Category Archives: The Zone

Powerful Mind Pt. 4

Created March 31, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 3, click here.

Chapter 2

The Observer State

A clearer, more effective state of consciousness —
only seconds away from your daily state of consciousness.
Just knowing it exists can benefit you

This entire book is about states of consciousness. In this chapter we will focus on one particular state of consciousness we call the Observer state. The Observer state is more powerful than the state most of us are in most of the time, and leads to the Flow state, which is more powerful still in terms of your ability to make an impact on others around you and on the world. We speak about both states as being “The Upper Mind”. The purpose of this book is to show you the simple yet easily missed doorways into the Upper Mind.

Why is it important to think about consciousness at all? Because life is all about consciousness. We do not exist without consciousness. While modern science has made brilliant progress in almost every other sphere of reality, too little is known about consciousness.

Yet all the ills of the world are rooted in ignorance of how consciousness works. We have made the world we see around us. It all started in our minds. Every day we do things we regret because we listen to and act on whatever our minds dish up to us. We need our minds to perform better, to become powerful, to gain insight into ourselves and others, to come to better decisions on a moment to moment basis.

The extreme anti-heroes who have become powerful on the world stage, who have driven much of our history so far, might not have chosen paths of destruction if their genius had been creatively channeled, if they had not lost touch with their compassion and love.

If we collectively knew our own minds better we would not go to war but rather we would find creative win/win solutions — the ones we get to in the end anyway after all the bloodshed. The path to a better world lies through the terrain of consciousness. One day when we all really do know our minds better the world will be a relative paradise compared to the way it has been throughout all recorded history. As the great science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells said, “History is a race between education and destruction.” If we can make our minds powerful now, we can gain the maturity as a race necessary to not destroy ourselves, given the extreme weaponry we have now at our disposal and our habitual disregard of our destructive effect on the environment (the air we breathe, the water we drink).

Because war is a pattern repeated throughout recorded history, we tend to assume this is the way it has to always be. And yet, “recorded history” literally means since the onset of written language. In short, written language and the thinking processes that go with it have led to acceleritis, information overload and Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), which blocks upper mind and leads not only to war but also to crime and personal cruelty born of our disconnection from innate compassion. Our minds need to become more powerful in order not to be confused by the information overload so much that we are easily led and manipulated into a life nearly devoid of positive feelings, squandering the opportunity of life.

Each of us knows intuitively that the only thing we can change is ourselves. This is the only way we can make a better world.

Powerful Mind seeks to reveal specific information and techniques for attaining specific states of consciousness. We will be talking about waking states of consciousness, not about sleeping states. Sleeping states are important too, but in the interest of focus we’ll leave these to another book.

A Broader View of What Science Is

Around 400 BC, in the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, one branch of philosophy called “epistemology” focused on understanding “how can we know”? Over time, different schools of thought evolved about how we can know: rationalists believe that we can know things directly through our intellect; authoritarians believe we know by listening to authority figures who tell us what we know; empiricists believe that we know by direct experience, by testing things in the real world; intuitionists believe we can know directly through a mysterious faculty.
Science developed out of empiricism, basing what we consider to be “truth” on factual experience, testing and validation. In the case of science as practiced in the West, especially in the last few hundred years, that “experience” is usually the taking of measurements using instruments with dials and displays from which one takes readings. The person taking the readings is the “observer” often mentioned in relativity and quantum mechanics, the latest forms of science. In the East, science is also based on experience, and there the experience can often be inner experience where dials and displays are not involved. This is still science and still based on empirical experience.

This Eastern willingness to accept internal evidence explains why science in the West has not validated the existence of the more effective states of consciousness. Starting toward the end of the 19th Century, inner experience or introspection fell out of favor in psychology, after William James, the last of the giants of psychology to accept inner evidence directly. The more externally-oriented culture of the West created a blind spot. In psychology, work shifted to behaviorism, the focus on externally quantifiable actions, along with the study and social application of conditioning to alter these actions.

Eastern epistemology actually fuses empiricism and intuitionism. No conflict is seen between these ways of knowing because they both involve experiencing reality for oneself.

Although based on empiricism, Western science became authoritarian and elitist in its epistemology: the common person was excluded from “knowing” by the reduction of all science to mathematics, a difficult language to master. Science at its cutting edge moved out of the sphere of something the common person could totally visualize and comprehend.

Science and States of Consciousness

Regarded academically as a “soft science”, traditional Western psychology recognizes only three states of consciousness: dreamless sleep, dream sleep, and waking consciousness. Eastern psychology since the fifth century B.C. recognized ten states of waking consciousness: the normal everyday waking state, the access state which precedes meditation, and eight progressively deeper states of meditation. Oscar Ichazo, a modern student/teacher of consciousness techniques and founder of the Arica Institute in 1968, fuses ideas from consciousness explorers throughout history (plus his own) to propose fifteen waking states of consciousness ranging from psychosis, through six levels of neurosis, three levels corresponding to the Eastern access state, and five levels of higher consciousness.

It is revealing that Western psychology reduces waking consciousness to a single state. William James was the first prominent Western psychologist who warned against “prematurely closing the book” on the existence of other states of waking consciousness. More recently, Mihaly Czikszenthmihalyi (pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”), former head of the University of Chicago Psychology Department, coined the term “Flow state” (known in show business as “Being On”, and in sports as “The Zone”), and conducted valuable research into this state, which was published in his 2008 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill

Open Your Present

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Created March 11, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Past, Present, Future. Select the middle one. Now open it.

What would it be like for you to learn how to open your present moment?

You’d have to be so much in the Now that you’d be momentarily less aware of your past and the hold that it normally exercises over you.

Without the past looming you would temporarily free of assumptions and expectations, lenses and filters, and your eyes and other senses would be naked.

What you see in front of you and all around you might not seem as familiar as it always did before.

The stunned silence overtaking your inner dialog might momentarily remove the self-not-self dichotomy so basic to everyone’s perspective. There would just be events flowing and unfolding “within you and without you”. No apparent self. Oneness happening.

Depending on the circumstances, something might happen that could cause you to dart back into your protective shell.

Or, if you were lucky enough the moment could be sustained. If allowed to loll in that return to nature, an idea might arise in your mind but as words form you might dismiss them as incomplete and unnecessary. All words would suddenly seem inadequate, that the real experience of life could not be contained in them, that wherever you are now as strange and miraculous as it might seem would never be something you could accurately bring back and report to humanity and share with your loved ones.

However, if you continued to experience moments like these where the awe and wonder of existence and the universe were more than enough, even without analysis and understanding, to enjoy as if encased in rare music and art of which you are a kaleidoscopic part…

Then that state would become friendly and familiar and you could incorporate the repeated experiences in your life, and maybe even begin to be able to turn on the state at will, opening your present moment and becoming one with it, part of the flow of time, an essential facet of the universe and fully at home and at peace in it.

The Flow state takes many forms. The most popular representations of the Flow state are the performer/athlete instance, being “on”, in the zone, and the scientist/artist form, the “aha” moment, “eureka!” The spiritual levels of the Zone are above these manifestation levels.

In my book You Are The Universe, I write about a theorized five levels of Flow state, four of which I’ve experienced and have memories of. They crystallized in my mind when I read about Oscar Ichazo’s postulated 15 levels of consciousness, said to have been derived from Ouspensky, which would have been influenced by Gurdjieff and perhaps Madame Blavatsky. My map is probably an inaccurate representation of reality and also a distorted view of Ichazo’s thoughts. But it works for me.

Oscar called it level 48 (meaning 48 limitations) when the body goes into Flow and you are moving perfectly and performing perfectly and effortlessly so that everything appears to be doing itself. My friend Eric Mart said that Oscar called this the basic professional state.

In 24, you are in ecstasy, your feelings are in Flow state, Ananda.

12 is the level in which your mind is operating in Flow and every word is a bon mot perfect for the moment, you are thinking in Shakespearean poetry.

6 gives you synchronicity in which you are aware of things that there is no contemporary explanation for, and around you, things are happening which you understand the meaning of, and which benefit you, as if your subconscious is controlling them.

Some years ago, a person I was mentoring had a habit that I tolerated as amusing although it had her stuck in her own evolutionary growth at a certain step. She read in my mind what I was about to tell her but she was not fully getting the point of what I was trying to clue her in on. She was attached to guessing the right answer and so continually interrupted me.

One day at my home on Moonhaw Road with bright sunlight flooding in and not a cloud in the sky, this routine was going on. Suddenly as she opened her mouth to guess my next words there was a clap of thunder drowning out her words. This went on about ten times, perfectly timed to when she started to talk, even though she waited and tried everything to get a word in edgewise. I believe that was level 6.

3, the highest level of Flow, I theorize would make a person capable of willing things to happen and have them happen in reality. Perhaps we all have this and it is merely happening very slowly so that it takes years to accomplish your mission.

The present culture has directed us away from such things as this, lumping under the term “magical thinking” anything that sounds as if it is far-fetched. Instead, we are inculcated into behaving according to the expectations of others, in a typically defensive stance with a sense of dependency on outside crutches, and a need to compensate for our inadequacies of life. My friend John Zweig was saying the other day that this is the way marketing is done now, products and services are there to make our lives worthwhile, we are portrayed as being needy without them. Ads often take the form of problem-solution. However, some ads depict the product or service in terms of the experiential enjoyment it brings, which does not convey any lack in the ad experiencer.

A few years ago, I was an expert witness in a patent case. A very aggressive young lawyer was cross-examining me and hoped to unnerve me by whipping out my book You Are The Universe and asking me what level of consciousness I am now in. I answered that I was in the Observer state, which is the highest state under the Flow state, and the state that my book Mind Magic is designed to bring on.

We won the case. Not that it had much to do with that incident, which merely illustrates the degree to which our present culture is excessively closed-minded about the further possibilities of consciousness.

But if we open our present, we discover for ourselves that the world is truly a much more magical place than we have been led to believe. Not that “magic’ automatically implies “supernatural”. There is nothing more supernatural than nature itself. It’s all science once we figure it out. We have figured out maybe one percent of all there is in this giant puzzle universe to figure out. We impede our own expansion of knowledge to be so cramped in our implementation of the scientific method.

Opening your present is paying unfiltered attention without going-in locked-down constraints. When you do this, you open yourself up to more awesome experiences by allowing for all possibilities and not assuming that you or even the human race now knows everything.

When you open your present, you receive the gift.

Best to all,

Bill

Holiday Blessings

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A holiday gift to you from all of us here at The Human Effectiveness Institute and songwriter Stan Satlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooF8CDQIpDE

Outsmart Hasty Closure

Created December 22nd, 2020

Built into each human being before birth is an information-processing program whose apparent purpose is to help us understand our external and internal experiences.

It works as follows: certain experiences or perceptions trigger a feeling of dissonance in the mind; you pay closer attention to and think about these until you have a feeling of having absorbed their information, at which point the feeling of dissonance goes away and we say that you have achieved closure.

Hasty closure can be defined as those instances in which it would have been useful to you to think further before closure. In the Observer state or Flow state – peak experience states of consciousness – we are “above” or “behind” the autonomic mind (Ego) and Hasty Closure does not occur.

“Acceleritis” — the condition caused by having too many things to pay attention to all at the same time, and pretty much all the time — makes us impatient if we are in “normal waking consciousness” – the autonomic mind (Ego aka The Robot). When we do not fully understand something, the drive for closure becomes palpable within our minds. We may become frustrated and maybe even apoplectic, especially if additional variables continue to be introduced — a ringing telephone, someone comes in with a request or sends us a text or e-mail, etc. If we are living in a state of continual impatience, our minds will do anything to get to closure as quickly as possible. If we run our lives and our minds in the usual impatient way, we will lack insight into this process, and so we will be eager to grab our mind’s first offering of a way to closure.

To help you distinguish which of these states you are in at any given moment, here below are some of the signs of hasty closure. When you spot these signs happening within yourself, you are jumping into the Observer state!:

One of the most obvious effects of Acceleritis is the increased tendency to see things in black/white terms rather than in shades of gray. “She is always out to get me.” “That guy is never right.”
Positions based on beliefs rather than on personal empirical experience. “A company should always be sharply focused on just one thing.” “Religion is just superstition.” “The White Race is supreme.” These beliefs likely came from other people who were influential in your life, including your parents.
Negative Charge. The presence of negative emotion such as tension, fear, anger or irritation. These feelings are evidence that you are seeing a situation a certain way, and on top of that, you have subconsciously already decided on a strategy for dealing with it. With such a negative premise, this is not likely to work.

Often these closures will trace back to experiences you had many years ago that you interpreted in a way that locks you into a certain inflexibility, and which trick you into believing you have learned something empirically from your own personal bad experience. But you’ve been fooled by the takeaway you received from that experience; the real lesson is somewhat subtler than the lesson you articulated to yourself long ago.

Typically, you may have overcompensation bias. You were too open, you thought you learned a big lesson, but now you are too guarded — “falling off the opposite side of the log”. You may have been too generous and now you’re too stingy, too severe and now too gentle, too trusting and now not trusting anything or anyone. And so on. You learned the wrong lesson — it wasn’t black or white, it was finding the right spot between them for each situation.

A powerful strategy for jumping into the Observer state is to doubt your own last thought/feeling. Before going off half-cocked, look back at what you just thought or felt, and demand proof before you choose what action to take. This ensures that all of you, your whole self, is in charge, not taken over by a part of you.

You may have an investment in accepting some thoughts over others, such as thoughts that make you look smart to yourself. Just knowing that you can be biased goes a long way to seeing past any bias you may have lurking in your head.

Don’t take anything to extremes. This post is not meant to turn you into Hamlet, never able to make a decision. You must in fact become more decisive, simply not hasty: think things through thoroughly and then take action. If you sense something is dragging on too long and you have needed to take action for some time, you really need to get away by yourself for however long it takes (within reason) to plan out what to do decisively.

Enjoy the peak experiences of the holiday season,

Bill

Transforming Our Emotions

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Updated July 2, 2020

Today our lives are lived in a pressure cooker as never before. Our movements are constrained, we are both cut off from social behaviors we need, and also often cut off from the alone time crucial to our sanity and effectiveness. In the complex accelerated culture in which we live (we call it Acceleritis™), self-mastery of our inner space, or even awareness of what is going on in there, is extremely complicated. Neuroses can arise like biocomputer viruses, and spread through society by intercommunication between people, through our thoughts and ideas and through moods upon which neuroses depend.

Be the masters of our emotions

Two recurring neurotic themes most of us can relate to involve money and frustration. Our culture is set up to cause most of us to worry excessively about money. Money is often the leading indicator of our feelings of self-worth, belonging, achievement, status, freedom, wellness, potency and security. I’m probably leaving some things out.

Frustration can mount, for example, in the workplace when co-workers and bosses don’t go along with the inspiring ideas we have about how to do our job better. Or when society does not encourage (or recognize) an inborn skill or talent and instead of channeling us into a career we love, we find ourselves doing work we can tolerate but that may do little to bring out those inborn talents.

Over time the mix of frustration and money fear can turn to a growing anger, often bottled up inside where when left to simmer and build it can become one of the causes of illnesses of the mind and body. We fall into a counterproductive cycle. We become blocked from getting into the Zone, where ideas, action solutions and clever ways to break through would lead us to create a path to more money, security and happiness.

With the emotions as a wrapper around our whole mental experience, thoughts flit along the surface of the mind. Emotions program thoughts and vice versa. Everything affects everything else in there.

We can ignite the start of a new cycle by seizing the control point where the avalanche starts — our emotional mood. Becoming aware of our emotional state and then working mindfully to take back control of the emotive space around our psyche is key. Detachment from outcome is the core of heroism. A sense of humor gives perspective. Willingness to face the worst with confidence in oneself (and for many, confidence in God/the Universe/a Higher Power) confers a courageous fatalism that has been rediscovered by all of the heroes in history.

In order to (re-)program our emotional wrapper, detachment is not enough. We are emotional beings, hardwired to have some emotional drama going on in the background at all times. Getting into the Zone aka Flow state requires awareness and management of that background emotional mood. If we are not proactively programming it in alignment with our intentions, it will continue to program itself.

Each of us needs then to work to transform negative emotion, the nemesis of the Zone, into positive emotion — which means remembering all we have to be grateful for, and all there is to look forward to and be excited about.

We may experience challenging (even heartbreaking) trials but we need to be able to shift our focus to see them as opportunities that reveal what we are really made of.

Happy Independence Day!

Best to all,

Bill

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