Tag Archives: Meditation

Make the Best Use of your Fine Brain

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Originally posted October 20, 2011

Even Bill Gates could not afford to buy this supercomputer. That is, if we could make one. The more science discovers what our brain can do, the more respect one has to have for the “random forces” that supposedly “collided” to make this brain.

On the other hand, those forces might not have been random, and may have been far smarter even than this fine brain you and I have.

As the ancient texts of India, all religions and esoteric schools, Jung and many others have postulated, we all appear to be connected somehow. Perhaps where we are all connected is the sum of everything, itself a brain made out of energy, manifesting to our senses as a three-dimensional material universe. But perhaps if our senses were cleansed of cultural conditioning, they might be as remarkable as our brain is, in the more complete universe they might then show us.

Although our cultural perceptual filters keep us from noticing, our fine brain gives us foreknowledge of certain events. Recently replicated experiments have shown that samples of college students, and occasionally other/broader population samples, can guess what the next image on a screen is going to be, even though that image is randomly generated. In other words, nobody can know in advance what that next image is going to be, not even the computer which is selecting the image, were that computer self-aware, even it wouldn’t be able to know which image is going to pop up next.

Typically a choice of perhaps five classes of images is offered, and the subject has the task of guessing which of the five categories the image is going to be in. If the guesses were entirely random, studies like this would show that the average subject is right 20% of the time, in the six-figure sample sizes now cumulated for this kind of research. Instead of 20% right guesses the average is 21-22% in the typical study, and with certain population segments such as meditators and monks the levels go higher.

Read Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe (yes he came up with the same phrase as I use in The Theory of The Conscious Universe) for science’s current tallies of sample sizes, numbers of studies, and exact odds against the results being a result of chance, for the main classes of ESP — telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis. In short, the evidence is in and the odds of these phenomena being explainable by chance is in the millions to one and sometimes higher. Major universities are involved in this research, as well as the military.

You too have these powers. But you probably ignore them all too often, goofing when you knew an instant ahead not to do a certain thing but ignored the hunch, and thus goofed.

Meditation, contemplation, and any other form of focusing the mind appear to be associated with success rates across the studies higher than the 21-22% average.

Some of the techniques in my book are gamelike. For example, here are some ways to enjoyably get the highest performance out of your fine brain, not only in terms of getting a lot more out of your intuition as we have just been discussing, but in every area of your functioning — intuition, intellect, feeling and perception (Jung).

It’s Always a Good Time for a Mind Cleanse

When you have nothing else to do, enjoy an interesting mind cleanse.

Give your self a report (I know “yourself” is one word, but you look at it differently when it’s two words.) How are you feeling? Everything great? Any complaints? Good. The fun is in the complaints. That’s where it’s interesting, and we can use the fine brain for its supreme problem-solving prowess.

Start to enjoy the way you no longer waste time on your supercomputer. You appreciate the great feats of which it’s capable therefore you wouldn’t think to burn minutes of its time in simple whining, playing old tapes, running on unconscious autopilot rather than the conscious Flow state kind, or whatever else diminishes the functioning of your fine brain.

It aids the focus to have paper and pen/cil, feeling free to draw or write whatever one feels like without having to make it neat or to conform to any rules whatsoever.

Sometimes you see your self drawing schematic diagrams with arrows and circles to depict some phenomenon that you would rather not have in your life. Let your self go, knock your self out — you will definitely learn something practical out of contemplating whatever is going down on paper or just flowing through your head. Pay close attention as if you were a detective studying someone else, not your self, someone you had never seen before — look with new eyes, willing to strip away all the old rhetoric about your self and opening your mind to reconsider everything — no buttons locked down on the keyboard.

Another thing that will happen is that you will start making a list. This is when there are so many things going round and round in your head they just are dying to leap through the ink onto the paper, so you let them. You may see a mix of relationship challenges and shopping lists. That’s okay, all of them have some level of importance in cleansing your mind. Just when they stop flowing freely for a minute, put priority numbers next to them and eventually you will have it as a list in your computer that will be in priority order, and probably in categories to keep the shopping lists out of the life changing hypotheses.

Go into it with the conviction that there are always solutions — even if you are acting to some degree, do it experimentally to see what the true results are in your case. Your fine brain got you into this, it can get you out of it.

On the other hand, also leave open the possibility that this thing you are trying to get to stop happening in your life, make believe for a few minutes that you could get to like it if you looked at it differently and performed differently when it is happening, and that it might be happening for a good reason — perhaps you even caused it by something that you wanted.

Look at the situation from as many points of view as possible, keeping an open mind.

Recognize your own powers without exaggerating them. How can you use whatever control you do have over the situation to gently nudge it a step at a time into the comfortable sustainable zone?

You don’t have to solve every challenge in one sitting. Just keep creatively attacking your list with strong intention and solution orientation every day — glance at yesterday’s list and then put it out of your mind. Go do something else until you feel a flow of ideas and then if possible get writing implements and seal your self off from any possible interruption to the extent that you can do so even for a very short time — take a biobreak if necessary to escape from the world for a few minutes.

Today’s flow of ideas might or might not have anything to do with yesterday’s list. If you find your self impatient for instant dramatic solutions, add that subject to the list. The highest part of you knows intuitively that dramatic sudden improvements are rare, and that some lower part of you is being childish. The goal is to move your center to the highest part of you at all times.

Let’s take the happy assumption that you, my special friends to whom I send this weekly missive, already know all this and therefore you don’t have anything to complain about. These same mind techniques apply to you too, because you have a purpose in life, currently expressed as a job (or sideline), in which these techniques of focusing make you more effective and give you more pleasure while you creatively make a success out of your business/profession, volunteer work, parenting, lovegiving, caregiving work, or other life activity.

In that sphere, the same sense of solution orientation applies just as strongly. Most companies and the people in them, and most other teams as well, spend too much time in problem definition, which is not as much fun as shifting more time to solving the problems (which is of course also more productive). Solving problems is fun. When they are not your own problems it is even more fun.

I was a consultant for many years. It was tremendously enjoyable. Always being creative about someone else’s problems — and even getting paid for it! However you do it, solving problems is fun. Because of Acceleritis™, we often have to remember to enjoy it. We get sucked into “our problems” like a horror movie, as if morbidly fascinated, and then hypnotized into taking it all too seriously, getting too attached to certain outcomes, generating that unhealthy and torturous thing called negative emotions.

As a consultant and in whatever position you’re in professionally, your fine brain yields the best results if you “think about the client’s whole business, not just the one department he/she wants your help on.” Broaden your perspective as much as possible while focusing all of your attention on it. As you get better at this, singlepointedness comes easily and naturally to you, words in the mind come infrequently and this speeds up the flow of ideas as you see in your mind’s eye fleeting images that race by and change much faster than you could explain the logic to your self by use of words in the mind.

It’s in this wordless observer state that you’re likely to experiences periods of Flow state. In these higher states that Accelertitis suppresses, hunches are far easier to pay attention to, because the Acceleritis-driven words in the mind no longer distract attention from the subtle and often fleeting appearance of a hunch in the mind. I use the word “fleeting” repeatedly here because it is a genuine characteristic of the phenomenon. Hunches and Flow state ideas both come at speeds that in any other state you would have an impossible time keeping up with. This suggests they are probably always there — even in EOP — except they are drowned out from attention by being too subtle for the grosser state you are in when in EOP.

Another key point of these techniques is prioritization, mentioned briefly above and deserving of more emphasis. You cannot be singlepointed if you are distracted knowing you might not be working your fine brain on the optimal thing at the moment. So always know the optimal sequence based on how much of a positive difference you can make in the world at any given point in time. You might be seen as a person who takes a lot of bio breaks, but there are worse things. 🙂

Best to all,

Bill

Do What You’re Inspired to Do

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At Any Given Moment

Volume 4, Issue 21

Our moment of history may be called “The Accelerolithic Era” by those living thousands of years from now who study records of our period (even if they’re Martians). Since written records began (and I theorize because of written language) our information pressure per day has been exponentially accelerating. I call the resulting condition of humanity “Acceleritis”. Perhaps some remote indigenous people have not yet succumbed to this syndrome — I hope so for their sakes.

One of the components of Acceleritis is that we never have enough time to get done all the things we feel we ought to do.

This is a pandemic shock reaction to the effects of ever-mounting stimuli that set up “anti-closures” in our mind. These “anti-closures” (“sanskaras” in Sanskrit) are circuits that have taken an interest in some stimulus but now have unasked questions about that stimulus or the things immediately associated with the stimulus. (For a more Technical and Theoretical Description, see below.)

Every time you note interest in something, like the things your eyes land upon, this is what is happening in your brain, and we are definitely unaware of at least 99% of it.

Because of an apparently innate drive for closure, and the seeming impossibility of ever reaching closure on everything the mind desires closure on, we are uneasy at most times but have gotten used to it.

The feeling of always being behind speeds up our actions to the point of increasing errors requiring fixing, thus slowing us down and making us feel even more behind with no apparent hope of ever catching up.

We also repress the sense of needing closure, thus purposely ignoring hints from the subconscious asking us to contemplate things we have done that we regret, people we have not forgiven, and philosophical questions that once fascinated us and are central to life. We push stuff back down into that repressed area, which enlarges the unconscious at the expense of the conscious.

Some or all drug addiction may be traceable to this phenomenon.

Don’t Overthink It

During your work day or at play, you are often not sure what to do first. Do what most inspires you at that moment. Why? Because that way the chances are higher that you’re doing it in the Flow state, which never occurs when you are doing something because you should do it. I call that “doing it to get it out of the way”.  Flow state only occurs when you are enjoying what you are doing, and doing it solely or mainly for its enjoyment.

If you’re in the grip of Acceleritis and held down below the Observer state, you’ll not know what inspires you more to do next, X or Y or Z. The solution here is to  just let your body go and watch what it does. The body often makes decisions before the mind is consciously aware of making the decision. It’s the same decision. It’s the reflection of both the mind and body, both of those phenomena being aspects of the One Consciousness.

Don’t Be Email/Text/Tweet/Social Media Driven

It has become all too easy in the Accelerolithic Era to become driven by incoming email, texts, Tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts — meaning you don’t decide what to do next, you react to the ubiquitous digital input stream. This goes on all day and you become a willing slave to this digital input stream.

It’s helpful to let people know the times each day you’ve set aside to catch up with emails and texts and whatever else is queueing up.

Meditation

Meditation — the mind observing itself — is the most efficient way to allow assimilation and closure of the most salient “anti-closures” bugging your mind subconsciously at any given point in time.

Like trying to remember a name, meditation does not work by “trying to do it”, it works by erasing everything going on inside and continuing to erase as thoughts/feelings/images/hunches arise. You’re allowed to jot down notes for later, using trigger words that will bring back the whole thought-train, and then resume the emptying out.

Here’s a quick YouTube video on the subject: Erase.

Best to all,

Bill

More Technical Theoretical Description

On the formation of “anti-closures”:

  1. These new pathways initially must be along established neurons. There they modify connectivity with other neurons by subtle chemical changes at the synapses caused by the mental state cascading from the reception of the stimulus.
  2. Longer term, new neuron growth is hypothesized stemming from the same causative event. Such growth helps the circuit continue to exist and occasionally “speak up” in the senate of the mind when the mental subject comes near the thoughts (or sub-thoughts) suggested by the stimulus.​

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

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

Inner Head Language

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Volume 3, Issue 33

My daughter Nicole and I were at a book fair today, ostensibly selling my book Mind Magic from our table alongside other local authors at their tables. I say “ostensibly” because my real motivation for attending these events is to see if and how people can be helped to reach higher levels of consciousness. Everything is reconnaissance with readiness to engage with any seeker. The average seeker today has seen it all and has the t-shirt.

My great friend Stanford Silverman, who came from 25 miles away to buy yet another copy of Mind Magic, summed the answer up as “99.9% actually get no benefit from books.” He went on to say, “when the supreme reality is not understood, the reading of books/scriptures is useless, and the study of books/scriptures is useless when the supreme reality has been realized.” This is the viewpoint of a person who has found a Living Master and has devoted his service thereto, for its own sake and also to receive the kind of grace that has been observed to effect great positive changes in people.

Nicole later questioned this pessimism about our work and I repeated the stats I had shared with Stan, that out of 35,000 books sold we’ve received over 2000 letters/emails/cards from readers saying the book changed their lives in a way they wanted to thank us for. That’s 5.7% — in a considerably higher ballpark than the 0.1% stat Stan offered. And 5.7% only counts the hand-raisers, not those who got benefit but didn’t let us know. I also told her we are not doing this to see a complete world change as a result (though that outcome would be nice and was my initial vision) but rather we are doing it because it’s the right thing to do, sharing this stuff based on the 2000+ hand-raisers. Whatever effect it will have, it will have.

A man asked what the book was about and Nicole answered “It’s about you,” and I explained that “the way the language speaks to your subconscious, it brings out your own higher Self.” The language in the book is my own “inner head language” — it came unbidden and I didn’t put it into the King’s English — and as a result, coming from my subconscious, it seems to absorb directly into the subconscious layer of the reader.

One reader said it like this: “The communication so transformed and met me as to feel as though it was clearly mind-to-mind.” (Jordan Salison, Insight Meditation Society, Barre, MA)

And this, from a review in New Age Journal, “resonates with the higher aspects of our beings and is experienced as truth…”

You can get a flavor of Mind Magic here.

I am always curious to hear what I will say when a person asks me what the book is about because something different always comes out. In a bookstore I don’t want to rattle on any more about the brain, Observer state and Flow state (the Zone), I want to relate to daily life, not its underlying science.

“It’s a mood, an attitude, the book gets you into. You see opportunities to take elements in the situation and move them around in ways you actually can, to be a win for everybody. Including stuff inside yourself, which you can move around to create a win/win inside yourself.”

The most useful answer we found was to suggest, “Open a page at random and see if it speaks to you.” This worked 4 out of 4 times, at which point I fled to write this column, leaving Nicole for a hostage. One woman said it understood her, that it was exactly what she had been thinking about. The others got absorbed and read for quite a while.

In the 70s, when the human potential movement got that name it was rediscovered that intellect alone does not change behavior, emotion and/or the subconscious, something deeper than the rational mind, must be involved. This goes back to even before the Eleusinian Mysteries, before the cave paintings, as old as homo sapiens ourselves, 200,000 years. The shaman was wise by definition, understanding at a gut level that someone not-yet-wise needed certain stimuli and experiences to become wise, and so he/she did the needful. Sometimes it worked. Maybe it nearly always worked a little.

Emotion, imagination, and/or the subconscious are engaged by the “inner head language” in Mind Magic in much the same way that these beyond-rational faculties are brought into play by art, poetry, music, theater. It is this linguistic subtlety as much as the insights that make it possible to move people into the higher states of consciousness with a book — not just Mind Magic but also other books whose neurolinguistic approach engages with the deeper levels of self.

This form of linguistic communication with more than just the rational mind could be more deeply investigated by brain researchers in order to optimize the psychotechnology. This is one of the goals of the Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI).

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. 

What’s Your Kryptonite?

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Volume 3, Issue 26

Who among us does not sometimes hold himself/herself to an excessively high standard, like playing Iron Man or Superwoman? Believing one’s own press releases, as they say in showbiz?

A client recently said he wanted to be more like me — always smiling, always happy, able to leap tall challenges in a single bound. Fact is, recently I’ve started to take this press release too much for granted and discovered that bits of a kryptonite-like substance can still knock me out of the sky.

In my case it’s an absurd perfectionism that grouses if a conversation with a client goes by without a Big Idea and a client aha moment. Silly, right?

Always wanting to top oneself is an attachment like any other. All attachments are kryptonite, robbing you of your superpowers, even when they are supposedly idealistic and positive.

Okay, time to get back to basics. Getting enough sleep is one. Days of treating the body as if there’s another one hanging in the closet (Len Matthews once told me that’s what I tend to do) — sleep and dream deprivation takes its toll. The quest for infinitely extended Zone or Flow state performance requires attention to such mundane details.

What’s your kryptonite? I imagine that since you read this blog, you too are on the quest for Flow state day in and day out, getting there a lot of the time and not getting there too. Flow tends to happen in the thing that is your métier, the thing you do, whatever you do best, that which it makes sense to make your life’s work, the thing you love to do the most. A day is not made only of that activity — there’s always a lot of other stuff to do, and Flow might not come as easily in those peripheral activities. At those times, if you focus on staying in the Observer state, the jump back to Flow will be much easier.

It’s useful to assume that whatever is happening, if it’s happening, it might be good enough, so long as you’re not bringing anybody else down. If it feels like you’re coasting now and then, don’t assume you’re not hitting it out of the park, or that you have to do something so you’re always hitting it out of the park.

The Wilhelm/Baynes edition of the I Ching says somewhere “He hastens to that which supports him”, having to me essentially the same meaning as John Lennon’s line “whatever gets you through the night”. This would be your own personal anti-kryptonite — meditation, sleep, yoga, working out, running, solo car karaoke — erasing whatever is tumbling through the washing machine of your mind and emotionarium.  Use whatever trick you find works to back you out of your own self-imposed hell, whenever you find yourself imposing it. Maybe something as simple as asking yourself, “What’s the hidden assumption causing this irruption of displeasure?”

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.