Tag Archives: ROI

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.

Do What You Want, and Take It to the People

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Volume 3, Issue 51

Kids setting out in life are best advised to have a two-level plan: the longterm plan to do only what they want and get paid enough for it, and the immediate plan of having a job in a field that pertains to that longterm goal.

First of course they have to know what they want. Intention is a powerful thing, with effects across one’s entire lifespan. Setting out without a strong intention i.e. a concrete two-level plan, is like driving blind. The Universe will still get you there unless you make it impossible with some point you’re stuck on, but it will take longer and involve more pain.

If you do what makes you happy, you are more likely by an order of magnitude to get into Flow state. Your performance will be Flow state, which will cause your natural audience to be attracted to you.

During my life I got to meet a lot of musicians, performers, artists of all kinds. I liked that. My father Ned was probably the last orchestra leader/master of ceremonies whose band backed the biggest acts in the world in nightclub and hotel venues as the Big Band era transitioned into a memory. He established a school that taught performers. My mother Sandy was a painter and paint sculptor.

I met so many whose talents far exceeded their success. Some even knew how to jump into the game, meaning they followed the advice of the plan above — find a way that pays to get into the field you want to be in. They taught me that lesson. For example, Bill Heyer, a multitalented genius who made the leap into big industrial shows with Harold Beebe, bringing Broadway to the corporate stage — great plan and inestimable talents. He was on his way to stardom when he lost his way.

For a decade I saw him in Flow state a large part of the time, and he exuded love. Later on, when he had lost his way, he hurt my feelings by pointing out that he was not really my adopted older brother, it was just an inside joke Ned and Sandy had and we’ve been humoring them all our lives.

“You mean you were humoring me,” I said.

Sometime later the police asked me if I knew a man about 6 feet tall, moustache, well built, who would have my phone number in his wallet along with nothing else. Bill had apparently been doing a Norman Mailer on the parapets of the Gotham and fell to his death. I see him dancing off the ledge.

Before the Internet, lots of artists of all kinds, including showbiz, photographers, authors, creative of whatever stripe, had a good excuse when they caved to their inner cowardice and refused to market themselves, waiting for the mountain to come to Mohammed. Now we live in the ideal era for artists, when the Internet allows them to do whatever makes them happy, and simply requires having a decent available presence on the Web. They will in time attract their natural audience if they are projecting positive energy, which is the real joy of Flow state — you don’t have to fake love, just get a good night’s sleep.

Do what you want artistically, and by that I include whatever turns you on — writing code, inventing things, whatever. It’s all art if it makes you happy.

And remember the two-level plan when you advise young people in their teens and younger. This is in all of our best interests!

Remind them too about the second half of the title of this post — you yourself have to market yourself, you can’t depend on anyone else any more.

Ned would have changed one thing in the world if he could have. Talented people would always be found. They wouldn’t perish like a beautiful flower in a desert, and waste one’s spirit on the air — allusions he used in his writing, echoing the poet whose line he quoted in his memoirs:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And  waste its  sweetness  on the  desert air.

  — Gray’s Elegy in a Country Church-Yard

 You’ve got to do it for yourself. Nowadays the way to do that is available and affordable to everyone. It’s Facebook, Twitter, having a website, having a Youtube channel of your own. Whether you’re an inspired carpenter or calligrapher or therapist or tuner of instruments, whatever gives you joy and so gets you into Flow, open these windows so people can see you doing it.

That’s the advice I would give a kid. Or a performer. Or anyone that needs to hear it.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — P&G’s Olympiad series on Youtube will be remembered as the start of the age of Custom Content Takes Over Advertising. 

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

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.

A Whole Different and at Least Equally Valid Way of Looking at Things

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Volume 3, Issue 48

The peachy-purple-gold sunset reflects with pink iridescence on the wet sand where the sea recedes from its last sally onto the beach. Soundlessly a squadron of hunting pelicans glides past my writing hand. These two-day escapes to Malibu reinvigorate my excitement at life.

Simply clearing the decks of one’s mind and its latest obsessions, leaving only the Observer and the richness to be observed, one can attain peace anywhere.

When I was very young, somehow I became inspired by the notion that a slight shift in the way I look at things could have enormous effect. Now decades later in my self training, the number of times I have applied this principle must be in the millions of repetitions, firmly installing it in my neurons, making it second nature for me to shift my point of view.

Finding that mental switch inside, feeling that subtly felt shift in feelings that occurs, may be not so easy the first time one tries it. The thinking part of the mind and the feeling part both represent potential obstacles of different kinds.

The feelings do not want nor seek solutions. Specialized in expressing themselves, the feelings therefore wish to simply find more and better, increasingly dramatic, ways of expressing whatever they are feeling at the moment, kind of an inertial momentum (i.e. an object in motion tends to remain in motion kind of thing).

Reasoning with the feelings, using thinking to ameliorate unwanted feelings, is not inherently a strong strategy. Telling oneself that one would prefer to feel joy, that happiness is a choice, so go ahead and make that choice, be indomitable — this sometimes worked for me, because I liked the idea of being indomitable and of not allowing anything to have power over me or my mood. At other times some part of me was clearly relishing wallowing in sulking, rage, guilt, anxiety, or whatever, as if an unsuspected part of me was coming from a separate reality and visiting here on a trip specifically for the experience of such an operatic range in dramatic emotion.

The strategy that works best for me is neither straight thinking nor straight feeling, but more intuitive. It is through the intuition that we can make a creative and altogether unsuspected slight shift in the way we look at things, which will both refill us with the happy anticipation of making improvement, and enlighten us with light cast in from a new angle revealing amazing insights.

This intuition has its first positive impact on hope and its second positive impact on curiosity. I find myself looking around in my mind for the perspective that will cause the felt shift. I have started from the assumption my thinking mind accepts: there will always be an angle on the situation that will bring relief. So far that prediction has always come true.

Wishing you all a strong new mind muscle, giving you the ability to seek and grasp the hidden gearshift to indomitable happiness dominating all and any input.

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.