Tag Archives: Observer State

Obvious Miracles in Our Lives

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Volume 3, Issue 52

Sometimes the miracles in our lives are more obvious than at other times. The world is always miraculous, it’s only us that sometimes see the miracle and other times repress it from our awareness.

Babies, kittens, flowers, stars, the Moon, the ocean, mountains, trees, falling in love together — these are among the more obvious miracles.

We often do not notice how improbable certain events are that occur within our detected experience bubble. We are not trained in statistics enough to realize how long the odds are of this happening and then it actually happening, and we just go along with it, taking it all for granted. The feeling is that if it is happening it can’t be miraculous, it must be all mundane.

By tuning down the appreciation for experiencing all that is life, we are radiating very little gratitude, and may even radiate to the universe as an ingrate. The universe responds by turning the dial on the lesson machine so that it bumps us a bit more roughly to make its points, since we seem to be missing the polite subtle hints.

Its intent, since it is guiding a blind man's bluff version of itself back to its full Self, is always beneficent. We the Universe are aggregately much too smart to kick ourselves in the groin just for fun.

A relatively new physics darling is the multiverse theory, a new name for what Heinlein called the “universe sheath”. Picture a very large or infinite number of universes all lying very closely side by side like a fat stack of clean paper in a drawer.

Maybe we tune from one to another. Perhaps they are laid out in a heaven-hell continuum and we can tune to the next more heavenly universe and actually make the crossover.

Is that what happened to Ina and me that day we visited Pfeiffer Beach back in the 70s?

Pfeiffer Beach courtesy of Craig Colvin Photography
"Pfeiffer Beach" courtesy of Craig Colvin Photography

My lady friend and I go back to our favorite beach, a well-known beach in California. It is totally different: there are Arabian brown and white striped tents, red flags at their tops fluttering in the breeze, in a row along the sand near the water and at the entrance path onto the beach there is now a mostly-completed wooden Church.

We walk up a few steps, smelling the new wood, and a man greets us at the door and lets us look in at the unfinished interior. We are not yet allowed to come in he says, though he doesn’t say why.

We walk the beach marveling at how amazing it looks. It’s as fine a day as a day can be. We are feeling fit as we walk and our hearts are light.

We come back another day and there is no church, no tents, just the familiar beach. Residents insist there never was anything built in that spot, and indeed there was no sign of anything disturbing the old tangle of sand and roots where we had walked up the steps together.

Needless to say this blew our minds, having both experienced the same thing with no help from our friends, so to speak.

Observer state is ideal for not taking the familiar for granted, for counting the cards and for noticing improbabilities.

Wishing you much personal experiencing of the miracle you are in, and much personal experiencing of the miracle you yourself are.

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.

What Is Humor?

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Volume 3, Issue 50

Like life itself, and consciousness, love, oneness, even Flow state, and so many other things we take for granted just because of long familiarity, have you ever stopped to wonder what is this weird sound-and-breath spasm thing we do sometimes? Laughing, I mean. What is that?

Feelings are one of the best clues to meaning. The meaning of any moment is most easily extracted from our feelings at that moment and in retrospect. Moreso than logical analytics alone.

(Side Note: The mind/body/spirit is in Flow state when all the detector and effector functionality is optimized together, feelings and intuition and analytics and perceptions and actions are not abstracted from one another, and inside/outside subject and object are one flowing process. A Oneness Singularity.)

What are the feelings associated with this bizarre phenomenon we take for granted? Laughing, that is.

We are pleased when we laugh, it’s fun, and it is an expression of at least momentary happiness, even if we do it ruefully during a negative feeling context.

Sometimes laughter is joy expressing itself bubbly and uncontainable, as when a child takes off on his first flight on a sled.

Humor is the intentional or unintentional causation of laughter. Of course the standup learns that sometimes it is the intention to create laughter without the fact of it.

Once we discovered that we liked this involuntary spasm (as we like orgasm, another preferred spasm, whereas we dislike and fear most spasms we experience) we began to purposely try to evoke it as much as possible under whatever circumstances befall us.

Laughter and orgasm may be related in ways we don’t know yet.

My dry cleaner is a comedian. Everything he says is intended to make you laugh. At least it makes him laugh, which is definitely a healthy thing. Good spasms are healthy spasms.

In the case of humor, sometimes our laughter expresses relief. The butt of the joke is being ridiculed, and since we are not the one getting the ridicule, we are relieved. Yet ridiculousness, related to ridicule, appears to be at the center of all humor.

When I have fallen from Observer state, I often get back up by realizing that if I can’t see the humor in the situation, I have clearly lost perspective. “These are the jokes,” I remind myself.

Enjoy this moment. And now this one.

Be prepared to laugh.

If you’re already smiling, you’re already prepared.

Wishing you laugh-filled days and nights,

Bill

PS – Top copywriter and genius Ed Ney of Young & Rubicam fame has moved on to the next classroom. Read his speeches and yours will be even better than they’ve been. Like Erwin Ephron, Ed used short pithy memorable sentences packed with meaning and impact, condensed intelligence and insight. Much to unpack. Rhythmic to the mind. Ed had been a reader of this blog. Treasured like all of you. So long, Ed, see ya. Somewhere somewhen down the long and winding.

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That, coming in February.

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.

Answering Any Question

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Volume 3, Issue 47

To continue what we’ve been saying about the alone space you need each day, one of the things you can do, if you really feel like it, is to play a game where you practice Flowing.

Discrimination is a function that comes into play at a micro level of our moment-to-moment decision-making. The more time we apply to making the discrimination among inner impulses to actions, the more delayed our impulsive actions. Even taking on and expressing a feeling that has meekly inched out of the wings seeking approval, is an action. We can eschew owning a provisional feeling, and we can treat all feelings as provisional until inspected to make sure we still agree with the logic that led to that feeling. This is the Observer state.

Although discrimination helps prevent actions we might regret, it also impedes the Flow state. In Flow state, we let our training and practice operate, as if instinctively, without hesitation. Yet even in moments of Flow, one senses there is a choice to be made, and hesitates while staying in the Flow state — the hesitation may be fractional until instinct causes movement before the time loss exceeds the action quality gain.

Ideally one could spend long hours each day for a lifetime training oneself at precisely the games that one loves the most. Acceleritis temporarily dwarfs the human race (in a sense by giving us too many stimuli too fast, a side effect of giving us too much brainpower too fast). In this dwarfing, the culture falls short of optimizing the delivery of people who love X to the task of X, although Google could fix that. In the dystopia created by Acceleritis, we also find ourselves in probably one of the most challenging games the Universe has ever devised, so who’s complaining? Rise to the challenge, recognizing that alone space is needed each day.

One of the fun things you can do whenever you feel like it, in your alone space, is to let yourself do automatic writing without editing — for no one will ever see that page except you unless you decide otherwise. Automatic writing of whatever comes into your mind, as if taking dictation from someone else, is an amazing experience and a doorway into the Flow state. Once you get going with whatever your mind wants to say, you can also ask any question that you may have always or just recently wanted the answer for — the key most challenging questions of your life or facing your company, whatever. As if having a crystal ball, you let yourself actually put down on paper whatever is the first thing that pops into your head.

Don’t let yourself go into long internal debates – like saying to yourself, “There’s no way I can be coming up with the right answers so easily to these questions!” Just do it. It’s a game. The thing is not the answer but the Flowing without discrimination at all. Life may not have handed you a built-in way to get into Flow through practice, but everyone can use automatic writing to get into Flow.

Not that all automatic writing is the Flow state. It might be flowing easily and that’s good but is not in itself a sign of Flow state or even Observer state. That’s not the point. Don’t be rating yourself each second (“Am I in the Flow state now?”) because that is one of the biggest blocks imaginable to getting into the Flow state. Everything you do in your alone space is for your own enjoyment, not for any other goal. The side effects of realizing higher states of consciousness are something to gratefully enjoy as they happen, not to wistfully hope for. So have the fun now.

Wishing everyone a lot more fun in 2014. 

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That!, coming in February

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.

Inquire of your Feelings and Motivations

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Volume 3, Issue 45

Raoul’s face showed no change, while inside he suddenly seethed with impatient anger at his spouse, whom he saw as going off onto a long negative diatribe tape he had heard too many times before without ever saying a word to her about it.

Feelings are expressions of motivation — your own motivation. Thoughts have great value of course but are not necessarily brilliant readers of your own feelings. Thoughts must make extensive effort before truly understanding one’s own motivations. Isn’t that strange? Thoughts and feelings working together can make your motivations more clear to yourself than thoughts alone.

Combining these ideas points to the need to put some effort, and not thought effort alone, into discerning your own feelings and motivations. Else you would not understand yourself completely enough to be in Observer state.

But first, what is the evidence that our thinking is not automatically adept at reading our own feelings? Do we not quickly realize when we are in a bad mood, or good mood, and isn’t it almost always obvious what caused it? Can’t we articulate the explanation in our own mind?

At that level of understanding, this is true. In most cases we are quick and confident judges when we think about what we are feeling. We can categorize the feeling into positive vs. negative, and instantaneously we make a mental thought connection with either an image or an amorphous memory of events leading up to the feelings.

This program loop does not even recognize that it’s worth tying into one’s own motivations and goes on somewhat blind to the actual priorities that determine action even when it is not what you, in your thoughts, necessarily planned to do.

At the Observer level of understanding, one experiences the ability to discern the micro steps that are going on inside as one event leads to another. These events are of the four Jungian types of experience, i.e. thoughts, feelings, intuitions (hunches), and perceptions; or the memory of these four types of experience re-arising.

In Observer state, if you are focused inwardly, you can detect that first there are feelings, then there are guesses being made about those feelings, then there is closure on one guess, the guess usually being a pre-existing category with a name. If the feelings exceed a threshold of arousal there is then gloating over and seeking subconsciously to re-experience and lengthen “good” (upbeat) feelings, or to repress, get angry or afraid or melancholy about, or think objectively about in order to fix “bad” (negative) feelings. Below that level of arousal the mind typically moves on to more important and/or pressing matters.

From the perspective of the Observer state there is a skeptically-objective further questioning of the guess before the feeling of closure is allowed. There is realization that outcomes typically have more than one cause so any classification into a single box is reductionism, leaving out significant parts of the system at work, which is the very thing one is seeking to understand more.

In the Observer state too — if one has been in that state long enough for significant processing to have occurred during these times — one is aware that behind the feelings lay the motivations, which the feelings are merely the expressions of.

Acceleritis has made the Observer state an atypical experience because of the drive toward closure in the avalanche of data falling upon the newly-evolved brain, which has only been in its present configuration for the most recent 20% of the time since we came down from trees, and which only taught itself written language in the most recent 0.6% of the time since we de-arborealized. The printing press was invented in the most recent 0.04% of that time, television in the last 0.0065%, Internet in the last 0.0018%, and mobile/social as we know it now in the last 0.0002%. Notice that the jarring shocks are occurring more frequently, accelerating — hence “Acceleritis”.

In Acceleritis mode we are happy to throw the feelings into a simple bucket, with a simple cause, and move on. We do not grasp the importance of more deeply understanding our own feelings and motivations. This is one of the unfortunate side effects of Acceleritis. We do not grasp the importance of a lot of things.

The key part of the feelings system is the moment at which you name it as good, bad, or neutral. I find that “Bad” tends to get oversubscribed. The very feeling of life in the Acceleritis field is background radiation negative. When in doubt, go negative, is the subconscious mental rule at that logic gate.

Avoid hasty closure is the takeaway. More about that in this excerpt from my book, Mind Magic.

Put off deciding that you are in a bad mood. In my case this universal problem manifests most often as feeling like I am not as happy as I should be. I find that just seeing how ridiculous this is, is enough to make me LOL which invariably ups my mood.

The rest of the sensorium seems to also take a clue from the frontalis and zygomaticus muscles of the face. In a devilish feedback loop, if you are always smiling your body will always assume you must be happy. The song “Smile” is actual psychotechnology. A frown on your face automatically triggers a descending mood spiral.

Less than a second after seething with impatient anger at his spouse, Raoul was observing that seething and trying to see what it was: could he feel it in his body somewhere? The feeling ebbed away into nothingness to be replaced by a faint everyday joy in the moment, mildly curious about its look, feel, and meaning, as his mind let go the memory of the momentary inner process and felt soft emotional receptivity focused on his beloved.

Happy New Year 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.