Tag Archives: Holosentience

Optimizing the value of feelings in decision making

2 Replies

What are feelings? How are feelings optimized?

Besides the input from the five physical senses, human consciousness receives feelings. Upcoming posts will offer experiments focused on this input stream, which you can conduct yourself. These experiments will establish whether you can achieve measurable improvements in your own effectiveness stemming from better channeling or processing of feelings-type information.

To prepare for the experiments, let’s contemplate: what are feelings?
 Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
The Orion Nebula
Feelings are urges that arise to sensibility within us, within our minds and within our bodies. Feelings are experiences, states of consciousness resulting from motivations, sentiments, preferences or desires. These terms all really mean the same thing: motivations, what we value, what we want, what we are trying to get, what we want to avoid.

Feelings are the way we respond internally to external and internal phenomena, based on what we are trying to get and avoid, and how current events can help or threaten our desired outcomes.

Therefore feelings generally come in two valences, positive or negative. The feelings are positive if current events appear to favor our targeted outcomes, and they are negative if events seem to be heading away from what we want to have happen.

Positive feelings are valued universally in themselves. We don’t need to argue in favor of them, we all like them, and would like to have them all the time.

Negative feelings not only make us feel bad (by definition), they lower our immune system thus making us more prone to disease, and they distract our cognitive concentration thereby reducing our effectiveness. These bad feelings can also serve a positive function as an alarm system to get our attention to the problem fast. Ironically, if the bad feelings continue while one is grappling with the problem on a rational level, it will take longer to solve the problem.

When a problem arises and is sensed partially by the bad feelings within oneself, alerting us to focus on the challenge, it’s easy to say, “Turn off the alarm and get on with solving the problem.” However, it is not so easy because of attachment and Acceleritis.

Acceleritis, the unending acceleration of information entering the human brain each day, simply overloads the average human being’s capacity to do effective mental work of any kind. One kind of mental work we are supposed to get better at as we truly mature and “grow up” and become a “mensch” is to be able to sanely and in a balanced way take our feelings into account in our actions, without being stampeded or reduced to hand-wringing by those feelings. Acceleritis therefore also escalates the power of other mental subsystems that push in the direction of closure, black-and-white thinking, snap decisions, self-consistency and self-imitation — anything to simplify. Complexity is tacitly perceived as the main threat and pain causer. Acceleritis therefore lays many of us low with attachment — if Acceleritis were not present, we would actually have the mental and emotional maturity to cope with the situation without attachment.

What then is attachment?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Whirlpool Galaxy
Attachment is the excessive dependency on something. It is actually love carried too far. You love something so much (a wonderful thing) you cannot do without it, and so you fall prey to fear of losing it, and this distracts the mind so that Observer state and Flow state are impossible. Your mind tends instead — in the Acceleritis-induced state of Emergency Operating Procedure (EOP) — to go around in circles wallowing in the fear of loss or the sense of loss, or the anger and bitterness related to the loss or threatened loss, or the hopeless defeated depression of having lost it with no hope of regaining it. No useful mental work is achieved, no problem solving, no creative new leaps rising to meet the challenge sideways, as would occur in the higher states of effectiveness, namely, the Observer and Flow states.

As discussed in earlier posts, these effectiveness states are posited to be real physical states in the brain, differentiated from one another in measurable ways. Our Theory of Holosentience is based on the hypothesis that the primary dimension determining the state of the brain and consciousness is the degree of harmony among functional areas of the brain (inhabiting our entire sentience at once) — wherein thoughts, feelings, motivations, and the other aspects of self achieve a synchronous integrity in both the experientially measurable consciousness domain as well as the scientifically measurable biometric material domain.

This brings us back to feelings. Feelings have always been less studied and talked about than thoughts. Descartes did not say “I feel, therefore I exist.”

The word feeling originally may have related (Wikipedia says) to the sense of touch, and then its meaning expanded to include the ineffable internal sense that brings us more bits (information) than the five physical senses in terms of the way it affects our actions.

What evidence is there that we are generally more driven by our feelings than by our thoughts? Freud established that thoughts are more likely to be rationalized in support of feelings, rather than people being able to use their thoughts to control their feelings. And yet, how valuable it is to be able to do just that — to have the mental self-discipline to focus one’s thoughts effectively even when one’s feelings are in an uproar.

In a nutshell, feelings are a manifestation of our motivations colliding with the external world. What feeling would we have if we had no motivations?

Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Cassiopeia Galaxy
You can actually discover this for yourself, by meditating. While there are many specific methodologies for meditation, all of them have this mind/gut mirror effect of showing you what your own motivations really are, where they have gotten you, and why you have each experience you ever have. You can also achieve such objectivity that you can, as it were, turn off certain motivations for the moment and see what that feels like — what visions of future possibilities arise now that X motivation is gone, how are you breathing, how do you feel?

This gaining of perspective through meditation makes you feel good. In other words, it not only helps you inspect deeply your own feelings and their consequences in the world, it also generates a feeling, and a very good one.

What is that very, very sweet feeling? Is it happiness? Is it ecstasy? Yes, it’s all those things and more. Then what is it?

It’s love. A word that provokes instant uneasiness all round. It’s a word that makes us all feel silly. The guy has lost it. You don’t talk about such things. Verboten. Just for family talk, not public talk. What an interesting word to have such an effect.

The F-bomb has become popular in meetings with both males and females, at least in certain businesses I have moved through in the last decade. It is more acceptable than the word “love” in such venues.

Beyond getting the author in hot water, what is love?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Pink sheer heart shape, computer generated fractal abstract backgroundIt is the master feeling, the one all the others come from. Love is white light whereas each feeling is a color.

Love is the residue that is left when motivations are tuned down into conscious perspective, in light of an open-minded empirical philosophy of demanding proof for everything, dropping every bit of information one has heard onto a trial workboard in the consciousness storage bin, and taking it offline in terms of decision making. This is the perspective of yoga. Zen. Meditation. Contemplation. Focused singlepointed attention. A way of life for millions of people today and throughout human history. These multi-strands of movements see themselves as part of a whole, although to those outside they seem like a bunch of cults that are all different. They are all the same in achieving perspective, distance from motivations that the bodymind otherwise assumes are immutable, non-negotiable. These methods are among those crystallized into simple steps in our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness.

Why does love remain when one has achieved objective distance from one’s motivations? What evidence do we have for that assertion, and what explanation do we have for it?

As an individual my only evidence for any assertion here are my own experiences. Every time through meditation I clear away the built-in locked-in powerful sway of my own motivations, I discover that I am content, every tiny aspect of what I am experiencing is enjoyable and interesting, I simply love it, all of it, I love myself, and everyone. Others have reported similar experiences, enough so that I know I am not an isolated case. In the next post we will offer a meditative experiment whereby this may also happen to you.

Why should it be so? Why should we feel love when we are not being driven this way and that by irresistible motivations?

In my cosmological Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU) we are all dubs of the master consciousness, like MP3 copies of a master recording of a song, each of us a microcosm of the whole universal consciousness. When we rise above the petty motivations that seem so all-important to us in our daily lives down here on this one planet, we partake of the carrier wave motivation we share with the master consciousness, the one that is always there under all the other motivations, from which they draw their power. Love that is omnidirectional is the wellspring, the source from which we splinter off love of money, love of power, love of sex, love of the idea of getting that big job, and so on. All other motivations are modulations of love. So when the splinter motivations are quieted, the background radiation that differentiates itself into these “local” motivations becomes visible. This is how I explain it to myself, that I have this omnidirectional love experience whenever I am centered and immune to the compulsions to protect and seize what I feel I must have.

Acceleritis makes it very difficult for me to communicate this so that it is widely credible, because Acceleritis works against the stopping of the momentum of the mini-mind —so it seems ridiculous to assert that we already have an abundance of love without having to get anything we don’t already have. And yet, if you allow the possibility of a universal consciousness of which we are all a part, what motivation would it have to be doing this universe if it did not love the doing of a universe as a game in itself, the master game, the master art form, the ultimate form of self-discovery.

Acceleritis makes it much easier to deal with information overload by focusing on differences and categorization into buckets mostly on a single continuum from good to bad. This goes on constantly below our conscious awareness. Making automated decisions that are often the wrong ones. This leads to all sorts of feelings, many of them bad. Clouding over the master feeling that exists already, unbrokenly from beginning to end. It is there underneath all this debris. It comes out when we clear off the rubble.

Now that we’ve explored “feelings”, the next post will describe an experiment you can carry out yourself on the optimization of feelings.

Best to all

Bill

______________________________________________________________

PS – Humorously, Wikipedia says that feelings are the conscious subjective experience of emotion. This is funny because psychology defines emotion as the aspect of feeling that can be measured in the body, such as glandular secretions, muscle tensions, breathing rate, brainwaves, perspiration, etc., and you could just as easily say that feelings cause emotions as you could say emotions cause feelings. The leftover behaviorist psychology way of looking at it would be to make emotions more important — in fact 100% important, with feelings relegated to the trash bin of mind as epiphenomenon, a sound track that actually has no control of what the body is doing.

Such behaviorist Pavlovian thinking is now almost a century out of date, yet remnants of that thinking still creep into the generally excellent Wikipedia (which needs our donations incidentally to stay alive, and someone should tip them off to using advertising to support themselves, doing it in a PBS-like manner to the side all the way down from top to bottom, with true sponsorship tonality). Behaviorist ideas permeated so much of our thinking as a culture when they held reign that growing up we each got a dose of such ideas in the background conversations of adults we overheard. This is where we got the idea that we can just let the mind and body do their thing the way we always do and the way other people do, without any stopping to check out what the hell these operational action decisions are being based on.

______________________________________________________________

Continuing Praise for David Brooks at ARF, and Holosentience

9 Replies

I’ve long been bemused by the fact that some people really love my book FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS, while others seem to stare at it uncomprehendingly, not knowing what category to put it in.

I myself have struggled to put the book in a category since there were no other books in that category. Or, at least, not since the Vedanta Sutra around 200 BC, and not until David Brooks’ THE SOCIAL ANIMAL, which I am now reading. I was drawn in by the uncanny similarities I discerned between our books during the most valuable Keynote I’ve ever heard at a conference — David’s Keynote at the recent Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Audience Measurement Symposium (AMS) 6.0, the world’s largest annual audience measurement conference.

Now there are two modern books in the category. The category is about looking inside to learn the right adjustments to become a truer you — the you that was born, sans a lifetime of fear-driven conditioning.

David draws his sources from the latest psychology research especially the brain frontier and its integration with classical psychological pattern observations. When I did my first brain experiments within the advertising field and U.S. military in the early 80s, I saw that the mapping of inner/outer experiences to parts of the brain in specific states was going to explode soon. And it has.

Back in the day I had the honor of working with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, former Harvard Psychobiology professors who had been at Harvard with Leary and Alpert. Richie has gone on to lead a large portion of the cutting edge brain research and is highly respected by every brain scientist I’ve met. Dan is best known for his best-selling EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE series.

Why don’t I put Dan’s books in the category of looking inside to learn the right adjustments to become a truer you? It’s because I have a larger division in my mind between books that show theory (“descriptive”) versus books that are specifically meant to be used as a manual of techniques (“prescriptive”). I made my manual fun by a sort of neopoetic style and parsing that I find also singles out ideas. David made his book fun by making it a love story. But I feel David’s motivations are similar to mine — a chance to improve everyone’s lives. All they need is equipoise — the ability to objectively look inside and make little acts of will in daring to follow one’s dreams with love and humility.

The two books agree in that. David’s is more descriptive, mine more prescriptive — and still somewhat unique in its emphasis on practical application of very specific techniques that have been proven to work by my own experience, and by a few thousand readers who wrote in to attest to positive results from reading my book.

David cites the actual experiments that are the basis for the way he makes his characters act. Although there is some experimental and fact-based grounding to my book, it exists within a seamless synthesis of brain research with psychoanalysis, 6000 years of inner observation findings and prescriptions summarized in pithy “sutras”, and all the other books I read in the 70s — but mostly from observing my own inner experience for my entire life.

As early as I can remember, I was fascinated more with what went on in my mind and soul than what went on outside. Long before I knew the words, I was often in a state of contemplation, concentration, or meditating. Ideas sprang into my mind that I found myself writing. I was keeping track of my own observations because from what I heard adults saying, it was apparent they would not know what I was talking about.

In my teens I found psychology, esoteric psychology/philosophy, and in my 20s, yoga. I started by trying to put together for myself a science by which I could intelligently predict my own behavior and understand its dynamics, causes and effects.

Soon after college, my career in media research — because it involved computers (in the 60s) — gave me the ability to see the mind through the lens of what computers do. Media research further allowed me to ground my ideas in the stable patterns and slow changes in population behaviors, brain function, attitude shift, cognitive science, and behavioral econometrics, and introduced me to the idea of optimization, which I instantly decided to apply internally.

Out of all of these fuzzy sources comes the theory of Holosentience. It’s amusing that after I thought I had coined this term, I Googled it and found a reference to the light-based doctor in the Star Trek megaseries. He called himself a holosentience, I recall that now. Well, I’m not going to change the name of the theory.

Here is the essence of my theory of Holosentience:

  1. We have a true self that is stitched into the fabric of the Universe. Whatever the Universe is, that’s the same as what the true self is. Our true self is who we are when we were born. It is the root and substrate of our existence, our being, who we are, our true identity, our essence — it is the most real thing about us in the sense of quantum physics reality. We experience it as an observer — it is an observer. It is consciousness, which we define as “that which experiences”.
  2. From pre-birth we begin to program our brain. Every conscious experience creates proteins in the brain — nerve tissue encoded with meanings derived from those experiences. Association areas take form, clusters of related experiences. Programs are written — true software — that inhabit the brain and begin to share control of motor functions with the true self. You do things you seem to not be able to stop yourself from doing. The classical name for this phenomenon is Ego. It is trying to protect you, trying to be helpful like Bill Gates’ Paperclip-being, is still doing things you now have long since forgotten you told it to do, and is in all ways doing what a robot does, acting on its programming. I call this part the software layer or Robot.
  3. Some of this programming needs to be removed, and you have to use what David calls equipoise — objective introspection and small acts of will — to gradually remove it. It does not leave easily. A lot of my book is about how to track down those behaviors and expose them to yourself for what they are. Because there are different centers in this software stemming back to different traumas and extraordinary experiences, in my book I use the term “Senators” to point out that we actually have different selves — although these are not our true self but rather copies of other people who made impressions on our software. David again echoes the idea of not one but many different selves, though he does not point out that they are all within a Robot layer apart from the true self.

There are three broad states of the foregoing Theory of Holosentience, which are not covered in THE SOCIAL ANIMAL:

  1. Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) — where we are now due to Acceleritis. Acceleritis is not new to today’s obvious-frenetic culture, it actually started 6000 years ago with seeable language. The individual is not processing out the counterproductive programs — that whole part of life is put on hold. There is little if any equipoise. People are not open to objectively considering their own flaws, they are too scared to admit they have any flaws. There is low effectiveness to decision making, action is mistimed, there is little grace and even less inspiration. The world as we see it aggregately — wars, Havenotism, selfish ignoble behavior all around. Creativity is being channeled negatively. In the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and a deteriorating environment and what appear to be permanent systemic challenges emerging in the economic system, it is quite possibly critical to the human race to get out of EOP asap. I feel that David and I are hoping to make a difference there.
  2. Observer State. There is a detachment of the true self from the software or Robot layer such that there is an arc gap, where the true self is able to objectively see what the software layer is doing. David calls this equipoise. The last great psychologist to urge us to introspect was William James. He was on the right track. Much of the inner work done in the East and in esoteric Western enclaves relates to simple (hah!) deconditioning of the counterproductive programs in the software layer. Decision making in the Observer State is much more effective because of objectivity and truthfulness. Self-protective defensiveness yields to greater clarity. Pragmatism becomes natural and automatic.
  3. Flow State. Instead of detachment of the true self from the software layer, they are a perfectly integrated team. Typically during well-practiced, deeply-known activities, from one’s highest work to sex, from spiritual experience to athletics, the Flow State comes to us as a gift. David calls this Moments of Transcendence and Self Forgetfulness. I understand the Self Forgetfulness part in that there is no subject-object division in Flow State, it is all just doing itself and is of one piece. David uses the word “lost” — “an athlete lost in sport, a believer lost in God’s love, lost in love for one another… the conscious mind disappears.” I would say instead that the chattering mind — part of the software layer — subsides, but that all minds are present (“Holosentience”) during Flow State, they are simply not dwelling on their selfdom in the usual EOP subliminally anxious way. Perhaps David is hewing to his theme of rational versus unconscious — where he is advocating a shift to include the unconscious in a more balanced way, including emotions and values. There are obviously ten places where David and I agree for every one where we might differ. In fact I doubt that we would differ once we mapped our maps together.

For a fun and mind-opening read get THE SOCIAL ANIMAL.

If you like it, try FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS next. (After all, it comes with a money-back guarantee. 😀 ) It is also mind-opening and spends more time on the “how to” of it — though as John Ziegler said, “[the book] seems to do it TO you. IT works. YOU don’t.”

Best to all,

Bill

 

Cognitive Toolkit Meets Psychotechnology

2 Replies

David Brooks has done what I wanted to do — tried to do for many years but couldn’t make it happen, at least not in such a big way. My hat’s off to him!

In his book The Social Animal — and in the popular reaction to the book — David has called the world’s attention to the levers that we all have inside. Things that make us better — strategies — little acts of will within our own minds. Levers we don’t leverage to their full advantage. I have called them “psychotechnologies” since 1976. David calls them “one’s Cognitive Toolkit”.

If you have read my earlier post about Acceleritis, you know I postulate that our culture has been accelerating since the advent of written language some 6000 years ago, and that the number of question-producing stimuli falling upon the average one of us each day has in that short period increased exponentially, given our 200,000 years in existence as homo sapiens.

If it were not for Acceleritis, most of us would quickly catch on to what David calls “equipoise” — the learnable trait of looking inside objectively so as to see how to improve oneself. In the infopressure stream hitting each and every one of us each second each day (with a few oases here and there), the development of this trait remains stunted. This is to my view a pandemic — a world-wide mental degenerative disease.

Because David has grabbed the mic and the world is listening, I see this as an opportunity to compare my psychotechnology theories to those set forth in The Social Animal. This can make for quite a few of these postings until one of you says talk about something else already.  😀

I’m serious. I really believe it’s important for all of us to learn the traits David wants us to learn — and a few he hasn’t gotten around to yet.

All of the easily-listable things wrong with the world reduce to human behavior, which reduces to what makes us tick inside.

What has been needed for 6000 years is a practical toolkit for overcoming the distractive power of Acceleritis and instead focusing inward — without losing one’s job etc. In fact, making even more money and succeeding in far more important ways as well, because of having seen inside more clearly than one sees in the average daily state of consciousness called “normal” on Earth in the current era.

What we call normal I call EOP: Emergency Oversimplification Procedure. We are not in the moment, savoring the moment, we are trying to get past it and on to the next thing on our list or one of the distractions that arise constantly to draw us away from our list. We are in a robotic state.

What I consider to be the really normal state a human being could be in all the time is the Zone aka Flow State — what David calls “Moments of Transcendence”. We would be there were it not for Acceleritis. That’s my theory anyway.

We can get there with the toolkit. David’s got some of it, I’ve got some of the same and quite a few different tools, others throughout time have had pieces of it. Let’s use it all. The more diverse the toolkit, the more balanced and accessible to all.

Science can help us discover the toolkit and validate it — but that is a very slow process. We might blow ourselves up — literally — if we wait for every tool that works to be validated by science before we use it. We should use it because it works. That is the apropos rule for dealing with runaway culture. Use what works — what is a win for all concerned.

David was in Flow for much of his Keynote at the ARF. But he didn’t mention the state. He gets it about the tools, but did not present an integrated theory — I’m guessing he would modestly say that the scientists from whom he draws his ideas are the ones to look for if we want theory — practical tools is where a writer might feel compelled to stop.

In my case, since I see myself as a scientist (in my approach to research), I have no hesitation to offer whole-cloth theories. My theory of Holosentience encapsulates the tools David presented — and those presented in my book FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS — within an explanation of how and why we move between states of consciousness — EOP, the Observer State (David’s “Equipoise”), and the Flow State.

By Holosentience I mean that in Flow State we are inhabiting our entire sentience at once — we are totally aware, open to information from unconscious (subconscious) sources — we are in a “Moment of Transcendence”. In the Observer State we have detached from conditioned mental/emotional circuitry that functions autonomically. In EOP we are dominated by the latter robotic circuitry. When distracted by Acceleritis, EOP is the probable result.

That robotic circuitry has been known classically as the ego. It is a subsentience that takes over, and as Dan Goleman and Richie Davidson say, “Hijacks the mind”.

When you are “in” your subsentience you think that’s all there is. You are the whole you that you always are. That’s what you assume. But there is another more noble and elevated part of you that you are oblivious to.

Neuroscience linkages to the three brain states hypothesized by my theory are presented in a previous posting, The Three States of Waking Consciousness, with guidance from Dr. Richard Silberstein, CEO of Neuro-Insight.

In some but maybe not all upcoming postings I’ll continue to bounce my ideas off those of David Brooks. It will be illuminating fun for all, I hope, including me. And maybe David is reading and getting some kicks too.

Best to all,

Bill