Category Archives: Flow State

Powerful Mind Pt. 2

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Created March 17, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 1, click here.

States of Consciousness

Flow state, or “being in the Zone”, is a shift of gears in the brain that happens when you are doing something you love — your life’s work — your true work. Your contribution to the Universe. What you leave behind for others to share. In Flow state everything seems to do itself while you watch blissfully. Flow state then gradually carries over to everything that you do.

Ironically, if you do an optimization model to figure out how to end war and make the world fun all the time, it comes down to matching each person with the thing they do best, and bringing that work out as a social value. Whether it is a great car mechanic, administrator, teacher, dancer, whatever it is that is your gift. We would all be having too much fun to want to fight wars. The value of the goods and services we produce would be increased to more than enough to go around. After all, Earth is still rich in resources and it is not too late to bring her back to mint condition. There is no end to our technological inventiveness. We just need to rechannel it positively, together.

Logically, since each of us is a unique package of Nature, a combination of genes which never existed before and will never exist again, we are like a precious piece in a cosmic museum. Irreplaceable.

Therefore, born with certain specific innate potentialities. The game of Life is to find these and capitalize on them. Get better and better, entering the Flow state. Leading to… leaving something behind. Making a difference.

Throughout history, many people have experienced the Flow state and some seem to live in it continuously. But is it out of reach for the average person?

You would think so just based on what you see around you. What if everyone is capable of Flow state but there’s something in the way?

The Cause of Poor Global Performance

There has been an acceleration in the amount of information the average person has been asked to process each day. This is actually the strongest possible deterrent to the Flow state.

The brain we have now is the same brain the first of our species had 200,000 years ago. Life back then was far simpler. There were fewer dimensions of life to cope with. The number of communications received each day was in the dozens. Today it is in the thousands. Advertising and marketing messages alone number around 1700 per day for the average American adult.

Every incoming message or experience we consciously notice generates questions for the inquisitive biocomputer that is the brain. When those questions never get answered, the brain starts to clog up. Emotionally-charged messages produce negatively creative defense reactions we are not even aware of. It’s been so long since we faced all the questions in our mind we go into an “Emergency Oversimplification Procedure” (EOP) to just get through each day. You can’t get into Flow state from EOP, though.

Making Powerful Mind

It’s possible to train the mind to stay focused through complexity, and to maintain emotional equipoise through stressful circumstances. It’s possible to get out of EOP. It’s possible to experience Flow. Over time it is a process. Eventually you might be able to live continuously in Flow — others do. Or spend half your time in it, getting better every day at moving toward Flow all the time.

Powerful Mind is your guide to a new level of mind Flow, using one simple key at a time. You will discover self-limiting behavior patterns in yourself and, remarkably, change them with little effort, because of your clarity. You will rediscover what you love doing and get flashes of inspiration about it. You will have the power and the will to persevere resolutely with confidence in reaching your goals. You will move into greater control of your life.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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We All Need Optimal Competition to Supplant the Unhealthy Kind

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Created February 17, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The optimal use of competition is to set it up to be good-natured. As if in a debating game. The way the Founders of the Constitution thought about it. Without fierce fear of failure, megalomaniacal attachment to power and political money, without hatred, gaming the system, or violence. The Founders knew there would inevitably always be political arguments along the way, but felt confident that with the checks and balances and good will, we would be able to work things out.

The Constitution itself never mentioned political parties. Jefferson and Washington both warned against the rise of political parties in America. They had seen what happened with the Tories and Whigs in Merrie Olde England. Wigs on the green. At the time, in the American Colonies, being the government was just a particularly hard and risky job without a lot of perks. Like being anything in the Colonies at that time.

In any situation where the lust for winning and the fear of losing has become obsessive, human effectiveness drops sharply. Different brain processes take over. Yerkes-Dodson experiments and later work by others proved that when we care too much about an outcome, we reduce our own power to get that outcome.

Too many of the human beings involved in the process of governing us are now showing their worst sides most of the time because they are so ignobly and obsessively motivated. I say ignobly because a public servant worth his or her or their title serves the public regardless of personal outcomes for themselves. They do the necessary for the good of the people. They keep their solemn Oath. Such were the Founders. If we had them today none of this would be happening. Which is not to say that all of our public servants today are ignoble. But the ignoble ones are showing off blatantly because they have used unfair tactics and are still getting away with it, so they appear at the moment to have the upper hand over the noble ones. 

What if anything can we do about the present disappointment many of us feel when we think about our beloved nation with its high ideals? Firstly, we ought not vote for ignobles. Secondly, smaller degrees of change are easier to achieve, so let’s see what can be done to moderate the behavior of those in government. They should be held to a higher standard. Lying, hate talk, attacking the other party, extolling one’s own party, damning the proposed solutions put forth by others without offering any solutions of one’s own, openly gaming the system (gerrymandering, filibustering, appointing of politically motivated judges) so as to gain and keep power, accepting inappropriate monetary rewards, there are specific guidelines which could be put forth as a new Code Of Conduct Standard for the country’s government decision makers at Federal, State, and even local levels.

That is only a surface change but it will have inner feedback loops that will help people break their conditioning. We’ve been all been conditioned and it’s hard but not impossible to break conditioning. Our conditioning began early and we had nothing to compare it to so we took it all for granted. Later we felt in our comfort zone to stay within the herd of people who received similar conditioning to ourselves, and we might not have even been conscious of doing it. This conditioning resides within brain neurons created by our experiences and affects us strongly. The repetition of reinforcement over decades enforces a self-image which is too much made up of what other people think and too little created by our own fully reconsidered clear-eyed contemplation.

In order for the governments of the world to perform optimally, and nations to be led to peaceful coexistence and compassionate cooperation, authoritarian (will take longer) and democracy/republic leaders need to evolve themselves by knowing themselves better, and by reinvigorating their true individuality. Becoming liberated from conditioned intense attachment to money and power and replacing those drives with loftier inspiration to make a better happier world. We all need this but we all need it to happen for world leaders as much as we need it for ourselves. Without inner changes in all of us, especially those who are supposed to lead us, the species might not make it in time to avert the many ticking timebombs our overwhelmed minds have created.  

Witness the recent slide of a perfectly humane and smart American party into what it is now. But the Republicans I know are nothing like that. Those in highest offices may be acting crazy, but the ground truth is quite different, very few Republicans I know who are not in the government are anything like crazy. It’s not the people; it’s a relative handful, a few thousand mis-motivated people that have arrogated unto themselves a great excess of power already, and they have made clear that they are not at all interested in keeping their oaths to protect the American Constitution. This is a domestic threat to our way of life. It’s un-American. It’s a return to what we sought to replace with Americanism. Because the atavistic governing style staging a comeback runs on bribes, maybe we should call it Bribalism.

The Business of the United States Is Business 

Republican legislators when acting sanely (before the extreme attachment to personal outcome hypnotized them) were pro-business before. Now their core is more the lesser educated, their concern for businesses could be manifesting as good advice and programs for small businesses in this era in which small businesses are arising more rapidly due to the internet. Meanwhile, businesses have transcended the pure profit motive for enlightened self-interest (buzzword: Purpose), which empowers them to take up good causes and aim to make people’s lives better. 

Although this is authentic to US business today, the party which used to cleave to business is not exactly doing that kind of thing as much. Now the GOP is saying only what will hold together the tens of millions of people who keep it in power. This is analogous to milking a brand that is on the decline: it will not avert the decline, but in the short term before that decline is finished, “get as much out of it as you can.” It would be far better to avert the decline by returning to its original brand identity as the Party of Lincoln, the party of business especially small businesses, the party demanding proofs and safeguards from those bringing progressive proposals, the party which completes a healthy optimal competition with the more change-oriented party.    

Republicans rise up to take responsibility for your party. You are true Americans; there are a few thousand people terrorizing the country and they unfortunately turn out to be all too many of the people we together elected, and unluckily for you most of them right now are of your party – but not of your mind, nor of your character. You have to rise up collectively to peacefully take back control of your party and bring it back to the center. No one else can do it but you. Step up, step forward, take responsibility. It’s the right thing to do.

Love to all, 

Bill

PS – How to take advantage of the “Yerkes-Dodson Law” (and more) to improve your own performance: https://www.humaneffectivenessinstitute.org/observerness/ 

PPS – I’m not saying bribes are limited to one party. Remember, I’m an Independent. As I’ve written here many times, I see fixed going-in conditions such as progressivism or conservatism to be biases, things which distort objective judgment and obscure and confuse objectivity. Biases block Observer state and Flow state.

Believing What We Want to Believe

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Created September 9, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The human race is driving itself insane. What is the root cause of this? I postulate that it is an overpowering desire for hard answers to questions for which we may not have scientifically objective hard answers for hundreds or thousands of years more of the current slogging forward and slipping backward.

So we manufacture black and white answers and defend our somewhat arbitrary/aesthetic positions by aligning with like-minded people, and demonizing all others, who are assumed to all be the polar opposite of what we stand for.

In Mind Magic, Chapter One “Avoid Hasty Closure” provides psychotechnology (mind tricks) to overcome this “mind takeover to relieve aggravated cognitive dissonance”. “If everyone read this one book” (as one reader wrote), it could have significant effect on bringing down the omnipresent Berlin Wall of psychoneurotic divisiveness.

Just telling people to be good does not do it. They need to know the mental and emotional corridors to explore to achieve a steady state of metacognition and self-metaprogramming (which I call the Observer state). Once established in this equilibrium, the mind takes it to the next level on its own (Flow state, the Zone). Flow state itself has levels, and at the higher levels the intuition (hunches) become very accurate (likely to be verified empirically).

Religions were started by people in these latter higher states of Flow. Some of those who became disciples of those religions developed themselves along similar lines. Other followers of specific religions have taken a different path. They are followers in name only, and have lost the essence of what their claimed religion stands for.

These latter people who are religious in name only, are doing that for the purpose of aligning with other like-minded people who have chosen one authority to believe, having the false comfort of mental closure, and also now having a scapegoat group of people on which to blame everything that is not right about the world. Although they may claim to believe everything their one authority said, their actions prove they are being hypocritical, and that they are repressing awareness of their own hypocrisy.

Not that Christianity is the only religion that suffers from false followership, a new article very carefully and authoritatively connects the dots to help Christians get themselves into alignment with Jesus rather than with any political faction. Written by Michael Gerson, Republican speechwriter and journalist, who was steeped in Evangelical Christianity from birth, and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the top 25 most influential Evangelicals in America, this article strikes me as potentially the most important article ever written. If all Christians read it and truly grok it, it will put their feet back on the path. I hope that writers with comparable levels of authority and learning regarding their own religion are able to emulate Michael’s article.

Blaming a religion itself for those who have perverted that religion is not a very intelligent thing to do. This is the same black and white oversimplistic reductionism to which we all flee in Hasty Closure state, because we find that something in us cannot bear not having at least provisional answers upon which to base one’s life and one’s actions. It’s not unreasonable to feel that way but a better response is open mindedness.

All true religions have taught the same moral lessons. Compassion, do unto others, kindness, respect, love. When in the name of religion, a person acts oppositely from these ethical compunctions, and hides that hypocrisy even from themselves, this to me goes beyond neurosis into true psychosis, i.e., a dangerous diseased condition, not just a tolerable level of neuroticism.

The fact that there were and are still religiously driven equivalents of Crusades, the Inquisition, and sexual molestation by clerics, that is not the fault of the religion, it is the fault of the followers in name only.

Religions are losing adherents faster than cable/satellite companies are losing cord-cutters. In the US for example Pew finds that the percent of people who are religiously unaffiliated has doubled to roughly 3 in 10 since 2007.

In another article, Pew explains why this is happening and relates it to a perceived dichotomy (more of the same black/white mindtrap) between religion and science. Science may have ruled out a white-bearded old man version of God, but it certainly has not ruled out the possibility that our own selves are offshoots of One Self (my Theory of the Conscious Universe).

Leading scientists including Einstein, Wheeler, Planck, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Wigner and many others have put forth scientific possibilities aligned with my notion, which also aligns with all religious writings.

The human race is becoming more open to the idea of animal intelligence and therefore animal rights (as I predicted in a 1972 sci-fi novel Ouroboros). For example, the reading public has recently discovered how intelligent octopi are. Upon closer scientific study it has become now widely known that each octopus tentacle has its own brain. This suggests that each octopus tentacle may have an independent sense of self.

Perhaps the main groupmind of these brains is the controlling sense of self, who can live through the each of the multiple sub-minds. And perhaps the main self can focus in on the one arm that is presently sucking on the most delicious shrimp.

How is that different from my theory that there could be One Self above us all into which we all feed? Is it mere coincidence that the latter lens integrates and depolarizes science and religion?

By opening one’s mind to include this possibility, one can regain a new oneness with everyone, and a new genuine, authentic oneness with one’s own birth religion or chosen religion. And by embodying the scientific method as the way to run one’s life (Foment Empiricism, as Scott McDonald says), one gains a new respect for science by practicing it in each moment oneself.

This lens overrules the impatient Hasty Closure black/white ache in one’s mind. By making sure that one does not jump to conclusions just to have a fake sense of certainty. Having a fake sense of certainty is what allows us to desire civil war to punish all the bad people who disagree with us politically. That fake sense of certainty is the insanity I spoke of in the first sentence of this article.

Coming back to intuition… Kurt Vonnegut in his satirical wisdom said that humans tend to cluster into two types of groups: karass, which is the real group we are destined to be with, and to whom we are brought together by unseen forces (“meant to be”, “bashert”, “kismet”), and granfalloon, a false karass. Suppose he was right. Granfalloons then might in some cases be political parties. In his brilliant article, Michael Gerson contrasts Jesus with Trump, and shows how scripture makes it clear that Jesus warned his disciples to stay away from politics. How can we know when we are following a true intuition and not simply believing what is convenient to believe?

The highest true (empirically verifiable) intuitions tend to give one a sense of peace, a sense that all is oneness, naturally oneness loves it parts, the universe is doing all this benevolently, there will be a happy ending, and from the ending we shall look back and see how the way that reached that end was perfect as it was. How the learning could not have otherwise been achieved. That it all happens for a reason.

Freud called this “the oceanic feeling”. Jung called it the “collective unconscious”. Kashmir Shaivism calls it “The Supreme Self”. The earliest Greek philosophers when they looked inside, and acted so as to foment empiricism, found that mind has hidden powers (intuition), and used them to think about what reality really is. Thales, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, and later many poets and natural philosophers including Berkeley, Newton, Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes, and endless more sages throughout hisandherstory, all came to the same conclusion that consciousness is primary, at least as important as the apparent matter-energy-time-space display which we all apprehend.

How can an empiricist postulate that the only thing he/she as an empiricist can swear exists (consciousness), is merely a derivative of a physical brain which is not directly known to the empiricist who needs a surgeon to inspect his/her brain? Unscientific, yet scientists sometimes assume that their intuition is superior to that of other people who sense a Friendly Larger Presence. Let scientists be the first to have open minds!

Love to all,

Bill

 

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We’ve Been Given More Powers Than We’ve Been Able to Control

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Created August 19, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The people who channeled the Bible and similar spiritual masterpieces had amazing precognition. The story of Adam and Eve for example shows how something in the human race makes us overeager for knowledge that gives us more power. How did they know that was going to happen? It wasn’t all that obvious when the catapult was the highest technology. It is all too obvious today that prophecy came true. We’re wiping out species on a wholesale basis and it certainly appears as if we want ours to be the next one to go.

In the Bible it is positioned as something that happened in the past. But it appears to have been a channeling of a situation whose reach was going to last thousands of years.

If we accept statistical evidence science has already proven that ESP exists, and that some people have more of it than others. Types of ESP tested, all of which are shown statistically to be real, are telepathy, clairvoyance (remote sensing), precognition (foreseeing), and retrocognition (being able to sense things that happened in the past). All of these are forms of obtaining information without the five physical senses. Received knowledge.

ESP being a real thing, distributed like everything else unevenly across the human population, could be something we all experience but refuse to categorize as ESP. Hunches, for example.

Ironically, ESP was usually lumped with magic as a bad thing by the religions, whose founders used ESP to have their spiritual revelations.

Within each religion there are secret (esoteric) sects that use ESP within their broader spiritual practice. Kabbalah within Judaism is one example. The word Kabbalah itself comes from the Hebrew word for received knowledge. In the Tree Of Life, the Kabbalistic map of the spiritual universe, there are ten spheres, plus one invisible sphere, which is where the ten visible spheres combine as one. The invisible one (called Da’at) in my own interpretation is where ESP transmission occurs, where knowledge is received without the use of the senses.

Although Kabbalah is associated with religion and magic, those are misperceptions. Kabbalah is a pragmatic science based on introspection and devout recognition of One Supreme Self that lives in relationship with us. Da’at is a construct useful in mapping one’s own states of mind as they change from moment to moment.

As elucidated in Chapter 20 of You Are The Universe, an individual is able to move his or her consciousness into what Kaballah calls the Da’at state after satisfying preconditions: balancing love vs. work, mercy vs. severity, and wisdom vs. understanding in his or her life (BH interpretation of Kaballah). You Are The Universe is an explanation in detail of my Theory of the Conscious Universe, cognizant of and embracing science as a first principle. In the book, I also hypothesize that Da’at, as conceived by ancient Kabbalists, is the state where Flow state happens. (In last week’s column I likened Flow state to ESP based on the otherworldliness and numinosity of how it feels to experience either of those states.)

What I’m saying is that people thousands of years ago knew ESP existed. They experienced it. Perhaps we were as small a percentage of the population then as we are now.

This does not mean I go around reading everybody’s mind all the time. These windows of Flow state occur when certain conditions are met, and last until those conditions change. The tools in Mind Magic are designed to maximize those conditions (Observer state, which is a full shift into metacognition). These are the same preconditions as prescribed by Kaballah, expressed very differently. Kabbalah uses a high level view of one’s life stages to express its teachings. Mind Magic uses operational second by second tactics.

Kabbalah does not go as far as to say that we are avatars of that One Supreme Self, however that idea goes back to the earliest writings in India and is finally fully articulated in 11th Century Kashmir Shaivism. Following the same road of introspection, reasoning, and received knowledge, I came to the same conclusions between age 12 and 27, and wrote the first draft of The Theory of the Conscious Universe when I was 30. Much later, I was told about Kashmir Shaivism by my wife Lalita on our second meeting, March 25, 2001.

The feeling of having an open mind to the idea that The One Self is us is a spiritually enhancing feeling. Even if you have doubt, if you don’t rule this out, it changes your life. Your decisions. Your actions. The way you feel each moment. How you relate to others, given that it might be you in there in them. I highly recommend you having these good feelings and letting them make you more buoyant. And make you more open to receiving knowledge. And to receiving and giving love.

Interesting synchronicities will happen. I take these as God winks. My term “noia” means the opposite of paranoia: the feeling that someone is out to do you some good. You will feel lots of noia if you open your mind to the possibility that the entire universe is One Consciousness, playing a game. It’s at least as plausible a scientific explanation for reality as Materialistic Accidentalism or any specific religious creation story. And yet when you wear it as a lens it makes life fuller and happier. Why not try it on?

Love to all,

Bill

 

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