Tag Archives: Flow State

Optimizing the value of feelings in decision making

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What are feelings? How are feelings optimized?

Besides the input from the five physical senses, human consciousness receives feelings. Upcoming posts will offer experiments focused on this input stream, which you can conduct yourself. These experiments will establish whether you can achieve measurable improvements in your own effectiveness stemming from better channeling or processing of feelings-type information.

To prepare for the experiments, let’s contemplate: what are feelings?
 Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
The Orion Nebula
Feelings are urges that arise to sensibility within us, within our minds and within our bodies. Feelings are experiences, states of consciousness resulting from motivations, sentiments, preferences or desires. These terms all really mean the same thing: motivations, what we value, what we want, what we are trying to get, what we want to avoid.

Feelings are the way we respond internally to external and internal phenomena, based on what we are trying to get and avoid, and how current events can help or threaten our desired outcomes.

Therefore feelings generally come in two valences, positive or negative. The feelings are positive if current events appear to favor our targeted outcomes, and they are negative if events seem to be heading away from what we want to have happen.

Positive feelings are valued universally in themselves. We don’t need to argue in favor of them, we all like them, and would like to have them all the time.

Negative feelings not only make us feel bad (by definition), they lower our immune system thus making us more prone to disease, and they distract our cognitive concentration thereby reducing our effectiveness. These bad feelings can also serve a positive function as an alarm system to get our attention to the problem fast. Ironically, if the bad feelings continue while one is grappling with the problem on a rational level, it will take longer to solve the problem.

When a problem arises and is sensed partially by the bad feelings within oneself, alerting us to focus on the challenge, it’s easy to say, “Turn off the alarm and get on with solving the problem.” However, it is not so easy because of attachment and Acceleritis.

Acceleritis, the unending acceleration of information entering the human brain each day, simply overloads the average human being’s capacity to do effective mental work of any kind. One kind of mental work we are supposed to get better at as we truly mature and “grow up” and become a “mensch” is to be able to sanely and in a balanced way take our feelings into account in our actions, without being stampeded or reduced to hand-wringing by those feelings. Acceleritis therefore also escalates the power of other mental subsystems that push in the direction of closure, black-and-white thinking, snap decisions, self-consistency and self-imitation — anything to simplify. Complexity is tacitly perceived as the main threat and pain causer. Acceleritis therefore lays many of us low with attachment — if Acceleritis were not present, we would actually have the mental and emotional maturity to cope with the situation without attachment.

What then is attachment?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Whirlpool Galaxy
Attachment is the excessive dependency on something. It is actually love carried too far. You love something so much (a wonderful thing) you cannot do without it, and so you fall prey to fear of losing it, and this distracts the mind so that Observer state and Flow state are impossible. Your mind tends instead — in the Acceleritis-induced state of Emergency Operating Procedure (EOP) — to go around in circles wallowing in the fear of loss or the sense of loss, or the anger and bitterness related to the loss or threatened loss, or the hopeless defeated depression of having lost it with no hope of regaining it. No useful mental work is achieved, no problem solving, no creative new leaps rising to meet the challenge sideways, as would occur in the higher states of effectiveness, namely, the Observer and Flow states.

As discussed in earlier posts, these effectiveness states are posited to be real physical states in the brain, differentiated from one another in measurable ways. Our Theory of Holosentience is based on the hypothesis that the primary dimension determining the state of the brain and consciousness is the degree of harmony among functional areas of the brain (inhabiting our entire sentience at once) — wherein thoughts, feelings, motivations, and the other aspects of self achieve a synchronous integrity in both the experientially measurable consciousness domain as well as the scientifically measurable biometric material domain.

This brings us back to feelings. Feelings have always been less studied and talked about than thoughts. Descartes did not say “I feel, therefore I exist.”

The word feeling originally may have related (Wikipedia says) to the sense of touch, and then its meaning expanded to include the ineffable internal sense that brings us more bits (information) than the five physical senses in terms of the way it affects our actions.

What evidence is there that we are generally more driven by our feelings than by our thoughts? Freud established that thoughts are more likely to be rationalized in support of feelings, rather than people being able to use their thoughts to control their feelings. And yet, how valuable it is to be able to do just that — to have the mental self-discipline to focus one’s thoughts effectively even when one’s feelings are in an uproar.

In a nutshell, feelings are a manifestation of our motivations colliding with the external world. What feeling would we have if we had no motivations?

Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Cassiopeia Galaxy
You can actually discover this for yourself, by meditating. While there are many specific methodologies for meditation, all of them have this mind/gut mirror effect of showing you what your own motivations really are, where they have gotten you, and why you have each experience you ever have. You can also achieve such objectivity that you can, as it were, turn off certain motivations for the moment and see what that feels like — what visions of future possibilities arise now that X motivation is gone, how are you breathing, how do you feel?

This gaining of perspective through meditation makes you feel good. In other words, it not only helps you inspect deeply your own feelings and their consequences in the world, it also generates a feeling, and a very good one.

What is that very, very sweet feeling? Is it happiness? Is it ecstasy? Yes, it’s all those things and more. Then what is it?

It’s love. A word that provokes instant uneasiness all round. It’s a word that makes us all feel silly. The guy has lost it. You don’t talk about such things. Verboten. Just for family talk, not public talk. What an interesting word to have such an effect.

The F-bomb has become popular in meetings with both males and females, at least in certain businesses I have moved through in the last decade. It is more acceptable than the word “love” in such venues.

Beyond getting the author in hot water, what is love?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Pink sheer heart shape, computer generated fractal abstract backgroundIt is the master feeling, the one all the others come from. Love is white light whereas each feeling is a color.

Love is the residue that is left when motivations are tuned down into conscious perspective, in light of an open-minded empirical philosophy of demanding proof for everything, dropping every bit of information one has heard onto a trial workboard in the consciousness storage bin, and taking it offline in terms of decision making. This is the perspective of yoga. Zen. Meditation. Contemplation. Focused singlepointed attention. A way of life for millions of people today and throughout human history. These multi-strands of movements see themselves as part of a whole, although to those outside they seem like a bunch of cults that are all different. They are all the same in achieving perspective, distance from motivations that the bodymind otherwise assumes are immutable, non-negotiable. These methods are among those crystallized into simple steps in our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness.

Why does love remain when one has achieved objective distance from one’s motivations? What evidence do we have for that assertion, and what explanation do we have for it?

As an individual my only evidence for any assertion here are my own experiences. Every time through meditation I clear away the built-in locked-in powerful sway of my own motivations, I discover that I am content, every tiny aspect of what I am experiencing is enjoyable and interesting, I simply love it, all of it, I love myself, and everyone. Others have reported similar experiences, enough so that I know I am not an isolated case. In the next post we will offer a meditative experiment whereby this may also happen to you.

Why should it be so? Why should we feel love when we are not being driven this way and that by irresistible motivations?

In my cosmological Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU) we are all dubs of the master consciousness, like MP3 copies of a master recording of a song, each of us a microcosm of the whole universal consciousness. When we rise above the petty motivations that seem so all-important to us in our daily lives down here on this one planet, we partake of the carrier wave motivation we share with the master consciousness, the one that is always there under all the other motivations, from which they draw their power. Love that is omnidirectional is the wellspring, the source from which we splinter off love of money, love of power, love of sex, love of the idea of getting that big job, and so on. All other motivations are modulations of love. So when the splinter motivations are quieted, the background radiation that differentiates itself into these “local” motivations becomes visible. This is how I explain it to myself, that I have this omnidirectional love experience whenever I am centered and immune to the compulsions to protect and seize what I feel I must have.

Acceleritis makes it very difficult for me to communicate this so that it is widely credible, because Acceleritis works against the stopping of the momentum of the mini-mind —so it seems ridiculous to assert that we already have an abundance of love without having to get anything we don’t already have. And yet, if you allow the possibility of a universal consciousness of which we are all a part, what motivation would it have to be doing this universe if it did not love the doing of a universe as a game in itself, the master game, the master art form, the ultimate form of self-discovery.

Acceleritis makes it much easier to deal with information overload by focusing on differences and categorization into buckets mostly on a single continuum from good to bad. This goes on constantly below our conscious awareness. Making automated decisions that are often the wrong ones. This leads to all sorts of feelings, many of them bad. Clouding over the master feeling that exists already, unbrokenly from beginning to end. It is there underneath all this debris. It comes out when we clear off the rubble.

Now that we’ve explored “feelings”, the next post will describe an experiment you can carry out yourself on the optimization of feelings.

Best to all

Bill

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PS – Humorously, Wikipedia says that feelings are the conscious subjective experience of emotion. This is funny because psychology defines emotion as the aspect of feeling that can be measured in the body, such as glandular secretions, muscle tensions, breathing rate, brainwaves, perspiration, etc., and you could just as easily say that feelings cause emotions as you could say emotions cause feelings. The leftover behaviorist psychology way of looking at it would be to make emotions more important — in fact 100% important, with feelings relegated to the trash bin of mind as epiphenomenon, a sound track that actually has no control of what the body is doing.

Such behaviorist Pavlovian thinking is now almost a century out of date, yet remnants of that thinking still creep into the generally excellent Wikipedia (which needs our donations incidentally to stay alive, and someone should tip them off to using advertising to support themselves, doing it in a PBS-like manner to the side all the way down from top to bottom, with true sponsorship tonality). Behaviorist ideas permeated so much of our thinking as a culture when they held reign that growing up we each got a dose of such ideas in the background conversations of adults we overheard. This is where we got the idea that we can just let the mind and body do their thing the way we always do and the way other people do, without any stopping to check out what the hell these operational action decisions are being based on.

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Gaining Conscious Control over Involuntary Reactions

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In this post we will begin to share what have been considered esoteric secrets by hidden schools for thousands of years. Today they would be classified as methods of applied cognitive psychology.

For thousands of years, mystery schools have existed at the core of each religion, where the religion at large is a diluted, simplified form of the core schooling, consisting mostly of rituals without retaining the full explanation of the entire system of thought. Over time, in response to the rise of religious tolerance and freedom, some of these occult (meaning “hidden”) schools have come out into the open at least to the extent of admitting their existence.

All of these schools taught (1) ethics (2) what today would be called applied cognitive psychology – the subject of today’s post, and (3) a cosmology centered around the idea of a unified identity of all things. These were never taught as three separate “courses” but as an organic whole in which the ethical and psychological portions were logical outgrowths of the cosmology. In other words, “Since you are part of a whole, treat the other parts fairly (ethics), and gain control of your involuntary reactions, which cause friction with the other parts and with your relationship to the whole (applied cognitive psychology).”

Teaching took many forms including a kind of immersive theater in which the teachers were actors and the student was not aware that they were performing. This was exemplified during the Classical Age in Greece by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and carried forth to this day by Freemasonry. The underlying principle being the now-scientifically proven fact that a person cannot change merely by intellectual understanding; instead it is pivotal that emotion/intuition/perception must also be engaged in order to make a profound and lasting psychological shift.

These “initiations” as they are called provide the types of feelings called “numinous” (magical) and what they do to the intellect – when theatrically effective – is to jar the belief in an accidental/”meaning”-less/materialistic-only universe, by seeming to provide contrary and compelling sensory evidence, i.e. a miracle or magical event. Today’s illusionists are an entertaining derivative of such practices but operate in a context where the adult audiences are fully aware that these miracles are simulated and because every adult knows the senses are being artfully tricked, hence these maneuvers are called “tricks”.

This is not to rule out that in some of these performances, something magical might actually occur – magical not in the sense of unscientific, but in the sense of not yet understood by science.

Science has now caught up to and verified that the cosmology being taught down through the ages by these hidden schools is correct. There is connectivity among all the constituent parts of the universe, matter is made of energy, space and time are one thing, particles are waves and waves are particles, and these “wavicles” remember their connection so that when apart and one changes, so does the other (as proven by the innumerable replicated experiments testing Bell’s Theorem). The information transfer from one wavicle to the other is supraluminal, i.e. faster than the speed of light, suggesting either that Einstein’s theories are at least partially incorrect, or that distance itself is an illusion, or both.

How did these relatively primitive people thousands of years ago know things that are only today being realized by our top scientists? My hypothesis is that the founders of these schools which radiated outward into far simplified dilutions called religions, were in the highest levels of Flow state when they had moments of enlightenment and realized these facts about the universe directly, through the faculty of cognition called “intuition”.

I’ve written here about Flow state many times. It is the state where the brain noise across the corpus callosum between left and right hemisphere disappears (Master Marvin Chun, Yale), and there is activity across all levels of brain rhythm as measured by EEG (delta, theta, alpha and beta waves) that appears as highly regular and synchronous between the brain hemispheres – in other words, organized rather than chaotic brain patterns. Experientially the Flow state manifests as perfect action, inspired ideation, joy, automaticity (everything is doing itself and you are along for the enjoyable ride) — and in its highest form (for there are sub-levels within this state) clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, and ultimately a spiritual dawning (conviction of universal connectivity, liberation from fear through intuitive trust in the ultimate benevolence of the universe) which if articulable (sometimes these experiences cannot be translated into words) would be what caused  the emergence of mystery schools and later religions themselves.

Latest science proves the existence of connectivity in physics (Bell’s Theory experiments among others) and in psychology (odds against chance being in the millions to one for the existence of clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy, per meta-analyses reported by Dean Radin and Charles Tart). The Theory of the Conscious Universe (my cosmology) posits that the basic stuff of which everything is composed is information and all of this exists within a single consciousness of which everything else is a part. But what is consciousness? It is that which experiences information. To be, to exist, is to be perceived/experienced by consciousness. This would have been a radical notion at the height of materialism, which probably peaked when I was a child and is already waning today as science makes strict materialism untenable. It’s pretty obvious to all of us that we are privileged to be living at an extraordinary time of change for the human race on Earth. One key aspect of this profound change is the proof that we are all connected and the true universe we live in is as miraculous as the ancients sensed.

Smooth and striated muscle tissue in the body generally have separate functions, the striated muscles being subject to voluntary control, and the smooth muscles being those that function without conscious will being involved – such as breathing. The mind and its four functions (Jung) of intellect, intuition, feelings and perception also has voluntary and involuntary aspects. We can use willpower and practice to extend the range of control we can exert over what is generally involuntary. For example, belly dancers can so control their stomach muscles as to make a quarter flip over and over while lying on their back, and advanced yogis can slow their heart rate down to reach a point approximating suspended animation. The term they use is “yogic control”, meaning the extension of the ability to control things in their formerly uncontrollable body-mind.

This yogic control concept comes into play in everyone’s life with regard to the phenomena of negative emotions including depression, dis-courage-ment, fear, anger, and other non-helpful manifestations in the domain of feeling. When such feelings arise they tend to curtail the ability of the intellect and the intuition to see solutions to the problems that have caused these negative internal states, and even the perceptions are changed, as we subtly begin to see more ugliness and less beauty in the world around us.

The ancient mystery schools still teach methods of making these involuntary feelings – which nobody likes to have, so they must be involuntary – something that can be controlled and stopped by the voluntary will. This involves the same principle of yogic control – extending what the individual can control within their own mind-body. These teachings were typically expressed in language that today would be regarded as unscientific. My book is an effort to provide the same teachings – which have been proven to work for thousands of years on small percentages of the population – in language that is non-mysterious, operational, actionable, simple, and hopefully therefore allows everyone to gain these extraordinary degrees of control, particularly over their own minds. Thousands of my readers have written in to say that the book worked for them, and only 11 out of approximately 35,000 readers have taken advantage of the lifetime moneyback guarantee.

Let’s take a look at anger, fear, discouragement and depression and the ways that these moods can be brought under conscious control and turned around – a small sampling of the book.

Most people assume there is nothing you can do about negative emotions – they come as they will, and you must just suffer through them. However, almost everybody knows someone who they have seen rise above these feelings at one time or another. Especially at a time such as now when the world is facing so many challenges all at once, it is vital to increase everyone’s ability to rise to the occasion and surmount negative feelings.

The common “solution” today for depression consists of drugs. These drugs often do alleviate depression temporarily but it always returns and another dose is needed. The drug approach is not bad but it is really a form of depression-maintenance program: it does not cure the problem but finds a way to live with it. The best aspect of drugs is the speed and ease of getting an effect. But this allows weakness of self-control to be carried forward often for an entire lifetime, skipping over the opportunity to use the problem as a springboard to increase the individual’s yogic control.

All of the mystery schools teach that death is not the end, that like matter-energy, consciousness also is conserved by nature, and that none of these things can ever be created nor destroyed, and some such schools explicitly teach that yogic control gained in this lifetime is carried over to subsequent lifetimes on this or other planes. Because the teaching of interconnectedness has been validated by science, this does not automatically mean that all the teachings of mystery schools are necessarily true, but it’s something to think about. The alternative is to rule out thoughts that have been associated with superstition just because of association in the mind, which is itself non-scientific. All things are unproven until they are experimentally proven. Whatever happens after death will remain very difficult to prove one way or another for us the living. Science may someday figure out the death barrier, but not today.

Regardless of such considerations, one does not have to go too far in order to justify the desirability of gaining control over defeatist feelings: regardless of any view of what the world is, it’s obvious that such feelings work against the person who has them — we see the evidence every day.

It is extremely difficult if not impossible to overcome one’s own negative feelings while remaining in the everyday state of consciousness. You can say, “I am going to put those emotions away and get down to the business at hand”, but many of us don’t really have the willpower to do it. The trick is to get out of the everyday state of consciousness. By moving into the observer state, one is able to far more easily turn off useless feelings. The active ingredient in this case is simply clarity.

The steps involved are not mysterious. The first step is to turn down all distractions which means getting into an alone space where one cannot be interrupted, where you can’t hear voices in the next room, where there isn’t a TV or something playing, where you are not under time pressure if at all possible (this is not an absolute requirement, especially after you have some practice behind you — in fact after practice there are no absolute requirements).

Once you are alone, with writing implements, task number one is to understand why you are in a negative state. The writing implements can be used for this but you really have them with you to write down notes about other things that distract you from what you are there to do – shopping lists, to-do lists, whatever. Be patient and wait. Once your mind knows you are focused on one thing, diagnosing the cause of why you feel the way you do, it will soon start to give up answers to that question. They may be obvious or they may contain non-obvious aspects as well. You may find yourself writing down non-obvious aspects or simple phrases that are suddenly more revealing and meaningful than you expected, which cast new light or which simply state things you already knew but in much sharper and more useful language than you had before.

What you are doing is called contemplation, and what you are contemplating is the causes for your current state.

It is likely that you will see the causes, at least some of them, and they may make you angry at other people for being part of the causation. This is part of everyday consciousness, and will not get you past your feelings but will in fact just keep you going round and round in those feelings. You need to reject everyday consciousness, reminding yourself that any ordinary negative feelings such as fear, anger, depression, discouragement, etc. are automatically wrong. They are just alarms going off to get you to see the real underlying causes so you can cure those causes. Some of those causes may in fact be within you. You may be the first cause that leads those other people to do what they do to make you angry, fearful, or whatever.

You are flying higher, getting above the weather, so whatever weather disturbance or turbulence you experience must be rejected, whatever is commonplace and you have been there before, put aside. Focus on this rejection of commonplace negative emotion. Say to yourself, “It must be wrong, by definition, it’s not constructive, it’s not getting me anywhere, it doesn’t lead to a solution, I need something NEW.” Strip it away as it arises and see what is underneath. Where is it coming from? Where did the whole pattern start? What did you want that led you into this negative mindset?

Get creative. Generate crazy ideas. Visualize what John Wayne or Katherine Hepburn would do – whoever you look up to – drop the boundaries on the types of thinking you will use to get closer to a good idea – something that will work. Come up with ideas that will not raise resistance – think in terms of Eastern martial arts, where you go with the flow not against it.

All mystery schools and religions teach acquiescence, trust and gratitude as three sides to the same coin – the acceptance of what is. In Islam, it is called the Will of Allah. In Taoism it is called getting into the rhythm of the Tao, linking into the underlying force of the universe. The word religion itself comes from the Latin religare, meaning to link up. The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit, meaning to yoke up, like yoking an ox to a cart.

How can you feel gratitude at times that try you to the breaking point? By comparing the situation to one even worse. What if you had never existed at all? The Universe has created you — is this not justification for gratitude?

Pastor Leonard DeWitt says, “It’s not about religion, it’s about relationship.” The relationship you have to the whole can either be synchronous or it can be at odds. When you are angry, fearful, and so on, you are not in synchrony with what is happening, you are fighting it. This is why you need to reject these feelings as you strive to drop everyday consciousness, and get into an esoteric, spiritual mood.

Whether you call it God or the Universe, today science knows that you and I are intrinsically intermingled into it. Get with the Flow of it, don’t be at odds with it. To do this, you need to reject ordinary thinking and feeling. What is really happening? What is IT trying to teach you? How can this situation possibly be something that can make you better and stronger?

These are applied cognitive psychological interventions. The ones we have just shared skim one surface of the subject, but should give you a flavor.

Best to all,

Bill

If You’re Not Enjoying Your Self, Something’s Wrong

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Most of the time if we are not having fun we just assume “what else is new.” This method asks you to assume differently.

Assume that if you are in a bad mood or feel a negative physical symptom, this is a communication to you. The highest priority then is to decode the message and thereby reverse the emotional or physical quandary.

It could be that your subconscious is trying to tell you something. This is an autonomic alarm system we all have. If for example your current activities are not in alignment with your goals, or if you have set a goal that is not in alignment with your core values, parts of your mind will try to bring this to your conscious attention any way they can, and often the signaling will involve feelings of distress or something not right. It could start out one day as a bad mood you don’t even realize you are in, then escalate as the signal strength is gradually increased in an attempt to finally get your attention. If this persists long enough it can turn into physical symptoms. It is all about communication — in this case, internal communication.

Don’t get lost in the suffering so as to forget to decode first ahead of anything else. Act as if you deserve to be happy at all times. Getting lost in the suffering is what most of us do at most times, and this is a life-threatening waste of time. It also blocks your quality. No point in soldiering on in a bad mood because whatever you do in that state will not be in the range of high quality / high effectiveness. Better to let the work fall even farther behind while you figure out what is bugging you and dispel it by taking the action required, whatever it is.

One of the primary characteristics of Flow state (aka the Zone) is that the individual is doing something s/he loves to do, and is immersed fully in the playing of that game as a game, without over-motivation to win or over-concern of failure — and above all that, impregnable by attachments, free. This mood is a clue that you are in the process of moving into higher effectiveness and you just go with the flow enjoying it — and if you don’t distract yourself by subtly gloating over it, you go all the way into the Zone.

If something is bringing you down, that is going to block the Zone. So set aside your work and get yourself somewhere where you are uninterruptible, and see inside yourself to detect where the bad mood or sick feeling might be coming from.

It is likely you are attached to something that you now have fear of not getting. Or you are attached to something not happening that some part of you now expects will be happening anyway. What could it be?

You might find that taking notes helps, especially if you let the pen just write, without editing. This is because different neuron clusters become engaged when you go from just pondering to also writing notes. Shifting modalities like this is like sweeping a searchlight around inside your psyche.

Another way to shift modalities and bring different neurons into play is to turn aside from actively thinking about the question and instead just cultivate emptiness inside while paying sharp attention. This is a powerful shift of neurons, known to other writers. For example, adman James Webb Young’s 1960 classic A Technique For Producing Ideas speaks about a need to set aside all thought about a project after studying and thinking deeply about it, and sure enough flashes of inspiration will appear out of nowhere (usually within three days in this writer’s experience, frequently within hours nowadays after decades of practicing this and other techniques).

The effectiveness of this kind of internal gear shifting is perhaps most commonly observed when we are frustrated trying to think of a word or name. It is on the tip of our tongue and we keep trying the same file drawer in our mind certain that with enough effort we will remember it. But we don’t remember it until we give up and then it easily pops into our head a short while later. This appears to be because we were forcing ourselves into the wrong file drawer and therefore blocking the retrieval.

To recap, we are discussing micro-methodologies to carry out the imperative of not taking foul moods for granted but instead getting to the bottom of the causes, so that action plans can be made that will help to overcome whatever is secretly bothering you. This will also tend to improve your physical health and keep you looking young. However our main goal is to get you out of lower states into the highest performing state Flow state (the Zone) or into the next best thing, the access state right before that, which we call the Observer state. Thus our purpose steadfastly remains to improve the creative effectiveness of our readers thus improving decision making for as many people as possible.

Test this method over the next week or lifetime and see if you don’t agree that it works. There is no downside risk in the lifetime test — it can only help you, or at the worst change nothing.

This has been another installment of our summary release of psychotechnology here at the blog of The Human Effectiveness Institute. We suggest that the condensation of this kind of subtle guidance system is also worth testing by getting our book or video. Another word from our sponsor. 🙂

Let’s review the techniques presented in the last few posts:

  1. Create in yourself and your team a mood of optimization, where that mood has the highest priority over self-aggrandizement or any other more typical mood.
  2. Banish negativity as ineffective time-wasting and rechannel it into a stimulus to discern root sources and then plan / implement effective actions to remove those root causes of the negativity.
  3. Respect yourself and everyone and everything else. Disrespect blocks solutions and creates new problems.
  4. Remain open to the existence of all possibilities where you have not proven — with evidence that would stand up in court and to scientific public scrutiny — that some possibility does not in fact exist.
  5. Do not tolerate bad moods or sickly symptoms in oneself without seeking out the root causes and taking effective action to remove those causes.

These are but a few of the techniques we share in our book and video. Lately people have told me they love the book but their busy lives are spinning out of time control entirely nowadays so the book sits with other books half-finished. My suggestion is to not read the book but just open it at random — especially at times when you do not feel on top of your game. One of the most frequently mentioned ideas in the thousands of endorsement letters and emails we have received from readers is this use of the random pages method. This is the way we suggest circumventing Acceleritis to still get the benefit of our book despite “never having enough time anymore.”

Best to all,

Bill

Continuing Praise for David Brooks at ARF, and Holosentience

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I’ve long been bemused by the fact that some people really love my book FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS, while others seem to stare at it uncomprehendingly, not knowing what category to put it in.

I myself have struggled to put the book in a category since there were no other books in that category. Or, at least, not since the Vedanta Sutra around 200 BC, and not until David Brooks’ THE SOCIAL ANIMAL, which I am now reading. I was drawn in by the uncanny similarities I discerned between our books during the most valuable Keynote I’ve ever heard at a conference — David’s Keynote at the recent Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Audience Measurement Symposium (AMS) 6.0, the world’s largest annual audience measurement conference.

Now there are two modern books in the category. The category is about looking inside to learn the right adjustments to become a truer you — the you that was born, sans a lifetime of fear-driven conditioning.

David draws his sources from the latest psychology research especially the brain frontier and its integration with classical psychological pattern observations. When I did my first brain experiments within the advertising field and U.S. military in the early 80s, I saw that the mapping of inner/outer experiences to parts of the brain in specific states was going to explode soon. And it has.

Back in the day I had the honor of working with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, former Harvard Psychobiology professors who had been at Harvard with Leary and Alpert. Richie has gone on to lead a large portion of the cutting edge brain research and is highly respected by every brain scientist I’ve met. Dan is best known for his best-selling EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE series.

Why don’t I put Dan’s books in the category of looking inside to learn the right adjustments to become a truer you? It’s because I have a larger division in my mind between books that show theory (“descriptive”) versus books that are specifically meant to be used as a manual of techniques (“prescriptive”). I made my manual fun by a sort of neopoetic style and parsing that I find also singles out ideas. David made his book fun by making it a love story. But I feel David’s motivations are similar to mine — a chance to improve everyone’s lives. All they need is equipoise — the ability to objectively look inside and make little acts of will in daring to follow one’s dreams with love and humility.

The two books agree in that. David’s is more descriptive, mine more prescriptive — and still somewhat unique in its emphasis on practical application of very specific techniques that have been proven to work by my own experience, and by a few thousand readers who wrote in to attest to positive results from reading my book.

David cites the actual experiments that are the basis for the way he makes his characters act. Although there is some experimental and fact-based grounding to my book, it exists within a seamless synthesis of brain research with psychoanalysis, 6000 years of inner observation findings and prescriptions summarized in pithy “sutras”, and all the other books I read in the 70s — but mostly from observing my own inner experience for my entire life.

As early as I can remember, I was fascinated more with what went on in my mind and soul than what went on outside. Long before I knew the words, I was often in a state of contemplation, concentration, or meditating. Ideas sprang into my mind that I found myself writing. I was keeping track of my own observations because from what I heard adults saying, it was apparent they would not know what I was talking about.

In my teens I found psychology, esoteric psychology/philosophy, and in my 20s, yoga. I started by trying to put together for myself a science by which I could intelligently predict my own behavior and understand its dynamics, causes and effects.

Soon after college, my career in media research — because it involved computers (in the 60s) — gave me the ability to see the mind through the lens of what computers do. Media research further allowed me to ground my ideas in the stable patterns and slow changes in population behaviors, brain function, attitude shift, cognitive science, and behavioral econometrics, and introduced me to the idea of optimization, which I instantly decided to apply internally.

Out of all of these fuzzy sources comes the theory of Holosentience. It’s amusing that after I thought I had coined this term, I Googled it and found a reference to the light-based doctor in the Star Trek megaseries. He called himself a holosentience, I recall that now. Well, I’m not going to change the name of the theory.

Here is the essence of my theory of Holosentience:

  1. We have a true self that is stitched into the fabric of the Universe. Whatever the Universe is, that’s the same as what the true self is. Our true self is who we are when we were born. It is the root and substrate of our existence, our being, who we are, our true identity, our essence — it is the most real thing about us in the sense of quantum physics reality. We experience it as an observer — it is an observer. It is consciousness, which we define as “that which experiences”.
  2. From pre-birth we begin to program our brain. Every conscious experience creates proteins in the brain — nerve tissue encoded with meanings derived from those experiences. Association areas take form, clusters of related experiences. Programs are written — true software — that inhabit the brain and begin to share control of motor functions with the true self. You do things you seem to not be able to stop yourself from doing. The classical name for this phenomenon is Ego. It is trying to protect you, trying to be helpful like Bill Gates’ Paperclip-being, is still doing things you now have long since forgotten you told it to do, and is in all ways doing what a robot does, acting on its programming. I call this part the software layer or Robot.
  3. Some of this programming needs to be removed, and you have to use what David calls equipoise — objective introspection and small acts of will — to gradually remove it. It does not leave easily. A lot of my book is about how to track down those behaviors and expose them to yourself for what they are. Because there are different centers in this software stemming back to different traumas and extraordinary experiences, in my book I use the term “Senators” to point out that we actually have different selves — although these are not our true self but rather copies of other people who made impressions on our software. David again echoes the idea of not one but many different selves, though he does not point out that they are all within a Robot layer apart from the true self.

There are three broad states of the foregoing Theory of Holosentience, which are not covered in THE SOCIAL ANIMAL:

  1. Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) — where we are now due to Acceleritis. Acceleritis is not new to today’s obvious-frenetic culture, it actually started 6000 years ago with seeable language. The individual is not processing out the counterproductive programs — that whole part of life is put on hold. There is little if any equipoise. People are not open to objectively considering their own flaws, they are too scared to admit they have any flaws. There is low effectiveness to decision making, action is mistimed, there is little grace and even less inspiration. The world as we see it aggregately — wars, Havenotism, selfish ignoble behavior all around. Creativity is being channeled negatively. In the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and a deteriorating environment and what appear to be permanent systemic challenges emerging in the economic system, it is quite possibly critical to the human race to get out of EOP asap. I feel that David and I are hoping to make a difference there.
  2. Observer State. There is a detachment of the true self from the software or Robot layer such that there is an arc gap, where the true self is able to objectively see what the software layer is doing. David calls this equipoise. The last great psychologist to urge us to introspect was William James. He was on the right track. Much of the inner work done in the East and in esoteric Western enclaves relates to simple (hah!) deconditioning of the counterproductive programs in the software layer. Decision making in the Observer State is much more effective because of objectivity and truthfulness. Self-protective defensiveness yields to greater clarity. Pragmatism becomes natural and automatic.
  3. Flow State. Instead of detachment of the true self from the software layer, they are a perfectly integrated team. Typically during well-practiced, deeply-known activities, from one’s highest work to sex, from spiritual experience to athletics, the Flow State comes to us as a gift. David calls this Moments of Transcendence and Self Forgetfulness. I understand the Self Forgetfulness part in that there is no subject-object division in Flow State, it is all just doing itself and is of one piece. David uses the word “lost” — “an athlete lost in sport, a believer lost in God’s love, lost in love for one another… the conscious mind disappears.” I would say instead that the chattering mind — part of the software layer — subsides, but that all minds are present (“Holosentience”) during Flow State, they are simply not dwelling on their selfdom in the usual EOP subliminally anxious way. Perhaps David is hewing to his theme of rational versus unconscious — where he is advocating a shift to include the unconscious in a more balanced way, including emotions and values. There are obviously ten places where David and I agree for every one where we might differ. In fact I doubt that we would differ once we mapped our maps together.

For a fun and mind-opening read get THE SOCIAL ANIMAL.

If you like it, try FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS next. (After all, it comes with a money-back guarantee. 😀 ) It is also mind-opening and spends more time on the “how to” of it — though as John Ziegler said, “[the book] seems to do it TO you. IT works. YOU don’t.”

Best to all,

Bill