Tag Archives: Self

If You’re Not Getting Enough Pleasure out of Your Life, You’ve Got to Fix That

Volume 3, Issue 12

No one else is going to do it for you.

All that exists is the Now, so you can’t be putting off fun to some hoped-for future. If you’re not getting it right now, this very day, you’re not playing to win at the game of life; you’re trapping yourself in illusion and accepting second best.

What’s stopping you from seizing the day and living your dreams, right this very moment? Very likely it’s the deep dark repressed (or expressed) belief that you don’t have the power to change your life into the ideal vision you had for it. Especially now, when so much time has passed, and you’ve got negative momentum leading away from the goal, and everybody sees you one way so how could it ever be even imaginable that the consensus reality could ever change that dramatically?

It’s a deep and true intuition we feel in our gut that when so many minds are tuned to one way, getting all those minds to change very much is literally unthinkable. Yet it is truly miraculous how much those minds can change once you’ve changed your own.

The Ouroboros, the Greek symbol that Carl Jung said was the first symbol used by humanity, is a snake holding its own tail in its mouth, forming a circle. It has many meanings, some “good”, some “bad” — really all of them good but most of them bring you at first through stuff that appears bad. The “bad” interpretation is the fact that when we have a mental block, like believing we cannot live our dream, the belief comes true only because of the belief itself.

The intellect alone cannot get itself out of such traps by understanding them. The whole self working together has to turn the great ship in the water because its momentum is so strong that without unity among all parts of oneself the belief will unfortunately be borne out.

You get to unity inside through the Observer state, in which you meditate on your own Self, observing its machinations in minute detail perhaps for the first time with such sustained energy. This causes a breakthrough in which the Observer state becomes second nature and you find yourself popping in and out of the even higher Flow state — higher in the sense of higher performance, greater effectiveness.

In these higher states you can unravel the Ouroboros and make sure the energy is flowing in the right direction, where its meaning is the consuming of minutiae thoughts and low feelings as they arise, like a rising phoenix burning the dross to reveal the gold of your inner genius.

Best to all,

Bill

PS I am doing a book signing and talk on Thursday, May 16 from 5 to 7 PM at Forest Books, 182 Birch Hill Rd., Locust Valley, New York 11560 in Long Island. Please join me if you are in the area.

Each of Us Is Many People, yet There Is Only One of You

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Volume 2, Issue 42

Is this oxymoronic? Or if not, then what am I talking about?

In You Are The Universe, which will be out in the Spring, I explain my Theory of the Conscious Universe in simple terms. The theory is not speculation but science, given my definition of science being its verifiability. This theory is just that sort of science. It is verifiable.

Mass verifiability may only be a dream. Yet individual personal verifiability is available and many individuals have achieved it.

If you’ve read enough of these posts you already know a bit about this theory. For other readers here’s a quick summary of what we’ve written about over the past two years:

The real you pre-existed your present body. The real “you” is also the “you” of the entire universe. There is no space, time, matter nor energy, except as “you” created it.

At the same time, on this planet, each of us is many people. Why is that?

Before we get there, take a look inside. Do you ever surprise yourself by doing something completely out of character? When you debate yourself internally, aren’t there voices taking opposing sides? Do you have the potential for extreme tenderness and extreme harshness? Could it be that there is a slight version of schizophrenia in all of us?

The Theory of the Conscious Universe posits that Acceleritis is what causes each of us to contain widely variant behavioral patterns, almost different selves, but not quite.

The Original Self is always there and always accessible. Acceleritis blocks that accessibility.

We become trapped in EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), and our actions become more predictable, mechanical outcomes of prior memory storage. The vectors combine with their relative accelerations and the outcome vector can be predicted. Creativity is lost, then effectiveness.

We become constantly distracted. Too much sustained infopressure per second on the human brain.

Having identified the problem, I set about finding solutions, which morphed into a book of tricks I had found to overcome Acceleritis and get in touch with the real me, the creative me.*

This is where the multiple inner selves part comes in. In my book MIND MAGIC, I call them senators. Minipersonalities that in moments of inner debate seem to be different people — perhaps specific people who impressed themselves on us and we retain their amanuensis within to help guide our actions.

Phenomenologically, what we experience most dramatically about our different selves is that we feel quite different (a) when we are oppressed into our EOP selves, versus (b) when we are in the coolly detached observer state, versus (c) when we are in the Zone — Flow state. Those three “selves” are the most obvious.

But those “selves” are not what I really mean by each of us being many people. What I mean is that unresolved emotion tagged experiences each create plucks on certain neuronal strings and set up camp as growing associational clusters of neurons, which become power centers. Together this software built from birth becomes the ego self, the self that is prone to fall into EOP.

So the meaning of the title is that:

1. There is only one virtual point, it is consciousness. The rest is maya.

2. Observed as if for the first time, one finds multiple points of view conversing within oneself, and maintaining this observer stance is a powerful learning strategy.

3. Personally verifiable evidence is available to everyone. You can verify this theory yourself, including the truth that one consciousness underlies our apparent separateness from each other. Once in Flow, in inner contemplation, over time, you come to see that this is true. You gather information from other minds and verify that you have done so. You intuit what is about to happen next and it happens. This is verification. Many people have reached the same state of universal consciousness at least briefly, and saints, sages, prophets and gurus (all essentially the same thing in my estimation) have resided permanently in that state once achieved.

Go with your flow,

Bill

*I am happy and excited. Through the miracle of the volunteer team at the Human Effectiveness Institute, the new Sixth Edition of MIND MAGIC, wearing its pretty new cover (over in the right-hand column), is in my hands. And it can be in yours — it’s now available in all bookstores through Ingram. Just text your friend at any bookstore and it will be in the store in a week if it isn’t already.

The Human Effectiveness Institute: A Personal View

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Volume 2, Issue 40

Many people ask me how my books compare with the flood of self-improvement books crowding the psychology/philosophy shelves nowadays. When my first book appeared there was not so much of a glut of such titles and the question rarely came up. Instead people told us they had never seen that kind of book before. Funny how things change. And it’s great that writers and publishers are filling so much bookstore shelf space with books to help people master the art of life — arguably the single most important practical topic imaginable from the standpoint of the pursuit of happiness.

My first book Mind Magic is still unique in the sense that it’s a set of techniques that came out of trial and error in my personal experience. Some of you know that my showbiz parents had me on stage at age 4 and my ensuing early experience of Flow state is what caused my concentration on learning to “control” and/or trigger desirable inner states. Mind Magic is a collection of what worked for me. Originally written just for myself as my “Book of Programs”, friends insisted I publish it because it worked for them too. Over 2000 readers have written that the book changed their lives, which encourages us to go on and add to the body of techniques we make available as widely as we can, in hopes that someday Flow state is a common occurrence, and its lead-in Observer state even more common.

Other books sitting near Mind Magic on the shelves are not so precisely focused on bringing on these two states. More generally, books “like” mine are aimed at making people feel better about themselves, and handling stress in their lives in a more effective and peaceful manner. Some are excellent condensations of latest psychological science or of ancient Eastern psychologies/philosophies, and some blend these together. Ram Dass and Daniel Goleman are two of the best in the world in this genre. Both have written endorsements of Mind Magic. Ram Dass and Dan aren’t just condensers and reporters, they teem with their own brilliant creative insights.

A long time ago Dan, his fellow former Harvard psychobiology professor Dr. Richard Davidson, and I were partners in a pioneering and successful brainwave research venture in the advertising industry. Dan and Richie coined the term “hijack the brain” to describe what happens when the limbic system and the amygdala in particular become energized to produce extreme attachment and cognitive distraction. This is exactly what I write about when describing the fall from Observer/Flow states into what I sensed as a child, EOP for Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, an ineffective involuntary bodily “strategy” for dealing with challenging external situational and/or internal mentation challenges.

Another friend and exceptional brain-trainer-psychiatrist/author/artist is Dr. Phillip Romero, who uses the term “triggering” to describe the brain’s program of switching into a limbic-system-control state. He created Logosoma Brain Training, a consilient algorithm that integrates theories of Buddha, Darwin, and John Bowlby for his patients. Logosoma training helps people master Relationship Stress, the most powerful stress trigger that hijacks our capacity for mindfulness, creativity, connectedness and compassion. Where Phillip is focused on training people to liberate themselves from Hostage Relationships and Reconnect with compassionate creativity, my colleagues and I at the Institute are focused on helping people achieve the exceptionally higher states of consciousness above normal waking consciousness.

Phillip has taken me to task for creating my own language that I find useful in inner space, where I find that I am dealing with parts of myself that respond to metaphor and imagery. As noted above, some 2000 people have reported that the heuristics presented in Mind Magic, even if more symbolic than scientific, are useful to them in attaining more creative and effective states. Phillip is right in that agreement on terminology will be critically important in pulling together the work of many people in order to turn the art of life into more of a science to the degree that is desirable.

My vision is that techniques for increasing personal success in dealing with all of life’s challenges will someday permeate the syllabi of the public education system. The books, audios, videos, television programs and movies that we envision for the future are aimed to be a resource for when the culture becomes even more attuned to this dimension of inner space navigation.

Best to all,

Bill

The “Not Petty” Filter

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Volume 2, Issue 35

Letting Stuff Go By

In the barrage of incoming stimuli you have a choice which pieces to respond to in some way and which pieces to let fly by. This is an opportunity to practice Observer state.

In Observer state, attention is deployed both internally and externally at the same time, the whole of it treated as a single perceptual field. The inner world is so different from the outer world that few of us naturally take to treating all of it as a single field.

Yet in my theory of Holosentience I posit that feelings are really inner perceptions, so of course the entire panorama of experience funneling into the self is one stream, the eponymous stream of consciousness.

In earlier posts I’ve mentioned noticing your own negative reactions to incoming stimuli and regarding those reactions with the same interest you’d give to a bug specimen.

These are not in fact all coming from the real you. The preponderance of what you have probably always thought of as your own reactions are coming from a mechanism inside you that did not exist at your birth. The mechanism is made out of protein and takes the form of neurons built since birth in your brain and interconnected in very specific ways. This firmware in your head is not the real you, it is a part of the real you.

The real you is the experiencer that existed at your birth. This is the place you are centered in when you are in the Observer state, and also when you are in the Flow state (the Zone).

At other times you are in Emergency Oversimplification Procedure or “EOP” for short, a pandemic mental disease caused (in my theory) by the accelerating inventiveness of the culture since the dawn of visible language about 6000 years ago. “Information Overload” is the Devil that humanity has always defaulted to when they could not account for how things ever got so messed up.

Holding off from identifying with your inner reactions is one filter that helps keep us above EOP.

Another one is letting stuff go by — like water off a duck’s back — when the alternative is to become petty yourself.

The next time you are with someone and are about to join that person at a petty level, stay focused on What Is the Big Idea, The Big Learning, The Highest Strategic Purpose That Could Be Served by steering away from the negative directionality of the moment. Let the other stuff go by. Don’t let your own negative feelings assume they have been validated by your central consciousness. Let that garbage float downstream behind you (“Get Thee behind Me Satan!”). What can you tell the other person that affords true solution potential rather than continuing down a yenta (gossip level) path?

Maintain compassion rather than judging the other person who got caught wasting the time of the Great Computers Upstairs in Your Heads with idle slop. Picture that your friend was wounded in a battle long ago and now cannot speak without spitting a little. The pettiness is the spittle from what was truly an old unresolved battle, still being fought in your friend’s brain to this day.

Big Ideas are largely a matter of focus above the petty levels.

Wishing you all a beautiful holiday season,

Bill