Tag Archives: Flow State

In Praise of Goofing Off

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Or, Indirect Observation of Undirected Mentation
Volume 4, Issue 31

The creative process goes through four stages: absorbing information, turning away, the Aha! Moment, and implementation.

A third of a second before the Aha! Moment — a type of Flow state experience — Daniel Goleman explains that there is a burst of gamma activity, signifying the rapid creation of a new network of neural connections, in the neocortical right temporal cortex of the brain.

The Aha Moment

The Aha! Moment (image courtesy of DailyMail.com)

In our present culture in which multiple jobs are held by most persons just to keep up with their Jones, and in which Acceleritis™ necessitates massive multitasking, the creative process tends to become truncated into a two-step process of absorbing information (never enough), and implementation. In other words, no Aha! Moment.

The absorbing of information part was easier before the Internet. One saw the logic of not going too far, because it would cost too much time. Now one can keep drilling down further and further without an apparent end in sight.

Finding information however continues to be the major complaint of executives and their teams. You know you have it somewhere and you can go searching for it but it is so boring and annoying given the time pressure. Give me a dashboard where I don’t even have to remember what it is called and yet can still find it in a second. Until then, just send that thing to me again.

When you break down how much time goes into the absorption (including searching) and other aspects of the process, the two middle stages — turning away, then the Aha! Moment — take almost no time compared with absorbing and implementing. And yet those two middle processes account for the quality of the outcome or creative result. With only the bookends and no middle the result may be passable but it does not rock. Are we here just to do stuff that’s passable, without the satisfaction of Flow state-level outcomes? No way — makes no sense. Life is about living large, not just robotically coping.

And all you have to do is have more fun! Goof off. Take a break, a mini-vacation at the right moments in your creative process, and the Aha! reveals itself.

However, this only occurs if your mind is in a certain state receptive to the sense of Aha!. That state can be described as the indirect observation of undirected mentation. Let’s break it down.

Undirected mentation is when you let your mind go wherever it wants.

Indirect observation is (by my definition) the alert watching of something as if seeing it for the first time.

So you receive Aha! to the degree to which your mind can do whatever it wants to do with no pressure to perform or achieve anything. Meanwhile a very alert part of you is watching your own mind, as if from outside.

When you do this, the tendency is for that Observer state part of yourself to go to sleep. That is, your point of view tends to get reabsorbed into the part of the mind that is just playing and you forget to look at it from the detached Observer point of view. You get caught up in some attachment motivation, some feeling/emotion, which identifies you with the relaxing, playing, wandering mind. This may feel wonderful; however, it doesn’t help you if the objective is Observer and then Flow states. “Identification with” leaves the attachment turned on. “Detachment from” is the goal.

Remain the scientist, the objective observer when goofing off, and the Aha! will come more often.

Best to all,

Bill

 

 

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

A Way Out of War

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Volume 4, Issue 24

Sun Tzu said that the greatest leaders win without having to fight. Solomon’s sarcastic remark about cutting the baby in half was an example of one tactic for conflict resolution. As was Jesus’ remark about ye who is without sin casting the first stone. May we continue to evolve ways of cooling down rather than escalating. Now that WMD are so available, living in a tinderbox would seem to require it.

It is easier to understand some sources of conflict than others. We have known since the Greek Golden Age and probably earlier about the tendency for hubris, how an individual’s rise tends to lead to megalomania. We today see the threat of North Korea in that light. We can be more empathetic when poverty is the seedbed for hostility, as in the recent splinter perversions of the otherwise upright Islamic version of the Abrahamic group of religions. (I know some readers will think about Muhammad’s own wars and color Islam with it, but every religion and nation has been embroiled in wars at least as far back as the advent of written language, which fomented Acceleritis.)

The war that is harder to understand, at least in our present day, is the war between science and religion, flaring up once again. In the old days it used to be religion attacking science, which is not as counter-intuitive as the recent eruptions of science attacking religion. And not only religion, today we even see isolated cases of scientists even attacking philosophy. One otherwise brilliant and charming scientist publicly calls people who believe in God “stupid” (although how “smart” is it to publicly insult 93% of the world population)?

Some media always call attention to controversy because “it sells papers”. The main dangers of such altercations are distraction, demoralization, and fuel for the fire of political conflicts. To the extent that civilization wishes to hold together against militant uprisings, it needs to also hold to civilized behavior.

Dichotomania is one result of Acceleritis — putting everything into black/white good/bad categories. To the extent that those disposed to cause trouble — the powers behind terrorism — can identify themselves as lovers of God and the scientific West/East civilization as anti-God (Satanic), the motivational drivers of kamikaze behavior are multiplied.

My great friend the artist Peter Sorensen just sent me a collection of articles from the British publication New Scientist. In these articles, leading scientists discuss religion from a more clearheaded perspective. One article by physicist and philosopher Victor J. Stenger vindicates what I have been saying for decades, that the existence of God can be treated as a scientific hypothesis. He goes on to say that no evidence has been collected in support of that hypothesis. In my dissenting view, this is because today’s science defines “evidence” in such a way as to exclude the experiences within individual consciousness that cannot be measured by external devices.

The hidden agenda of Materialistic Accidentalism — the splinter cult within science that practices reductionism, sometimes comes across as uptight, and has started up unnecessary fights with religion and philosophy — seems (perhaps only to me) overly concerned with absolute certainty, which I consider to be pragmatically unavailable. Even quantum theory is self-admittedly a construct with high predictivity, yet no one claims it is the final answer with absolute certainty. The certainty angle is the hidden reason behind the restrictive definition of evidence, excluding what we lay individuals can experience for ourselves without third-party instrumentation. This makes science a closed group excluding the mass of humanity from partaking in its ways, exactly like an ancient priest class. I feel we can all be scientists in the way we live our lives, keeping track of experimental results and changing our thoughts and actions accordingly.

I wrote my new book You Are The Universe: Imagine That to offer a third way of looking at things, outside of the classical religion vs. science context. The book is a theory, a set of hypotheses, intended to explain the universe in scientific terms as a single field of consciousness, and to define consciousness as, in effect, an energy computer of such an intelligence level as to allow self-awareness. This one Self manifests in many forms, living through each of us as a temporarily sequestered pseudo-identity.

The book details how this model actually supports the core beliefs of all religions. It is unique (insofar as I know) as a scientific/empirical approach that resolves the millennia-long appearance of a war and an at-essence incompatibility between religion and science.

Mine is neither the current science approach (demanding credentials and relatively rapid verifiability by instrumentalities in the consensus reality) nor the classic theistic approach (faith, belief, authoritarianism, doctrine). It is a third way.

In the book I offer an experiment that readers can perform and determine the pragmatic results for themselves. I’m more concerned with the pragmatic — finding a set of operating rules to optimize life, gain insight into self and others and into the whole of which we are each a part, and thus reach and stay longer in the highest Flow states.

I am hoping that many people experiment with this third way. Pleased with the results, they might then help damp down the unnecessary, distracting, demoralizing and dangerous ideological wars, and better enjoy life. They don’t even have to give up science or religion.

More about Materialistic Accidentalism in this one minute video interview I did with my daughter Nicole adds a relevant point. Krishnamurti beautifully explains why rooting exclusively for any partial system works against our highest collective interest:

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
— J. Krishnamurti

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.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book. The E-book is coming in September.

Smell the Sweetness

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Volume 4, Issue 22

Annie was moving fast. She always moved fast. She did everything fast. She even laughed fast, and then quickly moved on to the next thing.

She whisked through the garden doing the necessary watering without noticing the sweet fragrance of new-mown grass and wildflowers. The softly scented breeze on her bare arms itself felt delicious and somehow combined into one thing with the scent. Faintly and unheard, a small inner voice related the moment to the song about a kiss you could build a dream on. The perfumed wind and immobile meditation could have been a winged heart dream but all this was literally beneath attention as Annie had things to do and if asked she would have said all her concentration was on getting the job done. There was some truth in that. She was intent on getting the tasks behind her, but not because there was good stuff ahead that she was eager to get to. And there was nothing like a state of concentration going on in her head.

Like so many of us, Annie’s mind was a mess. It was not focused. Her current movements were not based on a carefully-thought-out plan with transparent priorities. She was just keeping up with the have-to-do’s — the pervasive tone of life in the Accelerolithic Era. Distracted state precludes Flow state. There’s too much noisy messy input, with seemingly not enough time to process it.

Annie could be an artist. She is good with her hands and could envision a piece and create it. Doing that got her into the Flow state where she did her best work — her gift to the world.

Making money at her art seemed like an idle fantasy judging from the toughness of the world, her surroundings and friends and the lives they all led. There was great beauty in her surroundings but the mood created by the difficulty of making enough money to live pleasurably without constant fear of money problems made that beauty literally invisible.

If Annie were hypnotized and asked patiently for a long time about why she is always moving so fast, eventually she would come to realize something she does not know: it is because she is always unconsciously striving to make money. She feels without knowing it that she will make more money by doing everything as fast as she can. She does odd jobs for friends and acquaintances, like working in a dress shop, washing cars, walking dogs, and landscaping, so there is some logic in that unconscious thought. However, in reality the fast motion causes a slowdown in finished product due to the need to patch up things not done properly, which also eventually causes her to not get as much work from her employers as she would if everything were always done without things being left in the wrong places or half-done.

One layer deeper she might realize that the quest to make money was not really because she wanted to buy specific things so much as to please her partner and also to have other people be proud of her or realize that she is more capable than the way they have treated her.

Annie went to the mountaintop one day and although as the sun passed its zenith and the breeze began to be cold, she remained bare-armed and slipped into that waking dream where she was uplifted out of her Acceleritis and into the Flow state at what You Are The Universe calls “Soul-Level Two” — the bliss state, ananda. She was not moving fast. She was not under the dominance of any have-to-do compulsions. Her mind and body and every aspect of her were all lined up in the Game. There was no rush. She could see everything around her, hear everything, smell it all, enjoying the moment itself with no force causing her to lose freedom, break the fast on motion, in any direction.

This is the place to live at every moment. It is its own reward. Because we then give our finest performances at any beloved Game, we get paid the most money for it. We cannot get there by giving up as unrealistic the inner drive to do a specific thing we love to do, and settling into a mortgaged life of second-choice work that is steady and dependable. Like the hero or heroine in a movie, in real life we must pursue our highest calling, have the daring to do that extraordinarily risky seeming thing.

Then we will have the ability to concentrate, the prerequisite for Flow state. We will smell the sweetness of Life. And because the Universe is us, if we actually do what we are uniquely designed to do so that we provide true value to others, as if by magic the dreams will come true in the end.

“Do what you like to do. You’re going to be doing it for a long time.”

—George Burns, while puffing cigar

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.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.

Do What You’re Inspired to Do

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At Any Given Moment

Volume 4, Issue 21

Our moment of history may be called “The Accelerolithic Era” by those living thousands of years from now who study records of our period (even if they’re Martians). Since written records began (and I theorize because of written language) our information pressure per day has been exponentially accelerating. I call the resulting condition of humanity “Acceleritis”. Perhaps some remote indigenous people have not yet succumbed to this syndrome — I hope so for their sakes.

One of the components of Acceleritis is that we never have enough time to get done all the things we feel we ought to do.

This is a pandemic shock reaction to the effects of ever-mounting stimuli that set up “anti-closures” in our mind. These “anti-closures” (“sanskaras” in Sanskrit) are circuits that have taken an interest in some stimulus but now have unasked questions about that stimulus or the things immediately associated with the stimulus. (For a more Technical and Theoretical Description, see below.)

Every time you note interest in something, like the things your eyes land upon, this is what is happening in your brain, and we are definitely unaware of at least 99% of it.

Because of an apparently innate drive for closure, and the seeming impossibility of ever reaching closure on everything the mind desires closure on, we are uneasy at most times but have gotten used to it.

The feeling of always being behind speeds up our actions to the point of increasing errors requiring fixing, thus slowing us down and making us feel even more behind with no apparent hope of ever catching up.

We also repress the sense of needing closure, thus purposely ignoring hints from the subconscious asking us to contemplate things we have done that we regret, people we have not forgiven, and philosophical questions that once fascinated us and are central to life. We push stuff back down into that repressed area, which enlarges the unconscious at the expense of the conscious.

Some or all drug addiction may be traceable to this phenomenon.

Don’t Overthink It

During your work day or at play, you are often not sure what to do first. Do what most inspires you at that moment. Why? Because that way the chances are higher that you’re doing it in the Flow state, which never occurs when you are doing something because you should do it. I call that “doing it to get it out of the way”.  Flow state only occurs when you are enjoying what you are doing, and doing it solely or mainly for its enjoyment.

If you’re in the grip of Acceleritis and held down below the Observer state, you’ll not know what inspires you more to do next, X or Y or Z. The solution here is to  just let your body go and watch what it does. The body often makes decisions before the mind is consciously aware of making the decision. It’s the same decision. It’s the reflection of both the mind and body, both of those phenomena being aspects of the One Consciousness.

Don’t Be Email/Text/Tweet/Social Media Driven

It has become all too easy in the Accelerolithic Era to become driven by incoming email, texts, Tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts — meaning you don’t decide what to do next, you react to the ubiquitous digital input stream. This goes on all day and you become a willing slave to this digital input stream.

It’s helpful to let people know the times each day you’ve set aside to catch up with emails and texts and whatever else is queueing up.

Meditation

Meditation — the mind observing itself — is the most efficient way to allow assimilation and closure of the most salient “anti-closures” bugging your mind subconsciously at any given point in time.

Like trying to remember a name, meditation does not work by “trying to do it”, it works by erasing everything going on inside and continuing to erase as thoughts/feelings/images/hunches arise. You’re allowed to jot down notes for later, using trigger words that will bring back the whole thought-train, and then resume the emptying out.

Here’s a quick YouTube video on the subject: Erase.

Best to all,

Bill

More Technical Theoretical Description

On the formation of “anti-closures”:

  1. These new pathways initially must be along established neurons. There they modify connectivity with other neurons by subtle chemical changes at the synapses caused by the mental state cascading from the reception of the stimulus.
  2. Longer term, new neuron growth is hypothesized stemming from the same causative event. Such growth helps the circuit continue to exist and occasionally “speak up” in the senate of the mind when the mental subject comes near the thoughts (or sub-thoughts) suggested by the stimulus.​

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.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.