Tag Archives: Consciousness

We Suddenly Know What Heaven We’re In

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 2

In his song “Begin the Beguine”, Cole Porter describes that miraculous moment in time when you really experience being in a heavenly realm, even though you are still on Earth. It is one of the higher levels of the Flow state.

Lovers can sometimes shift into that place together, as if tuning across to a parallel universe of bliss just a dimensional twist away from this universe where we assume a defensive stance against endless trials and challenges whose humor we can no longer see. Rarely are the lovers intending that shift consciously, although Tantric Yogis populate much of this rare group.

Just as often it is one person alone making the shift. Again it occurs by itself without conscious intent sometimes, though great numbers of people on Earth engage in practices long ago discovered to have the effect of potentiating and bringing on that state and other levels of Flow. Yoga is the science of those practices, its purpose being the realization within inner experience of connection with divinity.

Yoga, from Sanskrit, means to yoke up, as an ox is yoked up to a wagon, or an attention node of the One Consciousness is consciously yoked up to the whole of which it is a part. The corresponding linguistic root in Latin is religare (verb), or religio (noun), meaning to bind, very similar semantically with the additional connotation of a debt or duty to repay righteously. All religions are forms of practice designed to accomplish this shift in inner state. These inner states actually exist, as has long been obvious to common sense, and as is now beginning to be validated by the skeptical reductionist science dominant in Earth thinking for the last four centuries.

The word “religion” today is not as useful in a conversation like this as it might have been. Organized religions have let people down on too many occasions due to corruption and wars and torture and molestation and God knows what else that is the obvious opposite of what religion must stand for if and when pure. The subtext of the word is therefore poisoned with that long history of going off course. The term I prefer to use as a result of that baggage is “Spiritual”.

I use the word “spiritual” in the context of the classical perspective that within what we can perceive of the whole of reality, there are two palpable aspects: matter and consciousness. We experience both and therefore common sense accepts that both exist. The remaining question is simply, “What is the relationship between these two aspects of reality?”

In that context, “experience”, “consciousness”, and “spirit” all mean the same thing to me. They are the names of the domain of reality that is not matter.

More about these thoughts — the levels of Flow state, the meaning of the spiritual levels of Flow, the practices of yoga and other spiritual methodologies, the meeting ground between the spiritual domain and science — in our next exciting installment.  🙂

My best to you all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.

For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this video. Or this collection of videos.

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.

What Is Humor?

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 50

Like life itself, and consciousness, love, oneness, even Flow state, and so many other things we take for granted just because of long familiarity, have you ever stopped to wonder what is this weird sound-and-breath spasm thing we do sometimes? Laughing, I mean. What is that?

Feelings are one of the best clues to meaning. The meaning of any moment is most easily extracted from our feelings at that moment and in retrospect. Moreso than logical analytics alone.

(Side Note: The mind/body/spirit is in Flow state when all the detector and effector functionality is optimized together, feelings and intuition and analytics and perceptions and actions are not abstracted from one another, and inside/outside subject and object are one flowing process. A Oneness Singularity.)

What are the feelings associated with this bizarre phenomenon we take for granted? Laughing, that is.

We are pleased when we laugh, it’s fun, and it is an expression of at least momentary happiness, even if we do it ruefully during a negative feeling context.

Sometimes laughter is joy expressing itself bubbly and uncontainable, as when a child takes off on his first flight on a sled.

Humor is the intentional or unintentional causation of laughter. Of course the standup learns that sometimes it is the intention to create laughter without the fact of it.

Once we discovered that we liked this involuntary spasm (as we like orgasm, another preferred spasm, whereas we dislike and fear most spasms we experience) we began to purposely try to evoke it as much as possible under whatever circumstances befall us.

Laughter and orgasm may be related in ways we don’t know yet.

My dry cleaner is a comedian. Everything he says is intended to make you laugh. At least it makes him laugh, which is definitely a healthy thing. Good spasms are healthy spasms.

In the case of humor, sometimes our laughter expresses relief. The butt of the joke is being ridiculed, and since we are not the one getting the ridicule, we are relieved. Yet ridiculousness, related to ridicule, appears to be at the center of all humor.

When I have fallen from Observer state, I often get back up by realizing that if I can’t see the humor in the situation, I have clearly lost perspective. “These are the jokes,” I remind myself.

Enjoy this moment. And now this one.

Be prepared to laugh.

If you’re already smiling, you’re already prepared.

Wishing you laugh-filled days and nights,

Bill

PS – Top copywriter and genius Ed Ney of Young & Rubicam fame has moved on to the next classroom. Read his speeches and yours will be even better than they’ve been. Like Erwin Ephron, Ed used short pithy memorable sentences packed with meaning and impact, condensed intelligence and insight. Much to unpack. Rhythmic to the mind. Ed had been a reader of this blog. Treasured like all of you. So long, Ed, see ya. Somewhere somewhen down the long and winding.

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That, coming in February.

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.

How to Increase Your Luck

Volume 3, Issue 49

The flock of wild turkeys walks past my window facing the river, heads bobbing forward and back, through the light snow drifting down. Today, whatever guides me to decide to write about a specific thing in these posts has assigned me the subject of luck. My mind, like the snow, drifts through kaleidoscopic memories, recent ones of remarkable luck my two startups seem to be having, and for some reason, a particular moment one day in 1975.

A young lady let’s call Sue regards me as her spiritual coach and is ever eager to ask me questions, which I am happy to answer. Her pattern though is to guess at the answers as I am midway through the first sentence of an answer. I’ve patiently indulged her in this for some months. At times she appears to be reading my mind and at other times just wanting to be the smart one, making ridiculous statements, and I’ve woven whatever she says back into the conversation, playing Socrates and maintaining my own self-amusement. But on this particular day something happens that’s clearly out of the ordinary.

She has asked a question, I have started to answer it, and she interrupts. However, as she speaks, there is a crash of thunder. The sky is cloudless and there is no prediction of rain. She smiles and starts again, and again the thunder interrupts her. This time she waits and looks around kiddingly, seconds go by, and then I go back into giving my answer. She waits only a moment before interrupting, and again the thunder overrules her. This goes on for some time. The exact concurrence of the thunder with her interruptions is unbelievable — the explanation of the concurrence as a random coincidence being the unbelievable part. Somehow when I speak there is no thunder, and when she interrupts, there is.

When these strange synchronicities occur, as they do billions of times a day around the Earth, something has changed the odds. Luck — good or bad depending upon one’s point of view — is not a constant. Some kind of energy has changed the probabilities of things. Like the way the value of pi is theorized to change near a large gravitational source. In my observation, a person in Flow state appears to increase the probability of synchronicities.

Philosophy seems so impractical when one is living through a period of Acceleritis. As if the preconscious mind is saying to itself, while choosing among flitting mental impulses as to which ones to shine the bright light upon, “Cogitating about the nature of reality would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic — I’ve got to stay grounded in fielding all this incoming traffic.”

Unfortunately that’s a suboptimal procedure. The nature of reality has a very practical significance in every decision we make. Putting aside learning about the nature of reality is like deciding to keep playing a game without learning the rules, or like trying to win at cards without taking the trouble to keep track of which cards are already out.

In these posts and in my new book You Are The Universe I have laid out the case for strongly suspecting that consciousness is not a rare happenstance in the universe, but rather the essential nature of every part of it. This (some would say just accidentally) happens to explain the observer effect in quantum physics and relativity, and why Charles Tart’s objective statistical analyses of paranormal phenomena shows that the occurrence of telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing are statistically significant and the odds of a random explanation are billions to one. My theory also explains why sometimes our hunches are uncannily accurate, and explains the highly unlikely synchronicities that happen all the time.

Our culture makes us think that we are alone in our minds, whereas if my theory is correct (I am betting my life on it) we are all pseudopods of one mind, and hence anything but alone. There is a higher level of significance to everything that happens to us, and we are in a constant interactive game of life with a higher part of ourselves, the overall universe in which we are not a separate ball-bearing rattling around in a disparate box, but rather a morphing feature on the apparent surface of one Whole.

What luck is, then, is not a Monte Carlo procedure of random chance, but only appears that way because we do not understand all the purposes and causes impinging on every outcome of every action.

I feel intuitively certain that the next step for science is a subtle shift in point of view that will make everything fall into place, and will lead us to discover new ways of tapping into energy fields that will yield so much power that we can all afford to live like kings and queens. With his magnifying transmitters, Tesla had the start at a system of converting the Earth’s rotational magnetic energy into electricity — free to the masses. That was electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces, and perhaps all four can be tapped into in an analogous way. Will consciousness play a role as a fifth force in future technologies involving energy fields, not unlike the way the observer influences the outcome of quantum experiments?

Wishing you all luck that you consider extraordinarily good. I recommend objectively testing whether such “positive” luck can be attracted by flowing helpfully with every implied or explicit request that anyone makes of you. And that you dissect whatever appears to be “negative” luck so as to detect what the universe seems to be guiding you toward. I’d love to hear how your testing comes out — I do read your Comments, though most come by email.

Happy, lucky Chinese New Year!

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That, coming in February.

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.

The Season to Celebrate the Miraculous

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 43

The Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year when the sun appears at its lowest altitude above the horizon and darkness abounds, has been celebrated with festivals of light since Neolithic times. Earliest cavemen and cavewomen prior to the dawn of reason could have felt that the world was coming to an end, and might have sought to propitiate Nature, the Sun, and divinity in general, with encouraging firelight, signaling the request to bring back the great light.

The primary axis of Stonehenge, which could have been built as far back as 3000 BC, is aligned to point to the Winter Solstice sunset. Newgrange in Ireland, built around 3200 BC in the Neolithic period, is similarly aligned to point to the Winter Solstice sunrise.

Wikipedia lists an impressive array of holidays in all countries and religions oriented around the Winter Solstice.

Probably no other person in history has inspired more works of art in all media than Yeshua Ben Joseph (Hebrew equivalent to Jesus, son of Joseph), remembered as Jesus Christ, after whom Christmas is named — Christmas being the signature Winter Solstice celebration in the Western World for the past 2000 years.

The Founders of the United States of America, who considered themselves deists, nevertheless esteemed most strongly the philosophy of this high being. So does practically every other person who has come into contact with his teachings.

Among Jesus’ key ideas are that God loves us as a father would, and that we should treat each other as we’d like to be treated. None of his quotations in the Bible contradict my theory that we are all part of One Being. Certainly a single being playing many roles would love all of them as himself, and in a role conscious of this existential unity, would treat everyone else very well indeed, knowing all to be part of the One Being.

Jesus also emphasized that even our thoughts count. “As a man thinketh so shall he be.” My theory posits that the matter-energy timespace universe is projected from consciousness, and that even in our roles as humans — a reduced form of the Original Self — our thoughts, feelings, intuitions and perceptions, in a closed feedback loop, influence what subsequently happens in the matter-energy timespace universe.

Jesus gave us useful psychotechnology — tips on how to arrange our thoughts, feelings, intuitions and perceptions so as to be capable of forgiveness, such as seeing how we ourselves are just as righteously to be judged as we judge the flaws of others: Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone… and Thou hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

It is impossible to think of Jesus without thinking of miracles. While many miracles are attributed to Jesus, the church over the centuries has investigated other claimed miracles and certified a number of them as such. Travelers to the devout country of India often return claiming to have personally observed miracles.

The Jewish Winter Solstice holiday of Chanukah celebrates the miracle of the oil lasting eight days although there was only enough barely for one day. This occurred when the Jews had retaken the Temple in Jerusalem from the Syrian-Greek Seleucid Empire, and found almost all the oil desecrated (160 BC). The Jewish celebration of an eight-day festival of light goes much further back in antiquity, probably to Neolithic times, and is mentioned for example in a Talmudic document written during the Babylonian Captivity, which ended in 538 BC. In that document Adam is said to have sat for eight days in fast and in prayer anticipating that the world was going back to the darkness of chaos and confusion. When he saw the light returning he said “Such is the way of the world,” and observed eight days of festivity. The actual timing of Chanukah each year is based on both the Sun and Moon and therefore its exact timing is not synchronous with the Winter Solstice.

What is a miracle? Something that does not usually happen. Doctors today regularly bring the dead back to life, as in certain surgical operations where the body must be brought down to very low temperatures, and Google is not alone in believing that life can be extended indefinitely, achieving immortality. Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be miraculous to those who have not grown used to that technology.

The existence of the universe is itself a miracle. Why should anything ever have come into existence? How can something come out of nothing? Logically, all that should ever have existed is nothingness. In our theory, and in Kabbalah, the great bootstrap operation of all time occurred when the Nothing (ain) became aware of itself (ain soph) at which point light streamed out in all directions from this point of self-awareness (ain soph aur). The Original Self, living through each of us, is The Nothing’s Imagination. (I wrote a book about this for my grandson Nicholas — look for The Nothing’s Imagination in 2014.)

Flow state is a miracle. Seeing other people seem to go into slow motion. Suddenly out of the blue knowing how a friend’s characteristic mannerism came into existence and having him validate it. The many synchronicities — odd seemingly-meaningful coincidences — that occur more frequently than would seem the result of random chance. My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That! (coming soon), contains reports of some of the miracles I have witnessed.

This season celebrating the return of the light force is a time to reconsider the miraculous. Even though the universe I postulate is “just” extremely advanced technology — supremely advanced psychotechnology specifically — this does not vitiate the meaningfulness of having an attitude of awe and wonderment such as one holds toward the idea of miracle. It’s really a choice. Do you want to live your life with the childlike thrill you once had, alive in your life once more, or would you prefer to be blasé about existence, including your own?

It’s always your choice.

Happy Holidays! Celebrate the miraculous.

My best to you 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.