Tag Archives: Theory of the Conscious Universe

What Can Be Done When You Are Experiencing Emotions You Don’t Want?

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Volume 2, Issue 41

Such as when you are unhappy, anxious, scared, feeling guilty, mad at yourself, ashamed, bored, depressed, or not enjoying simply being alive and who you are? Measured against the alternative, just being alive is an amazing opportunity one must logically be grateful for, except perhaps during rare cases such as physical torture.

Nor is the Vulcan alternative really desirable. We do not espouse the strategy of killing off all emotions. Emotions are part of what makes life life. Being a robot and repressing all emotion not only shrinks life it also cuts one off from valuable information that helps optimize actions. Without an operating emotional center one becomes cut off from sensing and deeply grokking the emotions of others. Observer and Flow states become impossible or less likely with a goodly part of the sensorium (psyche, experiential panoply) edited out.

The word “control” has negative connotations, as in “mind control”, which raises specters of brainwashing, hidden persuaders, subliminal advertising, Nazism and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Yet we admire people who exhibit cool self-control when the average person would either fly off the handle, blush, show fear, or surrender to intimidation, so in that sense “control” is not always such a bad thing. In other words, as with most of life, there is always a balance point, a grey scale, where some amount of a thing is “good” (pragmatically valuable), and then too much of it is “bad” (counterproductive). Here we are speaking of being able to mediate, to a degree, the emotions we feel so as to make the whole of us more happy, creative, effective, and successful in the moment. And more likely to be in Observer or Flow.

A general “solution” to the types of negative emotions listed in the first paragraph above relies upon a better understanding of the causes and the phenomena themselves. If we can recall that the brain contains parts such as the limbic system, which can assert and draw energy to themselves, causing chemicals to flood our bodies during moments of unwanted emotion, this realization has the effect of giving us some degree of a more detached perspective. We may then become less stuck, less trapped in and overwhelmed by those feelings.

Many negative emotions are the result of one’s own ego. My Acceleritis theory is that the ego (software in the brain, built from proteins after birth, which is sort of one’s own built-in press agent, politicking with the outside world for a better deal) is made more powerful relative to the rest of our sense of self, by information overload — itself the result of visible language invented only about 300 generations ago, a relative eyeblink in evolutionary time. This is my putative explanation for the excessive competitiveness (e.g. continuous intraspecies war going on somewhere on Earth at all times) that has characterized us as a species since the dawn of written language.

When I feel negative emotions, I go after answering the question: what do I want so badly that I either fear I will not get or am angry that I have not gotten? Then I look inside to see why that thing is so darned important to me emotionally and whether having it is worth these tormented feelings. Typically (now after decades of such practice) I am able to rise above the attachment and negative emotion fairly quickly. What I value (Flow state) is something I would rather have than those other attachments, which when inspected are self-evidently ignoble motivations like wanting praise.

What is life after all? In my view (my Theory of the Conscious Universe) each of us is a microcosmic mask of the One Intelligence, which is all that truly exists. In Flow, one can actually contact that Original Self and feel fully one with it, in which perspective all annoying matters dissipate instantly with no effort whatsoever. One can be happy simply being Bill Harvey or whatever your name happens to be this time round. It’s more than enough just to be alive. This is what I intuit is the original meaning and intent of the Jewish toast “L’Chaim” (“To Life”).

Hoping these thoughts are useful in making your life more continuously blissful,

Bill

The Force Is Conscious

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Volume 2, Issue 11

In his inspired space epic film series Star Wars, George Lucas postulates a religion based on the notion that a single Force pervades all of spacetime, and can be used by adepts in combat and other situations. It imparts powers of telekinesis (the ability to move matter with the mind), prescience/precognition (knowing the future), remote sensing/clairvoyance (the ability to see things beyond the field of vision), and the ability to shoot bolts of energy from the fingertips.

In Lucas’ cosmology, the Force also has a Dark Side that can seduce you into using these powers for selfish benefits; however, this turns your eyes red and ruins your complexion.

When the first Star Wars movie came out on May 25, 1977, I had just two years earlier formulated my vision of reality which I refer to as The Theory of the Conscious Universe. I was keenly interested in the similarity between Lucas’ vision of the Force and my own theory. One of the key differences is that Lucas does not convey that the Force is conscious. In my theory, the universe is a self-aware field of consciousness.

There is no scientific reason why this cannot be the case.

In fact my theory makes it understandable why the world’s leading theoretical physicist of our times, the late John Wheeler, stated that we observers (consciousness) co-create reality, and that “bits (information) precede “its” (physical objects/energy fields)”. Why shouldn’t our consciousness co-create reality, if we are part of the One Consciousness that created reality in the first place? And why should we be surprised that information plans precede the creation of bits of matter/energy, since consciousness and sometimes conscious planning precede all human inventions including the words we speak — if everything is just one big consciousness?

We know that fields exist — electromagnetic, gravitic, the strong nuclear force that holds atoms together, the weak nuclear force that mediates particle decay. Why should consciousness not be a field?

The other key difference between Lucas’ Force and my theory is that I postulate the One Consciousness lives through us — what we take to be our identity is a sub-identity of the One Consciousness.

One reason I have conviction this theory may actually be the truth is that whenever I am most deeply immersed in acting for the good of all, the incidence of my slipping into Flow state, aka the Zone, is increased.

I have not detected anything like a Dark Side of the Force. When I am in a dark selfish mood I never find myself in Flow state. In my Theory of Holosentience I hypothesize that dark moods are part of EOP, which is the opposite end of the performance spectrum from Flow.

Why not experiment for yourself with “wearing” this point of view of what the universe is, to see if it has any effect on your daily life, and your experience of the Flow state?

Best to all,

Bill

Creating Joy

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Volume 2, Issue 9

The more you enjoy yourself the more likely you are to shift into the Zone, bringing your friends with you

We continue to report on behaviors we have found to be correlated with Flow state over decades of making such observations. Flow, aka the Zone, closely resembles a supernatural experience because everything seems to be doing itself perfectly. To expand on our discussion from last post, we are considering the implications of the fact that Flow is prompted by autotelic behavior — that is, you are engaged in the behavior for its own sake, not in your quest for something else, some desired outcome. You are outcome-free and then Flow arises if your challenge slope is perfectly matched to your skills.

Joy and enjoyment are closely linked to autotelic behaviors. One doesn’t do something one hates for its own sake. This implies that you tend to be in a pretty jolly mood prior to the onset of Flow experiences. And in turn if the outcome you want is to be in the Zone more often, then it makes sense to keep yourself in a pretty good mood at all times. Besides, life is more fun that way.

Internally here are some steps you can take:

  • Non-acceptance of non-joy — “it’s simply unacceptable” is the attitude you maintain, and then work it out however you work it out. You remember it is not logical to maintain negative moods because they transmit negativity and thus reduce your effectiveness and influence. This involves a test of your will power.
     
  • Compared to what? In this step, you appreciate the current phase of your life by comparing it to how bad it could be. Gratitude to the universe for your life is conducive to Flow state for some reason, and that correlation has led me to my Theory of the Conscious Universe.
     
  • Enjoy the creative challenges. Take the long view with regard to problematic and vexatious relationship situations. Make a study of the relationship loop and put off decisive action until the recon and assimilation has been completed. You will actually see why X always happens, and how you can reduce the probability of X. Then you begin a patient series of trials to engage with the creative challenge of that particular relationship loop, which may recur in more than one relationship. Accept that each such problematic relationship has been handed to you as a creative challenge to rise above over goodly amounts of time. Make it a project.

Externally, other people may tend to bring you down. But most of them will be willing to get into a good mood if you start it. That’s why positivity is so much more effective than negativity.

Best to all,

Bill

Gaining Conscious Control over Involuntary Reactions

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In this post we will begin to share what have been considered esoteric secrets by hidden schools for thousands of years. Today they would be classified as methods of applied cognitive psychology.

For thousands of years, mystery schools have existed at the core of each religion, where the religion at large is a diluted, simplified form of the core schooling, consisting mostly of rituals without retaining the full explanation of the entire system of thought. Over time, in response to the rise of religious tolerance and freedom, some of these occult (meaning “hidden”) schools have come out into the open at least to the extent of admitting their existence.

All of these schools taught (1) ethics (2) what today would be called applied cognitive psychology – the subject of today’s post, and (3) a cosmology centered around the idea of a unified identity of all things. These were never taught as three separate “courses” but as an organic whole in which the ethical and psychological portions were logical outgrowths of the cosmology. In other words, “Since you are part of a whole, treat the other parts fairly (ethics), and gain control of your involuntary reactions, which cause friction with the other parts and with your relationship to the whole (applied cognitive psychology).”

Teaching took many forms including a kind of immersive theater in which the teachers were actors and the student was not aware that they were performing. This was exemplified during the Classical Age in Greece by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and carried forth to this day by Freemasonry. The underlying principle being the now-scientifically proven fact that a person cannot change merely by intellectual understanding; instead it is pivotal that emotion/intuition/perception must also be engaged in order to make a profound and lasting psychological shift.

These “initiations” as they are called provide the types of feelings called “numinous” (magical) and what they do to the intellect – when theatrically effective – is to jar the belief in an accidental/”meaning”-less/materialistic-only universe, by seeming to provide contrary and compelling sensory evidence, i.e. a miracle or magical event. Today’s illusionists are an entertaining derivative of such practices but operate in a context where the adult audiences are fully aware that these miracles are simulated and because every adult knows the senses are being artfully tricked, hence these maneuvers are called “tricks”.

This is not to rule out that in some of these performances, something magical might actually occur – magical not in the sense of unscientific, but in the sense of not yet understood by science.

Science has now caught up to and verified that the cosmology being taught down through the ages by these hidden schools is correct. There is connectivity among all the constituent parts of the universe, matter is made of energy, space and time are one thing, particles are waves and waves are particles, and these “wavicles” remember their connection so that when apart and one changes, so does the other (as proven by the innumerable replicated experiments testing Bell’s Theorem). The information transfer from one wavicle to the other is supraluminal, i.e. faster than the speed of light, suggesting either that Einstein’s theories are at least partially incorrect, or that distance itself is an illusion, or both.

How did these relatively primitive people thousands of years ago know things that are only today being realized by our top scientists? My hypothesis is that the founders of these schools which radiated outward into far simplified dilutions called religions, were in the highest levels of Flow state when they had moments of enlightenment and realized these facts about the universe directly, through the faculty of cognition called “intuition”.

I’ve written here about Flow state many times. It is the state where the brain noise across the corpus callosum between left and right hemisphere disappears (Master Marvin Chun, Yale), and there is activity across all levels of brain rhythm as measured by EEG (delta, theta, alpha and beta waves) that appears as highly regular and synchronous between the brain hemispheres – in other words, organized rather than chaotic brain patterns. Experientially the Flow state manifests as perfect action, inspired ideation, joy, automaticity (everything is doing itself and you are along for the enjoyable ride) — and in its highest form (for there are sub-levels within this state) clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, and ultimately a spiritual dawning (conviction of universal connectivity, liberation from fear through intuitive trust in the ultimate benevolence of the universe) which if articulable (sometimes these experiences cannot be translated into words) would be what caused  the emergence of mystery schools and later religions themselves.

Latest science proves the existence of connectivity in physics (Bell’s Theory experiments among others) and in psychology (odds against chance being in the millions to one for the existence of clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy, per meta-analyses reported by Dean Radin and Charles Tart). The Theory of the Conscious Universe (my cosmology) posits that the basic stuff of which everything is composed is information and all of this exists within a single consciousness of which everything else is a part. But what is consciousness? It is that which experiences information. To be, to exist, is to be perceived/experienced by consciousness. This would have been a radical notion at the height of materialism, which probably peaked when I was a child and is already waning today as science makes strict materialism untenable. It’s pretty obvious to all of us that we are privileged to be living at an extraordinary time of change for the human race on Earth. One key aspect of this profound change is the proof that we are all connected and the true universe we live in is as miraculous as the ancients sensed.

Smooth and striated muscle tissue in the body generally have separate functions, the striated muscles being subject to voluntary control, and the smooth muscles being those that function without conscious will being involved – such as breathing. The mind and its four functions (Jung) of intellect, intuition, feelings and perception also has voluntary and involuntary aspects. We can use willpower and practice to extend the range of control we can exert over what is generally involuntary. For example, belly dancers can so control their stomach muscles as to make a quarter flip over and over while lying on their back, and advanced yogis can slow their heart rate down to reach a point approximating suspended animation. The term they use is “yogic control”, meaning the extension of the ability to control things in their formerly uncontrollable body-mind.

This yogic control concept comes into play in everyone’s life with regard to the phenomena of negative emotions including depression, dis-courage-ment, fear, anger, and other non-helpful manifestations in the domain of feeling. When such feelings arise they tend to curtail the ability of the intellect and the intuition to see solutions to the problems that have caused these negative internal states, and even the perceptions are changed, as we subtly begin to see more ugliness and less beauty in the world around us.

The ancient mystery schools still teach methods of making these involuntary feelings – which nobody likes to have, so they must be involuntary – something that can be controlled and stopped by the voluntary will. This involves the same principle of yogic control – extending what the individual can control within their own mind-body. These teachings were typically expressed in language that today would be regarded as unscientific. My book is an effort to provide the same teachings – which have been proven to work for thousands of years on small percentages of the population – in language that is non-mysterious, operational, actionable, simple, and hopefully therefore allows everyone to gain these extraordinary degrees of control, particularly over their own minds. Thousands of my readers have written in to say that the book worked for them, and only 11 out of approximately 35,000 readers have taken advantage of the lifetime moneyback guarantee.

Let’s take a look at anger, fear, discouragement and depression and the ways that these moods can be brought under conscious control and turned around – a small sampling of the book.

Most people assume there is nothing you can do about negative emotions – they come as they will, and you must just suffer through them. However, almost everybody knows someone who they have seen rise above these feelings at one time or another. Especially at a time such as now when the world is facing so many challenges all at once, it is vital to increase everyone’s ability to rise to the occasion and surmount negative feelings.

The common “solution” today for depression consists of drugs. These drugs often do alleviate depression temporarily but it always returns and another dose is needed. The drug approach is not bad but it is really a form of depression-maintenance program: it does not cure the problem but finds a way to live with it. The best aspect of drugs is the speed and ease of getting an effect. But this allows weakness of self-control to be carried forward often for an entire lifetime, skipping over the opportunity to use the problem as a springboard to increase the individual’s yogic control.

All of the mystery schools teach that death is not the end, that like matter-energy, consciousness also is conserved by nature, and that none of these things can ever be created nor destroyed, and some such schools explicitly teach that yogic control gained in this lifetime is carried over to subsequent lifetimes on this or other planes. Because the teaching of interconnectedness has been validated by science, this does not automatically mean that all the teachings of mystery schools are necessarily true, but it’s something to think about. The alternative is to rule out thoughts that have been associated with superstition just because of association in the mind, which is itself non-scientific. All things are unproven until they are experimentally proven. Whatever happens after death will remain very difficult to prove one way or another for us the living. Science may someday figure out the death barrier, but not today.

Regardless of such considerations, one does not have to go too far in order to justify the desirability of gaining control over defeatist feelings: regardless of any view of what the world is, it’s obvious that such feelings work against the person who has them — we see the evidence every day.

It is extremely difficult if not impossible to overcome one’s own negative feelings while remaining in the everyday state of consciousness. You can say, “I am going to put those emotions away and get down to the business at hand”, but many of us don’t really have the willpower to do it. The trick is to get out of the everyday state of consciousness. By moving into the observer state, one is able to far more easily turn off useless feelings. The active ingredient in this case is simply clarity.

The steps involved are not mysterious. The first step is to turn down all distractions which means getting into an alone space where one cannot be interrupted, where you can’t hear voices in the next room, where there isn’t a TV or something playing, where you are not under time pressure if at all possible (this is not an absolute requirement, especially after you have some practice behind you — in fact after practice there are no absolute requirements).

Once you are alone, with writing implements, task number one is to understand why you are in a negative state. The writing implements can be used for this but you really have them with you to write down notes about other things that distract you from what you are there to do – shopping lists, to-do lists, whatever. Be patient and wait. Once your mind knows you are focused on one thing, diagnosing the cause of why you feel the way you do, it will soon start to give up answers to that question. They may be obvious or they may contain non-obvious aspects as well. You may find yourself writing down non-obvious aspects or simple phrases that are suddenly more revealing and meaningful than you expected, which cast new light or which simply state things you already knew but in much sharper and more useful language than you had before.

What you are doing is called contemplation, and what you are contemplating is the causes for your current state.

It is likely that you will see the causes, at least some of them, and they may make you angry at other people for being part of the causation. This is part of everyday consciousness, and will not get you past your feelings but will in fact just keep you going round and round in those feelings. You need to reject everyday consciousness, reminding yourself that any ordinary negative feelings such as fear, anger, depression, discouragement, etc. are automatically wrong. They are just alarms going off to get you to see the real underlying causes so you can cure those causes. Some of those causes may in fact be within you. You may be the first cause that leads those other people to do what they do to make you angry, fearful, or whatever.

You are flying higher, getting above the weather, so whatever weather disturbance or turbulence you experience must be rejected, whatever is commonplace and you have been there before, put aside. Focus on this rejection of commonplace negative emotion. Say to yourself, “It must be wrong, by definition, it’s not constructive, it’s not getting me anywhere, it doesn’t lead to a solution, I need something NEW.” Strip it away as it arises and see what is underneath. Where is it coming from? Where did the whole pattern start? What did you want that led you into this negative mindset?

Get creative. Generate crazy ideas. Visualize what John Wayne or Katherine Hepburn would do – whoever you look up to – drop the boundaries on the types of thinking you will use to get closer to a good idea – something that will work. Come up with ideas that will not raise resistance – think in terms of Eastern martial arts, where you go with the flow not against it.

All mystery schools and religions teach acquiescence, trust and gratitude as three sides to the same coin – the acceptance of what is. In Islam, it is called the Will of Allah. In Taoism it is called getting into the rhythm of the Tao, linking into the underlying force of the universe. The word religion itself comes from the Latin religare, meaning to link up. The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit, meaning to yoke up, like yoking an ox to a cart.

How can you feel gratitude at times that try you to the breaking point? By comparing the situation to one even worse. What if you had never existed at all? The Universe has created you — is this not justification for gratitude?

Pastor Leonard DeWitt says, “It’s not about religion, it’s about relationship.” The relationship you have to the whole can either be synchronous or it can be at odds. When you are angry, fearful, and so on, you are not in synchrony with what is happening, you are fighting it. This is why you need to reject these feelings as you strive to drop everyday consciousness, and get into an esoteric, spiritual mood.

Whether you call it God or the Universe, today science knows that you and I are intrinsically intermingled into it. Get with the Flow of it, don’t be at odds with it. To do this, you need to reject ordinary thinking and feeling. What is really happening? What is IT trying to teach you? How can this situation possibly be something that can make you better and stronger?

These are applied cognitive psychological interventions. The ones we have just shared skim one surface of the subject, but should give you a flavor.

Best to all,

Bill