Tag Archives: Mind Magic

Savor the Moment

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Volume 3, Issue 32

It’s true that all we have is this moment, the Now. The past and future are concepts, abstractions, ways the brain has of organizing experience so it seems to make sense. What is always real is the Now. To the extent that our attention is divided into the Now, the past and the future, we are sapping the energies needed to get into the Zone (Flow state) in the Now.

Love the one you’re with. If your day is filled with scheduled meetings and phone calls, you may find yourself doing some of them to get past them and on to something you’re more looking forward to. You’re doing it so you can check it off your to-do list. The quality of the interaction you’re in would be nowhere near the Zone. A better strategy is to engage in each interaction at the top of your game. From the cosmic perspective you’re always on stage and no performance should be a throw-away.

Useful lens: love the One you’re with. See that person or those persons as other free-agent extensions of the One, highly sentient like you, each with his or her own story. You are interacting with them now for reasons that may be non-obvious, beyond and including the obvious reasons you know about. There are undoubtedly layers of additional opportunity in the moment. Allow your interest to gather in the interaction and be a studious observer.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. — Rumi, from “The Guest House”

Nothing will work, however, if your day is packed and you have not ingrained yourself with organized processes for managing constant chaos and distraction. One such process starts with putting fake meetings in your calendar so others will not book anything with you at those times. Those are times reserved for meetings with yourself, which on each occasion you will use as you like best at the time. It might be to launch into a high-opportunity project that has been waiting. It might be to take a break and a mental vacation, where you may find creative ideas popping of their own volition. It might be to sort out the latest incoming chaos and to assign it a place in your future schedule for handling.

The strategy is to pre-plan your days to include these meetings with yourself at reasonable intervals, and pre-dream the other meetings, calls and other activities — which you can do in the shower or even in bed in the morning or the night before. Arrange things so you can focus 100% on one thing at a time. As interruptions arise or even fresh thoughts relevant to the meeting you’re in, note them on pieces of paper so you don’t lose them (this also relieves your mind of the need to blurt them lest you forget them). Throw these notes into the chaos file folder until you can sort them into the right client file. Empty the chaos folder each night so you have the feeling of being in control and not overrun.

Deep breathing in the moment helps. Remembering how much can be accomplished in a few minutes when you are patiently relating human to human. Listening to and feeling the feelings of the mirror neurons in your brain. Swinging for the Big Idea fences inherent in the present conversation.

There is always a game going on. If you’re not in one game you’ll be in another. One game is the success game. Money is the main point-keeper in this game. Another game is self-actualization, where you are having fun because you love your work. There can still be attachment in the self-actualization game because if at any moment you are not having fun you can get brought down, and this is not conducive to the Zone. The most-rewarding game is the one in which you are always focused on the presence of a/The Higher Power (HP), with whom you are a working team. The HP is the pitcher and you the batter; however, you are both on the same team. The object is not to beat anyone else but to perform at your highest level through whatever game course you are playing.

When something “good” happens observe how you take it — ideally with gratitude and satisfaction but without hubris. When something “bad” happens observe how you take it — ideally appreciating the size of the challenge and the cool way you are not fazed by it, handling it with grace under fire, again not crossing the line into hubris.

Imagine this is actually the underlying real game whether we believe it or not. This is the game being played through us. We are just hypnotized into thinking we are separate beings instead of extensions of the One Being. It is this mis-identification that takes us out of Flow (the Zone). When we drop such conceptual baggage Flow happens. This is the core of Zen psychotechnology.

Computing power is the common link between consciousness and computers. We know that consciousness exists — in fact empirically it is the only thing we know for certain.

To grasp what the universe really is, it is necessary to merely accept the possibility of an unimaginably large consciousness, with enough computing power to be responsible for everything that is going on in universe.

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. I’ll be signing my book MIND MAGIC at the Dolphin Bookshop’s local authors book fair in Port Washington, NY on Saturday, September 28 from 11 AM to 3 PM. Please stop by if you are in the area.

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. 

Atonement

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Volume 3, Issue 31

Writing this on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish religion. The day to atone for one’s shortfalls, forgive oneself for them, forgive everyone for whom one is still carrying a grudge.

A perfect Jew, which I am not, would probably not be writing on this day. My friend Stan Silverman calls us HinJews. Even that does not quite encapsulate it — I am faithful to 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.

This of course makes it easier to forgive. If there is only One spark of being populating all of us, then a person 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. At-One-ment makes atonement easier.

If my friend, whose mother belittled him because of her own childhood conditioning, has become carping, surely on this day I can understand and forgive that. I myself am him, living a different life with different experiences that have made me less carping than him but perhaps imperfect in lots of other ways. I can forgive everyone including myself for all the influences that drive us all to become what we perhaps only temporarily are. Knowing this may free us from having to continue to be exactly the same today as we have always been.

Pragmatism again. There is utility to oneself to stop blaming others. Blame is an investment of mental/emotional energy that pays no return. That same energy can be redeployed to deliver a positive return. Solutions are better investment instruments than blame.

As Mind Magic says on page 229:

Do not be critical of that which has happened; do decide what should have happened and seek to bring it about in similar situations in the future.

What has already happened could not have been otherwise; all events are merely the resultant of their causes, which are themselves events dependent on the constellation of prior causes.

You can make yourself a more potent cause of future events by deciding how to act differently the next time the same kind of situation arises; you can do nothing about the past.

Do not be critical of what any individual, including yourself, has done: all actions are merely the resultant of their causes.

Again, seek only to set new policies for similar future situations.

Honesty and gentleness are essential tools in this endeavor.

Guiding others to adopt more useful new policies requires special gentleness; often it is best to simply ask the right questions to have the desired effect.

Best to all,

Bill

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 Last Day on Earth” Lens

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Volume 3, Issue 30

Whether we realize it or not, we are always managing our Selves. I’m capitalizing the word “Self” (and variants) for emphasis — to draw attention to the concept of Self, which may be of greater significance than any other concept in any language. To meditate on the Self and to penetrate to a deep understanding of our own Self confers the highest level of consciousness, the greatest happiness, the Zone/Flow state, creativity and peak effectiveness.

Our skill at Self-management varies. Sometimes we are in the Zone, though mostly not. Sometimes we are in a living hell. Whichever way it is, we are always doing it to ourselves. As the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers and Buddhists knew, whatever happens to us is not what makes us unhappy, it is our attitude toward it that makes us unhappy, and the latter can be controlled. Managed. It is a skill, one that can be learned.

As one studies and trains oneself and grows up to become a mensch (“stand-up guy”, “grownup”), it becomes apparent that:

  1. The most important thing to the Self is to know one’s purpose in life, and this gives meaning to life. One’s purpose is closely tied to one’s true work, which one must love or it is not one’s true work, one’s calling. One will not experience much Flow state if one is working at something else. However, I knew a truck driver who experienced Flow by his enjoyment of the travel adventure and camaraderie of the job, so as always in life there are no hard and fast rules.

     

  2. Distraction is the main barrier to Self-realization. Distraction is exacerbated by the Acceleritis-ridden culture we live in, and by attachment to outcomes driven into our psyches by conditioning, fear, and other-directedness. In a distracted state, little things having no bearing on our purpose in life become a big dramatic deal and we cannot think clearly because we keep obsessing over this peripheral stuff. It brings us down, making us weak, dependent, and fearful. We project failure, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We attract to us all the things we are fearful of.

In one of the methods described in our book Mind Magic, one does not “believe” anything, but instead takes an empirical approach to testing different strategies and carefully observing results to prove to oneself what works and what doesn’t. Lenses are used as trial strategies, that is, one temporarily adopts a lens or way of looking at things to see if this way gets one into the Zone more often, or not.

Here’s a lens for today: look at your life as if right now, today, it is your last day on Earth. This lens keeps you focused on what you are here to accomplish in this life — on meaning and purpose, and not on the little dramas that usually take all our attention.

In one’s last day on Earth, how you do things becomes the most important thing. Every little thing you do is done with quality. You are in the moment, present, with every person you interact with. You let out the hero inside. You exemplify grace under pressure, Hemingway’s and Churchill’s definition of courage. Churchill said that courage is the key virtue because all the others stem from it.

You find that the usual distracting dramas melt down in perspective to what they are, no big tzimmis.

By this lens one stays focused on the true priorities.

Best to all, 

Bill

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. 

What Is Mindfulness?

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Volume 3, Issue 24

In the prior post we made the point that better decision-making and higher performance in the end reduce to two main drivers, Positive Thinking and Mindfulness. Positive Thinking, which we also call Solution Orientation, is easier said than done, and we pointed to our book Mind Magic as a compendium of proven operational techniques for actually achieving and maintaining both of these inner behaviors. We promised to investigate the nature of Mindfulness in this post.

Mindfulness is a form of attention control. Going back at least as far as written language and probably as far back as the cave paintings, the human race has discovered the importance of focusing attention in achieving its aims. The cave paintings are widely believed to be evidence of a method for rehearsing the hunt. Yogic mental/emotional methodologies are the essence of what is recommended in the Vedas, some of the earliest writings on the planet, and these include contemplation, concentration and meditation, all three related to the conscious and willful control of the attention.

The need to be master of one’s own attention has gotten progressively greater over the centuries as a result of information overload and its distractive effects. We have given this condition the name Acceleritis. Our relevant hypothesis is that written language, by making language visual — the dominant sense of not only homo sapiens but of all primates — brought the human race up to Piaget’s Formal Operational level of thinking, the highest known level of thinking until Systems Level thinking was discovered in the twentieth century. This so augmented the ability to invent that in only 3% of the time since the appearance of the species, the human race in the last 6000 years has invented more and more things and ideas each year than in the prior year, and at an increasing rate, driving a vast increase in the amount of information needing to be processed by our brains each day. ADD, ADHD, and a fairly obvious reduction in the general population’s ability to stay focused on one problem long enough to solve it, have been the result. Again, the need for Mindfulness has never been greater.

Concentration is the focus of the mind on a single object. Contemplation is the focus of the mind on a single subject. Meditation is the contemplation of the Self. What then is Mindfulness? We define Mindfulness as the optimal allocation of attention for maximum effectiveness. Now that we’ve defined the term, we’ll stop initial-capping it.

Attention optimally allocates both inwardly and outwardly at the same time. This is in sharp distinction from normative behavior, which is to allocate virtually all attention outwardly whenever the eyes are open. This normative attention strategy virtually eliminates the ability to understand one’s own motivations in the moment, causing actions to be controlled by ego drives that are counterproductive to efficacy. When one is mindful, there is a predictive feedback loop allowing one to suppress actions that are merely self-serving and do not consider the needs and probable responses of others.

Mindfulness also makes one more observant externally, improving what fighter pilots call situational awareness. Our theory of Holosentience postulates a shift into a higher state of consciousness as a result of persistent mindfulness. We call this the Observer state, and it is from this state that the mind-body can launch into Flow state or the Zone, the highest known state of consciousness in which right actions seem to do themselves effortlessly.

It takes “attentional” effort to be mindful and thus to reach the Observer state and the Zone.

Mindfulness and solution orientation (overleaping the focus on the problem once it is defined and going right to the focus on the solution, otherwise known as Positive Thinking) combine to form the core of the Human Effectiveness Institute’s psychotechnology — the recommended set of methodologies to achieve superior decisions, highest effectiveness, and creative innovation in all aspects of one’s life.

Best to all,

Bill 

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.