Author Archives: Christine Niver

Why Does the World Seem to Be Moving Away from Democracy?

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Created October 21, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In my regular MediaVillage column the other day I advised the political parties to use imagery rather than just words in their midterm political ads. This was based on a finding that only 38% of Democrats and only about 20% of Republicans and Independents consider democracy to make it into the top two vote-deciding issues of the day. The greater concern is with money, meaning the declining portfolio values of investors and the cost of living going up. Voters clearly want those pain points to be made to go away by some form of governmental action. In the face of those felt pains on a daily basis, the idea of protecting democracy seems abstract and maybe even farfetched. My MediaVillage column implied showing, in ads, how life would be like if America became like Russia and China, people ratting each other out, getting conscripted and sent to war, not able to say what is really in their hearts and minds, and so on. This would be the way to get past abstractions and make the importance of democracy felt.

I was thinking of the great spot of the little girl smelling the flowers and then an A-bomb goes off behind her, which spot ended the presidential aspirations of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Images not words. I was picturing midterm political ads in the next couple of weeks with Americans having a loving dinner until political police kick in the door, 16-year-old girls in peaceful protests beaten to death, and so many other kinds of scenes like that which go on every day in most of the world, who live in authoritarian states rather than in democracies, ads showing those same sorts of things happening right here in America. That would be sure to cause a rise in the perceived importance of protecting our democracy in polls.

Americans are so sure of themselves however. We feel that it can “never happen here.” Which makes “protect our democracy” seem like mere political manipulation language, and we have all hardened ourselves against being manipulated.

I’m no longer so sure about the “It can’t ever happen here” thesis.

One of my former partners, a Chinese patriot in a long family line of Chinese patriots, told me sadly one day that he couldn’t stand to live in China because people were forced to rat each other out, so that you could never trust your neighbors to know anything beyond the superficial about you and your family’s doings. This was in 1983 when I visited China with him and found its ambiance very friendly, except for the airports and the soldiers inhibiting taking of some photographs. He said I didn’t know the half of it. Before he passed away he told me it’s much worse now.

Could it happen here, people ratting each other out to the government? Well, yes, in some States that are now attempting to pass or actually passing legislation paying bounties for reporting women seeking or having abortions, that’s a big step toward one of the many distressing things about living in an autocracy. One such law could move us a long way away from the kind of free-thinking freedom we’ve been used to for hundreds of years. And into the growing camp of countries who choose strong men to rule by force so as to allow individuals who play the game right to grow wealthy and powerful themselves, and the hell with everyone else.

Why is this happening now? Why didn’t it happen before? Newton’s Third Law: there is always an equal and opposite reaction. For more than a half century, civil rights, feminism, coming out of the closet, Hispanic immigration all made great strides in America, making it even better than it had always been. Then a line was crossed when Obama was elected. The shining moment. Not seen that way by everyone. Some white folks really disquieted. Pendulum starts to swing, metaphorically obeying Newton, we get Trump, Trump cozy with autocrats, acts like one, millions of Americans emulate him and let it all hang out.

Neil Postman said that television would eventually take us to a place where we all acted like we were on TV all the time. So did Aldous Huxley in his own way. We are here, living proof they were both right. Living as if in a dream world that pays very little attention to truth, facts, reality, where the average person plays back whatever they hear persuasively put, by people they are biased to believe in, in the expanded media, whether it’s backed by facts or not. Those of us lucky enough to go to college learned to think for ourselves but apparently many of us quickly forgot about that stuff under the endless media barrage. And Acceleritis. Let’s never forget that the human mind has limits and we are being pushed beyond those limits and have been for many decades by the media onslaught embedding our subconscious program of giving up trying to think for ourselves because it is all just too complex and everchanging. A great breeding ground for autocracy. Grand scale knuckling under to bullies.

That’s why it’s happening now, and why it’s already happening here. “It can never happen here” is obsolete. We are already about 40% of the way into autocracy. Fortunately, Millennials and Gen Z are thinking for themselves more than most of us. But we saw how 60s idealists were largely in finance by the 80s, so we can’t count on the purity of youth to save us. It’s an internal fight each of us has to win against our own tendencies toward autocracy, having bad feelings about some other people, unable to transcend that level of thinking and emerge into the daylight of solutions thinking, uniting rather than arguing. The essence of American democracy from the beginning. Rational discourse and civility, the genuine effort to find the win/win solution or get as close to it as possible. A uniquely American idea which echoes the importance placed upon balance by the eminent Greek philosophers.

When the question is asked in a poll after the kind of acerbic and heated media conversation that has been going on about democracy, the average person probably looks at this as a Democratic Party issue not as a really universal one. And answers accordingly, with the subconscious belief that “it can’t happen here”, that democracy is not the big issue of the day. Despite the first violent insurrection breaching the capitol in history. Insurrections are not democratic events, they are the signature of the start of most autocracies. Anyone who would use violence in those ways based on such skimpy evidence and self-delusional thinking would not hesitate to create laws to keep people from having abortions, from voting, for incentivizing tattling on others and taking vigilante actions, for gaming elections with districting, from stalling progress via filibustering, for arresting people on suspicion without habeas corpus, for allowing the state to cause individuals to disappear when considered desirable for the common good, for allowing people to be publicly humiliated in social media within purposely-impotent restrictions, for allowing legislators to goof off on the job for political gain ignoring the needs of the people, for allowing people to tell lies in the media with zero accountability… and all of the other tricks of the trade of the ever-dominant political form on the planet.

Here we are living it large and spoiled into thinking nothing can change that, all we need to do is pay less for gas and stabilize the stock market and go back to sleep. Too bad it isn’t that way, but it isn’t. Thousands of smart and calculating people have decided, long ago, to impose their will and take over control of the USA despite being a minority, and they have almost completed the operation. Millions of us have taken their word for things. Stuff happens in the world that Biden & co had no control over, yet the voters are told that that crew caused it all, and millions of people accept that without a second thought. They caused inflation, they caused the economy to go down, kick them out and put us in. Anyone running on that sort of ticket will not get my vote. I want to see solution plans, not irrelevant blame allocation. The best people in both parties can do a better job of forming their ideas and communicating them effectively, because right now the tailwind is going to people who are themselves internal autocrats, probably brought up by harsh parents, and who have the money, power, and will to win. That minority must not be allowed to take over the brightest hope of humanity. Elect Democrats or Republicans not based on their party but based on who they are and what solutions they are proposing. Are they putting down their competitors? Do they exude anger? Are they citing verifiable facts you can look up on Urban Legend and see are true, or are they telling what’s true to them?

The stakes are not just gas and stock prices. The stakes are slavery for ourselves and God knows how many generations of our progeny, if we stay asleep at the switch and let the strongest democracy ever to exist on Earth, backslide all the way centuries back into autocracy by simply voting the party and going back to whatever we were doing.

Please: Think. Feel. Vote.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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Cultivate Your Own Virtues, Including Conflict Resolution

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Created October 14, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In these dangerous times, the one thing you can do to help the world is to help yourself, by bringing out the best in yourself.

Imagine for a moment that the worst-case scenario actually happens. Say battlefield nukes are used by a person who only cares about himself, and then the use of nukes by capable parties escalates until numerous cities are wiped out and this continues until one day, you and your family come up from the basement and risk the radioactivity. And find yourself in an anarchistic society of survivors trying to pull together self-sufficient pockets built around local farms. What skills will you have to contribute?

If you’re a carpenter, plumber, electrician, doctor or dentist, farmer, or can repair machines, you will be very important to the community. Today many of us are knowledge workers and our abilities might not be immediately perceived as essential to survival. What can we do to help besides babysit, teach children to read, write and calculate?

There will always be a need for people who can help resolve conflicts through dialogue, who can serve as the voice of reason when others are locked in opposition. These are people who have processed their own internal divisions and can be objective and compassionate, who have conquered their own egos.

The value of becoming such a person – or becoming even more of such a person – is not dependent on the downside scenario. By uplifting ourselves we stand a better chance of bypassing the downside scenario. My main ongoing point is that the root causes of today’s horrifying threat vector salad are within ourselves, and that only by assimilating ancient knowhow can we transcend our racial immaturity and bootstrap ourselves to a society where leaders and citizens are profoundly converted into a state of enlightened self-interest. This is what the Founders, especially Jefferson, held as the ultimate vision for the USA and then the world.

This is not to expect spiritual enlightenment as being as close at hand for we eight billion human beings on Earth, that will surely take longer to accomplish. Enlightened self-interest is the same as pragmatism, the fully embodied predisposition to create win/win situations as being the ones that will be sustainable and most beneficial to everybody.

By contrast, the ego seeks only the satisfaction of the one self, obtusely blind to the inevitable backfire effects of winning so much personally as to force others to lose.

What we call ethics is the body of work that seeks to contain the damaging tendencies of the egos who have taken us over, much like the puppet masters in Heinlein’s novel and motion picture of that name.

What are your virtues? What are things that are best about who you are? What are your shortcomings? How can you overcome them? This is a contemplation well worth having some beautiful autumn day, perhaps today, sitting in nature where the human psyche is automatically uplifted. Bring a means of recording your revelations e.g., a notepad and pen.

The virtue of a metal is its strength. The word comes from the Latin vir, meaning man. The original application of the word was to a man’s valor, and the meaning expanded to cover honor, morality, goodness, kindness, fairness, charity, hope, spiritual faith in the goodness of the universe itself and/or of its Creator, taking care of others, and many other virtues.

In a conversation with his son, as reported by his students, Gautama Buddha taught that honesty is the primary virtue, because if a person would lie, then that person could be deceiving in other ways, such as pretending all of the other virtues.

Winston Churchill may or may not have been aware of the Buddha’s statement when Churchill proclaimed courage to be the foundational virtue, because all of the other virtues rest upon it, even honesty. It requires great courage to be honest, and great understanding to know when to not take honesty too far.

Greek philosophy assimilated earlier Eastern philosophies in esteeming balance as the most bedrock virtue, because in order to do right in a specific situation, one would need to balance all of the virtues together. This reflects a deep insight into the importance of situational (context) factors, an awareness of the complexity of things, and how such variation mandates a decision-making process which transcends black and white abstractions.

Today’s situation definitely escalates the importance of the virtue of courage, the ability to conquer one’s own fears. It’s much harder for a materialist to achieve the level of detachment which is possible for a person whose intuition is strongly supportive of the idea of a benevolent universe. However the Stoic philosophers did not depend upon spirituality to help individuals become resigned to outcomes beyond their control to prevent. Stoicism teaches that nothing is gained by fear, that in fact fear undermines the ability to overcome whatever situation is causing the fear. This was pragmatism appearing much earlier than Charles Sanders Peirce, and in subtler form.

Accepting what is and working on the controllable parts of the situation are strong plays regardless of one’s view of reality.

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The Virtue of Dialogue

Socrates and Plato were great believers in the value of dialogue, which they saw as leading to truth and deeper understanding than hortatory one-way writing. Plato explained this in relation to the value of inner dialogue as a means to reaching deep intuitional understanding of oneself and of external situations.

Dialogue was important to the Founders who believed that people elected to represent the people could talk things out reasonably and reach right decisions. Being elevated beings themselves, they may have over-estimated their fellow Americans a bit. I’ve always loved the Lorenz Hart line in the song “I Wish I Were In Love Again”: “the conversation with the flying plates”. That image seems to fit the conversations going on nowadays in the legislature, and among the three branches of US government. It would be good if we could get back to actual dialogue instead of performative anger mismanagement.

The importance and strength of dialogue can be seen if one looks carefully enough, even in current day events. In the recent UN dialogue and voting on human rights, although the many smaller countries of the world are keeping their options open and trying to play the superpowers off one another, the voting went against Russia because of the open military aggression against the Ukraine. China was not censured despite evident of flagrant human rights violations, because China is not currently invading anybody. The germ of good news I see in that is that (a) China is smart enough to read the signs and the likelihood of their invading Taiwan is now reduced a notch as a result of that vote (b) the Russian people are smart enough to see that invasions are out of style in the new world order (c) other nations who might be tempted to invade someone have relevant new data to include in their calculus.

Make yourself stronger, help others do the same, encourage people to do the right thing, do not vote for people who are concerned only about themselves no matter what they say (what they say is calculated to get your vote, do not be manipulated by your ego and your old inner rhetoric). Be prepared to deal constructively with whatever situation you find yourself in. Open your mind to all possibilities about the benevolence or indifference of the universe. Quantum physics has proven the existence of teleportation. The universe is a lot stranger thing than suspected by the anti-spiritualism movement within science in the last few hundred years. Science itself is in the slow process of changing its mind. Keep a good thought and good feelings. Live out each day with gusto and love. What’s the point of life if you’re always postponing enjoyment for some future state, as if you won’t allow yourself to smile until conditions are met. Heaven is right here in the present moment if you let it in.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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Levels of Consciousness

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Created October 7, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The idea that there might be a stepladder of different states of being goes back into antiquity, far earlier than the earliest written records. We all know that sometimes we’re on and sometimes we’re not.

Plato implied there were at least two states of being when he wrote, “The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.”

Artwork by Bruce Rolff (rolffimages.com)

What he meant by being conquered by oneself was allowing oneself to be taken over by incorrect inner biases, including fear, anger, conceit, vanity, ego. Conquering those things is what he meant by conquering yourself.

India during the time preceding the rise of written language – going back thousands of years before Plato – was aware of the stepladder of self, and sang about it in memorized sung poetry passed on from generation to generation. They knew that there was a spiritually elevated state of consciousness in which one became aware of being part of God. They also realized that before that stage was reached there were intermediary levels of consciousness. One of these was nivritti, the state in which one was no longer attached to the desires for sensory experiences.

Later in the development of this natural philosophy (science), Gautama Buddha developed the idea of nonattachment in language that anticipated modern psychology. The Greek Stoic philosophers including the greatest of them all Epictetus (must-read The Enchiridion) further honed these ideas into operational language that average human beings could understand, and can follow the practices that bring about this state of detachment. The Greeks saw a condensed stepladder which included hubris, the state of entrapment in ego which is the norm today vs. apatheia, the state of detachment (nivritti).

Also in India there evolved techniques for controlling the senses and which were therefore helpful in attaining detachment. Two paths are reported by Daniel Goleman in his classic The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience. In this valuable work Dan shows a definite stepladder construct called the Visuddhimagga (tracing back to Buddhism), with one path involving concentration and the other path utilizing insights, both ultimately reaching the state of highest spiritual oneness with the Universe and The One Self causing it.

In India there is another map called the Chakra system, which postulates a seven-stage process anticipatory of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in which the individual conquering himself/herself over the course of a lifetime (or a series of them), passes through the motivational stages of Security, Pleasure, Power, Love, Creativity, Self-Knowledge, and Self-Transcendence.

Levels of consciousness and the stages of evolution in a person’s own life are definitely related. The way they are related is that the stages in life construct is the longterm view and the levels of consciousness concept is the shortterm view. For example, in every stage of my life I experienced second-to-second changes in my level of consciousness, gradually as I moved up the chakra stages spending more and more of my time in the higher states (Observer and Flow states). You might say that the stages of life are a typology and the levels of consciousness are a phenomenology.

In Judaism, those attaining the Observer state (the lowest state in which the mind is enabled to conquer the ego by metacognition and self-metaprogramming) are called menschen (singular=mensch). In the I Ching, the “superior man” has approximately the same meaning. These are foreshortened stepladders into two possible conditions similar to the Greek hubris/apatheia, whereas other conceptions of the journey involve many more states, such as Visuddhimagga and my own map cited below, as well as an interesting stepladder created by a synthesis of the Rig Veda and Piaget’s developmental stages.

These ancient (and modern day) observations about what the mind can do are very relevant to our world today. Our own Western psychology, in a fight to gain the respect of the “harder” (easier to prove) sciences such as physics and chemistry, has straightjacketed and blindered itself into a heavy emphasis on behaviorism, because of its visibility from outside the subject. This to some extent mirrors Plato’s concerns about how our senses can be fooled, implying to modern minds the need for an external observer to observe the observer. However Plato had his own solution which was to employ the mind without the senses, which was more in line with the Eastern traditions cited above.

As a science, today’s Western psychology has skipped over the value of inner observation out of a distrust for the reporter of inner experiences. This is truly throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Our behavioristic psychology has been strongly involved with neurosis and psychosis, which definitely deserve attention, but insufficiently sparse with regard to the positive possibilities of the mind. Future psychology must repair this faster than present forces end the race too soon.

It might also be seen as a circularity of reasoning. Because individual scientists have ego, whatever they write about what happened within them internally will be distorted by their desire for self-aggrandizement, therefore  causing Western psychologists to think: let us measure third-party-observable behavior and place a stiff taboo on introspective reporting being considered acceptable within science. The reason this is circular is that without the knowledge of the techniques by which to reach higher states of consciousness we cannot get the ego out of the way; but because ego is ubiquitous in modern world culture and rules it, we are unable to learn those techniques that would remove the ego from its hypnotic Orwellian power over us, leading us to our doom.

That’s why I write about these ancient subjects, because they are a necessary part of our immediate future, if we are to have a future. The future psychology must make introspective data admissible within guardrails to be established and verified by third-party observations of behavior. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave us that validation system: it is the obviousness of the Flow state, a term which he coined. Some of what attracts human attention through the media is the Flow state that athletes demonstrate, as do great musicians, and performers of many types that we can see on our devices. We are appropriately awestruck watching what a human being can accomplish if they follow the requisite techniques to conquer themselves, as Plato put it.

In my book You Are The Universe, Chapter 21 is devoted to Levels of Consciousness, and offers a construct involving five levels of Flow state, starting with the Flow state of the body, and ultimately attaining the Supreme Flow state of the spirit. The levels shown in that chapter represent my own experience as organized around the map created by Oscar Ichazo and adopted by John Lilly, which was informed by the speculative stepladders of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

One of the techniques on the stairway to heaven, up Jacob’s Ladder, that is common to all religions is meditation, but it is not alone, it’s joined by contemplation and concentration. All three of these techniques require the conquering of the senses directly, one of the paths up the Visuddhimagga. The other path involving insights is represented in modern thought, for example, by my manual Mind Magic which is a compendium of mental/emotional self-interventions resulting in the conquest of oneself (specifically the ego part).

Levels of consciousness are important because in the race between education and destruction (H.G. Wells), if we as a species do not bring the subject of levels of consciousness to the forefront of the world media conversation, and into our lives as a daily regimen, we are at great risk of not being able to avert racial suicide which is visibly in its early stages even to an optimist like me. It is the failure of our science and education system worldwide (including the religions) that while maintaining the pomp and ceremony and numinous traces of the teachings of Christ and Buddha et al, we have eaten the seed and thrown away the fruit.

Getting billions of people to recognize that there is an internal stepladder to be climbed and helping them as they try to make their way up the stairway is a herculean task. I see no way around it. We definitely need to start with world leaders and would-be world leaders. May divine intervention make it so.

Love to all,

Bill

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The Future Psychology

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Created September 30, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Why think about the future of psychology, aren’t the rush of current discoveries enough? We are close to proving ESP. What else do you want?

A common phrase in marketing nowadays is “early wins”. It means when you have a Big Idea, it’s good to have some immediate tangible benefits.

Physics has had a never-ending run of early wins going back as far as you can go. Rubbing two sticks together was an early win of physics, the discovery of how to cause fire. The unbroken string continues through television and atom bombs, space travel, the Internet, virtual reality, cyborgism and perhaps cyborgasm.

What has psychology done for us lately? People continue to benefit from psychotherapies of all kinds. Research continues on all fronts. Nothing quite so spectacular as physics in the pragmatic big picture.

Could there be?

Why should we postulate a possible breakthrough by which psychology can become as relevant to the average person as physics?

Because what could be more important to us than us, ourselves? Any tangible improvement in our abilities to function effectively has more value than our pastimes. (Like love and war, television and VR.)

What if that shift de-necessitated war – naturally, coming from insides of us, out. No longer needing that psychotic entertainment form.

It has to emerge naturally or it is just another feeble hope that everyone will play nice forever, despite having been killer apes since before the beginning. We have to de-evolve away from the bloodlust by natural causes, stuff like psychotherapy and yogic meditation is where the new wave will come from in psychology.

The new wave will center on the notion of helping the human race improve cognitive and all other functional capabilities of consciousness. Therefore its metrics will be guided by experimental performance trials and verified increases in individual effectiveness. Analytics will be set up to deconstruct effectiveness into separate components including such types of effectiveness as creativity, imagination, hunches, system1, system2, etc.

Should new wave psychologists focus more on the structure of the mind, or on its functions? In consciousness, structure is function. However, connecting the physical neurological manifestations which happen concurrently with experiential qualia, is one horizon at which to aim. Many are working in this field which has been ably led by Dr. Richard Davidson since he and Daniel Goleman and their famous friends including Ram Dass started the trail. Richy has identified the brain signatures of meditative states and made the connection to beneficial health effects.

“Interventions” is a term used to signify third party actions with a goal in mind. The new wave psychologists will ultimately wind up testing all sorts of interventions to determine the Efficacy Lift Score (ELS) for each one. The epigrams in my book Mind Magic will be in that long conveyor belt of interventions worth testing.

Although the general drift will be to assuage but not be dominated by one’s own ego, the ego always has a way of sneaking back in. In this case the ego will cause there to be hierarchical thinking related to levels of consciousness, where people will strive to give the appearance of having a higher level of consciousness than the others. That will be unfortunate but it will be managed with appropriate forethought.

The idea that some of us are in a more effective state of consciousness, and the experience that we ourselves have, of going up and down in level of effectiveness, leads to the notion that there are organically-defined states or levels of consciousness in a ladder, and that this will turn out to be a scientific fact.

In an earlier post, I theorized what this ladder might look like, based on the work of Abraham Maslow and of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, and my own experiences, shown here and more detail in that post:

Given the human tendency to oversimplify, objective research into levels of consciousness may be tarred as elitist. That too can be clarified. It’s desirable not only for the one person but for all of us, for the one person to be effective. Wanting to make everyone more effective is not an elitist thought.

You have the opportunity to get ahead of the crowd. Test alternative interventions to see if they increase your effectiveness by watching these short videos, here or here.

In next week’s edition: A Brief History of Levels of Consciousness Research.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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