Tag Archives: Observer State

Science Has Accepted Consciousness

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Originally posted October 13, 2011 

We live at an exciting turning point in history. The first great turn has already occurred. Quantum Mechanics, the most successful theory in the history of science, has put the observer back into the picture of the universe collectively known as science.

Einstein started it with relativity theory, but Quantum Mechanics (QM) has institutionalized it.

At the moment, all this has really done is to cause a number of prominent physicists, the world’s most respected, to characterize the universe as consisting of not matter and energy but information (John Wheeler), thought (James Jeans), idea (Werner Heisenberg), and mind (Robert Wald). Gerald Schroeder, in his excellent book God According To God, provides a unique exegesis of the Bible to show that the ancients were on this same wavelength but lacked modern verbal thought tools.

Jeans expresses exactly what I have extrapolated further in the Theory of the Conscious Universe* — a theory I have begun to excerpt in this blog since earlier this year — when he says “each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.”

So far this early trend has not fully played out through the scientific community, which continues to work in the same Acceleritis™-infected, therefore fear-driven culture as you and I, dear reader. Individual scientists fear ridicule and loss of job opportunity just like the rest of us — except when individuals flash through the higher states of consciousness (observer state, Flow state) that quarantine the Acceleritis infection. In these higher states the high-end long tail of physicists such as Wheeler et al. emerge from the dark mental cloud and see the connections in all the bits swirling through their minds. They are able to bring back wisdom from those states and enlighten the rest of humanity by common language verbalization of what must be the truth based on all the evidence available to physicists today.

Just the other day the latest Nobel Prize-winning physicists Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Reiss won that prize by discovering that the universe expansion is accelerating as a result of dark matter further out attracting it from all directions. This overturns the widely held theory that the universe would reach a point where the Big Bang driven expansion would be tethered by gravity and would then fall back to an eventual Big Crunch, perhaps triggering another Big Bang.

An infinitely expanding universe is quite consistent with the modern Big Idea that “consciousness is fundamental” (Jeans). Also, just what is that “dark matter” that apparently constitutes 95% of the mass/gravity of the universe? Is it really matter at all or something else that has mass and therefore gravity? The previous concept of an expanding-contracting universe is closer to a mechanistic thermodynamic gas balloon model. We shall see where this all goes.

Physics continues to blow its own mind on a regular basis.

While this is going on, there is a culture around this physics cadre that continues to act as if the universe is purely materialistic, a picture that is decades if not a century behind the front edge of science.

The accelerating flood of distractive information around us each day also continues, creating forever-unanswered questions in our minds. The latest stat from Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner is that “the data equivalent to the total volume of information created from the beginning of human civilization until 2003 can now be generated in the space of just two days.” This Acceleritis condition is a strong shaper of the way our minds operate. Unless we employ psychic shielding techniques, such as in my book, it carries us along in a reactive state, not autonomous but believing that we are.

The state we are in leaves us very vulnerable when we lose a loved one.

In our gut we have a strong assumption that we shall never be in contact with these individuals again. Anything else seems beyond naïve and foolish. We are lacerated with pain, from which some of us never recover.

The last 15 years of my father’s life gave me an opportunity to get to know him in ways that I treasure. Before that I was a child and in awe of him. He was a celebrity in the world of New York showbiz and to other celebs known worldwide, whom I met in brief bright moments in the photo album of my life.

My first word that he had died was over the phone from the stage manager at the Concord where Ned (my father) was the orchestra leader, MC, and exec in charge of both bands. I was in a phone booth in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm.

I trudged back to the car with a desolate feeling about my own life. It was going to be flat and empty, of no value, going through the motions. “Why did it have to be now?” I heard myself ask him, “I wanted you and Sandy to see me make it.” Sandy was my mother, who had passed away years earlier. I had just returned to New York after living in California for two years and was at a trough in my career.

“Sandy and I can see you fine from up here. We’ll be waiting in the wings when you get off.”  I heard his voice — it was his voice — clearly say this in my mind. My mind flashed to a picture of Ned and me performing together onstage, with Sandy just barely visible in the wings stage left. While I was still stunned he said “Take care of Nat.”  Nat was his brother, who has more recently passed away. This surprised me, came out of nowhere — my mind flashed to other people he had not said to take care of. Then I thought perhaps he figured they could take care of themselves.

My mind has gone back to this and other strange incidents in my life which do not fit in a materialistic universe. This was the impetus for the Theory of the Conscious Universe*, in which I attempt to fit together all of the evidence, the licit and heretofore illicit, the common experiences we all share, and the cutting edge of physics. The theory will be published as a book.

At Ned’s funeral I was asked to say a few words to the hard-bitten, cynical showbiz crowd. Most of them had not seen me since I was a child and therefore all of them called me Billy. Ned, Sandy and Billy were our names all through my childhood until people started to call Ned “Chief”.

“We come into this life, we know not from where,” I said. “Where we go when we leave, in fact, nobody really knows. We assume it’s all over.” I told them what the Chief had said in my mind, and then offered this explanation: “Science says that nothing in the universe can either be created or destroyed, it can only be changed into something else, some other form. Matter and energy are both conserved. If Nature considers both matter and energy important enough to conserve, why wouldn’t Nature also conserve consciousness, which has to be much more important than mere matter and energy?”

Standing by the grave, Morty Gunty — a comedian well-known within the community and whom had been given his chance by Ned, as so many performers had — edged closer and said to me, “You know your remarks… were really great.” In the manner of saying that he liked my act, which is not a bad thing, since it’s all showbiz.

Our own consciousness can change. We can change our acts. We can be in control of our minds and our emotions without becoming heartless unfeeling creatures. We can open our minds to the possibility that our consciousness in some form will be conserved. Just be open to that possibility. Don’t believe anything you can’t prove experientially. This includes not believing in permanent death, since it has never been proven either. Keep an open mind.

Aside from the heartbreak and depression emanating from loss of loved ones, there is another reason to keep an open mind about death.

We ourselves lead lives that can slip into a form of craven fear. It is a mood brought about by the belief in the unproven superstition that death is permanent — it may or may not be. There is no evidence either way. Zero evidence. Zero.

Add Acceleritis to the belief in death and you have a cocktail of mind poisons guaranteed to impel you into a life of hidden background fear at all times. Money worries are just an extension of that insecurity about security. All worries and concerns about reputation, image, standing in your community, not taking chances, not just letting yourself have fun, not saying what’s in your heart spontaneously but putting up the proper façade — all of that has death belief at its core.

What’s important is enjoying every moment, now. When you look back in the end — whether it’s a permanent end or a temporary one — it will be the enjoyment moments you’ll count up as what you got out of this life. Enjoy all of them then. Enjoy the getting to wherever you’re going.

I predict that someday science will empirically prove that consciousness is conserved. Just like matter and energy. Why wouldn’t it be, if it is the fundamental stuff of which matter and energy are built, as stated by the great physicists of our time? When that day comes, if not before, we can all shed our death belief and get on with living life to its fullest.

Best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 . 

Getting Your Team into the Zone

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Originally posted August 25, 2011

The Zone or Flow State is something we all have observed in other people such as supreme athletes or musicians in moments of peak performance — people doing something extremely difficult and doing it perfectly — it seems like magic or even a miracle — we are riveted, transfixed, watching it happen.

Science has begun to acknowledge that this state is real and measurable. Master Marvin Chun who heads Yale’s Neuroscience Department notes that what appears to be chatter crossing the corpus callosum between left and right brain dies down with the onset of the Zone. This is just one notable example of scientific measurements of the Zone in recent years.

In The Theory of The Conscious Universe, the Zone is the state in which information leaks in from outside the local self; as if the membrane separating you from the rest of the universe has suddenly become semi-permeable. We postulate that the heroic personages recorded by history who have moved us in the direction of more noble ideals were in the Zone when these ideas hit them, as were the great scientists who intuited amazing truths about reality. The Kabala uses a diagram of consciousness called The Tree of Life in which there is a dotted circle representing the Zone where one receives information in an extrasensory manner — “inspiration” as if breathing in information. This sphere is called Da’at or Da’ath. In fact the word Kabala means “to receive” and “the received”.

In an earlier post we postulated a theory of what we call Holosentience, which speculates that the Zone occurs when all parts of the brain and mind* are working together as a single unit, like a finely tuned orchestra. This contrasts in our theory of Holosentience with the everyday state of consciousness I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure or EOP, in which a part of the brain and mind, a sub-sentience, operates as if it is the whole sentience. This sub-sentience has been called the ego. I see it as the software layer of the brain, which is built up of proteins into neuron clusters mostly in the early years of life. Experiences drive this buildup and in this way unassimilated memories become unassimilated motivations. Under the regime of Acceleritis™ — information overload generated by the type of culture we have become — EOP is now our dominant coping style.

EOP keeps us out of the Zone. The way from EOP into the Zone starts with the Observer state, an interim state in which we detach from identification with the voices of ego in our head, our thoughts, while remaining aware of these voices or thoughts for what they are — ingrained robotic reflexes. The Observer state combined with practicing an activity we love leads to the Zone. Emotional distraction by the ego’s excessive desire to win, or the ego’s fear of failure, is the final barrier to the Zone — that is, when our practice and training has reached the point where the Zone is physically within reach of our skills.

In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s protagonist Harry Morgan ultimately concludes that “one man alone… ain’t got no chance.” This has never been truer than it is today with the accelerating information overload totally out of control as we head toward a precipice of seemingly impossible economic challenge, miniaturization and increasing availability of weapons of mass destruction, carcinogenic environmental conditions, and spiritual bankruptcy. The world more than ever needs for people to be able to work together as high performing teams. And so the headline of this post, Getting Your Team into the Zone — even more important than getting yourself into the Zone because one person alone in the Zone might not be able to make enough of a difference. We need critical mass.

So how do we do it? How do we evoke Zone performance in a whole team, of which no single person is ever in total control, even if he/she is technically “the boss”? You dear reader are probably the boss of your team while you and your team are a part of your boss’s team — a common situation in corporate life. How do you get your own team into the Zone, and then how does your team get the larger team of which it is a part into the Zone?

Obviously you don’t expect this to be a one-trick answer. We are all too sophisticated to believe it could be that simple, or we’d all be there already. It isn’t simple, it’s incredibly complicated. But one can extract simple principles that work, and enough of these simple principles put into practice will produce a high performing team.

Let’s start in this post with one of the most mission critical principles. It’s about negativity.

Negativity is counterproductive to team Zone performance because it spills time and energy. The Zone is a state of ultimate efficiency and so anything wasteful is guaranteed to block the Zone. Explain it to your team this way: negativity gets in the way of solving whatever it is that has caused the negativity. Take negativity as an alarm that tells us we need to define the problem clearly, generate creative solution ideas, make decisions on an action path, and take that action. Negativity is just stalling that whole process and wasting time — which is no way to create team high performance.

The thing about negativity is that it does not emanate from the whole brain and mind. Negativity comes from the sub-sentience. It is a well-worn reflex. When confronted with a threat, the holosentience reacts with an optimal response to that threat, if the person is in the Zone. If the person is in EOP, the sub-sentience reflex is fear that may be compounded with a sense of helplessness, doom, defeatism, self-loathing, anger, frustration  and other overlays, triggered by a cascade of energy lighting up interlocking neuron clusters. The negativity of these feelings is typically communicated to those in the vicinity including animals even if only by body language and the pheromones in perspiration. These micro clues of negativity further reduce the likelihood of an effective real world response to whatever the challenge is, by encouraging foes and undermining the support of potential allies.

Teams can engage in frequent training sessions to talk about the value of becoming high performing members of high performing teams, and ways to get there. Bringing in outside speakers helps overcome the inertia and subconsciously gives “permission” for sudden change to be realistically possible. The word “training” may or may not be used; some people feel that once they are adults there is something insulting and/or embarrassing about the word. Maybe call them Zone sessions to keep the goal in mind and remove the connotations of “training”.

Team members are directed to deploy negativity detectors within their mind at all times. When a person detects the auto-negativity, he/she should be able to remain in the Observer state by not siding with the negativity, not making it one’s own, but rather seeing it as a bodily reaction, an old habit pattern, and something that can be risen above into a state closer to the Zone (the Observer state being the access path to the Zone).

Now, something must be done with that negative energy in order to transmute it into something else, otherwise it is more difficult to overcome the feeling in oneself. Remaining the Observer one can look at the negativity in a new way, gaining insight into oneself and others, and creating conditions conducive to new solution approaches. Why am I being negative? What haven’t I tried yet? What is the goal? What are the obstacles? What causes each obstacle? Analysis is the place to channel the negativity.

Anything can be described as a game. And people and animals love games. By making more things gamelike, the possibilities for making a high performing team out of a demoralized griping bunch of cynics become realistic. Consider it a game to make negativity off limits in one’s own mind. You can’t initially stop the negative impulses from arising but you can get better and faster at judoing those impulses into opportunities for analysis and creativity.

You might hear yourself groaning inwardly in a meeting in which so-and-so repeats his endless habit of blaming everyone else for something. Quickly gain control of your inner self and do not identify with your inward groan but attribute it to a robotic reflex of certain neuron clusters. Okay thanks, neuron cluster, you did your job, like an alarm clock, painting a certain event as a clue that something needs fixing — in this case it is something that you never took it on yourself to fix because let’s face it, your chances of changing so-and-so seem pretty slim, so like everyone else you’ve just lived with it. Maybe that has always been a cowardly reaction that you’ve shared with everyone else. So maybe today is the day to start to consider the right action instead of dodging it.

That doesn’t mean impulsively jumping in and trying the first thing that comes to mind, although sometimes that works. It might be better to use the energy to run some simulations in your mind of what you could say and how it might be received. As long as you know you have successfully rechanneled the negativity and you are on the case with some fresh ideas as to how to help so-and-so out of his blaming mode, you needn’t rush into action in that same meeting. Just keep processing the action ideas until the time feels right and you are yourself feeling centered in a moderate frame of mind and in the Observer state without negativity or ego attachment — then you can flow with the moment and put out a new thought that might help so-and-so break his old negativity habit of the blame game.

If the team knows that high performance is the goal, this helps everyone look at things in a new way: it is more gamelike, more intriguing, it isn’t the same old.

The first two principles to move your team toward the Zone therefore are to set the goal, and to reveal the trick of rechanneling negativity inside yourself. More principles of high performing team creation in posts to come.

Best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 . In the Theory of the Conscious Universe, the brain is the energy emanated by the Original mind, wound into matter, and our experience transcends dependence on the brain as we are a part of Original mind (and the whole of its experience of selfness). In modern day materialism, the mind is an energy field emanated by the brain. In ultra-behaviorism, the mind is an impotent epiphenomenon of the brain, making believe it is calling the shots but is really just along for the ride.

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Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) on a Social Level

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In a superbusy world, EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure)* Man jumps at the chance to believe, and says to himself he has no time to think for himself. Religions, political systems, sports leagues, the old left-right wing oversimplification, skin color biases, all of these things become time saving conveniences to EOP Woman and Man. Don’t have to think, thanks!

At some age, pretty early in life, each of us thinks of all the big questions for the first time. Who am I, why are we here, etc. That, on top of all the other unanswered questions produced by our interactions with others, drives us all to the same emotional state of permanently giving up on getting answers. This is the very moment EOP begins.

Some of us never did give up on getting answers and so slip in and out of EOP but spend more than the average amount of time out of that state. EOP still gets us because our minds were not trained to deal with the rapid and complex input streams. But we periodically catch up and come out of it.

Avoiding deep thought and simply getting through life is EOP.

This creates an ideal petri dish in which to grow the ideas that are offered to us as mass movements. Instead of each of us having access to tools that allow us to bring out our inherent individual talents and give these developed talents to the world, our time is too constricted for that because we are doing something often tangential to our true talents in order to pay the dues we owe society in the form of money. Instead of our own perceptions we are provided a menu of mass perceptions to choose from, and because everyone subconsciously gets it that we are all in some kind of fog (EOP), there are not too many choices.

Pre-packaged belief systems on the menu: Capitalism, Communism, specific religions, immersion in some form of ongoing mind-consuming gladiatorial spectacle (spectator sports) requiring memorization of names and scores and other factoids in order to sustain a feeling of belonging and being accepted, choices on mass issues such as race – all of this is a kind of mantra that distracts the mind and keeps it busy processing the accepted mass topics and positions on things, often particular to where you happen to live.

The individual life of the mind is something we are faintly aware of hearing and feeling going on somewhere in the background but we don’t have time to pay much attention to our own thoughts except when we are alone, which is rare. If most of us break out of EOP at all, it is sometimes, when we are alone.

Socially, the effects of EOP are dramatic. We ignore the empathy-endowing effects of the mirror neurons in our brain and coldly close our hearts to other people except under exceptional circumstances. We see life as a dog-eat-dog bar brawl in which we have to look out for number one. Money pressures are the riverbanks that shape the flow of our actions and reify the perception of life as a free-for-all fight for survival.

Neofeudalism becomes the underlying state of society, in which the Haves control the situation, and not-having is perceived by all as being perfectly civilized. Democracy is the right idea when fully carried out, which it never has been. Today democracy is a noble intention but not yet a realized reality. The Internet creates greater potential for true democracy – we shall see how many years go by before such a thing happens.

Whatever tools we use to re-adjust society it will probably take hundreds of years to fully eliminate Havenotism everywhere on Earth, and establish a hutopia (a humanly possible utopia) where individuals are cultivated for their unique mix of talents, which can be shared with others on as large a scale as naturally develops in each case. Again it sounds like some form of Videoized Internet will be involved – perhaps totally artificial reality as visualized in the early works of William Gibson (who coined the term “cyberspace”).

Some will ask whether we can ever really get there from here. Naturally it is easy to think of the Haves as being selfish and not wanting hutopia. In fact you the reader are probably a Have, as I am. We are not bad guys. So maybe there are fewer bad guys than is normally assumed in EOP. Maybe practically all of us are just caught up in this Acceleritis™ pandemic, and not actively against hutopia. How about hutopia without anyone giving up a reasonable level of wretched excess?

In hutopia even the Haves will be having a better time. There is a very high ROI on hutopia. And it is a payoff for everyone, without exception.

The pursuit of happiness. Having that in our country’s Declaration of Independence and bonded into the Constitution was a first in history. No country before us legitimatized the natural right to happiness, or even the idea of natural rights. The great contemporary songwriter and my great friend Stan Satlin brought this to my attention and said that in Judaism is the same idea, mitzvah, focused on giving others happiness and so sharing in that happiness oneself (and thereby giving back to the Creator).

I often think that the one other natural right I would have suggested had I been there would be the right to have one’s innate talents cultivated. This is where I see the greatest tragedy in Havenotism. So many talents wasted. We all benefit from having the greatest development of talents on Earth. We will all wind up getting better service that way.  😀

The Earth’s resources divided by the number of people probably makes hutopia easily possible even with today’s toolware. And the technology is also in (and driving) the state of Acceleritis so it won’t be long before the technomultiplier effect gives us even more economic leverage to achieve hutopia with.

But put that dream aside for now. Let’s talk about what we can do in our lifetimes.

I submit that the priority is EOP. We have to get out of it.

How do we do that?

First of all we will need a psychotechnology – a set of practices which allow an individual to spend less and less time in EOP. More time in the Observer State and Flow State.

This is by no means optimized as a technology today. What we have are the beginnings of toolware. Thousands of people have attested to the fact that these tools work.**

As a society we have to continue to develop and refine psychotechnology, and we must see to it that it is installed in all of our schools.

I don’t mean my stuff necessarily. Let’s as a society engender a process by which these plowshares get beaten into gleaming instruments of biofeedback contentware, kind of a Rosetta Stone language feedback courseware expanded into all conceivable media from books and blogs to artificial realities and brainscans.

Let’s make it a priority to clear our minds of EOP. By all means let’s have real scientists verify what I have been saying. I have in fact been getting positive feedback from neuroscientists for some time, so I know that while unscientific, my hypotheses are somewhere in the vicinity of the truth, lying as behind a veil just out of perception range by the mass of humanity.

It should be possible to measure the brain signatures of EOP, Observer State, and Flow State, and thereby better understand their existence and ways to move from one to the other. Since the early 80s I have been peripherally involved with experiments of this type and know that symmetry of EEG levels (delta, alpha, beta) between left and right brain is one part of the brain signature of the Observer State (and probably of Flow State). From recent work at Yale we know there is a reduction of random information flow across the corpus callosum – as if a reduction in mental chatter – in the Flow State (The Zone, as Yale Master Marvin Chun puts it).

Precisely knowing the totality of the brain substrates of these states will move us from hypotheses to a real theory of brain states, and a true psychotechnology that can elevate the effectiveness of the human race. It’s my hope that the Human Effectiveness Institute can at least begin this process, and we will get as far as we can.

Best to all,

Bill

*EOP (Emergency Oversimplfication Procedure), the condition that sets in when there is too much information resulting in desperate shortcutting such as rationalized guesswork.

** Out of ~35,000 copies of my book Mind Magic sold on lifetime moneyback guarantee, 11 came back, and over 2000 endorsement letters/emails were received generally citing life changes in desired directions and saying more people should read this book.

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In Praise of Goofing Off

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Or, Indirect Observation of Undirected Mentation
Volume 4, Issue 31

The creative process goes through four stages: absorbing information, turning away, the Aha! Moment, and implementation.

A third of a second before the Aha! Moment — a type of Flow state experience — Daniel Goleman explains that there is a burst of gamma activity, signifying the rapid creation of a new network of neural connections, in the neocortical right temporal cortex of the brain.

The Aha Moment

The Aha! Moment (image courtesy of DailyMail.com)

In our present culture in which multiple jobs are held by most persons just to keep up with their Jones, and in which Acceleritis™ necessitates massive multitasking, the creative process tends to become truncated into a two-step process of absorbing information (never enough), and implementation. In other words, no Aha! Moment.

The absorbing of information part was easier before the Internet. One saw the logic of not going too far, because it would cost too much time. Now one can keep drilling down further and further without an apparent end in sight.

Finding information however continues to be the major complaint of executives and their teams. You know you have it somewhere and you can go searching for it but it is so boring and annoying given the time pressure. Give me a dashboard where I don’t even have to remember what it is called and yet can still find it in a second. Until then, just send that thing to me again.

When you break down how much time goes into the absorption (including searching) and other aspects of the process, the two middle stages — turning away, then the Aha! Moment — take almost no time compared with absorbing and implementing. And yet those two middle processes account for the quality of the outcome or creative result. With only the bookends and no middle the result may be passable but it does not rock. Are we here just to do stuff that’s passable, without the satisfaction of Flow state-level outcomes? No way — makes no sense. Life is about living large, not just robotically coping.

And all you have to do is have more fun! Goof off. Take a break, a mini-vacation at the right moments in your creative process, and the Aha! reveals itself.

However, this only occurs if your mind is in a certain state receptive to the sense of Aha!. That state can be described as the indirect observation of undirected mentation. Let’s break it down.

Undirected mentation is when you let your mind go wherever it wants.

Indirect observation is (by my definition) the alert watching of something as if seeing it for the first time.

So you receive Aha! to the degree to which your mind can do whatever it wants to do with no pressure to perform or achieve anything. Meanwhile a very alert part of you is watching your own mind, as if from outside.

When you do this, the tendency is for that Observer state part of yourself to go to sleep. That is, your point of view tends to get reabsorbed into the part of the mind that is just playing and you forget to look at it from the detached Observer point of view. You get caught up in some attachment motivation, some feeling/emotion, which identifies you with the relaxing, playing, wandering mind. This may feel wonderful; however, it doesn’t help you if the objective is Observer and then Flow states. “Identification with” leaves the attachment turned on. “Detachment from” is the goal.

Remain the scientist, the objective observer when goofing off, and the Aha! will come more often.

Best to all,

Bill

 

 

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