Author Archives: Christine Niver

A Holiday Gift to Our Readers

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Updated December 17, 2021

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog post.

With affection and gratitude for you, our best friends and readers, this post and the next one will be a chapter out of my new science fiction book, The First Son, an alternate view of the great turning points in history over the climactic period from 3100 BC through the Resurrection.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07LCRV3GM/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3

 

Many of you will sense a familiarity with the story in this chapter. What’s new is the viewpoint of five characters who are witnessing and participating in the unfolding event as Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, which is also the name of the series of 15 novels I am currently writing.

In this first published book of the series, ancient legends and mysteries are seen in a different light, connecting seemingly disconnected fragments of history, and introducing the invisible side of things as they might have happened.

Without further ado, let me tell you a story…

One night as Mary sat in meditation in her cell in the Temple, an unusual light crept to the barred arched window high above. It drew her attention and as she watched, the light grew brighter and expanded slowly down the walls until the room shone as if a full moon was exactly at the correct angle to illumine the room. Enchanted by this thought, she stood and tried to step into position to see the full moon but it was not there, and then she remembered that she had seen the full moon a week or so ago, so the light could not be coming from the moon.

Mary, a kind voice said in her mind and she was suddenly very alert. Her heart was beating loudly in her ears. Don’t be afraid, Mary, the voice said, for you have found favor in God’s eyes.

The Agents invisibly present were silent out of respect for an Archangel. It was Gabriel, also invisible, and come from far away as messenger of The One.

Mary prostrated herself on the floor, realizing it was an Angel, and sensing other Angels around her. Technically, Agents were of a different order than Angels, but Mary did not know of such distinctions. She spoke aloud, softly. “What can I do for God that He sends you to me? Please name it, and I shall obey.”

You shall have a son, who will be The First Son of God, and you shall name him Yeshua Immanuel. He comes to free Israel and all creatures on Earth of the reign of sinfulness, the Angel responded.

“But I am a virgin, and betrothed to Joseph,” Mary said before she could stop herself, and then regretted having said anything that showed doubt.

You will still be a virgin when you marry Joseph, although by that time God will have planted His seed in you.

“You know that I could be stoned to death as an adulteress. Even Joseph who is good, and trusts me, may depart from me.”

You are protected, Mary, I shall speak with Joseph, and no harm will befall you. When you are married and Joseph knows you for the first time, his faith in you will be vindicated forever.

“Then I am the Lord’s handmaiden, to be done with as He wilt.” She felt something overtake her then and had to lie down. A softness gently pressed her from above, and she felt infinite joy and wellbeing, swooning as she felt the first stirrings of a new life within her.

Mary confided to Joseph what had happened the next time he visited her. He believed her but still felt conflicted until Gabriel visited him in a dream and set his mind to rest. Once Mary told Hillel, he advised her to spend the rest of her pregnancy with Mary’s cousin Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s husband Zachariah in a hill town of Judea, in order to avoid trouble as the pregnancy began to show and most people would be cynical. Elizabeth, he told her, had an unusual pregnancy too, given her advanced age. An Angel had also come to Zachariah to inform him that as he and his wife had long prayed, they would have a son, who would be an important servant of God. When Elizabeth welcomed Mary, Elizabeth felt her son jump for joy in her belly. Her son would later become an Essene known as John the Baptist. He had also been Ezekiel. His real identity is Melchizedek, an Agent of Cosmic Intelligence.

Mary returned home in time to give birth in Nazareth, but upon arriving, Joseph told her they would have to set out for Bethlehem to register in the census ordered by Caesar Augustus. Bethlehem was back in Judea, from whence Mary had just come. “Why Bethlehem?” she asked.

“Because I am—and we are—of the house of David,” Joseph said, and Bethlehem was the city of David. Now that they were married, Joseph fully trusted her, having confirmed for himself that she was still a virgin on their wedding night. This miracle affirmed everything he had been taught by Hillel and everything that his intuition had told him was true since his earliest memories.

I suspect the whole census hokum was cooked up to find Him. Templegard/Menachem expressed all of their feelings, except Melchizedek’s, who was only half-awake within the Baptist, in Elizabeth’s womb.

Herod’s magicians sensed it and read it in the omens, Maitreya/Hillel reminded them. All of Herod’s Arya were semi-awake Rebels. Kings decreeing the slaughter of all male sons was a well-established Rebel practice whenever the shamans sensed an enemy being born. It had gone on for millennia on Earth, and much longer across the multiverse. This was old hat to the Agents.

When Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, Mary was weary and felt her time to be near. Joseph had rehearsed and was ready to tell a guard at the gate why he was ordered to enter and about Mary’s condition, when the guard winked. Joseph was startled and stared as the guard gently led them in, suspiciously not even saying a word of explanation to the other guards and the officer. Nastassia, appearing as a burly young male, led the couple in and although a foreign mercenary who would be expected to be hustling them along all the more cruelly for supposedly knowing Mary’s condition—Joseph somehow had a feeling that he knew—did nothing to hasten their pace, which given the journey was that of a much older couple.

“She’ll be coming soon,” Nastassia observed to Joseph. Joseph looked at him levelly, wondering at the intimacy and if the guard had evil intent.

“We could have found a room, actually. Despite the horde of visitors there are still kin who have space,” Nastassia explained, leading them to an active barn with many animals, many of them chickens trailing chicks, but no other people. Layla was also there but not presently visible. Joseph’s nose crinkled in disgust at the smells of animals where Nastassia now pointed at a very clean and large bed made of hay in a charming corner with outside lighting. There were rose petals on it. Mary petted a baby lamb that had rubbed her calf and looked up adoringly. The chickens ran in all directions with their tail of chicks as the humans and pseudohuman came into the space.

“There are misguided people who want your child to die,” Nastassia whispered in Joseph’s ear, confirming his worst fears. “Don’t panic, we your friends are all around you. You’re always safe in God’s hands.”

Joseph and Mary both profusely thanked the young man, who smiled back and said, “My sister will be here to help with the birth. She’s right outside.”

In the alleyway where nobody could see, Layla appeared in a clean white apron, with towels and pockets stuffed with things, and holding a silver bowl of slightly steamy water. She had a red bandana on her blonde head and a pink scarf, and no shoes. She peeked in and saw the couple waving her to come in, so she did. Nastassia disappeared as soon as “he” stepped out of sight.

Joseph and Layla helped Mary get comfortable on the bed. “What’s your name, sister?” Mary inquired respectfully of the girl even younger than herself.

“I’m a Mary too,” Layla said, and Mary took her meaning that they were both nuns.

“Thank you so much,” Joseph said to the other Mary.

Inside the soon-to-be mother Mary was a confrontation of which she was caused to be unaware, although this was against Perse’s will. Perse had come to intimidate his older brother, or perhaps even tempt him, depending on how it went.

You know I could kill you right now, Perse pathed, and Yeshua merely smiled inside Mary’s womb. Maitreya, Templegard and Nastassia prepared for mental combat, as did Layla, though showing no sign of it.

Excerpted from THE FIRST SON, Chapters 23–24, pp 118–123, ©2018, Bill Harvey

Best to all,

Bill

Who Am I?

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Created December 10, 2021

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog post.

When you hear yourself talking to yourself in your mind and using your name, what do you think?

As in:

Bill, you know you are not going to forget an idea like that, you don’t have to write it down, stop acting crazy.

Perhaps you dialog with yourself:

Why am I addressing Bill as if I were someone else? I am Bill.

No, I Am That I Am. As I always have been and will be. I know the past and future. But I – in many forms – am changing it every day, thank Myself! Otherwise I’d be alone for eternity. I give spinoffs self-control so I can laugh at myself as they/I muck things up, and through my I’s I can feel a wide range of emotions with incredible intensity, because I think I have skin in the game.

Who is Bill, then? I asked, my vision having been suddenly altered so that I now seemed to be hovering within the back of Bill’s head.

Our car this time!

An idea that has never occurred to you? Or one that since the 60s has gripped you? That it could all be the one videogame, all that exists, and that naturally who each of us is, is a faithful microcosm of The One Self, an avatar in a videogame but with no memory of your real life. As in the movie Total Recall.

With earthly videogames, we don’t so totally lose ourselves in our character. This will become less and less of an unsound barrier as virtual reality (VR) evolves. We already have feelies and have known how to add smellies for decades. With a little plastic straw in your mouth soon you can have tasties.

So VR fans will see God sooner than most of us.

“The human body serves as a receptacle for the divine, allowing it to enter into the world,” writes Michel Quinot, quoting the Patristic tradition. The writer has deep knowledge into, and feeling for Orthodox theology and its art, and a way of writing that shifts one into that thrilling feeling about life.

He writes: “God… is said to have clothed himself in flesh in order that man might be clothed in divinity.”

Let’s say that part of it is true.

Before stipulating any other religious belief beyond that, why is that part so hard to take seriously?

“That part” being that you, reading this now, are and have always been the author of the Universe, the Universe Itself.

We recent/still apes have the concept of VR videogames in which the player can lose self into the character being played. Something unimaginably larger than yourself in terms of information processing power could easily exist.

You have an awareness of yourself, so it’s not a leap to assume this even more powerful likely-to-exist mind could also possess this gift.

At minimum, more powerful minds than ours are a near certainty somewhere in the Universe.

So stepping from imagining that supermind, to where I perceive truth lies, please step up to imagining that you are the Universe.

What is looking out your character’s eyes is the Universe, not a part of it but the whole Universe is looking out your eyes.

Same for every other character in the improv play.

Life is an improv play.

And also an improve play. The trajectory of the story is from spiritual and physical rags to riches, by our own dedicated self-improvement.

Not just a book fad since the 60s. That’s the main thing we’re here to do. We’re also allowed to have fun and free will. And pleasure and wealth of all kinds.

Since we now all know this, can we now all start having fun together instead of what our characters have cooked up for Us?

Best to all,

Bill

A Method for Gaining Inner Control

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Created December 3, 2021

On an average day, what percent of your waking hours are spent in a really good mood?

Let’s try a scientific experiment together to see whether this method can increase that percentage.

The experiment will run from now through whenever you decide the experiment is over.

During the experiment, you’ll try out the method espoused here. What you’ll be looking for is any change in the degree to which your days become filled with good moods.

First, some needed background. The things that bring us down from our really good mood tend to fall into two types:

  1. Things our conditioned brain classifies as threat vectors.
  2. Things that our brain sees as annoying irrelevant distractions that are sapping our efforts to deal effectively with the threats.

Our outwardly focused Western civilization tends to leave us with little interest in studying what is going on inside of us from one second to the next. Most of us in the West are used to clumping together everything that goes on in our minds and emotions as one thing.

This hidden assumption gives us no leverage with which to gain inner control. Then, if and when we come to the conclusion that we need to gain control of ourselves, we fall back upon yelling at ourselves in our mind, a strategy with very low success potential.

Although we can chunk our inner experiences into more than two buckets, this method simplifies the inner glory of our existence into just two buckets.

Let’s call one state the Self, and the other state the Ego.

The Self is your “Me That Was Born” – the way you were before you had any experiences outside of the womb. The Self is an experiencer, an entity that has personal subjective experience, both of events within the psyche called qualia, as well as your experience of “external” events. The Self is pure consciousness without an object, until events call the Self’s attention.

The Ego is part of your mind/body/soul’s autonomic nervous system. It is robotic, like a kneejerk. It is the result of your “inner” and “outer” experiences. It is the conditioned neural pathways that have been laid down in your physical brain.

You may not know it yet (until now), but you can be controlled from either place – your Self or your Ego. Your inner feelings and clues can reveal to you in which seat you are sitting at any given moment.

If you are feeling either calmly neutral or positive, taking in what is going on and playing with it for fun or because it’s your passion work, you are in your Self.

The hints that you have been sucked into control by the Ego are anger, fear, irritation, comparison of self with others, tension, wanting something it doesn’t look like you’ll be getting, feeling under time pressure, feeling inadequate or cocky. The list goes on but you get the idea.

The first principle of this method is simply to remember to check the hints to see where you happen to be from time to time during the day and night.

When you start to get really good at this – remembering to check your state often – the easy part is then knowing which state you are in. The tricky part is how to back out of the Ego, and that’s where the method comes in.

The method works best when you can maneuver yourself into being alone for a few minutes. This is the beauty of bathrooms. When else are we allowed to grab a few minutes of alone time?

I see you sitting on the bathroom throne, wearing your clothes. You close your eyes, rotate your shoulders backwards, your back is straight. You check every part of your body for tension and relax it there and everywhere. Breathe deeply and slowly.

Focus on the part of you that is the observer, that doesn’t care what happens. It sounds impossible but that is the real you, your core, your essence. The closer to it you get the less you are attached to what happens with whatever the current threat vectors are. You may not experience this on the first serious try – or you might.

You’ll experience this state as fatalistic, accepting of whatever life deals out, and happy to play by those rules or seek to change them, but not troubled. You are above all that stuff.

Way back before there was human language, it’s possible that our brains had threat-related reactions only a few times a year. But as our own creativity continues to make life more complicated every day, we now tend to have threat/Ego reactions multiple times every minute – a pre-existing unnoticed pandemic I call Acceleritis.

The Ego will fight back by arguing that you can’t risk being fatalistic you have to try harder to win or you will wind up in the gutter and no one will like you.

The Ego can be very convincing. All you have to do is to deal with the holding of your position in the Self, in what I call Observer state, the state right before Flow state.

Yes, this is a method that will lead to your more frequent flights of Flow state.

It’s a good thing when the Ego calms down and starts to converse sanely with the Self about the matters that are driving it wild. The Self’s innate intuition gives answers which in some cases actually convince the Ego, at least for that moment. In time, the Ego becomes reabsorbed as a useful extension of the Self, as God intended it, before we screwed it up with Acceleritis. Too much creativity. Too much of a good thing.

But we can have our cake and eat it too, by this method. We can continue the reckless adventuring into making real whatever comes into our heads, and if we also always practice the method, we can better see future consequences before taking each turn in the road, which will reduce the wreckage we are making of the other species and the planet itself, and our own species making itself suffer the most. Who needs it? Let’s stop it.

This is the way to do it.

That, and prayer.

Love to all,

Bill

Thanks For the Memories

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Created November 23, 2021

This time every year I write a column about gratitude.

Gratitude has a lot going for it as an emotion and as an attitude. The mood of gratitude encompasses both an attitude mix (gladness and recognition of a benefactor) which can be expressed in words, as well as emotions which can only be spoken of metaphorically or described physiologically. The whole package not only makes us feel good, it emanates outward to those around us and makes them feel good too. According to the Mayo Clinic , a daily gratitude practice boosts the immune system and improves sleep.

We are spoiled by life. It is so taken for granted that we cease to realize we might never have existed, and so we see no need to feel gratitude just having had life for as long as we have had it.

Spoiled brats that we are, we never put two and two together: how can we be so intensely attached to continuing to live, without seeing how that implies how much we worship living.

Perhaps for many of us who have taken on the multi-century pandemic doubts about a Supreme Creator, since we doubt that there is anyone to be grateful to, we assume that a generalized gratitude feeling might be irrelevant. But that is short sighted: rationally we can direct gratitude to the people that raised us, shaped us, helped us get to where we are today.

Science of any stripe would not go so far as to prohibit feelings of gratitude toward Nature, most scientists would say that it’s none of their business, has nothing to do with science, and humanist scientists would say that to deny loving Nature and being part of it is anti-life.

When I was very young and thinking about these things – childishly siding with science and the Yankees, rather skeptical about God at the time – I could not rule out the possibility of God. A moment came during these contemplations when I had admitted to myself that God could exist and might be listening in to my thoughts right now. Strangely I felt a huge sadness descend upon me and I felt that God must feel very sad and rejected to see how lost His creation is, as if I were to turn and slap my mother, how would she feel, that must be how God feels, if He exists, I thought. In my mind I comforted Him before laughing at myself and moving on.

I’m grateful for all my memories including my worst moments, they have taught me so much. If I hadn’t made those mistakes then, I’m afraid to think about who I would be now, still driven about by mechanically conditioned behaviors. Learning from our own mistakes is salvation from being a robot.

I’m grateful for all the people I’ve meet and am to meet.

Most of us reading this ought to be more grateful that they are living in a democracy. We proud Americans savor the fact that the USA was one of the significant leaders in bringing democracy to what is now one in five human beings alive on Earth today. Pretty lucky you made it into the one in five this time around.

To you readers who are not living in a free country, what are you to be grateful for? You are living. You are in some degree of equilibrium with your environment. If you are a warrior, you remain free inside. If you are truly to win over the situation you must not let your own principles be corrupted by it. Be grateful you have the strength and adaptability to survive. Be grateful for all of these things, and for the things to come. Be grateful for these amazing younger generations we all share, the young are a global community, they see the truth, they see what must be done, and they will free us all.

Be grateful for all that.

A song which comes to mind:

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Love, Bill