal cortex and cortex are fully formed but only slowly making ground in not being dominated by the older parts of the brain where feelings, perceptions, memories, and instincts (hereditary intuitions, intuitions that made it onto the genes) are mediated.

As Shakespeare and Milton knew hundreds of years ago, free will is what explains suffering. You cannot have free will without mistakes, and suffering comes along with mistakes.

The One can either play with dumb dolls from the outside, or can have this universe, where S/He plays the dolls from the inside and really believes s/he is the doll during the playtime. You and I are among the many dolls. The One has avatars in so many forms that the word “doll” is inappropriate.

What more fun could you have as The One?

It’s lonely and boring out there as a dimensionless sentient point source.

You can, sure, use up a few quintillion years just thinking, but after that you want to do something! You want some company. You have superpowered imagination and so you know you could have feelings — but this would require you to have goals that can be helped and thwarted (see earlier post that establishes there are no feelings without motivations).

You decide it would be great to have feelings! But that would mean you actually have to want something, which means you cannot be allowed to remember who you are or you would never want anything.

So humor me for a moment — if this is the universe as it really is, of which  each of us is a rather important part in the cosmic sense — this means there is an unseen and important audience watching our life like a movie —from the “inside” as well as from the “outside”.

Everything that happens, in order to be important to The One, must have deeper meanings, revelations that our explorer-pod of Self needs in order to evolve back toward union with the original Self.

All it takes is a stolen few moments in time and imagination to find reasons why something that is happening today, had to happen. Imagination allows us to see that there could be a worse future if this bad event did not happen now, that a much worse event could happen in the future, which might be prevented now that we have this case to teach us.

As an experiment, we propose that you test this in your own life. Look at the events you wish had not happened that occurred — recently or long ago. Without committing to believing anything, allow yourself to imagine an explanation based on this lens of preventing a worse harm in the future. See if there is any applicability and what action decisions you might make to arm you for recurrence of similar challenges.

If you begin to look at the happenings moment to moment in your own life through this lens, you will in all likelihood have a similar experience — things will make more sense, and you can find solutions faster. You see the problem from the cosmic point of view. You understand better what is happening. You see what has to be done and as you do it, things go well.

After this happens again and again you will start to entertain the possibility that these theories explain what’s actually happening in and around Us.

My best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 .

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.

The Alchemy of Transmuting Feelings into Right Action

Leave a reply

Originally posted December 22, 2911

Experiments you can perform best when alone, such as in shower or tub

Full disclosure: I am an interested party — these experiments will tend to confirm my speculations and hypothesis — and help prove my theories.

On the other hand, you stand to gain a great deal. Your decision making can be made more creative and more effective — by judo-ing your own negative emotions so that they stop hurting you and start helping you.

You have free will — theoretically. That freedom is constrained by conditioning that governs you more than you perhaps realize. Acceleritis™ and attachment, as explained in a prior post, interfere with your free will and come to dominate your decision making, and your internal life. These aspects of your consciousness, when seen from another dimension, are the same as the material neuron clusters in your brain where experiences you’ve had whose learning has yet to be fully assimilated are stored. These neuron clusters fire frequently in cascades, triggered by negative emotion, caused by events hostile to your desires.

The firing of these habitual patterns is inimical to free will, creativity, and therefore effectiveness. They blunt the genius of your mind. When you can surmount these patterns you enter Observer state and ultimately Flow state. You take right action emanating from wisdom, understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. In Flow it is effortless given the state of your brain phenomenology at those times.

Bad feelings can actually help you get there. You just have to flip them on their side. No magic involved or hard concentration. Just the opposite — maximum relaxation of everything. Once the body is relaxed in as many ways as possible, then you relax the mind and emotions in as many ways as possible.

First we’ll briefly summarize the steps in the experiment, then we’ll explain each step in more detail.

Summary

After you are as relaxed as there’s time for, you inspect your own feelings of the moment — of this whole time period of your life, not just how you feel in the present interlude.

You then check out how you feel about those feelings, and the desires that drive them. Is this a want you want to want? Did one of your parents give this want to you, or a teacher or friend? Where did it come from?

You will experimentally check to see whether you can actually simulate giving up all of it. You’ll see how that feels. You may have moments of great freedom and a sense of great love. If not, it will happen in a later pass over the same ground. The first experiment starts its own process that you individualize over time. Obviously, you only continue if you’ve gotten something out of it.

You’ll take notes of your current deep priorities in life, and action items.

Tips on each step

I.   Relaxation

Jacuzzi, tub, shower, pool, getting a massage, sauna, steam room, treadmill, stationary bike, taking a walk, before sleep in bed, in a comfortable position on a recliner, you name it, whatever, just so your body is as happy and relaxed as it can be at that moment.

Make sure you aren’t holding tightness anywhere in your body. Feel from the inside each part of your body, one part at a time, to make sure each part is relaxed. Breathe deeply and slowly, in and out, all the way down into the belly. Imagine the air going everywhere, not just the lungs — into your head, imagine it as sparkly, expanding and contracting galaxies of stars.

If you are carrying on an interior dialog, listen to what you are saying. Is the self-talk relaxed? By an act of will, seek to relax your mind. Truncate words before they form or as they form, fade them out in midstream. Keep doing this.

Feelings will probably now be more noticeable. What are the feelings you are having?

II.   How do I feel in my life now?

There will probably be a cluster of feelings. You will be able to articulate a few different words that come close to explaining to yourself how you are feeling mentally/emotionally because of or despite the relative comfort of your body. Your mind and/or emotions may not be relaxed. They may even be agitated despite your physical comfort. Or you may be having a good time.

If you’re not having a good time yet, ask yourself why. What are the causes, the incidents. What desired end state of yours is being thwarted?

III.   Do I want to feel that way?

Once you know how you feel, and what desire of yours is threatened, ask yourself where that desire came from, and if you want to still keep it.

If you still value the desired thing, and want to continue to strive for it, then it is a Priority, and you move to the next step. If you’re not so sure it’s worth it, and you are willing to contemplate giving up the desired thing, picture the life you’d like to live in the future with that desire out of the picture, and see if you can imagine that life will be fulfilling anyway. What would you do instead?

If you can live without striving for that desire, then give it up. The fewer conditions you place on outcomes in your life, the greater your chance for happiness. Many great sages and saints renounced all worldly desires and other-worldly desires too, and lived in joy and love. This is the permanent Flow state, where the human race is heading in terms of evolution.

You might, either in the success of your imagination or by a rare life shift, experience a sense of omnidirectional love that occurs when attachments are turned off even if only temporarily (see explanation in a previous post).

If you do experience this wonderful feeling, take advantage of it by seeking out your loved ones and sharing yourself with them as you will then be feeling, in flow state and in love with life.

IV.   Priorities

You will have a pen and paper close by, which at some point you’ll find yourself using to jot notes of learnings, action points, and a ranking of your Priorities.

V.    Action Plans

These will tend to spring into your mind effortlessly. In fact the main way you will capture them is by paying closer attention to what is happening inside you — feelings, hunches, images, words — by looking at it all as if for the first time, taking nothing for granted, being curious, and being willing to state the obvious to yourself.

Under the yoke of Acceleritis, we are afraid to sound stupid, afraid to waste other people’s time by seeming stupid, and so we act that way even to ourselves. This makes us unwilling to state the obvious to ourselves, and yet only by being willing to re-examine everything, even the seemingly obvious, do you penetrate the rush of Acceleritis. Only then do all the parts of your self focus attention together on a particular something. (Read more about my Acceleritis theory.)

Stating the obvious to yourself in notes that get written down and looked at later begins to push back against the tide of Acceleritis.

My Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.

What if your mind can actually do more tricks than you currently believe it can? Part 1

1 Reply

Originally posted November 17, 2011

What is the value of an open mind?

The mind, like a reducing valve, closes down to keep out overload. In this so far 6000-year era of Acceleritis™, there has been a lot of shutting down, when openness without commitment either way would always have been the more careful strategy.

People in the cloak of Acceleritis feel proudly that they have been properly hard-nosed when they are unconsciously trying to simplify and don’t know it, so this hard-nosed stuff is merely a rationalization. They unconsciously don’t want to consider how much scarce mental bandwidth it might take to deal with the flood of hard questions that will arise in their mind if they were to actually try to keep it open on the huge issues of life — such as what is death — is there a universal consciousness and if so is it personal or something else — who are we, each of us, what are we, why are we here, is there a point to it all?

The first moment in life that Acceleritis takes over, when we are very young, is the moment that we turn off the wonder at these questions and decide to get on with life, without realizing it we have unconsciously made a set of assumptions about the answers to those questions. Our every action is decided based on those assumptions, and every instant of our life will be shaped by those assumptions.

What if your assumptions are actually less favorable than the true conditions of reality in which you might partake?

Game Theory would posit that you are better off trying to get away with the most positive view of life you believe is conceivable, until empirical proof drives you to dial that down a bit — if that ever happens; leaving open the possibility that things could turn out to be even better than that, or simply as good as that, and you might never have to revise your assumptions downward.

Game Theory would disapprove of starting out from the most negative assumptions possible. And yet Acceleritis hugely raises the odds that an individual will tend to shoot low when making these unconscious assumptions about the nature of reality, probably normatively before age 5 in our present culture.

This is because Acceleritis increases the daily sense that we are incompetent, as compared with days of yore, those halcyon days before written language let all genies out of all bottles, in a 6000-year cascade.

Yet more genies-out-of-bottles no doubt lie ahead. So the premise of our institute is that the human race had better evolve mental emotional software to finally conquer and cure Acceleritis, if not the unthinkably enormous capacity of the human race to invent tools/weapons/media.

Acceleritis is the trance-like accommodation the human race has made for its own over-inventiveness, since written language caused our brains to rewire themselves in a way that allows us to visualize spatially at the same time as we symbolize in ever more condensed packets, enabling levels of abstraction and logic that make geometry seem like child’s play. We never had this before written language because before that we could not see communication, except for the numinosity – communicating symbols earlier hominids must have had, such as the circle, triangle, and other “magical” archetypal figures.

Numinosity for all its importance is just a feeling, whereas abstraction as potentiated in our visually-dominant primate species by seeable language, is a tool. Acceleritis is all about tools — inventions — machines — weapons — media. Our mind could not make any but the most rudimentary tools, scarcely more sophisticated than the tools made and used by other animals, until we were able to see communication. Communication being the only way that ideas can be expressed. Ideas being what drive the making of tools/inventions.

Today we receive too many question-producing stimuli each day, which causes us at an early age to shift the big questions in life off the screen of our consciousness and onto the hidden screen of our subconscious/unconscious. There, decisions/assumptions made previously constrain our body’s and conscious mind’s alternatives considerably and we are unaware of it. Like slaves, or robots of a hidden master.

Observer state is when the hidden master is exposed and the whole self is there watching itself objectively.

Flow state is when all of those parts flow into automatic harmony with one another and the individual is transported into a special state of consciousness where numinosity or miraculousness is present although the experience does not have to feel spiritual. Most people have it a few times in a lifetime playing a sport, playing a musical instrument, making love, or having a transcendent experience seemingly out of the blue.

Again these two higher states occur when Acceleritis is cured temporarily — and for more evolved human beings, permanently. The Human Effectiveness Institute sees no reason why the whole human race cannot experience these states far more often, which would lead to greater effectiveness and far greater happiness and ultimately to peace among all peoples.

We come back to the question of an open mind. What is the value of it?
Game Theory says the value of not assuming negative conditions is great, no matter what game you play. Modern psychology finds this is scientifically accurate, not just theory. Our beliefs, perceptions, assumptions, expectations, intentions and other mental emotional stuff predict the outcomes of our actions, and our scores on games. This is validated science today.

Flashback: In college majoring in philosophy and minoring in psychology I am inveigled into an experiment as a subject. More than a dozen cards are being shown, and the subject is asked to remember the sequence the cards are in. Each time you try, you are asked whether you think you will make it in 10 rounds. You go ten times to see if by the final round you can remember the whole sequence — of course the cards are shuffled each time. Turns out afterward that the actual point of the study was to compare an individual’s prediction that he or she will succeed with their true success scores. They seemed amazed that I said ten times I expected I would succeed, and that I did succeed. I asked why that was so amazing and they said no one else thought they would succeed, although nearly half did.

Acceleritis does that to our self-confidence. We of course project confidence to the degree we realized how important it was to our standing vis-à-vis other people, that if we did not show more confidence they would walk all over us.

It probably was not like this before Acceleritis.

Now about the experiments that we will undertake next week in part 2 of this post.

You don’t have to believe in anything. In fact, that would bias the experiments. You have to set aside all beliefs — suspend disbelief — in order to start.

The object of these experiments is to level set reality — you reopen your mind to the existence of all possibilities, you strip away all hidden assumptions, and then allow reality to teach you what it is, without you imposing any restrictions on it.

Of course, what these actions do in your conscious mind has less effect on your subconscious mind than on your temporary conscious mind, and all of it can flow downstream rather rapidly leaving you back in Acceleritis. However, this does not in any way mean our intentions are futile. Quite the opposite. They just take time and repetition to sink in down below the quarterdeck. But sink in they do.

You can perform these experiments surreptitiously because there are no obvious outward manifestations. It is all going on within you. No one else knows what you are doing. You cannot lose face, so while you are still attached to that, it cannot distract you from the experiment. This is highly useful because distraction is the main means by which Acceleritis reduces our effectiveness. Any way distraction can get tuned down or nullified, use it, so that your entire mind is swept as if by a ring of brooms back from its diffuse expanse, into single-pointed focus.

The stage is now set and we hope you’ll come back next week to try our incredibly easy and vitally important experiments that will help you level set your reality.

UPDATE to this post:
Watch a 3.5 minute video I made about my theory of Acceleritis.

Best to all,

Bill