Tag Archives: Observer State

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 21st 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.

 

The Unified Level of Flow State

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Volume 4, Issue 11

On this, one of the first springtime days, finally, I was able to clamber through the woods to the stream and meditate in Nature. Back at the house, a horde of tiny yellow birds flood the side deck feasting on the thistle seeds we put out for them.

We’ve been exploring the higher states of consciousness in recent posts and in this post we reach the highest level I have experienced — though probably not the highest state that exists in the Universe for Someone. In this state there is no separation between the current individual and the ageless Conscious Experiencer or Ultimate Self of the Universe. One is aware of that true identity directly, not simply as a concept.

In this level of Flow state it is impossible to be attached, that is, fixated on something needed for self-completion. One is already irrevocably self-complete. When it becomes ingrained as the omnipresent state, where there is no turning back, this is that ultra- rarest of states known classically as Enlightenment, Liberation, Moksha, and endless other names. It is not a myth.

I have experienced this level of Flow only at rare moments and briefly each time. A couple of those experiences are recounted in You Are The Universe: Imagine That.

After having experienced this state, I was firmly convinced that my intuition was correct, everything jibed, and it felt right. Nevertheless, I continue to fall back to lower states, as Acceleritis™-driven distractions engage the robot part of my mind into habitual attachment programs.

Even though once I was at the peak of the mountain, where I saw there was no sense at all in getting that sucked into the drama of the current incarnation, the pull of the gravity of repetition-ingrained reactions in the brain, with their powerful chemical effectors, drug the intellectually-aware mind into acting as if it does not know it is already complete, whole. The intense feeling and intuition of Oneness with the Creator fades while only an intellectual awareness of it remains. Over time, one spends more time in the upper levels, driven by awareness of the process, and by spending one’s days doing or transitioning to one’s passion work.

In this uppermost level of the Flow state, one has all of the benefits of the earlier stages on the stepladder of higher consciousness: objective perceptiveness in the Observer state, then the Flow state levels of self-perfect action, then self-perfect affect (bliss), then self-perfect cognition, then self-perfect precognition, and then fully merged back into what One Really Is.

While in that awakened state, the current life on Earth is seen as something like a dream from which one has awakened. Not exactly a dream because all of it counts for something and is of enormous cosmic significance, but now one is looking at it from a wholly different perspective, as a piece of art within an infinite tapestry — one is the spider spinning that multidimensional rainbow web.

In the prior Flow level of precognition, one experiences telepathy, precognition, and remote sensing. In this potentially-ultimate-for-humans state, add telekinesis. One actually wills events and they occur with unlikely predictivity.

This probably sounds like the Force in “Star Wars”, much like it did to George Lucas when he created the movie, out of his personal experiences no doubt.

Each of us has more power to create future reality than we realize. Even in the lower states of consciousness this is true, though often to our detriment.

Being part of the One Self, the One Consciousness, the One Energy Biocomputer that is the only thing that exists, why would we not have such powers?

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.

The Precognition Level of Flow State

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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

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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.