Tag Archives: Flow State

What Is Humor?

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Volume 3, Issue 50

Like life itself, and consciousness, love, oneness, even Flow state, and so many other things we take for granted just because of long familiarity, have you ever stopped to wonder what is this weird sound-and-breath spasm thing we do sometimes? Laughing, I mean. What is that?

Feelings are one of the best clues to meaning. The meaning of any moment is most easily extracted from our feelings at that moment and in retrospect. Moreso than logical analytics alone.

(Side Note: The mind/body/spirit is in Flow state when all the detector and effector functionality is optimized together, feelings and intuition and analytics and perceptions and actions are not abstracted from one another, and inside/outside subject and object are one flowing process. A Oneness Singularity.)

What are the feelings associated with this bizarre phenomenon we take for granted? Laughing, that is.

We are pleased when we laugh, it’s fun, and it is an expression of at least momentary happiness, even if we do it ruefully during a negative feeling context.

Sometimes laughter is joy expressing itself bubbly and uncontainable, as when a child takes off on his first flight on a sled.

Humor is the intentional or unintentional causation of laughter. Of course the standup learns that sometimes it is the intention to create laughter without the fact of it.

Once we discovered that we liked this involuntary spasm (as we like orgasm, another preferred spasm, whereas we dislike and fear most spasms we experience) we began to purposely try to evoke it as much as possible under whatever circumstances befall us.

Laughter and orgasm may be related in ways we don’t know yet.

My dry cleaner is a comedian. Everything he says is intended to make you laugh. At least it makes him laugh, which is definitely a healthy thing. Good spasms are healthy spasms.

In the case of humor, sometimes our laughter expresses relief. The butt of the joke is being ridiculed, and since we are not the one getting the ridicule, we are relieved. Yet ridiculousness, related to ridicule, appears to be at the center of all humor.

When I have fallen from Observer state, I often get back up by realizing that if I can’t see the humor in the situation, I have clearly lost perspective. “These are the jokes,” I remind myself.

Enjoy this moment. And now this one.

Be prepared to laugh.

If you’re already smiling, you’re already prepared.

Wishing you laugh-filled days and nights,

Bill

PS – Top copywriter and genius Ed Ney of Young & Rubicam fame has moved on to the next classroom. Read his speeches and yours will be even better than they’ve been. Like Erwin Ephron, Ed used short pithy memorable sentences packed with meaning and impact, condensed intelligence and insight. Much to unpack. Rhythmic to the mind. Ed had been a reader of this blog. Treasured like all of you. So long, Ed, see ya. Somewhere somewhen down the long and winding.

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

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.

How to Increase Your Luck

Volume 3, Issue 49

The flock of wild turkeys walks past my window facing the river, heads bobbing forward and back, through the light snow drifting down. Today, whatever guides me to decide to write about a specific thing in these posts has assigned me the subject of luck. My mind, like the snow, drifts through kaleidoscopic memories, recent ones of remarkable luck my two startups seem to be having, and for some reason, a particular moment one day in 1975.

A young lady let’s call Sue regards me as her spiritual coach and is ever eager to ask me questions, which I am happy to answer. Her pattern though is to guess at the answers as I am midway through the first sentence of an answer. I’ve patiently indulged her in this for some months. At times she appears to be reading my mind and at other times just wanting to be the smart one, making ridiculous statements, and I’ve woven whatever she says back into the conversation, playing Socrates and maintaining my own self-amusement. But on this particular day something happens that’s clearly out of the ordinary.

She has asked a question, I have started to answer it, and she interrupts. However, as she speaks, there is a crash of thunder. The sky is cloudless and there is no prediction of rain. She smiles and starts again, and again the thunder interrupts her. This time she waits and looks around kiddingly, seconds go by, and then I go back into giving my answer. She waits only a moment before interrupting, and again the thunder overrules her. This goes on for some time. The exact concurrence of the thunder with her interruptions is unbelievable — the explanation of the concurrence as a random coincidence being the unbelievable part. Somehow when I speak there is no thunder, and when she interrupts, there is.

When these strange synchronicities occur, as they do billions of times a day around the Earth, something has changed the odds. Luck — good or bad depending upon one’s point of view — is not a constant. Some kind of energy has changed the probabilities of things. Like the way the value of pi is theorized to change near a large gravitational source. In my observation, a person in Flow state appears to increase the probability of synchronicities.

Philosophy seems so impractical when one is living through a period of Acceleritis. As if the preconscious mind is saying to itself, while choosing among flitting mental impulses as to which ones to shine the bright light upon, “Cogitating about the nature of reality would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic — I’ve got to stay grounded in fielding all this incoming traffic.”

Unfortunately that’s a suboptimal procedure. The nature of reality has a very practical significance in every decision we make. Putting aside learning about the nature of reality is like deciding to keep playing a game without learning the rules, or like trying to win at cards without taking the trouble to keep track of which cards are already out.

In these posts and in my new book You Are The Universe I have laid out the case for strongly suspecting that consciousness is not a rare happenstance in the universe, but rather the essential nature of every part of it. This (some would say just accidentally) happens to explain the observer effect in quantum physics and relativity, and why Charles Tart’s objective statistical analyses of paranormal phenomena shows that the occurrence of telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing are statistically significant and the odds of a random explanation are billions to one. My theory also explains why sometimes our hunches are uncannily accurate, and explains the highly unlikely synchronicities that happen all the time.

Our culture makes us think that we are alone in our minds, whereas if my theory is correct (I am betting my life on it) we are all pseudopods of one mind, and hence anything but alone. There is a higher level of significance to everything that happens to us, and we are in a constant interactive game of life with a higher part of ourselves, the overall universe in which we are not a separate ball-bearing rattling around in a disparate box, but rather a morphing feature on the apparent surface of one Whole.

What luck is, then, is not a Monte Carlo procedure of random chance, but only appears that way because we do not understand all the purposes and causes impinging on every outcome of every action.

I feel intuitively certain that the next step for science is a subtle shift in point of view that will make everything fall into place, and will lead us to discover new ways of tapping into energy fields that will yield so much power that we can all afford to live like kings and queens. With his magnifying transmitters, Tesla had the start at a system of converting the Earth’s rotational magnetic energy into electricity — free to the masses. That was electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces, and perhaps all four can be tapped into in an analogous way. Will consciousness play a role as a fifth force in future technologies involving energy fields, not unlike the way the observer influences the outcome of quantum experiments?

Wishing you all luck that you consider extraordinarily good. I recommend objectively testing whether such “positive” luck can be attracted by flowing helpfully with every implied or explicit request that anyone makes of you. And that you dissect whatever appears to be “negative” luck so as to detect what the universe seems to be guiding you toward. I’d love to hear how your testing comes out — I do read your Comments, though most come by email.

Happy, lucky Chinese New Year!

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That, coming in February.

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.

Answering Any Question

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Volume 3, Issue 47

To continue what we’ve been saying about the alone space you need each day, one of the things you can do, if you really feel like it, is to play a game where you practice Flowing.

Discrimination is a function that comes into play at a micro level of our moment-to-moment decision-making. The more time we apply to making the discrimination among inner impulses to actions, the more delayed our impulsive actions. Even taking on and expressing a feeling that has meekly inched out of the wings seeking approval, is an action. We can eschew owning a provisional feeling, and we can treat all feelings as provisional until inspected to make sure we still agree with the logic that led to that feeling. This is the Observer state.

Although discrimination helps prevent actions we might regret, it also impedes the Flow state. In Flow state, we let our training and practice operate, as if instinctively, without hesitation. Yet even in moments of Flow, one senses there is a choice to be made, and hesitates while staying in the Flow state — the hesitation may be fractional until instinct causes movement before the time loss exceeds the action quality gain.

Ideally one could spend long hours each day for a lifetime training oneself at precisely the games that one loves the most. Acceleritis temporarily dwarfs the human race (in a sense by giving us too many stimuli too fast, a side effect of giving us too much brainpower too fast). In this dwarfing, the culture falls short of optimizing the delivery of people who love X to the task of X, although Google could fix that. In the dystopia created by Acceleritis, we also find ourselves in probably one of the most challenging games the Universe has ever devised, so who’s complaining? Rise to the challenge, recognizing that alone space is needed each day.

One of the fun things you can do whenever you feel like it, in your alone space, is to let yourself do automatic writing without editing — for no one will ever see that page except you unless you decide otherwise. Automatic writing of whatever comes into your mind, as if taking dictation from someone else, is an amazing experience and a doorway into the Flow state. Once you get going with whatever your mind wants to say, you can also ask any question that you may have always or just recently wanted the answer for — the key most challenging questions of your life or facing your company, whatever. As if having a crystal ball, you let yourself actually put down on paper whatever is the first thing that pops into your head.

Don’t let yourself go into long internal debates – like saying to yourself, “There’s no way I can be coming up with the right answers so easily to these questions!” Just do it. It’s a game. The thing is not the answer but the Flowing without discrimination at all. Life may not have handed you a built-in way to get into Flow through practice, but everyone can use automatic writing to get into Flow.

Not that all automatic writing is the Flow state. It might be flowing easily and that’s good but is not in itself a sign of Flow state or even Observer state. That’s not the point. Don’t be rating yourself each second (“Am I in the Flow state now?”) because that is one of the biggest blocks imaginable to getting into the Flow state. Everything you do in your alone space is for your own enjoyment, not for any other goal. The side effects of realizing higher states of consciousness are something to gratefully enjoy as they happen, not to wistfully hope for. So have the fun now.

Wishing everyone a lot more fun in 2014. 

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That!, coming in February

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.

Cultivating Your Own Enjoyment

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Volume 3, Issue 46

The sky has never been a sharper blue before, it seems, as I stand in the subzero temperature looking at the frozen river. The hopping birds flocking the feeders seem at home in the snow, even sitting in it. Multiply layered and not cold at all I sense my own enjoyment and completeness, at rest-ness. Nothing tugs me away into action. Nothing seems to need doing at the moment for the completion of the Universe’s Mission. The warmth of the heart flows outward encompassing all things, all beings in its love. High warmth within record cold.

The reason it is not selfish for you to cultivate your own enjoyment is that you will give better service that way. Whomever you serve will get the most value from you when you are having a good time, because that is what potentiates the Flow state.

To nurture and develop your own enjoyment so that it stays with you more of the time and eventually always, it will help to schedule daily alone space. The thing about your alone space is that no one can get to you, so you are free to do anything you really want to do.

If there is a very long project you want to turn to, don’t be put off by the fact that you won’t be able to get very far in the 20 minutes or whatever time you have realistically been able to eke out of your day, diking back the ocean of obligations. You may get much further than you thought possible in terms of flashes of a high-level framework. These enjoyable Flow experiences then function as super-powerful rehearsal as you will at some point in the future get into the detailed work, as powerfully as if you spent hours in practice in a normal mundane level of everyday consciousness.

Whatever it is you really want to do, note that. As an observation like “Hmm, I apparently really like to do X.” The cumulative effect of those objective observations of fact about yourself will be valuable even if seemingly Captain Obvious at the outset.

Note if there is absolutely nothing you feel like doing. Is it that there is nothing in your life you consider fun, or is it simply not something you can do alone with yourself in 20 minutes? If you can’t do “it” now, you can daydream about “it” now. Those daydreams can become more than daydreams, they can help program your life with more of “it” because they are rehearsals — these revelries program your very cells, those cute little biocomputers in the massively parallel array of computers constituting the material substrate of our self.

Just finding out what “it” is, is a very valuable use of time. You need to move toward doing what you love the most all of the time, even if you only achieve a fraction of that movement in your lifetime, given Acceleritis and the money system. In utopia we would not have to meet money deadlines hence not have to accept labors unconducive to our enjoyment. We are working toward building that utopia for our heirs, some future generation that finally has free energy and matter in such profusion as to support what Aristotle meant by leisure for every person on the planet.

Meanwhile, back to 2014 Earth. Daydreaming about small moves you can realistically make toward more enjoyment in your life is a good use of time in your alone spaces.

More next week about why we need more enjoyment and how we can get it.

Here’s to more fun for all of us in 2014! Best to all,

Bill

PS: See me on TV today – follow me on Twitter and look at my tweet today.

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.