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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.

The Flow State of Bliss

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Volume 4, Issue 8

In this most recent series of blog posts we are reviewing the highest levels of consciousness above the divided levels in which most of us live most of the time. Two posts ago we discussed the three Observer states and in the most recent post we covered the first of the Flow states, the Flow state of Action.

These five Flow states and three Observer states are nested upward, meaning that the benefits of the Observer state inhere in all the Flow states, and each Flow state contains the benefits of the Flow states below it. It is because of this cumulating upward characteristic that it is logical to consider the states progressing upward in the sequence in which we have placed them.

I began to discover the Flow state of Action at age four when performing onstage. Fascinated and sensing that this strange experience had something to do with the purpose of my life I studied my inner states constantly after that. I suspect introspection has always been a strong natural tendency for me.

In my 30s I began to realize that I was not alone in experiencing these states. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky had written about their efforts to organize and understand states of consciousness, and then Oscar Ichazo founded a school called Arica Institute. John Lilly had written a book about his studies with Oscar, and in his descriptions of the states of consciousness I saw correspondences with my own experiences. Much later I read Czickszentmihalyi, who advised the Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) for a few years in the 90s and it was at that point that I adopted his term “Flow” state. Continuing my readings in the 2000s I learned through my friend Daniel Goleman of the Visuddhimagga, written in 430 CE, which includes tables showing levels of consciousness based on the path of concentration and on the path of insight. My own stacking of the levels I have experienced is similar but not identical to the path of insight table in the Visuddimagga, as accessibly reported in Dan’s The Varieties of Meditative Experience.

Above the Flow state of Action is a state I call the Flow state of Ecstasy or Bliss. The objectivity of observation that exists in the Observer state carries through into this state along with the self-propelled perfection of action. In this state, however, there is the additional overlay of the most positive imaginable emotions/feelings. Another way of saying this is that there is total appreciation for what one is experiencing. One sees the perfection in all of it and nothing is lacking.

This is the first stage in which a spiritual intuition comes along with Flow state although it may not be cognized that way. One is filled with love that connects to everything. A feeling of benevolence washes over you from the inside. The highest ethics become innate because there is a feeling of understanding and forgiving and therefore no wish to cause hurt to anyone or anything.

Of course, when the Founders of The United States of America (specifically Thomas Jefferson) used the expression “the pursuit of happiness” as one of the components of the unalienable natural rights of human beings, he was in a sense alluding to this end- state as the implied highest good (Latin summum bonum). From the standpoint of my own theory, described in my new book You Are The Universe: Imagine That, the highest end-state three levels above the Flow state of Bliss would be the target state, retaining the joy of the latter state but adding more dimensions to it, as will be discussed in my next three posts.

Best to all,

Bill 

P.S.

  1. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming next month.
  2. 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.
  3. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this collection of videos.

The Flow State of Action

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Volume 4, Issue 7

woman sitting in active scene

Below the Observer state, we are like a computer that has one of the keys on its keyboard stuck down. A state of distraction and internal division exists. This is the state that most of the human race finds itself in, in the average second, in 2014.

Our level of consciousness is really all about our attention. The way our attention is yanked around below the Observer state is the opposite of self-mastery. Islam calls the great jihad the work we have to do against the processes that pull us down into this mechanical state. In the Jewish and Christian Bibles the term “hardening of the heart” refers to the lower states.

“Ego” is an interesting word, originally both Greek and Latin for the self-identity, and in modern usage meaning a person’s sense of self-importance. In our Theory of Holosentience the ego is the subsentience formed by neurons created after birth, which arrogate to themselves the status of the real self that existed at birth, maintaining that illusion until the individual attains the Observer state and sees through the masquerade.

In the prior post we described the Observer state and promised to discuss in this post the first level above the Observer state, the first level of the Flow state. The Observer state is when the individual is able to see the robotical self-protective and defensive way that the ego performs, projecting a strength opposite to the unconscious true feelings that are the motivation for accepting the rule of the ego. The Flow state is when the individual transcends the inner division between the self that was born and the ego, and allows both parts to unite as one doing something that delights all parts of oneself. The Flow state also can take over when the individual is challenged to the core and has no time for flimflam and although delight is not involved the person performs impeccably in inner unity.

Again it is all about attention. In Flow state the attention is single-pointed on the activity at hand. We are not distracted by attachment such as fear or worry or avarice or self-aggrandizement, all characteristic of the ego.

The first level of Flow state is the Flow state of action. Action is perfect because it happens with a sense of doing itself. There is no hesitation to consider alternatives. Action is intuitive and natural. For most people this occurs while doing something that has been practiced for a long time.

In an ideal life one discovers what one loves to do and spends a lifetime developing that practice, offering it to oneself and to the Universe as a gift. After a while one is in the Flow state at one’s métier. And this leads to the next level of the Flow state, about which, more in the next post.

Best to all,

Bill

P.S.

  1. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming next month.
  2. 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.
  3. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might want to check out this collection of videos.

Invisible Emanations from Your Navel

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(A useful mental construct?)

 Volume 4, Issue 6

At stages of the Flow state one becomes able to sense in uncanny ways. For thousands of years people from one end of the world to the other — people with remarkable achievements and qualities — have reported actually seeing other subtle energy bodies within our physical bodies.

Their reports are uniform in the observation of seven energy centers and in other particulars. There are to my knowledge no other similar but conflicting systems for the structure of inner energy bodies. If this was all just crazy stuff, surely numerous nuts would have made up widely varying systems to gain attention.

Anyway, put a pin in it. The conversation today is about not actually seeing anything, but getting a feeling about or image of something. You could call it sensing — meaning “detecting something independently* real”; or you could call it imagination making a symbol of something in order to think about it better. 

The point is pragmatic. Opening your mind to experience this naturally-occurring phenomenology as it unfolds within you is not necessarily a waste of time. You might see something going on inside that you were not noticing before.

Play along with me for a second, if you will. Visualize a stream of luminous microparticles emerging like a firehose stream from your navel, then diffusing and forming an egg-shaped luminous cloud around you. Imagine that these are the signals you are sending out to other people and whoever else is listening/watching whatever. These could in the physical world include pheromones, microgestures, signs of nervousness or tight control or emotion or distraction and so on.

In my construct, this signal stream is the unconscious one, and is dominant in driving outcomes in the consensus reality. Heck, Gerald Zaltman and many others have now proven that part.

Meanwhile in our conscious mind we are playing the Game however we are playing it consciously. We are controlling the mask. We are trying to project something. Or we are in a higher state of consciousness — Observer state or Flow state. In these higher states there is communication with the subconscious, increasing across three levels of the Observer state and five levels of the Flow state.

What the people around us are getting about us is coming from the firehose, not from our conscious actions.

The firehose emits content relevant to whatever it is that we Love. In the Acceleritis cloud, Love turns to attachment, caring too much, making us unrealistic and eventually neurotic. In that ordinary state — which probably will not be ordinary in a culture that graduates from Acceleritis — the firehose is communicating our neediness, self-protectiveness, and/or some other unattractive emanation.

The unconscious signals are the “L-Offense in the Room”. To a degree you are broadcasting the chip on shoulder, heart on sleeve, etc. Observer state allows you to see these signals because you are in touch with your subconscious. The first phase of Observer state is a negative state in that you are seeing things you do that you don’t like but can’t seem to control. In the second phase, when you’ve evolved some degree of ability to control robotical behavior, your emotional starting point is neutral, and in the third phase is emotionally/mood positive. At that stage of Observer state you have adaptive toolkits that can take you far, all the way to the Flow state of Action. More about this next stage next week.

Best to all,

Bill 

*The word “independently” is meaningless in this context because everything in the Universe is interconnected in depth, and at the core is only One thing.

P.S.

  1. Watch for my new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.
  2. For those interested in my work in the media business world you might watch myvideo interview in which I sum up highlights from the ARF’s ReThink Conference  in New York last week with Bob Lederer on Research Daily Report.

    Bill Harvey being interviewed by Bob Lederer at the ARF ReThink conference last week.

    You also might want to check out this collection of videos.

  3. 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.