Tag Archives: Observer State

Do What You’re Inspired to Do

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”:

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.
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.

Which Motivators Drive Our Most Frequent Choices?

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Volume 4, Issue 16
June 26, 2014

Lessons from my day job

One of the benefits of my day job as a media researcher is that I gain valuable insight into what sorts of things I should create in the future to carry the messages of the Institute to as many people as are ready for it. My day job also enables me to do my ultimate passion work, which is to improve human effectiveness and thus happiness and/or fulfillment for the greatest number of people. The following post illustrates the synergy between my day job and my ultimate passion work.

The year: 1997. My company Next Century Media is working with John Hendrick’s innovative Discovery network and John Malone’s dominant cable operator TCI, installing addressable optimizer Opti*Mark into the National Digital Tech Center (NDTC) in Denver, for inclusion in the uplinking of dozens of TV networks to cable systems. This will make all the cable commercials potentially addressable to the set-top box (STB), will measure the STB, and offer program recommendations to subscribers on command.

The reasoning behind the program recommender is both to increase natural delight and also to give subscribers a cogent reason to feel better about their behaviors being tracked, albeit anonymously.

A technology favored at that time for recommendation engines — and still used today — is the collaborative filtering technique (CFT). It’s not the Netflix method of slicing down programs/movies into 78,000 tiny sliver genres, like Humphrey Bogart WWII movies of the 40s, and then counting the incidence of these subgenre choices within each subscriber’s individual record to make recommendations of other properties in the subgenre cluster that have not been watched yet through Netflix. CFT is the familiar “people who have bought this book also bought this other book”. NCM did not want to use CFT although it was ready to go off the shelf and cheap, not to mention accepted.

NCM wanted a method that would yield insight about people’s preferences, not just the facts of their observed choices.

Also, CFT takes a while to build a database and cannot give recommendations for a new show until there is some history of who watched it and who didn’t. With the importance of new shows to TV ad planners and programmers there was no way to live with CFT’s delay. So NCM created a keyword-driven system (today like so many other things called Bayesian). We compiled 1500 or so different words that are used to describe TV programs, ads and movies — screen content. Some of this came from work I had done consulting for the launches of cable networks, some had been from movie work I did with studios, and some was the result of many researchers pooling their knowledge.

One day the late Gerry Despain, who led the dozen software developers working on this, came to me and said he wanted to drop over 1200 of the keywords. I was aghast because test viewers were thanking us more than 9 to 1 in favor of the recommendations the system was producing. He said, “You don’t understand. I just want to drop the ones that do not predict set-top box data.” I saw that he was right and approved the efficiency move.

Later it gradually dawned on me the utter enormity of what had just transpired. We had stumbled on 250-300 words that DO predict the choices people make as to what to watch and what not to watch. Nowadays, in finally having the time to continue that line of development, we are calling those golden terms Drivertags^TM (Dtags^TM for short) because the modern screenworld name for such descriptors is “metatags” — and because these 250-300 metatags are the first we know of that actually do appear to describe inner motivational states that predict real world behavior. Specifically, what we choose to watch on screens.

This would be merely a very important discovery in one group of businesses in the private sector. However, if we zoom out, we see that today’s civilization on Earth is in the process of becoming totally dominated by screen content. This is the latest evolution of the information acceleration process we call Acceleritis™, which my theory attributes to the advent of written language.

The primary devices with screens on which there is content, used by most of us in civilization today, are the computer, TV set, tablet, and mobile phone. People with enough money (or enough credit) are making sure they have at least one of each. Monied households with large families are accumulating screens perhaps faster than anyone in the household can count or cares to. Moreover, by any researcher’s count, the average person now spends more than half their waking hours with eyes on these screens.

The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) will be working with ScreenSavants, the private sector startup licensing NCM’s IP in this area, to make applications of learning to our Mission of increasing human effectiveness. We’ll be studying how specific DTags identify viewers more prone to Observer state or Flow state. We’ll be networking with interested academics including people who are working in nearby inquiries such as explaining the attraction of viewers to specific characters, deriving psychological insight from natural language utterances, linking screen content to higher values, semantic mapping, and all forms of related psycholinguistics. One reason for doing this is simply to understand — pure science. The other is for practical application to the mission of THEI, improving human effectiveness. We’ll report our progress here.

For a first example, consider the following graph. What does it mean?
graph on DriverTags

The easiest way to explain a graph is to explain what one datapoint means. In the upper left you’ll see “Situation #2”. That is a particular DTag — and 9 out of 10 top-rated situation comedies have that DTag. None of the cancelled sitcoms have that DTag. Now look at the lower left and you’ll see “Value #50” — 8 out of 10 cancelled sitcoms have that DTag, but only 1 of the top 10 rated sitcoms has it.

If I were investing $2.5 million per average new TV series pilot I would love to know which DTags are vital to success and which drive failure. That is the business reason for all this.

For psychology, given that the biggest use of time in our civilization is screen usage, discovering the motivators of this preponderant activity yields considerable new insight into what motivates people in our culture today. That’s the science reason for it.

The attachment of DTags to TV shows happened long before the analysis of ratings and cancellations. The same DTags that worked in 1997 are still working in 2014. On the inside we haven’t changed so much.

This is the kind of science I personally get to do that is part of my passion work. I’m a very lucky guy.

The gratitude attitude and admission that the Universe may indeed be sentient are the causes I attribute to such great luck. Hope you are very lucky too!

All my best,

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.

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

Resiliency, Situational Awareness, Mission, and Positive Emotion

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Volume 4, Issue 14

The word “resiliency” has risen in usage within the U.S. military. It means the ability to quickly spring back from traumatizing experiences and function at Flow state levels. This connotes a degree of toughness, mental toughness. A physical weakling with low resistance to pain might nevertheless have enough mental toughness to be more resilient than a battle-hardened athlete with high resistance to pain.

Mental toughness means enough non-attachment to not be enslaved by attachment. Slavery to attachment to this life can make one act in a cowardly fashion, as can slavery to attachment to the opinions of you held by those who know of you. Mind Magic spends a chapter on methods to clean out these slaveries, increasing mental toughness and resiliency.

As slavery to attachment is lessened, the Observer state emerges from the layers of internal distraction and conservation-of-energy-driven avoidance of giving attention internally, which prevailed in the reign of our various slaveries.

The air forces of the world use the term “situational awareness” to essentially mean the same thing I mean by “Observer state”. However they are not as interested in understanding the process and heightening it as much as I am. The term is applied to those fighter pilots who during a three-dimensional dogfight maintain a sense of where everybody is and the vector on which they are traveling. To do that requires at least Observer state and in the most situationally aware fighter pilots, Flow state.

The emotional state of the individual moving from the slaveries into these higher states is at first a relief from negative emotion. There may then be a period of emotionlessness that makes one feel as if one’s compass has been lost. What, then, am I here for, the individual may ask, now that the false drivers of attachment have been vitiated.

I wrote You Are The Universe: Imagine That for everybody but especially for people who have yet to realize their greatest passion in life, for whom slavery to attachment at least makes each day a drama, albeit grueling. Liberation from the slaveries is replaced by a vacuum if one is not focused on a Mission to deliver one’s gifts to others in the highest way possible. The book explains how to find your sense of Mission and understand the context in which you are part of a larger whole in a true scientific and yet spiritually inspiring way — so that each day may be not only vibrantly dramatic but also filled with positive emotion.

May your day be filled with both vibrant drama and positive emotion!

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

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.

The Need for Flow State Diplomacy

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Volume 4, Issue 13

The peacefulness of a Saturday morning, left alone to write. Even the animals inside and around the house who consider me Daddy sense the time calls for his isolation. From the back deck the feel is of a tree house. A green thicket of suddenly leafed-out trees exude exaltation in their bloomery. Through their generous expanse the river is now just barely visible as a patch of undulant sun reflection. The brook tinkles merrily downstream into the river. All’s right with the world.

Still a chill in the morning air recalls the aggressive winter, and then the memory is beaten back like a boat against the current. A chill in the back has always felt thrilling to me, as if there is something happening to me that is glamorous and interesting. I felt that way sneaking my first subway ride to Coney Island at age 12. Standing on the platform letting the wind rip through my leather jacket gave me that thrilling chill perhaps for the first time.

Memory jump to 1984. Weston Gavin and I are the only Westerners on the ramshackle bus jammed with Chinese tourists on their way with us to the Great Wall at Badaling, outside Beijing. For some reason in the subzero temperatures the Chinese are hot and have all the windows open. Weston has apples in his pockets and gives me one and I start to eat it. The Chinese man on my right gestures that he wants a bite, so we share it. We have just signed a contract with the People’s Republic Cultural Ministry to co-produce a movie in China. That thrilling chill again…

China, the oldest continuing civilization on Earth, abounds with founts of wisdom from ages of experience. Lao Tzu. Sun Tzu. Confucius. Today China is the fastest growing winner of the derby race called Capitalism. Weston recently visited us from London, arriving at our new (to him) home on May 8. Saturday morning at breakfast he called our attention to a tiny article in The New York Times about China plunking an oil rig just off the coast of Vietnam. The three of us (including my wife Lalita) couldn’t believe that this esteemed paper would bury this story deep in its pages, and Weston wondered if perhaps Washington had put out the word to keep the story at a low profile until it figured out what to do if anything. A recent Forbes article has all of the key information.

Contemplating what ought to be the optimal American response, I remembered how the Chinese always react to meddling, and my first assumed principle was to form a response that could not be knee-jerked with the usual Chinese response, but instead could bring discussions to a higher level. Why bother just going through playing those same old tapes? Another round of that just makes China feel stronger and more contemptuous of the USA. The rest of the kids on the block can only lower their estimate of the USA for running the same losing play again. Yet this is apparently what happened. The State Department’s official statement was that China’s state-controlled oil company Cnooc’s actions were “provocative and unhelpful to the maintenance of peace and stability in the region”. China’s Xinhua news service wrote in response, “The U.S. is in no position to make irresponsible remarks on China’s affairs.” Wu Shicum, head of China’s National Institute for South China Sea Studies, attributed the deployment of the oil rig at this time — despite gradually thawing relations between China and its client nation Vietnam — ironically to the Obama trip around the region. In other words, we stirred up this trouble by continuing to act as if we are the undisputed singular global superpower in all respects, whereas China wants to be an equal to the USA and anyone else. It is these key attitudes in us and in China which draw incidents like this to manifest.

Rather than place blame on individuals or countries, the Flow state way to react to the present situation is to change the game. The old game is not working. The old game is which nation has the most power. That’s testosterone talking. We need frontal lobes talking, not limbic systems. In the 21^st century, we don’t need to project our influence into the Pacific in order to have influence everywhere. We’re all digitally interconnected up to the neck. We all have influence everywhere. One tweet is like the proverbial Amazonian butterfly changing the whole Earth’s weather pattern. What then is the highest way to look at what is going on so that we may transcend it?

Territoriality is built into our brains. It goes all the way back in evolution to the earliest creatures. Robert Ornstein refers to the oldest part of our brain as the Reptilian brain because we can see how reptile behavior exhibits similar patterns to those of animals at later stages of evolution such as us. Although most of us associate the term with Dr. Ornstein, the term goes back to 1936 work by Paul D. MacLean who said that the fish started the Reptilian brain and drew this picture of the brain:

Paul D. MacLean's illustration of the reptilian brain

Note that the Reptilian brain is associated with decision making! That’s how important it is. Only in Observer state and Flow state is the individual free to overcome this powerful influence within in order to see things as they are and be clear enough to solve problems such as those between nations.

Before the USA reacted, in my contemplations, I developed a scenario. The USA has a quiet talk with China, not in full public view. The USA says it understands China’s reasoning: in a brief war in 1974 China won the Paracel Islands from Vietnam, and it still feels it owns those islands. The oil rig is within the zone China considers to be the territorial waters of the Paracels, which is China. Others may dispute this claim but we start from acknowledging that we understand China’s position. As fellow stewards of Planet Earth, what guidelines or new ideas or old forgotten good ideas can we together come up with to solve the island disputes here and elsewhere in the next few centuries?

We don’t stop at having that conversation with China, we start there. Then we have the same conversation over and over again with everyone else, respecting the privacy of what we say one-on-one, while going public about our new principles. These really are our Founders’ principles of live and let live, applying reason, kindness, and understanding, giving everyone a chance to be happy.

In my scenario, China and the USA get into the Flow state during their conversation and agree that the better way for China to have played the oil rig hand would have been to talk about it first with Vietnam, agreeing to give them a discount on the oil from that rig just to show that the emotional bond is real. The USA for its part in the Flow state conversation says that in retrospect we should have visited China in that swing through the region.

This is the level at which this conversation should continue so that the two biggest kids on the block get to protect the whole block (Earth) in a way that demonstrates true leadership and how the game is to be played from now on.

“You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.”

—John Lennon, “Imagine”

Best to all,

Bill

My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.

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.