Tag Archives: Observer State

How Acceleritis Affects Organizational Effectiveness

Originally posed November 10, 2011

The metrics used today to judge the effectiveness of organizations are primarily stock prices and their direction in context of the market condition. This is supposed to reflect the equity of the brands in the stable of the organization. It is therefore all built on the fuzzy perceptions that people collectively share, of individuals, brands and organizations. However we think most of the judgments made of which organizations are high performing based on stock prices and general fuzzy perceptions, are largely accurate. We hypothesize that human beings have sufficient intuition and intellect to quickly see a team that works well together and to see the opposite. This post offers a few thoughts on how to move your team toward higher effectiveness in terms of these economic metrics.

You’ll recall my hypothesis explaining the increasing inability of the human race to be effective in managing its world: the acceleration of information racing into the brain per average day.

No one can deny there has been such an acceleration whether or not you buy my method of reaching that hypothesis.

Is there a reader who would argue that the human race is just as effective in managing its world today as it ever was, and that the human race is as effective today as it ever can be? You may be right (if “you” exist) but that is a self-limiting thought. This meme can spread like a virus through our biocomputers – and it has. Defeatism, and self-limiting self-fulfilling prophecies have been observed being inculcated in children by pessimistic parents, and the children then perpetuate these self-put-downs and everyone-else-put-downs for the rest of their lives, passing it on to their children, and so on down through the centuries.

Has there ever been a time when no one could think up a new idea to restore equilibrium to the perilously-wobbling globally interconnected economic system?

Of course, we never had such a precariously interconnected system before. The challenges of our own making have escalated due to tool making and invention. This and media are causal drivers of acceleritis in the first place. A secondary hypothesis posits that the three main causal drivers of acceleritis are written language, tools/weapons, and media.

These are three historic shocks that have created the modern trance. (pre-publication monograph available to other researchers in this field.)

The word “trance” implies hypnotism or drugs or a mental state brought on by high fever – characterized by a reduced level of functional effectiveness, especially in terms of complex challenges. EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure) is my name for the state caused by Acceleritis™. Like a trance of any other kind, EOP reduces our functional effectiveness as compared to when we reach two higher states, Observer state and Flow state. The vector that best describes the continuum formed by these three states of waking consciousness is non-distraction: distraction brings the mind down to EOP; and perfect singlepointed focus where distractions are automatically mentally controlled, yields Flow state, Observer state being the doorway to Flow state. The message inherent in these hypotheses is that we must as a race and as individuals learn to stay focused through complexity. This is the purpose of The Human Effectiveness Institute and the psychotechnology toolware we are creating.

How do organizations actually function today, under these widespread conditions of acceleritis and EOP? For a moment, contemplate government. Then, for a moment, contemplate your own organization. What behaviors and outcomes can you see that are consistent with this hypothesis?

The flow of communication in organizations is extremely non-optimal in most cases I’ve observed during my 30 years of consulting for hundreds of Fortune 500 corporations.

As information moves upward in the typical organization today, much information is purposely hidden. The motivations are primarily fear, and secondarily lust for success – not necessarily greed, because that implies people already have the basics covered, which is not the general condition today.

Workers tell certain things to their managers, hiding their mistakes and also hiding bits of information they sense could be useful to them more when the timing is right and they’ve thought it out to the end of the logical stream. “Wisely” they do not want to blurt out ideas that could be powerful and could also be stolen and used by others to gain the power that the individual lusts for. Alas this “wisdom” (actually cunning) serves motivations that are conditioned rather than consciously chosen. Acceleritis is what has conditioned people to “not have time” to fully contemplate their lives and so they are just rushing through it, trying to keep up, and oversimplifying everything as much as possible. Black and white jumping-to-conclusions is one common tactic for keeping things as simple as possible. None of these acceleritis-driven behaviors (information blocking, black and white thinking, rushing) are conducive to being a high performing individual in a high-performing organization.

Information blocking then continues as information flows upward and across an organization. Managers tell directors what is beneficial to the managers. Directors tell officers what is beneficial to the directors. Officers tell the CEO what is beneficial to the officers. Information becomes overladen with this spin and that, with specific people in the organization taking credit for certain spins and where they should lead, so that they will be promoted if the course is taken and works out. These behaviors trace back in the evolutionary dawn to the level of brain development in the reptile stage. Territoriality and pecking order start even earlier and are exalted in this stage. Mammals and humans have more corrugated cortical tissue and the potential to understand nobility. Nobility mediates selfishness to create an individual in tune with others, and thus able to lead. However nobility is a high level of further human development not inherent in the acceleritis shaped civilization we have built. Nobility must be achieved by bootstrapping oneself out of acceleritis driven EOP and into Observer state in order to clear the mind of its own distractions and robotical behaviors, at which point periods of the highly-effective Flow state occur naturally.

The same is true with organizations. The thing that obstructs information the most is lack of direct contact between the top and bottom of the hierarchy. One deals mostly with peers and superiors. The King/Queen does not disguise himself/herself to go among the people to learn what is really going on. When this occasionally happens “accidentally”, so much is learned it inspires creativity throughout the organization.

The larger the organization the more levels and therefore the more filtering of information for selfish reasons. With companies and governments getting larger and larger, acceleritis continuing to accelerate, the harm of organizational bigness is exacerbated. Plato reasoned that a utopian community could consist of individual groupings of people not larger than 1000 persons, because everyone could stay in touch with everyone else. Above that it would not be optimal in effectiveness because communication would break down and selfish interests would tear it apart. Whether or not he got the magic number right, his prediction has certainly been borne out. The larger the organization, the more important that the leaders find a way to stay in touch with people at all levels of the organization, as many as possible.

One method of encouraging people to share their ideas early so that more minds can work on them sooner is to develop a culture that rewards people for their ideas with immediate positive recognition.

Fear can also be minimized in an organization by a culture that provides constructive feedback in a supportive manner, and never creates a mood suggesting impending punishment and disgrace.

A sense of safety and collegiality makes a team more likely to perform in Observer state, where objectivity and search for clarity are the mood, and there is no compelling emotional tug of war between one outcome and another. In this state, which has been called the basic professional state (Ichazo), wasteful movements are minimized, and people keep their eyes on the real priorities from second to second. There is a relative absence of fear and other negative emotion, as people are not attached to getting recognition, nor fearful of sounding stupid, because this has been the context that management has successfully inculcated.

Leaders need to be role models and this is the strongest form of training. Aplomb is the operative word. Merriam-Webster definition: “complete and confident composure or self-assurance: poise.” Poise sounds more like something one is trying to project. In my mind, aplomb beats poise just because aplomb counter-suggests that the person is striving to portray an image. Instead, to me, aplomb evokes an image of a lead plumb bob hanging down perfectly steadily. That is of course where the word came from, French a plomb, “according to the plummet” (plummet=lead plumb bob in modern parlance). A person in equipoise, not needing to prove anything to anybody, incomparably fearless, palpably unflappable. At rest like a plumb bob but ready to move in any direction responsively.

People, especially leaders, like to show confidence. But in doing so sometimes they show a lack of aplomb either by fleeting angry expressions, trying to make a joke, scratching themselves, or any of a number of other obvious clues including just their apparent tension. This shows the confidence is just a façade. People around them know what it is without necessarily putting it into words in their mind. They know the leader is not truly confident but that it’s just an act. This does not attract real supporters.

If the team does not have total confidence in the leader, their acceleritis will immediately leap them into a mode of performance that is sub-optimal for the organization, where they will be in a mood of self-protection rather than a mood of teamwork, solutions and success. If it is not gamelike, if it is not play, if you would not be doing it except for the money and where it might lead you, you might get through the day but Flow state will be a rarity. Your team needs to see that you are enjoying every minute of it so they realize this way would be more fun than the way they usually get through a day.

Acceleritis is the great enemy of aplomb. Imagine a higher being – God if you wish – or simply a being that is to human beings what human beings are to viruses – a scientific possibility in the viewable universe of billions of galaxies. Somewhere right now such a being probably does exist. Imagine that being is the soul of aplomb. What does she/he have to worry about? Phenomena such as acceleritis and EOP cannot take hold in the mind of such a being, its intuition and intellect — being at far higher bandwidth and information processing power than we operate at — can see through such traps of the mind while we as yet cannot. At least until the individual discovers this truth for herself/himself and begins to work consciously on seeing the EOP trap and subtly sliding around it again and again back into Observer state, every minute of the day, every day, and brings it under conscious control such as a higher being could do far more quickly and easily, with no practice needed.

We Earthlings do need constant practice if we are to make our minds fully conscious of what drives us and therefore in control of that whole process. That’s just where our current bandwidth is at. Comes with the package, the brain as it is today in evolution. Software that has been pre-programmed into our minds before we ever knew to think to ask for a choice about which programming came in and which stayed out. By the time we are five there have been over a billion neuron connections wired into our brain simply by our experiences. The brain automatically learns, and some learnings are actually incorrect — they make wrong predictions about what will be successful, yet they exist in your brain as having power over you to force you or impel you into unthought-out actions that have the apparent safety of being exactly the same thing you always did before in such a situation.

This is conditioning. Conscious choice is preferable to being a robot driven by your conditioning.

It’s not what you have to learn. It’s what you have to un-learn.

Imagine how manicky you and I must seem to a higher space being of true aplomb. Racing around to get things done without the perspective of how unimportant most of these things are in the Big Picture, although we are anguished by them at the moment.

When the EOP caused by Acceleritis™ is stripped away, and the person spends more time in Observer state, where fewer and fewer things can press her/his buttons, the individual exhibits true aplomb, signaling true inner freedom from attachment to anything. True fearlessness with regard to whatever could happen, including death. This is not a common state for human beings today. However, we do see this aplomb in sages, saints, “great men” and “great women”, performers of all kinds from athletes to entertainers to public speakers/politicians – very rare in the latter category, though some of our presidents have had aplomb at important turning points in history, and great deeds emerged from this cocoon.

Your team gets closer to aplomb when you have created the right atmosphere, and provided the right role model. They are less obsessed by the petty little personal biases, ambitions and other stuff that a typical team is totally immersed in and can’t see past. This is not coming from their essence as a person but from the acceleritis buildup of conditioned robotic behaviors driven by powerful neuron clusters in the brain. A person who is not aware of this syndrome can obviously do nothing to counter it. Those who have achieved aplomb have done so consciously, having discovered the inner software and reprogrammed it over time.

Aplomb at its highest level exists because the individual identifies not with the body you see standing there before you, but with the entire universe including the parts unseen, and so has nothing to lose. In India and throughout Asia, this ultimate aplomb is also known as enlightenment, liberation, equipoise, and by other names, and those who have achieved this ultimate aplomb are known as gurus. Real gurus are very rare even in the East, although those on the path to guru-ness are a much larger number. In our blog we are constantly offering suggestions toward a degree of guru-hood for all of us some day in the perhaps not-too-distant future. Science and our own Will shall determine the speed of getting there; however, I hypothesize it is in fact our destiny to all rise to this higher level, or Flow state, through long practice maintaining Observer state from which Flow eventually springs.

Ultimately, organizational effectiveness will be exponentially increased as a result of most of us spending most of our time in Observer/Flow states. This will have a hugely beneficial effect on government, the economy, levels of happiness and quality of life.

Best to all,

Bill

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

Make the Best Use of your Fine Brain

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Originally posted October 20, 2011

Even Bill Gates could not afford to buy this supercomputer. That is, if we could make one. The more science discovers what our brain can do, the more respect one has to have for the “random forces” that supposedly “collided” to make this brain.

On the other hand, those forces might not have been random, and may have been far smarter even than this fine brain you and I have.

As the ancient texts of India, all religions and esoteric schools, Jung and many others have postulated, we all appear to be connected somehow. Perhaps where we are all connected is the sum of everything, itself a brain made out of energy, manifesting to our senses as a three-dimensional material universe. But perhaps if our senses were cleansed of cultural conditioning, they might be as remarkable as our brain is, in the more complete universe they might then show us.

Although our cultural perceptual filters keep us from noticing, our fine brain gives us foreknowledge of certain events. Recently replicated experiments have shown that samples of college students, and occasionally other/broader population samples, can guess what the next image on a screen is going to be, even though that image is randomly generated. In other words, nobody can know in advance what that next image is going to be, not even the computer which is selecting the image, were that computer self-aware, even it wouldn’t be able to know which image is going to pop up next.

Typically a choice of perhaps five classes of images is offered, and the subject has the task of guessing which of the five categories the image is going to be in. If the guesses were entirely random, studies like this would show that the average subject is right 20% of the time, in the six-figure sample sizes now cumulated for this kind of research. Instead of 20% right guesses the average is 21-22% in the typical study, and with certain population segments such as meditators and monks the levels go higher.

Read Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe (yes he came up with the same phrase as I use in The Theory of The Conscious Universe) for science’s current tallies of sample sizes, numbers of studies, and exact odds against the results being a result of chance, for the main classes of ESP — telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis. In short, the evidence is in and the odds of these phenomena being explainable by chance is in the millions to one and sometimes higher. Major universities are involved in this research, as well as the military.

You too have these powers. But you probably ignore them all too often, goofing when you knew an instant ahead not to do a certain thing but ignored the hunch, and thus goofed.

Meditation, contemplation, and any other form of focusing the mind appear to be associated with success rates across the studies higher than the 21-22% average.

Some of the techniques in my book are gamelike. For example, here are some ways to enjoyably get the highest performance out of your fine brain, not only in terms of getting a lot more out of your intuition as we have just been discussing, but in every area of your functioning — intuition, intellect, feeling and perception (Jung).

It’s Always a Good Time for a Mind Cleanse

When you have nothing else to do, enjoy an interesting mind cleanse.

Give your self a report (I know “yourself” is one word, but you look at it differently when it’s two words.) How are you feeling? Everything great? Any complaints? Good. The fun is in the complaints. That’s where it’s interesting, and we can use the fine brain for its supreme problem-solving prowess.

Start to enjoy the way you no longer waste time on your supercomputer. You appreciate the great feats of which it’s capable therefore you wouldn’t think to burn minutes of its time in simple whining, playing old tapes, running on unconscious autopilot rather than the conscious Flow state kind, or whatever else diminishes the functioning of your fine brain.

It aids the focus to have paper and pen/cil, feeling free to draw or write whatever one feels like without having to make it neat or to conform to any rules whatsoever.

Sometimes you see your self drawing schematic diagrams with arrows and circles to depict some phenomenon that you would rather not have in your life. Let your self go, knock your self out — you will definitely learn something practical out of contemplating whatever is going down on paper or just flowing through your head. Pay close attention as if you were a detective studying someone else, not your self, someone you had never seen before — look with new eyes, willing to strip away all the old rhetoric about your self and opening your mind to reconsider everything — no buttons locked down on the keyboard.

Another thing that will happen is that you will start making a list. This is when there are so many things going round and round in your head they just are dying to leap through the ink onto the paper, so you let them. You may see a mix of relationship challenges and shopping lists. That’s okay, all of them have some level of importance in cleansing your mind. Just when they stop flowing freely for a minute, put priority numbers next to them and eventually you will have it as a list in your computer that will be in priority order, and probably in categories to keep the shopping lists out of the life changing hypotheses.

Go into it with the conviction that there are always solutions — even if you are acting to some degree, do it experimentally to see what the true results are in your case. Your fine brain got you into this, it can get you out of it.

On the other hand, also leave open the possibility that this thing you are trying to get to stop happening in your life, make believe for a few minutes that you could get to like it if you looked at it differently and performed differently when it is happening, and that it might be happening for a good reason — perhaps you even caused it by something that you wanted.

Look at the situation from as many points of view as possible, keeping an open mind.

Recognize your own powers without exaggerating them. How can you use whatever control you do have over the situation to gently nudge it a step at a time into the comfortable sustainable zone?

You don’t have to solve every challenge in one sitting. Just keep creatively attacking your list with strong intention and solution orientation every day — glance at yesterday’s list and then put it out of your mind. Go do something else until you feel a flow of ideas and then if possible get writing implements and seal your self off from any possible interruption to the extent that you can do so even for a very short time — take a biobreak if necessary to escape from the world for a few minutes.

Today’s flow of ideas might or might not have anything to do with yesterday’s list. If you find your self impatient for instant dramatic solutions, add that subject to the list. The highest part of you knows intuitively that dramatic sudden improvements are rare, and that some lower part of you is being childish. The goal is to move your center to the highest part of you at all times.

Let’s take the happy assumption that you, my special friends to whom I send this weekly missive, already know all this and therefore you don’t have anything to complain about. These same mind techniques apply to you too, because you have a purpose in life, currently expressed as a job (or sideline), in which these techniques of focusing make you more effective and give you more pleasure while you creatively make a success out of your business/profession, volunteer work, parenting, lovegiving, caregiving work, or other life activity.

In that sphere, the same sense of solution orientation applies just as strongly. Most companies and the people in them, and most other teams as well, spend too much time in problem definition, which is not as much fun as shifting more time to solving the problems (which is of course also more productive). Solving problems is fun. When they are not your own problems it is even more fun.

I was a consultant for many years. It was tremendously enjoyable. Always being creative about someone else’s problems — and even getting paid for it! However you do it, solving problems is fun. Because of Acceleritis™, we often have to remember to enjoy it. We get sucked into “our problems” like a horror movie, as if morbidly fascinated, and then hypnotized into taking it all too seriously, getting too attached to certain outcomes, generating that unhealthy and torturous thing called negative emotions.

As a consultant and in whatever position you’re in professionally, your fine brain yields the best results if you “think about the client’s whole business, not just the one department he/she wants your help on.” Broaden your perspective as much as possible while focusing all of your attention on it. As you get better at this, singlepointedness comes easily and naturally to you, words in the mind come infrequently and this speeds up the flow of ideas as you see in your mind’s eye fleeting images that race by and change much faster than you could explain the logic to your self by use of words in the mind.

It’s in this wordless observer state that you’re likely to experiences periods of Flow state. In these higher states that Accelertitis suppresses, hunches are far easier to pay attention to, because the Acceleritis-driven words in the mind no longer distract attention from the subtle and often fleeting appearance of a hunch in the mind. I use the word “fleeting” repeatedly here because it is a genuine characteristic of the phenomenon. Hunches and Flow state ideas both come at speeds that in any other state you would have an impossible time keeping up with. This suggests they are probably always there — even in EOP — except they are drowned out from attention by being too subtle for the grosser state you are in when in EOP.

Another key point of these techniques is prioritization, mentioned briefly above and deserving of more emphasis. You cannot be singlepointed if you are distracted knowing you might not be working your fine brain on the optimal thing at the moment. So always know the optimal sequence based on how much of a positive difference you can make in the world at any given point in time. You might be seen as a person who takes a lot of bio breaks, but there are worse things. 🙂

Best to all,

Bill

Science Has Accepted Consciousness

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Originally posted October 13, 2011

We live at an exciting turning point in history. The first great turn has already occurred. Quantum Mechanics, the most successful theory in the history of science, has put the observer back into the picture of the universe collectively known as science.

Einstein started it with relativity theory, but Quantum Mechanics (QM) has institutionalized it.

At the moment, all this has really done is to cause a number of prominent physicists, the world’s most respected, to characterize the universe as consisting of not matter and energy but information (John Wheeler), thought (James Jeans), idea (Werner Heisenberg), and mind (Robert Wald). Gerald Schroeder, in his excellent book God According To God, provides a unique exegesis of the Bible to show that the ancients were on this same wavelength but lacked modern verbal thought tools.

Jeans expresses exactly what I have extrapolated further in the Theory of the Conscious Universe* — a theory I have begun to excerpt in this blog since earlier this year — when he says “each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.”

So far this early trend has not fully played out through the scientific community, which continues to work in the same Acceleritis™-infected, therefore fear-driven culture as you and I, dear reader. Individual scientists fear ridicule and loss of job opportunity just like the rest of us — except when individuals flash through the higher states of consciousness (observer state, Flow state) that quarantine the Acceleritis infection. In these higher states the high-end long tail of physicists such as Wheeler et al. emerge from the dark mental cloud and see the connections in all the bits swirling through their minds. They are able to bring back wisdom from those states and enlighten the rest of humanity by common language verbalization of what must be the truth based on all the evidence available to physicists today.

Just the other day the latest Nobel Prize-winning physicists Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Reiss won that prize by discovering that the universe expansion is accelerating as a result of dark matter further out attracting it from all directions. This overturns the widely held theory that the universe would reach a point where the Big Bang driven expansion would be tethered by gravity and would then fall back to an eventual Big Crunch, perhaps triggering another Big Bang.

An infinitely expanding universe is quite consistent with the modern Big Idea that “consciousness is fundamental” (Jeans). Also, just what is that “dark matter” that apparently constitutes 95% of the mass/gravity of the universe? Is it really matter at all or something else that has mass and therefore gravity? The previous concept of an expanding-contracting universe is closer to a mechanistic thermodynamic gas balloon model. We shall see where this all goes.

Physics continues to blow its own mind on a regular basis.

While this is going on, there is a culture around this physics cadre that continues to act as if the universe is purely materialistic, a picture that is decades if not a century behind the front edge of science.

The accelerating flood of distractive information around us each day also continues, creating forever-unanswered questions in our minds. The latest stat from Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner is that “the data equivalent to the total volume of information created from the beginning of human civilization until 2003 can now be generated in the space of just two days.” This Acceleritis condition is a strong shaper of the way our minds operate. Unless we employ psychic shielding techniques, such as in my book, it carries us along in a reactive state, not autonomous but believing that we are.

The state we are in leaves us very vulnerable when we lose a loved one.

In our gut we have a strong assumption that we shall never be in contact with these individuals again. Anything else seems beyond naïve and foolish. We are lacerated with pain, from which some of us never recover.

The last 15 years of my father’s life gave me an opportunity to get to know him in ways that I treasure. Before that I was a child and in awe of him. He was a celebrity in the world of New York showbiz and to other celebs known worldwide, whom I met in brief bright moments in the photo album of my life.

My first word that he had died was over the phone from the stage manager at the Concord where Ned (my father) was the orchestra leader, MC, and exec in charge of both bands. I was in a phone booth in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm.

I trudged back to the car with a desolate feeling about my own life. It was going to be flat and empty, of no value, going through the motions. “Why did it have to be now?” I heard myself ask him, “I wanted you and Sandy to see me make it.” Sandy was my mother, who had passed away years earlier. I had just returned to New York after living in California for two years and was at a trough in my career.

“Sandy and I can see you fine from up here. We’ll be waiting in the wings when you get off.” I heard his voice — it was his voice — clearly say this in my mind. My mind flashed to a picture of Ned and me performing together onstage, with Sandy just barely visible in the wings stage left. While I was still stunned he said “Take care of Nat.” Nat was his brother, who has more recently passed away. This surprised me, came out of nowhere — my mind flashed to other people he had not said to take care of. Then I thought perhaps he figured they could take care of themselves.

My mind has gone back to this and other strange incidents in my life which do not fit in a materialistic universe. This was the impetus for the Theory of the Conscious Universe*, in which I attempt to fit together all of the evidence, the licit and heretofore illicit, the common experiences we all share, and the cutting edge of physics. The theory will be published as a book.

At Ned’s funeral I was asked to say a few words to the hard-bitten, cynical showbiz crowd. Most of them had not seen me since I was a child and therefore all of them called me Billy. Ned, Sandy and Billy were our names all through my childhood until people started to call Ned “Chief”.

“We come into this life, we know not from where,” I said. “Where we go when we leave, in fact, nobody really knows. We assume it’s all over.” I told them what the Chief had said in my mind, and then offered this explanation: “Science says that nothing in the universe can either be created or destroyed, it can only be changed into something else, some other form. Matter and energy are both conserved. If Nature considers both matter and energy important enough to conserve, why wouldn’t Nature also conserve consciousness, which has to be much more important than mere matter and energy?”

Standing by the grave, Morty Gunty — a comedian well-known within the community and whom had been given his chance by Ned, as so many performers had — edged closer and said to me, “You know your remarks… were really great.” In the manner of saying that he liked my act, which is not a bad thing, since it’s all showbiz.

Our own consciousness can change. We can change our acts. We can be in control of our minds and our emotions without becoming heartless unfeeling creatures. We can open our minds to the possibility that our consciousness in some form will be conserved. Just be open to that possibility. Don’t believe anything you can’t prove experientially. This includes not believing in permanent death, since it has never been proven either. Keep an open mind.

Aside from the heartbreak and depression emanating from loss of loved ones, there is another reason to keep an open mind about death.

We ourselves lead lives that can slip into a form of craven fear. It is a mood brought about by the belief in the unproven superstition that death is permanent — it may or may not be. There is no evidence either way. Zero evidence. Zero.

Add Acceleritis to the belief in death and you have a cocktail of mind poisons guaranteed to impel you into a life of hidden background fear at all times. Money worries are just an extension of that insecurity about security. All worries and concerns about reputation, image, standing in your community, not taking chances, not just letting yourself have fun, not saying what’s in your heart spontaneously but putting up the proper façade — all of that has death belief at its core.

What’s important is enjoying every moment, now. When you look back in the end — whether it’s a permanent end or a temporary one — it will be the enjoyment moments you’ll count up as what you got out of this life. Enjoy all of them then. Enjoy the getting to wherever you’re going.

I predict that someday science will empirically prove that consciousness is conserved. Just like matter and energy. Why wouldn’t it be, if it is the fundamental stuff of which matter and energy are built, as stated by the great physicists of our time? When that day comes, if not before, we can all shed our death belief and get on with living life to its fullest.

Best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 .

Getting Your Team into the Zone

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Originally posted August 25, 2011

The Zone or Flow State is something we all have observed in other people such as supreme athletes or musicians in moments of peak performance — people doing something extremely difficult and doing it perfectly — it seems like magic or even a miracle — we are riveted, transfixed, watching it happen.

Science has begun to acknowledge that this state is real and measurable. Master Marvin Chun who heads Yale’s Neuroscience Department notes that what appears to be chatter crossing the corpus callosum between left and right brain dies down with the onset of the Zone. This is just one notable example of scientific measurements of the Zone in recent years.

In The Theory of The Conscious Universe, the Zone is the state in which information leaks in from outside the local self; as if the membrane separating you from the rest of the universe has suddenly become semi-permeable. We postulate that the heroic personages recorded by history who have moved us in the direction of more noble ideals were in the Zone when these ideas hit them, as were the great scientists who intuited amazing truths about reality. The Kabala uses a diagram of consciousness called The Tree of Life in which there is a dotted circle representing the Zone where one receives information in an extrasensory manner — “inspiration” as if breathing in information. This sphere is called Da’at or Da’ath. In fact the word Kabala means “to receive” and “the received”.

In an earlier post we postulated a theory of what we call Holosentience, which speculates that the Zone occurs when all parts of the brain and mind* are working together as a single unit, like a finely tuned orchestra. This contrasts in our theory of Holosentience with the everyday state of consciousness I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure or EOP, in which a part of the brain and mind, a sub-sentience, operates as if it is the whole sentience. This sub-sentience has been called the ego. I see it as the software layer of the brain, which is built up of proteins into neuron clusters mostly in the early years of life. Experiences drive this buildup and in this way unassimilated memories become unassimilated motivations. Under the regime of Acceleritis™ — information overload generated by the type of culture we have become — EOP is now our dominant coping style.

EOP keeps us out of the Zone. The way from EOP into the Zone starts with the Observer state, an interim state in which we detach from identification with the voices of ego in our head, our thoughts, while remaining aware of these voices or thoughts for what they are — ingrained robotic reflexes. The Observer state combined with practicing an activity we love leads to the Zone. Emotional distraction by the ego’s excessive desire to win, or the ego’s fear of failure, is the final barrier to the Zone — that is, when our practice and training has reached the point where the Zone is physically within reach of our skills.

In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s protagonist Harry Morgan ultimately concludes that “one man alone… ain’t got no chance.” This has never been truer than it is today with the accelerating information overload totally out of control as we head toward a precipice of seemingly impossible economic challenge, miniaturization and increasing availability of weapons of mass destruction, carcinogenic environmental conditions, and spiritual bankruptcy. The world more than ever needs for people to be able to work together as high performing teams. And so the headline of this post, Getting Your Team into the Zone — even more important than getting yourself into the Zone because one person alone in the Zone might not be able to make enough of a difference. We need critical mass.

So how do we do it? How do we evoke Zone performance in a whole team, of which no single person is ever in total control, even if he/she is technically “the boss”? You dear reader are probably the boss of your team while you and your team are a part of your boss’s team — a common situation in corporate life. How do you get your own team into the Zone, and then how does your team get the larger team of which it is a part into the Zone?

Obviously you don’t expect this to be a one-trick answer. We are all too sophisticated to believe it could be that simple, or we’d all be there already. It isn’t simple, it’s incredibly complicated. But one can extract simple principles that work, and enough of these simple principles put into practice will produce a high performing team.

Let’s start in this post with one of the most mission critical principles. It’s about negativity.

Negativity is counterproductive to team Zone performance because it spills time and energy. The Zone is a state of ultimate efficiency and so anything wasteful is guaranteed to block the Zone. Explain it to your team this way: negativity gets in the way of solving whatever it is that has caused the negativity. Take negativity as an alarm that tells us we need to define the problem clearly, generate creative solution ideas, make decisions on an action path, and take that action. Negativity is just stalling that whole process and wasting time — which is no way to create team high performance.

The thing about negativity is that it does not emanate from the whole brain and mind. Negativity comes from the sub-sentience. It is a well-worn reflex. When confronted with a threat, the holosentience reacts with an optimal response to that threat, if the person is in the Zone. If the person is in EOP, the sub-sentience reflex is fear that may be compounded with a sense of helplessness, doom, defeatism, self-loathing, anger, frustration and other overlays, triggered by a cascade of energy lighting up interlocking neuron clusters. The negativity of these feelings is typically communicated to those in the vicinity including animals even if only by body language and the pheromones in perspiration. These micro clues of negativity further reduce the likelihood of an effective real world response to whatever the challenge is, by encouraging foes and undermining the support of potential allies.

Teams can engage in frequent training sessions to talk about the value of becoming high performing members of high performing teams, and ways to get there. Bringing in outside speakers helps overcome the inertia and subconsciously gives “permission” for sudden change to be realistically possible. The word “training” may or may not be used; some people feel that once they are adults there is something insulting and/or embarrassing about the word. Maybe call them Zone sessions to keep the goal in mind and remove the connotations of “training”.

Team members are directed to deploy negativity detectors within their mind at all times. When a person detects the auto-negativity, he/she should be able to remain in the Observer state by not siding with the negativity, not making it one’s own, but rather seeing it as a bodily reaction, an old habit pattern, and something that can be risen above into a state closer to the Zone (the Observer state being the access path to the Zone).

Now, something must be done with that negative energy in order to transmute it into something else, otherwise it is more difficult to overcome the feeling in oneself. Remaining the Observer one can look at the negativity in a new way, gaining insight into oneself and others, and creating conditions conducive to new solution approaches. Why am I being negative? What haven’t I tried yet? What is the goal? What are the obstacles? What causes each obstacle? Analysis is the place to channel the negativity.

Anything can be described as a game. And people and animals love games. By making more things gamelike, the possibilities for making a high performing team out of a demoralized griping bunch of cynics become realistic. Consider it a game to make negativity off limits in one’s own mind. You can’t initially stop the negative impulses from arising but you can get better and faster at judoing those impulses into opportunities for analysis and creativity.

You might hear yourself groaning inwardly in a meeting in which so-and-so repeats his endless habit of blaming everyone else for something. Quickly gain control of your inner self and do not identify with your inward groan but attribute it to a robotic reflex of certain neuron clusters. Okay thanks, neuron cluster, you did your job, like an alarm clock, painting a certain event as a clue that something needs fixing — in this case it is something that you never took it on yourself to fix because let’s face it, your chances of changing so-and-so seem pretty slim, so like everyone else you’ve just lived with it. Maybe that has always been a cowardly reaction that you’ve shared with everyone else. So maybe today is the day to start to consider the right action instead of dodging it.

That doesn’t mean impulsively jumping in and trying the first thing that comes to mind, although sometimes that works. It might be better to use the energy to run some simulations in your mind of what you could say and how it might be received. As long as you know you have successfully rechanneled the negativity and you are on the case with some fresh ideas as to how to help so-and-so out of his blaming mode, you needn’t rush into action in that same meeting. Just keep processing the action ideas until the time feels right and you are yourself feeling centered in a moderate frame of mind and in the Observer state without negativity or ego attachment — then you can flow with the moment and put out a new thought that might help so-and-so break his old negativity habit of the blame game.

If the team knows that high performance is the goal, this helps everyone look at things in a new way: it is more gamelike, more intriguing, it isn’t the same old.

The first two principles to move your team toward the Zone therefore are to set the goal, and to reveal the trick of rechanneling negativity inside yourself. More principles of high performing team creation in posts to come.

Best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 . In the Theory of the Conscious Universe, the brain is the energy emanated by the Original mind, wound into matter, and our experience transcends dependence on the brain as we are a part of Original mind (and the whole of its experience of selfness). In modern day materialism, the mind is an energy field emanated by the brain. In ultra-behaviorism, the mind is an impotent epiphenomenon of the brain, making believe it is calling the shots but is really just along for the ride.

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