Category Archives: Flow State

Becoming Immediately More Effective

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Created August 23, 2021

The aim of reading this article is that it will stimulate your own mind to the degree that you can sense something is happening to you inside, and it will accelerate your own metacognitive programs (the ones you discovered for yourself) to further develop faster.

If it doesn’t work, please let me know.

Probably the most distinguished developmental psychologist of our age, John H. Flavell coined the term “metacognition” to mean the mind considering itself (those were not his words, he said “thinking about thinking, or more formally, cognition about cognition”). He wrote that in 1976.

That same year my manual for metacognition MIND MAGIC came out.

The only thing is, I didn’t know it was a manual for that; I had used the term “Observer state” to describe metacognition in its most practiced and achieved state.

Now that I have belatedly caught up with Dr. Flavell (and blown away by the William James brilliance of his writing) I see how to inject my work into the science of psychology (my minor). Of course, that makes me very happy. Marketing science and data science (specializing in optimization) have been my official sciences and now I have an avenue to potentially funnel my work on consciousness, into psychology. I anticipate synergies with the work of many others, especially neuroscientists who have identified the agencies by which certain qualia (inner subjective experiences) appear in the consciousness, as my work has focused within the qualia, the use of introspection and concentration to come up with “mind tricks” that pragmatically work to improve social interaction, finding one’s passion work, and performing it.

I promised a pre-experience of what it is like to go through the manual.

Let’s start with the quest for peak experience. We all have had them, and some people have them all the time. They are self-evidently desirable states to have more often. That is the aim here. The ultimate purpose of my work.

A map is always helpful when one starts a journey. How do we map the levels of waking consciousness?

  • Maslow posited three states of waking consciousness, the first focused on deficiencies, the second focused on the release of one’s gifts, and a spiritual level he added toward the end of his life
  • Csikszentmihalyi coined the term Flow to characterize the state of perfect action
  • Flavell coined the term “metacognition” to mean the mind’s reflection upon its own behaviors and states
  • If we put this all together on one map, mixed in with my own speculations and empirical findings, it looks like this:

Looking at the righthand bar, metacognition appears to be a precondition of the Observer state, just as the Observer state is a precondition for the Flow state. For example, the program known as the Will within the qualia appears more strongly in the Observer state than in beginner’s level metacognition. The Will is what is required to overrule one’s prior thought. The Observer state is still metacognition, but it is fully developed, especially in terms of the Will.

Metacognition – the practice of thinking about one’s thought processes

Observer state – the temporary or permanent ability to objectively challenge one’s own prior thought or feeling

Flow state – automatic “perfect” performance

There are today many brilliant writers on the subject of metacognition and I hope to meet all of them. In their writings as well as in Dr. Flavell’s, the prefix “meta” is seen preceding other functions of mind as in metamemory, etc. In the table below you will see many of these “metas”.

Mind Magic chapters, now that I can look at them through the lens of metacognition, can be classified as follows (I suggest a glance down the righthand column, then skipping the table for later contemplation). In the table, the word “challenge” always means to challenge oneself, inside.

The journey goes something like this for the reader:

A – I must have been in some sense hypnotized to have allowed myself to assume it’s OK for me to be living this desperate life

B – Living in this racing age, it’s understandable that as a soft babe I was certain to be awed into going along with all this and have never woken up since

1 – Since I obviously have to take control of my own life now, there’s no going back, I need some hints as to how to navigate, and the first thing I have to do is to avoid jumping to conclusions too soon, I have to check myself constantly

2 – Why did I just do that? I hurt someone’s feelings and I feel like an ass. What makes me act that way, I must locate the program, and fix it so my programmed mind stops doing that to me

3 – I sound like a broken record. Why am I always playing tapes of old stories or whatnot? I must find the root of that behavior and fix it so I can act anew every moment, from where I am in the now, not imitating my own past behavior

4 – I can save time by just doing my best and learning from my mistakes without making it personal, it’s pathetic how I good boy bad boy myself what a waste of time and how ignobly embarrassing

5 – Yes but what do I really want out of life? Is that what I really want? Am I potentially very good at that? What is the evidence for that? Ahah! I have found my dream again

6 – Taking in what is going on, situational awareness, studying people, keeping mind open

7 – Staying focused through complexity by revolving attention, maintaining many streams of thought at once

8 – Not rushing in prematurely but waiting for the foreseen to happen in the dance, nor hesitating past the right moment

9 – Dis-identifying with the contents of one’s own mind so as to be able to re-decide whether or not one wants to continue to wear each of those particular attitudes/beliefs

10 – I can actually look more closely at my thoughts arising, first there is a fleeting image or memory of some sort, followed by a feeling either good or bad, and then snatches of words I am saying to myself

11 – Why must I entertain negative feelings? Isn’t that like purposely wounding myself? I must creatively transmute negative feelings into positive action, without hesitation as soon as I sense negative feelings, stop knifing myself as soon as possible

12 – If I identify with all I perceive, I wind up nurturing other people and myself into the bargain, what an improvement over the selfish way I lived until now, not taking responsibility for others

Outroduction – A vicarious sample of what it feels like to be in the state exhorted by this manual

If you put this article into practice without needing the manual, I shall be extremely pleased. Reading more examples of these general principles helps when you are trying to embody new behaviors, which is why I wrote MIND MAGIC, feel free to go either way, please just get to be in the Observer state for as much of the time as possible, and into Flow as often as possible.

The present world situation requires it of all of us to be at our highest performing best. It might be the only way out, and the gift to us from the Universe, that She, Nature, is forcing us to find, by threatening to collapse our world around us, and we did it to ourselves by not using our heads.

In this case the end gift of higher mind may actually justify the scary means.

Best to all,

Bill

 

Favoring Your Better Side

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Created June 11, 2021

In the prior post I wrote about Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), which I hypothesize to be a milder version of Post Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD). At the end I provided a few brief takeaways that are effective mind tricks to get out of EOP and into your naturally most effective and happy states of consciousness:

  • Observer state in which you are able to really see your Self, where you have the reins to metaprogram your own behavior with true free will and creativity – vs. EOP where you are inattentive, predictable and robotic and not totally sentient. I hypothesize Observer state to be our state in nature prior to the existence of written language, civilization, culture, and the information overload it has all led to today. Remember, from the standpoint of the 12.1 million years it took to develop our species out of ape stock, the 5000 years since written language began is a relative eyeblink (.004% of the time since we started): EOP could simply be the initial shock reaction of the immense acceleration our species has gone though in only the last 250 generations.
  • Flow state in which, during well-practiced and/or innately gifted behavior, you are so immersed in what you are doing that it appears to be doing itself better than you thought you could, although you are at play and not attached to any outcome.

Readers of my book MIND MAGIC sometimes ask me if there is a way that I can simplify my advice. For example, consider this Amazon review:

“This book is THE owner’s manual for the mind. This book presents nearly impossible challenges to even the most powerful and dedicated seekers. I’ve never known a single person that actually finished the work contained in this book.”
—   Benjamin Zabriskie, Amazon review of MIND MAGIC

For readers of this blog, this post will attempt to release you from your Emergency Oversimplification Procedure by means of extreme further simplification. This would seem to be self-contradictory but let’s see if it works anyway.

The strategy recommended here also judos dichotomania (binary coding, seeing everything as polar opposites) which is an aspect of EOP, doing so by reducing everything to noting the two streams of inner dialog and images/feelings in your mind.

From this moment on, if you agree to try this experiment with me, note what you are thinking and feeling from moment to moment and decide which of your two selves that thought or feeling represents:

  • Your Better Self – Heroic, blasé, confident, positive, constructive, compassionate, loving, kind, strong, determined to always do the right thing
  • Your Frail Human Side – Fearful, worried, escapist, taking refuge in addictive practices, having no faith in happy endings, seeking the easy way out, guilty and remorseful about the past

Without overthinking it (because you could become as indecisive as Hamlet if you wait for rational certainty) steer toward your hero side at all times. Do not blame your other self for having unworthy thoughts or feelings. If you have an unworthy thought don’t touch it. Don’t act on it. Don’t yell at it. Don’t even reject it. Just let it sit there in the wake of your mind contrails and drift away into the past without giving it further attention as you move onto into the next new now. Instead turn to considering testing alternative ways of doing things in the future which ought to soothe and remove the cause of whatever it was that gave you those craven thoughts or feelings.

If this simplified method works for you, it will mean that it is a sound means for you to use to get into the Observer state, where you can see the EOP side of yourself but take away its power over you. Where you can drill down to causality paths that will remove the sadness and bad feelings the EOP mind retains but is unable to terminally process. Your better side will be able to remove all the gunk in your mind. Just hew to your higher self and you will re-become that self you were always meant to be in the first place.

All my best,

Bill

The Whole Human Race Has PTSD

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Created June 4, 2021

Post Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) is usually associated with combat veterans, but civilians have also had it after being in violent or dangerous situations. To millions of whites in this country having Obama elected president was a traumatic shock, and to half of Americans the Trump years were a prolonged traumatic shock. On top of these conditions came the pandemic, having to teach your own children what they were supposed to be learning at school, having your home turned into a submarine of compression togetherness, the insurrection, and the escalating publicity about police and domestic violence, the collapsing environment, overstretched national debt levels, threatening signs from other nations, and the ongoing sense of unreconcilable differences tearing us apart.

More than enough to account for the mass PTSD, leading with help from certain media to a degree of mass hysteria.

Maybe we should call it OTSS: Ongoing Traumatic Shock Syndrome.

The first step is to admit the possibility that you have a degree of PTSD. You may feel unmoored lately, unsure of your place in the world, unsure of where the future may be going for you, troubled by frictions within the family that had never existed before, challenged to keep the same level of income coming in. You may not be as certain what you believe in as you always had been. Letting yourself acknowledge such feelings is essential to begin to process those feelings into constructive thought and action.

My theory is that the human race has been in a degree of PTSD for a very long time. In MIND MAGIC I refer to the somewhat milder PTSD condition as EOP: Emergency Oversimplification Procedure. I believe we began to develop pandemic EOP about 5000 years ago when we started to see written language, which did something to our minds that has never been equaled.

The spread of EOP accelerated as written language led us to invent tools, weapons, machinery, media, governments, technology, science, and innumerable other things.

EOP results when we do not feel we have the attentional capacity to deal with the many questions in our minds, and so we decide to short-cut our thinking.

This increases the tendency toward:

  • dichotomania, the predisposition to perceive that everything fits neatly into one of two boxes which are polar opposites of one another;
  • subscribing to and becoming fanatically loyal to pre-packaged notions such as religions and ideologies;
  • increasing power to confirmation bias;
  • avoiding consideration of the largest questions in life;
  • replaying the same tapes over and over in one’s mind and in one’s speech;
  • actually hallucinating that one is seeing exactly what one expected to see and to hear exactly what one expected to hear, although that is not what really happened;
  • hasty closure, making up one’s mind too fast;
  • not thinking for oneself, although one may see oneself as a paragon of individualism and independence;
  • over-generalization: one person of that ‘type’ does X so all of that type do X
  • and a horde of other self-hypnotic, robotical microbehaviors, all of which underestimate the desirability of more objective self-observation, therefore keeping us out of the Observer state, and significantly reducing our chances of getting into the Flow state.

I started to write about EOP nearly half a century ago, and expected that in my readings I would eventually discover that someone thought of this a long time ago. Strangely, despite my wide-ranging reading over the years, I never came across the notion of EOP by any other name.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I was reading about the work of a fellow marketing/media researcher, Professor Karen Nelson-Field, whom I’ve met a number of times. What never came up in our brief conversations at conferences is that she has observed EOP and describes it using other language:

KNF: I’d like to give the attention economy a bit of background, if I may because it’s quite a buzzword now. Many people don’t really understand the context and its background. We all know that we live in this age of extreme distraction and our capacity to process is very small. What happens is that humans make decision shortcuts, and give little thought to what it is to avoid information overload. They give little thought to researching every single thing that comes past the desk.

The attention economy comes from the concept that taking decision shortcuts when you’re an air traffic controller or when you’re driving a car is not ideal. I think the study of information overload started during the World War II era. What impact does that have on our economic and social systems?

By its nature, the attention economy is a study of inattention and its economic or social impact.

Essentially, we want to understand not only the cause of inattention, the consequences of inattention but also some ethical solutions to correct it. MORE

I applaud Karen’s thinking and am grateful to now know of another scientist giving credence to what I call EOP.

Brief takeaways for countering EOP and thus returning to the more natural Observer state, doorway to the Flow state:

  • Stop moving, breathe deeply, observe your mind as if from afar.
  • Hold off on agreeing with the thoughts and feelings that arise in you, reconsider them from the other side with a fully open mind, reset the basic assumptions to zero just for this interlude.
  • Feel, look and listen for small “voices” (could be feelings or images) that are hunches about something you hadn’t been considering, trying to break through to your attention.

Best to all,

Bill

A Way to Decide How to Live Your Life

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Created March 5, 2021

Painful periods in history have always made us stronger. Other than the venom of our disagreements, we now show great promise as a race. We are now advanced enough to come up in less than a year with vaccines that work against novel deadly viruses, and several nations are visiting Mars right now. Think of all the great new tech we are making and using together. If robots put us all out of jobs, governments and businesses will have to sponsor us so they still have someone to sell things to.

On the other hand, everyone is so roiled up by the last few years of callous misuse of media for political and financial gain, including several nations that had taken years to calm down, it could all blow up before we get to ultimate technotopia.

It would sure be a shame to let that happen.

Because if we can keep a steady hand on the tiller, it’s in everyone’s self-interest to not blow it all up, but for national leaders to create win/win trade deals keeping the whole machine going and making it work better year after year.

As nations and as individuals, we’ve all gotta feel for the other “guy” because either we’re one big happy family or we’re one big dysfunctional war hole.

The biggest disagreement that is driving us apart reflects two very different worldviews. One view assumes that the universe is benevolent or neutral, and that everyone is trying to do the right thing. The other view is that the universe is a dangerous place filled with both good and evil beings. Those of the latter view naturally are more likely to exhibit hate and be prone to violence.

Millions or billions of us need to really rethink about how to live the rest of our lives. It might be a whole different worldview than we have lived by until now.

The way I go about thinking about how to live my life starts from looking over what I think the world is.

I find it implausible that the universe is an accident.

The one thing that I am certain exists, is my consciousness. If my consciousness can exist, a God-sized consciousness could also exist. That consciousness might regard itself in some other way than as God per se. That consciousness could be as scientific as a far more advanced version of our science. It could have a sense of self the way we do. It could know itself better than we each know ourselves. It could realize that it is a vast biocomputer, that it processes information the way our minds do.

It could have such immense processing power that it can pay attention to an infinite number of different things at once. In that way, it could be playing a three-dimensional “videogame” through us, its avatars.

If that were the case, our consciousness could live forever, once our current body stops working.

None of this is unscientific. Great scientists differ in their hunches as to ideas like this; one of the greatest physicists of all time, John Wheeler, had an open mind about such subjects. He postulated that consciousness is an essential causal factor in making the reality we experience, exist. (The link brings you to a ten-minute video explaining this in more detail for those interested.)

All religions could be essentially true, including the miracles. Who among us has not experienced miracles such as suddenly knowing something is going to happen, what someone else is thinking, or receiving an incredibly good idea out of the blue? Some of us have experienced more inexplicable things than others. I’ve shared my own strange experiences in my book You Are The Universe.

Paranormal experiences have brought out the spiritual feelings I had as a small child. People who have not had those experiences are highly likely to be skeptical about God.

I was highly skeptical of the things I was told about religion. As life confirmed the predictions inherent in all truly religious ethical statements, I became somewhat more open-minded. I identified in myself a cultural bias which dichotomized my thinking into pro-science/anti-religion vs. pro-religion/anti-science.

I concluded that one must allow for the probability of some sort of God. That had not been ruled out by science. That was when I began to think about how they might both be true.

I see the universe as a single consciousness. The original Experiencer is living through each of us, not just humans but everything. That is my take on what is going on. I invite you to start again to consider what the universe may be, and how your bet in reality is going to guide you to right action, in your future reimagined free of lockdowns your mind may have firmly decided in the past.

Even though we have learned millions of amazing things since we began, we still know very little about the largest questions, who are we, why are we here, and therefore we must bet our lives on some basic assumptions that are relevant to decision making day to day.

My baseline is that everything that has not been ruled out by science is possible. And so, my actions should be optimized for both an accidental material-only world versus a God World in which each of us is God, temporarily self-hypnotized for the zest of the game.

But beyond actions, one also has feelings, and feelings inside of us should also be optimized. If we merely go through life deferring the question of what the whole universe is, we are avoiding one of the most important aspects of being alive, and merely closeting the wonder and awe we were born with.

Aesthetically, I am betting on the God Universe. Pragmatically that also allows me to experience hunches and inspirations and spiritual feelings for all things and beings, which I find to be all very positive feeling experiences.

Since we cannot know definitively, the game is set up that way, we can either bet one way or another or can optimize for all worldviews simultaneously. But we cannot walk around the question of what we feel the universe is. It’s a key part of the journey. From that will come the wellspring of inspiration that will show you your new high road in life.

All my best, Bill

PS – Chapter 12 of MIND MAGIC provides more specific recommendations on how to reopen your mind to the expanded worldview possibilities of consciousness itself, which John Wheeler and other eminent quantum physicists have validated as consistent with quantum theory.