Tag Archives: Flow State

Bring a Sense of the Epic into Your Life

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Volume 3, Issue 11

Science can no longer rule out the possibility that a Single Universal Intelligence is the only thing that exists, per our Theory of the Conscious Universe. Our theory explains how this Intelligence is able to simultaneously play an infinite number of chess games called lives. The You who looks out your eyes and experiences life may not be the gnomish “you” that parts of yourself — neuron clusters programmed by Accidentalism and Materialism — think you are.

Accidentalism is the religion that claims the universe came about by accident out of nothingness.

Materialism is the religion that claims everything is matter, so the human need to worship something can be directed only at material things.

My theory is not a religion. It is a system of hypotheses aimed at explaining all of documented human experience including the “paranormal”. We classify certain experiences as “paranormal” based on our limited experience in the universe as the standard for what is “normal”. And based on our mental emotional ego filters that protect us from dissonance by steadfastly refusing to make anything out of the cumulatively uncanny success rate of our own hunches, thereby trivializing our own experiences of the “paranormal”.

The explanation making the most sense to my gut is that there is only One of us. Each of us is another instance of the Universal Intelligence. All instances are really one Intelligence playing many roles.

The main thing about my theory is that I don’t want you to believe it but rather to test it for yourself. This means using it as a lens of what may in fact be true, certainly is possible, and why not see if using the lens to explain experience might not lead to more control and pleasure than the present way of looking at things?

Some might liken this to a pleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy. It is equally plausible that the way we as a world look at things today is an unpleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy.

At any rate, one needs merely to entertain the possibility that the entire selfness of the Universe is what looks out your eyes, which you call yourself “me”. This is logically and empirically possible based on the most predictively successful theory in history, quantum mechanics. So entertain it for a second.

Realize it is possible that you are the one self that exists, enjoying yet another life. Realize if this just happens to be the one true explanation that science and everyone will affirm some day in the future, here you are going to the movies to enjoy identifying with a fictional character who is having an epic adventure, when in fact that is just a fairy tale produced in Hollywood while your own life is a genuine, authentic, rich real life saga of a hero beset by challenges and overcoming them — just like in the movies — but real — and therefore infinitely more meaningful and dramatic.

It is possible that the One Being is you… and everyone else. Possible. Actually possible. You have been betting on a reality so far different from this, your automatic reaction is to thrust it aside with a derisive snort. That reflex is itself an interesting phenomenon deserving careful attention — put a pin in it, we will come back and dissect it often on this page in the future. Call it your daily persona, “the robot”. The name is a handle to put on that aspect of your self — the reasons will become apparent in this blog and in my books (including Mind Magic) and DVDs. 

Don’t let the thrusting aside of new concepts or experiences be internally accepted. Override it by an act of will from your true self. Keep an open mind. Empirical evidence is the only thing to give weight to. Things you yourself have experienced, seen with your own eyes, not things you were told. All the philosophies and cosmologies and religions and scientific theories and my theories are just abstractions of the real thing — symbol systems, metaphors, isomorphisms (same information carried in different code). Reality is what it is. As a race we cannot say yet that we really know what it is. Therefore an open mind is the only sane position — yet another clue that the present world system is not actually sane. Acceleritis has caused EOP. Information overload has actually existed for 6000 years and just keeps getting worse, exponentially. We are dealing with it very poorly. Our society is not yet a sophisticated one. Civilization on planet Earth will be sane and sophisticated when its mind is open and each person is making careful and unfiltered observations of his/her own experience. The Observer state leading to the Flow state.

Takeaway: don’t thrust aside the undisprovable possibility that you are the hero in the most epic movie of all time… and so is everyone else.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — You Are The Universe  is now on track for Summer 2013 publication. Watch this space for more.

Going Through the Worst to Get to the Best

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Volume 3, Issue 10

The two biggest blocks to the Zone/Flow state are distraction and attachment.

Attachment is also the only block to happiness, joy, delight, fun, ananda (from Hinduism, Buddhism, Extreme happiness, one of the highest states of being.) — the natural (built-in) target state of all experiencers. An experiencer is any entity that experiences consciousness through which an apparent inner/outer world is engaged. In this condition of experiencing, the automatic preference is for positive self-reaction.

This is because experiencers are driven by motivations that exist in the emotional dimension of experience (the other dimensions being intuitive, intellectual and perceptual). And happiness is the off-the-scale self-evidently best state one can experience in the emotional dimension.

Attachment blocks happiness because one is fearful of losing the things one associates with happiness and tacitly assumes are requirements for happiness. One is also angry at whatever agencies are suspected or known to be removers of those precious happiness-causing things.

“I am really attached to Pippin” (one of my cats) is a true statement for me because I love her. To experience love is not necessarily to be attached. So it is possible to get lost in word games about whether attachment is a good or bad thing because the word “attachment” is associated with the word “love”. To avoid confusion and getting lost in wordplay, I am using the term attachment to mean the inability to separate love from attachment and therefore the anger/fear syndrome.

The difference is the importance given to keeping the “things” that give us happiness. If one truly appreciates the joy that has been created by one’s loves, joy that has been creating other good things through spontaneous Flow state creativity — which emerges naturally from joy and from love — it is still possible to not worry about losing any of those “things”. In fact, when one is in that state of non-fearing loss, one is truly free, and true freedom does not exist up to that point, even in a pure democracy. This is because one is not free from one’s lower self — the ego software we built in our heads since birth (the Theory of Holosentience) — until Enlightenment, the lightening up (Fred Klein) that sets in once one has seen through the self-trickery of attachment.

A powerful contemplation technique in Mind Magic is burning out one’s attachments by intensely imaginarily experiencing the loss of each separate thing to which one is attached. This requires setting aside Alone Time, without a sense of time pressure. It requires immersion, concentration, patience as you go over the same material again and again. You can only do it for one object of your attachment at a time. It can take weeks to fit it in and spend the necessary time.

Give your imagination free reign like in a daydream. See yourself go through the experience of the moment the loss takes place, visualize how it might happen. See it vividly from the inside the way you experience life. Feel the feelings. Watch yourself in the daydream, the things you say in that situation, and the way you say them, and how the other person responds (if the particular attachment involves another person). Let yourself actually feel the loss as if it is really happening.

In your later iterations of the exercise you start to act like the hero you are in the daydream of the loss. You give the situation a more intelligent response. You realize that this is now how you will respond if that ever happens, or when it happens if it is inevitable. You feel differently about yourself from that moment on — more confident, more self-respectful, more courageous, in fact less prone to fear, and also harder to make angry.

It can take much longer than weeks for you to feel the effects of this internally due to the interconnections among various ego circuits in your head. It’s best to be removing all of the attachments during the same period of time — the perceptual, cognitive, intuitive/spiritual, and emotional parts. This is what the manual called Mind Magic is designed to do.

Happiness to all,

Bill

Flow Genes

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Volume 3, Issue 9

Thanks to Steven Kotler and the Flow Research Collective for their metaphor of the Human Genome Project as the kind of thing we need even more to facilitate Flow state. Now that thousands and maybe millions of us are experimenting and getting into this state, it has to become a world priority like the environment and the economy. In fact it can solve those and any other challenges we face, whereas the reverse is not true. If we start with the symptoms we will never reach the cure. Flow is where it all starts. Flow means better decision making and more creativity. If that is not exactly what we need, what is?

Love you say? Glad you added that. Love is actually the best pathway for the average person to reach Flow most quickly. Loving communication is the way for the masses to realize Flow state in our lifetimes — maybe the only way.

It starts with people we already love. We find Flow ways to communicate with them. They notice and appreciate the difference. We notice the stuck keys inside us that we get past to allow us to talk lovingly about another’s stuck keys in a way that feels good to everyone.

Getting back to the metaphor of genes, what could Steven and his colleagues mean? If I take it to mean that brain states and methods are the two ways of looking at the components within Flow, this metaphor has objective and subjective levels:

  1. Understanding what goes on in the brain in getting to and through Flow and the post-period and recycle — this is the scientific objective level that corresponds most exactly to the Human Genome Project, which decoded what information each gene carries;
  2. Understanding the methods we can each use to take advantage of this prior scientific understanding, where each method is a gene — this is the subjective interior method each individual takes by acts of will or automatically in order to experience Flow and maximize it. The subjective is operationally more important to us than the objective level, because it is only through willful inner experience shaping that we exercise any power to bring on one state or another.

The Human Effectiveness Institute has discovered numerous genes/methods for bringing on Flow more often. The Aha! Cultivation process is one of them that the Institute shares with Steven Kotler and his colleagues, who revealed only that one method at the ARF conference; we assume there are more methods/genes in the Flow Genome Project so far, and more to be discovered by cross-fertilization with other researchers like ourselves. Aha! is only one way in which Flow can be experienced — other methods get you there too. The book Mind Magic is a compendium of Flow genes/methods, not exhaustive of the entire long list. The book is focused on stimulating Flow state through the Observer state by the use of “inner head” language, which some see as poetry, to evoke moods that evidently change brain chemistry and shift energy patterns within different brain parts.

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi who coined Flow, lists quite a few genes/methods such as the balance between skills and challenges, the autotelic enjoyment-driven way the individual comes to the game or métier, and a number of other great insights available in his books.

Daniel Goleman has also contributed genes/methods to the list. His dictum that a person needs about 10,000 hours of practice in something in order to become a candidate for Flow in that endeavor is illuminating. This is a gene that can guide us to selection of activities in which to attempt and monitor our success. Anything that guides the individual to use specific methods that actually work to get to Flow is a gene in the way I take, or perhaps take liberties with, the seminal metaphor Steven and the Flow Genome Project have cooked up.

The work of many people led to the discovery of the gene of previsualization, which is widely recognized to increase Flow.

The genes that our work has contributed include, to mention a few top of mind:

  1. Getting to the Flow state by getting to the Observer state first
  2. Thinking without words
  3. Burning out attachments
  4. Vigilant action to vitiate the power of distraction
  5. Unconditional Omnidirectional Love
  6. Fun
  7. Can-do attitude

I hope that someday when all the genes have been listed someone will organize them into something that looks like a space age version of Mendeleyev’s (periodic) table of the elements so we can see the relationships among the genes/methods/brain states and thereby have a better understanding of how each method works to change the brain state.

Best to all,

Bill

Flow State — How Can I Know It Will Work for Me?

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Volume 3, Issue 8

In the last episode about the recent ARF Re:THINK 2013 conference, I left off at the point where Bob Barocci was about to relate a conversation with Steven Kotler, a thinker and writer on Flow state (in other words, another “me” 😀 who was twice on the conference docket as luncheon speaker.

Bob’s question to Steven was framed by him first saying in effect that Flow was for athletes and Bob didn’t think it was for him. The question then was how could you test this and tell for sure if it makes a real difference in performance?

Steven said that the 4-stage Aha! Process could be disrupted, and the results measured. In other words, performance would be lowered, proving that Flow state can be blocked, and thus logically “proving” that it can also be fostered by not interfering with the natural process as companies might unknowingly be doing by current business practices e.g. people popping into one’s office. Bob appeared unswayed, so I sent him a copy of my book Mind Magic suggesting that he could tell if it worked using this questionnaire on himself after reading the book. So far no word back from Bob as to effects.

Having thought about the question of testing and validation of Flow for most of my life, starting long before I knew the word Flow in this context, I have some ideas as to how to actually do it. In one instance I presented to a client, a group of senior U.S. military officers in a strategic unit, the idea of two combat units currently performing at equal levels. A Flow induction intervention is applied to one but not the other.

Flow induction interventions that have been considered in the past across the planet (not all necessarily effective) can be specific forms of mental focus i.e. meditation concentration contemplation, books, blog posts, videos, podcasts, tweets, persuasive speakers, chemicals (the military has tested some of these for example), several other people acting but you think it’s a real situation you’re in, being put into a life- threatening simulation but you think it’s real, psychotronics, etc.    

Within a company, two teams performing equally well and doing similar jobs, perhaps in different geographies but similar work cultures, matched in as many other ways as possible, would be the way to test the efficacy of any purported Flow intervention.

Companies and every other working grouping of people owe it to themselves to test Flow induction by any means they are attracted to. In the next post, some “genes” of Flow that the Human Effectiveness Institute has discovered, and the nature of the Flow inductions we recommend and offer.

Best to all,

Bill