Author Archives: Christine Niver

The Art of Neutralizing Negative Emotion

Created June 3, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Negative emotion serves one pro-survival purpose only: it galvanizes us into action as an alarm system.

Once having detected her/his own negative emotion, the sophisticated Flow state experiencer moves quickly to neutralize the negative emotion and to work rationally and dispassionately on solving the problem which caused it. Like turning off the alarm clock in the morning.

What is a sophisticated Flow state experiencer? A person who has had the benefit of learning how to perform some skill so well that they repeatedly experience the sense of autotelic behavior: behavior that appears to do itself, perfectly, and without the need to put forth any effort for that to occur.

Such a person then invariably begins to contemplate this strange experience that comes and goes and is very welcome to stay longer than it ever does.

In a way, a sophisticated Flow state experiencer is like a lucid dreamer, one who is able to know the she/he is dreaming, and therefore able to control the dreams to a greater degree than the average person. “Life is but a dream” is a line out of the children’s song Row, Row, Row Your Boat. In that metaphor, the lucid dreamer is the sophisticated Flow state experiencer in the dream level we call “real life”.

I know that negative emotion can be neutralized because I do it all the time now. I’m not sure that I can put into words the perfect instructions for how you can do this, but I’ll try.

First, why? Why would you want to learn the trick of neutralizing your own negative emotions?

One obvious answer is that you feel bad when you have negative emotions and it’s obvious that nobody would choose to feel bad when they could otherwise feel good.

Another valid answer is that negative emotions reduce our effectiveness and keep us out of higher states of consciousness, such as the Observer state and the Flow state.

In the Observer state you can see why you have an impulse that arises in you out of your subconscious. In normal waking consciousness you would either simply act out the impulse or hesitate without knowing what to do.

In Flow state you are beyond all that, your body and mind are doing everything perfectly without any inner heckling or gloating.

Negative emotion blocks both of these higher levels of performance. It also biases choices and decisions we make rather than enable objectivity and rationality in making better decisions.

When I neutralize negative emotion one thing that happens is that I observe what is going on inside me very attentively and put aside emotion entirely. I observe emotion and therefore am not inside it anymore. There is a falling away of my historic passions and motivations into a deferred file to be resumed later. I am highly cognizant of the lack of proof for any position over any other position in terms of human values. I experience sort of an ennui, or boredom, or tiredness with everything I stand for and believe in and am trying to bring about. I have a feeling, unspoken, of something like ho hum so what. I am as if reborn tabula rasa (blank slate). I can see things in new ways I could not before. Consider possibilities I never would have considered before. I have total free will with no mortgages from the past. All of this happens in a moment.

You might try this and see if it works for you the next time that something gives you negative emotion of any kind. Anger, hate, resentment, loathing, fear, guilt, melancholy, depression, sadness, regret, physical pain, loss.

Negativity keeps us from more quickly solving the problem that caused the negativity.

Love to all,

Bill

What It Takes to Get Back on Track

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Created May 27, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Each day the news becomes more worrisome. I don’t remember ever experiencing a time like the one we are passing through now.

One thing that will be necessary if we’re going to turn this all around is a new emphasis on reinventing ourselves, each one of us.

That’s because the roots of our current history are embedded in each individual consciousness. Disunity, divisiveness, power hunger, anger, hate, violence, fear are all manifestations of ego. We’ve let our egos get too big.

At the same time, we’ve lost sight of the ultimate goal of coming to a mystical understanding of the universe and our role in it. Awe and wonder are browbeaten out of us even before we leave childhood by the pervading cynicism that has become the sine qua non of sophistication. Non-cynics are derided just for backsliding from the cynical stance of our Age.

Even our top scientific minds who retain their awe and wonder at nature remain trapped in the unproven assumption that consciousness is an afterthought in the universe. Somehow the scotoma (blind spot) is so large that otherwise brilliant minds do not connect the dots between the “observer” essential to Relativity Theory and consciousness. The leading quantum physicists of today, many of whom who were mentored by John Wheeler, colleague of Einstein and Bohr, first to coin the term “black hole”, do not get it that in his ultimate view of the universe, consciousness and matter are equally important, as if their minds cannot conceive of it, or simply that they would rather stay in the acceptable range for sake of their careers. The latter behavior brings us back to the ego dominated culture in which we now all live, where going along with the herd is the prime directive, in order to get what you want.

But at the same time this involves compromising quite a bit with what we, deep down, really want as unique individuals. The percentage of us who live out their dreams and earn their living pursuing their passion work are a dismally tiny percent of the population everywhere on Earth. As it has been since as far back as history remembers. When something has always been a certain way, it is invisible, taken for granted, never even thought about, no alternative ever imagined.

When I say the present world must start from a reinvention of ourselves, each person for themself, what do I really mean?

Self-improvement is a term that means something different to each person. Most books on the subject are about losing weight and exercising. The relative few that are not mainly about the body are about the important subjects of meditation, yoga, mindfulness, and positive thinking.

The invisible elephant in the room is that these are the 101 of the subject. They are introductory, and barely scratch the surface. For most people, these primers equip the person to give the right answers (ego again) to continue to be perceived as up-to-date in conversations. But these surface readings and parrotings on the subject tend to not fundamentally change mental or outward behavior.

In the words of a reader of Mind Magic, Benjamin Zabriskie, writing in his Amazon Review:

Dismiss thoughts that don’t benefit you. Deny social impetus that would otherwise dominate you. Perceive new realities at your whim. Stop time and think. Leave this earthly realm behind and explore the diverse worlds of the hearts and minds of all living things. Restructure your actions, thoughts, perceptions and desires into exactly the shape that suits your goals.

Not for the weak-hearted, nor the easily scared, this book is THE owners manual for the mind. This book presents nearly impossible challenges to even the most powerful and dedicated seekers. I’ve never known a single person that actually finished the work contained in this book.

When I took up my asceticism, I decided to give my extensive book collection to the local library. After paring down hundreds of books I was left with only 3 essential manuscripts. Mind Magic: The Science of the Microcosm is one of those incredible spiritual powerhouses. Only recently did I finally give my copy away to a young man in need of self-understanding.

In other words, what the world needs now is for people to do a very deep soul searching beyond anything they have ever experienced before. It is multidimensional and goes far beyond the pop-psyk books lining the shelves.

It’s cognitive and emotional, intuitional and perceptual. It’s a complete rebuild, rethink, start from scratch.

One of the hundreds of specific techniques explained in full in the manual is to eschew ego moves. To detect and interrupt your own automatic inner impulses to toot your own horn in ways that have become perfectly socially acceptable and which everyone practices continuously to maintain their own egos.

This is part of a chapter that is broader in scope, entitled Avoid Hasty Closure, which in general means to edit your actions and do so by reflecting continuously on where each of your own thoughts and impulses is coming from. Is it authentic and real in the moment, or is it the ego robot playing one of its tapes?

If everyone in the world took responsibility for what they can actually really do to help us all out of the present existential dilemma, namely to reinvent themselves, with very serious methodical principles, we would have at least a better chance for survival as a species and with the ability to choose to live in a place where we feel that our rights are respected. A better chance to avert the robotic pendulum swing back to despotic centralism, which itself is the unavoidable manifestation of a culture in which ego is king.

Another chapter focuses on visualizing the universe as one thing, including oneself and everyone else, consciousness and matter and energy and time and space all one thing. Wheeler’s scientific assessment of this singularity, the one thing we call the universe, is that it is in constant self-reinvention, even able to reinvent the actual past (read the link above for the details). Whether other scientists agree or disagree is irrelevant, Mind Magic does not advise believing anything, it advises simply keeping a truly open mind.

The amazing thing about simply keeping an open mind about what we the universe are, allows you to once again experience the inspiring awe and wonder, and the sense of transcendent possibility, of living a real mystery unfolding, the transcendent feeling.

Highly recommended: article in Renew magazine, published by United Healthcare Group, “The Power of Awe”, documenting the widespread research now establishing the health benefits of awe, which can also be seen here.

One of the benefits found in these many articles of the feeling of awe, is that it also comes with a greater sense of feeling of connectedness with other people. That would surely help as we are otherwise pulling apart in all directions.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to become sharper.”

–William Butler Yeats

Love to all,

Bill

2042: The Human Union

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Created May 20, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Bill Harvey was very old by then, but he suddenly felt very young again when the international space mission landed on Ganymede. Its shuttle brought the astronauts down in groups of four (all the shuttle was built for) so everyone could enjoy actually being there. The crew contained astronauts from a number of countries including the United States of America, China, and Russia. With the astronauts chosen solely on merit, the other countries represented included some small ones.

With permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars and more coming, the world economy had evolved to include the international territories throughout reachable space. An “international territory” was part of planet Earth, not part of any specific nation on Earth.

These colonies were the children the Earth nations were choosing to have together.

Planners studied the history of colonies on Earth, and read Robert A. Heinlein’s prophetic novels, in order to know what to avoid in the era of space colonization. It had been decided that these colonists, picked as carefully as astronauts, would have to be treated permanently as having the right to make decisions as sovereigns of their colony.

One rule that was finally agreed upon that multiple colonies on a given planet or satellite were okay, so long as they cooperated and remained committed to their equality relationships with the nations on Earth, and that a given planet or satellite or asteroid would never find itself split between disagreeing factions, or seceding from the Human Union.

Companies were the main explorers of space, with governments taking almost as big a role, in order to feel in control of security risks. This was a vast improvement over the rich having wandered to Hollywood as a way of investing excess wealth and having the most fun possible for them at the same time. That went on, of course, but now the big bucks were going to space and fundamental R&D. R&D companies flourished because investors saw the much greater possible returns of discovering new science upon which to monetize technology. R&D had always been a low single-digit percentage but was now double-digit everywhere.

In fact, there was so much opportunity for competition in commerce, driven by new science and technology, that the attraction for wars had once again receded, following the same curve as in the period 1945-2013. All that testosterone had a different outlet.

After things started getting too hot in 2022, some rational people created a new media type in which world leaders could have conversations open to public view on virtual reality television (VTV) where the heads of state looked like they were in the same room or auditorium. The personal gravitas and objectivity of the show hosts led to slow reluctant participation by all of the nations, although it took a long time to build up to that level. Nonetheless, from the start this became a new species of high rated high attention television. The ads accepted in island position (no podding) were guidelined to be apropos for the viewing environment, and advertisers and agencies by then understood the need to impart altruism and empathy in advertising.

The world leaders having the opportunity to actually communicate rather than merely posture, after the first few weeks, some normal human communication actually began to occur (not devoid of posturing). The “west” laid out its agenda of world cooperation and peaceful resolution of differences. This was hard to publicly disagree with, so it was the first happy moment when that idea was unanimously ratified. China and Russia requested, in the spirit of cooperation, that all economic warfare had to stop, and the “west” provisionally agreed with that, if enough that had separated us could be agreed upon so that we could all relax.

So, then it was a long process of naming the gripes and figuring out how to resolve them amicably. Win/win outcomes. These were reasonably approximated, without however satisfying everyone. Those on the sidelines eager to get in would apply by bitching about something or other, and sweetening that with a good idea, which would usually qualify them to be on camera. This tended to cause people to try to think up good ideas instead of just ranting about the other party.

It was in this atmosphere that the cooperation spread from among governments to also bring in the business world. Corporations and cartels had already become as powerful as governments (as predicted by Dr. Strangelove) so that the idea of combining forces was natural. It was a sharp shift from companies funding candidates for public office, so it changed the nature of the relationship in a constructive way.

Younger people started calling upon companies to make the world a better place in the 60s and 70s and that “movement” is now essentially the entire population, with a younger skew because young people haven’t been fully disillusioned yet.

Space was only one way in which businesses worked with governments to help solve world problems. When everyone suddenly saw the voter booth value of actually creating positive change rather than just talking about it, many whose legislative master strategy was to slow forward change and where opportune, go back to perceived-as-better ideas of the past, pivoted toward getting in on public gratitude as their first principle, which meant being part of making majority- and minority-perceived improvements.

Bill was very old by then, as I’d mentioned, but all of these developments between 2022 and 2042 kept him feeling young, and kept him alive.

Love to all,

Bill

PS – Incidentally, the idea about a VTV “world conflict resolution show” appears in the background of my new sci-fi novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices which includes a panoply of other elements that amuse me.

The Two Future Scenarios We Must Choose Between

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Created May 13, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

One of these scenarios is very easy to visualize. It’s the downside scenario of war. We’ve seen the way this works and are extremely familiar with it. We can picture it, including sitting under a mushroom cloud ourselves, something I’ve been visualizing all my life.

The upside scenario is not nearly as easy to visualize. We as a race have not expressed much about that scenario. We seem morbidly attracted to dwelling upon the negative.

And yet we seemed to be making some progress there for a while.

In 2003, the late Mark W. Zacher, a pioneer in the study of global governance, wrote a paper published by Cambridge University Press called “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force”. In it, he cited nearly 100 academic authors in establishing his case that “coercive territorial revisionism” was on the decline since the end of WWII. Many of the scholars he referenced indeed painted the same picture.

Alas, today we see that this relatively halcyon period appears to have come to an end. WWII-size battles reducing beautiful cities to rubble in Europe are now happening again. Do we have to go back into the old game? Is it built into us that there will never be an end to people fighting for ground?

In the development of species, the hardwired instinct for territoriality behavior goes back at least as far as the first reptiles and perhaps even further back. But humanity, possessed of more obvious intellectual credentials than other Earth species, in discovering what instincts are, could use its brains to conquer instincts – or can we?

Why is it that Putin and his supporters feel the urgent need to own more land when they already are such a massive piece of geography? Opinions in the press suggest that he is driven to re-establish the U.S.S.R. And why would that be what drives him? Why would he not set equally lofty goals for leading the human race into space, or building larger particle accelerators than the west, or some other goal that is more original? The goal of simply taking over the neighborhood goes way back, it’s imitative behavior, it may make us remember a person in history but not necessarily in a positive way. It’s been done before. Why not show off by doing something new?

Why would China place such importance on taking back Taiwan which had previously been called Formosa? There are so many other things for China to do, and they are already doing most of them, and doing well at them. If the specter of war were swept off the table China should be among the most confident and hopeful nations on Earth. Why bother with adding another small swath of land to their country? When one takes land by force it’s only a matter of time before someone else is there attacking you to take that land back. It’s almost guaranteed to become a perpetual motion machine keeping war in the lives of your descendants for many generations if not forever.

The human race has so many better things to do rather than return to the old bullying game. It’s gotten so old. First, we have to bring the pandemic down to permanent containment, which implies far-reaching progress in being able to anticipate the directions mutations could take, and getting the jump on them before they go there. Then we have to bring everyone up to par in quality of life. Then we have to bring education up to an unprecedented level that is individualized to each person’s gifts and aspirations, lifelong education that starts in the home from birth and lasts throughout the individual’s lifetime. The list goes on and on after that, so many things to do to make us all feel a sense of purpose, of meaning.

Underneath everything else all of us are driven by a search for meaning. We didn’t make it any easier for ourselves when we made it unhip to allow for the possibility of God. Even in a world that avoids God like the devil, a person can still live a meaningful life by simply bringing her/his gifts out for the enjoyment of others. Putin and Xi each have huge canvases on which they are free to paint beautiful pictures the world can adore, why settle for the bad guy role, even if lies and censorship can make people keep their mouths shut? Why is that the way that Putin and Xi can make themselves the happiest?

If we didn’t have such a rich roster of activities into which we could happily throw ourselves, then maybe I could understand playing the war game, but that game has worn thin its welcome. We’ve had a good run since the end of WWII – not without enough violence for anyone with a taste for that stuff – but staying away from major wars. Why break the winning spree now? Just because they can? I suspect that is the real explanation.

But no one’s hands are clean. The rest of us have not done enough to paint the picture of what life could be like if there is world cooperation on the broadest scale. Dystopias have more drama in them, and more opportunity for action scenes, while utopias are easy to put down because cynicism is hip. So few if any utopian movies or television series or novels. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” came as close to a utopian vision of a united Earth culture as we’ve seen on television. Lost Horizon by James Hilton (1933) was a novel and then a movie which showed how a sequestered culture could live in harmony (the story of mythical Shangri-La).

When Joe Biden was elected, I wrote a series of fictional stories here in Pebbles in which Joe reached out to Vlad and Jinping and detailed how cooperation could be attained and how lovely that would be for everybody, with me hoping that was in his plans. My c dream soon collapsed, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. If we don’t detail the upside scenario we will continue to slide down into this downside scenario we’ve been stuck on for too long. Someday soon we may never again have the option of revisiting this upside visualization opportunity, there may not be a someday if we don’t start now.

Love to all,

Bill

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Author Archives: Christine Niver

The Art of Neutralizing Negative Emotion

What It Takes to Get Back on Track

2042: The Human Union

The Two Future Scenarios We Must Choose Between