Tag Archives: Mind Magic

Anti-Terrorism Critical Success Factors: Propaganda (AKA Communication) and Morale

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Volume 4, Issue 30

Map of Middle East

Propaganda (my stipulated definition) is any attempt to influence by any means — a very broad definition including advertising, much of marketing, packaging, and even product and service design.

The advertising business received many high-ranking former OSS (the CIA of the time) officers, indicating the existing two-way street between these disciplines. Volunteers from the advertising industry do pro bono work for most public service announcements and would pitch in if called upon by the US for help communicating the messages we most need to get across to soldiers fighting terrorists, terrorists, potential future terrorists, victims of terrorists, allies, potential allies, and everyone else.

Propaganda in my view can be waged most effectively with the weapon of The Truth.

ISIS (or ISIL) is, as we all know, the cadre of terrorists using the predictable propaganda weapon of declaring themselves the world’s first Islamic State. In retrospect, it’s a wonder this hasn’t happened before now.

Courage is an emotion that depends on feeling that one is in the right. We can observe in animals that those defending their own territory fight harder than those who would casually invade. However, the intruder can shake the confidence of the defender, and that changes the odds.

ISIS's clever albeit obvious propaganda innovation has caused the Iraqi army to fear them despite the best of American training and weapons (UK Guardian reports US to increase flow of weapons and Iraqi news reports 13,000 US troops arrive). This is because the claim to being the Islamic State inevitably makes a Muslim wonder What if ISIS is in the right? Wondering this, without closure, reduces the Iraqi army’s will to fight ISIS, and generates the worrisome thought that if Allah is actually on their side, of course that will cause ISIS to win.

Propaganda and morale are closely intertwined. Effective propaganda can lower the enemy’s morale and change the odds in a fight. The best propaganda unites everyone including noncombatants on one’s own side, and reduces the confidence of the other side including their noncombatants. This is the decisive factor, above and beyond weapons systems, training, and sheer numbers.

And we have not been playing the game well lately. The US has signaled that we are divided, tied up in our own shorts and so can be messed with. We have not communicated our policies clearly so that everyone can follow the logic and see us as the good guys. This has gone so far as to cause some of us to wonder if we are the good guys. If this nonsense does not stop now, we are going to continue to drift into a much worse situation. And Iraq is the place where it is likely to start — the same place where civilization started, full circle.

Just before the US invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam, some predicted such a war would cause the resumption of the centuries-old civil war. It was also predicted that the country would be left too weak to defend itself and would be invaded by its neighbors. Both of these dire warnings came true following the removal of US troops as insisted upon by the Iraqi government and as prayed for by a large proportion of Americans. Iranian, Syrian, and Lebanese (Hezbollah) forces are operating in Iraq, the US is arming the Iraqi army and the Kurds, many countries are considering doing something whether in the air or on the ground, and the brewing of something big and nasty is pretty obvious.

It would be good to learn how to communicate well in a situation like this — and fast.

First of all, the emphasis should be on drawing a distinction between Islam and ISIS. The ground should be cut away on which ISIS stands as the Islamic State. The US and the world should clearly state that any nation wishing to make one religion its basis has the sovereign right to do that. The US and many other countries prefer and strongly embrace freedom of religion and thought for themselves, but that selfsame humanitarian spirit behooves everyone to allow a person or nation to make its own choices. We have to make it clear that we are not fighting Religious Statism, even though we would not choose to live in such a state. We are simply continuing to fight people who are murderers, people who make you fight them therefore who must be fought, even though we would prefer to make peace. Someone who seems insanely determined to kill you in the most humiliating way possible has to be stood up to and controlled, changed, jailed, or killed, because self-defense is defensible.

Allah through the Koran has revealed: “Hasten to virtuous deeds.” Or as Jesus put the same message, “Judge them by the fruit of their actions.” How virtuous is it when ISIS brutally kills children? Is ISIS virtuous enough to be calling itself an Islamic state or is that claim itself an offense against Islam?

The Koran also says “Be cautious of them, lest they seduce you.” Implying that “If someone says they are coming from Me, check them out carefully” — and judge them by their effects not their claims.

Until our propaganda is more effective than theirs in every city and village and dwelling in the world, we are not doing all that we can to make the world a better place. This is priority number one. And we can become far more effective communicators and truthfully-inspired propagandists. We certainly have the abundance of patriotic and humanistic creative/media talent for it, in the advertising/ entertainment industries and everywhere else.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — Thank you for the many positive emails about the serialized story of The Great Being. The series will continue in future issues, interspersed with other stories I am more inspired to write at the time. cool

Resiliency, Situational Awareness, Mission, and Positive Emotion

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Volume 4, Issue 14

The word “resiliency” has risen in usage within the U.S. military. It means the ability to quickly spring back from traumatizing experiences and function at Flow state levels. This connotes a degree of toughness, mental toughness. A physical weakling with low resistance to pain might nevertheless have enough mental toughness to be more resilient than a battle-hardened athlete with high resistance to pain.

Mental toughness means enough non-attachment to not be enslaved by attachment. Slavery to attachment to this life can make one act in a cowardly fashion, as can slavery to attachment to the opinions of you held by those who know of you. Mind Magic spends a chapter on methods to clean out these slaveries, increasing mental toughness and resiliency.

As slavery to attachment is lessened, the Observer state emerges from the layers of internal distraction and conservation-of-energy-driven avoidance of giving attention internally, which prevailed in the reign of our various slaveries.

The air forces of the world use the term “situational awareness” to essentially mean the same thing I mean by “Observer state”. However they are not as interested in understanding the process and heightening it as much as I am. The term is applied to those fighter pilots who during a three-dimensional dogfight maintain a sense of where everybody is and the vector on which they are traveling. To do that requires at least Observer state and in the most situationally aware fighter pilots, Flow state.

The emotional state of the individual moving from the slaveries into these higher states is at first a relief from negative emotion. There may then be a period of emotionlessness that makes one feel as if one’s compass has been lost. What, then, am I here for, the individual may ask, now that the false drivers of attachment have been vitiated.

I wrote You Are The Universe: Imagine That for everybody but especially for people who have yet to realize their greatest passion in life, for whom slavery to attachment at least makes each day a drama, albeit grueling. Liberation from the slaveries is replaced by a vacuum if one is not focused on a Mission to deliver one’s gifts to others in the highest way possible. The book explains how to find your sense of Mission and understand the context in which you are part of a larger whole in a true scientific and yet spiritually inspiring way — so that each day may be not only vibrantly dramatic but also filled with positive emotion.

May your day be filled with both vibrant drama and positive emotion!

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Inner Imagery Shorthand to Reinstate Flow

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Volume 4, Issue 14

Five hours in an airport. It’s a great way to catch up on work and then relax with a novel of speculative fiction, especially when I’m exhausted. It’s all okay until they start the delaying-the-flight game, which all too often leads to cancellation. Kristin isn’t working (on my clock) but has a little time so she starts researching the hotels nearest the airport and the probable flight alternatives, God bless her. Sure enough the flight is cancelled and I make it to the taxi stand before the horde. Only problem is that I’m going to get at best 4 hours sleep to make the flight heading to a city 1000 miles further away from home in order to change planes and get home by 5PM, right in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend traffic. Really? Ah well.

Next morning, walking through the airport toward my first plane of the day, I sense that I am feeling angry, exasperated and negative, projecting that I will run into further snags all day. Knowing that such projection will cause the snags, keeping me out of Flow, I experience something that I will describe below, laugh at myself and am back in a good mood. My eyes always go back and forth taking in as much as possible when I am in an unfamiliar setting, and on the next leftward sweep I see a flight heading to where I am going – La Guardia – leaving shortly nonstop for home. Why didn’t they put me on that flight, I wonder, and keep walking. A step later I figure I have time, why not at least check if I can get on that flight. Sure enough there is one seat.

In You Are The Universe I talk about Noia, the word I coined to mean the opposite of paranoia: yes, there are personas out there trying to do something to you, but it isn’t harm, it’s gifts. If you perceive the Universe to be a single Self playing all these roles including you, there is every reason in the world why Noia as a lens should work to help you notice these subtle gifts and clues happening constantly. Therein lies the magic. Of course, that kind of observant behavior would also be good to protect you should anyone be out to do you harm, so pragmatically, why not use that lens?

The shortest flight home and my noticing it was a gift that appeared a second after my mood shifted out of negativity, and the feeling I had at that instant was a powerful sense of synchronicity, the Universe giving me my just reward for acceptance of what is.

I said that I would describe the experience I had of shifting out of the lower state (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, or EOP, as I call it), which in fact is my reason for writing this — to share that moment of shift and what it felt like, so that it becomes a shareable psychotechnology.

A long time ago, I had established “trigger words” to remind myself of one folly or another so that when I was later in the same sort of stuckness loop I could spring those triggers to mind and it would restore the clarity and learning to frontal awareness where evasion of the lower state would be easier (despite the chemical insistence of such states).

For the situation as described, what I would say to myself in my youth was something like this: Accept What Is. That would unpack a stream of remembered relevant words that might go something like this: It is what it is. It’s not in your control. So you’re just wasting time and bringing yourself down by railing against it. It’s a useless activity not worthy of you. You’re not a fool any more. Meanwhile, in my mind I would see a goat butting a fence repeatedly. Eventually, the goat (me) calmed down.

In the airport I heard none of those words although a wispy suggestion of the goat image flashed. Another image came with it that is hard to describe. The Universe around me that ended at my skin was a solid substance and then again I too was in that substance, I am that substance. All of it was translucent and One Thing. Without words, the image conveyed that the very fact that it – the substantial Thing, the process of It – was happening, meant that it was real and everything else that could be imagined about it was not in an equal sense real. So logically, It – the happeningness – was all that truly existed., and any emotional reaction to it was a nice-to-have addition layer but not with equal realness and solidity. That image-feeling was what shifted me out of the downcast defeatist mindset.

Consciousness is the substance of the One Thing that is the primal substrate of existence. Science is even coming around to this view. Psychotechnology to guide consciousness is therefore not a crazy idea. Discovering what works and sharing it is something all of us do naturally, although not often enough, due to Acceleritis™. Yet psychotechnology is the very thing that can cure us of Acceleritis. Let’s have more of it! You can start with this excerpt from my book, Mind Magic: Doorways into Higher Consciousness.

Best to all,

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Your Unconscious Is in Control

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That much Science and I can agree upon

Volume 4, Issue 1

I think now that I might have been borderline autistic.

The stage performances, and Ned and Sandy’s social behavior coaching, eventually got me to a place where I could hang out with people. Hanging out led to ultimately receiving data from my mirror neurons, thereby really sensing other people and their feelings. And being able to love people for what I sensed in them.

What I always found most interesting to study, however, was me. Watching myself carefully, I knew from very early on that I the observer was not in total control of this reckless robot. Psychology as a science is only now coming to that realization. If they had only looked inside they would have found out sooner. Instead they were looking outside for measurable phenomena in the subjective consensus reality, the scientific credibility of subjective introspective reality having washed out to sea after William James left us very early in the 20th century.

My room had a red rug, black couch, black furniture. On one wall was a construction I had made with a Fairbairn Fighting Knife hanging under a red plume feather pen. “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Door closed often, I would stand in contemplation for very long periods of time. I would take notes and sketch diagrams of consciousness, my own consciousness.

Later I would write down the distillation of decades of operating this observatory. I could have called it Mining the Unconscious. Mind Magic, as it is actually called, is a way of pivoting your mind that happens as you read the book and gain more transparency between conscious and unconscious.

My brainwaves apparently indicate abnormal amounts of delta waves going on while awake. I happened to be in a terrific mood the day of the measurement and laughed when the psychologist asked if I was extremely depressed. He opined that I must have access to my subconscious mind at all times to have sleep waves going on during wakefulness.

One thing I noticed was that there were many “voices” speaking to me (really thinking to me) in my head. I knew by this point what split personality disorder (schizophrenia) was and studied myself carefully, ruling out that conclusion. I did not seem crazy to me, and there were not two or a few well-defined personas with their own names and such. Instead it was a senate of many speakers, all in effect claiming to be the same person. Me.

This became useful when I learned that I the observer could listen to a speaker in my head acting as me, and objectively consider the message as if it were coming from someone who is not me.

Reporting my results to a strategic government think tank a couple of years ago I shared my working hypotheses:

  • A new neuronal net grows around undigested experiences that impinge on motivations.
  • This involves brain plasticity, i.e. new neuron formation;
  • As well as new patterns of connections among neurons.
  • In effect this is new software, not part of us at birth, therefore not the essence observer self that was born.
  • Each such “senator” or “senatorobot” is able to convince the observer self and moreover the body to follow its commands as if it were the total self speaking.
  • Each senatorobot is a subsentience, i.e. it has a degree of intelligence and a degree of self-reference as its own self.
  • Therefore each senator has a drive to continue to exist even when the observer self wants to discontinue it (for causing undesired behaviors).

Science has now validated certain parts of this theory. I just finished reading one of my Christmas presents from Lalita, Incognito, by noted neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman. Dr. Eagleman refers to senators as “automaticities” and describes the way the unconscious mind runs most of our behavior as “a team of rivals”, which sounds like a senate to me. The number of pages I’ve marked in his book suggests I’ll be writing a book about his book! 😀 

Drinking caffeinated (who knew?) carbonated beverages in great quantities I laid awake nights watching the debates among the senators and feeling how a speaker could ensnare me into fully taking ownership of what he said. I assumed that everybody was doing this.

I am very happy now to see a path to integrate my theories with the latest best-of-breed science, and hopefully add a dimension: how our experience changes when certain things are going on in the neuronal part of our self. That dimension gave me a control surface to work with to metaprogram my brain. Without introspection, neuroscience would have no way to hand the controls over to the patient, except Pavlovian button-pushing to change the chemical mix. David Eagleman’s work is a bold step away from the dominance of reductionism, leaving introspection as a valid part of the testrig. Thanks, David!

Best to all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.

For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this video. Or this collection of videos.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.