Tag Archives: Flow State

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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Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, June 21, 2024
Powerful Mind Part 44 Created January 12, 2024

Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse

You may say “That’s easier said than done,” wherever in my writings you come across my exhortations to light up your inside, pay more attention to what’s going on inside you, and other phrases of that ilk. I agree. One cannot simply decide to have more inner visibility, one needs specific mental methods to bring that about.

We’ve already discussed some of these methods. Parking the body in a comfortable position where in time it can disappear from your radar. With your eyes closed, watching to see the very beginning of a feeling or thought arising. Being aware of procrastination and going in circles. Daily Alone Space. Mindquiet, thinking without words. Last thoughts before sleep. Conducting your own inner orchestra. And many methods so far in this book Powerful Mind being serialized here.

A visual image – kind of a mind map – is another type of method. Imagine that you are in bed, in an especially comfortable position, nothing about your body feels uncomfortable to you. Your eyes are closed and your breaths are slow and deep. Your mind appears to you in a visual image. In that visual image, you can see that you are composed of an outer bubble, containing two side-by-side inner bubbles, one in front of you on the left, and one in front of you on the right. The essence of who you are, The Experiencer, is what is seeing this, so it itself is not seen in the picture. You look out from your position as The Experiencer.

The bounds of the outer bubble are unknown. The outer bubble when your eyes are open extends as far as your eyes can see, your ears can hear, your nose can smell. The outer bubble is your entire consciousness, and for all you know, may be coexistent with the entire consciousness of the universe, as your present sensory abilities may not tell the whole story.
The bubble ahead of you within the outer bubble on your left is your BioAI, what we have called the robot. It is constantly making suggestions based on calculations, predictions based on all prior stored experiences.

The bubble ahead of you within the outer bubble on the right is your Muse or Master voice, the place from which comes your revelations, inspirations, moments of extreme clarity, mental Flow state, Eureka moments, Aha! moments, the ideas that suddenly pop in and startle you by their insight and their ring of truth.

This image can help remind you to be aware of the provenance of each thought, feeling, and impulse arising within you – is this more imitative babble from the BioAI or is this the Muse.

Alas, at the beginning of such a journey, if you are to be real with yourself – the journey is pointless if you are not going to be real with yourself – you will experience that most of what you allow your most precious asset, your mind, to spend its time on, is babble from the BioAI. The good news is that over time the methods will shift your time allocation substantially over to receiving from the Muse, with a great reduction of time spent and actions taken based on the forecasts of the BioAI.

You may ask, what is the Muse? Is it your own subconscious, or is it actually some helpful invisible being, or is it The One Being that is the entire conscious Universe? Science is not yet able to answer that with high confidence. Someday (my personal conviction) science shall be able to establish what the true answer is. Until then, one must accept not knowing the answer, while still obtaining the pragmatic benefits of receiving suggestions from the Muse and giving them the proper respect and cautious trial in external world interactions.

This image is a tool to be used but is not intended to depict reality itself. In reality, there will be many useful thoughts you think which are not readily classifiable into BioAI or Muse, and in fact, trying to reduce all experiences to two pigeonholes is itself robotic oversimplification – the dodge the BioAI uses to deal with excess complexity – reductionistic oversimplification and dichotomania. What we have called Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).

Instead, this visualization tool is aimed at noticing evidence of the presence of one or the other of these extreme cases – robotic impulses or flashes of brilliance.

The BioAI, thousands of years ago when the world was far simpler for human beings to deal with, was undoubtedly a very valuable “extra sense” to have. In the complicated civilization rocketing ahead with new changes day to day, the BioAI adapted as best it could, but was outclassed by the challenge slope, as it has moved from climbing a one-degree slope, toward a practically vertical one.

Acceleration of complexity is not the only aspect of our civilization which has strained the BioAI. The type of civilization we have evolved is hierarchical, competitive, and disadvantageous to most Earth homo sapient natives, advantageous to a lucky few. Some of us resonate with the idea of leveling the playing field, and some of us resonate with the game as it has been played for millennia. These philosophical differences have always been manipulated to serve the self-interest of powerful individuals and groups. As a result of complexity acceleration (“Acceleritis”) and these other conditions, the new individual entering this world is likely to experience one or more traumas early in life. These traumas can alter the functioning of the BioAI, predisposing it into an assumed permanent defensive posture which is so ever-present as to become invisible to that person.

We define defensive ego behavior as a predispositional wound syndrome of the BioAI. In many people, the BioAI acts as if that individual is coming from behind, and in one way or another, seeks to catch up. This might involve calling attention to one’s accomplishments or best qualities, taking offense at not being properly credited, chronic envy causing dislike, racing always to get more things done faster, which can cause bodily tensions the individual is so used to they are almost invisible to the conscious mind.

In that latter category, check your body right now, and from time to time throughout each day, to find where you are holding yourself tight and to focus on relaxing those places. Let your shoulders relax down and out, stop causing your breath to be shallow. You are not in a race against the clock (most of the time) so let yourself slow down to enjoy whatever puzzle it is you are in the midst of solving. Put distracting ideas on notes and put them off to the side to thoroughly engage with one thing at a time and enjoy perfecting that one thing. Then organize and schedule the notes for consideration, being very conservative about how much you plan to accomplish in any one day. Leave room for all the surprise requirements that show up on the average day. And for frequent breaks which increase the probability of Flow state (merging with the Muse).

Studying myself through the lens of these mental methods, I find that my original traumatic wound to my BioAI was early heartbreak at my own incompetence at almost everything. My BioAI adjusted to this by doubting myself, even after achieving competency at some things. This insight was obtained through the use of the bubbles imagery outlined above.

The scientistic mood of the present culture is part of the EOP reductionism. Because we don’t “need” God to explain the things we see and measure around us, this permits us to bias our studies toward assumption of materialistic accidentalism. We may not “need” to explain the universe as a single consciousness, but that does not mean that the universe might not in reality be a single consciousness.

It’s best to be open-minded about things that have not been proven yet one way or the other. That includes the possibility that you are a point of view of the universe – “nobly born” as put in the Egyptian Book of Emerging Into the Light, also known as the Egyptian Book of The Dead.

It includes remaining open-minded about what powers of mind you might have – hunches (intuition, precognition) – the ability to receive inspiration – telepathy. Allow yourself to receive. Study the received content and see how it relates to the experiences you are having. Does the content have the ring of truth? When you act upon the received advice, are the results positive or negative? Don’t become hung up on where are the messages coming from – that might not be answerable yet – but that doesn’t mean that one should ignore all such content – better to cautiously test it in your day-to-day life.

Don’t leave out the soul of life – things like wonder and awe, Flow state, spiritual experiences, these peak experiences as Maslow called them have always been tied up with the works of great artists, musicians, thinkers, poets, people who have made life even more wonderful and precious – remain open to those experiences happening to you more often.

Here’s another exercise – try it on for size. Put your preferred hand on your heart and say to yourself:

  • Evidence suggests to some philosophers – Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Berkeley, Harvey, and others – a parental field of consciousness within which the Universe is happening
  • If this field does not perceive you, you do not exist
  • I am a point of view of that Universe consciousness – regarding Itself from many points of view

That may only be a mind-stretching exercise, or it may be the truth. All of the science we have today can fit even more neatly in that framework than it does in the dominant Earth first-world human culture bias framework of materialistic accidentalism.

Key #11:

Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse

Love 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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