Tag Archives: Flow State

The Feeling of Being Guided by a Higher Power to Do Good

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Powerful Mind Part 46

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – August 23, 2024
Created January 26, 2024

A 2023 Pew survey found that 45% of Americans “have had a sudden feeling of connection with something from beyond this world.”

“Have you ever wondered what life is all about?” I asked the precocious two-year-old.

“All the time,” she replied.

This is the kind of conversation that parents should initiate as early as possible in a child’s upbringing.

But since this is a rarity, we tend to grow up shoving our awe and wonder out of our conscious minds, because we don’t have time to dally. It’s all coming at us too fast, especially in recent centuries. A conscious mind process forms which Freud named the Ego and the Superego.

The Ego presents itself as the active conscious mind and so we all think of it as our self. It’s really more of a chosen spokesperson for the much greater totality of the real self that is our individuality.

The Superego is that part of the Ego (in my estimation) that second-guesses ourselves, our inner critic. Freud considered the Superego a separate functionality in which society’s demands are embedded as the conscience.

H.L. Mencken said, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that somebody may be watching.”

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may be the part of the brain playing a major role in the manifestations Freud labeled the Superego. It is probably also the structure supporting what Daniel Kahneman labeled as System 2, explicit thinking. Interestingly, Observer state (my term for metacognition) is very useful, and I associate it with the executive control network mediated by the frontal brain; but in Flow state, which is even more effective than Observer state, the frontal regions of the brain give up control to more primitive parts of the brain (“hypofrontality”), and the Ego and inner critic disappear, as intuition and practice meld everything into a sense of oneness that does itself effortlessly.

When one begins to shift into Flow state as a way of life, it transcends the Ego, as if the Ego had been training wheels which you can now take off your bike. You can now sense and live from the real you, your full self, not the defensive Ego, but from the joyous Muse within you, it was you all along, although it may also be the Self of the Universe living through you.

By now, many people know about the Flow state, and it has become formally recognized by the scientific and medical communities. However, there are some aspects of that state which are still taboo subjects. These are the spiritual intuitions which often accompany the Flow state.

We’ve already discussed Noia, my term for the intuitive feeling that invisible forces are trying to help us by getting us to notice certain stimuli which appear to be giving us information relevant to our current situation and/or thought process. U.S. Andersen, whom I’ve cited earlier, writes about surrendering control to what he calls the Secret Self, and he is talking about the same thing I’ve often referred to as the Universe, or the Muse within. The religion of Islam also preaches the same notion of releasing control to Allah.

It’s conceivable that one should first use the conscious mind and intuition to practice at life and gain a degree of proficiency at it before giving up the inner critic continuously second-guessing oneself, i.e. the Ego. Without practice, the Flow state might not come on so easily just by making a decision to release conscious control. Instead, one might be fooled by impulses coming from the Ego that one thinks are coming from higher guidance.

I know from my personal experience that the latter misclassification has dramatically fooled me many times in my life, especially as a youngster.

I think now that many spiritual people think they are being guided to make political choices by higher powers when it might actually be the Ego masquerading as God.

Even those of us who experience some Flow state every day are (wisely) hesitant to speak much about a feeling of being guided from above. It’s the sort of statement that can cause one can wind up being pigeonholed as a nut.

U.S. Andersen embraces this sense of being guided by the Universe to do things that will develop us as individuals and enable us to provide more value to others. Having been a successful pro football player and businessman perhaps he was less concerned about how people labeled him.

In this book Powerful Mind being serialized here, I’ve already recommended that you keep an open mind about whether the Universe might be a single Self, and you one avatar of The One. It is definitely a scientific possibility that cannot be ruled out. Whether or not in Flow state, I now take it as almost a certainty, because of my experiences. But I do not urge you to believe anything, merely keep an open mind to all possibilities, and notice what your own experience teaches you.

Set your sights high. Visualize how you want your life to be without undershooting out of fear of being heartbroken by failure. Don’t be attached to any outcome, just visualize the outcomes you want, and curtail negativity, and enjoy your life each moment. Turn negativity into learning and creatively adapting to circumstance. Don’t fight what is, go with it and steer toward the positive.

As Bob Dylan wrote, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Each of us is serving by the work we choose to do, we are serving people, they pay us money for what we do for them. In your life’s best dream—your visualization that you will refresh daily—you have to be doing the work that gives you joy and gets you into the Flow state, otherwise you are not on the path to your dream. If you have to make a difficult switch in your life, do it in the way that gives you and others joy rather than stress, and make changes patiently.

Leave open the possibility that you are working for the Universe and that it will guide you along the way to your dream; look for possible messages in everything, but don’t talk yourself into wishful thinking, stay balanced and open-minded, use all of your faculties, all of the instruments in your inner orchestra.

Attune yourself to what is happening to you – become one with it – and go with its flow, except where you feel the need to go around certain parts of it that simply don’t feel right.

Believe in yourself and your ability to tackle any problem life throws your way, just know that you have to put everything else aside and patiently, without time pressure, use single-pointed focus on that one problem. Other side thoughts will arise but note them in writing and put them aside for later. You can tackle everything but take it one at a time, don’t rush, and you’ll see that you can solve everything you need to.

The feeling of being guided by a higher power to do good is a wonderful feeling. Make sure you are being an empiricist about it, that other people are sincerely thanking you, that you are really doing good in general, not just for selected others, with some other folks actually being harmed by your actions, but doing good for everybody. That and a feeling of joy in your life are the two essential checkpoints that you are on the path to your dreams.

Key #12:

Continuously focus on, bring out, and enjoy the Good

The 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Powerful Mind Key

New Mental Strategy

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#1

Trial-doubt your own last thought/feeling.

#2

Study, edit, and reset your automatic reactions.

#3

Constructively and kindly express what you are really feeling.

#4

Root for the Universe, not just for your current vehicle.

#5

Self-rating is irrelevant.

#6

Be sure of what YOU want and enjoy the journey to your dreams, without attachment to outcomes.

#7

Take Observer position, note your feelings without owning them.

#8

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

#9

Consciously determine how much to take your time.

#10

Patiently determine the most constructive use of each salient inner experience.

#11

Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse.

#12

Continuously focus on, bring out, and enjoy the Good.

Love to all,
Bill

Oversimplifications Do Not Achieve a Happy Mind

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog:  August 2, 2024

Achieve a happy mind.

Widespread mental emotional handicaps are not a new thing. Depression, anxiety, violent impulsiveness, sociopathy… they have been with us a long time.

So have inventions or discoveries of ways to improve one’s own use of the mind and feelings. They go back to antiquity. Counting to ten and taking deep breaths when losing one’s temper, for example, probably goes back before written language. In the first millennium of written language appear cogent ideas about better ways of using the mind that could have been passed down by oral tradition for generations. The Rig Veda had been sung for centuries by the time Vyasa first wrote it down. The advice given was quite sophisticated and the lessons taught about cooperation and consideration of consequences before action still to this day have not been learned by billions of us.

The Stoics such as Epictetus wrote down methods in considerable detail and I was amazed to read his Enchiridion written more than two millennia before my book Mind Magic with some of the same ideas, similarly expressed. Buddha’s and Christ’s teachings from millennia ago, as we all know, are at the highest levels of sophistication concerning what we permit to go on in our minds.

It’s not just the sophistication, it’s also the detail in which the method is described to the learner. The mind is extremely tricky and contains a robotical element which one must learn to deal with properly. The presence of this bio-AI was detected by the ancients and is described in the Old Testament as the “hardening of the heart”, which is only one of the ways the robot manifests. However, until Mind Magic in my lifetime of study of the mind and writings about the mind old and new, I have not seen detailed instructions for integrating the bio-AI into a useful member of the mind’s internal community, which is why I wrote Mind Magic. To date I have read many of the most popular as well as many of the least known self-help books and I have not found anything remotely detailed in terms of specific operational instructions as in Mind Magic.

This line of thought was triggered by an experience I had two days ago. I was having a Zoom call with one of my AI expert collaborators and he demonstrated to me a system that within a minute or two took the text of Mind Magic and turned it into a course, complete with tests. This of course was amazing and I am still duly impressed. The one fly in the ointment was the tests. They seemed to oversimplify the teachings into summary words containing no learning value, words like “Meditate”, “Contemplate”, “Use Mindfulness”, “Do Shadow Work”, “Use Affirmations”, “Law Of Attraction”, etc. The AI had scoured the Internet and found things like the ideas in Mind Magic and had assumed that all of the various books and scholarly papers were all giving the same generic advice. That is like summarizing the Old Testament or the words of Jesus into “Be Good” and implicitly assuming that advice was going to solve the whole thing and the person would emerge with a happy mind and life.

I have yet to look at the rest of the course and I expect that most of it will retain the detailed instructions so that all I’ll have to do is to retrain the AI how to pose the questions better. Yet it got me thinking about all of the generalizations and oversimplifications being made across the self-improvement field.

Overall impact of the New Age Movement since the 1970s has been quite positive despite shortcomings. There is a general sense of awareness and tendencies toward openness and respect for others that I did not perceive around me growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, where many kids carried knives and zipguns. The Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” is emblematic of the good that has been done by the human development movement which started in the 1960s. To some extent this has been the humanism movement supporting the logic of goodness as a way of life while the organized religions gradually slipped out of perceived relevancy in the modern world. Without the rise of the human potential movement the world today could be in even darker place, or we might have gotten to present straits much sooner.

Motivational speakers can, without passing on any detailed methodologies for better use of the mind and feelings, achieve short-term and even a sprinkling of long-term effects simply by their confidence, presentation ability, body language, and inspiring stories. Practically any self-help book can have some positive effect. However, without detailed instructions, especially concerning the multiple phenomena one finds in one’s mind, including the robot – which has now been called the inference engine and the prediction engine by Dr. Karl Friston – oversimplified advice will not achieve states of higher consciousness, and can even feed the ego to believe that one is in the Flow state when one is not. The term for this in the 1970s was Spiritual Materialism.

In every phase of life we see that there is a longing to keep things simpler than they actually are. This reductionism is one of the most dangerous temptations that we face. Oversimplifying something complex seems to be a good idea in the short run but then one bangs into the walls that have been ignored away. They didn’t really get removed by ignoring them. Instead, they stopped you when you needed to keep going and now you have to stop and rethink everything. Better to do all that thinking at the outset.

Look for methods, and test those that appeal to you. Identify platitudes and appreciate them as positive reminders, without pretending that they are sufficient on their own to solve problems.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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Leading Neuroscientist Confirms Theory of Bio-AI

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog:  July 19, 2024

As I was growing up, I was constantly studying my own mind. This was natural to me and then it was accelerated by my experiencing Flow state, mostly during some stage performances starting at age four.

I didn’t have a name for it other than describing it as “perfect performance as if doing itself.” There were other attributes I didn’t talk about because I knew they were taboo, such as the feeling that these experiences were otherworldly and suggested “magic” or the “supernatural”, which I repressed as I had decided that science was everything and that religion was merely superstition. I eventually revised the latter decision based on experiencing the spiritual level of Flow state.

I wanted to regain the “perfect performance” state and maintain it all the time. This motivated me to pay even more attention to what was going on in my mind at all times, and to relate that activity to the external world experiences I was having at the same time. I sought to relate states of my mind to the positive or negative feedback I was getting from other people and things.

The first “validation” that this strange “perfect” state existed came when I confessed my experiences to my favorite comedian of the era, Jack Carter. He said, “Oh sure, Billy, everyone in show business has that sometimes, it’s called ‘being on’.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “Flow state” when he studied the phenomenon as head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago. His first published work on the subject came out in 1975.

My first published work was written in 1972 and its subject matter was what I had learned about the states of my mind. It came out as the book Mind Magic in 1976. Throughout the book I referred to a part of the mind as “the robot”. This was the part of the mind that generated some of my actions that yielded the most negative results in the external world. The robot I had deduced was keeping me out of the “perfect” state (Flow state).

I knew that this automatic part of myself was making predictions. The following passage appears on pages 48-49 of Mind Magic:

MIND MAGIC by Bill Harvey“When you are about to see something, your mind automatically searches your memory for a comparable object (note the distinction between you seeing something and your mind having already seen it). If your mind finds something similar enough, it projects the stored image onto the new object so that you do not ever see the new object, but are merely dimly aware that there is a familiar type of object there… As a result of this, you mostly do not perceive your environment, instead perceiving mostly what you expect to perceive, i.e. you usually see your mind’s prediction.”

The term “artificial intelligence” and its abbreviation as “AI” appeared in 1955 in a project proposal by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. I became aware of the term as an avid sci-fi reader and began using it in my own sci-fi writing in the late 70s. In 1979 I formed one of the first neuroscience companies in the marketing field (Psychophysiological Research Management, PRM), partnering with Dr. Richy Davidson and Dr. Dan Goleman. Sometime thereafter, I began to use the term “bio-AI” as synonymous with “the robot”.

In 2002, Dr. Karl Friston published his first work on “active inference” in which he proved the existence of the prediction engine in the brain which I had introspected in myself a half-century before it became scientifically recognized. Friston’s work with many other scientists has identified the prefrontal cortex as being involved in the automated calculations often occurring below the level of consciousness. That suggests we have only had the bio-AI for about 200,000 years, for that is when the prefrontal cortex appeared.

After William James, psychology had become disenchanted with the use of introspective evidence, because of the tendency to bias and inaccuracy. However, the fact that in modern times an individual was able to predict science decades in advance by the careful use of introspection, strongly suggests that introspective evidence be reconsidered as a tool of psychology.

A few pages later in Mind Magic on page 53 it says:

“…society communicates expectations to you which you then see in place of seeing the realities themselves.”

This theme recurs throughout the book, emphasizing that cultural biases are conditioned into the bio-AI. This explains why brainwashing by social media, media “news”, parents and peer pressure is so powerful: it slips into the bio-AI inference engine below the level of consciousness.

We as a species are at a crossroads. The pro-survival bio-AI which enabled us to evade superior predators 200,000 years ago today often functions as contra-survival, as I discovered as a child by allowing my automated reactions to play out in the real world, which often resulted in negative results. The chaos into which the entire world has fallen today, to me, points to the urgent need for rapid widespread education of a new kind, teaching people how to bring decision making into the sphere of the conscious mind, what I call metacognition (term coined by John H. Flavell) and my partner Dr. Gerald Zaltman calls open-mindedness.

My interests in introspection and in neuroscience are connected to one another. My life’s work is to make the connections between the discoveries of neuroscience and the subjective inner life of the individual that will enable science and education to work together to cause most human beings to be able to spend most of their time in states of metacognition/open-mindedness and Flow. If we as a species can accelerate this process of what I call “psychotechnology” or “microcosmology” we can deter the drift back into the self-administered Feudal slavery of inviting “strong men” to take over our governance and protection. It’s never too late.

We all know how difficult it is to control the mind, to master oneself. Socrates said, “Know Thyself,” and Plato said, “I still do not know myself, so why would I spend time studying anything else?” (Phaedra) The only control panel or dashboard life gives us for achieving this task is the user interface (UI) we call the mind. The conscious mind experiences “qualia”, subjective experiences within consciousness, including words, images, snatches of memories, and especially feelings. We have control over certain things through this UI. We can choose to slow down our breathing, engage in positive imagination, question our attachment to certain outcomes, use reasoning and evidence, and these and many other tactics are within the sphere of our control. In this introspective world, we have the only chance we will ever get to solve our problems or to see that they are opportunities. Therefore, we cannot Behavioristically study only structure and function of the brain, we need to relate events at the physical level to the qualia at the mind level, or else we lose the value of having that control panel inside.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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Superfluous Superstructure of the Self

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June 7, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

We all pay some attention to our inner lives. But for some of us this means sustained micro-observation and for most of us it is occasional flashes in between slavish addiction to the endless rushes of information coming in through our five fascinating physical senses.

This tsunami of infobits roaring in has itself escalated over time, causing even more outward focus.

But even 2500 years ago, Aristotle made the same observation, commenting that the unobserved life is not worth living. He was trying to get more people to turn inward. His teacher’s teacher Socrates had started the whole thing by his exhortation “Know Thyself”. (Socrates had inspired Plato with whom Aristotle studied.)

The greatest philosophers and psychologists of all time were all practiced at inner micro-observation. This was especially true in ancient India, and for example, metacognition is at the core of Buddha’s teachings. In the modern era this includes William James, perhaps the best of them all at concentrated introspection, as well as Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow. Freud however was more of a rationalist, deducing things logically, whereas Jung was more of an intuitionist, taking the original feelings arising in his cognition without embellishing them with rational overlays as much as Freud did.

A long time ago by introspection I realized that thoughts do not arise as thoughts but as feelings, and then the cognitive affective processes embellish those feelings with attributed meanings, interpretations, often involving images, metaphors, and words, at which point they are truly what we all call thoughts.

This has recently been discovered by science, decades and millennia after the same insight was available to each of us by micro-inner-observation.

It will help you attain metacognition to imagine that your inner space has a map. At the pure core of your being imagine that you have a center, something like an energy or a gas, that you can sense. In higher states of consciousness such as the spiritual level of Flow state you can see this self of yours as light, often bluish. Most of the time you can only feel it.

Imagine now in this map that there is another part of yourself that you yourself have built over time, a superstructure that is overlaid on top of the central sphere of your selfness. Suspend disbelief for the sake of argument, and for the moment consider my theory that this part of you is akin to an artificial intelligence (AI) that has a physical underpinning of neurons and their interconnections in your brain and nervous system, specific neurons and interconnections which were caused by your experiences, especially where there were degrees of emotion and assimilated “learning”. The word “learning” is in quotes because much of this was mis-learning.

The entire superstructure taken together corresponds to what Freud termed the Ego.

This superstructure uses a substantial part of your mental energy but the return on that energy investment tends to be negative. The expenditure of this incremental cognitive load tends to do you a lot more harm than good.

Freud said that this appurtenance was called into being when the baby first experiences frustration at not getting what it wants or needs. It functions as the security officer (Worf in Star Trek) and press agent, business manager, negotiation agent, sales rep for what Freud called the Id, and I refer to above as your core beingness.

The reason I say Freud was more of a rationalist is that when I introspect into my Id or core essence self I do not find the animal selfishness and limitation to hardwired instinct that Freud said I would find there. Instead I find a happy lightness of being that is not needy but is caring and fascinated.

Try this experiment and I feel that you will totally get what I’m saying and can add it to your personal strength arsenal.

  • Take your place in your core, the pure witness, the observer.
  • From that vantage point, simply observe the feelings that arise in your superstructure.
  • You will sense the apparent duality in you at that point, probably a realization of your own indifference and yet interest in these ego feelings.
  • This higher feeling is the most important key to metacognition.

You may have experienced this many times in your life, and it may have come about by temporarily hitting bottom. When you have been pushed around by life and have not seen the lesson the universe intended, you may in your frustration, resentment and rage just say to yourself that you give up, you just don’t care anymore.

When this happened to Bucky Fuller – heartbroken by unrequited love – he decided to commit suicide. Once he did that he was in his core self, looking at all of the superstructural self he had built, disillusioned in a good way by all that stuff, having just given it all up. He now discovered no reason to end his life, for a new better version of it was just beginning. He then became the Bucky Fuller genius we all remember.

You can practice this core self-perspective any time you want, for a few seconds or minutes or extended periods, even continuously for the rest of your life.

The essence of the feeling is that you are above all the nigglings in your superstructure. It’s only habit which has made you so vulnerable to those sudden feelings of worthlessness, fear, anxiety, defeatism, hatred, envy, resentment, and so on which have become automatic and super powerful.

Habits reinforced by hundreds of thousands of repetitions in your life do not pack up and go away right away. They will sometimes come back and even overpower you sometimes. But once you have learned to identify with your core and not your superstructure you are on the high road to true freedom. Keep practicing this Observer state and you cannot lose.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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