Tag Archives: Self

Bringing On the Observer State

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Volume 2, Issue 19

As we wrote in the last post, the best strategy for getting into the Zone is to start by slipping into the far more easily achieved Observer state.

Doing anything to master oneself cognitively and/or emotionally involves mental trickery of the culturally-induced false self we call the ego. I prefer the term “robot” because this power center is built out of neuronal software, so the word “robot” helps to remind ourselves that we are dealing with a stubborn biocomputer system not unlike the overly helpful systems installed on most of our personal computers. We cooperated in setting up these well-intentioned programs, which today have taken over the castle so completely that we identify with these systems as if they are the true us.

There is actually a gap we estimate to be less than a tenth of a second in which a suggestion/command from the robot is not yet identified as being our own intention. When in the Zone state we can instantly detect it as an ego command that we can choose to ignore. A lot like playing Simon Says.

In the Observer state the modus operandi is to set oneself up to not act immediately on inner impulses. This way, one has time to realize a moment after the fact that the impulse seemed intelligent for a second but in retrospect — having not yet acted upon it — we see the impulse as just another clever ego-driven strategy masquerading as our own true self.

This is the Observer state — so named because one is observing oneself as well as everything else. Before accepting the mantle of an emotion that raised its hand as one’s own, or taking physical action, or accepting a point of view offered by a thought, one waits for good sense to settle in.

In the hurly-burly of Acceleritis, the ubiquitous condition of our culture, taking this contemplative mental/emotive state requires us to be motivated to exercise our true will and understand as a prime directive that we cannot achieve our goals in the real world unless we are centered within our own highest true self, not being manipulated by our fear-impelled robot. Motivation combined with understanding are the only foundation that will allow us to overcome the chemically-supported (hormones, adrenalin, cortisol, norepinephrine, etc.) domination of our moment-to-moment emotions. It is mighty tempting to accept anger and self-righteousness whenever these feelings arise in response to valid cases of unfairness and injustice, which no doubt abound. Yet taking on these emotions makes us virtually helpless to right the wrongs since our negativity only fans the flames. Remembering this is the way one stays in the Observer state.

It’s also helpful to remember that the true hero acts in freedom, nobly and objectively with compassion, and is not the puppet of the emotional mind control instituted by habituated stimulus-response trigger cascades.

In mastering one’s mechanical behaviors, one is always negotiating the landscape of a devilishly challenging inner videogame, using one’s own tricks learned from mistakes made along the way, peeling away layer after layer and rising higher and higher in the game.

This is our intuitive and scientific (i.e. subject to verifiability) decoding of the advice given by the ancient psychologies of the East and West, Raja and Jnana Yogas, Zen, Kabbalah, Early Christianity, Hermetism/Gnosticism/Alchemy, the true Great Jihad, known by innumerable other names in other cultures. All detected the same inner battle and described it metaphorically, having no information-processing framework in which to describe it transparently.

Now we have such a framework. Each individual reading this has access to his or her own mind and emotions and therefore can test and verify our statements. Doing so will not only benefit the individual but will tend to bring more of us into higher states of functional effectiveness, where we will all serve each other more effectively than before.

Best to all,

Bill  

The Role of Attention in the Zone

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Volume 2, Issue 15

Our nonprofit organization,The Human Effectiveness Institute, may be unique among nonprofit foundations in providing people with heuristics specifically designed to increase individual experience of the Observer and Flow (Zone) states of consciousness. Books that contain ancient scriptural texts from India, and other psychotechnologies derived from these teachings or rediscovered experientially, also offer such advice, since the samadhi, satori and zazen states are neurological levels within Flow.

In recent posts we have looked at Flow from many different points of view, including the relation to Flow of values, motivations, attachments, matching of skills and challenges, doing something for its own sake not for outcomes, and striving for Flow in the work one does best. In this post we will consider how attention  is central to both Observer and Flow states.

ADD and ADHD are two modern symptomologies of Acceleritis, which undoubtedly also existed in the past but were never so prevalent as to warrant being named and studied. With the world culture veering wildly as information overload overwhelms our cortical abilities, our attention tends to be diffuse, unfocused, and constantly hopping from one distraction to another — conditions inimical to Flow.

A terrific book given to me recently by my great new friend and partner in Playshops, Richard Zackon, The Taboo of Subjectivity, by Alan Wallace — which recounts with such authenticity one feels as if Wallace is the reincarnation of William James — describes how James analyzes the most advanced “mystical” contemplative state he himself achieved as being one of alert vivid attention. Furthermore, the state was free of subjective constructs, conceptual thinking, and the singlepointed focus was on the nature of the experience of consciousness itself, thus utterly transcending the usual experience of mindand its incessant chatter. James thus demystified this state by explaining its differentness in purely scientific terms.

So long as one is not master of one’s own attention, none of the other suggestions we have provided or can provide will bear fruit in the way of Flow state. This is why so many of the Eastern traditions start with, and continuously emphasize, concentration training. Such training is no longer optional in the racing world of information overflow in which we now live, it is something we all need almost as much as we need love.

We cannot cover the subject of concentration training fully in this one post. A few key secrets of achieving concentration in current real world conditions will have to suffice for a start:

  • Focus 100% on one thing at a time.
     
  • Be present in the moment.
     
  • Do not rush — go no faster than you can with a rational and appropriate degree of perfectionism for the challenge you are facing.

In order to focus on one thing at a time you need:

  • To ruthlessly block off distractions.
     
  • As distracting but important ideas arise, jot them down on a side notepad and put them totally out of your mind until later. At the end of each day, integrate the list of waiting thoughts in priority order in a single list (or a personal list and a core business list). This will enable you to turn away from distracting thoughts without your mind tugging at your sleeve, fearing that important time limits are being exceeded on one or more of these items. Indeed, get done the side-notes in their own needed timeframes.

More on attention in future posts. This one dimension is one of the most important overlooked matters in world culture circa 2012.

Best to all,

Bill

PS – Gian Fulgoni was kind to tweet our last post – Click here.

The Total Ineffectiveness of Negative Moods

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Volume 2, Issue 4

Our motivations are the original rock that starts an avalanche. Motivations turn into goals, and then cascade into emotions that flare negative or positive when events/people are perceived to interfere with or enable us in reaching our goals. This all happens whether we are aware of any of it or not.

When we are in a state of negative emotion our capabilities are reduced. Brainpower is being distracted away from effective action clarity. The very thing that caused our negative emotion guffaws in triumph at our helpless self-attack, which leaves the irritant unscathed. The very thing we need most when the negative alarm goes off is to turn off the alarm and use all our brainpower effectively. So from the standpoint of adult commonsense logic, our indulgence of wallowing in negativity for more than an instant is totally unjustifiable and indefensible — in a word, ineffective.

People say they have no control over negative emotions. This is the archetypal self-fulfilling prophecy. If you refuse to give up control to your own habituated robot circuitry and instead fight it (the true meaning of jihad) eventually you win and then you feel very good forever after that. This is called Enlightenment. Think of it over-simplistically as gaining control of your own castle, your own motivations, goals, emotions, and everything else that is you.

What is a man?

What has he got?

If not himself, then he has not.

—   Excerpt from the lyrics of My Way, sung by Frank Sinatra

Once you have that control it is easier to give up control to the Flow state, where things seem to be doing themselves spontaneously and perfectly while we watch as observers from the inside. This often has the appearance to outside observers of you performing so perfectly that you even seem to know what other people are going to do next. Your motivations-goals-emotions-ideas-actions system is performing as a whole in Flow state, which is why the actions are so perfect. This is where you eventually get by rejecting negativity and getting down to solving whatever is the cause of your negative emotion.

I hypothesize that our being trained to cry for rescue in infancy sets up a circuit that sublimates into the same thing on more invisible levels throughout life. Parenting around this would be a good idea, for example by soothingly reminding the infant every time he/she cries that it is more effective to call for us more pleasantly, perhaps even musically, and we will come just as fast. Then we have to remember to pay off that promise ardently so as to reinforce the non-anguish appeal over the rescue me syndrome. I see all negativity as coming from this rescue me circuit. It is a construct that helps me overcome it.

Any construct that works to gain control of habitual counterproductive programming is a useful tool. A more extreme version is my imagining that an alien spy is the source of the negativity — it is not coming from the true me. Such constructs appear to resonate with the animal parts of ourselves or perhaps at the cellular level of consciousness and certainly with the oldest parts of our brain including the limbic system. At any rate negativity deflates in the presence of such mental toolware, which emerges from imagination in the marketplace of the inner mind. Imagination is a great source of energy and leads to clarity.

The Human Effectiveness Institute offers such toolware but we achieve our own highest success when we inspire individuals to get into the game of creating their own toolware in response to their own observed moments of EOP and their own observing of what works to overcome it.

To return to our first point, motivations are the base of your being, so it is good to start there as you re-inspect your “SELF” from these perhaps new points of view offered here. What are your motivations and why? What are the goals that serve these motivations? What is helping you reach those goals? What is impeding you? What do these insights imply in terms of action decisions?

In the absence of protracted negativity — using it just as an appreciated alarm system — enjoyment of life is the natural levity remaining once the weights have been lifted. Let’s levitate into levity!

Best to all,

Bill

The Immediate Upside Opportunity of Engaged Relationships

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Volume 2, Issue 1

The next boom could be right around the corner, but we have to create it

When one is in a depressed defeatist state of consciousness, one draws down upon his or her self all manner of further difficulties incremental to what caused the depression. Some might say this is just others reading and taking advantage of obvious clues of weakness, while others might say the Divine Matrix is mirroring and giving each of us what we need. The construct is irrelevant because the predictions are the same. Both are accurate.

The same thing happens on a global level, as in the Great Depression and in today’s economic swoon from which we are tepidly recovering. The perception is that there is not enough to go around.

Yet there is evidence that the resources of the planet, properly stewarded, are more than enough to prove Malthus wrong and to make everybody’s quality of life quite acceptable in terms of the basics. The fact that we have been squandering some or all of those resources of course creates a potential shortfall. But these are human actions thus conceptually under our control. We can change our actions.

However, we feel that we cannot control or change our actions. And the truth turns out to be that whatever we feel/think/believe comes true, as if we are creating our own future. Gosh, how can anyone say we are not creating it, as in The Secret? This was not mainstream thinking as recently as the 1970s, when I wrote Mind Magic and Seth Speaks became popular, but many today agree that whatever is in our minds later manifests in the consensual reality in some form. Nevertheless the Will is missing on a mass scale to grab hold of the reins and make the 180-degree course change that we all deep down inside want the planet to make. The difference between the imagined utopia and the present mess is just too vast and we feel exhausted before we begin. Pessimism trumps optimism among the core of the culture. We are indeed seen to be the screw-ups that many interpretations of the Bible said we are. You’ll guess that Bill is about to tell us Acceleritis and the inevitable trial and error consequences of our new cortex is behind the mess, and you’re right, that is my estimate of the situation.

This blog is always about “What can we do about it now?” This week’s post explores how we can start with our relationships and how the ripples in the pond will spread to the ends of the Earth.

First let’s recognize that the immediate opportunity, if not distorted by negative assumptions, could be seen as incredibly promising. The Arab Spring for example is a hopeful sign that the universally available information/communication phase has now rolled out into totalitarian territory and the effect is inevitable.

And there are other hopeful signs. Every member state of the UN has agreed to wipe out extreme poverty in the world by 2020 through implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Inspired by the ideas of economist Jeffrey Sachs, this program has been doing its job and is on track to make its numbers.

Genomics and nanotechnology along with a host of other new sciences and technologies, offer new potential for medicine, and growing realization of how we have poisoned and cancered ourselves with pesticides and other unwise choices. All of this simultaneously offers the possibility that we will begin to dial back the causes of ill health. When we are all feeling physically good and not worried caregivers of loved ones on the descent, this will do a lot to improve the way we use our minds.

However, we have to start now in the more difficult uphill condition of using our minds well, despite the many factors bringing us down to counterproductive mental habits that inexorably and progressively worsen our situational estimates.

Among the biggest opportunities that lie ahead include marketing to the developing nations around the world, and to all of the other nations as well. Global commerce is the biggest upside on the horizon, and Brookings Institute partnering with J.P. Morgan Chase has created the Global Cities Initiative to drive the exports of American goods and services that can bring us back into boom for a long time. This is an opportunity not just for Americans but for everyone.

There will be a host of new and better products and services that are more win/win in terms of the entire ecosystem of our minds, bodies, and external environments. Software will continue to amaze us with where it takes us. Facebook and Twitter will lead our evolution in the direction of developing each individual and marketing him and her across the Global Digital Matrix.

Money will cease to be a problem over the course of time, and fallbacks into depressions may not be necessary, once we learn how to play nice in this big blue/green sandbox. Money is a symbol used in trade and we can and do create as much of it as we want. Over time — once we are spending more time in Observer and Flow states — we can probably improve upon the fiscal implementation details currently in place via the Fed, international monetary policy agreements, etc. so that the symbology system does not itself continue to confuse us into believing we do not have enough to go around.

What about aggressor states and terrorists and other criminal and/or psychotic behaviors? Big challenges lie ahead. Some people are not good listeners and are past willingness to learn they have gone off course in any way. Compassion and good communication will not always succeed — especially here at the beginning of the True Global Enlightenment, while we are at the deepest depths of the Real Dark Ages.

How do we avert a nuclear escalation if Israel and Iran clash, for example? These and other real world threats have an increased probability of occurrence to the degree that we believe they are inevitable and do not use our creativity to dream up compelling alternative scenarios and then sell them at all levels.

Although many Americans have issues and concerns about the UN, this organization is the greatest hope for a communication strategy that the world has or can have. The only way to bring everybody to the table will always turn into what the UN is perceived to be, a place where America feels it is not being treated fairly because it is not the dominant and ruling voice. Every member state has to feel it has an equal voice — this is the nature of the give and take of having neighbors.

This is where Engaging Relationships comes in. We have to look at every relationship as an opportunity, whether we are enjoying it at the moment or not. We have to accept it as a given, making the best of it that we can — drawing upon the wellsprings of unfamiliar creativity patterns in doing so, and pulling out all the stops from the standpoint of making maximum improvements, optimizing all the issues together. We have to decide to appreciate the challenge in each case. We have to stop demonizing the other and accept who he or she is, seeing the good news that difficult relationships are a fine learning stimulus, and finding places in ourselves where we can make excellently productive fine tunings.   

The UN has to itself evolve. It needs a new activism aimed at reducing the incentives for aggression — perhaps something like Mutually Assured DEfense (MADE, as in we all have it MADE) — the opposite of the US Cold War program Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The UN would have a protocol for discussing each act of aggression to determine the share of blame to each player — never assuming either is 100% to blame — counting up the instances of unnecessary escalation, e.g. who struck the first blow, etc. The UN would also have a protocol for defusing each crisis early on — similar perhaps to Jim Channon’s First Earth Battallion.

Bill Rouhana, CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul, has a program called Humpty Dumpty Institute that has worked hard to bring UN and Congress members into close communication with one another. This is a worthy program and along with other of Bill’s nonprofit initiatives should be seriously considered for sponsorship by major advertisers seeking to have Engaging Relationships with their customers. Telling people the benefits of your products is not enough anymore. The world is too serious a place. Since the 1930s Coca-Cola has known that its communications with customers must address their values and tensions (presentation to ARF Re:THINK 2012 this past week*). If you only communicate with them on the mercantile level, your customers think your brand is just interested in them as a wallet.

Ed Martin of Hershey is another chap who excels at finding and helping nonprofits with high potential to change the world for the better. For example, he is now helping Leonard DiCaprio and La Columbe Coffee’s charitable alliance, which is donating 100% of profits from its new coffee brand LYON to carefully-selected potentially high-yield environmental and disaster relief projects. At the same time he’s helping Hillary Clinton’s International diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA) — an innovative platform for public-private partnerships bringing together communities in the USA and “back home” in the plethora of countries that are the roots of most Americans — to promote trade, investment, volunteerism, philanthropy, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

These are our role models in showing how we can amp up our Engagement with the world — in all of our relationships and in new ones — enjoying each one more, in a gamelike fashion conducive to Flow state. The Human Effectiveness Institute has its own sponsorable nonprofit project involving democracy and social media, which we are offering to brands as a way of Engaging Relationships with customers and prospects. Brands interested in learning more, please click here.

As we focus this week on seizing the day with all our relationships, let’s remember to include the one we have with our self — which deserves some time allocation — and the relationship we have with the postulated One Self that is the Universe, in which we are an aspect and the whole at the same time. Each moment, let’s leave open at least the possibility that the Whole is aware of us.

*ARF will post the Coke presentation to their website within the next month where all ARF member companies can access it. www.thearf.org

Best to all,

Bill