February 3rd, 2021

An “As-If” viewpoint opens the mind. You don’t have to believe that the Universe is conscious. But, just because it is possible, and it is of practical value (more about this presently), you can choose to allow yourself to play the game of trying to see the universe’s lesson in whatever happens.

You can regard this as a stimulus to creative thinking.

As an example, take the cancelling of the Keystone XL Pipeline. For environmental reasons, many of us support that move. Yet there are people who have been living that project as their dream, and are heartbroken at the disappearance of their passion work.

The Universe’s lesson is that each decision must consider every possible fallout, and legislation must provide for innocents harmed.

Are we THAT good, where we can aspire to a system in which legislators are THAT sensitive to their many constituencies?

Definitely it’s demanding more of ourselves when it seems we have already overborrowed at that bank.

Here’s the catch. It might truly be impossible with minds continuing to be used in old fashioned ways that no one has seriously questioned in thousands of years.

But we have always had available to us keys to reaching more effective and exalted states of consciousness. Thanks to William James, Abraham Maslow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, these peak experience states are now accepted facts of science, at least as regards the exalted state called Flow and known colloquially as the zone.

Each of us in life rediscovers these Perennial Keys to the higher state but the average person captures very few of them.

They appear in the Bible, vastly in Indian literature, and in every culture on the planet.

You already own more of these keys than you realize.

They are tricks of the mind, hence the jocular title of our book MIND MAGIC.

Rediscovering these oft-rediscovered keys and bringing them down from puzzles in the mind, and from reading the metaphors and exhortations in ancient literature, we’ve distilled and field-proven modernized techniques to learn. You know, because you already read this column.

This mental change is no longer a nice to have.

The game has been stacked so far against us we now must take the leap into self-testing these methods – and all others you deem useful.

In MIND MAGIC where the entire first course is found, there are hundreds of these “viewpoints”. Each one is its own lens. Several appear on the typical page.

Each chapter is one key, and is made up of many diverse viewpoints all of which give you tools with which to achieve that chapter’s key.

Chapter 7 is about – of all things – multitasking.

It’s not the way to get into the Flow state where attention is single pointed and merged with the experience bubble – no separation of subject and object.

But it has become our way of life at least during working hours including domestic duties. Media are virtually ever-present, on top of people speaking to you, and there might be several people talking to you and each other at once, and you may be driving, plus you just had an interesting job breakthrough thought now what was that…

The chapter is about the reader being in exactly that situation, and yet he keeps up with it (in the story) by rotating his attention so as to pay attention to each person and especially the road without losing that big idea.

Rotating one’s attention is not only a strategy for dealing with multiple job streams, it is also a strategy to use within the imagination, for examples, for legislators to plan the cancellation of the pipeline with ability to foresee having to help certain people out who didn’t do anything wrong.

There’s going to be a lot of this.

The Universe’s lesson is that we have to jump level in our use of the mind, or struggle to survive in a much nastier game than we thought we were permanently entitled to.

Look around, see your brethren, help each other simply try to do the right thing. Let love in. We can enjoy the rest of our lives without having to live immersed in vicious rancor. We make our own reality. Take responsibility for the reality you are creating.

If the insurrectionists had all learned that last line, internalized and embodied it to their bones, there wouldn’t have been an insurrection.

We have shown that it is very hard to change political opinions.

It is far easier to change mental emotional self-management. I may be wrong, but spreading these techniques seems to me the best thing I can do for the good of the lifeboat.

Here’s the link to Chapter 7.

We can do it. We can Be It.

My best to you all,

Bill