Tag Archives: Observer State

Optimizing the value of feelings in decision making

What are feelings? How are feelings optimized?

Besides the input from the five physical senses, human consciousness receives feelings. Upcoming posts will offer experiments focused on this input stream, which you can conduct yourself. These experiments will establish whether you can achieve measurable improvements in your own effectiveness stemming from better channeling or processing of feelings-type information.

To prepare for the experiments, let’s contemplate: what are feelings?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.

Feelings are urges that arise to sensibility within us, within our minds and within our bodies. Feelings are experiences, states of consciousness resulting from motivations, sentiments, preferences or desires. These terms all really mean the same thing: motivations, what we value, what we want, what we are trying to get, what we want to avoid.

Feelings are the way we respond internally to external and internal phenomena, based on what we are trying to get and avoid, and how current events can help or threaten our desired outcomes.

Therefore feelings generally come in two valences, positive or negative. The feelings are positive if current events appear to favor our targeted outcomes, and they are negative if events seem to be heading away from what we want to have happen.

Positive feelings are valued universally in themselves. We don’t need to argue in favor of them, we all like them, and would like to have them all the time.

Negative feelings not only make us feel bad (by definition), they lower our immune system thus making us more prone to disease, and they distract our cognitive concentration thereby reducing our effectiveness. These bad feelings can also serve a positive function as an alarm system to get our attention to the problem fast. Ironically, if the bad feelings continue while one is grappling with the problem on a rational level, it will take longer to solve the problem.

When a problem arises and is sensed partially by the bad feelings within oneself, alerting us to focus on the challenge, it’s easy to say, “Turn off the alarm and get on with solving the problem.” However, it is not so easy because of attachment and Acceleritis.

Acceleritis, the unending acceleration of information entering the human brain each day, simply overloads the average human being’s capacity to do effective mental work of any kind. One kind of mental work we are supposed to get better at as we truly mature and “grow up” and become a “mensch” is to be able to sanely and in a balanced way take our feelings into account in our actions, without being stampeded or reduced to hand-wringing by those feelings. Acceleritis therefore also escalates the power of other mental subsystems that push in the direction of closure, black-and-white thinking, snap decisions, self-consistency and self-imitation — anything to simplify. Complexity is tacitly perceived as the main threat and pain causer. Acceleritis therefore lays many of us low with attachment — if Acceleritis were not present, we would actually have the mental and emotional maturity to cope with the situation without attachment.

What then is attachment?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.

Attachment is the excessive dependency on something. It is actually love carried too far. You love something so much (a wonderful thing) you cannot do without it, and so you fall prey to fear of losing it, and this distracts the mind so that Observer state and Flow state are impossible. Your mind tends instead — in the Acceleritis-induced state of Emergency Operating Procedure (EOP) — to go around in circles wallowing in the fear of loss or the sense of loss, or the anger and bitterness related to the loss or threatened loss, or the hopeless defeated depression of having lost it with no hope of regaining it. No useful mental work is achieved, no problem solving, no creative new leaps rising to meet the challenge sideways, as would occur in the higher states of effectiveness, namely, the Observer and Flow states.

As discussed in earlier posts, these effectiveness states are posited to be real physical states in the brain, differentiated from one another in measurable ways. Our Theory of Holosentience is based on the hypothesis that the primary dimension determining the state of the brain and consciousness is the degree of harmony among functional areas of the brain (inhabiting our entire sentience at once) — wherein thoughts, feelings, motivations, and the other aspects of self achieve a synchronous integrity in both the experientially measurable consciousness domain as well as the scientifically measurable biometric material domain.

This brings us back to feelings. Feelings have always been less studied and talked about than thoughts. Descartes did not say “I feel, therefore I exist.”

The word feeling originally may have related (Wikipedia says) to the sense of touch, and then its meaning expanded to include the ineffable internal sense that brings us more bits (information) than the five physical senses in terms of the way it affects our actions.

What evidence is there that we are generally more driven by our feelings than by our thoughts? Freud established that thoughts are more likely to be rationalized in support of feelings, rather than people being able to use their thoughts to control their feelings. And yet, how valuable it is to be able to do just that — to have the mental self-discipline to focus one’s thoughts effectively even when one’s feelings are in an uproar.

In a nutshell, feelings are a manifestation of our motivations colliding with the external world. What feeling would we have if we had no motivations?

Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.

You can actually discover this for yourself, by meditating. While there are many specific methodologies for meditation, all of them have this mind/gut mirror effect of showing you what your own motivations really are, where they have gotten you, and why you have each experience you ever have. You can also achieve such objectivity that you can, as it were, turn off certain motivations for the moment and see what that feels like — what visions of future possibilities arise now that X motivation is gone, how are you breathing, how do you feel?

This gaining of perspective through meditation makes you feel good. In other words, it not only helps you inspect deeply your own feelings and their consequences in the world, it also generates a feeling, and a very good one.

What is that very, very sweet feeling? Is it happiness? Is it ecstasy? Yes, it’s all those things and more. Then what is it?

It’s love. A word that provokes instant uneasiness all round. It’s a word that makes us all feel silly. The guy has lost it. You don’t talk about such things. Verboten. Just for family talk, not public talk. What an interesting word to have such an effect.

The F-bomb has become popular in meetings with both males and females, at least in certain businesses I have moved through in the last decade. It is more acceptable than the word “love” in such venues.

Beyond getting the author in hot water, what is love?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
$Pink sheer heart shape, computer generated fractal abstract background$ It is the master feeling, the one all the others come from. Love is white light whereas each feeling is a color.

Love is the residue that is left when motivations are tuned down into conscious perspective, in light of an open-minded empirical philosophy of demanding proof for everything, dropping every bit of information one has heard onto a trial workboard in the consciousness storage bin, and taking it offline in terms of decision making. This is the perspective of yoga. Zen. Meditation. Contemplation. Focused singlepointed attention. A way of life for millions of people today and throughout human history. These multi-strands of movements see themselves as part of a whole, although to those outside they seem like a bunch of cults that are all different. They are all the same in achieving perspective, distance from motivations that the bodymind otherwise assumes are immutable, non-negotiable. These methods are among those crystallized into simple steps in our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness.

Why does love remain when one has achieved objective distance from one’s motivations? What evidence do we have for that assertion, and what explanation do we have for it?

As an individual my only evidence for any assertion here are my own experiences. Every time through meditation I clear away the built-in locked-in powerful sway of my own motivations, I discover that I am content, every tiny aspect of what I am experiencing is enjoyable and interesting, I simply love it, all of it, I love myself, and everyone. Others have reported similar experiences, enough so that I know I am not an isolated case. In the next post we will offer a meditative experiment whereby this may also happen to you.

Why should it be so? Why should we feel love when we are not being driven this way and that by irresistible motivations?

In my cosmological Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU) we are all dubs of the master consciousness, like MP3 copies of a master recording of a song, each of us a microcosm of the whole universal consciousness. When we rise above the petty motivations that seem so all-important to us in our daily lives down here on this one planet, we partake of the carrier wave motivation we share with the master consciousness, the one that is always there under all the other motivations, from which they draw their power. Love that is omnidirectional is the wellspring, the source from which we splinter off love of money, love of power, love of sex, love of the idea of getting that big job, and so on. All other motivations are modulations of love. So when the splinter motivations are quieted, the background radiation that differentiates itself into these “local” motivations becomes visible. This is how I explain it to myself, that I have this omnidirectional love experience whenever I am centered and immune to the compulsions to protect and seize what I feel I must have.

Acceleritis makes it very difficult for me to communicate this so that it is widely credible, because Acceleritis works against the stopping of the momentum of the mini-mind —so it seems ridiculous to assert that we already have an abundance of love without having to get anything we don’t already have. And yet, if you allow the possibility of a universal consciousness of which we are all a part, what motivation would it have to be doing this universe if it did not love the doing of a universe as a game in itself, the master game, the master art form, the ultimate form of self-discovery.

Acceleritis makes it much easier to deal with information overload by focusing on differences and categorization into buckets mostly on a single continuum from good to bad. This goes on constantly below our conscious awareness. Making automated decisions that are often the wrong ones. This leads to all sorts of feelings, many of them bad. Clouding over the master feeling that exists already, unbrokenly from beginning to end. It is there underneath all this debris. It comes out when we clear off the rubble.

Now that we’ve explored “feelings”, the next post will describe an experiment you can carry out yourself on the optimization of feelings.

Best to all

Bill

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PS – Humorously, Wikipedia says that feelings are the conscious subjective experience of emotion. This is funny because psychology defines emotion as the aspect of feeling that can be measured in the body, such as glandular secretions, muscle tensions, breathing rate, brainwaves, perspiration, etc., and you could just as easily say that feelings cause emotions as you could say emotions cause feelings. The leftover behaviorist psychology way of looking at it would be to make emotions more important — in fact 100% important, with feelings relegated to the trash bin of mind as epiphenomenon, a sound track that actually has no control of what the body is doing.

Such behaviorist Pavlovian thinking is now almost a century out of date, yet remnants of that thinking still creep into the generally excellent Wikipedia (which needs our donations incidentally to stay alive, and someone should tip them off to using advertising to support themselves, doing it in a PBS-like manner to the side all the way down from top to bottom, with true sponsorship tonality). Behaviorist ideas permeated so much of our thinking as a culture when they held reign that growing up we each got a dose of such ideas in the background conversations of adults we overheard. This is where we got the idea that we can just let the mind and body do their thing the way we always do and the way other people do, without any stopping to check out what the hell these operational action decisions are being based on.

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If You’re Not Enjoying Your Self, Something’s Wrong

Creating a Mood of Mental Optimization in Your Organization, with the Power of Respect

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The charter of The Human Effectiveness Institute defines our mission as improving decision making. As you delve into our material you discover that it is clarity we aim to engender as the means to improved decisions. A clarity that is lacking due to Acceleritis and EOP .

Distraction is the agency through which Acceleritis diminishes our clarity. The control of distraction both externally and especially internally is the focus of many of our methods. But even when one is paying singlepointed attention/concentration to one thing, the Zone may be elusive.

The Zone block in that case could be motivational. If we are attached to the outcome, feel overmatched, or bored — if these types of feelings are present, they too are distractions, even if we are not consciously aware of them until someone or something brings them to our attention. Our methods are designed to help you notice these subliminal feelings in yourself sooner rather than later, with no need for something external to jog you to realize the presence of such feelings.

Mental optimization is the underlying idea behind Psychotechnology, which is our rubric for any methods that help you work better in the world through clearer decisions. Methods that move you from EOP to Observer state to the Zone.

Mental optimization is a mood — a modality of consciousness that shapes the choices consciousness makes, shapes its information processing priorities, shapes everything that consciousness does. The way large masses with their gravity shape spacetime.

Mood is a supervening variable. It is where consciousness starts out each moment before any thoughts or feelings, memories or sensory percepts, or hunches/intuitions, arise. This is why mood is the shaping governor of which specific thoughts/feelings/percepts/intuitions arise and get your attention.

If you run the show, you can create a mood of mental optimization in your organization. The list of benefits is endless. Everyone will be in a mood of enjoying the game of making everything better, each second, the way a hero/heroine does, without internal pettiness to ruin the perfect pleasure.

Organizations run enormously better this way.

It is like expanding what you do in optimizing a marketing plan (demand), and optimizing the supply chain, and optimizing the balance sheet — applied even more broadly to optimizing the entire operation.

It is also the single best thing you can do to mentor and make good on the promise of nurturing and developing your team members, bringing out the best in each one of them. Showing them the mood, getting them into the ultimate game, where they feel its gamelike fun through and through — this is the basis for which they will continually choose this mood until they wake up every day with it fully operational in their consciousness.

How do you do this? How do you get them into the mood?

It starts with you being in the mental optimization mood. Telling them it’s your new modality. Offering to share it with them. They will ask, “Okay, so what do I do first?”

You’ll tell them the first rule is to assume, as an operating principle regardless of right and wrong, that negativity inside is useless and obstructive to optimization.

You’ll have to give examples and practice this. The best examples will be closest to home. Describe how you did it yourself — something happened recently to the organization and your first feeling was anger at certain people or entities — then you quickly set that aside as not optimal and began your search for problem definitions, opportunities hidden or obvious, and solution oriented win-win action plans, including provision for major refinement based on feedback along the way. Give a few examples of how you turned a challenge into a win for the organization by not wasting time with negativity nor letting it interfere with your ability to conjure a win-win solution.

Obviously you can’t come up with perfect win-win ideas while you want someone to lose because you are mad at them.

You’re even less effective at hurting them when you are sucked into negativity. Not that we espouse hurting anybody as a reasonable goal for an organization. Just pointing out how useless and counterproductive negativity really is.

But, dear reader, I hear you thinking, “Sure, Bill, you already told us about negativity in the last post. What else is there?”

There is respect. Respect is the second principle worth sharing here. Everyone wants it. The thing that usually causes people to quit ultimately comes down to respect. Either they didn’t feel it enough, or the position somehow compromised their internal self-respect, or usually both hand in hand.

Of course most people are in EOP almost all the time, so although their true self wanted respect, the way this manifested was that their ego was wounded and/or they were attached to having their egos flattered. This was coming not from their self that was born, but rather from the software layer functionally called the ego and structurally consisting of neurons built in the brain since birth, which exhibit the robotical behavior that highjacks the mind — this is EOP.

These people could have been kept in the organization by providing them true respect in the right ways and not necessarily by fanning the flames of their ego. What is the right way to show respect? There are many, including:

Not interrupting.
Providing just the right degree of autonomy i.e. not micro managing.
Not utilizing lateral second guessing as a quality control process.
Offering suggestions in the right way i.e. aimed at optimization goals held in common by those in the conversation, and without putting down anyone else’s ideas.

Not an exhaustive list. Let’s delve more deeply into each of these just for clarity.

You should run the meetings you are in either openly or subtly. If it’s someone else’s meeting, be subtle but make sure people are always allowed to finish their thoughts (method 1). Exceptions would be the rare but obvious cases where someone is talking too much and slowing things down. In those cases be careful to use respect and ensure respect from the group to the person who is being longwinded, while keeping things moving. Often the way to do this is to offer an offline meeting with that person at a later time. At that meeting you would employ method 4 above — showing respect in the way that you offer corrective constructive feedback. Your employee will appreciate the feedback if you do it in the right way — the optimization focus with respect — not a put-down.

The optimization mood gives you permission — in fact mandates you — to tell employees the hard truth of what they are doing wrong — but with respect so they can actually appreciate it.

Flashback war story. Hal Miller, my first boss in the media business, was a great mentor and implementer of all these principles. In his training program with two other people at the time we developed full marketing communications plans for a fictitious brand. He had each of us present to him alone in conference room with him pretending to be George Washington Hill, CEO of American Tobacco Company in the 30s and early 40s. Hal’s feet were up on the conference table and there were holes in his socks. He smoked a big cigar and interrupted annoyingly five times on every flipchart.

All of 21 at the time, I was polite at first and gradually became snarky in shooting down his objections one by one by my superior understanding of the technical research underpinning my case.

Later in the hall he came up to me and said “You know you really knew your stuff, and were brave in defending your recommendations,” and at this point he pinched my cheek and looked into my eyes, “but you didn’t make us love you.” Thus he showed respect for my work while giving me feedback that I was then able to appreciate.

I won’t explain micro managing (method 2) since we all know what it is — giving a person less autonomy than is customary across all industries based on that person’s experience, title, and/or responsibilities.

Method 3 above relates to a subtler form of micro managing, where a boss has one person within the organization systematically second-guessed by peer review, as a matter of course.

All four of these methods are forms of restoring respect that has diminished within an organization as a result of sub-optimal practices slowing things down and leading to sub-optimal decisions as well as to losing employees.

So far in these posts we have covered the first three principles of creating a culture of optimization within your organization:

State the goal of optimizing everything and everyone. Explain it, give personal examples, stay the course over time.
Explain and follow the Negativity Rule. When broken follow the Respect Rule and bring everyone back to optimizing.
Explain and follow the Respect Rule. When broken follow the Respect Rule in bringing it back for everyone, understanding that it is all for optimization.

The optimization mood feels better, and it’s also more fun.

Click here for a relevant sample from our book FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS.

Best to all,

Bill

Continuing Praise for David Brooks at ARF, and Holosentience

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I’ve long been bemused by the fact that some people really love my book FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS, while others seem to stare at it uncomprehendingly, not knowing what category to put it in.

I myself have struggled to put the book in a category since there were no other books in that category. Or, at least, not since the Vedanta Sutra around 200 BC, and not until David Brooks’ THE SOCIAL ANIMAL, which I am now reading. I was drawn in by the uncanny similarities I discerned between our books during the most valuable Keynote I’ve ever heard at a conference — David’s Keynote at the recent Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Audience Measurement Symposium (AMS) 6.0, the world’s largest annual audience measurement conference.

Now there are two modern books in the category. The category is about looking inside to learn the right adjustments to become a truer you — the you that was born, sans a lifetime of fear-driven conditioning.

David draws his sources from the latest psychology research especially the brain frontier and its integration with classical psychological pattern observations. When I did my first brain experiments within the advertising field and U.S. military in the early 80s, I saw that the mapping of inner/outer experiences to parts of the brain in specific states was going to explode soon. And it has.

Back in the day I had the honor of working with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, former Harvard Psychobiology professors who had been at Harvard with Leary and Alpert. Richie has gone on to lead a large portion of the cutting edge brain research and is highly respected by every brain scientist I’ve met. Dan is best known for his best-selling EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE series.

Why don’t I put Dan’s books in the category of looking inside to learn the right adjustments to become a truer you? It’s because I have a larger division in my mind between books that show theory (“descriptive”) versus books that are specifically meant to be used as a manual of techniques (“prescriptive”). I made my manual fun by a sort of neopoetic style and parsing that I find also singles out ideas. David made his book fun by making it a love story. But I feel David’s motivations are similar to mine — a chance to improve everyone’s lives. All they need is equipoise — the ability to objectively look inside and make little acts of will in daring to follow one’s dreams with love and humility.

The two books agree in that. David’s is more descriptive, mine more prescriptive — and still somewhat unique in its emphasis on practical application of very specific techniques that have been proven to work by my own experience, and by a few thousand readers who wrote in to attest to positive results from reading my book.

David cites the actual experiments that are the basis for the way he makes his characters act. Although there is some experimental and fact-based grounding to my book, it exists within a seamless synthesis of brain research with psychoanalysis, 6000 years of inner observation findings and prescriptions summarized in pithy “sutras”, and all the other books I read in the 70s — but mostly from observing my own inner experience for my entire life.

As early as I can remember, I was fascinated more with what went on in my mind and soul than what went on outside. Long before I knew the words, I was often in a state of contemplation, concentration, or meditating. Ideas sprang into my mind that I found myself writing. I was keeping track of my own observations because from what I heard adults saying, it was apparent they would not know what I was talking about.

In my teens I found psychology, esoteric psychology/philosophy, and in my 20s, yoga. I started by trying to put together for myself a science by which I could intelligently predict my own behavior and understand its dynamics, causes and effects.

Soon after college, my career in media research — because it involved computers (in the 60s) — gave me the ability to see the mind through the lens of what computers do. Media research further allowed me to ground my ideas in the stable patterns and slow changes in population behaviors, brain function, attitude shift, cognitive science, and behavioral econometrics, and introduced me to the idea of optimization, which I instantly decided to apply internally.

Out of all of these fuzzy sources comes the theory of Holosentience. It’s amusing that after I thought I had coined this term, I Googled it and found a reference to the light-based doctor in the Star Trek megaseries. He called himself a holosentience, I recall that now. Well, I’m not going to change the name of the theory.

Here is the essence of my theory of Holosentience:

We have a true self that is stitched into the fabric of the Universe. Whatever the Universe is, that’s the same as what the true self is. Our true self is who we are when we were born. It is the root and substrate of our existence, our being, who we are, our true identity, our essence — it is the most real thing about us in the sense of quantum physics reality. We experience it as an observer — it is an observer. It is consciousness, which we define as “that which experiences”.
From pre-birth we begin to program our brain. Every conscious experience creates proteins in the brain — nerve tissue encoded with meanings derived from those experiences. Association areas take form, clusters of related experiences. Programs are written — true software — that inhabit the brain and begin to share control of motor functions with the true self. You do things you seem to not be able to stop yourself from doing. The classical name for this phenomenon is Ego. It is trying to protect you, trying to be helpful like Bill Gates’ Paperclip-being, is still doing things you now have long since forgotten you told it to do, and is in all ways doing what a robot does, acting on its programming. I call this part the software layer or Robot.
Some of this programming needs to be removed, and you have to use what David calls equipoise — objective introspection and small acts of will — to gradually remove it. It does not leave easily. A lot of my book is about how to track down those behaviors and expose them to yourself for what they are. Because there are different centers in this software stemming back to different traumas and extraordinary experiences, in my book I use the term “Senators” to point out that we actually have different selves — although these are not our true self but rather copies of other people who made impressions on our software. David again echoes the idea of not one but many different selves, though he does not point out that they are all within a Robot layer apart from the true self.

There are three broad states of the foregoing Theory of Holosentience, which are not covered in THE SOCIAL ANIMAL:

Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) — where we are now due to Acceleritis. Acceleritis is not new to today’s obvious-frenetic culture, it actually started 6000 years ago with seeable language. The individual is not processing out the counterproductive programs — that whole part of life is put on hold. There is little if any equipoise. People are not open to objectively considering their own flaws, they are too scared to admit they have any flaws. There is low effectiveness to decision making, action is mistimed, there is little grace and even less inspiration. The world as we see it aggregately — wars, Havenotism, selfish ignoble behavior all around. Creativity is being channeled negatively. In the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and a deteriorating environment and what appear to be permanent systemic challenges emerging in the economic system, it is quite possibly critical to the human race to get out of EOP asap. I feel that David and I are hoping to make a difference there.
Observer State. There is a detachment of the true self from the software or Robot layer such that there is an arc gap, where the true self is able to objectively see what the software layer is doing. David calls this equipoise. The last great psychologist to urge us to introspect was William James. He was on the right track. Much of the inner work done in the East and in esoteric Western enclaves relates to simple (hah!) deconditioning of the counterproductive programs in the software layer. Decision making in the Observer State is much more effective because of objectivity and truthfulness. Self-protective defensiveness yields to greater clarity. Pragmatism becomes natural and automatic.
Flow State. Instead of detachment of the true self from the software layer, they are a perfectly integrated team. Typically during well-practiced, deeply-known activities, from one’s highest work to sex, from spiritual experience to athletics, the Flow State comes to us as a gift. David calls this Moments of Transcendence and Self Forgetfulness. I understand the Self Forgetfulness part in that there is no subject-object division in Flow State, it is all just doing itself and is of one piece. David uses the word “lost” — “an athlete lost in sport, a believer lost in God’s love, lost in love for one another… the conscious mind disappears.” I would say instead that the chattering mind — part of the software layer — subsides, but that all minds are present (“Holosentience”) during Flow State, they are simply not dwelling on their selfdom in the usual EOP subliminally anxious way. Perhaps David is hewing to his theme of rational versus unconscious — where he is advocating a shift to include the unconscious in a more balanced way, including emotions and values. There are obviously ten places where David and I agree for every one where we might differ. In fact I doubt that we would differ once we mapped our maps together.

For a fun and mind-opening read get THE SOCIAL ANIMAL.

If you like it, try FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS next. (After all, it comes with a money-back guarantee. 😀 ) It is also mind-opening and spends more time on the “how to” of it — though as John Ziegler said, “[the book] seems to do it TO you. IT works. YOU don’t.”

Best to all,

Bill