Tag Archives: Flow State

Conduct Your Inner Orchestra

Leave a reply

Powerful Mind Part 40
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog December 13, 2024.
Created December 15, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 39

Simplify the task of conducting your inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it.

The reason homo sapiens have settled into this pandemic coping pattern I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is that the mind – with its jumble of thoughts, feelings, images, memories, imaginings all coming too fast one atop the other – is initially very difficult to orchestrate. That might not have been the case before written language when the number of question-producing experiences we had each day was likely to have been a mere handful. Since written language, there has been an explosion of inventions (including tools, weapons, and media) bringing us more and more information per day. As you know I call this Acceleritis, the probable cause of EOP, which, fifty years later, neuroscience is now discovering as the default network.

The purpose of Key #10 is to simplify the task of conducting this inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it as in the case of EOP.

Let’s review the ground we’ve covered so far regarding Key #10:

    • Interpret your feelings constructively – seek to learn from bad feelings – transform all inner experiences into future operating guidelines
    • Be grateful for existing – use willpower to maintain a permanent attitude of positivity – filter out negative hypnotic suggestions
    • Edit your headstream – test your inner drafts – update your senators (your inner AI ego robot) (Keys #1 & #2)
    • Balance your own arousal so that it is optimal for performance – detached from addiction to specific outcomes
    • Go with the Flow as long as it remains 100% positive – gently and Socratically share any concerns with others only if that feels more helpful than a wait-and-see attitude
    • Note your own mental chatter without taking it as how you really feel (Key #7)
    • Do not have a closed mind with regard to the possibility that you and the universe are one connected consciousness
    • Minimize time spent worrying by detecting worry and immediately turning it into fixing

This may seem like too many things to consider at once, all the time. You are absolutely right. That’s why we went with EOP in the first place. So don’t try to explicitly juggle all these balls, just let them sink into the core of your being. How then to simplify one’s inner life so as to stay in Observer and Flow states as much as possible?

Optimizing Rituals

We all have our rituals, things we do each day. Our life is organized around these daily patterns. These little certainties impart a sense of order and keep our life from flying apart in troubling times.

In order to remove the feeling that twelve Keys, each of them filled with complexity, is too much to internalize workably, here are some suggested additions to your daily ritual which can pragmatically overcome this sense of being daunted by the size of the task of self-mastery.

Check for Joy

The first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, or even opening your eyes, remember your life’s mission and check for your own joy. You ideally will be eager to jump out of bed and seize the day, but if you’re not, contemplate what is bothering you.

I’ve noticed that sometimes I’m out of sorts for a day or more right before my subconscious mind delivers an idea that changes everything. It’s almost like birthing pains. The idea itself that finally emerges fills me with joy again. Often it’s something that’s been right in front of my face sometimes for months or years and seems utterly obvious in retrospect.

If joy is absent at the start of your day, see if you can get an angle on the possible cause even before you get out of bed. Maybe your dreams will offer clues. Obligations may cause you to need to keep moving but you can continue to dissect why your passion mission is not enough to motivate your joy today, while bathing and/or showering and otherwise getting ready for the day. This is usually a very productive time for diagnosing your own mood.

Be on the lookout for the root of your lack of joy being some attachment you have allowed to persist. You might be attached to doing things in an orderly way and the pressure of incoming assignments and requests may have destroyed any hope of order. All you can do is to focus on prioritizing and being decisive until order is re-established. Scheduling when you are going to get something done, and being extremely conservative about how long each task will take, can get you back into feeling that you can be patient, systematic, and thorough.

Some or many of these tasks might be questions in your own mind and feelings about what to do about specific situations, or about abstract principles. It relieves stress to keep a list of these unanswered questions so you can come back to them without being attached about getting them all resolved asap. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It helps to have the sense that you have added one new thought or idea about each such question every time you contemplate it.

Passion Projects

Be aware of your own passion projects and how each one figures into your overall mission. Keep a list of those and see how you change their ranking over time.

Each person you love is one of those passion projects. Each goal in your life is on that list.
In the day-to-day tumble of obligatory and voluntary events, having the mission and passion projects to remind you of the meaning of your life is restorative.

Glance at the list once a day. This is effectively a form of Key #8, rotating your attention to cover every passion project. This will have the effect of springing out good new ideas or reminders that should have higher priority for sooner action on one or more of your passion projects.

Daily Alone Space

While keeping up with the tsunami of responsibilities, duties, chores, assignments, and unexpected events, days tend to pass without allowing any space for strategic thinking. This is why it’s mission-critical that you give yourself an uninterruptable 20 minutes or more each day to meditate and contemplate how your life is going. You can do this while doing yoga or exercise or while sitting up straight cross-legged or in a chair. Slow deep breathing helps. Often the best time each day for this is around 5 pm, but it can be any time you can carve out that particular day.

Simply watch the material your mind brings up and decide what is important enough to think about. You may find that you are displeased with something that you yourself did. If so, forgive yourself by understanding why the event happened as it did, and make a plan as to handle it if a similar situation presents itself in the future – as it undoubtedly will.

Remind yourself to be grateful that you screwed up in this relatively minor way this time, because that provoked your learning from it and deciding upon how to handle such things in the future, when they might be far more important to your life and mission. Just in case the universe is conscious and actually let this small goof happen so you could be armed to not make the same mistake in a situation of much greater importance, thank the universe or God whichever way you prefer to address the Totality Of Existence.

Last Thoughts Before Sleep

Before you let yourself fall asleep, prevision the next day the way you’d like to see it come out. Obviously, a glance at your schedule before getting into bed will make this much easier and more effective.

As you do this you may find yourself rehearsing what you will say and will catch things that you realize would be stepping on a land mine. Rephrase those of course. You will then find yourself feeling more confident about the morrow and this will take you into a fine sleep.

You may also see how certain meetings or events could take a bad turn. Rehearse your optimal gentle, Socratic, constructive, win/win response to such pushbacks. But do not dwell upon those downside possibilities once you have prepared yourself for them. Before you go to sleep once again prevision the day the way you would prefer it to go, strengthen your intentions and your resoluteness with courage, and enjoy a beautiful night’s sleep.

Those are the daily rituals we suggest upon rising, after work, and before going to sleep.

Learn & Teach

As you progress through life, look at the whole process as one of learning, and share your learnings when people ask for that. You may also sometimes cautiously try sharing what seems to you to be a piece of learning that the other person needs even though they have not asked for help. But be prepared to immediately abandon the idea if the other person doesn’t want to hear it.

Mindquiet

There may be times when despite how much you have learned and how much time you spend in Observer state, everything is just coming at you too fast, from the outside as well as the inside. It’s best at those times, if you can, to excuse yourself and go into a bathroom stall where you can be alone, and exercise your will to blank out the flow of inner thoughts and feelings. Just breathe slowly and deeply and wait and watch the blankness of your inner world. Big Picture integrations, summarizations of where you are at may soon present themselves to your psyche. Often it will resolve into a single main challenge you face. This clarity and focus will equip you to flow with the situation courageously and effectively.

Key # 10:

Patiently determine the most constructive use of each salient inner experience

What this Key says is that whatever is going on inside of us, some of it is obviously more important, let’s call that the salient part. Don’t bother with minor imperfections but go for the Big Picture items that cry out to be dealt with first. Look patiently at those salient items without allowing the feeling of urgency to take you over. Treat that feeling of urgency as part of the auto-completing bio-AI in your brain, not as you yourself.

Contemplate each salient item as something to learn from, and the impetus for you to give yourself new guidelines. Don’t be attached to reaching closure on the new solution, let its picture resolve in its own time. Maintain a list of items that are still cooking and use strikethroughs when they have resolved themselves so that you can look back at your trail up the mountain.

My best to all,
Bill

Keeping Score Is Mundane Thinking

Leave a reply

Powerful Mind Part 26
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 18, 2024.
Created September 1, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 25

We have been conditioned to rate how well we have performed for other people. Our parents told us we were “a good boy” or “a good girl” at times, and “bad boy” or “bad girl” at other times. Gradually we became more aware of which things would get us which rating, and played to that scorecard. Now, all these many years later, that same approval-seeking program still has independent existence in our minds.

It is what it is. Good and bad are just labels we paste on real things. This labeling has positive outcomes when it helps guide us toward benefitting living things and away from disadvantaging them. But the way we are constantly labeling ourselves moment to moment is a neurotic pattern that is mostly counterproductive.

We also carry around a certain amount of unforgiven guilt, probably as deeply repressed as we can make it. We regret some things we did in our past and some part of us refuses to ever forgive ourselves for it. Even if we act out such a forgiveness it tends not to take the first few times.

These related behaviors use up a certain amount of cognitive capacity that holds us back from Flow state. Our thinking remains petty because of these old wounds and ongoing concern with how well we are performing moment to moment. These are just more attachments we have, conditions we have counterproductively established that do not permit us to feel good about ourselves, nor enjoy the now, unless we can prove ourselves to ourselves every moment. As if we can never be good enough.

Self-rating is irrelevant. We need to relieve ourselves of the burden of constant self-judgment. This is really the ego, presenting the masks that we think people want to see from us. Just more other-directed conditioning, that is preventing us from exercising free will and being in Flow.

Observer state enables us to clear the slate of all mundanities arising within our robotic false selves, as they arise. Like shooting down a missile while it is just leaving the launching pad. We actually have enough attention to be able to pay close watch on what is going on both inside us and around us at the same time. But not if we are unable to control our own attention. If we are living in fear that fear can cause us to be distracted by sounds or movements in the periphery of our vision.

This is why for thousands of years empiricists in all world cultures have trained themselves and others to be able to concentrate, and to ignore distractions and stay single-pointed. Without the ability to concentrate, metacognition becomes much more difficult if not impossible, and Flow state is likely to never occur.

Among the exercises practiced in some cultures is the burning out of fear, by meditating next to a corpse or in a graveyard. My preferred method is to imagine the feared event happening, and working out what one will do if it happens. Once you see yourself having the guts to ride through the feared situation with your head held high, the fear abates.

Getting rid of fear is part of getting rid of distractions, attachments, and other common habits of people who do not know about the higher states of consciousness they are giving up to hang onto these primitive mental ways.

Instead of keeping score on yourself, just let those impulses float away downstream.

Those scorings will otherwise either pump up your ego, making it more capable of distracting and fooling you, or they will undermine your confidence. Either way they will detract from your future performance. In effect, when you give yourself a bad score at moment #1, you are increasing the odds of giving yourself an even worse score at moment #2.

It is more logical and practical for you to recognize the value of the mistake you just learned from, because it makes you much less likely to make the same kind of mistake again, so in effect you ought to be rewarding yourself for having gotten that mistake out of the way as soon as possible.

But the best path is the one that lets all the scoring disperse as quickly as it tries to grab your attention. With a little practice this is not so difficult. That’s why this is the shortest chapter in this serialized book Powerful Mind.

If something is happening, going with the flow of it is generally the best practice, unless you are certain it is not who you are to go along with that. If something is happening that is against your highest principles you should not go along with it. What you might do is ask a question without seeming to take sides. This gives you the most potential leverage to correct the situation, although others with similar principles might misunderstand your actions. Not being attached to what others might think of you temporarily or permanently frees you to do the most good by your own lights.

Control

You are what you control. Your body and mind may not currently be entirely under your control. Deeply habituated ego conditioning may control your emotional reactions faster than you can stop them. This can feel frustrating and you might be tempted to blame yourself for it. However, if you do not currently control those things, it would be unfair to blame you. Leave aside the blame and simply persevere to take over your own castle knowing that in the end it cannot stop you from taking over.

Equilibrium

Balance and moderation are two of the great virtues taught by classical Greek Philosophy, Taoism, and to some extent by all spiritual traditions as well as inner exploration psychologies. The ability to deal with every moment is maximized by not over reacting, taking everything in stride, not throwing people out of your heart based on something said or unsaid, not being so fervent about your high principles that you get sucked into attachment to them and passionate rejection of what seem like opposite principles. Everything is connected. Dichotomies exist in the mind but what is, is one connected whole.

Key #5

Self-rating is irrelevant.
This is radical new mental strategy #5,
the fifth simple key to the doorway
of the upper mind.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

Staying Focused Through Complexity

Leave a reply

Powerful Mind Part 34

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, September 26, 2024.
Created October 27, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 33

By this point in our journey, your priorities are to be your highest self and spend as much time as possible doing your passion work, while avoiding distractions, especially from your own doubts and fears. But there are so many other distractions to deal with, including people you love popping into your life at odd moments. By now your savior faire may include noting that these are assignments from the Universe that deserve your attention even when the timing is frustrating.

Because we have collectively dreamed up this ultra-distracting culture we now live in, in which we are being exposed to multiple media simultaneously for most of our waking moments, and in which emails, texts, phone calls, and innumerable other messages are incoming at all times, these challenges may often overcome our resolve, and make us feel as if we are never going to be able to stay in Flow or even in Observer state. Plus, we may be balancing the work we use to make money with the work that is our passion to which we are ever so gradually transitioning.

The reality is that multitasking is something we all overestimate our own talent for. We are all at our best when we immerse completely in one single-pointed attention stream at a time. The implication: we need to schedule our time in advance, leaving at least twice as much time as needed to complete a given task, but making advance arrangements (like turning phones and email audio notifications off, and closing doors with Do Not Disturb signs) so that we can really focus on one task at a time, enjoying it to the hilt, and treating it as the most important thing in the world for the allotted time.

But the reality is that we will not always have the luxury of controlling our own space. Sometimes we will be out in the world of action mixing with dozens of other people we know. Sometimes we will be doing that while operating heavy machinery (e.g. a car). Let’s take a hypothetical situation in which you are driving a car, involving looking forward, occasionally in the rear view mirror, occasionally in the side view mirrors, and keeping in mind where you are going, which might involve listening to cues from a GPS. You will also be monitoring your own mind and feelings, but your salience network is prioritizing safety above all else.

This means that if you are daydreaming idly in default network, you will switch consciously back into Observer state, where you may detect flash-forwards to the upcoming meeting to which you are driving, and noting useful ideas that you might bring up in that meeting. You may also hear yourself rehearsing specific dialog that suddenly gets you in trouble in your mental picture of the meeting. You also make a mental note to avoid that line of dialog, and perhaps you come up with a good phrase to use if someone else brings up that sensitive topic.

But you do not allow your useful inner predreaming to distract you from primary attention to the movements of cars and the changing of traffic lights, and to intuitions you may have of what another driver is going to do.

Let’s make the situation even more complex. Let’s say you’re driving a fairly large car with one passenger to the side and three more in back. One of these people is your business partner whose apparent main goal in life is to diminish you in the eyes of others, which he does with amazing manipulative powers, projecting boundless self-confidence. The others in the car are important clients. Your partner is leading a discussion about an idea you have had which he is criticizing, and the others are taking his views seriously and asking questions.

You note your ego’s reaction to this and set it aside, merely listening while maintaining safety on the road.

A method which can help in circumstances such as these is the rotation of attention. You might not be able to safely see each person while driving, but you can pay special attention to listening to what each person says, and you might ask for the views of someone who is staying silent. By rotating your surplus attention rather than trying to focus on everything at once, you may find that you can remain in the Observer or Flow state, get everyone safely to your destination, and perhaps, with right timing, make some short statement which restores the awareness of why you brought up that new idea in the first place, and why it still is worthy of testing further.

Better to let the idea rise or fall without intervention and return to it at some apropos later point, than to get emotionally hooked into the game your rival is playing. Safety and staying above your own ego are the natural priorities in the situation.

Key #8


When there is too much going on,
rotate attention to make sure
every workstream is covered.

 

Your own inner world is one workstream. The road ahead and the three mirrors are four other workstreams while driving. Each person in the car with you – or the radio – each of these is another workstream. Your equipment (mind, intuition, perceptions, feelings) is not at its best when dealing with multiple workstreams, and the tactic that optimizes you when multiple workstreams are unavoidable, is rotation of attention focus. At least for brief instants you are taking a full grab of each workstream. But the one or more workstreams which contain existential danger (like when driving) must never be without some degree of attention, even as you grab information from split second peeks elsewhere.

Best to all,
Bill

What Do You Really Want?

1 Reply

Powerful Mind Part 27
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – September 6, 2024
Created September 8, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 26

Strangely this is not something we normally think about. The subject usually rises to our conscious mind only at times of great shock, typically the loss of a loved one, a job, or something else we greatly value. At other times most of us appear to assume that all of that has been decided already, we are “obviously” doing what we want to do with our lives, and so we just go along day to day doing our best, mostly guessing or following the path of least resistance in order to not make things any worse.

The species or at least the intelligentsia has finally admitted that homo sapiens are not rational actors, hence the science of behavioral economics. P.T. Barnum could have told us that a hundred years ago. However, some of us may be more rational than others, and for a rational person, it makes the most sense to stop life for a moment or longer while seriously considering what the real you really wants. How else can a rational person guide his or her decisions on a moment-to-moment basis?

As soon as one sets to making an objective fact-finding study of oneself, one finds that there are a great number of things that come up as probable wants, including both material and immaterial things. Page 95 of Mind Magic lists these, for example: “You may want money, specific possessions, status, fame, glory, power, accomplishment, respect, a large family, many lovers, to be loved, to be known, to be happy, health, long life, adventure, travel, certain feelings, certain experiences, etc.”

A more abstract list appears in my work on human motivations through Next Century Media, which discovered 265 psychological variables driving television program choice, and RMT (Research MeasurementsTechnologies), which distilled these into 15 life motivations. In Canada where RMT is already integrated with Vividata (“The MRI/SIMMONS of Canada”), here is the latest snapshot of how these 15 variables rank across the population of Canada:

Motivational States by Ethnicity-vividata

As you can see, wealth/success is the main driver for most Canadians, but there are differences in motivation ranking by different ethnic subcultures in Canada. Culture is definitely a factor in shaping our individual motivations. However, as this book Powerful Mind being serialized here has often pointed out, we as individuals are much better off to be able to discover what we ourselves deep down really want, and to not automatically go along with all of the ways we have been shaped by outside forces.

It’s much better to contemplate our lives to the degree that we can be the ones to decide what we truly want out of life.

Aristotle wrote that the un-contemplated life is not worth living. I would say that slightly differently: one is not living the fullest life possible if one is swept along by external forces from beginning to end.

Life situations also affect our motivations. For example, note how important the motivation of “belonging” is to people who recently moved out of their parents’ home, and how important “security” is to people who recently retired. (These measurements are not based on survey questions asking people what motivates them; it is based on what television programs they report watching, and the method has been validated by seven independent studies.)

Motivational States by Life Events - vividata

If we look across all of the cultures in our hisandherstory (aka “history”), we see that in many of them, great value was placed on self-transcendence (altruism) e.g. the Zhou Dynasty, self-knowledge e.g. Greece in Socrates’ time, creativity e.g. the Renaissance. When we look at our current culture, the situation is quite different. In the cancel culture of today, idealism in any form is something that causes people to “cringe”. Cynicism and snide remarks are the safe harbor for conversations. Science in recent centuries has assumed that the universe is an accident, therefore the culture does not believe that there is meaning and purpose in life, nor is idealism defensible in objective terms. Authoritarians rise to power by promising to remove all of the causes of fear, similar to the protection racket. In our culture therefore it is less likely that you have chosen to want idealistic things, or if you have, it is because you are exceptional.

Wanting the Approval of Others

One of our most ignoble wants is the approval of others. Hence the high ranking of “belonging” among the 15 motivations. In order to “fit in”, one generally is expected to share the same values, pastimes, and sayings of the group. After a while, individuals forget that they are wearing a mask and start to believe that the mask is really them.

Make a study of yourself. Take your time. Write down notes as the spirit moves you. What do you think you really want most out of life today? Was it always that way? What was your dream when you were very young as to what you would do with your life? Did it change? Why did it change?

Assume that in your own case, there was the “Me That Was Born”, who you really were, before the culture and other people started to shape you. Using all of the access to memories which you still have, what did that person want out of life, and where were the change points along the route to now?

If you look at the list of wants and motivations above you may see that you have always wanted all of these things to some degree but today there may be only a couple of them that really energize you. You may see how running after some of the other things took you off into directions you didn’t enjoy and have now processed past those wants. Or, you may find that nothing seems to matter anymore, it’s all falling short, you need something more, but have no idea what it is.

One clue is to think back about the things that you’ve been good at, and that you enjoyed doing. Those are your gifts to the world. Your Mission is to do those enjoyable things that you do so well so as to make as many people and other living things as happy as possible.

If you follow that star it will take you to the Flow state.

My best to all,
Bill