Tag Archives: Observer State

Probability of Winning Is Proportional to Acceptance of Losing

Volume 2, Issue 16

Sharing techniques to attain and maintain Observer and Flow (Zone) states, in earlier posts we described the Yerkes Dodson Law and explained why we perform best when our motivational arousal is moderate rather than extreme, and why ancient Greek and Indian philosophies esteemed nonattachment which we redefined as “losability” the mental/emotional acceptance of outcomes divergent from targeted or desired outcomes.

We also linked motivation to values and therefore recommended a rethink of what you want out of life so as to reset yourself for a fuller life with more capability for creative effectiveness through these two higher states of consciousness, Observer and Flow.

To the degree that you are afraid of losing a match, the more likely you are to lose it; that is the corollary of the title for this week’s post. You get out of this fear by understanding it, the same way you get out of any fear. You might realize in this process before the big game or other big moment that your fear stems from other people’s opinions or judgment of you, and you might decide that it is ignoble for you to be driven by such things. You might then find yourself able to discard such a base motivation and suddenly experience a lasting fearlessness that allows you to win the big game by simply playing it as a game, enjoying the process without attachment to the outcome — the very conditions that cause Flow. This applies to every challenge you face every day, even those you don’t normally think of as challenges.

Perhaps all of us at some point in our lives have gone through the following thought process, which leads one to become motivated by something larger than oneself. This might happen when one has just been called up to be sent to a war zone. One thinks of the option of conscientious objection, running away to Canada (if one is an American), and realizes that some gut feeling inside holds you back. One might then face the possibility of dying on the battlefield. Then comes the thought, well it might be OK if I die, so long as my family is taken care of, and I have prepared for that so they will be. It might be OK if I die so long as America lives and goes on to rekindle its idealism and help lead the world to decency, fairness and justice.

At that stage probably only a few of us — perhaps those who are philosophers — think further down this same track. Well, dying might be OK so long as Earth humanity survives and learns from its mistakes and goes on to a better way of being. And then: well, even if Earth is destroyed, that might be OK if the universe goes on and evolves highly idealistic and kind races. Or even: well, dying might be OK so long as there is a benevolent God and such a God is happy with all outcomes.

There is inherently no operational difference between the first stage of latching one’s motivations to something larger than oneself — e.g. one’s family — and the later stages all the way up to God. In all cases one has already accepted the ultimate losability. I may die, but I’ve set my family up well, they all know I love them, they will grieve and miss me but their lives can be happy with the strength I have imbued in them by example and by loving communication. I can die knowing that my family will be OK — my country will be stronger for what I did while alive — the human race was enhanced by my accomplishments — the Universe and God will certainly be all right with me dead — hopefully I will have added some value along the way, and the universe learned some lessons from my mistakes.

When Bucky Fuller, despondent over a lost love affair, decided to commit suicide he reached the highest realization of his life up until that point: he was now free and could go on living. By agreeing with himself to give up life, he discovered that was harder than giving up the lost woman, and the attitude shift required to decide on suicide had freed him from the cause of suicide. From that point on he had true perspective on what is large and what is small. Perspective is what allows a sense of humor even in the most menacing situations — grace under fire — true courage, the virtue upon which all others are based according to Winston Churchill.

These are the utilitarian values of an attitude of losability.

Best to all,

Bill

The Role of Attention in the Zone

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Volume 2, Issue 15

Our nonprofit organization,The Human Effectiveness Institute, may be unique among nonprofit foundations in providing people with heuristics specifically designed to increase individual experience of the Observer and Flow (Zone) states of consciousness. Books that contain ancient scriptural texts from India, and other psychotechnologies derived from these teachings or rediscovered experientially, also offer such advice, since the samadhi, satori and zazen states are neurological levels within Flow.

In recent posts we have looked at Flow from many different points of view, including the relation to Flow of values, motivations, attachments, matching of skills and challenges, doing something for its own sake not for outcomes, and striving for Flow in the work one does best. In this post we will consider how attention is central to both Observer and Flow states.

ADD and ADHD are two modern symptomologies of Acceleritis, which undoubtedly also existed in the past but were never so prevalent as to warrant being named and studied. With the world culture veering wildly as information overload overwhelms our cortical abilities, our attention tends to be diffuse, unfocused, and constantly hopping from one distraction to another — conditions inimical to Flow.

A terrific book given to me recently by my great new friend and partner in Playshops, Richard Zackon, The Taboo of Subjectivity, by Alan Wallace — which recounts with such authenticity one feels as if Wallace is the reincarnation of William James — describes how James analyzes the most advanced “mystical” contemplative state he himself achieved as being one of alert vivid attention. Furthermore, the state was free of subjective constructs, conceptual thinking, and the singlepointed focus was on the nature of the experience of consciousness itself, thus utterly transcending the usual experience of mindand its incessant chatter. James thus demystified this state by explaining its differentness in purely scientific terms.

So long as one is not master of one’s own attention, none of the other suggestions we have provided or can provide will bear fruit in the way of Flow state. This is why so many of the Eastern traditions start with, and continuously emphasize, concentration training. Such training is no longer optional in the racing world of information overflow in which we now live, it is something we all need almost as much as we need love.

We cannot cover the subject of concentration training fully in this one post. A few key secrets of achieving concentration in current real world conditions will have to suffice for a start:

Focus 100% on one thing at a time.
Be present in the moment.
Do not rush — go no faster than you can with a rational and appropriate degree of perfectionism for the challenge you are facing.

In order to focus on one thing at a time you need:

To ruthlessly block off distractions.
As distracting but important ideas arise, jot them down on a side notepad and put them totally out of your mind until later. At the end of each day, integrate the list of waiting thoughts in priority order in a single list (or a personal list and a core business list). This will enable you to turn away from distracting thoughts without your mind tugging at your sleeve, fearing that important time limits are being exceeded on one or more of these items. Indeed, get done the side-notes in their own needed timeframes.

More on attention in future posts. This one dimension is one of the most important overlooked matters in world culture circa 2012.

Best to all,

Bill

PS – Gian Fulgoni was kind to tweet our last post – Click here.

Being Amused by the Accelereality Comedy of Errors

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Volume 2, Issue 12

Have you experienced being in a meeting where someone shoots down your idea dismissively and then presents a longwindedly crude expression of the same idea, without seeing that it is the same idea?

Have you pitched something to a company that is so clearly what they need, and then have them take a pass based on the strength of frozen ritual processes that no one believes can ever be changed?

Impossibility thinking, dream state management, “Earth must be God’s sitcom channel”, and other amusingly cynical thoughts pass through my head as I encounter these events daily. Still, I remain ever hopeful that in time the race will learn to use its prefrontal cortex, and see how the psychotechnology techniques such as those of the Human Effectiveness Institute do push back against the tide of information overload, i.e. Acceleritis, which causes the pandemic EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure) exhibited in these funny behaviors.

It’s healthy and pragmatically useful to take these things as amusing rather than become frustrated by them since that negative emotion brings us down to the EOP level. If Observer state and Flow state are the objective and the answer, then the sense of humor is a major ally in the game. Humor and perspective are closely related, which is why comedians are actually philosopher/poets who express profound truths in an artistic and therefore pleasantly diverting form that cleanses the emotions of negativity or sublimates the negativity to a less harmful species of it.

The prefrontal cortex is a radical evolution. Once it was empowered by seeable (written) language starting about 6000 years ago — a mere eyeblink in human history — this triggered an acceleration process that manifests as a fall from grace, a submersion in self-dwarfing pettyism, a loss of the sense of connectedness to divinity and our numinous birthright. Acceleritis as we call it. Written 2190-2070 BC, much earlier in the accelerating information overload period we are still living in, the Lamentations of Ipou-our recall the spiritual culture that Egypt had already lost by that time.

Prior to the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the Nag Hammadi library was found in Upper Egypt in 1945. Whereas the Dead Sea Scrolls appear to be early drafts of the Old Testament, the Nag Hammadi scrolls contain what appear to be early drafts of the New Testament. One muses that the wars perennially fought over the Holy Land might have something to do with the findings of these materials — which cast such revealing light on our early Western spiritual beginnings. Not exactly a grail, the scrolls near Nag Hammadi were found in a large jar. The aspect I find particularly interesting about them is the many writers who groped to explain why, if there is God, the world has gone so wrong. These explanations are all variations on a theme of error-ridden/evil early offspring of the original Spirit creator, bad demiurge gods/archons aka the Devil. The early Christian church edited out these heresies (while retaining Satan) probably wisely as they are so negative and paranoia inducing. Also, the far simpler and perhaps more logical explanation is information overload and the time it takes for information-processing beings to learn to manage their own internal resources after such a powerful mutation (evolution of the prefrontal cortex) and its cascading effects.

The most important work each of us does is the work we do on ourselves, which the Human Effectiveness Institute calls psychotechnology — the broader field containing Buddhism, psychoanalysis, Zen, and a host of other specific methodologies springing up in different regions of the world. Psychotechnology is what propels us out of the Acceleritis-driven EOP state. Many of us, with the coming of maturity, reach a permanent equilibrium in the Observer state that allows us to laugh at ourselves and to appreciate the humor in the challenging, maddening conditions of our historical period. Jews call this being a mensch. This is definitely a hopeful sign, of which many abound all around us. Perhaps in a millennium or two, we will emerge from Acceleritis on a global basis — or maybe we are even closer. What can we do to (at least begin to) make it happen in our own time?

Best to all,

Bill

Dial Back on Arousal to Reach Highest Performance

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Volume 2, Issue 3

Science verifies the Vedas, Tantra, Qabala, and other ancient ideas

Hope you’re enjoying the new “2-minute read” format.

Thousands of years ago, individuals who trained themselves to be introspective all learned the same wisdom about the mind, in Greece and Egypt as in India and elsewhere. I’ve also rediscovered those bits of wisdom in a lifelong self-training to be an objective introspective observer — so as to really learn things and not just prop up my own ego, as we are all mostly forced to do by the information overload pressure that all too often sinks us into EOP.

The ancient wisdom even more applicable in today’s accelerating culture says that if we care too much we ruin it. Whatever “it” is. The word “attachment” is the meme of this wisdom, the gene from which a Pandora’s Box of linked ideas emerge.

Some became Buddhists, but most of the kids in my college class went on with their lives with their attachment level dialed way up, and this caused them painful life lessons from which they have grown up and consequently dialed down their attachment levels.

Although we find it expedient to ignore ancient wisdom, believing our science to be light-years ahead, science is only now coming to the same conclusions as the ancients but by humorously roundabout trips. If only psychology had listened to William James and seen introspection as a valuable tool of science. Science today would be accelerating into Observer and Flow state discoveries, leapfrogging over my mere intuitions and practical experience.

Consider the following “now-scientific” evidence. The widely-accepted Yerkes-Dodson law in psychology says that the optimal level of arousal for highest performance is moderate — a word Aristotle would also have chosen. he inverted U-shapes relationship between arousal and performance, known as the Yerkes-Dodson law, interacts with the complexity of the task.

Note that arousal should be set even lower for more difficult tasks. Not rookie over-eagerness, but a fatalism that is above caring about success or failure — kind of a playful fun resignation to whatever outcome the universe chooses, so long as you like your play.

Arousal in this context means the same thing as the mental causes of physical and brainstem arousal — we call these motivations. If we are attached, meaning too highly motivated such that not succeeding would be anguishing — then we are not going to give our highest Flow state (Zone) performance.

Dial back the arousal. In future posts we will address the next question: how does one actually do that?

Best to all,

Bill