Author Archives: Christine Niver

All The World’s a Classroom

Leave a reply

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, January 10, 2025
Created February 2, 2024

Not to contradict the Bard’s “All the World’s a Stage” – both lenses make sense. The value of using lenses experimentally is that you see things in new ways. This both stretches and searches your imagination.

Einstein said that imagination was even more important to him than intellect, and he demonstrated the power of imagination in his thought experiments methodology, without which we might to this day not know about relativity.

Hopefully, you have in my earlier writings picked up my notion that there is probably a scientific explanation for the actual existence of God. My own lens (which I now have come to strongly suspect is the truth) is that all that exists is a single consciousness of which we are individualized manifestations.

In A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and God, I support this hypothesis within the current physics standard model, positing that John Wheeler’s quantum foam might be identical with consciousness.

If the truth is anywhere in that neighborhood, what is consciousness doing here on Earth, why is our history the way it is, why are we facing the perils we today are facing?

If one looks for the Good, and asks how can the turmoil and terror we are now undergoing be a good thing, the answer is that it might be the only way for us to learn lessons we desperately need to learn.

It is common to observe that a person who is spiraling downward often cannot reverse course until he or she hits bottom. This has oft been observed for example in the case of alcoholics.

Perhaps we have become so addicted culturally to ego and its demands that the only cure is to let it take its painful course. Money and power have over the millennia been concentrated in a small fraction of us. Today, some of those people have decided to use their money and power for Good, while the vast majority still are hypnotized by greed and narcissism.

The vast majority worry about the future and have become cynical. Merriam-Webster defines “cynicism” as “the sneering disbelief in sincerity or integrity”. This means literally that the average person believes that no one has sincerity or integrity and if they do, they’re a fool.

What if the meaning and purpose of life on Earth is that we are here to learn about life, about reality, our place in it, and what to do about it, how to fit in cosmically, and perhaps how to be trustworthy enough to be reborn in an even more powerful body and mind, possibly at a higher level of evolution?

This cannot be tossed aside as a ridiculous idea. It could be what is actually going on.

What can we do more of than anything else? Learn, perhaps? Each day, each second, there is something to learn from the situation we are in. Possibly a lens might tend to be more useful the more that lens can help us notice learning opportunities and think deeply, and feel deeply around inside, about these learning opportunities.

All of the turbulence in our minds is in its own buckshot way a groping, distracted, grasping at straws attempt to figure out stuff. How do we apologize, how do we keep this job, how do we cure this ill, how do we repair this damage, what should we do first. We may not be successful at it, but it does appear to be some sort of effort to learn something.

All species appear to share curiosity and play, both of which are key parts of a learning process.

Where we went wrong as a race is we learned how to take more than our share and then unintentionally idealized that as the summum bonum. The highest good.

Hence a world fixated on competition rather than cooperation. A world that increasingly disbelieves in the Good.

Is Earth where souls from everywhere who got left back got sent for remedial education?

Or does it just seem that way from the news and social media babble?

As we navigate amongst each other each day we encounter friendly folks making jokes and standing up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 99% of what we experience in an average day is Good. Unless we are spending too much time imbibing doom and gloom from pitiless media choices.

A lens of seeing the Good, looking for it whenever it seems to be absent, asking what could a possible single consciousness be doing here for us to doubt the justification for suffering in today’s world, such a lens enables us to divine what the Divine might be thinking.

We ourselves have conscious choices to make as to what learning we welcome the most, what lessons we wish to draw upon ourselves. We can choose not to suffer. It actually works when one uses the powers of concentration which lie perhaps dormant from long disuse within us. We can choose to release the tensions in our bodies, to see and feel the Good in our lives in the present moment, to take in and savor the beauty around us, to focus on taking the Good to others, sharing Good as widely as possible, learning step by patient step how to become better at it.

We need to learn that negativity cannot serve the Good.

Love to all,
Bill

Respect Everything

Leave a reply

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – November 29, 2024
Created February 23, 2024

We have not found any other way to effectively turn off the hate so why not try respect?

Open-mindedness is one of the most important principles of metacognition (continuously studying one’s own mind as if from the point of view of an outsider) according to Dr. Gerald Zaltman, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard, and metacognition at Harvard Business School. Without open-mindedness one tends to be locked into positions one has taken in the past, even though there might be new relevant evidence that could be considered.

If one is truly open-minded, then that person can also see the possible truth in positions 180 degrees away from their own. An atheist can see that it is possible that an intelligence created the universe. A progressive can see that there might be useful truth in some things that a conservative says.

How little we know, as Hoagy Carmichael’s and Johnny Mercer’s song tells us (from the 1944 Hemingway-based movie To Have and Have Not). Arthur C. Clarke put it another way, he said that of all the things that we can someday know, what we know now is an infinitesimally small percentage.

We have changed our scientific perspectives many times along the way, and we continue to change them. The wisest among us have this perspective and their epistemology naturally embraces open-mindedness. Although in most of his work a physicalist, the great Stephen Hawking in his final book quoted John Wheeler’s Participatory Principle which states that our consciousness helps create reality. This opens the door to overthrowing physicalism and establishing consciousness as the principal underlying reality.

These are great thoughts from great people. Open-minded to the very end, despite their decades of study and theorizing.

Compare that to the average person. The average person takes very strong stands based on, really, very little. They fall into a very deep rut as to what they believe and the beliefs they hate. Most of their assumptions are not something they themselves learned from their own life experiences, but heard about from others influential in their lives. This reflects an unconscious epistemology of Authority rather than Empiricism. The very selfsame unconscious epistemology that leads to Authoritarianism. Blind followership, in other words.

Without open-mindedness, a person drifts as if by animal instinct to be attracted to types of people, e.g. tough guys, or pretenders of that ilk. This is a survival instinct in many species (e.g. pecking order) and when human beings behave animalistically they are not rising to the occasion of having exclusive cognitive capabilities proprietary to our species.

The lack of open-mindedness impels us to be negatively motivated. We know what we are fighting against. We are less sure of what we are fighting for. This is most apparent in the current political climate. It would be most noble and most fun for governments to spend 100% of their time focusing on creative solutions. Instead, they appear to spend most of their time knocking down the ideas of others. Yet we must respect all of them if we are to be open-minded. Respect does not imply agreement or support. It simply reflects the recognition that we all deserve respect. Even those who do not respect us. Noblesse oblige.

Open-mindedness and respect go together. If one is open-minded, one tends to listen respectfully to the thoughts and feelings of others. If one is respectful, one tends to listen to others with an open mind, and to use metacognitive strength to hold at bay the screaming voices in one’s own mind reflexively denouncing what the other person is saying.

If all of reality is a single consciousness, the larger parent of that part of the consciousness we take to be our own, then respecting everything makes complete sense. We have been conditioned by centuries of majorities of thinkers we respected who could not see how ancient conceptions of God could be squared with the findings of science.

What came out of nowhere in the last half Century were new conceptions of God that fit neatly in with quantum physics and relativity. Just replace the word “God” with “the original consciousness field” and everything makes sense, the Participatory Principle, relativity, quantum entanglement, the Heisenberg effect, Bits Before Its, the jigsaw puzzle falls into place.

What Wheeler called the quantum foam could simply be the original consciousness field. The way Wheeler described the quantum foam, which pre-existed The Big Bang in his theory, was that virtual particles spontaneously arose from it and fell back into it. Sounds a lot like consciousness, with ideas and feelings arising from it and often disappearing back into it before we could grasp them.

Since we cannot prove that point right now, it comes down to being open-minded about it. For some of us who have noticed that our hunches, at least the dispassionate ones, often have great validity, we can decide to run our lives betting on cosmopsychism, as scientists are now calling it. When that struck me as more of a revelation than a hunch circa 1969 I called it The Theory of the Conscious Universe. I had a feeling that everything was conscious, it was an experience, more like a perception than an idea. I also dimly recalled that I had always had that perception as a child but it went away a long time before, slipping away quietly.

If we retain the realization that the world might be a very different sort of place than it appears, and take that possibility seriously, we naturally become more open-minded and respectful toward others, who may actually be ourselves at a different place in the game.

Whatever the truth might be, we can perhaps know it with certainty the next time we die.

In the meantime, if we can all agree that the world needs a bit of a makeover right now, which I think is a pretty pervasive take on things, we can exercise our will to take a stronger hand in the game by rising to a state of open-mindedness and respect for all things, as all things may be a part of our One Self.

This includes respect for our own current self. The popular term “self-esteem” is not quite as healthy as self-respect, because “esteem” implies a vain ego, and “respect” does not.

If we respect others, we shall find that it has increased our level of self-respect. It is a magnanimous position to take. We have taken unconditional responsibility to behave properly.

If we can apply respect in our daily lives, it will automatically tune down the hate. We have not found any other way to effectively turn off the hate so why not try respect?

Love to all,
Bill

Be Indomitable

Leave a reply

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, November 8, 2024.
Created February 16, 2024

Being indomitable is consciously favoring the approach mode.

The day my mother died, Jewish customs would have been for the whole family to do nothing else but “sit shivvah” for several days. Therefore, they were shocked when my father, MC and orchestra leader in a big NYC nightclub, went to work that night. His eyes briefly met mine, and without his having to say it out loud, his eyes told me what they had both always taught me about moments like these. The show must go on.

In moment-to-moment living, we each have our ups and downs. It occurs to some of us that we are being dominated by the inputs we receive from moment to moment, without having the ability to resist the invisible strings on our puppet selves being pulled by outside forces, and this stiffens our resolve to not be jerked around by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We then go inside to find or to build the control systems that will make us each master of our own self, impervious to outside control by anyone and anything.

This discovery of one’s inner abilities to overcome one’s own negative emotions and not to be excessively carried away by one’s own positive emotions goes back long before spoken or written language, long before humans were able to clarify the processes involved enough to pass along how-to instructions. One of the earliest schools of philosophy on record is stoicism. This philosophy was all about understanding and inculcating these control abilities in human beings. Epictetus, in my estimation the greatest stoic philosopher of them all, was born as a slave. Enslavement gave him a fertile ground of unhappiness to deal with, and instead of caving into a life of misery, he faced squarely up to his situation and found out how he could modify his reactions to that situation. His book The Enchiridion, when I first discovered it as a teenager, blew my mind because stuff I had been working on within myself had actually existed before.

The need to become more fatalistic and resilient may not be greater than ever before in human hisandherstory but it is certainly much greater now than ever before in my lifetime. I need not list the litany of threat vectors currently present on our dance card. Possibly the one that is most disheartening is the attitude of young people who feel they have been gypped, and those who feel that way do so, not without good reason. The world needs a lot of fixing and we are just the species that can do that fixing in the highest and most heroic manner. Soon there will be a realization of a need to shift into that mindset, rising to the challenge. As we did, as a species, in WWII. That same right stuff still resides within us. It’s time to call upon it, to draw it out, to become the indomitable selves that we are and have always been. It’s what we are here to learn how to do, and to demonstrate that we have learned it. Then perhaps we can graduate to the next classroom.

I find it very interesting to learn from latest neuroscience the underlying computational functions of the brain. My special interest comes from a lifetime of introspection with concentration in which I have always attempted to understand how I make decisions and to improve upon the methods I observe myself using. Now in the light of current neuroscience I can link up my experiential evidence with the revelations of fMRI and EEG. For example, Richy Davidson, one of my many neuroscientist mentors, back in the 1980s when we had a company together, discovered that emotional valence could be measured based upon asymmetrical energy use in the left and right lobes of the frontal cortex, a method that is still prominent today. In the brain, this valence is understood to be based on the concept of approach versus avoidance. Positive emotion comes along with approach, whereas negative emotion is part of avoidance.

Being indomitable is consciously favoring the approach mode.
Stepping forward to engage with the challenges.
Fixing rather than worrying.

One cannot simply decide to do this, and then it is done. The effort involved is primarily one of self-discipline. This is hardest in the beginning and then becomes easier and easier with practice.

Whatever we choose to focus on internally becomes a stronger force in our lives.

When one is thrown into the pool as a babe, one swims, and instinctively swims with the current if there is one. Given little time to think the modern child is rushed into play with other children, sports and then studies, with daily doses of media, creating masses of questions and thoughts from all these impressions. Processing time to contemplate all of this is not built into the daily regime of our culture yet. In a subtle and generally unnoticed way, the child proceeding into adulthood adopts a somewhat defensive coping lens as the main way of thinking. What could go wrong, fear, plans to deal with feared situations, doing this planning in snatches between externally assigned priorities which must be coped with moment to moment.

The most dangerous aspect of this condition is that if a person spends most of their time focused on what could go wrong, they are actually mentally rehearsing for those things to go wrong. To repeat, whatever we choose to focus on internally becomes a stronger force in our lives. If we are focusing on the downside scenarios we are increasing the probabilities of those scenarios occurring.

How does this happen? There is a continuum of explanations, schools of thought. Physicalists (believers in materialistic accidentalism) may admit that this occurs but insist that it is because the individual is giving off micromomentary signals which telegraph their fears in a way that provokes others to manipulate them, all on an unconscious level. Two of our greatest physicists of all time, Wheeler and Hawking, posit what Wheeler named the Participatory Anthropic Principle, by which our consciousness helps cause reality. This theory rests on Wheeler’s theory that underlying what we dub as physical (“its”) are “bits” of information, and that both consciousness and matter/energy are therefore reducible to information, out of which everything is made. This is a short step away from my theory that a single self-aware consciousness is where all this information resides.

In both versions of reality, physicalism and cosmopsychism, there is adequate support for the true existence of the programming of reality by the thoughts and feelings of the individual. However one explains it, it is there, and ignoring it and giving in to wallowing in pessimism, what we might call brain avoidance rather than brain approach, is self-sabotaging.

So here we all are as a species wallowing in pessimism. Remaining this way cannot have a happy ending. The stoic response to this situation is to unlock concern about the probable bad landing ahead, to fatalistically accept it could easily happen, but to make oneself focus courageously on bringing about the happy landing anyway. Once understanding the way the feedback loop works, this is the only sane response, taking active conscious control of where the mind is allowed to go.

Realism requires that a small allocation of time is spent on making contingency plans for how to avoid the undesired outcome, and how to deal with it should it occur, so long as first and last the mind is mentally rehearsing and pre-experiencing the desired future of the individual. Meaning that contingency planning should be done seriously and carefully but not dwelt upon, instead gotten over with, so as to resume consciously telling the universe the way the movie happy ending is to be for oneself.

Chemicals and electrical trickery is used within the brain and body which makes it hard to get out of bad moods such as fear, anxiety, grief, resentment, and so on. It helps me to realize that the sodium pentothal and other psychometric drugs used to interrogate and brainwash are the same sorts of chemical agents my own brain whips up to give me these overwhelming feelings that dissolve my ability to focus on fixing. Knowing this enables me to see my brain as trying to force me into feeling certain ways I know to be against my best interests, and gives me the gumption to force back those feelings.

“Yes, that could happen, but why do I care so much?”

“Yes, that could happen, and I’ve prepared myself to deal with it if it does happen, including not showing it’s gotten to me, but meanwhile, I might as well enjoy every second to the max, and it may never happen and I may get away with it to the very end.”

“Or if it eventually does happen, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I had fun without fear for such a long time, I got away with all of that, and so if it all ends badly at least I will know that I did what was right, what was good, and I can authentically admire myself for it.”

Self-admiration is a much healthier thing to experience than pride. Pride is not self-admiration because it goes too far and mixes it with vanity. This is caused by the needy defensive stance of the ego which is the sense of not having caught up with integrating all the clashing parts of myself (integrity).

There are other practical ways one can increase the ability to remain in the approach mode. Time alone especially in nature, paying attention internally, seeing the good, counting the blessings, seeing the beauty all around, remembering all the good in people, being grateful, opening the mind to all possibilities, recapturing the awe and wonder of existing as a consciousness in a vast universe, realizing the wellsprings of creativity inside which can be tapped to solve anything, remembering all of the love one has for this person and that thing, and understanding the scientific possibility that we are all one benevolent loving self, manifesting as many for the fun and learning. All of these are powerful inhibitors of the avoidance reaction.

You may still decide to avoid certain things that you conclude just bring you down, but you will do so indomitably rather than fearfully. You will find a smile on your face when you look in the mirror rather than a grim visage. Your sunny disposition will draw and uplift other people making it faster for this wave of indomitability to ripple out across the pond until herd immunity to fear and pessimism has been achieved.

Each of us shall then be a mensch.

Love to all,
Bill

What Would Socrates Do?

Leave a reply

Welcome to a special Pebbles blogpost.
Created October 23, 2024

Socrates took being a citizen to be a solemn matter.

He felt a responsibility to act in the proper manner for a citizen. He even agreed that the State had the right to put him to death, despite knowing it was their error.

Perhaps it is no longer the modern way to make such commitments to ideas.

Unless you are immune to reality, you are probably attuned enough to be voting in this election.

No election before ever had such significance in the history of the world. Many millions of people are getting very involved in this election. Many who are still undecided are preparing for it by studying the solutions that each candidate is talking about and trying to be objective in comparing these proposed solutions.

It’s the kind of thing you want to be a part of. Even if you never voted before, and never do it again.

Everything you experience teaches you things.

Here are my suggestions on how to get the most out of this election in terms of having a peak experience, knowing you are part of history.

Really feel alive. Take deep breaths. Look at the sky.

When you are in the voting booth (or voting in advance), here are the steps:

1.   Look and feel deep inside yourself, who you really are in yourself, not your parents, not anybody else. What do you want out of your future? For yourself, and all of the people you care about.

2.   Focus on one candidate. Let yourself imagine what it’s going to be like on that timeline if this one wins. How it will affect you, and all the people you care about.

3.   Do the same with the other candidate.

4.   Vote.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.