Volume 2, Issue 7

Valuable lessons from two great scientists — one of the mind, the other of marketing

The Human Effectiveness Institute defines Flow as the state of autotelic perfect action. It is a brain/mind state where all parts of you are in synch, and is now popularly known as the Zone. “Autotelic” means you are doing the action for its own sake, not for its outcome, and it feels to you as if it is doing itself, because you are going with the flow (“automaticity”). This however is different from your robotic Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) state where you run off at the mouth, for example, without all your mental/intuitive gears meshing and thus you constantly undo yourself.

A subtle state indeed. Most people can remember having at least one experience of being in the Zone, but are not quick to agree that one can learn to spend more time in Flow. Most people consider it something accessible to top athletes, musicians, artists and other performers, but to no one else. The Institute’s mission is to change that perception.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, former Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, coined the term “Flow” and has written the definitive books about the phenomenon. His theories were developed while working to successfully improve the performance of the school’s lacrosse team. He created the accompanying schematic,

presented a few years back at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, which shows that you are not going to get into Flow unless you are doing something in which you are already highly skilled. Flow happens when high skill and high challenge meet.

This means that to truly train yourself to attain Flow more often, you need to practice it within your own personal métier — the thing you do best.

For those of my readers who work somewhere in the broad field of marketing, I recommend Al Achenbaum’s new book. This will be a way for you to practice your skills at an even higher level, by absorbing the 1500 pages of lessons that must be the single most valuable treasure trove of marketing learning in existence, given where Al has been and what he has accomplished.

When I was a rookie at Grey, Al and his estimable right hand at the time (another luminary, Russ Haley) were moving the industry away from sole reliance on judging the value of an ad based on its memorability. They introduced the difficult new concept of attitude shift into a field that at the time was as auteur-dominated by creatives as Hollywood, and therefore just as hard to present science to. Yet they succeeded, with help from FCB’s Frank Gromer and his Study of Brand XL, which established that attitude shifts actually preceded buying changes (the only extant copy I know of is the one I donated to Ed Papazian’s library).

Back in those days Grey had assembled a brain trust of Al Achenbaum, Russ Haley, and Betty Coumbe on the research side, and on the media side Hal Miller, Larry Deckinger, Howard Kamin, Helen Johnston, and Norm Hecht — and me at the bottom of the food chain. These incredible mentors encouraged me to roam the halls at 5AM reading from all the unlocked files on the 11^th floor at 445 Park — like a monk in the Alexandrine Library. This is how I absorbed Al’s teaching, as well as that of other luminaries. Plus Hal had his personal training program for two lucky pups, one of whom was me.

Al’s book is called (“and may I say, not in a shy way”*) Marketing Lessons From a Living Legend and is available from BarnesandNoble.com on their eBook platform, the Nook. Al is truly one of the all-time original Mad Men and he will help your quest for Flow even if you’re not in marketing but have an interest in how scientists have improved that art.

Best to all,

Bill

*From the song “I Did It My Way”.

Volume 2, Issue 6

The Human Effectiveness Institute defines psychotechnology as methods which increase human effectiveness.

With the collaboration of my old friend and former brainwave research partner Dan Goleman, Google is offering its employees a seven-week course called S.I.Y. for “Search Inside Yourself”. The course is delivered by its prime creator, Chade-Meng Tan, a Google engineer, and other teachers, and is offered four times a year. More than 1000 Google employees have already taken the course. Each time it’s offered, half the 60 seats are already taken by the waiting list. This video  will give you a feel for what it’s like.

This is potentially a major turning point. One of the goals of The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) is to bring psychotechnology into schools at all levels and into organizations in a widespread way. Way to go, Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Google, and the rest of the collaborators behind the S.I.Y. course. Now that Google is doing it, all sorts of organizations will follow with psychotechnology courses for their staffs. As I say, a major turning point for the good.

When you start considering psychotechnology for your own organization, here are some things to think about:

• Is there a focal point you have in mind, perhaps some problem you are trying to solve? In Google’s case it was the pressure and friction issues. The driven high-achievers who make up the Google corporate culture experience 24/7 stress and some had boiled over, and from this challenge came the idea of using psychotechnology to channel the energies back into constructive directions. One of the key takeaways from the Google course is S.B.N.R.R. — Stop, Breathe, Notice, Reflect, and Respond. Our parents taught us to take a deep breath and count to ten — a variant of the same ancient piece of psychotechnological lore. We get the sense that the Google course is somewhat focused in the affective (feeling) dimension.
   
• Are you looking for a broader spectrum of benefits — cognitive, intuitive and perceptual as well as affective? The Institute’s psychotechnology aims to cover the broadest ground for the widest benefits, designing workshops that focus wherever the need is greatest.
   
• Make sure that participants will be given interactive exercises not just lectures. In order to accomplish actual behavioral changes, people must do more than just listen; they must practice internal techniques during the course/workshop.

Let it be known that the Human Effectiveness Institute is a resource you can turn to for bringing psychotechnology into your organization. The Institute has for more than three decades been developing course materials and conducting psychotechnology workshops for organizations ranging from major corporations to elite units of the U.S. military.

Do a search and give consideration to all potential sources. Check out the testimonials from people who have taken the courses and/or used the course materials.

In order to accommodate expected demand for psychotechnology, THEI will be partnering with Richard Zackon in the delivery of courseware. Richard and I will be launching our collaboration later this year with a workshop (Richard changed the name to “playshop”) focused on creativity for high-level research executives, through the auspices of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). More details here as we approach the date and ARF puts out the call for participants.

Psychotechnology for business is now not such a wild and crazy idea. Hallelujah!

Best to all,

Bill

Volume 2, Issue 5

I first met Bob Herbold (see www.bobherbold.com) when he was at P&G, before he went on to be COO of Microsoft where he’s credited with a fourfold increase in revenue and a sevenfold increase in EBITDA. Last week I got to reconnect with Bob by phone and as in all my conversations with him I learned a lot.

Nowadays Bob is spending half his time in the fast-developing areas of Asia such as Singapore, Indonesia, Penang and Chongqing. He’s feeling the vibrant energy of these places, where companies from the U.S. and other developed nations can ride the ebullient ballooning of commerce. He notes the intelligence of the talent pool, the effectiveness of the education systems, and the willingness to work hard that he attributes to the population not having the excess self-esteem of American workers. I’m thinking Americans don’t have to give up their self-esteem (nor their hard-won rights as workers) if they are reinspired by a crystallizing and uniting vision — this might be a way to make us show the same focused yet humble drive of these new economic engines. Bob would like to see the USA fulfill Ben Franklin’s dream of a land of people taking personal responsibility to the degree that the need for unemployment insurance and welfare payments is naturally reduced. Undoubtedly the recipients of those payments today would protest that conditions outstripped their ability to take responsibility, and what is needed are better systemic solutions empowering personal responsibility — educational/training-oriented, incentives to create jobs, methods of helping small business, and so on.

A similar idea appeared in my 1976 report A Plan For America, which recommended strategies for empowering people to become plugged in where their talents and training could contribute the most success for themselves and for the rest of society.

Bob’s ardent wish is that the US government and the press could become what he perceives as less anti-business. He points out as one example the fact that US corporations are disincentivized by high (35%) tax rates on money that has already been taxed to bring cash back from overseas into the US. He goes on to say there are only the US and seven other Western nations with similar policies — out of all of the nations — whereas countries he considers smarter in adapting to changes, such as Switzerland, allow the money back into the home country without re-taxing it above the taxes already paid in foreign countries. He cites Switzerland’s 2.5% unemployment rate as indicative of what the US could achieve by learning from policies of other countries that are adapting better to the massive shifts in the world economic order. Clearly there is a question here of whether we can help our leaders find ways to better dial tax structure decisions to maximize US job creation.

My cousin Bernie like others in my immediate family growing up, was a union man. To show for it he had a steel plate in his head, where company-hired goons hit him with truncheons. This is an early impression I had of the seemingly natural strain between business and people. Today I no longer feel there is anything natural about such an adversarial tension between business and people. We all need the US to be more economically successful. We all need there to be jobs for everyone who needs and wants and is able to work. Business and people are the same folks looked at two different ways. What can be done to eliminate ancient distrust and get the whole team humming?

We need a new way to work at solutions together, collaborating between people and business. Business saw the need for an association called ALEC* to work out solutions good for business and to pitch these solutions to legislators. Social media has shortened the time it takes for seismic events to occur in our 21^st century society. A blogger discovered ALEC and didn’t like it. One corporation found itself being misquoted as daring the people to boycott its products if they didn’t like ALEC. Digital conversation reaction sentiment was negative and voluminous, and now corporations are rapidly departing ALEC.

Why not replace ALEC with a digital platform that opens up such conversations about legislative solutions, to take place between business and people on all sides of the issues, together? We need innovative solutions because mostly what we get are old ideas recycled endlessly. With all of the media exposure taking place about our problems, why shouldn’t a non-negligible percentage of it be about constructive new solution ideas, good for business owners and workers alike?

The Human Effectiveness Institute has designed a digital platform for this purpose and is seeking the right partners to make it work. We call it The Democracy Channel. Bill Rouhana, CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul and a good friend has already joined us. Take a look at The Democracy Channel platform  and get in touch if you’d like to play a role in making this happen. It’s a good thing that business wants to help find new solutions, let’s just channel that energy into a venue where one’s customers want to help — where both sides win.

Best to all,

Bill

* For those who want to see what all the hubbub is about from a different point of view, here’s an interesting site: 
http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

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

Volume 2, Issue 3

Science verifies the Vedas, Tantra, Qabala, and other ancient ideas

Hope you’re enjoying the new “2-minute read” format.

Thousands of years ago, individuals who trained themselves to be introspective all learned the same wisdom about the mind, in Greece and Egypt as in India and elsewhere. I’ve also rediscovered those bits of wisdom in a lifelong self-training to be an objective introspective observer — so as to really learn things and not just prop up my own ego, as we are all mostly forced to do by the information overload pressure that all too often sinks us into EOP.

The ancient wisdom even more applicable in today’s accelerating culture says that if we care too much we ruin it. Whatever “it” is. The word “attachment” is the meme of this wisdom, the gene from which a Pandora’s Box of linked ideas emerge.

Some became Buddhists, but most of the kids in my college class went on with their lives with their attachment level dialed way up, and this caused them painful life lessons from which they have grown up and consequently dialed down their attachment levels.

Although we find it expedient to ignore ancient wisdom, believing our science to be light-years ahead, science is only now coming to the same conclusions as the ancients but by humorously roundabout trips. If only psychology had listened to William James and seen introspection as a valuable tool of science. Science today would be accelerating into Observer and Flow state discoveries, leapfrogging over my mere intuitions and practical experience.

Consider the following “now-scientific” evidence. The widely-accepted Yerkes-Dodson law in psychology says that the optimal level of arousal for highest performance is moderate — a word Aristotle would also have chosen.

Note that arousal should be set even lower for more difficult tasks. Not rookie over-eagerness, but a fatalism that is above caring about success or failure — kind of a playful fun resignation to whatever outcome the universe chooses, so long as you like your play.

Arousal in this context means the same thing as the mental causes of physical and brainstem arousal — we call these motivations. If we are attached, meaning too highly motivated such that not succeeding would be anguishing — then we are not going to give our highest Flow state (Zone) performance.

Dial back the arousal. In future posts we will address the next question: how does one actually do that?

Best to all,

Bill

Volume 2, Issue 2

This blog takes a new shortened form optimized for Acceleritis conditions

Listening to you readers, I now enjoy writing this blog more than ever. Everyone I talk to says it is something totally different and therefore worth reading. Thank you all again for the encouragement.

The other thing you all say is that each week you stockpile some of it that you just can’t make time to read, given everything else. So with the intent of listening and acting on input, we’ll experiment with a far shorter format starting with this post.

Habit is the biggest obstacle to innovation and adaptability. The number of repetitions in our ingrained mental habits is in the millions by age 30. Each repetition reinforces many synapses thus increasing their automaticity. This is your challenge in breaking out of mental ruts, which is something you must do if you aspire to Flow state. And something you must do simply to innovate and adapt yourself and your company/organization to an accelerated treadmill of inputs, questions, challenges, and opportunities.

Imagination is the best tool we have and the one that is the most fun to use. Use of imagination regenerates synapses that have fallen into disuse and dials back the automaticity of the ones you use all the time.

Take your company, for example. Imagine the wildest scenarios you can — radical changes in partnerships, a totally different pricing model, an impossible dream of a new product you’d love to have — you make it up. See if this mental exercise doesn’t give you some imaginative yet prudent immediate actions. I bet it will.

Do the same for yourself. Think the unthinkable. Every 7 years every cell in your body is different, the old ones are gone. We are a new self every moment. Daydream your near-term and far-term future, knowing you are purposely being unrealistic and perhaps grandiose — it’s allowed because it’s only an exercise.

Or is it?

Best to all,

Bill 

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

Sensible procedures for quickly returning to your best self

This blog aims to provide a new psychotechnology for maximizing human performance and happiness, derived from a synthesis of the author’s experience and the relevant findings of science both modern and ancient. The construct posits three levels of waking consciousness:

1. Flow state — the most desirable state in terms of performance and happiness, where things happen perfectly and one feels a seamless part of everything. A non-ordinary, altered state of consciousness that occurs when you are totally immersed in and merged with an activity you have practiced well and you have simultaneously given up caring whether you win or lose, rising above all negativity and all of your usual ordinary concerns. Action just happens without hesitation, like a child at play.
2. Observer state — the second most desirable state, in which your attention misses very little of what is going on inside you and around you. The access window to Flow, this state is a form of meditation/contemplation that requires no closing of eyes or immobility, but does require self-honesty/objectivity and paying very close attention both inside and outside.
3. EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure) — the typical state of the overwhelming majority of human beings today, from which individuals spring infrequently into the higher states in rare moments of clarity and nobility. In EOP there is always a background dilemma, a sense of incompleteness, of wanting and being attached to something that you may or may not get.

In my theory the EOP state is not the natural state of the species but arises from a multi-millennial delay in integrating our evolutionarily most recent brain part, the cortex. Like children handed loaded machineguns, with our newfound inventiveness running amok, our weapons-centric culture has handed control of the planet to those who possess the most powerful weapons, and now through proxies they control everything else as well. This has been true since earliest recorded history. In fact the invention of written language appears to have been the catalyst for the only culture we know, which has made information overload and distraction the way we spend our days, separation our hidden assumption, and EOP our state of being.

Yet every philosopher worthy of such designation has explained that we need not live this way. Each in his/her own way has explained how to peel away the tarnished layer of the outer accidental self to find the pure inner self that exists always, despite whatever culture we find ourselves in. Collective wisdom and understanding from philosophy, theology, science and commonsense proverbs have always existed as a form of primitive psychotechnology. “Primitive” because the whole problem has never been clearly defined. Therefore the solutions have always been merely rote methods that work for reasons beyond the understanding of even those who practice and teach them.

I’ve spent my lifetime trying to figure out the things that spontaneously propelled me into the higher states, having first experienced Flow when performing onstage as a child, being part of a show business family. Over the years, working at it daily, I’ve discovered procedures that help me stay in the higher states more of the time. I rediscovered many of the same procedures that others before me have rediscovered. There are few among us who themselves have not discovered some of this — each of us has come upon some of these truths of how to be one’s highest self. Like me, most people strive to be the best they can be, often without even knowing they are doing this, nor explaining it to themselves in any philosophical or otherwise reasoned way.

Years back I founded The Human Effectiveness Institute to share these procedures, the ones that work for me and for 3000 or so readers of the first edition of what is today the book Freeing Creative Effectiveness — all reporting (unsolicited) positive results. The Institute also exists to understand the underlying scientific mechanisms, i.e. why these psychotechnological procedures work to elevate the mind into the higher states. In an earlier post I provided hypotheses drawn from my theory as to which brain parts are involved in each of the three states of waking consciousness. These hypotheses are the starting point toward making psychotechnology more of a science than an art. Today it is an art more than a science — or a soft science in contrast with the highly-regarded hard sciences.

In the rest of this post we’ll focus on what to do when you find you are not in your best place — and how to get back to your best self as quickly as possible. We’ll divide this into two short sections: (1) the first time you do this, and a few times a week after that, when you can grab an oasis of alone space to check in on your self, and (2) on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis.

The first time, and in alone spaces after that

First, how do you know you’re not in your best self? That part is easy, here are the symptoms: you’re not happy, something is bothering you and you may not even know what it is. You are making mistakes and making things worse. There is a loop going around in your head telling you so many different things about you and your life that you don’t like — you don’t know where to start and you feel defeated before you start. Those conditions are the clue to quickly find that hidden switch in your head.

The practical, sensible procedure when you are having this kind of experience, the first time it happens from now on, is:

1. You need to be alone for awhile.
2. You need to let your mind dump the problem statement and whatever solution idea fragments it may have by simply transcribing — taking dictation from your mind, in the form of incoherent notes or however they spill out when you are not trying to make them read well for other people.
3. Note how much you care about — are dependent upon — certain attachments, as if you are an outside observer watching yourself as a scientific subject. Note how many of these attachments are ignoble things — like envy, jealousy, pride, vanity — that you would rather not see in yourself. Consider what you might do with your life if you gave up caring so much about these specific things or about any specific things. Being looked up to, having more money, whatever forms your attachments take.
4. Give it all up. Even if you are just pretending, or experimenting — picture and feel that you are tired of it all, and you don’t want these things any more. You are not dependent on anything or anyone. Whatever happens, you will be strong enough to start from scratch and be creative and make decisions to flow with whatever reality deals you. Vividly envision losing it all, and being tough enough to withstand that loss.

One piece of psychotechnology common to many Buddhist and Hindu traditions is to meditate on a corpse in order to eventually lose all horror about it — a common practice also for doctors and nurses. This illustrates the psychological principle at work: it is possible to get used to anything, to the idea of losing anything, given enough time and mental practice. It doesn’t happen overnight in most cases, although sometimes it does.

Will life be worth living, you might ask, if you stop caring about all the things and people to which and to whom you are now attached? You don’t have to stop caring — you can still love people and things even more — it’s just that you are becoming fatalistic and accepting of whatever might happen that would cause you to lose these people and things.

In the moment, in the midst of action

Any time you notice you are not in your best self — making mistakes, losing your temper, feeling lousy or scared, whatever it is — re-set your mind by erasing everything. “Clear the mechanism” as Kevin Costner’s character says to himself in the movie “Love of the Game” (a film that shows what Flow state feels like to a baseball pitcher, as Bob DeSena points out).

Assume that any sense of dilemma is a lack of clarity, that if you were thinking straight you would be accepting what is and dealing with it without negative emotion, just with pure effectiveness. The one thing you want is to take whatever life hands you and deal with it most effectively, and anything short of that is rejected out of your mind and body instantly.

At first you will find yourself re-setting again and again as you slip back into the old time-worn ways of mental hand-wringing, but over time your mental muscles will toughen up. Just stick with it and you will become indomitable.

I know that many of my readers have already been practicing this for a long time, and this post may seem elementary to you, though the review can’t hurt. Since our aim is to always widen our audience to reach as many people as possible, we will sometimes return to basics.

Wishing you Flow and Observer filled days.

Best to all,

Bill 

Science in all its amazing advances still admits it does not know the ultimate truths of our existence — who we are, why we are here, what reality is. In place of this knowing some choose faith as one lens e.g. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, et al. Even though perhaps attending a specific church, many slide easily into the prevailing unspoken lens of our times — the lens that earlier science gave us and which still sticks in our head (and eyes). We assume unthinkingly that the lens of science has not changed in 200 years.

The old lens is the lens of materialism, which says matter is the primary constituent of the universe. The lens that says the universe is an accident, and the force of its accidental explosion into being caused and still causes most major interactions to occur through collisions, e.g. stars, planets, satellites, asteroids, comets. The lens that says life also began by accidental collisions forming chemicals and then proteins and eventually life. Life then evolved through the destruction of all but the accidentally survivable species. And life then evolved consciousness accidentally, and the consciousness we experience is a phenomenon projected by the material brain somehow, all on its own. And of course, each consciousness is forever separate, cut off, and in competition with everything else in the universe for survival, eking out as much contentment as possible against great odds.

Science has matured enough to realize that the latter is all a lens and not proven truth. In fact its central premise, all that exists is matter, has been utterly blown away. Matter turns out to be (as Indian sages said thousands of years ago) an appearance of what is really going on, which when you are able to detect really small interactions, everything is ultimately not matter, but energy. Matter is made of energy. Another way to see this is that the macro phenomena we associate with the word “matter” are illusions of the interactions between our sensory apparatus and the energy swirls in our immediate vicinity. One scientist once said it this way (wish I remembered which scientist): matter is just light revolving rather than moving in a straight path.

My favorite physicist John Wheeler then decomposes energy as the ultimate substrate of matter by saying that information is even more basic and foundational than energy to what the universe is.

These are all still lenses, ways of gestalting the universe. Not scientifically proven truth, nor fact. Models. Constructs. Ways of talking about things, ways of looking at things, ways of seeing them.

It’s good to be able to remember this and not be stuck in making fixed immovable assumptions that are hidden from ourselves, based on the autonomic and forgotten use of lenses. Because then we use these hidden assumptions as the basis for decision making, even when we do not realize we are making decisions every moment. Choices that keep us moving in a direction that at the same time might be a direction we complain about.

In the absence of knowing much, there is a way of making decisions that works extremely well when it is actually applied. This is called Game Theory.

With Game Theory, when you don’t know what the outcomes will be, you list possible outcomes and then see which ones you like. Then you see if you can convince yourself to make the decisions that will get you moving in one of those preferred directions.

How much meaning do you want to see in life, in your everyday, second-to-second life? If you want there to be rich meaning abounding, then choose a lens that gives you that view. A lens that makes things more explainable and understandable. Remember, it is still just a lens!

For example, let’s say that in terms of the nature of reality, there are really only two clusters of lenses to choose from. One says there is something like a God, and the other says there is nothing like a God.

Through the lenses that say there is something like a God, there appears to be an abundance of meaning in our lives. In the other cluster of lenses, there appears to be a dearth of meaning — much happens that makes no sense, nor do we expect it to make sense.

I was in this lens for many years. It came from being so impressed by science as a kid. I can testify that there are good things about this lens. For one thing, it makes one feel terribly independent, an independent thinker, since most of the world is in the other lens cluster. It sometimes strips away so many considerations that you can quickly look at situations and see the barest of elements, the quintessence. There is a certain minimalist “cleanliness” if not clarity.

Emotionally the lens of being alone in an unbenevolent universe can be toughening, allowing you to more easily become fatalistic and to shed many of your attachments. You get in the habit of not making assumptions but rather being very commonsense and down to earth. Very empirical. You don’t lean on illusions or faith or anyone else to define reality for you. All of which can be good.

The God lens from the standpoint of Game Theory has its benefits too. Again we are not saying anything definitive about the true nature of reality. We are only discussing the lenses we can look through.

Through the lens that says the universe is not accidental and intelligence was present from the beginning, intelligence may indeed be the ultimate “information processor” that both started the universe and is the universe. Everything else — information, energy, matter — is epiphenomena arising in appearance from this intelligence as the single existent thing in the universe.

This is somewhat of a new lens — I might even be inventing it — in the cluster of lenses I have dubbed the “Something like God exists” cluster.

The other lenses in this cluster are more “religious” in their depiction of the underlying intelligence. Mine is more “scientific”. On the other hand, when one looks back through history for others who have espoused lenses similar to mine, one goes all the way back to native shamans and to what for a long time we have called “pantheism”. Certainly all mystics use lenses that come close to mine in the sense that they are mystics —  admitting they still operate in the mists, with no one fixed ideology.

This scientific-mystic lens affords meaning to everything. Use this lens (without believing it to be the truth, nor disbelieving it) if you yearn to have more meaning in your life. You will always see the meanings as tentative without become locked into them, but at least you will see a wealth more meaning in your life.

Since meaning adds a sense of value to all human beings, the Game Theory “bet” on intelligence behind the universe is a better bet than the opposite bet, because it imputes more value to life.

However, I am not saying you should make a bet, just continue to keep an open mind, and experiment with both lenses.

In fact it will help you shoulder on the mantle of this lens to remember that you don’t know the meaning of life or reality — nobody does, it is all a wonder-fully thrilling awesome unknown. This makes it interesting, mysterious-mystical, immense, awe-inspiring. Wouldn’t we be missing something if we did know everything?

Since a universal intelligence of some kind cannot be ruled out, this lens allows you to entertain explanations for things in every moment both with and without God or Universal Intelligence in your mindstream.

Wearing this pure empirical maximal-skeptic lens you will start to see possible reasons why certain things happened — as if the universe is trying to help you — even by putting certain training obstacles in your path. I call this noia — being the opposite of paranoia.

By seeing things as possible gifts from the universe even if they are not, and even if they don’t feel like gifts, you gain some leverage from being able to see how to use the event better. Game Theory.

You benefit most by being able to switch lenses at will. Have fun!

Best to all,

Bill

Not for ego gratification, but to be that You on command

We’ve got to start taking daily vacations. Not only is that what life is all about — what it is meant to be every second of every day — but on top of that, we then give far better service to each other.

Emotion is more powerful than Will in the average person today, because of Acceleritis, and the EOP condition it causes, bringing us down from Observer and Flow states where our Will is stronger than our emotions.

Emotion is the body casting its 800-pound vote through a cascade of brain chemicals, resulting in specific neuron energy gains in the amygdala and other brain locales, specific neuron energy reductions in the prefrontal cortex and other places, glandular secretions, and adrenalin. There are so many powerful brainwashing mind control technologies in play that you are typically helpless, in EOP, to do anything but be swayed into whatever those tyrannical electrochemical drivers impose on us.

It’s not at all dissimilar from what happens in the brain from chemicals such as sodium pentathol and more modern/secret drugs used in paramilitary and military interrogations. In the case of emotions the brain’s chemical process doesn’t necessarily get us to tell the truth. What it often does is restore sovereignty of our actions for a time period until we get out of it, to a loop between our limbic system and left brain, which is our “lower self”. Call it the ego. 

You believe your self to be that being.  (I know “your self” is one word, but made into two words it has a different meaning and is a provocative subconscious stimulus to a more empirical mental stance) You unhesitatingly fall back into those positions that are so easy to slide back into. You have those rapid flashes of envy, resentment, fear, etc. that you are so used to you don’t even notice them or consider them abnormal. You say things to your self that if you were listening like you do in the Observer state, you would see you are just wasting time trying to project an image to yourself of your latest achievements, or some other useless folly. You are not showing the noble side of your character.

You are highly unlikely to get flashes of insight, inspiration, happiness, gratitude, or love in EOP. These things are not at home in that state because the brain signatures are very different. The allocation of energy armies across the various parts of the brain is not conducive to these more beneficial and enjoyable experiences. Nor to high performance for your organization, your family, the world in general, your self, or the Universe (the power and brains behind which, some call “God”).

High performance is our obsession at The Human Effectiveness Institute. It is so easy to move the world toward improved decision making. These little tricks are not so hard. They make us feel so good that they fairly quickly take over as our preferred state of being. Challenges can kick us out of that state and in the early going it takes us a while to notice and then work our way back up to Observer/Flow states. With practice, we are kicked out, clear the mechanism, and get back in. Sooner or later we are almost always there, with rare relapses. But from the start, the process just makes us happier.

Don’t you know people who seem to be so mentally strong that they almost always seem happy, positive, never say a bad word about another person? There are more of us every day. It’s happening already. It’s happening all around us. More and more of us practicing random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty. Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Our actions coming from the knowledge that “with all beings and all things we shall be as relatives” (Sioux Indian proverb).

Sure, some of those people are still basically egotistical. It’s a phase. They’ll grow out of it. At least they are enthusiastic about something even if it is their own self.

An upbeat attitude goes a long way to inciting higher performance in one self and others. The affective/emotional is more powerful than the intellect. Negative emotion — even mild background radiation so-used-to-it you forget that it is inherently negative — conditions and entrains weak intellectual strategies/tactics, whereas positive emotion does the opposite to the cognitive faculties.

It’s worth a lot to get your self into a good mood. And where’s the penalty — what’s there to lose? It’s all upside — it feels good — you feel good — and you make others feel good. A total no-brainer.

So how do you get your self to feel good? A daily vacation is a great start.

All it means is you take a break and do whatever you want to do. Create a space away from other people (sometimes that is not necessary but it usually is in the beginning). Then you just do whatever you feel like from second to second. You play. Like a child again. Like who you really are.

Take notes if you feel moved to do so. Only then — no pressure.

If you’re home, empirically seek inner detection as to the feelings evoked in you when you gaze at objects in your home. Best to start with one and stay on it for a minute.

The point of this is in part just being attentive in the moment, slowing down, deceleration from Acceleritis — but it’s also to reconnect with parts of your self that might be buried just beneath the surface. Things that are so familiar to you, you no longer notice how you feel about them. The fact is, you probably love practically everything that is in your life right now. You probably would miss some of the things that you suppose you hate. Maybe I’m wrong but you are the only one who will know, you’re the only observer who can tell what the truth is about your own feelings.

When you’re on vacation, you want to be in bliss. It’s the whole point, so why not do little experiments that are fun and are part of checking out your feelings, in order to make sure they are in bliss — and if not, you get them there.

You aren’t in a hurry when you’re on your daily vacation. You won’t accomplish the vacation objective fully if you are conscious of how soon you have to get back to work and thus trying to cram in the fun, still speeding, still in the clutches of Acceleritis.

A personal experience as an example. I was taking a vacation alone at home on a Saturday, my day for most of my weekly nonprofit work and writing. I always feel great on the Sabbath as a result of it being a vacation day for me.

So I happen to be in my closet and my eye falls on a particular shirt. I feel a wave of love wash over me. I love that shirt. It is like a human being to me or a pet — I feel such tangible love for it. I realize that wherever I look I am still feeling love. It’s not just the shirt. I love all of this. I love life. It feels like it’s been this way continuously for as long as I can remember, although that’s not quite the case. Yet the way I feel at this moment is that I’ve always loved everything and how could it possibly be otherwise. I feel like I am looking at the Universe the way God would — the way God does.

I am back in the original consciousness in terms of the affective dimension, although not omniscient not omnipotent. I think of God then and a wave of gratitude comes over me — reverence too but mostly gratitude. What a great game you/I/we created. I love this game!

When I go back to work it is not because the vacation ended but rather it’s what I really want to do. A flood of ideas later validated by experience rush me so fast I have to write in my own shorthand, leaving out letters.

Start giving your self these daily vacations, please. And during vacation whenever you feel like it, jot down the times you were at your best in this lifetime, whatever times you shone mightily like the Sun. There is a richness of positive emotion at these times, and it’s good to bask in that feel-good-ness, to remember what it feels like rather than to bask is ego-glory. Capture it as an Observer not wallowing in ego about these events. Scientific detachment. Objective honesty with your self. Record the facts as a scientist in your diary or journal or whatever note keeping system you have for these vacation journeys.

Go back and look at this “Possible Flow State” record whenever you feel like it.

The point is to deeply realize without blockage or limitation that you can do this again. You can be that you on command.

In fact there is no scientific reason why you cannot live in Flow state virtually all the time. You might need a five-year ramp to get there and along the way there may be more Flow experiences each month, which you can record in your objective log.

It’s not just to pump your self up. It’s to manifest more Flow and Observer state in your life, so you enjoy life more but particularly so you can give high performance in your work and your love life and your life in general.

This I wish for you! And you can do it with no help from anyone. And it is not effort-laden work because it is vacation. So please, start now!

Love to all,

Bill