Tag Archives: Observer State

The Precognition Level of Flow State

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 10

Driving back from the inn where we held our Human Effectiveness Institute Spring Meeting I check out the baby black cows dotting the broad rolling field to my left. Grazing nearby, their mommies tower over them, the babies being the size of small dogs. I imagine holding one of the baby cows in my lap and petting it like a dog, staring lovingly into each other’s eyes. A winding turn past a winery with vast rows of viniculture and then I am home to our little piece of paradise. In the house, warming up from the late April chill still hanging over from the brutal winter, I encounter the peony, which has now opened fully. It is an amazing specimen, huge like a pink many-petaled galaxy breathing its sweetness toward me, with hot pink tips to its stamens.

We had an agenda for the three days, which we all lovingly allowed to evaporate and then flowed like water through the topics that seemed to bubble up like passionate lava from one or another of my colleagues. My autonomic software-layer impulse was to continuously take charge of the meeting and I mostly ignored it, trusting the Universe to make sure everything necessary got done, which it all did, in its own chosen order.

For each of the last several blogposts we have been taking another step up the ladder of consciousness. We are exploring the highest states of consciousness, the Observer state, and the successive levels of Flow state: Action, Bliss, Cognition and now Precognition. I reported my experiences discerning different levels of the Flow state. Action, when my child actor/comic performances eventually slipped into doing themselves perfectly with me watching from nearby. Bliss, when not only Action but also feeling is at its very best. Cognition, when the speed of one’s mind in identifying and articulating deep insights becomes self-propelled.

Precognition is the next level up from there. This is a state strongly suffused with spiritual feeling. In the prior levels starting from Bliss there was an anticipation of this, the first levels going upward in which one senses something/someone larger, real and yet invisible, who is definitely paying attention to you — and you feel it.

Since all benefits cumulate upward in the design of the system, for the benefit of the One Ultimate Beneficiary, this new sensing ability — which allows you to feel your connection to the One — starts in Bliss and is present to the same degree when Cognitive Flow takes over. The increase in this factor, this spiritual feeling, makes a quantum increase moving into the Precognitive Flow state.

It is an increase in the speed of the mind so much faster that it exceeds the speed of light and you are therefore able to see into what is about to happen before it happens. This can take place either in a very interactive challenge environment or in contemplation receiving highly-predictive visions. Telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing are the three manifestations of this acceleration in processing speed. The unusualness of this level is qualitatively beyond the Flow state levels below it. Until now these are the familiar human senses, feelings, and muscle control abilities, simply moved onto a whole new chart. In Precognitive Flow one is now entertaining supernatural powers as if they have always been in the toolkit. There is an instant injection into life that makes life far more interesting, exciting, and magical than it has ever been before, and you know that now, and you are letting It know you know. You are checking into this new place, you like it here. 

However, it is not happening by your craft but perhaps despite it — doing itself. You are not at the controls of these Powers. They appear to do themselves and are very helpful.

Your Noia ability increases, meaning that you find yourself automatically decoding hidden connections among diverse events occurring around you, and acting as if somebody is out to do something good for you, and you’re too smart to ignore all the hints. (Noia is the opposite of paranoia in our coinage.)

In our theory, as explained fully in You Are The Universe: Imagine That, information is freely flowing across the fictional boundary between the individual and the rest of the One because consciousness is One. At this high a level of consciousness one is seeing out from the stipulated confines of the individual to be aware that this was simply a boundary agreed to temporarily for the sake of the great game of Cosmopoly.

As explained more completely in the book, the ethics of the individual at this level of consciousness is utterly incompatible with ego dominance. In our theory of Holosentience the ego dominant states are the new self built since birth as circuitry added during neuron formation.

I did not invent all the stuff I added to the media business: I saw it happening in my head and shared the news. Precognition.

Everybody is capable of doing the same thing.

Best to all, 

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming this month.

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 Cognition Level of Flow State

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 9

We’ve devoted each of our most recent posts to describing a different level of higher consciousness, working our way up the scale higher and higher. We skipped over the seven lowest levels of consciousness, the ones in which most of the human race has spent most of its time during this short sliver of time since the onset of written language 6000 years ago. Those all-too-familiar levels are covered adequately in our new book You Are The Universe: Imagine That.

The higher states commence with the three levels of objective consciousness I call the Observer state. These are followed by the five highest levels that I have experienced and hypothesize to be all of the remaining levels for human consciousness, called the Flow state (the term coined by Csikszentmihalyi). In the prior two posts we described the first level of Flow, in which the body experiences perfect action, as if doing itself, and the Bliss level of Flow, in which joyous emotion is added.

In the next higher level the mind is in Flow, not just the body and the emotions. Deep realizations erupt spontaneously from everything the mind touches upon, whether things that are in the field of the senses, or other more distant things that the mind considers. Intellect is flowing so rapidly it outpaces words, and understanding comes in the flavor of images and feelings with only occasional words in the mind. The words that do come are condensed, as if one is thinking in perfectly lucid poetry where all the allusions and multiple meanings are self-evidently present.

For scientists and creatives, this is the level in which the “Aha!” moment occurs, in which inspiration strikes, in which Kekule had the vision of the benzene ring, and in which Einstein realized that E=mc2. Flow state at any level is what Maslow called “peak experience”. In the Flow level of Cognition, the qualities of the lower Flow levels are still present, as this cumulativity applies throughout the upper states. So where in the Flow level of Bliss the tonality is emotional and brings with it a sense of Hume-ian Sympatico for all people and things, in the Cognition level of Flow one’s aesthetic senses are also at peak engagement. Great inventions and innovations are brought into this world through the window of the Cognition level of Flow state.

Although the written and oral histories of the past 6000 years on this planet are largely a tale of conflict and war, suffering and dishonor, it is highly likely that these are mere growing pains in a multimillion year destiny for the human race of Earth. The lemur ape-monkeys from which we descended came down from trees 5 million years ago, and only attained the present human brain about 200,000 years ago, leaping forward only in the last 6000 years into this present miasma we call the Acceleritis Era, in which written/visual language has unlocked the potential of the human mind to express ideas producing an explosion of inventiveness — largely tools, machines, weapons, and media — and an overload of information falling back into the brains collectively responsible for the overload. The resulting distraction has suppressed the higher states of consciousness by distracting our attention. Through techniques that focus the mind — which we call psychotechnology — individuals can overcome Acceleritis and achieve the higher states. As H.G. Wells said, history is a race between our destroying ourselves or collectively reaching a permanent shift into the higher states of consciousness. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I prefer to think of myself as a self-fulfilling prophet in forecasting that psychotechnology — whether called yoga, meditation, Zen, or any other name — will win the day for humanity and the planet.

Best to all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming next month.

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 Flow State of Bliss

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 8

In this most recent series of blog posts we are reviewing the highest levels of consciousness above the divided levels in which most of us live most of the time. Two posts ago we discussed the three Observer states and in the most recent post we covered the first of the Flow states, the Flow state of Action.

These five Flow states and three Observer states are nested upward, meaning that the benefits of the Observer state inhere in all the Flow states, and each Flow state contains the benefits of the Flow states below it. It is because of this cumulating upward characteristic that it is logical to consider the states progressing upward in the sequence in which we have placed them.

I began to discover the Flow state of Action at age four when performing onstage. Fascinated and sensing that this strange experience had something to do with the purpose of my life I studied my inner states constantly after that. I suspect introspection has always been a strong natural tendency for me.

In my 30s I began to realize that I was not alone in experiencing these states. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky had written about their efforts to organize and understand states of consciousness, and then Oscar Ichazo founded a school called Arica Institute. John Lilly had written a book about his studies with Oscar, and in his descriptions of the states of consciousness I saw correspondences with my own experiences. Much later I read Czickszentmihalyi, who advised the Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) for a few years in the 90s and it was at that point that I adopted his term “Flow” state. Continuing my readings in the 2000s I learned through my friend Daniel Goleman of the Visuddhimagga, written in 430 CE, which includes tables showing levels of consciousness based on the path of concentration and on the path of insight. My own stacking of the levels I have experienced is similar but not identical to the path of insight table in the Visuddimagga, as accessibly reported in Dan’s The Varieties of Meditative Experience.

Above the Flow state of Action is a state I call the Flow state of Ecstasy or Bliss. The objectivity of observation that exists in the Observer state carries through into this state along with the self-propelled perfection of action. In this state, however, there is the additional overlay of the most positive imaginable emotions/feelings. Another way of saying this is that there is total appreciation for what one is experiencing. One sees the perfection in all of it and nothing is lacking.

This is the first stage in which a spiritual intuition comes along with Flow state although it may not be cognized that way. One is filled with love that connects to everything. A feeling of benevolence washes over you from the inside. The highest ethics become innate because there is a feeling of understanding and forgiving and therefore no wish to cause hurt to anyone or anything.

Of course, when the Founders of The United States of America (specifically Thomas Jefferson) used the expression “the pursuit of happiness” as one of the components of the unalienable natural rights of human beings, he was in a sense alluding to this end- state as the implied highest good (Latin summum bonum). From the standpoint of my own theory, described in my new book You Are The Universe: Imagine That, the highest end-state three levels above the Flow state of Bliss would be the target state, retaining the joy of the latter state but adding more dimensions to it, as will be discussed in my next three posts.

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S.

  1. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming next month.
  2. 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.
  3. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this collection of videos.

The Flow State of Action

Leave a reply

Volume 4, Issue 7

woman sitting in active scene

Below the Observer state, we are like a computer that has one of the keys on its keyboard stuck down. A state of distraction and internal division exists. This is the state that most of the human race finds itself in, in the average second, in 2014.

Our level of consciousness is really all about our attention. The way our attention is yanked around below the Observer state is the opposite of self-mastery. Islam calls the great jihad the work we have to do against the processes that pull us down into this mechanical state. In the Jewish and Christian Bibles the term “hardening of the heart” refers to the lower states.

“Ego” is an interesting word, originally both Greek and Latin for the self-identity, and in modern usage meaning a person’s sense of self-importance. In our Theory of Holosentience the ego is the subsentience formed by neurons created after birth, which arrogate to themselves the status of the real self that existed at birth, maintaining that illusion until the individual attains the Observer state and sees through the masquerade.

In the prior post we described the Observer state and promised to discuss in this post the first level above the Observer state, the first level of the Flow state. The Observer state is when the individual is able to see the robotical self-protective and defensive way that the ego performs, projecting a strength opposite to the unconscious true feelings that are the motivation for accepting the rule of the ego. The Flow state is when the individual transcends the inner division between the self that was born and the ego, and allows both parts to unite as one doing something that delights all parts of oneself. The Flow state also can take over when the individual is challenged to the core and has no time for flimflam and although delight is not involved the person performs impeccably in inner unity.

Again it is all about attention. In Flow state the attention is single-pointed on the activity at hand. We are not distracted by attachment such as fear or worry or avarice or self-aggrandizement, all characteristic of the ego.

The first level of Flow state is the Flow state of action. Action is perfect because it happens with a sense of doing itself. There is no hesitation to consider alternatives. Action is intuitive and natural. For most people this occurs while doing something that has been practiced for a long time.

In an ideal life one discovers what one loves to do and spends a lifetime developing that practice, offering it to oneself and to the Universe as a gift. After a while one is in the Flow state at one’s métier. And this leads to the next level of the Flow state, about which, more in the next post.

Best to all,

Bill

P.S.

  1. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming next month.
  2. 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.
  3. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this collection of videos.