Tag Archives: Higher States of Consciousness

Interconnectedness

May 31, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

God bless Jerry Zaltman. In my May 17th blog post, I reported that Harvard’s pioneer neuroscientist who introduced the field of subconscious measurement by his creation of the patented ZMET system, is joining with me in a project to introduce methods in schools for thinking more constructively, objectively, clearly, and creatively. In laying the groundwork for this project, Jerry is finding that others are already moving in the same direction, which is inspiring.

Today I received notice from Jerry of a new paper in the Journal of Education for Business  – Mental health among college students: Relationships with Actively Open-Minded Thinking, Spirituality, and Psychological Wellbeing – by educators at two US state universities, Arkansas and Idaho, which proves that:

“Mental health, like many other physical diseases, can contribute to a significant loss of output in our economy. Higher education institutes can play a significant role in enhancing the mental wellbeing of college students. In support of this endeavor, this research investigates how actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and spirituality (SP) relate to psychological wellbeing (PWB). Data revealed that both AOT and SP have a positive impact on most dimensions of PWB and in some instances, SP acts as a moderator. Our study highlights the importance of SP in the PWB of college students.”

One might wonder how spirituality being taught in public and state schools jibes with the separation of church and state. This paper however addresses spirituality at its core essence as a feeling and as a concept of interconnectedness. The spiritual feeling an individual has is that person’s sense of being connected with others, and possibly even with the universe itself. The Founders who insisted on freedom of religion would probably not deny the teaching of this concept and the feelings that surround it.

In the paper, the authors compare spirituality in this meaning to holistic thinking, starting from the big picture of how a specific subject is connected with other subjects, before drilling down to a micro level within that subject of interest. In this they consciously align with what they call the Eastern philosophical approach, contrasting it with the Western approach of starting from the micro level and studying a subject and possibly never getting to seeing the connections between that subject and all other subjects.

Back in the 70s, someone came up with the idea of adding one more level to Piaget’s model of the evolution of human cognitive processes, Systems Stage, which would appear above Formal Operational Stage in the model. This is where holistic thinking comes in, seeing everything as part of a single interconnected whole.

Prior to that the term “Systems Thinking” was coined by Professor Jay Forrester in 1956 when he founded the Systems Dynamic Group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

The idea that we are all interconnected was reintroduced in a new way in the modern era by one of Piaget’s influencers, Carl Gustav Jung, who published the idea of the Collective Unconscious in 1916.

Today in the Standard Interpretation of Quantum Physics it is recognized that particles become entangled by association with one another and after that they are able to share information instantaneously regardless of the distance they are apart.

This lays the groundwork for physics to one day include the entanglements of consciousness as part of its quantum entanglement theory. John Wheeler has already established a framework for including consciousness in the quantum physics model, called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (1983), which Stephen Hawking referenced and tacitly endorsed in his final book.

This Principle explains that consciousness, which observes, transforms non-determined probability waves into concrete realities by its act of observation. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God”, I carry Einstein’s, Wheeler’s, and Hawkings’ ideas further by speculating that a single consciousness is all that exists, and that one of the ways it operates is to “look out from” a multitude of apparent selves (all of us including everything in the universe), and that Wheeler’s Quantum Foam is the substance of that Original Consciousness.

Science consists of theory and experimentation. Experimentation is the way that theories are proven, altered, or disproven. One wonders what sorts of experiments could be run in order to study the relationship of consciousness to quantum physics.

Another brilliant neuroscientist and perhaps the first of the neurophysicists, Dr. Richard Silberstein, is the first to carry out experimentation into the possible quantum entanglement of consciousness.

Science Explores Telepathy from a New Angle

Robert A. Heinlein wrote many great books, one of which is called Time for The Stars. The story is about achieving interstellar travel but needing a way to stay in touch with Earth, a method that is not limited to the speed of light, because when traveling light years away, messages would take years to go back and forth, which is not conducive to providing learning to the people at home.

In the story, the solution found is that some identical twins are able to telepathically communicate with each other, and that these messages happen instantaneously regardless of distance.

My great friend and highly respected neuroscientist, Dr. Richard Silberstein, never read that Heinlein novel. But he got the same idea. He read scientific papers which led him to have the idea. Having invented and patented an improved brain measurement system (steady state tomography, SST) he applied that method (commercially available through the company that Richard founded, Neuro-Insight) to conduct an experiment with monozygotic (MZ, coming from a single egg, “identical”) human twins.

The experiment was written up in the respected neuroscience journal Frontiers in Neuroscience paper published about a month ago.  There is now strong statistical evidence that information was transmitted mind to mind in a significant number of cases within the design.

If and when science was to announce that telepathy is real, that too could have a potentially positive impact on the moods and emotions of the masses.

It would say —

We can be more than we think we can be.

Here’s a ten-minute video piece on Connectedness: Sanity Is an Acquired Taste: Connectedness

My best to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

The Unified Level of Flow State

Volume 4, Issue 11

On this, one of the first springtime days, finally, I was able to clamber through the woods to the stream and meditate in Nature. Back at the house, a horde of tiny yellow birds flood the side deck feasting on the thistle seeds we put out for them.

We’ve been exploring the higher states of consciousness in recent posts and in this post we reach the highest level I have experienced — though probably not the highest state that exists in the Universe for Someone. In this state there is no separation between the current individual and the ageless Conscious Experiencer or Ultimate Self of the Universe. One is aware of that true identity directly, not simply as a concept.

In this level of Flow state it is impossible to be attached, that is, fixated on something needed for self-completion. One is already irrevocably self-complete. When it becomes ingrained as the omnipresent state, where there is no turning back, this is that ultra- rarest of states known classically as Enlightenment, Liberation, Moksha, and endless other names. It is not a myth.

I have experienced this level of Flow only at rare moments and briefly each time. A couple of those experiences are recounted in You Are The Universe: Imagine That.

After having experienced this state, I was firmly convinced that my intuition was correct, everything jibed, and it felt right. Nevertheless, I continue to fall back to lower states, as Acceleritis™-driven distractions engage the robot part of my mind into habitual attachment programs.

Even though once I was at the peak of the mountain, where I saw there was no sense at all in getting that sucked into the drama of the current incarnation, the pull of the gravity of repetition-ingrained reactions in the brain, with their powerful chemical effectors, drug the intellectually-aware mind into acting as if it does not know it is already complete, whole. The intense feeling and intuition of Oneness with the Creator fades while only an intellectual awareness of it remains. Over time, one spends more time in the upper levels, driven by awareness of the process, and by spending one’s days doing or transitioning to one’s passion work.

In this uppermost level of the Flow state, one has all of the benefits of the earlier stages on the stepladder of higher consciousness: objective perceptiveness in the Observer state, then the Flow state levels of self-perfect action, then self-perfect affect (bliss), then self-perfect cognition, then self-perfect precognition, and then fully merged back into what One Really Is.

While in that awakened state, the current life on Earth is seen as something like a dream from which one has awakened. Not exactly a dream because all of it counts for something and is of enormous cosmic significance, but now one is looking at it from a wholly different perspective, as a piece of art within an infinite tapestry — one is the spider spinning that multidimensional rainbow web.

In the prior Flow level of precognition, one experiences telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing. In this potentially-ultimate-for-humans state, add telekinesis. One actually wills events and they occur with unlikely predictivity.

This probably sounds like the Force in “Star Wars”, much like it did to George Lucas when he created the movie, out of his personal experiences no doubt.

Each of us has more power to create future reality than we realize. Even in the lower states of consciousness this is true, though often to our detriment.

Being part of the One Self, the One Consciousness, the One Energy Biocomputer that is the only thing that exists, why would we not have such powers?

Best to all,

Bill

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

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 Precognition Level of Flow State

Volume 4, Issue 10

Driving back from the inn where we held our Human Effectiveness Institute Spring Meeting I check out the baby black cows dotting the broad rolling field to my left. Grazing nearby, their mommies tower over them, the babies being the size of small dogs. I imagine holding one of the baby cows in my lap and petting it like a dog, staring lovingly into each other’s eyes. A winding turn past a winery with vast rows of viniculture and then I am home to our little piece of paradise. In the house, warming up from the late April chill still hanging over from the brutal winter, I encounter the peony, which has now opened fully. It is an amazing specimen, huge like a pink many-petaled galaxy breathing its sweetness toward me, with hot pink tips to its stamens.

We had an agenda for the three days, which we all lovingly allowed to evaporate and then flowed like water through the topics that seemed to bubble up like passionate lava from one or another of my colleagues. My autonomic software-layer impulse was to continuously take charge of the meeting and I mostly ignored it, trusting the Universe to make sure everything necessary got done, which it all did, in its own chosen order.

For each of the last several blogposts we have been taking another step up the ladder of consciousness. We are exploring the highest states of consciousness, the Observer state, and the successive levels of Flow state: Action, Bliss, Cognition and now Precognition. I reported my experiences discerning different levels of the Flow state. Action, when my child actor/comic performances eventually slipped into doing themselves perfectly with me watching from nearby. Bliss, when not only Action but also feeling is at its very best. Cognition, when the speed of one’s mind in identifying and articulating deep insights becomes self-propelled.

Precognition is the next level up from there. This is a state strongly suffused with spiritual feeling. In the prior levels starting from Bliss there was an anticipation of this, the first levels going upward in which one senses something/someone larger, real and yet invisible, who is definitely paying attention to you and you feel it.

Since all benefits cumulate upward in the design of the system, for the benefit of the One Ultimate Beneficiary, this new sensing ability — which allows you to feel your connection to the One — starts in Bliss and is present to the same degree when Cognitive Flow takes over. The increase in this factor, this spiritual feeling, makes a quantum increase moving into the Precognitive Flow state.

It is an increase in the speed of the mind so much faster that it exceeds the speed of light and you are therefore able to see into what is about to happen before it happens. This can take place either in a very interactive challenge environment or in contemplation receiving highly-predictive visions. Telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing are the three manifestations of this acceleration in processing speed. The unusualness of this level is qualitatively beyond the Flow state levels below it. Until now these are the familiar human senses, feelings, and muscle control abilities, simply moved onto a whole new chart. In Precognitive Flow one is now entertaining supernatural powers as if they have always been in the toolkit. There is an instant injection into life that makes life far more interesting, exciting, and magical than it has ever been before, and you know that now, and you are letting It know you know. You are checking into this new place, you like it here. 

However, it is not happening by your craft but perhaps despite it — doing itself. You are not at the controls of these Powers. They appear to do themselves and are very helpful.

Your Noia ability increases, meaning that you find yourself automatically decoding hidden connections among diverse events occurring around you, and acting as if somebody is out to do something good for you, and you’re too smart to ignore all the hints. (Noia is the opposite of paranoia in our coinage.)

In our theory, as explained fully in You Are The Universe: Imagine That, information is freely flowing across the fictional boundary between the individual and the rest of the One because consciousness is One. At this high a level of consciousness one is seeing out from the stipulated confines of the individual to be aware that this was simply a boundary agreed to temporarily for the sake of the great game of Cosmopoly.

As explained more completely in the book, the ethics of the individual at this level of consciousness is utterly incompatible with ego dominance. In our theory of Holosentience the ego dominant states are the new self built since birth as circuitry added during neuron formation.

I did not invent all the stuff I added to the media business: I saw it happening in my head and shared the news. Precognition.

Everybody is capable of doing the same thing.

Best to all, 

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming this month.

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.

Useful Transcendence Techniques in Mental Wrestling

Volume 3, Issue 37

Fluttering saffron leaves wave at me through all the windows that surround. It is another ecstatic autumn day here in the Hudson Valley. Inside the house, décor projections of Lalita’s beauty catch my eye as I sit to write to you.

The subject as always is living in the Flow state (the Zone), and employing psychotechnology to get there. My recurring theme: it’s easiest to get there through an earlier state of awareness, the Observer state.

Educators at their best have toyed with the notion of providing courses in Thinking (click and scroll to Majoring in Thinking),  allowing students to major in it. The second article at this link uses the term “metacognition” to describe thinking about thinking, and being cognizant of one’s own prior thought. This is exactly the Observer state if one is focused only on the thinking dimension, but instead of thinking out of the box, folks ought to consider getting out of the box called thinking. There is also intuition, perception, and emotion to be cognizant of within oneself. The Observer state then is to be aware of all of this stuff that is going on within, without losing observant attention to the apparently-outside world. So in the end it is all about attention.

Brilliant psychological work has been done by Piaget in recognizing the high abstract level of thinking he dubbed the Formal Operational Level. In my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, I suggest that as a race we reached this level for the first time when cave paintings and then written language appeared, which happened only very recently in our embryonic species career. This triggered such acceleration in information input to each of us that we mostly operate below the Piagetian level due to distraction. More recently other brilliant psychologists and researchers have named a new even-higher level of thinking called Systems Thinking; however, one is still locked into the trap of acting as if thinking is the whole of the self. Flow state and even Observer state require that one is in one’s body feeling the emotions, receiving the perceptions, and attuned to the subtle guidance system of the intuition. In fact the intuition is the most valuable platform in terms of Systems Thinking, where the more precise term might be Systems Perception.

Within the sphere of the emotions there is a crucial dimension called motivation. Here the leading psychological minds of the twentieth century include Maslow and Erikson, each of whom offers a specific set of levels the individual passes through on the ladder to the highest states of consciousness. At Maslow’s highest stage, one is motivated by morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts. This is a very good description of the Observer state, and the spontaneity part of it is suggestive of the Flow state.

In fact it is the lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts that best characterizes the Observer state among Maslow’s list of terms. Below the Observer state one is operating through a distortion lens caused by wounds one has received and habitual defensive patterns one has robotically adopted to cope with these wounds.

Wrestling the angel in transcending the wounded ego self, which is the true/higher inner jihad, one learns the traps one’s opponent (the ego) gets one into, and the escapes by which one extricates one’s higher true self. Incoming gets autoclassified by the ego self and this autotriggers certain reactions —look for these reactions and let them float downstream, disidentifying with and annihilating them. This keeps or gets one into the Observer state, the launch pad from which Flow can occur. Emotional reactions to be on guard against are: anger, negative judgment, unease/fear, envy, and irritation/impatience.

These emotional reactions are signs of the nonacceptance of fact, and the existence of prejudice in oneself. One is projecting a subjective expectation rather than observing objectively. This reduces one’s problem-solving ability, bringing one down below the Formal Operational Level.

Woodstock Roundtable host Doug Grunther, himself a psychologist and dream therapist who has interviewed many deep thinkers, commented in a recent radio interview with me that “higher” states of consciousness ought to really be called “deeper” states of consciousness, because these states come from deep down within oneself. I would agree and add that they come from deep down within the One Self too. So in what sense are they “higher”?

The stated purpose of my nonprofit Human Effectiveness Institute is the improvement of decision making. Our objective in understanding psychotechnology and getting more people into Observer and Flow states more often is so that we can run ourselves and the world better, be more competent, more effective, more creative. “Deeper” may be more descriptive and explanatory, but “higher” illustrates the rise from lower dysfunctional levels.

Takeaway: notice and nullify the prejudicial instant reactions of anger, negative judgment, unease/fear, envy, and irritation/impatience. Accept the facts and get on with finding creative and effective solutions. This will bring more pleasure to you and yours, and radiate outward as positive energy to the ends of the universe.

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.