Created September 23, 2021

Dissatisfaction is rampant. It has never been as dominant a theme before in the USA. We descendants of tough colonists and immigrants with the guts to leap into the relative unknown are a hardy breed. We have always overcome, at least until Vietnam. That was kind of a turning point. It wasn’t our fault. We were acting idealistically, continuing the world leadership that had come to us during the world wars. Over the succeeding half century, we learned again and again that our success with force can only be counted upon to work when we use it in self-defense and deterrence. As soon as we project it in other ways – even with the best of intentions – it’s like the tar baby in the Disney classic “Song of the South”: every punch and kick only get us more stuck in the trap.

At an individual level Covid and politics and climate change and “losing world leadership” – if that has really happened – are nothing compared to our own personal life dissatisfactions. Like Edward G. Robinson’s character in the movie “Key Largo”, who always wants “MORE!”, our minds are always comparing what we have now to what we once had or to our dreams of what we must attain or we shall be sad and bitter all our lives (that is the way we blackmail ourselves – one of the negative tricks of the mind discussed earlier in this free Course).

Comparison is one of the negative tricks of the mind we must watch out for. When we stop comparing what is happening in the moment to our expectations, we can really enjoy life.

That doesn’t mean giving up one’s dreams – in fact it makes us more effective so the chances of our dreams coming true are increased. It means to turn down the volume knob on the melancholy that we are not there yet and that we don’t seem to be making fast enough progress – not as fast as so-and-so – there’s those comparisons again.

The positive tricks of the mind are superior in every way to the negative tricks of the mind.

“Tricks” is often used as a pejorative word. Scientists, who tend also to be highly creative people (all of us are much more creative than we typically realize), make up much better words. “Metacognition”, coined by John H. Flavell now of Stanford, means being cognizant of one’s own thinking patterns, and implies the ability to thereby take better control of those thought processes (that taking over was named “metaprogramming” by John Lilly in the same era as Flavell’s coinage – 1960s-1970s).

The job of the Human Effectiveness Institute is to compile empirical generalizations for the most prevalent applications of metaprogramming – or in lay terms, compile positive “mind tricks”. Hence our first book being called MIND MAGIC although it is empirically based science, proven to work (see a small sample of our testimonials to the right on this page). Collectively, our suggestions enable users to become better and better at metacognition and metaprogramming so that they rise into semi-permanent “altered states of consciousness” described by William James and called “peak experiences” by Abraham Maslow.

I say semi-permanent to mean that as we grow into true human maturity – become menschen – we all go through our ups and downs, but the long-term trend is to greater resiliency in the face of upsets, less tendency to dwell upon our dissatisfactions, far greater tendency to make real, positive changes in our lives that remove those dissatisfactions.

In the last few posts of this Course you are taking with me, we talked about finding your own determination, likening it to a hidden switch inside of you. Determination is a constructive judo-ing of your dissatisfied energies. Finding the hidden switch is discovering that you can channel (find a positive outlet for) your dissatisfaction, despair, heartbreak, hate, anger, envy, outrage, passive and active aggressiveness, and all of the other negative emotions into a titanium Will, and you can apply that Will constructively and positively in ways that keep you from sinking into the pits, and make you uplifting to yourself and to the world around you. Reach around inside yourself wordlessly right now for that subconscious hidden switch while you watch, experience, and internalize this 82-second video, please:

I’m not going to take it anymore, go ahead and dish it out, it won’t affect me. I’m going to have my own joy no matter what you do to me… that’s the attitude best suited to going through life – especially through this dramatic period we are now passing through.

Hang on to that joy – if you don’t feel it yet, try counting your blessings, thanking God or the Universe for all the things you possess right now, that you have not lost, that would leave terrible holes in your life and in you if they were to depart. Enjoy those things while you have them! If you are emanating the opposite of joy – as we see people all around us doing right now – you are wasting the good things you have in your life right now. That you take for granted. Revel in the good things in your life whenever you feel yourself slipping back from determination, courage, and the Will to grapple against all odds to do the right thing and to help the world back on course.

Metacognition implies the Will to take over one’s own life. You are always at a perfect age to do that.

Love to all,

Bill

Created August 27, 2021

We’ve licked terrible odds before and we’ll keep doing it. It’s what we do.

Every situation has a handle, which if you grab it, levers everything positive.

I have total confidence we will find the handle.

You can be sure even better technology will come out of it.

The world’s best equipped realists are doing hundreds of Manhattan Projects right now racing against medical, environmental, economic, thermonuclear, cyberdystopic, moral, spiritual, and emotional world collapse.

There have been many moments in history like this, none quite so well-armed. We stood up and faced it squarely and conquered it. That’s what we’re doing right now.

Soon the bickering will see its ratings drop. That will be the turning point.

The present epochal moment has forced us all inside. That is an excellent place to be. When you go inside, you open up all the possibilities to recreate yourself. The highest form of recreation.

As you’ve no doubt gleaned from my prior post, I’m going to provide bits of our metacognitive psychotechnology – helpful mental/emotional/intuitive hints – in each column from now on. The course will start today with this post.

The reason we are providing free metacognition training to the public at large is because the public needs it. To help all rise to the challenges, by entraining Observer and Flow states. Please benefit from these free stimuli and pass them on. We all have to become more effective in order to survive as a species. We need to think more clearly – that much is obvious by now.

Here is our first “lesson”. All of the experiences in our media including this blog are stimuli to evoke your own “spiritual immune system” known as the intuition. This video is only 64 seconds. After you watch it, we’ll talk about it a bit.

Before you can succeed in life you need to be able to see what it is that you want as the outcome, and you must realize deep down inside that if you do everything you can to bring it about, it can come about.

If you’re harboring doubt that you’re ever going to get there, that is programming yourself to fail.

Of course, one can never be certain how things will come out. All you can do is your best, and enjoy every second along the way, without being so attached to the outcome that you get in your own way.

It helps to previsualize the outcome you want, and to also previsualize a future in which you don’t reach your dream goal, and how you would handle it if that time ever comes. Once you know that you have a fallback way of handling it, you will have disarmed a large part of the limbic system’s emotional distraction power over your conscious mind. You will be able to do creative and constructive things you really want to do regardless of where it all comes out.

Please show YOUR MOVIE above to children whenever you can. Especially when they are feeling low.

Remind them of their gifts – the things they have going for them. Remind them of their proudest moments.

Advise them to show themselves their own courage in the face of adversity. Every time they see themselves being courageous about life’s challenges, they increase their storehouse of real courage. It’s like exercising a muscle.

It takes courage to be yourself, act authentically, without warping that by being overly self-protective. Authenticity counts for a lot.

Kids need to know we believe in their dreams, like we believe in them.

We need the same thing. Stay alert to make sure you are always backing your self, believing in your self.

This has only been the first class of the course, and so we have only covered a very little bit of what everyone needs to know to get into and stay in the more effective states of consciousness, the Observer and Flow states.

We hope you will stay with us week to week and hope you enjoy each week’s short video, a permanent improvement to this blog.

Next week: How to make sure you notice your own hunches – by learning how to detect and read the signals of your un-talking mind.

Best to all,

Bill

 

 

 

Created August 13, 2021

Have you noticed that sometimes when you are feeling down, you don’t even know what’s doing that to you?

Isn’t that interesting? Some part of me knows that something is wrong. But my conscious mind doesn’t know what it is.

That could mean my bad feeling is for a stupid reason, and if I could only realize what it is that is putting me off, maybe the bad mood would evaporate, perhaps even evoking a laugh if the cause was ridiculous enough.

On the other hand, my hunch machine is sometimes quite right, and this could be one of those cases.

I must find out which of these is true, whether the bad feeling is something to ignore, or pay attention to.

Where to begin?

I write down the symptoms. That’s my go-to first diagnostic troubleshooting step when I lack joy.

Low energy

Not looking forward to anything today

That often leads to thoughts and usually then, the moving pen begins to write as if by itself (sometimes via keyboard).

When you discover what the stimulus is that is evoking negativity in you, you can decide what to do about it. That sometimes makes you feel better. The situation is usually something that comes from you in the first place, not from someone you know, and the solution usually involves your having to grow up a bit more to change your own attitudes.

So, this whole process is a good thing. It gets you back into a positive frame of mind, and makes you better too.

Unless you don’t believe you have the power to change. That’s sort of a show stopper.

If you don’t feel the power to change, discovering the reason for your bad mood doesn’t help. It might make you feel even worse.

Clearly, it is not a good thing to assume you have zero power to change.

If you didn’t feel you have the power to change, before reading this, start right now to allow yourself to open your mind to the possibility that you could rise to this occasion. That you do have the power to change. Now more than ever before. That is called The Will. Determination. Resoluteness. Dedicated to keep agreements with your Self. Not a pushover or a weenie.

Whenever you don’t feel on top of your game enjoying life and the moment, stop a second and Check For Joy. If joy is not present, what is bothering you?

Pay special attention to (a) your dreams (b) the way you feel when you wake up in the morning.

You’ll see that a bad dream can discolor the first part of a day. Or take you off your game for the whole day just as likely. Unless you’re on top of it.

If you can see yourself (“metacognition”) you can detect what kind of mood you’re in. Metacognition is the Observer State. My book Mind Magic is a manual to teach yourself the skills involved in metacognition – really seeing yourself. Able to look critically and objectively at your own last thought. A higher state of consciousness which was given the name “metacognition” by eminent developmental psychologist John Flavell. Now that I have discovered his work, I see that he calls “metacognition” what I call the Observer State. Funny that both of our books came out the same year, and that it’s taken me this long to see that other scientists have not altogether missed what I have been writing about for years. Interestingly, so far, I have seen a lot written about metacognition from the standpoint of studying the phenomenon, but other than Mind Magic I’ve not seen any manual teaching one to have the skills to achieve metacognition.

Net-net, I am pleased that science, specifically developmental psychology, has in effect validated my work by recognizing the existence of this better state of cognition.

Hopefully dear reader you are already metacognitive – after all you have been reading stuff for some time 😊 – and may have been metacognitive even before that. Most readers whom I have met, say they read my book in the first place because they were having these Observer State experiences on their own, but at a very slow rate, and they didn’t even know what it was and therefore couldn’t really tell anybody about it.

Once you have steadied on the gift of metacognition, exploit it fully by setting a mental trigger that will go off as soon as possible after detection of a downer. No longer tolerate downers for yourself. You deserve joy in every moment. It isn’t a farfetched impossibility. People who are self-actualized, doing their passion work, having peak experiences every day, are already doing what I say you can do too.

Bad dreams can set you off badly and the obvious imperative is to decode them before you get out of bed or as soon as practical.

Once you know the reason for the dream it will no longer hold any power over you.

I’ve been enjoying my life and my moments this Summer and was not surprised to wake up in a bad mood, because during the bad dreams which caused the mood, I already knew that these dreams were disturbing me and I couldn’t figure out why. Neither in the dream nor after waking out of it.

After some contemplation I realized what had caused the bad dream.

The cause of the bad dream was that I am enjoying my life and my work so much right now, some part of me had found time to worry about somehow losing it.

Attachment is a cause of bad dreams in general. Things you are afraid of losing. Try that as a first possible key when you next wake from a bad dream, which I hope you shall never have to do again.

Best to all,

Bill