Category Archives: Mind Magic

A Time for Love, Forgiveness, and Flow State

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 14, 2025
Created November 4, 2021

Happy Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love.

Many see Valentine’s Day as a time for romantic love. But it doesn’t have to be only that. Let’s celebrate love, just love; much more than an emotion, it is the highest state of the human heart. Why not celebrate brotherly love, love of neighbor, love of country, love of nature, just love. The world needs it more than ever.

So, we are reposting this issue of the blog to look at what becoming more loving and forgiving might entail.

In a prior post, taking a page from Freud’s id, ego, superego division of consciousness, but altering it to suit my own experience, I defined three places you could be at any given moment:

  1. Seated in the essence of your Self, the experiencer, enjoyer, observer, taking it all in without excessive caring, in a state of high indifference, accepting what is and gleaning whatever pleasure you could get out of it (Freud characterized the id quite differently, more like an animal)
  2. In the current normal state of win/lose consciousness, instantly judging, always comparing to the ideal state and feeling cheated (Ego)
  3. Beating yourself up for some perceived failing (Superego)

In the prior post we provided an exercise to help you discern which state you are in.

Now, to take it a step further, let us reveal that Flow state is when your Self (the #1 state described above) is in control of your entire being.

In my psychological theory, it is the proclivity to spend time in those other two states which is responsible for keeping us, as a race, out of the Flow state.

Come with me at least provisionally and see if it doesn’t help you experience Flow more frequently, including right now as you read this.

Spurn mundane consciousness, the life we have all been living, sucked into such attachment to conditioned target objectives that in today’s multi-challenged world, we are angry and disappointed nearly all the time, because it covers our fear of even more tragic losses ahead.

Choose the mind that is different, that is above the madding crowd, the perspective of a Plato or Aristotle or Buddha or Jesus The Christ.

Whether you “believe in” God or not, the thoughts and words of people like these have come down to us through the ages and continue to sparkle with eminent truth. Let’s take Jesus as their exemplar for the purpose of achieving Flow state as Jesus did.

We call ourselves a Christian country, yet these qualities are not exclusive to any one group of human beings, in my worldview everyone, in their Self (#1 above), reverberates with these loving, forgiving values.

United we stand, divided we fall, has never been more true than today. Forget parties, who did what to whom, let’s forgive it all at once, one big forgiving, and get on with it, working cooperatively to overcome the numerous threats to our existence which we ourselves have created by spending lifetimes in states #2 and #3.

World leaders, readers, I’m not saying to stop what you’re doing, by all means, keep up the great work, just be sure to always do it in the spirit of true love, friendship, and forgiveness, so as to evoke the Flow state in yourself and in all of us. The more of us in the Flow state, the easier it is for the rest of us to get there, because we’re all connected.

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

—John Donne

Let’s each of us make ourselves and the people around us happy by staying in loving forgiving Flow all the time. We can do it. It’s just a matter of learning attitude control.

Like in an airplane. The rudder and ailerons are the control surfaces, and we have controls in our hands and feet. Except you are the airplane, and the control surfaces are inside you, you have to learn to use them.

Nothing else, I predict, is going to get the human race out of this befouled nest of our own making. It will be an upsurge in understanding that the solution lies within each one of us, that it isn’t just talk, it’s science.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi passed away just before this was posted. He coined the term Flow. He proved it was real by training the University of Chicago (where he was head of the psychology department) hockey team to win by inner attitude control. He was an advisor to my nonprofit Human Effectiveness Institute, which puts out this free course in a blog.

Beware of darkness, as George Harrison wrote, don’t let the world get you down, when you sense anything making you feel bad realize that you have slipped into either state 2 or 3, and get back into 1.

Don’t make it bad, as the Beatles wrote in Hey Jude. It is what it is. Labeling it bad immediately lowers your effectiveness and your energy level. Don’t label it at all, just let it go and spring back to 1. That is the only thing you ever need to remember.

Let me leave you with a song that is just right for the moment, lyrics to sing along are below.

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

Get Together
Song by The Youngbloods

Love is but a song we sing
Fear’s the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Though the bird is on the wing
And you may not know why

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

Some may come and some may go
He will surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

If you hear the song I sing
You will understand, listen
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It’s there at your command

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

I said come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now
Right now
Right now

 

“In Action, Watch the Timing.”

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Powerful Mind Part 35

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – January 17, 2025
Created November 2, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 34

This quote from Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching is worth unpacking. Taoism traces its roots to this collection of wisdom and another book, the Zhuangzi. Both books were written about half a millennium before the birth of Jesus Christ. Now, about two millennia after that world changing event, almost every living person knows and understands what the Force means to a Jedi knight, and this is the closest thing to the Tao in our modern pop culture. There are many differences however between Steven Spielberg’s brilliant conception and the Tao.

There is no “dark side” to the Tao. The Tao is the animating principle of all of existence and its common soul or spirit. It is inherently innocent, simple, humble, honest, natural, and spontaneous. Lao Tsu attributed the “dark side” of human beings to their falling out of synch with the Tao due to unnatural additives to natural simplicity and humility. In the language I use to explain such things, these de-synchronizing additives are all the result of ego attachments to things that reach beyond the natural enjoyments of life.

Lao Tsu describes the Flow state as being brought on by the wu wei attitude, in which nothing is added to natural innocent spontaneity. Wu wei may also be translated as doing nothing. Like Plato, and like Zen, both of which came later, Lao Tsu was aware that the use of language itself invited the mind to build imaginary things that could lead the individual to desynchronize from the natural universe. Both Taoism and Zen provide exercises for relaxing back into natural spontaneity.

There could be a philosophical connection between Taoism and the Bible story of Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden Tree Of Knowledge. This was a move away from natural innocent spontaneity.

For us in the accelerated culture of the 21st century, using words in articles/books like this one are playing with a two-edged sword, using words to reduce the hypnotic effects of a lifetime of detachment from natural spontaneity that was itself caused by millions of words, and overpowering attachments to conditioned desires, and thousands of traumatic memories from unassimilated learning experiences when those desires were thwarted.

“Spontaneity” is one of those two-edged words which can have opposite meanings in certain contexts. When one is in the Flow state, back in synch with the Tao/Universal Consciousness, every action we take and every thought/feeling that goes through us is perfect, and there is nothing gained by hesitation, checking each impulse before acting upon it. Yet in the Observer state, the state which I’ve learned is more sustainable and a jumping-off point for the Flow state, the opposite is true: in the Observer state, it has the most positive outcomes to check oneself before acting on impulse. This is probably the most subtle trick in the book of life, knowing when one is in Flow and can trust the natural impulses of the heart, versus knowing when is not in Flow and ought to seek shelter in the Observer state in order to maximize one’s positive effects on the world and the self.

Negativity is the basic clue to making this discernment properly. Any presence of negativity in oneself is a clue to restrain action, because negativity is incompatible with Flow. The cue may be subtle internally and it takes practice to learn to pay attention to subtle guidance system internal cueing.

This is why timing is so important, because there is this knife-edge distinction between one’s readiness to Flow versus the wisdom of holding back and studying one’s own impulses before letting the action occur.

Mind Magic pages 137-141 offers an exercise which can help train your mind to automatically achieve this balancing act between action and non-action. Here are a few excerpts from that passage:

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.

 Are you curious
About something that is now going on nearby?
What specifically will you gain by looking?
Why do you want to gain this?

Be aware of, but unmindful of, voices and feelings
Which tell you that you must decide now
Or must take action now.
These voices and feelings
Are a force that has had power over you until now;
They originate in society;
Society which expects you to perform in certain ways.
Then you should remove all force
From the feelings inside you
Which tell you to move.

Hurrying (in most cases) is a sign that you are afraid and/or that you wish to get past the thing you are currently doing, in order to do something specific that you can’t wait to be doing. It would be far more valuable to set aside the thing you are doing in a rush and to do the thing you really want to be doing. That is what brings on the Flow state, doing something that you find to be fun.

My good friend Marshall Cohen, known as the guru of the cable industry, sent me an article indicating that billionaire Warren Buffett is aware of Flow state, and purposely leaves open certain days on his calendar in order to maximize his own experience of Flow.

Planning and scheduling your time and leaving enough time to not feel any time pressure is a wise course of action, and will tend to maximize the quality of what you create, and your enjoyment of life. Remember James Taylor’s saying “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” This is very Tao.

Sometimes you will feel that the Universe has given you an inspiration, an idea which will make a positive difference in someone’s life or even in the lives of many people. Your natural tendency will be to share that idea as quickly as possible. But the timing must be right in order for an idea, no matter how good, to be accepted and acted upon. If you spill it out impulsively because your ego has become attached to the praise you expect from it, the likelihood is that it might fall flat, and then take even longer to be adopted. Wait for the cue that it is the right moment to use such ideas.

Be especially sensitive not to mistake right timing because your idea might be very rational and the person you are giving it to might be in a very emotional state, or vice versa. If you sense any subtle doubt in yourself, wait. If you are missing the moment the Universe will give you an encouraging cue to say it now.

Key #9

Consciously determine how much to take your time.

Best to all,
Bill

Oversimplifications Do Not Achieve a Happy Mind

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog:  August 2, 2024

Achieve a happy mind.

Widespread mental emotional handicaps are not a new thing. Depression, anxiety, violent impulsiveness, sociopathy… they have been with us a long time.

So have inventions or discoveries of ways to improve one’s own use of the mind and feelings. They go back to antiquity. Counting to ten and taking deep breaths when losing one’s temper, for example, probably goes back before written language. In the first millennium of written language appear cogent ideas about better ways of using the mind that could have been passed down by oral tradition for generations. The Rig Veda had been sung for centuries by the time Vyasa first wrote it down. The advice given was quite sophisticated and the lessons taught about cooperation and consideration of consequences before action still to this day have not been learned by billions of us.

The Stoics such as Epictetus wrote down methods in considerable detail and I was amazed to read his Enchiridion written more than two millennia before my book Mind Magic with some of the same ideas, similarly expressed. Buddha’s and Christ’s teachings from millennia ago, as we all know, are at the highest levels of sophistication concerning what we permit to go on in our minds.

It’s not just the sophistication, it’s also the detail in which the method is described to the learner. The mind is extremely tricky and contains a robotical element which one must learn to deal with properly. The presence of this bio-AI was detected by the ancients and is described in the Old Testament as the “hardening of the heart”, which is only one of the ways the robot manifests. However, until Mind Magic in my lifetime of study of the mind and writings about the mind old and new, I have not seen detailed instructions for integrating the bio-AI into a useful member of the mind’s internal community, which is why I wrote Mind Magic. To date I have read many of the most popular as well as many of the least known self-help books and I have not found anything remotely detailed in terms of specific operational instructions as in Mind Magic.

This line of thought was triggered by an experience I had two days ago. I was having a Zoom call with one of my AI expert collaborators and he demonstrated to me a system that within a minute or two took the text of Mind Magic and turned it into a course, complete with tests. This of course was amazing and I am still duly impressed. The one fly in the ointment was the tests. They seemed to oversimplify the teachings into summary words containing no learning value, words like “Meditate”, “Contemplate”, “Use Mindfulness”, “Do Shadow Work”, “Use Affirmations”, “Law Of Attraction”, etc. The AI had scoured the Internet and found things like the ideas in Mind Magic and had assumed that all of the various books and scholarly papers were all giving the same generic advice. That is like summarizing the Old Testament or the words of Jesus into “Be Good” and implicitly assuming that advice was going to solve the whole thing and the person would emerge with a happy mind and life.

I have yet to look at the rest of the course and I expect that most of it will retain the detailed instructions so that all I’ll have to do is to retrain the AI how to pose the questions better. Yet it got me thinking about all of the generalizations and oversimplifications being made across the self-improvement field.

Overall impact of the New Age Movement since the 1970s has been quite positive despite shortcomings. There is a general sense of awareness and tendencies toward openness and respect for others that I did not perceive around me growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, where many kids carried knives and zipguns. The Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” is emblematic of the good that has been done by the human development movement which started in the 1960s. To some extent this has been the humanism movement supporting the logic of goodness as a way of life while the organized religions gradually slipped out of perceived relevancy in the modern world. Without the rise of the human potential movement the world today could be in even darker place, or we might have gotten to present straits much sooner.

Motivational speakers can, without passing on any detailed methodologies for better use of the mind and feelings, achieve short-term and even a sprinkling of long-term effects simply by their confidence, presentation ability, body language, and inspiring stories. Practically any self-help book can have some positive effect. However, without detailed instructions, especially concerning the multiple phenomena one finds in one’s mind, including the robot – which has now been called the inference engine and the prediction engine by Dr. Karl Friston – oversimplified advice will not achieve states of higher consciousness, and can even feed the ego to believe that one is in the Flow state when one is not. The term for this in the 1970s was Spiritual Materialism.

In every phase of life we see that there is a longing to keep things simpler than they actually are. This reductionism is one of the most dangerous temptations that we face. Oversimplifying something complex seems to be a good idea in the short run but then one bangs into the walls that have been ignored away. They didn’t really get removed by ignoring them. Instead, they stopped you when you needed to keep going and now you have to stop and rethink everything. Better to do all that thinking at the outset.

Look for methods, and test those that appeal to you. Identify platitudes and appreciate them as positive reminders, without pretending that they are sufficient on their own to solve problems.

My best to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

Ride the Psychic Foam

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Powerful Mind Part 38
Created December 1, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 37

Key #10 is about how to ride the bucking bronco that is your mind. Your mind, which is constantly throwing up inner words, feelings and impulses that – if allowed – can enslave your mood.

When my late partner Len Matthews, a wonderful human being, read my book Mind Magic, he initially disagreed with the idea that he should “dis-identify with the thought senate” (paraphrasing the title of Chapter 9). He said, “I’m proud of my ideas, I want to call them my own.”

I pointed out the subtitle of that chapter “Not Throwing Your Authority Behind Untested Head Spewings”. This, I explained, allowed for cases in which a person can take pride and ownership of ideas after having tested those ideas thoroughly enough, with which he agreed.

Therefore Key #10 is about how to test one’s inner drafts before adopting them as one’s own official policy.

Not viewing the situation that way, the vast majority of the human race throughout history, and perhaps more so today due to the Distraction Culture produced by Acceleritis, tend to assume that the inner soundtrack is one’s very own self expressing positions that have been fully ratified by all sides of oneself.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the pandemic coping condition for information overload, most of the time the mind is operating in what neuroscientists call the Default Network. This is an idle stream of consciousness that keeps switching tracks based on associations, and includes daydreaming as well as commentary on what one is doing in the external world of consensual reality sometimes involving other people.

In the Observer state, neuroscientists say that the brain is operating from the Executive Control Network, and the mind is in a state of metacognition, able to observe with a degree of detachment what the inner wordstream is saying. It is that degree of detachment which Mind Magic Chapter 9 aimed to achieve in readers. By having that degree of detachment, one can inspect what one’s mind just said, to see if it is consistent with one’s general viewpoint, or if it appears to be an outlier, perhaps a remnant of who you used to be. Or just a first reflexive reaction of anger at someone in language you might have used as a child or as a teenager but would not normally use aloud today.

By helping children to learn these ways, they shall more quickly become able to be in control of their own impulses.

When I was a child, like all other children, I had a very hard time guessing which of my impulses to act upon and which ones to just let drift away. Perhaps I had more trouble with it than most children. Because on stage and in other rare moments I had experienced the Flow state, in which simply letting myself flow with all of my impulses seemed to work fantastically well. At the time this is what I muddily thought. It was only much later on that I realized that in Flow one does not always act on every impulse, in fact, in making that assumption I had caused myself to be taken out of Flow after very short periods of it. This took years to discover. In the meantime, I had absurd experiences of following impulses which turned out to be ridiculously wrong and impossible to defend afterward.

In that chapter of Mind Magic, one of the metaphors used is to consider the mind to be a vast senate of viewpoints, installed based on people you have met who may have impressed you in one way or another, which set up a robot simulating that person within one’s own mind, presumably mediated by a specific pattern of electrochemical flow among specific neurons. In a lifetime one may meet, or hear, speak, or read the words of, tens of thousands of people, including in media. Thousands of them may leave permanent impressions as biological “AI” outposts within one’s mind. This, then, is the senate.

The Executive Control Network may be viewed as the inner True Self, trying to sort through what may be conflicting impulses arising simultaneously like virtual particles in the quantum foam, within one’s own microcosm. The great physicist John Archibald Wheeler postulated that in nothingness before the Big Bang, there had always existed quantum foam, with virtual particles arising and disappearing. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” I posited that the quantum foam itself is consciousness, the original substrate of the universe. Whether or not this is true we might not as a species know for millennia, although as individuals some of us may decide to adopt it as a working hypothesis for life, as I do.

By installing Key #10 in one’s own mind, one gives oneself the psychic distance to edit one’s own headstream.

More than that, one can take the time to teach errant senators how to behave properly. For example, one day recently, I heard myself think something mean about a person I love. With Key #10, it’s not enough to just correct oneself and move on: you are advised to carry on an inner dialog with the senator who said that, and to find out how that part of you thinks and feels. Does the part of you who just said that mean thing not love this other person? Or was that just an old reflex from your childhood when you first started to use mean words like that? If the latter turns out to be the case, as it did, that senator (or neuron grouping) can learn that it’s no longer appropriate to use such language even to oneself, it’s no longer fitting within the person you have become. In this way the mind is eventually cleansed and impurities have been removed from it.

One of the inner signals that one learns to pay attention to is any trace of negativity. By now, using the other Keys 1-9, we have already changed our mental habits enough to realize that we prefer to be happy and to know how to quickly tune out of anything that makes us unhappy. Negativity is what makes us unhappy, therefore we have already started to learn how to tune away from negativity to positivity, to find one’s creativity interested and challenged by the “dare” of negativity to find creative solutions to remove all causes of negativity from one’s life as quickly as possible in each case.

More methods for riding one’s psychic froth in the next installment.

My best to all,
Bill