Tag Archives: EOP

The Door to Enlightenment Is Always an Inch Away Part 2

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Originally posted as the second part of February 9, 2012 blog post

In the prior post, Part 1, we analyzed the concept of Enlightenment and some of its meanings from Kant to SRI VALS to Eastern philosophy, and pointed out that it is not an attainment but a maintainment, as one keeps slipping back out of it, with very few making it a permanent state. In this post we’ll focus on the practical steps one can take to beat the odds of spending more time in that state.

It’s okay to be a saint, in other words. It doesn’t mean you are NOT Enlightened. It simply depends on why you are acting saintlike. If there is any trace of ego motivation, you are merely in the highest attachment area before Enlightenment, which is not bad at all. Especially today when Acceleritis™ has us on the brink of our own mass destruction and already practicing it actively against other species of fauna and flora. If you count insecticides that have caused awful cancers and brain diseases, we are already practicing mass destruction against our own species, so caught up in Acceleritis are we.

So if you want to be a world saver, or caregiver, or an otherwise unselfish actor, consider that a degree of Enlightenment already; go ahead and give in to it. We need more of it anyway. It will lead you all the way.

And so as to technique: what techniques can be engaged in order to have these brief epiphanies of Enlightenment?

Why would a saint be taken out of Enlightenment if primarily motivated by the desire to please God?

Because this takes one out of the moment — doing the moment for something outside of the moment — something that exists in the future. Flow, which contains Enlightenment at its top end, does not work that way. If one is doing something for any outcome, one is out of Flow.

One is even out of Flow if one is grading one’s own performance. This is one of the biggest blocks to Flow. This is part of the herd mentality. You are only worth what others think of you. Each moment you have to be attached to what they think of you. This is drilled into us with reward/punishment (“Good Billy! Bad Billy!”).

This goes deep and starts at the first moment of dissociation, the first descent from Flow singularity/pointedness into a divided sheaf of self — the moment Freud referred to in Civilization and its Discontents when the Ego (manager-intermediary) first forms. Freud saw the id (the self that one is born with) as being a primitive, animal-like tabula rasa (a blank state) rather than being the single Consciousness of the Universe — the pure state of Selfness — the singularity of experiencing  — the Observer.

Whatever the parts of consciousness that exist when one is divided, as has become the endemic (and to Freud, natural) state of our race — the point is that a divided mind is the opposite of Flow. Our hypothesis is that our race could have existed mostly in Flow at some point far back enough in time, before Acceleritis set in.

Not being divided inside manifests as there being no distinction between your self and the moment. It is all one piece. You are not observing it from outside. You are experiencing it from inside while being totally immersively aware of the moment. You are not rating your own performance. You are not focused on success. You are not trying to remember technique. You are not narrating your own life novel. You are not making smart alecky comments although they may occur to you wordlessly. Feelings and ideas are happening quickly without being seized upon by the muscle of the mind. They do not take away attention from Flowing with the moment. You are not trying to figure out why you are doing this, or what techniques you are using — you are just doing what comes naturally.

When in Emergency OversimiplificationProcedure (EOP), we are living as though watching a rear view mirror, facing backward all our lives, with breaks to look forward. Only once in a while are we lucky enough to see/be the moment as it happens, not seeing ourselves and the moment as different things. This is to be cultivated.

The looking backward is all about slave mentality — judging your own performance in sublimated attachment to what others think of you. Such attachment is a form of dilemma perception — seeing everything to always be in a world of permanent dilemma, imperfection, hence the need to strive for something outside of the moment.

The word dilemma is all about being divided — “two postulates” is the Latin root meaning. Of course if there is more than one postulate there is the potential for a conflict between them, hence the uneasiness of having a dilemma. Dilemma, dissatisfaction, striving, attachment, all of these are the same thing — EOP. The state the great majority of us are in virtually all of the time. Our leverage to get out of that state and into Flow state is through these little windows that are only an inch away.

Here’s a recap:

  • If one is doing something for any outcome, one is out of Flow.
  • Grading one’s own performance is one of the biggest blocks to Flow.
  • A divided mind is the opposite of Flow.
  • In Flow, there is no distinction between your self and the moment. It is all one piece.
  • In Flow, you are not trying to figure out why you are doing this, or what techniques you are using — you are just doing what comes naturally, in the moment.

Jump through!

Best to all,

Bill

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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.

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Inner Imagery Shorthand to Reinstate Flow

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Volume 4, Issue 14

Five hours in an airport. It’s a great way to catch up on work and then relax with a novel of speculative fiction, especially when I’m exhausted. It’s all okay until they start the delaying-the-flight game, which all too often leads to cancellation. Kristin isn’t working (on my clock) but has a little time so she starts researching the hotels nearest the airport and the probable flight alternatives, God bless her. Sure enough the flight is cancelled and I make it to the taxi stand before the horde. Only problem is that I’m going to get at best 4 hours sleep to make the flight heading to a city 1000 miles further away from home in order to change planes and get home by 5PM, right in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend traffic. Really? Ah well.

Next morning, walking through the airport toward my first plane of the day, I sense that I am feeling angry, exasperated and negative, projecting that I will run into further snags all day. Knowing that such projection will cause the snags, keeping me out of Flow, I experience something that I will describe below, laugh at myself and am back in a good mood. My eyes always go back and forth taking in as much as possible when I am in an unfamiliar setting, and on the next leftward sweep I see a flight heading to where I am going – La Guardia – leaving shortly nonstop for home. Why didn’t they put me on that flight, I wonder, and keep walking. A step later I figure I have time, why not at least check if I can get on that flight. Sure enough there is one seat.

In You Are The Universe I talk about Noia, the word I coined to mean the opposite of paranoia: yes, there are personas out there trying to do something to you, but it isn’t harm, it’s gifts. If you perceive the Universe to be a single Self playing all these roles including you, there is every reason in the world why Noia as a lens should work to help you notice these subtle gifts and clues happening constantly. Therein lies the magic. Of course, that kind of observant behavior would also be good to protect you should anyone be out to do you harm, so pragmatically, why not use that lens?

The shortest flight home and my noticing it was a gift that appeared a second after my mood shifted out of negativity, and the feeling I had at that instant was a powerful sense of synchronicity, the Universe giving me my just reward for acceptance of what is.

I said that I would describe the experience I had of shifting out of the lower state (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, or EOP, as I call it), which in fact is my reason for writing this — to share that moment of shift and what it felt like, so that it becomes a shareable psychotechnology.

A long time ago, I had established “trigger words” to remind myself of one folly or another so that when I was later in the same sort of stuckness loop I could spring those triggers to mind and it would restore the clarity and learning to frontal awareness where evasion of the lower state would be easier (despite the chemical insistence of such states).

For the situation as described, what I would say to myself in my youth was something like this: Accept What Is. That would unpack a stream of remembered relevant words that might go something like this: It is what it is. It’s not in your control. So you’re just wasting time and bringing yourself down by railing against it. It’s a useless activity not worthy of you. You’re not a fool any more. Meanwhile, in my mind I would see a goat butting a fence repeatedly. Eventually, the goat (me) calmed down.

In the airport I heard none of those words although a wispy suggestion of the goat image flashed. Another image came with it that is hard to describe. The Universe around me that ended at my skin was a solid substance and then again I too was in that substance, I am that substance. All of it was translucent and One Thing. Without words, the image conveyed that the very fact that it – the substantial Thing, the process of It – was happening, meant that it was real and everything else that could be imagined about it was not in an equal sense real. So logically, It – the happeningness – was all that truly existed., and any emotional reaction to it was a nice-to-have addition layer but not with equal realness and solidity. That image-feeling was what shifted me out of the downcast defeatist mindset.

Consciousness is the substance of the One Thing that is the primal substrate of existence. Science is even coming around to this view. Psychotechnology to guide consciousness is therefore not a crazy idea. Discovering what works and sharing it is something all of us do naturally, although not often enough, due to Acceleritis™. Yet psychotechnology is the very thing that can cure us of Acceleritis. Let’s have more of it! You can start with this excerpt from my book, Mind Magic: Doorways into Higher Consciousness.

Best to all,

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

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Bring a Sense of the Epic into Your Life

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Volume 3, Issue 11

Science can no longer rule out the possibility that a Single Universal Intelligence is the only thing that exists, per our Theory of the Conscious Universe. Our theory explains how this Intelligence is able to simultaneously play an infinite number of chess games called lives. The You who looks out your eyes and experiences life may not be the gnomish “you” that parts of yourself — neuron clusters programmed by Accidentalism and Materialism — think you are.

Accidentalism is the religion that claims the universe came about by accident out of nothingness.

Materialism is the religion that claims everything is matter, so the human need to worship something can be directed only at material things.

My theory is not a religion. It is a system of hypotheses aimed at explaining all of documented human experience including the “paranormal”. We classify certain experiences as “paranormal” based on our limited experience in the universe as the standard for what is “normal”. And based on our mental emotional ego filters that protect us from dissonance by steadfastly refusing to make anything out of the cumulatively uncanny success rate of our own hunches, thereby trivializing our own experiences of the “paranormal”.

The explanation making the most sense to my gut is that there is only One of us. Each of us is another instance of the Universal Intelligence. All instances are really one Intelligence playing many roles.

The main thing about my theory is that I don’t want you to believe it but rather to test it for yourself. This means using it as a lens of what may in fact be true, certainly is possible, and why not see if using the lens to explain experience might not lead to more control and pleasure than the present way of looking at things?

Some might liken this to a pleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy. It is equally plausible that the way we as a world look at things today is an unpleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy.

At any rate, one needs merely to entertain the possibility that the entire selfness of the Universe is what looks out your eyes, which you call yourself “me”. This is logically and empirically possible based on the most predictively successful theory in history, quantum mechanics. So entertain it for a second.

Realize it is possible that you are the one self that exists, enjoying yet another life. Realize if this just happens to be the one true explanation that science and everyone will affirm some day in the future, here you are going to the movies to enjoy identifying with a fictional character who is having an epic adventure, when in fact that is just a fairy tale produced in Hollywood while your own life is a genuine, authentic, rich real life saga of a hero beset by challenges and overcoming them — just like in the movies — but real — and therefore infinitely more meaningful and dramatic.

It is possible that the One Being is you… and everyone else. Possible. Actually possible. You have been betting on a reality so far different from this, your automatic reaction is to thrust it aside with a derisive snort. That reflex is itself an interesting phenomenon deserving careful attention — put a pin in it, we will come back and dissect it often on this page in the future. Call it your daily persona, “the robot”. The name is a handle to put on that aspect of your self — the reasons will become apparent in this blog and in my books (including Mind Magic) and DVDs. 

Don’t let the thrusting aside of new concepts or experiences be internally accepted. Override it by an act of will from your true self. Keep an open mind. Empirical evidence is the only thing to give weight to. Things you yourself have experienced, seen with your own eyes, not things you were told. All the philosophies and cosmologies and religions and scientific theories and my theories are just abstractions of the real thing — symbol systems, metaphors, isomorphisms (same information carried in different code). Reality is what it is. As a race we cannot say yet that we really know what it is. Therefore an open mind is the only sane position — yet another clue that the present world system is not actually sane. Acceleritis has caused EOP. Information overload has actually existed for 6000 years and just keeps getting worse, exponentially. We are dealing with it very poorly. Our society is not yet a sophisticated one. Civilization on planet Earth will be sane and sophisticated when its mind is open and each person is making careful and unfiltered observations of his/her own experience. The Observer state leading to the Flow state.

Takeaway: don’t thrust aside the undisprovable possibility that you are the hero in the most epic movie of all time… and so is everyone else.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — You Are The Universe  is now on track for Summer 2013 publication. Watch this space for more.