Tag Archives: Flow State

Forgive the Universe for Having Hurt You

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 5

The Universe is trying to bring out the best and highest in each of us — motivated selfishly by the fact it IS us.

So for the corrective feedback we get, we will eventually be grateful. We will get to a place where we can see the Big Picture.

If it hadn’t been for that warning tap (which deeply crushed our feelings and the bad feelings never went away) we would have not been prepared for that next situation. The outcome could have been a lot worse.

The prediction about a next situation of the same kind is not just a probability but a certainty. Self-fulfilling prophecy: if you don’t get it, there will have to be a next warning tap. You have to face the long-range lessons of your own heart, since that center starts and drives all the play of your life. And from the highest perspective it is all play.

It all starts with our own choices anyway so we are causing whatever light warning taps we are getting. We should not wait to be grateful for them, because that grateful perspective lens helps you get the messages faster. Ask the right question: how could this possibly turn out to be helpful to me? It helps to ask the right question.

We start the action every time we Love something. Each Love is one driving center of long-term action. The intermingling of the Loves of course adds layers of complexity and individuation to the Game. It’s never played the same way twice in all of infinite eternity.

Carrying around bad feelings impedes Flow state, so why do it? Forgive the Universe right now for having banged you around and tell It you are trying on for size the notion that this is all well intended. Give it half a chance to prove Itself to you. Kiss and make up. (Play nice kids — oops I mean play nice Me, God says with a smile.) Try on that atmosphere for a while and see what it does for you. And please let me know. Thanks!

Best to all,

Bill

P.S.

  1. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming in April.
  2. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might watch my video interview on the unconscious decisionmaking of consumers with Bob Lederer on Research Daily Report. You also might want to check out this collection of videos.
    Bill Harvey interviewed on March 19, 2014 on Research Business Daily Report online

3.  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.

The L-Offense in the Room

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 4

Caring too much about something makes you unrealistic, distorts your judgment. Stuff you would easily and correctly get instantly, now you’re unsure about because you care too much. You either are too optimistic or too pessimistic or somehow both at the same time or they flip-flop. Your degree of caring interferes with reason. The gravity of the caring distorts, bends the light of your internal Reason signals around the blazing stars that attract you.

Western psychology would say that you are too far to the right on the Yerkes-Dodson Scale. If this persists, psychologists classify you as neurotic in the behavior involved: stuck. In the Acceleritis™ cloud where we live, it is easy for this to happen. We are already off balance from Acceleritis. It is the distraction of Acceleritis that makes it easy for our caring loving center (in the East they would say “heart”) to start to care too much about one thing or another, or in fact many things. When we are distracted, we make more mistakes.

It is also possible that the allocation of your caring is less than optimal. Could it be that you are caring too much about certain things, and perhaps not caring enough about other potentially even more important things? Perspective at its widest point recognizes that one is playing this local current game but in fact is oneself the same One that plays all these games. This moment of recognition and widest perspective attenuates excessive caring and stuckness and attachment to outcomes specific to the current Mission passion in the incarnation. The highest and best in oneself comes out. The caring allotments fall into the optimal allocation. Attention follows love and so the attention deployment becomes optimized. We call this Flow state.

Everything starts from Love. So if you want to trace back how you got to where you are so you can deal with it better, trace back to the Love that started the series of events. What was the Love for? What was your first Love, and your second, and where did these Loves all lead you in Life?

Some might say that our Loves could have been carried over from earlier Lives. There is no scientific reason why this or any other Eastern notion should be crossed off the list as impossible. That is not the spirit of true science but a mere epiphenomenon of reductionist scientism (the quasi-religious dogmatic ideology of Occam’s Razor Accidental Materialism Meaninglessness) of the last few centuries. It is no more in the spirit of true science than poesy is poetry.

Meanwhile, in our distracted Acceleritis-ridden state, something in you is sending out the wrong messages to everybody else and so the net Universe response to your actions brings you not what you want. These wrong signals are the ones you are least aware of sending. You are not purposely sending them from the workaday mask control system that you wear. In most cases the unconscious signals are the opposite of the ones you intentionally send. This out of synchness arises from a suboptimal deployment of Love. You are still too attached to certain things and are not even aware of how in Love with them you still are.

There would need to be a certain component in the Universe if One were an infinitely conscious Self hanging out devising a worthy Game to play for eternity. That component is the challenge. Without challenge there is no game, no fun. Without challenge the trajectory of a story does not exist. There has to be a function within the Universe that continually adjusts the challenge slope and type to maximally teach the player how to bring out the highest and best in himself/herself. Call it karma, destiny, kismet, the gods, angels, any name you prefer or no name at all.

So one must wake up each day in Love with the challenges that wait to pounce as soon as you are awake, and in fact while you were sleeping too. Recognize how you created them with what you Love, and accept that these are the jokes and enjoy them.

I love to create complex games. Then when they become overly complex and the email breaks down at the same time, if I am not in my highest and best place, I can get frustrated. That would be too much Loving the many people I see myself helping, and too much Loving time and efficiency, too attached to getting a lot more Good done in one day than just a few little sprinkles of Good. An L-Offense in the room that everyone can see better than me if I tumble down to narrow perspective.

Trusting the One wants each of us to win, learn, grow, becoming the higher and better self we can see in ourselves. Trusting this is the key to setting the heart at its highest and best place. Love will flow to everything from this perspective.

Next week, more about Love and the heart, which rule attention and therefore control the turning on and off of the Flow state.

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S.

  1. Bill is speaking at the ARF Monday at 1:50PM on Addressable Commercials.
  2. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming in April.
  3. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might watch my video interview on the unconscious decisionmaking of consumers with Bob Lederer on Research Daily Report this week . You also might want to check out this collection of videos.
    Bill Harvey interviewed on March 19, 2014 on Research Business Daily Report online

4. 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.

We Suddenly Know What Heaven We’re In

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 2

In his song “Begin the Beguine”, Cole Porter describes that miraculous moment in time when you really experience being in a heavenly realm, even though you are still on Earth. It is one of the higher levels of the Flow state.

Lovers can sometimes shift into that place together, as if tuning across to a parallel universe of bliss just a dimensional twist away from this universe where we assume a defensive stance against endless trials and challenges whose humor we can no longer see. Rarely are the lovers intending that shift consciously, although Tantric Yogis populate much of this rare group.

Just as often it is one person alone making the shift. Again it occurs by itself without conscious intent sometimes, though great numbers of people on Earth engage in practices long ago discovered to have the effect of potentiating and bringing on that state and other levels of Flow. Yoga is the science of those practices, its purpose being the realization within inner experience of connection with divinity.

Yoga, from Sanskrit, means to yoke up, as an ox is yoked up to a wagon, or an attention node of the One Consciousness is consciously yoked up to the whole of which it is a part. The corresponding linguistic root in Latin is religare (verb), or religio (noun), meaning to bind, very similar semantically with the additional connotation of a debt or duty to repay righteously. All religions are forms of practice designed to accomplish this shift in inner state. These inner states actually exist, as has long been obvious to common sense, and as is now beginning to be validated by the skeptical reductionist science dominant in Earth thinking for the last four centuries.

The word “religion” today is not as useful in a conversation like this as it might have been. Organized religions have let people down on too many occasions due to corruption and wars and torture and molestation and God knows what else that is the obvious opposite of what religion must stand for if and when pure. The subtext of the word is therefore poisoned with that long history of going off course. The term I prefer to use as a result of that baggage is “Spiritual”.

I use the word “spiritual” in the context of the classical perspective that within what we can perceive of the whole of reality, there are two palpable aspects: matter and consciousness. We experience both and therefore common sense accepts that both exist. The remaining question is simply, “What is the relationship between these two aspects of reality?”

In that context, “experience”, “consciousness”, and “spirit” all mean the same thing to me. They are the names of the domain of reality that is not matter.

More about these thoughts — the levels of Flow state, the meaning of the spiritual levels of Flow, the practices of yoga and other spiritual methodologies, the meeting ground between the spiritual domain and science — in our next exciting installment.  🙂

My best to you all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.

For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this video. Or this collection of videos.

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.

Do What You Want, and Take It to the People

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 51

Kids setting out in life are best advised to have a two-level plan: the longterm plan to do only what they want and get paid enough for it, and the immediate plan of having a job in a field that pertains to that longterm goal.

First of course they have to know what they want. Intention is a powerful thing, with effects across one’s entire lifespan. Setting out without a strong intention i.e. a concrete two-level plan, is like driving blind. The Universe will still get you there unless you make it impossible with some point you’re stuck on, but it will take longer and involve more pain.

If you do what makes you happy, you are more likely by an order of magnitude to get into Flow state. Your performance will be Flow state, which will cause your natural audience to be attracted to you.

During my life I got to meet a lot of musicians, performers, artists of all kinds. I liked that. My father Ned was probably the last orchestra leader/master of ceremonies whose band backed the biggest acts in the world in nightclub and hotel venues as the Big Band era transitioned into a memory. He established a school that taught performers. My mother Sandy was a painter and paint sculptor.

I met so many whose talents far exceeded their success. Some even knew how to jump into the game, meaning they followed the advice of the plan above — find a way that pays to get into the field you want to be in. They taught me that lesson. For example, Bill Heyer, a multitalented genius who made the leap into big industrial shows with Harold Beebe, bringing Broadway to the corporate stage — great plan and inestimable talents. He was on his way to stardom when he lost his way.

For a decade I saw him in Flow state a large part of the time, and he exuded love. Later on, when he had lost his way, he hurt my feelings by pointing out that he was not really my adopted older brother, it was just an inside joke Ned and Sandy had and we’ve been humoring them all our lives.

“You mean you were humoring me,” I said.

Sometime later the police asked me if I knew a man about 6 feet tall, moustache, well built, who would have my phone number in his wallet along with nothing else. Bill had apparently been doing a Norman Mailer on the parapets of the Gotham and fell to his death. I see him dancing off the ledge.

Before the Internet, lots of artists of all kinds, including showbiz, photographers, authors, creative of whatever stripe, had a good excuse when they caved to their inner cowardice and refused to market themselves, waiting for the mountain to come to Mohammed. Now we live in the ideal era for artists, when the Internet allows them to do whatever makes them happy, and simply requires having a decent available presence on the Web. They will in time attract their natural audience if they are projecting positive energy, which is the real joy of Flow state — you don’t have to fake love, just get a good night’s sleep.

Do what you want artistically, and by that I include whatever turns you on — writing code, inventing things, whatever. It’s all art if it makes you happy.

And remember the two-level plan when you advise young people in their teens and younger. This is in all of our best interests!

Remind them too about the second half of the title of this post — you yourself have to market yourself, you can’t depend on anyone else any more.

Ned would have changed one thing in the world if he could have. Talented people would always be found. They wouldn’t perish like a beautiful flower in a desert, and waste one’s spirit on the air — allusions he used in his writing, echoing the poet whose line he quoted in his memoirs:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And  waste its  sweetness  on the  desert air.

  — Gray’s Elegy in a Country Church-Yard

 You’ve got to do it for yourself. Nowadays the way to do that is available and affordable to everyone. It’s Facebook, Twitter, having a website, having a Youtube channel of your own. Whether you’re an inspired carpenter or calligrapher or therapist or tuner of instruments, whatever gives you joy and so gets you into Flow, open these windows so people can see you doing it.

That’s the advice I would give a kid. Or a performer. Or anyone that needs to hear it.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — P&G’s Olympiad series on Youtube will be remembered as the start of the age of Custom Content Takes Over Advertising. 

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That, coming soon.

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.