Tag Archives: Self

Obvious Miracles in Our Lives

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Volume 3, Issue 52

Sometimes the miracles in our lives are more obvious than at other times. The world is always miraculous, it’s only us that sometimes see the miracle and other times repress it from our awareness.

Babies, kittens, flowers, stars, the Moon, the ocean, mountains, trees, falling in love together — these are among the more obvious miracles.

We often do not notice how improbable certain events are that occur within our detected experience bubble. We are not trained in statistics enough to realize how long the odds are of this happening and then it actually happening, and we just go along with it, taking it all for granted. The feeling is that if it is happening it can’t be miraculous, it must be all mundane.

By tuning down the appreciation for experiencing all that is life, we are radiating very little gratitude, and may even radiate to the universe as an ingrate. The universe responds by turning the dial on the lesson machine so that it bumps us a bit more roughly to make its points, since we seem to be missing the polite subtle hints.

Its intent, since it is guiding a blind man's bluff version of itself back to its full Self, is always beneficent. We the Universe are aggregately much too smart to kick ourselves in the groin just for fun.

A relatively new physics darling is the multiverse theory, a new name for what Heinlein called the “universe sheath”. Picture a very large or infinite number of universes all lying very closely side by side like a fat stack of clean paper in a drawer.

Maybe we tune from one to another. Perhaps they are laid out in a heaven-hell continuum and we can tune to the next more heavenly universe and actually make the crossover.

Is that what happened to Ina and me that day we visited Pfeiffer Beach back in the 70s?

Pfeiffer Beach courtesy of Craig Colvin Photography
"Pfeiffer Beach" courtesy of Craig Colvin Photography

My lady friend and I go back to our favorite beach, a well-known beach in California. It is totally different: there are Arabian brown and white striped tents, red flags at their tops fluttering in the breeze, in a row along the sand near the water and at the entrance path onto the beach there is now a mostly-completed wooden Church.

We walk up a few steps, smelling the new wood, and a man greets us at the door and lets us look in at the unfinished interior. We are not yet allowed to come in he says, though he doesn’t say why.

We walk the beach marveling at how amazing it looks. It’s as fine a day as a day can be. We are feeling fit as we walk and our hearts are light.

We come back another day and there is no church, no tents, just the familiar beach. Residents insist there never was anything built in that spot, and indeed there was no sign of anything disturbing the old tangle of sand and roots where we had walked up the steps together.

Needless to say this blew our minds, having both experienced the same thing with no help from our friends, so to speak.

Observer state is ideal for not taking the familiar for granted, for counting the cards and for noticing improbabilities.

Wishing you much personal experiencing of the miracle you are in, and much personal experiencing of the miracle you yourself are.

Best to all,

Bill

Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.

For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this video. Or this collection of videos.

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.

A Whole Different and at Least Equally Valid Way of Looking at Things

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Volume 3, Issue 48

The peachy-purple-gold sunset reflects with pink iridescence on the wet sand where the sea recedes from its last sally onto the beach. Soundlessly a squadron of hunting pelicans glides past my writing hand. These two-day escapes to Malibu reinvigorate my excitement at life.

Simply clearing the decks of one’s mind and its latest obsessions, leaving only the Observer and the richness to be observed, one can attain peace anywhere.

When I was very young, somehow I became inspired by the notion that a slight shift in the way I look at things could have enormous effect. Now decades later in my self training, the number of times I have applied this principle must be in the millions of repetitions, firmly installing it in my neurons, making it second nature for me to shift my point of view.

Finding that mental switch inside, feeling that subtly felt shift in feelings that occurs, may be not so easy the first time one tries it. The thinking part of the mind and the feeling part both represent potential obstacles of different kinds.

The feelings do not want nor seek solutions. Specialized in expressing themselves, the feelings therefore wish to simply find more and better, increasingly dramatic, ways of expressing whatever they are feeling at the moment, kind of an inertial momentum (i.e. an object in motion tends to remain in motion kind of thing).

Reasoning with the feelings, using thinking to ameliorate unwanted feelings, is not inherently a strong strategy. Telling oneself that one would prefer to feel joy, that happiness is a choice, so go ahead and make that choice, be indomitable — this sometimes worked for me, because I liked the idea of being indomitable and of not allowing anything to have power over me or my mood. At other times some part of me was clearly relishing wallowing in sulking, rage, guilt, anxiety, or whatever, as if an unsuspected part of me was coming from a separate reality and visiting here on a trip specifically for the experience of such an operatic range in dramatic emotion.

The strategy that works best for me is neither straight thinking nor straight feeling, but more intuitive. It is through the intuition that we can make a creative and altogether unsuspected slight shift in the way we look at things, which will both refill us with the happy anticipation of making improvement, and enlighten us with light cast in from a new angle revealing amazing insights.

This intuition has its first positive impact on hope and its second positive impact on curiosity. I find myself looking around in my mind for the perspective that will cause the felt shift. I have started from the assumption my thinking mind accepts: there will always be an angle on the situation that will bring relief. So far that prediction has always come true.

Wishing you all a strong new mind muscle, giving you the ability to seek and grasp the hidden gearshift to indomitable happiness dominating all and any input.

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe. Imagine That!, coming in February.

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.

Your Bucket List for 2014

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Volume 3, Issue 44

Why have bucket lists for the rest of your life without having one for the upcoming year? Forming a strong intention to do something in 2014 that you’ve always wanted to do is so much more concrete and action-oriented than simply hoping you’ll get around to doing it someday. The probability of actually having that wish come true goes up when you put a time frame around it.

There is a solid benefit to just making a bucket list and then assigning one or more items on that list to 2014. That benefit is self-knowledge. Anything that helps you contemplate yourself from a new perspective is going to provide serendipitous actionable insights.

What if you find that you have outgrown your bucket list? The connotation of a “bucket list” is fun stuff you would like to do once. Perhaps when you contemplate such amusements in the context of your life and/or the next year, you discover that instead of caring about such idle pleasures, what you really would like to focus on making happen is something much more important, like making a transition to the kind of work you’ve always wanted to do. If not your vocation then an avocation that you’ve always desired but never made time for. Surely 2014 is the time to make a substantive move in resurrecting that dream. What’s more important?

A writing partner and lifelong friend of mine is now following his dream. Somehow he has kept the wolves at bay monetarily and has managed to concentrate on writing and researching his scripts every day of his life. It was not always like that.

Like most people he felt he was going to get around to that someday but first he had to put himself on a solid economic footing. The quest for that stability seemed never ending. His confidence in ever getting around to his real work was gradually shrinking, a little bit every day, without him at first noticing what was happening until it was almost too late. One day he woke up and realized he was no longer sure he could do it anymore.

Has that ever happened to you?

Trying to inspire him out of that state of mind, Socrates being one of my heroes, I asked him lots of questions. Let’s call him James. James had been a character actor in big box-office movies and quality television shows, and a singer/songwriter as well. He gradually began to realize he had a gift for writing, which attracted him more than performing. He wrote a script that was a page-turner. He had one project that he really wanted to make happen right away and even had an idea about how to market it. It started with seeing an actor he knew who was in a position to help him: Robert Duvall.

It hit me that we all have dreams we want to make come true and ideas about how to break into some field — maybe someone we know who is highly placed can help us. Often we hesitate and maybe never make that phone call or send that email or letter. It depends on how far our confidence has slipped, how much we have become resigned to our fate of the economic survival treadmill being the only reality.

To motivate him — and myself — I coined a phrase. I told him that every day he must remember to “Do his Duvalls” — meaning to actually do the things that would advance his real lifelong aspirations. Today he is doing his Duvalls and finally so am I.

Wishing you a 2014 in which you wake up each morning, remembering to do your Duvalls, and actually doing them.

Best to all and happy New Year!

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.

The Season to Celebrate the Miraculous

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Volume 3, Issue 43

The Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year when the sun appears at its lowest altitude above the horizon and darkness abounds, has been celebrated with festivals of light since Neolithic times. Earliest cavemen and cavewomen prior to the dawn of reason could have felt that the world was coming to an end, and might have sought to propitiate Nature, the Sun, and divinity in general, with encouraging firelight, signaling the request to bring back the great light.

The primary axis of Stonehenge, which could have been built as far back as 3000 BC, is aligned to point to the Winter Solstice sunset. Newgrange in Ireland, built around 3200 BC in the Neolithic period, is similarly aligned to point to the Winter Solstice sunrise.

Wikipedia lists an impressive array of holidays in all countries and religions oriented around the Winter Solstice.

Probably no other person in history has inspired more works of art in all media than Yeshua Ben Joseph (Hebrew equivalent to Jesus, son of Joseph), remembered as Jesus Christ, after whom Christmas is named — Christmas being the signature Winter Solstice celebration in the Western World for the past 2000 years.

The Founders of the United States of America, who considered themselves deists, nevertheless esteemed most strongly the philosophy of this high being. So does practically every other person who has come into contact with his teachings.

Among Jesus’ key ideas are that God loves us as a father would, and that we should treat each other as we’d like to be treated. None of his quotations in the Bible contradict my theory that we are all part of One Being. Certainly a single being playing many roles would love all of them as himself, and in a role conscious of this existential unity, would treat everyone else very well indeed, knowing all to be part of the One Being.

Jesus also emphasized that even our thoughts count. “As a man thinketh so shall he be.” My theory posits that the matter-energy timespace universe is projected from consciousness, and that even in our roles as humans — a reduced form of the Original Self — our thoughts, feelings, intuitions and perceptions, in a closed feedback loop, influence what subsequently happens in the matter-energy timespace universe.

Jesus gave us useful psychotechnology — tips on how to arrange our thoughts, feelings, intuitions and perceptions so as to be capable of forgiveness, such as seeing how we ourselves are just as righteously to be judged as we judge the flaws of others: Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone… and Thou hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

It is impossible to think of Jesus without thinking of miracles. While many miracles are attributed to Jesus, the church over the centuries has investigated other claimed miracles and certified a number of them as such. Travelers to the devout country of India often return claiming to have personally observed miracles.

The Jewish Winter Solstice holiday of Chanukah celebrates the miracle of the oil lasting eight days although there was only enough barely for one day. This occurred when the Jews had retaken the Temple in Jerusalem from the Syrian-Greek Seleucid Empire, and found almost all the oil desecrated (160 BC). The Jewish celebration of an eight-day festival of light goes much further back in antiquity, probably to Neolithic times, and is mentioned for example in a Talmudic document written during the Babylonian Captivity, which ended in 538 BC. In that document Adam is said to have sat for eight days in fast and in prayer anticipating that the world was going back to the darkness of chaos and confusion. When he saw the light returning he said “Such is the way of the world,” and observed eight days of festivity. The actual timing of Chanukah each year is based on both the Sun and Moon and therefore its exact timing is not synchronous with the Winter Solstice.

What is a miracle? Something that does not usually happen. Doctors today regularly bring the dead back to life, as in certain surgical operations where the body must be brought down to very low temperatures, and Google is not alone in believing that life can be extended indefinitely, achieving immortality. Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be miraculous to those who have not grown used to that technology.

The existence of the universe is itself a miracle. Why should anything ever have come into existence? How can something come out of nothing? Logically, all that should ever have existed is nothingness. In our theory, and in Kabbalah, the great bootstrap operation of all time occurred when the Nothing (ain) became aware of itself (ain soph) at which point light streamed out in all directions from this point of self-awareness (ain soph aur). The Original Self, living through each of us, is The Nothing’s Imagination. (I wrote a book about this for my grandson Nicholas — look for The Nothing’s Imagination in 2014.)

Flow state is a miracle. Seeing other people seem to go into slow motion. Suddenly out of the blue knowing how a friend’s characteristic mannerism came into existence and having him validate it. The many synchronicities — odd seemingly-meaningful coincidences — that occur more frequently than would seem the result of random chance. My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That! (coming soon), contains reports of some of the miracles I have witnessed.

This season celebrating the return of the light force is a time to reconsider the miraculous. Even though the universe I postulate is “just” extremely advanced technology — supremely advanced psychotechnology specifically — this does not vitiate the meaningfulness of having an attitude of awe and wonderment such as one holds toward the idea of miracle. It’s really a choice. Do you want to live your life with the childlike thrill you once had, alive in your life once more, or would you prefer to be blasé about existence, including your own?

It’s always your choice.

Happy Holidays! Celebrate the miraculous.

My best to you all,

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.