Tag Archives: Acceleritis

Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) on a Social Level

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In a superbusy world, EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure)* Man jumps at the chance to believe, and says to himself he has no time to think for himself. Religions, political systems, sports leagues, the old left-right wing oversimplification, skin color biases, all of these things become time saving conveniences to EOP Woman and Man. Don’t have to think, thanks!

At some age, pretty early in life, each of us thinks of all the big questions for the first time. Who am I, why are we here, etc. That, on top of all the other unanswered questions produced by our interactions with others, drives us all to the same emotional state of permanently giving up on getting answers. This is the very moment EOP begins.

Some of us never did give up on getting answers and so slip in and out of EOP but spend more than the average amount of time out of that state. EOP still gets us because our minds were not trained to deal with the rapid and complex input streams. But we periodically catch up and come out of it.

Avoiding deep thought and simply getting through life is EOP.

This creates an ideal petri dish in which to grow the ideas that are offered to us as mass movements. Instead of each of us having access to tools that allow us to bring out our inherent individual talents and give these developed talents to the world, our time is too constricted for that because we are doing something often tangential to our true talents in order to pay the dues we owe society in the form of money. Instead of our own perceptions we are provided a menu of mass perceptions to choose from, and because everyone subconsciously gets it that we are all in some kind of fog (EOP), there are not too many choices.

Pre-packaged belief systems on the menu: Capitalism, Communism, specific religions, immersion in some form of ongoing mind-consuming gladiatorial spectacle (spectator sports) requiring memorization of names and scores and other factoids in order to sustain a feeling of belonging and being accepted, choices on mass issues such as race – all of this is a kind of mantra that distracts the mind and keeps it busy processing the accepted mass topics and positions on things, often particular to where you happen to live.

The individual life of the mind is something we are faintly aware of hearing and feeling going on somewhere in the background but we don’t have time to pay much attention to our own thoughts except when we are alone, which is rare. If most of us break out of EOP at all, it is sometimes, when we are alone.

Socially, the effects of EOP are dramatic. We ignore the empathy-endowing effects of the mirror neurons in our brain and coldly close our hearts to other people except under exceptional circumstances. We see life as a dog-eat-dog bar brawl in which we have to look out for number one. Money pressures are the riverbanks that shape the flow of our actions and reify the perception of life as a free-for-all fight for survival.

Neofeudalism becomes the underlying state of society, in which the Haves control the situation, and not-having is perceived by all as being perfectly civilized. Democracy is the right idea when fully carried out, which it never has been. Today democracy is a noble intention but not yet a realized reality. The Internet creates greater potential for true democracy – we shall see how many years go by before such a thing happens.

Whatever tools we use to re-adjust society it will probably take hundreds of years to fully eliminate Havenotism everywhere on Earth, and establish a hutopia (a humanly possible utopia) where individuals are cultivated for their unique mix of talents, which can be shared with others on as large a scale as naturally develops in each case. Again it sounds like some form of Videoized Internet will be involved – perhaps totally artificial reality as visualized in the early works of William Gibson (who coined the term “cyberspace”).

Some will ask whether we can ever really get there from here. Naturally it is easy to think of the Haves as being selfish and not wanting hutopia. In fact you the reader are probably a Have, as I am. We are not bad guys. So maybe there are fewer bad guys than is normally assumed in EOP. Maybe practically all of us are just caught up in this Acceleritis™ pandemic, and not actively against hutopia. How about hutopia without anyone giving up a reasonable level of wretched excess?

In hutopia even the Haves will be having a better time. There is a very high ROI on hutopia. And it is a payoff for everyone, without exception.

The pursuit of happiness. Having that in our country’s Declaration of Independence and bonded into the Constitution was a first in history. No country before us legitimatized the natural right to happiness, or even the idea of natural rights. The great contemporary songwriter and my great friend Stan Satlin brought this to my attention and said that in Judaism is the same idea, mitzvah, focused on giving others happiness and so sharing in that happiness oneself (and thereby giving back to the Creator).

I often think that the one other natural right I would have suggested had I been there would be the right to have one’s innate talents cultivated. This is where I see the greatest tragedy in Havenotism. So many talents wasted. We all benefit from having the greatest development of talents on Earth. We will all wind up getting better service that way.  😀

The Earth’s resources divided by the number of people probably makes hutopia easily possible even with today’s toolware. And the technology is also in (and driving) the state of Acceleritis so it won’t be long before the technomultiplier effect gives us even more economic leverage to achieve hutopia with.

But put that dream aside for now. Let’s talk about what we can do in our lifetimes.

I submit that the priority is EOP. We have to get out of it.

How do we do that?

First of all we will need a psychotechnology – a set of practices which allow an individual to spend less and less time in EOP. More time in the Observer State and Flow State.

This is by no means optimized as a technology today. What we have are the beginnings of toolware. Thousands of people have attested to the fact that these tools work.**

As a society we have to continue to develop and refine psychotechnology, and we must see to it that it is installed in all of our schools.

I don’t mean my stuff necessarily. Let’s as a society engender a process by which these plowshares get beaten into gleaming instruments of biofeedback contentware, kind of a Rosetta Stone language feedback courseware expanded into all conceivable media from books and blogs to artificial realities and brainscans.

Let’s make it a priority to clear our minds of EOP. By all means let’s have real scientists verify what I have been saying. I have in fact been getting positive feedback from neuroscientists for some time, so I know that while unscientific, my hypotheses are somewhere in the vicinity of the truth, lying as behind a veil just out of perception range by the mass of humanity.

It should be possible to measure the brain signatures of EOP, Observer State, and Flow State, and thereby better understand their existence and ways to move from one to the other. Since the early 80s I have been peripherally involved with experiments of this type and know that symmetry of EEG levels (delta, alpha, beta) between left and right brain is one part of the brain signature of the Observer State (and probably of Flow State). From recent work at Yale we know there is a reduction of random information flow across the corpus callosum – as if a reduction in mental chatter – in the Flow State (The Zone, as Yale Master Marvin Chun puts it).

Precisely knowing the totality of the brain substrates of these states will move us from hypotheses to a real theory of brain states, and a true psychotechnology that can elevate the effectiveness of the human race. It’s my hope that the Human Effectiveness Institute can at least begin this process, and we will get as far as we can.

Best to all,

Bill

*EOP (Emergency Oversimplfication Procedure), the condition that sets in when there is too much information resulting in desperate shortcutting such as rationalized guesswork.

** Out of ~35,000 copies of my book Mind Magic sold on lifetime moneyback guarantee, 11 came back, and over 2000 endorsement letters/emails were received generally citing life changes in desired directions and saying more people should read this book.

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers.

In Praise of Goofing Off

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Or, Indirect Observation of Undirected Mentation
Volume 4, Issue 31

The creative process goes through four stages: absorbing information, turning away, the Aha! Moment, and implementation.

A third of a second before the Aha! Moment — a type of Flow state experience — Daniel Goleman explains that there is a burst of gamma activity, signifying the rapid creation of a new network of neural connections, in the neocortical right temporal cortex of the brain.

The Aha Moment

The Aha! Moment (image courtesy of DailyMail.com)

In our present culture in which multiple jobs are held by most persons just to keep up with their Jones, and in which Acceleritis™ necessitates massive multitasking, the creative process tends to become truncated into a two-step process of absorbing information (never enough), and implementation. In other words, no Aha! Moment.

The absorbing of information part was easier before the Internet. One saw the logic of not going too far, because it would cost too much time. Now one can keep drilling down further and further without an apparent end in sight.

Finding information however continues to be the major complaint of executives and their teams. You know you have it somewhere and you can go searching for it but it is so boring and annoying given the time pressure. Give me a dashboard where I don’t even have to remember what it is called and yet can still find it in a second. Until then, just send that thing to me again.

When you break down how much time goes into the absorption (including searching) and other aspects of the process, the two middle stages — turning away, then the Aha! Moment — take almost no time compared with absorbing and implementing. And yet those two middle processes account for the quality of the outcome or creative result. With only the bookends and no middle the result may be passable but it does not rock. Are we here just to do stuff that’s passable, without the satisfaction of Flow state-level outcomes? No way — makes no sense. Life is about living large, not just robotically coping.

And all you have to do is have more fun! Goof off. Take a break, a mini-vacation at the right moments in your creative process, and the Aha! reveals itself.

However, this only occurs if your mind is in a certain state receptive to the sense of Aha!. That state can be described as the indirect observation of undirected mentation. Let’s break it down.

Undirected mentation is when you let your mind go wherever it wants.

Indirect observation is (by my definition) the alert watching of something as if seeing it for the first time.

So you receive Aha! to the degree to which your mind can do whatever it wants to do with no pressure to perform or achieve anything. Meanwhile a very alert part of you is watching your own mind, as if from outside.

When you do this, the tendency is for that Observer state part of yourself to go to sleep. That is, your point of view tends to get reabsorbed into the part of the mind that is just playing and you forget to look at it from the detached Observer point of view. You get caught up in some attachment motivation, some feeling/emotion, which identifies you with the relaxing, playing, wandering mind. This may feel wonderful; however, it doesn’t help you if the objective is Observer and then Flow states. “Identification with” leaves the attachment turned on. “Detachment from” is the goal.

Remain the scientist, the objective observer when goofing off, and the Aha! will come more often.

Best to all,

Bill

 

 

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers .

A Way Out of War

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Volume 4, Issue 24

Sun Tzu said that the greatest leaders win without having to fight. Solomon’s sarcastic remark about cutting the baby in half was an example of one tactic for conflict resolution. As was Jesus’ remark about ye who is without sin casting the first stone. May we continue to evolve ways of cooling down rather than escalating. Now that WMD are so available, living in a tinderbox would seem to require it.

It is easier to understand some sources of conflict than others. We have known since the Greek Golden Age and probably earlier about the tendency for hubris, how an individual’s rise tends to lead to megalomania. We today see the threat of North Korea in that light. We can be more empathetic when poverty is the seedbed for hostility, as in the recent splinter perversions of the otherwise upright Islamic version of the Abrahamic group of religions. (I know some readers will think about Muhammad’s own wars and color Islam with it, but every religion and nation has been embroiled in wars at least as far back as the advent of written language, which fomented Acceleritis.)

The war that is harder to understand, at least in our present day, is the war between science and religion, flaring up once again. In the old days it used to be religion attacking science, which is not as counter-intuitive as the recent eruptions of science attacking religion. And not only religion, today we even see isolated cases of scientists even attacking philosophy. One otherwise brilliant and charming scientist publicly calls people who believe in God “stupid” (although how “smart” is it to publicly insult 93% of the world population)?

Some media always call attention to controversy because “it sells papers”. The main dangers of such altercations are distraction, demoralization, and fuel for the fire of political conflicts. To the extent that civilization wishes to hold together against militant uprisings, it needs to also hold to civilized behavior.

Dichotomania is one result of Acceleritis — putting everything into black/white good/bad categories. To the extent that those disposed to cause trouble — the powers behind terrorism — can identify themselves as lovers of God and the scientific West/East civilization as anti-God (Satanic), the motivational drivers of kamikaze behavior are multiplied.

My great friend the artist Peter Sorensen just sent me a collection of articles from the British publication New Scientist. In these articles, leading scientists discuss religion from a more clearheaded perspective. One article by physicist and philosopher Victor J. Stenger vindicates what I have been saying for decades, that the existence of God can be treated as a scientific hypothesis. He goes on to say that no evidence has been collected in support of that hypothesis. In my dissenting view, this is because today’s science defines “evidence” in such a way as to exclude the experiences within individual consciousness that cannot be measured by external devices.

The hidden agenda of Materialistic Accidentalism — the splinter cult within science that practices reductionism, sometimes comes across as uptight, and has started up unnecessary fights with religion and philosophy — seems (perhaps only to me) overly concerned with absolute certainty, which I consider to be pragmatically unavailable. Even quantum theory is self-admittedly a construct with high predictivity, yet no one claims it is the final answer with absolute certainty. The certainty angle is the hidden reason behind the restrictive definition of evidence, excluding what we lay individuals can experience for ourselves without third-party instrumentation. This makes science a closed group excluding the mass of humanity from partaking in its ways, exactly like an ancient priest class. I feel we can all be scientists in the way we live our lives, keeping track of experimental results and changing our thoughts and actions accordingly.

I wrote my new book You Are The Universe: Imagine That to offer a third way of looking at things, outside of the classical religion vs. science context. The book is a theory, a set of hypotheses, intended to explain the universe in scientific terms as a single field of consciousness, and to define consciousness as, in effect, an energy computer of such an intelligence level as to allow self-awareness. This one Self manifests in many forms, living through each of us as a temporarily sequestered pseudo-identity.

The book details how this model actually supports the core beliefs of all religions. It is unique (insofar as I know) as a scientific/empirical approach that resolves the millennia-long appearance of a war and an at-essence incompatibility between religion and science.

Mine is neither the current science approach (demanding credentials and relatively rapid verifiability by instrumentalities in the consensus reality) nor the classic theistic approach (faith, belief, authoritarianism, doctrine). It is a third way.

In the book I offer an experiment that readers can perform and determine the pragmatic results for themselves. I’m more concerned with the pragmatic — finding a set of operating rules to optimize life, gain insight into self and others and into the whole of which we are each a part, and thus reach and stay longer in the highest Flow states.

I am hoping that many people experiment with this third way. Pleased with the results, they might then help damp down the unnecessary, distracting, demoralizing and dangerous ideological wars, and better enjoy life. They don’t even have to give up science or religion.

More about Materialistic Accidentalism in this one minute video interview I did with my daughter Nicole adds a relevant point. Krishnamurti beautifully explains why rooting exclusively for any partial system works against our highest collective interest:

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
— J. Krishnamurti

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI". It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book. The E-book is coming in September.

Smell the Sweetness

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Volume 4, Issue 22

Annie was moving fast. She always moved fast. She did everything fast. She even laughed fast, and then quickly moved on to the next thing.

She whisked through the garden doing the necessary watering without noticing the sweet fragrance of new-mown grass and wildflowers. The softly scented breeze on her bare arms itself felt delicious and somehow combined into one thing with the scent. Faintly and unheard, a small inner voice related the moment to the song about a kiss you could build a dream on. The perfumed wind and immobile meditation could have been a winged heart dream but all this was literally beneath attention as Annie had things to do and if asked she would have said all her concentration was on getting the job done. There was some truth in that. She was intent on getting the tasks behind her, but not because there was good stuff ahead that she was eager to get to. And there was nothing like a state of concentration going on in her head.

Like so many of us, Annie’s mind was a mess. It was not focused. Her current movements were not based on a carefully-thought-out plan with transparent priorities. She was just keeping up with the have-to-do’s — the pervasive tone of life in the Accelerolithic Era. Distracted state precludes Flow state. There’s too much noisy messy input, with seemingly not enough time to process it.

Annie could be an artist. She is good with her hands and could envision a piece and create it. Doing that got her into the Flow state where she did her best work — her gift to the world.

Making money at her art seemed like an idle fantasy judging from the toughness of the world, her surroundings and friends and the lives they all led. There was great beauty in her surroundings but the mood created by the difficulty of making enough money to live pleasurably without constant fear of money problems made that beauty literally invisible.

If Annie were hypnotized and asked patiently for a long time about why she is always moving so fast, eventually she would come to realize something she does not know: it is because she is always unconsciously striving to make money. She feels without knowing it that she will make more money by doing everything as fast as she can. She does odd jobs for friends and acquaintances, like working in a dress shop, washing cars, walking dogs, and landscaping, so there is some logic in that unconscious thought. However, in reality the fast motion causes a slowdown in finished product due to the need to patch up things not done properly, which also eventually causes her to not get as much work from her employers as she would if everything were always done without things being left in the wrong places or half-done.

One layer deeper she might realize that the quest to make money was not really because she wanted to buy specific things so much as to please her partner and also to have other people be proud of her or realize that she is more capable than the way they have treated her.

Annie went to the mountaintop one day and although as the sun passed its zenith and the breeze began to be cold, she remained bare-armed and slipped into that waking dream where she was uplifted out of her Acceleritis and into the Flow state at what You Are The Universe calls “Soul-Level Two” — the bliss state, ananda. She was not moving fast. She was not under the dominance of any have-to-do compulsions. Her mind and body and every aspect of her were all lined up in the Game. There was no rush. She could see everything around her, hear everything, smell it all, enjoying the moment itself with no force causing her to lose freedom, break the fast on motion, in any direction.

This is the place to live at every moment. It is its own reward. Because we then give our finest performances at any beloved Game, we get paid the most money for it. We cannot get there by giving up as unrealistic the inner drive to do a specific thing we love to do, and settling into a mortgaged life of second-choice work that is steady and dependable. Like the hero or heroine in a movie, in real life we must pursue our highest calling, have the daring to do that extraordinarily risky seeming thing.

Then we will have the ability to concentrate, the prerequisite for Flow state. We will smell the sweetness of Life. And because the Universe is us, if we actually do what we are uniquely designed to do so that we provide true value to others, as if by magic the dreams will come true in the end.

“Do what you like to do. You’re going to be doing it for a long time.”

—George Burns, while puffing cigar

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.