Author Archives: Kristin Dragos

Improving Personal Timing Is the Lowest Hanging Fruit

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Created February 11, 2021

Sometime between 600 BC and 400 BC, Lao Tzu advised “In action, watch the timing”.

Sometime between age 4 and age 6, a showbiz celebrity advised me after seeing my act “Timing is everything”. During my teen years operating the spotlight for shows at Hotel Brickman I carefully observed how the greatest acts used timing. It was almost imperceptible. Later I read that science refers to micromomentary gestures as part of how we subliminally communicate with each other. Those little gestures are all wrapped up in timing too.

Jack Carter hit the mic twice with his ring before each punchline. Except when he went into Flow (he called it “being on”) which was most of the time he was on stage. I asked about the ring thing and he said it used to be his way of managing his timing and now it was just an old friend.

As a society, the left and right political classification scheme reflects different attitudes toward how quickly to move from good things we have already created, into new things that impassion their creators and could be even better things than the ones we have now. That is a timing issue.

Most of us wish the vaccines could move faster to our arms. Another kind of timing issue.

I’m actually referring to each of us as individuals and the way we use timing in our lives. Sometimes we move too fast – and then make mistakes and everything we were trying to speed up just got slowed down. Sometimes we move too slowly – such as after recognizing our own mistake – but every moment is different and there are only a small set of minimalist rules to help you regulate the speed you are attempting to go at, at the moment. These clues comprise Chapter 8 of MIND MAGIC – free during the pandemic.

The chapter starts with an exercise the reader performs in the moment while interacting with that page. The exercise brings on a different state of consciousness which most readers who write say they find intriguing and different from their normal introspective experiences.

“Act only when you decide

That the loss in value associated with delay

Is probably greater

Than the gain in value associated with thinking further

About the motives, possible consequences,

And alternatives to such action.

 

Start now.

Do not move any part of your body

From the position it is now in.

Regard any such movement

As an action to be evaluated prior to action.”

 

The chapter spends some time diagnosing why you may be rushing. Fear is usually involved but one is not conscious of the fear, but rather projects it as righteous duty and keeping agreements and not letting down the team or the CEO.

In all cases it pays to stop the clock and block out all distractions and focus on the stuff that’s got to get done, what the real priorities are, and reschedule a lot of it, then focus on the one lowest hanging most pressing fruit that will do the most good at the moment.

The chapter suggests that the voices and feelings which take us over and get us to rush out of subliminal fear, are actually AI remnants of the conditioning we received as we were growing up. “AI” is a metaphor of course, we are natural creatures, not artificial in that sense. But the robotical part of the mind which I associate with Ego as defined by Freud acts just like all those “helpful” popup suggestions on our screens and keeps us out of the Flow state.

You will only get into the Flow state if you can immerse yourself in one task at a time and do it for the enjoyment of doing it well. If you don’t get into the Flow state the work you will be giving your client or employer will not be at the genius level. Why do it then?

The same with what you give your loved ones and friends and people you meet. If you are going to be driven like a stampeding animal by remnant feelings and voices in your head, without becoming self-aware and the master of your self, the potential joy you could bring to those people will be sharply reduced.

If you happen to be in government, please stay there, we need you! Of all people you should know how to help yourself get into the zone.

I’m saying it’s possible for each of us to be geniuses. Artists. Philosophers, Renaissance People. We each have that potential within us and it isn’t miles away. It starts with a few simple rules and then you start to get your own inspirations.

It’s not only possible, it’s necessary. The human race is being severely challenged. It’s a special time. We must rise to the occasion, like WWII but more so. Back then you had to have a liberty garden and do the right thing to pitch in and win the war. Now you have to train yourself to be able to give your best 24/7.

Take the course. It’s free during the pandemic. If you don’t like it, you wasted 5 minutes. But I suspect you’ll spend more time with it and thank me.

We all need this. Let’s do it.

Best to all,

Bill

My 2019 Scifi Novel Coming True in the South China Sea?

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Created February 7, 2021

Let’s hope not. PANDEMONIUM: LIVE TO ALL DEVICES depicts one of the downside scenarios. It’s our job to steer into one of the upside scenarios.

My career-long friend Norm Hecht just sent me this news story about China creating new laws making it legal for her to fire on foreign vessels in waters where ownership is disputed. And then sending Chinese Coast Guard ships close to what Japan considers a couple of its islands, earlier today February 6, 2021.

Here’s an excerpt from my fictional story, intended to anticipate some of what is really bound to happen, based on how the chips are stacked:

When the Chinese president awoke the next day, he announced to the world, on television and handhelds, the exact GPS coordinates of the South China Sea as defined by China, “which has always been the property of China, and for too long we have been taken advantage of.” He told the world that non‐Chinese ships would need to go around this piece of sea or be boarded and inspected, on threat of lethal force. “If a war erupts in that location, China will limit itself to these GPS coordinates and not escalate the fighting to outside that war zone.”

* * *

President Snike did not hesitate to send a pweet deriding that announcement. “If China wants a rumble in their neighborhood, we’re up for it,” he wrote. Separately he ordered two more carrier groups to move toward the area. In the fleet with the George Washington steaming into the South China Sea, all were at battle stations.

The Marxist superpowers from 1945 onward made it a practice to test the resolve of each new US president by seeing what they could get away with. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the test the world remembers best.

Unlike my fictional US president Norfal Snike, our real President Joe Biden will undoubtedly take a firm stand without raising the temperature.

As I’ve written before, the best diplomacy nowadays would be to spell out the scenario options and agree on the ones closest to win/win that we can get.

We’re all in this together, and we all have to unite against the forces that threaten us all equally, pandemics, environment, hatred, greed, unemployment, inequality, injustice, debt…

And as we learn to work together to overcome the common threats, we can join together to take advantage of the common opportunities, including a better life for all, technology, space travel, human potential, and the scientific quest for true enlightenment – knowing everything there is to know about reality. Including materialist science, but not limited by its assumptions, e.g. that consciousness could not exist without matter.

But first, much closer at hand, we have to put away the old ways, substituting better ways to do international diplomacy and everything else.

We really don’t have much choice.

We can do it.

Best to all,

Bill

 

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

Decode the Universe’s Lesson

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February 3rd, 2021

An “As-If” viewpoint opens the mind. You don’t have to believe that the Universe is conscious. But, just because it is possible, and it is of practical value (more about this presently), you can choose to allow yourself to play the game of trying to see the universe’s lesson in whatever happens.

You can regard this as a stimulus to creative thinking.

As an example, take the cancelling of the Keystone XL Pipeline. For environmental reasons, many of us support that move. Yet there are people who have been living that project as their dream, and are heartbroken at the disappearance of their passion work.

The Universe’s lesson is that each decision must consider every possible fallout, and legislation must provide for innocents harmed.

Are we THAT good, where we can aspire to a system in which legislators are THAT sensitive to their many constituencies?

Definitely it’s demanding more of ourselves when it seems we have already overborrowed at that bank.

Here’s the catch. It might truly be impossible with minds continuing to be used in old fashioned ways that no one has seriously questioned in thousands of years.

But we have always had available to us keys to reaching more effective and exalted states of consciousness. Thanks to William James, Abraham Maslow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, these peak experience states are now accepted facts of science, at least as regards the exalted state called Flow and known colloquially as the zone.

Each of us in life rediscovers these Perennial Keys to the higher state but the average person captures very few of them.

They appear in the Bible, vastly in Indian literature, and in every culture on the planet.

You already own more of these keys than you realize.

They are tricks of the mind, hence the jocular title of our book MIND MAGIC.

Rediscovering these oft-rediscovered keys and bringing them down from puzzles in the mind, and from reading the metaphors and exhortations in ancient literature, we’ve distilled and field-proven modernized techniques to learn. You know, because you already read this column.

This mental change is no longer a nice to have.

The game has been stacked so far against us we now must take the leap into self-testing these methods – and all others you deem useful.

In MIND MAGIC where the entire first course is found, there are hundreds of these “viewpoints”. Each one is its own lens. Several appear on the typical page.

Each chapter is one key, and is made up of many diverse viewpoints all of which give you tools with which to achieve that chapter’s key.

Chapter 7 is about – of all things – multitasking.

It’s not the way to get into the Flow state where attention is single pointed and merged with the experience bubble – no separation of subject and object.

But it has become our way of life at least during working hours including domestic duties. Media are virtually ever-present, on top of people speaking to you, and there might be several people talking to you and each other at once, and you may be driving, plus you just had an interesting job breakthrough thought now what was that…

The chapter is about the reader being in exactly that situation, and yet he keeps up with it (in the story) by rotating his attention so as to pay attention to each person and especially the road without losing that big idea.

Rotating one’s attention is not only a strategy for dealing with multiple job streams, it is also a strategy to use within the imagination, for examples, for legislators to plan the cancellation of the pipeline with ability to foresee having to help certain people out who didn’t do anything wrong.

There’s going to be a lot of this.

The Universe’s lesson is that we have to jump level in our use of the mind, or struggle to survive in a much nastier game than we thought we were permanently entitled to.

Look around, see your brethren, help each other simply try to do the right thing. Let love in. We can enjoy the rest of our lives without having to live immersed in vicious rancor. We make our own reality. Take responsibility for the reality you are creating.

If the insurrectionists had all learned that last line, internalized and embodied it to their bones, there wouldn’t have been an insurrection.

We have shown that it is very hard to change political opinions.

It is far easier to change mental emotional self-management. I may be wrong, but spreading these techniques seems to me the best thing I can do for the good of the lifeboat.

Here’s the link to Chapter 7.

We can do it. We can Be It.

My best to you all,

Bill

What Is Fairness Among Nations?

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Created February 2nd, 2021

Part of why Russia and China are perpetually mad at us is that we have continuously called them out for doing things we don’t approve of. We have identified the cause of what we see as their bad behavior as being the fact that they are not democracies in the sense of free speech, etc. There is of course a goodly degree of truth to that; however, even if they were to do their best to mimic our kind of democracy, their root cultures going back thousands of years might still interpret democracy in a more top-down way than our ideals ask for.

And of course, the envious nations we have lectured in the past revel in how we have been self-exposed to be just as low as they were when we criticized them!

Let’s look at Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping and put ourselves in their shoes. What would you do if you ran Russia or China? How would you play their hand? Leave aside what you have read or heard about the two people in those shoes, look at it only from the point of view of the position, of the responsibility you have.

At the end of WWII the USA had half the world market economically, was the only nation on Earth with atomic weapons, and was actively helping other nations to rebuild. Russia and China had been allies in that war but very soon after it was over it became clear that there was now a new strife, a war of ideologies. The USA was clear and outspoken in favor of democracy, liberty, equality, justice for all, and against Communism. America had been against Communism long before WWII. So on the gameboard of RISK the two largest Marxist nations and the US were on a collision course. That was 76 years ago.

Over those 76 years the US has shaken its right forefinger at those two proud nations and its leaders almost ever day of every year one way or another. It’s one of the ongoing themes covered by the news.

Then mirabile dictu! By some nasty miracle those damn Americans had been right all along about Capitalism. That sort of sets you up, if you are one of those two world leaders, to have a chip on your shoulder about those damn yankees, certain of whose main ways had been so proven to be right, one just had to eat humble pie, give up and join in with them as capitalists.

The background of emnity doesn’t have to always be that way. It’s understandable that it’s where we find ourselves now. But no need to continue in the same manner. We have options. All sorts of options. Let’s evaluate all of them. Meanwhile, back to the game: you are Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping. How do you play the hand you’ve been dealt?

Leaving aside the chip on the shoulder, even if you were to start with a fresh slate, you need to grow your nation economically and technologically and assure a better life for as many of your citizens as possible. While of course yourself continuing to enjoy all the things you like best.

You don’t necessarily want war. War even in a limited war zone scenario is terribly costly. It could nowadays all too easily go all the way. The Trump years demonstrated that civilization is a tenth of an inch veneer you could almost scratch off with a fingernail.

You definitely don’t want any more insults from the Americans or anyone else. You want to be respected.

It would be far more convenient from a security standpoint to be able to control the fringes of your empire, although this is looking like the thing that could set off the tinderbox.

During the past 76 years part of the game is to see what you can get away with, to test each new US president. As I allow the reader to take control of these two world leaders in this mind experiment, the testing process is taking place around the South China Sea especially Taiwan (predicted in my 2019 anticipatory novel PANDEMONIUM: LIVE TO ALL DEVICES).

In Russia’s case that would include places like the Ukraine etc. where there are recent reasons to be mad at the Americans.

If you are now temporarily living through Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping, you are thinking about how do you balance your objectives of economic growth and consolidating your empires? If you can convince yourself to live with the geographic borders as they are for this decade anyway, you could focus on economic growth. If America stops talking down to you maybe the trade deals could be worked out that would blow the doors off the Russian economy. Allow technological development at the highest levels ever conceived. Possibly the former USSR states would clamor back to the closest ties with Russia ever.

Same story for China. If focus on improving domestic economies and happiness is allowed, by retracting game pawns from the borders, China is already predicted to becoming the next USA in terms of largest economy. By trade benefits China could then bloodlessly get the consolidation feeling it wants. Just a matter of patience.

This would point to a 20s of world boom and peace. My recommendation is that the USA starts from this thinking in reapproaching the other world leaders.

There is no question about the need for firmness and straight-out honesty about no more cyber and psychological cold war mischief. That is table stakes.

Beyond that and other military testing adventures going away, the US can pledge to stop telling them how to behave, while the US focuses instead on returning to be a good role model in terms of its own behavior, which comes down to a pledge of that kind by each of us Americans individually.

We can work out what is a win/win/win for all of us, and make that boom a reality.

Once the engine is running, no one will want to throw a shoe in the machinery, so the ultrasecret bad stuff will even be shut down then. No Russian or Chinese person of importance will want to risk being cancelled for having been caught in the cookie jar. Same goes for us and every country. Once we are in happy boom mode, the impetus to do negative things will evaporate.

But first we’ve got to get there.

To be clear, I’m recommending that:

(a) Daily we remember to always put ourself in the other person’s shoes before speaking or writing about, or to him or her.

(b) Our State Department take on this mantle of explicitly and forthrightly reframing the 76-years-old-time-to-go mindspace in all talks and communiques with the foreign leaders. Showing them our win/win/win scenario and promising to uphold it without sneaky tricks for as long as they do. And of course keeping our promises.

This means giving up the idea that we are destined to force the whole world to adopt the American system of democracy. Let them devise their own ways of living in their own countries. Help wherever we can anyone whom we feel is being given a raw deal but do so within the rules of conduct among sovereign nations. Offer economic and technological incentives where the opportunity arises that result in a higher quality of life everywhere and for everyone on Earth, especially once our own citizens are in their own homes and able to survive without fear, balancing care at home and abroad based on majority voting. No longer project that we know best and are better than everyone else. As much fun as it has been especially in novels since the OSS and Otto Skorzeny co-invented the modern paramilitary, we hope that we keep ours strong and make it stronger, but don’t have to use it aggressively as much in the coming boom times of world equilibrium and American Unity.

“The past was about domination. The future is about liberation.”

—Harvey Kraft, Digitalism

“You better free your mind instead.”

—The Beatles, Revolution

We can do it.

All my best,

Bill