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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.

Answering Any Question

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Volume 3, Issue 47

To continue what we’ve been saying about the alone space you need each day, one of the things you can do, if you really feel like it, is to play a game where you practice Flowing.

Discrimination is a function that comes into play at a micro level of our moment-to-moment decision-making. The more time we apply to making the discrimination among inner impulses to actions, the more delayed our impulsive actions. Even taking on and expressing a feeling that has meekly inched out of the wings seeking approval, is an action. We can eschew owning a provisional feeling, and we can treat all feelings as provisional until inspected to make sure we still agree with the logic that led to that feeling. This is the Observer state.

Although discrimination helps prevent actions we might regret, it also impedes the Flow state. In Flow state, we let our training and practice operate, as if instinctively, without hesitation. Yet even in moments of Flow, one senses there is a choice to be made, and hesitates while staying in the Flow state — the hesitation may be fractional until instinct causes movement before the time loss exceeds the action quality gain.

Ideally one could spend long hours each day for a lifetime training oneself at precisely the games that one loves the most. Acceleritis temporarily dwarfs the human race (in a sense by giving us too many stimuli too fast, a side effect of giving us too much brainpower too fast). In this dwarfing, the culture falls short of optimizing the delivery of people who love X to the task of X, although Google could fix that. In the dystopia created by Acceleritis, we also find ourselves in probably one of the most challenging games the Universe has ever devised, so who’s complaining? Rise to the challenge, recognizing that alone space is needed each day.

One of the fun things you can do whenever you feel like it, in your alone space, is to let yourself do automatic writing without editing — for no one will ever see that page except you unless you decide otherwise. Automatic writing of whatever comes into your mind, as if taking dictation from someone else, is an amazing experience and a doorway into the Flow state. Once you get going with whatever your mind wants to say, you can also ask any question that you may have always or just recently wanted the answer for — the key most challenging questions of your life or facing your company, whatever. As if having a crystal ball, you let yourself actually put down on paper whatever is the first thing that pops into your head.

Don’t let yourself go into long internal debates – like saying to yourself, “There’s no way I can be coming up with the right answers so easily to these questions!” Just do it. It’s a game. The thing is not the answer but the Flowing without discrimination at all. Life may not have handed you a built-in way to get into Flow through practice, but everyone can use automatic writing to get into Flow.

Not that all automatic writing is the Flow state. It might be flowing easily and that’s good but is not in itself a sign of Flow state or even Observer state. That’s not the point. Don’t be rating yourself each second (“Am I in the Flow state now?”) because that is one of the biggest blocks imaginable to getting into the Flow state. Everything you do in your alone space is for your own enjoyment, not for any other goal. The side effects of realizing higher states of consciousness are something to gratefully enjoy as they happen, not to wistfully hope for. So have the fun now.

Wishing everyone a lot more fun in 2014. 

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.

The Game of Life

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Volume 3, Issue 40

In my Cosmopoly, a game form of my cosmology, we seek to mirror the intuited Self having all these lives, including the life through us as an individual. To the Self it is just a game and since we are the Self why don’t we just wake up to our true role or, if that is too unbelievable right now, play it that way anyway?

What do you have to lose?

Like everyone else, you’ve already made it tough enough on yourself. Couldn’t you use a little relief?

Why not even as purest fantasy, impossible to conceive. Nevertheless let’s just play along with Bill in this funny crazy game… at least unless it becomes too risky or not fun.

There really isn’t any risk because whenever you see any non-fun coming, you drop out of warp. Just try warp with me for a little while, provisionally. Trekkies welcome.

Imagine it is at least scientifically possible (even if you can’t picture it or it sounds too good to be true) that there is one Self, kind of like an optimized Mind — at essence a form of biocomputer. It’s all that ever existed, It will always exist, and It will always be the only thing that exists.

And what you think of as your identity, your sense of being yourself, is actually an active bit of the One Mind that is assigned to your coordinates. It’s living through you.

The Game is to see how long It takes to wake up in each specific role and “challenge-environment”. To wake up and realize who It really is. And what It can really do, even in this attenuated-self version.

Knowledge is power. The power to do good — if this Knowledge we’re talking about is our own inner knowledge of our own true identity. Even if you’re only accepting this as a trying-on of something you might decide to buy, like a new dress or suit. A working hypothesis to be confirmed or disconfirmed — which way shall the evidence point? That’s part of the game. The part we are at now, on Earth.

The process of waking up during our lives, whether or not we are guided by this working hypothesis, always involves a thousand adjustments we must make to ourselves consciously and effortfully as we go along.

Some individual adjustments take lifetimes.

Take a review of where you are at the moment:

  1. For whatever reasons, is there anything happening with your body that you could be paying more attention to and resolving?
  2. Same question about your mind.
  3. What about personal appearance?
  4. What about people in your life, now or in the past, with whom you still have bad feelings?
  5. Are you doing the work you really want to and should be doing?
  6. Are you having moments of fear? Anger? Envy? Melancholy? Greed? Cruelty? 

If you have cleared away most of these adjustments, you are likely to be in and out of the Flow state and usually sustaining the Observer state. And pretty happy most of the time, behaving as the mensch you are, encouraging, mentoring, taking care of other people, loving as many and as much as you can.

Perhaps you agree with some of what I say but consider it arrogant to equate oneself with the Deity, with whom one must always take a surrendering posture. In fact we agree on the surrendering posture, yet the only story I can calculate in optimizing agreement with all observables, is that there could only logically have ever been one point of light, the self-referential Observer Itself. This premise is explored in depth in my upcoming book You Are The Universe: Imagine That!

We surrender in many ways. The most meaningful is the surrendering of existential sloth, eagerly accepting the many challenges to make the adjustments needed to actually make all the connections back to the great Spiritual Mind of the Universe. Honoring the Whole of which we are an aspect is obviously the only sane response to the situation. Playing the (W)Holy Game each day, making the adjustments pointed out to us. Reading situations this way rather than cluttering them up with stuff that is only logical until you realize the process of the game underneath the little games you’re playing on the surface of each day. 

My best to you all, as you,

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.

To The Protectors

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Volume 3, Issue 39

It is Veteran’s Day as I write this. On the way to the airport listening to the radio I heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing a special show celebrating America and its war veterans.

Flashback to the 60s when certain protesters sometimes crossed the line to not only condemn the war but also the country itself with the moniker Amerika, sometimes substituting a swastika for the “k”. That saddened me.

We all make mistakes and sometimes they are big ones. This is true not only for individuals but also for groups of people like protesters, countries, corporations, even well-meaning nonprofits and religious institutions.

But the ideals of the Founding Fathers are unique among the articles of constitution for each of the 190+ nations on Earth. The U.S. Constitution is our Mission statement and our collective vision still. Protecting these ideals and this country that seeks to bring about a world based on these ideals is still a sacred trust.

Those who are warriors for any free nation, especially if they take that role voluntarily, are at least in part moved by a very high level of consciousness. The realization of something greater than oneself, and the urge to serve others. This can also be true of cops, firefighters, doctors, and many other vocations, even the oft-criticized paramilitary. Not every individual in these vocations is equally motivated by the idea of service and the will to protect, and that motivation can vary over time. But when one is in that headspace and heart space it is a form of the Flow state and attracts cosmic fire support — at least according to my Theory of the Conscious Universe, which is explored in my soon-to-be-published new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That!

Most if not all of us would like to see an end to war, but this does not mean we should be unappreciative of the warriors. The prerequisites to ending war forever are not forever distant and unapproachable; in fact we are closer than ever to realizing these possibilities:

  1. Psychotechnology and education bring about better self-management and decision-making at an individual level everywhere, engendering sanity, clarity, perspective, menschness, and happiness.
  2. Science and technology release unlimited free energy by which there is plenty of whatever anyone might need or want, as in the “Culture” novels. With free energy we can afford to transport the Earth’s still abundant raw materials from where they are to where they are needed. Nicola Tesla was on the track of unlimited free energy a century ago and it is no further off than unlimited life extension. Perhaps another century will do the trick.
  3. Space travel provides enough room and raw materials to not have to fight over land.
  4. Medical science brings about the ultimate cures. Only a matter of time. Not soon enough to end the heartache in our lives but soon enough to remove great gobs of pain from the lives of our children’s children’s children.

It will all happen. If we don’t blow ourselves up or befoul the environment too much more between now and then.

In the meantime, here’s to the protectors. We still need them, and they deserve to be honored with our gratitude and deepest respect.

In that spirit, I’d like to share the lyrics to a song written by my friend Stan Satlin, who was inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to write songs about the country he loves.

I Am an American

Chorus (repeats after each verse):

I am black and I am white, I'm yellow and brown
I am red white and blue, Yankee Doodle won't you come to town
I am the whole wide planet, rolled into one
I am a citizen of the world, I am an American

Verse 1:

I came from distant lands, to seek a better life
All I owned was on my back, by my side my wife
The work it wasn't easy, in the factory and the farm
But hope in me grew stronger, like the muscle in my arm               

Verse 2:

As I sailed across the ocean I was told of gold in the streets
When I arrived I soon found out not everything was sweet
I built the road and cities, from the east coast to the west
I've been tricked and cheated, but the land is still the best

Verse 3:

Some things are much better, some things still need change
I wish I could bring back some things, like buffalo on the range
I don't want to be a master or servant of any man
I just want to go on living my life, doing the best I can

And this, to honor the symbol that inspires our warriors, Old Ragged Flag, as told by Johnnie Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgpp0V7sDbE.

Best to 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.