Tag Archives: Mind Magic

Solving Challenges with Just One Fresh Thought

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Updated August 28, 2020

Do you get frustrated when you look at a longstanding problem or challenge and feel that you just don’t know how to solve it?

Acceptance is a choice that leads to a path.

Is it possible that you do know how to solve it, but deep down inside you realize that the solution is likely to involve long, hard effort? Perhaps the situation seems so complicated that you’ve refused to even begin to think about how to untangle it. Are there complexities to the situation that have you considering easy solutions or quick fixes instead of dealing with those complexities?

How can you find your way out of this loop and move forward?

What works for me is to reconsider the situation and have “just one fresh thought on the matter” each time I’m considering what may seem a longstanding challenge. Instead of pressing for an ultimate solution immediately, I begin to consider and pursue step-by-step progress. The part of my mind that insists on easy solutions usually sees this as a reasonable compromise.

Accepting this creative compromise also refocuses the energy that was being expressed as frustration so that it now manifests instead as progress. I’ve found I begin to actually make progress the longer I restrain from lurching for a final solution while adding relevant observations, and that the probability for right decisions is noticeably higher. Continue reading →

Moving Beyond Fear to Happiness

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updated May 8th, 2020

The worldwide calamity has increased our tendency to live in fear. Fear is like an alarm clock, designed to alert us to make apt decisions soon. We don’t let the alarm keep ringing in the morning when it wakes us up, and the best reaction to fear is to focus objectively on what we can do. Fear is always linked to attachment, something we are afraid of losing, such as our lives, our loved ones, our livelihood, our lifestyle. But the real question is What action can we take that is the heroic and best response to the current moment? With the right self-observational techniques you can edge into a state of ultimate competency in meeting each moment, what scientists call the Flow state and athletes call the Zone – where you want to be at all times, but most especially in the present crisis. One way to achieve happiness in the present moment is to let it all go, assume that the worst will happen, but picture yourself standing strong and smiling through the worst that can happen. Distraction is always a problem but much moreso today when we are always crowded together at home (if we’re lucky to not be alone). This post delves into practical ways you can take yourself in hand and use your strengths to enjoy every second of life, otherwise what’s the point of wanting to live?

The two biggest blocks to the Zone/Flow state are distraction and attachment.

Release Attachment - Let it go. - Bill Harvey

Attachment is also the only block to happiness, joy, delight, fun, ananda (or bliss, from Hinduism and Buddhism) — the natural built-in target state for all of us.

Attachment blocks happiness because one is fearful of losing the things one associates with happiness and tacitly assumes are requirements for happiness. When we are attached, we are also angry at whatever is suspected or known to threaten or take away those precious happiness-causing things.

“I am really attached to Pippin” (one of my cats) is a true statement for me because I love her. To experience love is not necessarily to be attached, though. To avoid confusion and getting lost in wordplay about whether attachment is a good or bad thing (because the word “attachment” is associated with the word “love”), I am using the term attachment to mean the inability to separate love from attachment and the resulting anger/fear syndrome.

The difference comes from the importance we give to keeping the “things” that give us happiness. If we truly appreciate the joy that has been created by our loves, joy that has been creating other good things through spontaneous Flow state creativity (which emerges naturally from joy and from love) it is still possible to not worry about losing any of those “things”. In fact, when we are in that state of not fearing loss, we are truly free.

A Process for Releasing Attachment

A powerful contemplation technique offered in Mind Magic (download free PDF here) involves burning out one’s attachments by intensely envisioning and feeling the loss of each separate thing one is attached to. This requires setting aside alone time, without a sense of time pressure. It requires immersion, concentration, patience as you go over the same material again and again. It’s probably best to focus on one object of your attachment at a time.

Give your imagination free reign like in a daydream. Imagine and see yourself go through the experience of the moment you lose something you are deeply attached to and visualize how it might happen. See it vividly from the inside, the way you experience life. Feel the feelings. Watch yourself in the daydream, the things you say in that situation, and the way you say them, and how the other person responds if the particular attachment involves another person. Let yourself actually feel the loss as if it is really happening.

Each time you go over the same imagined loss experience, you give the situation a more intelligent response. In your later iterations of the exercise, you will start to act like the hero you are in the daydream of the loss. You will begin to feel differently about yourself from that moment on — more confident, more self-respectful, more courageous, in fact less prone to fear and anger.

Through this process, you realize you are no longer attached to a particular outcome because you now know how you will respond if what you had feared ever happens.

Release attachments. Let them go. Happiness is the off-the-scale self-evidently best state one can experience in the emotional dimension.

 

Alone Space VideosWatch short videos on cultivating Alone Space Contemplation.

 

Happiness to all,

Bill

P.S. It can take some time for you to feel the effects of this technique internally, due to the interconnections among various ego circuits in your head. Be patient and persevere. And be happy. smiley

Read the latest post at my media blog, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com

How Did We Become So Distracted?

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Updated April 24, 2020

Although we are staying home now, and the amount of overstimulation we receive from our environment is therefore considerably lessened, with the screens in our home and the audio and (if we’re lucky) other people and pets that are with us, there’s still an awfully lot going on and coming in through our senses.

We live at a discontinuous point in history.

Most of us know that the human race started evolving from primates, coming down out of trees over 1,000,000 years ago, but it’s only been the last 200,000 years that we’ve been homo sapiens.

We’ve written things down for only 6,000 years out of those million years so we have no written record of what went on before those roughly 6,000 years.

Key Survival Characteristic

My hypothesis as a social scientist is that in the last 6,000 years, written language changed the way we use our minds.

It actually started with the cave paintings, some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, using symbolism — we started to be able to look at abstract symbols to represent things like animals that we were going to be hunting.

When we moved to written language, we could see the language — the granular bits of information. Pictures don’t have chunks to them like words do.

Though nowhere near digital yet, we started to get into granular chunk thinking as soon as we got into written language.

This development marked the beginning of a revolution in the way we use our minds, and this has been accelerating for the last 6,000 years.

We started inventing things — first tools, then weapons and then media — and all of those things have contributed to the fact that we now every day are subjected to a deluge of stimuli that exceeds our ability to answer all the questions arising in our mind second-to-second.

We get into a habit of just sweeping things aside. “I’m never gonna answer all this stuff. I won’t try to answer all this stuff. I won’t even try to answer the basic question of what is life, what is the meaning of all this, what is my purpose? It’s just too many questions. I can’t answer them.” I call this condition Acceleritis™.

We see things like increasing ADD and ADHD and we see people who are supposed to be running big countries acting like high-school kids and not getting anything done.

This deluge of stimuli all the time is not good for any of us. In the face of the hugely distracting environment of Acceleritis, we are being distracted from Flow state, which I believe is our natural state and which occurred a lot more before 6,000 years ago.

This is why I consider psychotechnology, which prepares people with techniques to stay focused through complexity, to be so important. No matter who we are, the quality of our life depends upon our effectiveness in meeting challenges, whether as a parent, an executive, an athlete or a world leader.

Shutting out distractions

Most all of the techniques I use to increase focus and creativity are included in my book, MIND MAGIC, and I also share them here in this blog space — techniques like mindfulness, meditation, self-awareness and letting go of attachment. Learning to become the observer more often and not getting caught up or reeled in by all of these distractions, we can find greater clarity and reach Flow state more often. Learning to stay focused in an ever increasingly distracting world, we can ultimately increase our creativity and improve our decision making.

Best to all,

Bill

Read the latest post at my media blog  “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com.

Practicing Forgiveness

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Original post December 1, 2015

There are a great many benefits when we stop blaming and instead open ourselves to forgiveness. Blame is an investment of mental and emotional energy that pays no return. The same energy can be redeployed to deliver a positive return.

I am faithful to what I see as the common core of all religions, not as religions but as scientific truth. My hypothesis and conviction is that there is only One of us. And if there is only One Spark of Being populating all of us, then anyone who has offended us has done so because his or her experiences have led that originally perfect tabula rasa into a condition in which giving offense is possible and perhaps inevitable. This awareness makes it much easier to forgive.

If, for example, my friend, whose mother belittled him because of her own childhood conditioning, has become carping, surely I can understand and forgive that. If I am him, living a different life with different experiences that have made me less carping than he is but imperfect in other ways, I can have an empathetic understanding.

[dropshadowbox align=”center” effect=”lifted-both” width=”83%” height=”” background_color=”#f9d798″ border_width=”1″ border_color=”#b3b3af” ] To forgive all, be all. — Bill Harvey from Mind Magic, page 233. [/dropshadowbox]

If we can forgive everyone including ourselves for all the influences that drive each of us to become what we perhaps only temporarily are, it may free us from having to continue to be exactly the same today as we have always been.

What has already happened could not have been otherwise, since all events are merely the resultant of their causes, which are themselves events dependent on a constellation of prior causes. Everything happens for a reason.

We can become a more potent cause for positive future events by being less critical of whatever happened that caused us to feel resentful, and instead reimagine the situation, decide what should have happened and then seek to do that in similar future situations. We can do nothing about the past. The goal is to simply set new policies to put into practice going forward.

Guiding others to adopt more useful new policies requires gentility; often it is best to simply ask the right questions to have the desired effect. Honesty and gentleness are essential tools in this endeavor.

To forgive a person, for a time in your imagination, be that person.*

If you are having difficulty forgiving someone, create space for an empathetic perspective: set some time aside and imagine living through that person’s role from the beginning to now, seeing if we could have played any parts better, and which blocks are likely to have prevented them from seeing or taking these options Then figure out how to help the person get past those blocks. This of course also works for self-forgiveness.

Communicating in some way what is in our heart, and then letting go and forgiving, will at a minimum stop tying up some of our energies deep in our psyche.

Instead of squandering our energy by blaming or being unforgiving, seeing situations with an open heart and an empathetic perspective can lead us to more positive outcomes where we can realize solutions that are a much better investment of our time and energy.

Thought you might also enjoy today’s latest short video commenting on advertisers taking charge of audience measurement.

Best to all,

Bill

*From Mind Magic, p. 233.

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