Tag Archives: Mind Magic

How Did We Become So Distracted?

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Updated April 24, 2020

Although we are staying home now, and the amount of overstimulation we receive from our environment is therefore considerably lessened, with the screens in our home and the audio and (if we’re lucky) other people and pets that are with us, there’s still an awfully lot going on and coming in through our senses.

We live at a discontinuous point in history.

Most of us know that the human race started evolving from primates, coming down out of trees over 1,000,000 years ago, but it’s only been the last 200,000 years that we’ve been homo sapiens.

We’ve written things down for only 6,000 years out of those million years so we have no written record of what went on before those roughly 6,000 years.

Key Survival Characteristic

My hypothesis as a social scientist is that in the last 6,000 years, written language changed the way we use our minds.

It actually started with the cave paintings, some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, using symbolism — we started to be able to look at abstract symbols to represent things like animals that we were going to be hunting.

When we moved to written language, we could see the language — the granular bits of information. Pictures don’t have chunks to them like words do.

Though nowhere near digital yet, we started to get into granular chunk thinking as soon as we got into written language.

This development marked the beginning of a revolution in the way we use our minds, and this has been accelerating for the last 6,000 years.

We started inventing things — first tools, then weapons and then media — and all of those things have contributed to the fact that we now every day are subjected to a deluge of stimuli that exceeds our ability to answer all the questions arising in our mind second-to-second.

We get into a habit of just sweeping things aside. “I’m never gonna answer all this stuff. I won’t try to answer all this stuff. I won’t even try to answer the basic question of what is life, what is the meaning of all this, what is my purpose? It’s just too many questions. I can’t answer them.” I call this condition Acceleritis™.

We see things like increasing ADD and ADHD and we see people who are supposed to be running big countries acting like high-school kids and not getting anything done.

This deluge of stimuli all the time is not good for any of us. In the face of the hugely distracting environment of Acceleritis, we are being distracted from Flow state, which I believe is our natural state and which occurred a lot more before 6,000 years ago.

This is why I consider psychotechnology, which prepares people with techniques to stay focused through complexity, to be so important. No matter who we are, the quality of our life depends upon our effectiveness in meeting challenges, whether as a parent, an executive, an athlete or a world leader.

Shutting out distractions

Most all of the techniques I use to increase focus and creativity are included in my book, MIND MAGIC, and I also share them here in this blog space — techniques like mindfulness, meditation, self-awareness and letting go of attachment. Learning to become the observer more often and not getting caught up or reeled in by all of these distractions, we can find greater clarity and reach Flow state more often. Learning to stay focused in an ever increasingly distracting world, we can ultimately increase our creativity and improve our decision making.

Best to all,

Bill

Read the latest post at my media blog  “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com.

Practicing Forgiveness

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Original post December 1, 2015

There are a great many benefits when we stop blaming and instead open ourselves to forgiveness. Blame is an investment of mental and emotional energy that pays no return. The same energy can be redeployed to deliver a positive return.

I am faithful to what I see as the common core of all religions, not as religions but as scientific truth. My hypothesis and conviction is that there is only One of us. And if there is only One Spark of Being populating all of us, then anyone who has offended us has done so because his or her experiences have led that originally perfect tabula rasa into a condition in which giving offense is possible and perhaps inevitable. This awareness makes it much easier to forgive.

If, for example, my friend, whose mother belittled him because of her own childhood conditioning, has become carping, surely I can understand and forgive that. If I am him, living a different life with different experiences that have made me less carping than he is but imperfect in other ways, I can have an empathetic understanding.

[dropshadowbox align=”center” effect=”lifted-both” width=”83%” height=”” background_color=”#f9d798″ border_width=”1″ border_color=”#b3b3af” ] To forgive all, be all. — Bill Harvey from Mind Magic, page 233. [/dropshadowbox]

If we can forgive everyone including ourselves for all the influences that drive each of us to become what we perhaps only temporarily are, it may free us from having to continue to be exactly the same today as we have always been.

What has already happened could not have been otherwise, since all events are merely the resultant of their causes, which are themselves events dependent on a constellation of prior causes. Everything happens for a reason.

We can become a more potent cause for positive future events by being less critical of whatever happened that caused us to feel resentful, and instead reimagine the situation, decide what should have happened and then seek to do that in similar future situations. We can do nothing about the past. The goal is to simply set new policies to put into practice going forward.

Guiding others to adopt more useful new policies requires gentility; often it is best to simply ask the right questions to have the desired effect. Honesty and gentleness are essential tools in this endeavor.

To forgive a person, for a time in your imagination, be that person.*

If you are having difficulty forgiving someone, create space for an empathetic perspective: set some time aside and imagine living through that person’s role from the beginning to now, seeing if we could have played any parts better, and which blocks are likely to have prevented them from seeing or taking these options Then figure out how to help the person get past those blocks. This of course also works for self-forgiveness.

Communicating in some way what is in our heart, and then letting go and forgiving, will at a minimum stop tying up some of our energies deep in our psyche.

Instead of squandering our energy by blaming or being unforgiving, seeing situations with an open heart and an empathetic perspective can lead us to more positive outcomes where we can realize solutions that are a much better investment of our time and energy.

Thought you might also enjoy today’s latest short video commenting on advertisers taking charge of audience measurement.

Best to all,

Bill

*From Mind Magic, p. 233.

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village.

Visualizing 2019

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Visualize the whole universe as one thing

Originally posted January 5, 2016Volume 5, Issue 47

As we leap into 2019, with clear intentions and resolve, let’s keep this visualization in the forefront of our minds to guide our thoughts and actions:

Visualize the whole
Universe as one thing
Every individual
of every species
Every idea
Every event
Every moment of time
Every percept
Every lump of matter 
and energy
All parts of one thing*

Then, each day, realizing your connection with the Universe, play your hand as best you can:

You are a Musician,
harmonize.
You are an Actor,
detach.
You are Real,
don’t pretend.
You are in Time,
don’t hurry.*

May we all reopen our minds to the existence of all possibilities, as we rediscover the unique experiment that Nature has designed uniquely for each and every one of us on our branch of the Tree of Life.

Happy New Year 2019!
Bill

*From Mind Magic: Doorways into Higher Consciousness

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

THE FIRST SON – My Intention and Hope

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October 11, 2018

Just as with my nonfiction books MIND MAGIC and YOU ARE THE UNIVERSE, my intent in THE FIRST SON is to free the consciousness of the reader from habitual thinking and feeling. Sharing with you here my hope for the effect that reading my new sci-fi alternate history novel will have on its readers.

The First Son by Bill Harvey

Click the book to read about my first novel.

First of all, I hope the reader will be drawn into the characters and their love for each other. THE FIRST SON is like a family drama in a way. I’ve spent years working to make each of the characters three-dimensional and alive.

Almost as important is the visceral realization of the heroes’ dilemma. If you don’t get the trouble the heroes are in, or don’t care which way it comes out, I haven’t succeeded in really immersing you in the story, in which the whole multiverse is threatened.

At some point in THE FIRST SON story’s unfolding, I hope the reader experiences a shift, recognizing the subtle differences between the traditional historical account and the alternate perspective of the story, and gets the feeling that either way of looking at these events could be true. I am also hoping that the underlying thrill of history itself becomes part of the reading experience. The mystery of history—the fact that we don’t know exactly what really happened, and have always been just trying to piece it together.

A great deal of the action involves beings taking over each other’s minds, which is a metaphor for the way we continually hijack our own minds and feelings. The way psychic agents in the story protect themselves from takeover is the same advice I give in MIND MAGIC, morphed into fiction. I’ve found that one has more ability to discipline one’s own mind and feelings if a lens of defending oneself against an outside adversary is used. Readers will let us know the degree to which the novel has this effect of increasing self-mastery.

The most important cognitive/emotive shift THE FIRST SON hopefully creates is the opening of the reader’s mind to the possibility that science and religion are entirely compatible, and that what we call religion came out of visionaries who had psychic powers that are at the heart of all religious experience, what Freud called “the oceanic experience”. This can manifest as Flow state, being taken over by a benevolent and super-competent higher Self. It can manifest as speaking in tongues, channeling, shaking/quaking, dervishing, the Subud Latihan, oneness, mind reading, precognition, bliss, chills up and down the spine, hair standing on end, crying with happiness, laughing at a suddenly perceived cosmic joke, and other phenomena associated with all religions in one form or another.

In our culture today, these phenomena have been assigned to a sort of   by many people, and are not given much serious attention. By turning our backs on the most important questions in life and in history, we diminish ourselves. The wiser course of action is ours for the taking.

I have high hopes, as you can see.

Most of us would like to make at least a small contribution to making humankind less warlike, greedy, and unkind, and more loving and peaceful. Each day many of you readers are doing your best along these lines. We have to try new ways to achieve these important ends. THE FIRST SON is my current offering to this end. I hope you enjoy the journey.

One experience I know you will enjoy is listening to Paul Harvey’s brief and inspired A Letter From God.

In similar spirit to THE FIRST SON, except where Paul says we can never understand The One Self Inside Us All, and where he says that The One Self never speaks with us individually.

All my best,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers.