Tag Archives: Meditation

Entering Flow State

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Volume 3, Issue 1

An Elegant Bargain

In the prior post we were talking about mindfulness. The Buddha said that a life of true happiness will be led once one has settled into a permanent state of mindfulness and comprehension.

Note that the comprehension part typically requires certain life experiences that expand mindfulness into more corners of life. One might have perfect mindfulness on the basketball court but lack it in the bedroom or boardroom. Life fashions itself to teach us how to be mindful across the spectrum of life. Hinduism and Buddhism indicate that more than one lifetime is normally required to achieve mindfulness and comprehension as a steady state.

Zen masters have, according to Wikipedia, an interesting and apparent contrarian viewpoint on mindfulness:

“Some Zen teachers emphasize the potential dangers of misunderstanding “mindfulness”.

Gudo Wafu Nishijima criticizes the use of the term of mindfulness and idealistic interpretations of the practice from the Zen standpoint:

However recently many so-called Buddhist teachers insist the importance of ‘mindfulness.’ But such a kind of attitudes might be insistence that Buddhism might be a kind of idealistic philosophy. Therefore actually speaking I am much afraid that Buddhism is misunderstood as if it was a kind of idealistic philosophy. However we should never forget that Buddhism is not an idealistic philosophy, and so if someone in Buddhism reveres mindfulness, we should clearly recognize that he or she can never be a Buddhist at all.[25]

Muho Noelke, the abbot of Antaiji, explains the pitfalls of consciously seeking mindfulness.

We should always try to be active coming out of samadhi. For this, we have to forget things like “I should be mindful of this or that”. If you are mindful, you are already creating a separation (“I – am – mindful – of – ….”). Don’t be mindful, please! When you walk, just walk. Let the walk walk. Let the talk talk (Dogen Zenji says: “When we open our mouths, it is filled with Dharma”). Let the eating eat, the sitting sit, the work work. Let sleep sleep.[26]“

This apparent contradiction is resolved when one applies the Human Effectiveness Institute’s theory to it. Mindfulness helps one get from EOP into Observer state. Striving to be mindful, however, blocks movement further into Flow state (zazen).

The “tricks” one uses to maximize one’s own performance are not obvious to most of us and need to be rediscovered. That is the mission of the Human Effectiveness Institute. Subtle modulations of the mind that worked for me for decades are what we share in our books, videos, audios, here and elsewhere.

I propose an elegant bargain. I will uninhibitedly share here what I know — what has worked for me — to help you maximize your own performance. The quid pro quo is that if it works and you see happy progress in certain areas that you attribute in part to these “tricks”, then you will imbibe more of them and share them with as many people as possible, in order that all of us are averaging more time in Observer state instead of EOP for the rest of our lives.

To that end, best to all,

Bill

P.S. February 17, 2013 was the second anniversary of our blog. Thank you all for another great year!

Optimized Mindfulness

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Volume 2, Issue 44

The usage of the word “mindfulness” is increasing rapidly, in connection with the benefits of meditation and the cultivation of emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson are among those who have popularized this useful word.

There are two basic kinds of meditation: deep relaxation that uses the breath, mantra, japa or rosary beads, a candle flame, etc., to carry the individual into a deep inner state— and the other type focusing on mindfulness, the inner deployment of attention to observe carefully what is going on inside oneself at all levels — by an act of will, bringing on the Observer state or at least seeking to do so.

One widespread form of mindfulness meditation is focused on the garnering of insights about oneself and reality in general, and is sometimes called Insight Meditation.

The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) specializes in its own specific form of mindfulness/insight meditation, which might be called “Optimized Mindfulness”. This was a technique that arose instinctively early on and evolved throughout my life. Since it helps me get more frequently into the Flow state and keeps me most of the time in the Observer state, both of which I find useful and enjoyable places to be compared to the alternative (EOP), I am eager to share this technique and thus formed the Institute many years ago as the vehicle to do so.

What distinguishes Optimized Mindfulness is this. The generalized version of mindfulness meditation does not start you out with many insights, nor does it usually guide you to assemble your insights with the specific purpose of achieving the two higher states of consciousness just mentioned, Observer and Flow states. Mostly, mindfulness meditation in the current world is being used to reduce the stress of EOP, by at least for short periods each day getting you out of EOP into the Observer state. The military is now using mindfulness and relaxation meditation to reduce the suicide rate of troops suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). As we recommended to military leaders in speeches and meetings many years ago, they are now finally empirically testing the efficacy of one versus another specific version of meditation to see which works best.

Just as in the infant science of psychology, the modern world starts by focusing on the negative side of the coin, using not only meditation but many forms of applied psychology (we call it psychotechnology) primarily if not totally to relieve negative states. THEI, like Maslow, goes the other way and focuses mostly on the achievement and maintenance of positive states.

To summarize, THEI’s ideas are unique in the general field of mindfulness in the following ways:

  1. Focuses on the achievement and maintenance of two specific positive states of consciousness. Both states can be verified by the individual observer, thus we are talking science not “mere” mysticism (although mysticism is one valuable heuristic lens of mindfulness we will discuss another day). The states also have measurable correlates both in terms of objective performance metrics and in terms of brain conditions.
  1. Provides insights to begin with —ways of looking at things that have been observed to help precipitate the desired states. For example, Mind Magic.
  1. Provides a framework for the accumulation and mining of one’s own insights. By demonstrating that some thoughts and ways of being help reach Observer state (Flow typically coming later), each individual realizes profoundly that paying attention to one’s own insights is unbelievably valuable, among the most important things in life. This changes life from too often a grind into an adventure of discovery, in which challenges are appreciated as the irritants to catalyze creativity and self-growth, turning the tables on negativity.
  1. When negativity does get through the shields, and one spirals down into old- fashioned EOP, Optimized Mindfulness provides ways to get out again as quickly as possible.
  1. In short, Optimized Mindfulness is a Westernized approach in the sense of having set very specific goals and objectives, and not losing track of the focus on those goals, while systematically moving toward and into them, based on accumulated fieldcraft, hard logic and reasoning. At the same time Optimized Mindfulness does not lose sight of the value of the intuition, nor impose reductionist assumptions the way that Western Materialist Religious Scientism does.

We hope you experiment with and enjoy Optimized Mindfulness, adding it to your moment-to-moment life, and that your incremental experiences in Observer and Flow states make your daily life an even more wondrous experience.

Happy Valentine’s Day, 

beating heart

Bill

P.S. From Wikipedia on Mindfulness
__________________________________________________________
Zen criticism
Some Zen teachers emphasize the potential dangers of misunder-
standing “mindfulness”.

Gudo Wafu Nishijima criticizes the use of the term of mindfulness and idealistic interpretations of the practice from the Zen standpoint:

However recently many so-called Buddhist teachers insist the importance of ‘mindfulness.’ But such a kind of attitudes might be insistence that Buddhism might be a kind of idealistic philosophy. Therefore actually speaking I am much afraid that Buddhism is misunderstood as if it was a kind of idealistic philosophy. However we should never forget that Buddhism is not an idealistic philosophy, and so if someone in Buddhism reveres mindfulness, we should clearly recognize that he or she can never be a Buddhist at all.[25]

Muho Noelke, the abbot of Antaiji, explains the pitfalls of consciously seeking mindfulness.

We should always try to be active coming out of samadhi. For this, we have to forget things like “I should be mindful of this or that”. If you are mindful, you are already creating a separation (“I – am – mindful – of – ….”). Don’t be mindful, please! When you walk, just walk. Let the walk walk. Let the talk talk (Dogen Zenji says: “When we open our mouths, it is filled with Dharma”). Let the eating eat, the sitting sit, the work work. Let sleep sleep.[26]
_________________________________________________________________

BH comment
The concept of mindfulness, as a positive thing to be striving for, helps one get from EOP to Observer state, but impedes one getting from Observer state to Flow state. The Zen Masters above are saying the latter but not explaining fully what they mean.

Improve your relationships with our book MIND MAGIC

Rediscovering that Ancient Territory: Your Own Mind

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Volume 2, Issue 33

All of us are naturally curious about our own selves. When someone who knew us when, someone older than ourselves, tells us a story about something we did when we were too young to remember it, we are raptly attentive.

If it were not for the culturally ubiquitous time pressure, we would have the same curiosity if offered a searchlight method to see more deeply into our own mind than ever before. This blog post offers just such a searchlight, followed by my own “field report” on using the method, and what I found.

Find 5 minutes when you can’t be interrupted and there is nothing dragging you away like a deadline. This means you probably won’t find time to try this until the weekend, so leave yourself a note somewhere you’ll see it Saturday or Sunday morning.

Sit with your eyes closed and back straight, with your head drawn up toward the ceiling. First, still the mind by experiencing your breath going in and out, without trying to control the breath in any way. After a half-dozen breath cycles or whenever you feel as if your mind is relatively still, begin the exercise.

The exercise is simply to watch for what happens at the very beginning of a thought or feeling. This is not as easy as it sounds because we tend to get so instantly caught up in the thought or feeling we forget that we are doing this exercise. That is, until through exercises very much like this, we find that we have gained true control of our minds. This tends to be a gradual process — we get better and better at it over time.

One trick is to pretend that you are a soldier and you are watching for the enemy that you know is going to come over the rise ahead. A thought or a feeling is going to arise. You are in a state of concentrated sharp attention and the game is to see that arising as quickly as possible, identify what it is, and be able to remember the experience of it as accurately as possible.

Before you sit down to do this experiment, consciously strip away everything you have ever thought about the nature of the mind, all preconceptions, theories, maps, structures, models, concepts, hidden and overt assumptions. This allows you to see what is really there without biasing it by slapping a label on it or gestalting it into a preconceived category.

In the addendum below — for our more scientifically minded readers who may be interested in the nascent science of consciousness that has been very slowly emerging over thousands of years — is my field report on my own experience as a result of doing this exercise. You might want to defer reading it until after you have done the exercise yourself, so that I do not bias your own findings.

Best to all for an enjoyable holiday season,

Bill

PS — Hope to see some of you Friday, November 30, 2012 at the ARF Industry Leader Forum, where I will be speaking on a panel at 1PM, “New Methods to Drive Insights into the Future”.
 

Field Report: Investigating Bill’s Brain from the Inside

In order to get into the two higher, most effective states of consciousness — the Observer state, where we can really see what is going on inside ourselves rather than being puppeteered by software in our heads, and the Flow state (Zone), where we are spontaneously doing everything just right — we need to become experts in the empirical study of our own minds and inner life. This week’s blog post is about classifying and understanding the basic building blocks of all inner experience — thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and perceptions. We see these not as four different things but rather a smaller number of things that metamorphose so as to seem to be four different things.

Why bother? The reason we are writing this is to ask you to consider — or to reconsider — all of the experiences you have had of your own mind, your own inner life. In effect, this posting is a brief exploration into the architecture of inner experience to offer you the opportunity to look for yourself, empirically, into your inner self. What are these things you call your thoughts, your feelings, your hunches, your perceptions?

Carl Jung defined the four functions of consciousness as perception, feelings, intellect and intuition — the latter referred to in day-to-day life as “hunches”. These are four kinds of events that can go on in consciousness. According to Jung, nothing else besides these four styles of experience can be experienced. Do you agree?

Modern psychology studies emotions, which are the objectified manifestations (heart rate, skin conductance, etc. — measurements taken by instruments) of what consciousness phenomenologically experiences as feelings.

Within consciousness, what we experience first is something inside that motivates us and moves us toward or away from something. Those are feelings. Instincts – hardwired genetic carryovers, part of the machine, inherited before birth – are partly responsible for some or all of our feelings. The rest arise from motivations we accumulated during our lives, stuff we learned or decided to want or not want as a result of our experiences since birth.

When I watch what goes on inside of me, it often starts with a feeling that is also somehow an image at the same time.

Then what happens inside is that another part of me takes that feeling/image and interprets it as a conscious thought — putting names, categorizations, and other specific recognizable details onto the original amorphous feeling/image.

I think that’s what a thought is. An interpreted feeling/image. I posit that Jung was not quite correct — thoughts and feelings are the same thing, at different stages of development.

Thoughts add details to feeling/images, turning them into specifications, bringing out additional information that had somehow been packed into the feeling/vision.

Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) classifies feelings as “kinesthetic”, making them bodily feelings albeit in some cases infinitely subtle. I’m not entirely convinced that all feeling/images can be felt in one’s body, but the term works intuitively.

Possibly feelings are the most substantial and primary actor, coming out of our most intimate connection with the vehicle we identify as the material sovereignty of our self, and arising to be transmuted into intuitions and/or thoughts and/or emotions and/or images/visions.

Perceptions coming in from the “outside” accompanied by an equal stream of feelings from “inside” – suggests that feelings are another sense, like seeing and hearing. In which case, we simply perceive, and the rest of the functions are what evolves from our perceptions. In other words, feelings are inner perceptions, and what we call sense perceptions are outer perceptions. Inner and outer perceptions are the raw stuff of experience, and as we turn them over in our minds, those perceptions turn into thoughts and/or intuitions.

So instead of Jung’s four-way classification of inner experience, I suggest that perceptions evolve into what Jung classified as thoughts (intellect) and/or hunches (intuition). Outer perceptions — the five physical senses — are what Jung called “perceptions” — and the inner perceptions are what Jung called “feelings”. Close inspection of these feelings, in my own empirical experience journeying within myself suggests to me that these feelings have both a body-type kinesthetic aspect and an imagistic aspect. The raw stuff of my inner life is comprised of feeling/image arisings that I then articulate internally as thoughts, with either words or not, or observe as hunches, without inner words.

Those feeling-image packets hit “the worder”, which often perfectly articulates the intent of the feeling-image packet. Just as often, “the worder” seems unable to get it right and comes out saying something other than what you intended — the right words don’t seem to come.

“The worder” physically sits above your left ear – Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area – decoding incoming words and encoding outgoing words, respectively. I observe that my own outgoing words are preceded by feeling-image packets (often invisible unless I am concentrating on seeing the details of inner head action), sometimes with more image, often with more feeling.

If it can be proven that both thoughts and feelings have a common root in the feeling-image packet (FIP), then Jung’s 4-way design would be reduced to 3-way. But what if it can be reduced further?

Intellect and intuition have always been seen as similar functions. Intellect reaches new conclusions step by effortful step. Intuition gets there in one leap, involuntarily, all by itself.

Sometimes when the intuition or hunch is particularly credible and important and came out of nowhere, we call it inspiration, suggesting help from some outside invisible source.

If these two sides of cognition may be thought of as a continuum, then the formula for consciousness would not be a series of 4 items in no particular order, it would be:

S→P→[FIPs→Cognition→Action]

Where “S” is stimuli, “P” is perceptions, and these impinge upon the consciousness (symbolized by the square brackets) in which what goes on are feeling-image packets that turn into cognitions that turn into actions we take as a result of the process. Many of these gratefully are non-actions.

We need maps to study consciousness. We also need meditation to concentrate on seeing what really goes on inside for oneself.

This was my somewhat unusual sharing of my inner experience. You might find it worthwhile to look inside of yourself to see what arises moment-to-moment — and see how it might compare (or not) with what I’ve described in this “field report”.

By looking inside, we can begin to cut through dogma and other people’s beliefs, and see for ourselves who we are in our inner worlds.

Best to all,

Bill

Set Yourself Up To Cultivate “Aha!” Moments

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Being a creative being you are constantly having “Aha!” moments. In the Acceleritis cloud, however, like everyone else you may rarely notice your own “Aha!” moments.

These insights often go by unnoticed simply because they are obvious to you and you have heard them before. However, your subconscious continues to present them to you because some aspect of the insight has still not been fully realized. There is another layer there your subconscious wants you to get.

Give yourself permission to have “Aha!” moments. Give proper inner recognition to “Aha!” moments. Expect these moments to try to sneak by. Jot down even one-word fragments your mind seems to have some reason to offer you. These may be words and/or they may be images, feelings, or a cluster of all of these in a jumble. What do they mean? What action is indicated?

One test of the relevancy of what seems to be an old idea is, if it is so obvious, have you fully acted on it? If not, what is stopping you?

The day starts with dream wisps fast fading. Assume there is an encoded message that some part of you is communicating to some other part of you. Jot down the content in the fewest words that will bring back the original dream. We call these trigger words because they trigger whole thought-streams and/or other memories encapsulated in the most condensed code-words that capture the essence of the meaning the content has for you.

The shower is another place where ideas seem to come to everyone. Perhaps it is the negative ionization created by the water stream evoking a physical brain process. Develop memory discipline to count the number of ideas you have had in the shower and string together the keywords for those ideas into one funny picture. Have paper or electronics or whatever you use to jot notes close by at all times including right outside the shower and next to the bed and in fact wherever you might happen to be.

Clearing the mind is conducive to getting new ideas. A change of scene helps, especially stepping outside into nature and away from the work you have been doing. A sense of goofing off, not working on anything, just taking a break, a mini-vacation, giving yourself permission to just veg out, deeply enjoying just breathing — this often leads to the highest quality ideas of the day.

As the mind tries to continue what it has been obsessed with, gently cut off any words in midstream. The fewer words the more likely the subtlest parts of the self will be able to get an “Aha!” idea in edgewise.

A large sheet of blank paper can evoke automatic writing and/or drawing, e.g. a freeform diagram with trigger-word ideas or entities or processes in balloons connected by arrows or lines to other balloons with trigger words in them.

Meditation with eyes closed either on a chair sitting up straight, or face down on the backs of your hands on the floor stretched out (Sphinx position), just breathing and waiting and listening can summon a Master voice that speaks only deep truth to you, sometimes when you least expect it.

If you give presentations, creative Flow can occur if you prepare and rehearse but then avoid referring to any notes — just have fun with it, and take the tack “I can’t wait to hear what I’ve got to say.”

Just have fun with every moment and everything else will work itself out.

Best to all,

Bill