Category Archives: Flow State

Bringing Out Our True Selves

Created August 12, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

This came through at 3am, I got out of bed and am writing it down.

Materialistic Accidentalism is a story we made up to explain reality to ourselves. In their heart of hearts, most of the people in the world today assume that the universe is an accident and that it is principally made up of matter. Most of the rest believe their religious explanation, and navigate through a wicked materialistic world as best they can, keeping to their articles of faith and training regarding the guard rails on their own behavior as best they can.

Let’s play a game. I’ll make up a story that is at least equally plausible as the latter two stories, Materialistic Accidentalism and religious creation explanations. Frankly, it will be more consistent with the latter, but that is not because of prejudgment or bias on my part, it just comes out that way as a result of logic. Here is my story:

Consciousness is a real thing in itself. Consciousness is the substrate, the primal content of the universe. Consciousness projects matter which pushes back when we push on it, which is really the processing of signals at the subatomic level of matter. Consciousness invented the brain to use the way we use our personal computers, to do the boring work for us.

The brain was our first personal computer.

War Reflects a Wrong Idea About Reality

The story that we each are separate is easy to believe because it sure feels that way. The sense of self is what consciousness is. It’s composed of coherent energy.

It’s conceivable that all of us together are cells in a single consciousness which has a richer, more multifaceted sense of self. Like the multifaceted eye of a fly on a higher level.

Not having, in our everyday state of consciousness, any awareness of such a connected reality of consciousness, we are alienated, we act selfishly, self-protectively, competitively, and sit in judgment of everyone else. In the end this leads to war and could lead to the entire destruction of the planet and everything on it. Looking at it from the perspective of our species, we are on our way to committing mass suicide, justified by lots of blather and by motivations which are dark humor if my story about who we are happens to turn out to be the real explanation. Like a man punching himself in the face. If we are in fact all one Being.

We are not here to accumulate land and absorb whole other countries, nor to rack up toys/material objects, praise and worship, fame, sex partners, power or money.

We are here to evolve as a consciousness. The road ahead, in my story, is that we will live again and again, and the long trend is upward to greater sanity and perceptual scope. Ultimately to being self-aware in the totality consciousness, the Original Self.

In the internal logic of my story/explanation of reality, competing against Accidental Materialism and the religious creation stories, the One Original Consciousness is what is creating each of our individual consciousnesses by populating us from within, looking out our eyes, as what we sense as OUR self. We are all avatars in the original video game.

What We Call the Subconscious Is Actually the Superconscious

In our present state of normal everyday consciousness, we are confused by such statements, since “sub” means “below” and “super” means “above”, it seems like a meaningless statement, an oxymoron. This linear black and white thinking is part of the limitation inherent in what we call normal consciousness.

What I’m saying is that what we call our subconscious is our real self, submerged in ego. The ego – a function of the brain, our personal inbuilt computer, the neural net built into our brains by our assimilated and unassimilated experiences – has taken over the castle of our mind. We now identify with the ego sub-sentience that is street-smart to, and resonant with, our ego dominated materialistic selfish Acceleritis-riddled culture, taking ego as our true self, when actually it is not. We have repressed our true self (what Freud called the id) and over-ridden it with the “out for number one” persona that takes over in early childhood.

Every now and then our real self tries to say something and that registers as a hunch. Or a dream, if we happen to be sleeping. Or, as flashes of true insight we get as we are lucky enough to slip into the Observer state or the Flow state. I’m positing that those higher state experiences are our true self, the self was born, breaking through the clouds.

Extra Motorific Competency

Another name for the Flow state might be Extra Motorific Competency, in terms of our ability to perform flawlessly in action. This is a takeoff of Extra Sensory Perception – ESP and EMC. Making the point that they are both aspects of the same thing: the arising of a more intelligent, competent, balanced and ethical part of ourselves, with unsuspected powers operating.

Both types of experiences – ESP and EMC – when we have them feel otherworldly, like nothing else we have ever experienced. They are Maslovian “peak experiences”. Numinous. What Freud called the “oceanic” feeling.

Observer state is a more subtle experience, that does not seem in any way “supernatural”. It is simply metacognition: being able to objectively consider one’s thoughts and feelings. The importance of the Observer state is that it is the doorway to Flow state. I’m reporting solely from my own experiences in saying that.

At 3am, half-asleep, when I started taking this down in scribbled notes I was experiencing it as taking dictation. This has been going on since I was a child. I hear whole sentences which excite me and I have to write them down so I don’t have to worry about not remembering it in the morning. I associate taking dictation in this way with inspiration in the classical sense used by Plato and metaphorized as the Muses. In modern slang it’s “channeling”. But channeling whom? Our true selves, what we now call our subconscious. Except that it is more powerful than what we call our conscious mind which – until we are in Observer state – is actually the ego, our internalized personal biocomputer.

These “magical” (that’s the way they feel) experiences of Flow state, ESP, taking dictation, are as real to me as everything else I experience, like inventing a new type of optimizer, or meeting my wife for the first time, or taking a vacation, or boiling eggs.

That is not scientific proof. But since it is real to me, and works to make me more effective in my life, I take my story as being the one I’m betting on. It’s pragmatic for me to do that because it works. When I ignore my hunches, or am cowed by being painted as “weird” by the imposing size of the ego culture, I do not perform at Flow state level.

I do expect that science will come around to validating my story. It might not happen in our current lifetimes. Science is on its way there as a result of relativity, quantum physics, and information theory. Consciousness is the “observer” in relativity. Consciousness “freezes probability waves” in quantum physics. Consciousness itself is information processing. Physicists and psychologists are divided between stories but tenure and security are tied to sticking with Materialistic Accidentalism until there is unassailable scientific proof of a different story. The ego culture is totalitarian in that way.

Coming back to religion. Above I wrote that my story competes with the religious creation stories. That was an oversimplification. My story could actually be the scientific explanation for their stories. For example, there can be little doubt that Jesus and Buddha experienced Flow state. My scifi novel The First Son is a fictionalized demonstration of how Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and other religions could have come from Flow state inspiration and taking dictation. My story and the religious stories are unified in that book and in Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, my newest scifi novel, set about thirty years in the future from today.

“God does not play dice with the universe.” –Einstein, denying Accidentalism

I set this nighttime dictation as a note in a bottle here to float out across the history of time… until it is found and considered by those whose minds are open to all possibilities not yet verified or disconfirmed by science.

Love to all,

Bill

Editing Impulsive Neediness

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Created August 5, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

As always in this column I’m writing about self-mastery. The objective is for most if not all of us to achieve and maintain the Observer and Flow states, the higher states of consciousness in which we are more effective. We need herd immunity to the lower states of consciousness dominating our culture up until now.

We need it now more than ever, as the acceleration of negative events is obvious to us all: the human race is running amok. Just to cite the most recent example, the leaders of China are tossing missiles around. Would that they had assimilated the ideas of Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the I Ching.

This macro behavior starts at the personal individual level. Each of us can only improve our own personal behavior. It could take a long time for this shift to roll over enough of the population to make a difference. But it is the only way to get to the desired end state. And for each of us, it will make whatever may happen to us more bearable if we are in these higher states during what may be trying times ahead.

Not that trying times are inevitable. We mustn’t underestimate the power of the media to effect shifts positive or negative. So far no one has organized the media to promote positive shifts. Such a scenario (as fictionalized in Pandemonium: Live To All Devices) could have significant positive impact on the outcome of the latest threat vectors.

I’ve written recently about the way the ego – the part of the mind that is driven to get us what we feel we need – as a result of various cultural pressures (information overload, complexity of life, expectations placed on us, restrictions on our creativity, too many unassimilated traumatic errors in our trial and error growing up phase) has become defensive. Without realizing it about ourselves, most of us tend to be continually attempting to compensate for having already been somewhat defeated.

Good and sensible things can have bad effects if taken to extremes. The ego function is not inherently a bad idea, but under present world conditions it becomes toxic. We overreact, and do so prematurely. We have been wrong too often, we see ourselves as having been victimized too often, we have been frustrated too often. In a less complex and more egalitarian society, with less continuous stress, less sense of continuous time pressure, more opportunity to be creative, the ego would function normally and not become toxified.

In our brains the amygdala is involved in this phenomenon. It goes into fight or flight reaction. A good thing to have when one is actually being physically threatened, but not such a good thing when it goes off all the time in what are, realistically, not situations that are all that threatening.

The wisest philosophers in history have painted a picture of what it is to be an ideal human being. It involves a degree of moderation and balance, not getting carried away to one extreme nor to the opposite extreme. In the Kabbalah, one’s work and love, mercy and severity, wisdom (knowing right action) and understanding (forgiving and curing wrong action) must be brought into balance in order to achieve inspiration (Flow state). A nobility of spirit in taking responsibility and care for other people, a friend to the world, with a true and profound commitment to that degree of empathy. This is what it is to be a mensch.

In the origins of show business, the Greeks invented tragedy and comedy plays. Tragedy portrayed a noble spirit who fell off the wagon into hubris – the ego. Comedy portrayed people in lower states of consciousness and how funny their behaviors are when looked at from a higher perspective.

Hisandherstory looked at through this lens reveals that we as a race knew it all along. We knew about Observer and Flow states. We knew about ego. We just used other words to describe the same things.

A noble individual exudes calm and remains calm no matter what happens. This makes that individual more effective. Such an individual does not seem at all needy to others. He or she is not addicted to anything, so threats of having something taken away may be regarded objectively.

We today who have been so ravaged by life in an ego dominated culture and yet aspire to get out of that stuckness, can benefit from remembering and using these methods:

Don’t act on impulse. First study the impulse and why you are having it. Is it coming from some sort of neediness, for attention, or affection, or recognition, or from fear of loss? Remain calm, breathe deeply, edit the impulse rather than acting on it.
When you feel suddenly brought down by something, not as happy as you were a second ago, push that reaction away and study it without wearing it. Decide calmly what to do – because the higher function of those negative feelings is like an alarm to get you to focus on solving something. Take it as a creative challenge. There is probably no rush, it’s likely a problem that has been around for a long time.

We all know these secret tricks perhaps, but we don’t always use them. The future of the planet depends upon rising to the occasion and being our worthiest selves 24/7. Fortunately, it can be catching. When we see someone else acting rightly it brings us up. We just need that to go viral.

Love,

Bill

Setting Up a New Command Center in Your Mind

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Created July 8, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

If you are horrified by what is going on in the world today and wish you had the power to make it better, here’s how to get that power and to start using it for the good.

Nothing can be achieved until you are master of your “self”.

A battlefield shortcut methodology to achieve self-mastery is summarized in this post.

Imagine that you are installing a new spot in your mind to which you can return at will. A place you can go to whenever you really need effectiveness, and to get away from all bugaboos you use to torture yourself.

Furnishing the New Command Post

First, understand what this place is. It’s a new/old perspective point where you rise above all that has come before and start anew every time you arrive there. You’ve visited that terrain before, perhaps, at times when you just threw up your hands and gave up on everything. You may have felt it oddly freeing rather than a continuation of despair in a new guise. It is definitely identifiable by the freedom you feel to modify, override, replace, erase even the things for which you’ve been desperately striving for a long time. You can think of it as the Reset Button. The wellsprings of unbounded creativity live in this place.

Another attribute of the Command Post is that you feel a fondness for your own most noble impulses. And an impatience with your own whining tendencies. Keep that feeling alive to you every moment.

You may also feel that everything you thought you knew is really half-knowledge, that you’ve been going along with everyone else because resistance would have been futile, but from here in the Command Post you are able to dispassionately observe things as if experiencing them for the first time.

Now that you’ve acclimated to the subconscious/feeling aspects of the new Control Center, here are the recommended conscious furnishings:

Apply your new perspective to see the humor in the things that have been your personal albatrosses. And through that same lens to continuously see the humor in all things, even if at some times expressing that to others may be insensitive, and make a point of remembering that last point, i.e., it’s sometimes better to keep that perception of humor to yourself. At other times the other people around you will benefit from that perspective. You’ll need to see which way your noblest self feels at that moment and act accordingly.
Remove all barriers to feeling the love that you feel for the things and entities that you love. Start with yourself. Get in touch with the love you feel for yourself. See what you feel is loveable about yourself. Now migrate carefully from there to plumbing the depths of your spirit to what it is you are here on Earth to accomplish. Once you have a feeling for your life’s purpose, write it down in the form of a vow, an intention, what you intend to do, despite the challenges in the way. However, recognize that the actual outcomes will not be 100% under your control so that you cannot equate the intention with any guarantee of success. All you guarantee is that you are going to give it your very best shot every moment. However, it comes out will be up to the total system, the Universe. Here in the Command Post you shall never give in to feeling attached to how it will all come out.
What logically flows from the prior furniture you’ve just installed, is the supportive, empowering intention to not waste your own computing power on nonsense. Respect the power and value of your own being, your own mind for example, and don’t simply tolerate the situations in which you find your mind in the default network of simply hopping from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, aimlessly and without hookup to your reason for being, your self-assigned mission.
Install a mirror. Make sure to look in that inner mirror while hanging out in the Command Module.
Install a periscope. Use it to take a long view of what is going on in the rest of the world which appears to exist outside you. Understand the difference between the frame of mind you are now in (in the Command Center) and the frame of mind of all the hysterical people racing around out there. Make a vow, a strong intention, to catch yourself when you slip back into that default network conditioned by the culture into which you were born, and to remind yourself that you’re better than that, and move back into your Command Center.
Form a talisman and put it on. It will be your philosopher’s stone, the tool you use know whether to flow with your natural first inclination, or to wait and check things out before allowing your motor control to obey your first natural impulse from within. This talisman of discrimination will enable you to easily move into the Flow state much more often, and also prevent you from making disastrous mistakes. The way it works is you carefully and continuously use the mirror to detect negativity in what you are about to say or do. Negativity is a sign of non-Flow-state impulses. Letting through impulses directed by love is the sign of oncoming Flow state.Now that you’ve set up your Command Center, spend as much time there as possible, while doing what you have to do based on prior agreements, and/or while carrying out your mission.

How This Relates to Dealing with the Horrors of the Present

From your new Command Post you will be in the best possible condition to help others deal with the fears and angers endemic to the current world situation in which all of the malingering ancient errors have been magnified by the latest technology, and compounded together into an enormous traffic snarl affecting all the minds on the planet. Around you people will begin to feel better and will become more able to make effective decisions to exercise damage control over their own lives and the lives of the people they love. This will ripple outwards.

The people who are most carried away by their self-inflicted wounds will find themselves losing the support of those who have cleared away most of the debris in their minds. This may initially make them even more dangerous but ultimately they will have to take stock of what is happening and make some new decisions. We are social animals. We are all codependent. We have tremendous influence over each other. This has been part of the problem but if we play our cards right, from our personal Command Centers, we can make it part of the solution.

Love,

Bill

You Can Revolutionize Your Thinking

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Created May 6, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

What good would that do you? It would give you a whole new vista on your choices in life. You stand to lose nothing by trying it. If you love everything about your life already, I’d say stand pat. Otherwise, here’s how to revolutionize your thinking.

Disadvantages of conventional thought processing

Tends to create ruts which can go on for a lifetime
You tend to ignore inner sixth sense trying to warn you or give you just the right words to use in a conversation
The awe and electricity of the way life can feel – the zest – trickles off
The Flow state (Zone) experience doesn’t happen to you as often as you’d like

One level deeper – the technical flaws in conventional thought processing that make it the most self-limiting are:

You too often fly into following whatever your inner impulse seems to be at the moment
You are not paying attention to your subtle guidance system – your intuition – so that valuable ideas you need remain “subconscious”

Let’s take these two things one at a time.

Going with your ego flow (better stop doing it!)

What’s so wrong about going with whatever you feel at the moment? Isn’t that what Flow is all about?

No. That’s not Flow state, it’s the momentum of ego, the built-up viral load of all unassimilated experiences, the robot, the predictable persona that masks as the real you even to you. You may tell yourself it’s Flow state but unless it meets the following description, it’s not, it’s your ego overclaiming as usual.

Flow state is about your ego disappearing, you feeling as if The Force is moving you, your actions are perfect, there is no sense of self versus other, there is no attachment to outcome, you are enjoying yourself, your mind is moving much faster than events.

In Flow state – while it lasts – and especially as you are starting to slip out of it – you will have some terrific thoughts, and then you will actively add afterthoughts that are your ego trying to keep up with your intuition, and the thought packets will not have labels on them to allow you to easily separate the imitative ego from the Flow-inspired giant thought of a moment earlier. Learning the trick of being especially skeptical of follow-up thoughts will help you stay in the Flow state.

Leaving the special case of Flow state aside for a moment, in the non-Flow state most people are in most of the time, it’s a terrible strategy to act on every impulse, or even to take ownership of every thought and feeling you have as being something you totally believe in. Many thoughts we have are autonomic nervous system tapes playing in our heads, reinforced by how often we have played those tapes before. If we do not watch ourselves like hawks, we will stay in the same place for a lifetime, stuck at a certain level.

Not all of your thoughts (and feelings) are equally smart. Most are automatic involuntary reactions like the mental version of kneejerks.

Learn to suspend judgment about each thought and especially each feeling that you have. Pay more attention to the feelings that come upon you suddenly, especially the negative ones, and do not tolerate the immediate giving in to feeling deflated. Pause. Return to neutral. Study what has just happened. Diagnose what caused it. Question why you should allow yourself to not to choose joy right now, in every now. Resist these automatic impulses, do not cave to them instantly anymore. Discriminate carefully before movement and before acceptance of a specific negative mood. Refuse to continue to be a manipulatable creature of habit. Start your life over with a clean slate. Forgive yourself and everyone else for all of history to date and start over in each moment. There is nothing to be gained from carrying along the wounds of the past other than understanding the point of the lessons they taught you so you can apply those lessons going forward.

Making your subconscious conscious

Daniel Kahneman has given us a new linguistic tool that helps in describing The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) methods: Kahneman’s System 1 is thinking fast and System 2 is thinking slow, as he describes them. We see subdivisions in his two Systems which we’ll go into in future columns but for now let’s use his apt descriptions another way. Your subconscious can get through to your conscious when you are in System 1, but not doing anything. You might be meditating or just sitting around or walking in the woods, but you are not trying to figure anything out.

Most people at most times when they are not in any activity requiring focus are daydreaming or letting their minds go anywhere they might based on free association. That’s one way to use System 1 but it won’t lead to revolutionizing your thinking process. The other way to use these times of taking a break is to simply observe your own mind as it were someone else’s. Don’t let it catch you up into any of its dramas. This is surprisingly hard to do the first hundred times you try it, but it starts to get easier after the first session if you keep it up. Question every thought, even if it is a thought you consider to be one of your most important values.

But don’t encourage yourself to debate each item at the time, jot it down in a log of your experiences for later inner debate, and as soon as possible return to taking a vacation from thinking, or to use the technical term, meditating. This is the state most conducive to detecting your normally-subconscious thoughts and feelings.

This brief article attempts to summarize my entire book Mind Magic in fewer than a thousand words. It obviously leaves a lot out, but I hope it helps.

Love to all,

Bill