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Bringing on the Observer State by Observation

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Powerful Mind Part 31
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created October 6, 2023. Updated March 21, 2025

Read Powerful Mind 30             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

“How observant of you!” We have all heard people say this from time to time, to us or to someone else. There is wisdom in everything that is said, often much deeper wisdom than even the person who says it is aware of. Old sayings especially.

The Observer state is more than being an observant person, although that is one aspect of the state.

We are embarking here on explaining Key #7, which is about the perceptions, the five senses, and the internal sense, the mind with its thoughts and feelings. Feelings include more than emotions; emotions are the bodily manifestations of our feelings. Thoughts are more than us talking to ourselves in our minds; thoughts include images, memories, hunches, and ideas we understand without using words in our mind.

These sensory systems bring us information about the world outside and inside.

Key #7 is about how to use these tools to further your Mission, and take care of yourself and other people better, by getting into the Observer state. Key #7 focused on how to do that using more powerful methods of observation. Other Keys aim to get you there by other strategies.

To review, the default network in the brain, what we call EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), is the most common state of most human beings. The mind wanders, impulses arise, and you choose which impulses to act upon based on the past. A prominent brain function which neuroscientist Karl Friston refers to as the inference engine acts like an AI to keep track of every event in your past and makes associations between event type, action taken, and result; and then sends you impulses to take specific action that would have been best, in that event type, in the past. I have called it the robot since the previous century and lately have been calling it the Bio-AI.

This is of course not a perfect way to make decisions. What if the event you are now embroiled in has never appeared in your life before, and the default events that are most similar and which the inference engine therefore uses as proxies for your current situation, are really not close enough? What if none of the actions you took in the past were really all that effective? As explained in the chapters relating to Key #2, consistency is not really the best policy.

The inference engine is part of the old brain, going back millions of years. 200,000 years ago our species evolved a frontal cortex specifically as an improvement on the earlier decision “optimization” system. This new part enables the executive control network in the brain, although all brain systems are distributed in many parts of the physical brain. This network is where you want to work from. The best way to shift gears to that network is though conscious metacognition, that is, by observing your own thinking and feeling. This will get you into the Observer state.

You can easily slip out of the Observer state into EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). The reason it is easy to slip out is distraction. The environment in what we call modern civilization is extremely distractive, unless you live alone in a cave. Another reason is long habit. Getting mad at yourself only makes things worse. Maintain your sense of humor, it’s another way of maintaining your sense of perspective. Perspective allows us to realize that minor slippages are usually unimportant in the greater scheme of things, and are valuable learning experiences if you use them that way. The old sayings that captured this include “don’t sweat the small stuff”, “no use crying over spilt milk”, and “practice makes perfect”. Key #4 also helps with this, reminding you not to keep score (because it trivializes you) but rather stay focused in the present.

Ego

Metacognition and the executive control network do not assure the onset of Observer state. Observer state is where you can identify impulses arising in you which come from ego. It’s not always obvious. And you’re in the Observer state when you can ignore such impulses, not act upon them.

Ego is a form of neediness, also known as attachment, where you experience negative feelings because something you have become needy of, is withheld.

If something you were born actually needing is withheld – like oxygen, food, water, certain temperature levels, health – it’s natural to have negative feelings, and would not fall into the category of ego.

Most of ego is related to esteem – the desire that other people esteem you. Such dependencies weaken you and get in the way of achieving a powerful mind.

One of the things you will be looking out for as you amp up the power of inner and outer observation is your own subtle neediness. Observer state is the powerful will that enables you to surmount those attachments. Renunciation of that neediness doesn’t mean stopping yourself from enjoying those things when they come your way, but you must have the will power to stop yourself from running after more of the same.

It will seem like the universe is testing your resolve (and that might be what is actually happening).

You make your will stronger by exercising it. Especially when you can discipline yourself. Be careful not to exercise your will by being domineering with other people.

As a first step toward internalizing Key #7, keep an eye out inside for signs of neediness and analyze what it exactly is. Imagine scenarios in which your ego gets the stroking you want and scenarios in which your ego is crushed and humiliated. You will sense progress when you realize you don’t care about that stuff so much anymore – the sting will have been taken out of such mortification incidents. You will have become a mensch.

Be vigilant from the start of each day to the end. It’s optional but very helpful to keep a journal noting when ego arose in you and what you felt and did about it.

After this useful preparation we shall begin to more directly address observation in the next post.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

Stripping Away Imposed Limitations

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Powerful Mind Part 29

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, March 14, 2025.
Created September 22, 2023
Read Powerful Mind Part 28.

We have all been brainwashed. It was not done because of any conspiracy. It arose naturally as a result of the original minorities that seized power, the education systems and other structures that bloomed in the environments of those governments, the media the species invented, the economics of media and marketing in the world as it became.

The world we came into, the best intentions of our parents, and our own tabula rasa impressionability did the rest. Operant conditioning was applied “accidentally”. Our parents wanted to prepare us for life with all its warts and so their advice was designed to help us avoid mistakes they had learned from, painfully. We, of course, insisted on learning for ourselves. By the time our childhood peers became more influential upon us than our parents had been, most of our behaviors, gestures, facial expressions, comments, likes, dislikes, and tendencies had already been conditioned by family influences, including the friends of the family to whom we were exposed.

We were more like little imitative monkeys than we realized. We were generally not cognizant of how what we thought of as our self was being formed by others. Later in life, we all realize it to some degree sooner or later. Some of us more than others, upon realizing this insidious process and how it shaped what we thought of as our own thinking, rebelled. Without realizing it, perhaps we repressed anger at our parents for having controlled our belief systems and values to the degree they had. We suddenly valued independent thinking as a thing that had never mattered to us before. Often, in the process of trying to differentiate ourselves from those who had influenced our development, we came around to realize years later that the fight against the early conditioning had led a circular path right back to performing along the early ingrained lines anyway.

How can we, in reality, make a clean, permanent break from the brainwashing we endured and continue to endure each day?

How can we take charge of ourselves, stripping away the external influences, and will we find anything left of ourselves once we have done that? How scary to feel that without all the mimicry programs, there might not be a “self left to stand on”? Never fear. You do have a real self under all that. Your dreams and visions and hunches tap into the roots of your individuality even though they may be tainted by external influences too. Which is why it is a good idea to pay attention to your deepest thoughts, feelings, images, memories, and to analyze and understand what they mean, what your non-conscious mind is trying to communicate to your conscious mind.

This is all about you and your life, what you want to do with the blank canvas, which by now has scribbling all over it.

Don’t trash the scribbling because it too has messages that will help you understand yourself. Everything you have done – even things you now regret – is of positive value to you as learning experiences, and you have probably not yet extracted all of the learning you can get out of each experience. Looking back over your life as we said  here – especially the memories that still evoke emotion in you – is for the purpose of extracting the remaining lessons. Once you have fully assimilated an experience that has always made you feel guilty and ashamed, those feelings will no longer have any sting.

Metacognition – studying yourself – can actually unwind emotional blocks and take the sting out of “bad” memories. That is not the only benefit of metacognition, but it’s an important one.

How much have you gotten out of this series of posts so far? One way to look at that is to remember the “wants” that came into your mind when you read the post “What Do You Really Want?”  Hopefully you took notes either on paper or in a device and kept those notes, and if so, you can review them now. In any case, what you can do right now is to repeat the short exercise of writing down the things you want, and even if you have no notes, you can think about how the wants you write down now might have changed. Your inner processes are not all at the conscious level, so you could be surprised at noticing that certain things you said you wanted a couple of weeks ago now don’t seem as important to the you of now. And maybe other wants have risen higher recently.

Think about this for a moment: which wants do you want to have, and which wants would you rather not have?

There could be things that used to drive you, and caused you painful experiences—these may be wants you don’t want to have anymore.

Also, I have found that it helps to throw off desires I have by plumbing the depths of, “Where did I get that want in the first place?” Once I discover how a want was planted in me, it makes it all the easier to cast off that want or to dial it down.

One of the most pernicious wants – especially if it becomes a need – is the desire for approval by others. Self-approval is, of course, a bedrock requirement. If we don’t like ourselves for any reason, we are going to be undermining ourselves, like a scorpion continuously addicted to constantly stinging itself. Why be that way? It’s an insult to the opportunity of life itself. You have to be on your own side. If something is preventing that, it’s a top priority to contemplate that first, and conquer it, no matter what else you might have to give up or dial down.

Whereas self-approval is a good thing, the need for approval from others is very undermining. Catch yourself justifying yourself to others: it is evidence that your need for the approval of others is causing you to act in a pathetic manner. Not everyone around you is sharp enough to see that consciously, but everyone can sense that you are needy without clarifying that in words in their own minds. Do you really want to appear needy to others? Is that really going to help you accomplish what you wish to accomplish in your life? Best to edit out those words that your impulsive default network sends to your tongue to enunciate.

Ask yourself:

    • What are you going to accomplish with the remainder of your life?
    • What is your mission, your purpose, your goals?
    • How are you going to deliver the gifts you have been given to the rest of the world.
    • How are you going to leave something behind that will make you feel fulfilled when you breathe your last breath?

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

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The Consistency Program

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Powerful Mind Part 18

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 28, 2025
Created July 7, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 17

“Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Essay on Self-Reliance: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’ His point was that only small-minded men refused to rethink their prior beliefs. Or, put another way, he thought that today’s intuition could trump yesterday’s conclusions.” — Paul Rosenzweig, LAWFARE

Wise people have been aware of this excess invocation of consistency for some time, but their admonitions have been little grasped as cultural necessities. Why is that?

Decision-making is the basis for all action by conscious agents of any species.

Almost all decision-making is implicit, meaning the same as subconscious in this context. And because that literally means it takes place below the level of conscious awareness, it becomes understandable that many mental bad practices can persist for millennia.

Wise folks can and do tell us the right ways to live, and yet, even if it sounds good to us, we can’t seem to put their wisdom into practice.

That’s because it is harder to change mental habits than the wise have realized in the past. Those wise in today’s age are probably quite aware of the importance of this difficulty in taking control of one’s actions such that one is able to optimize real-world decision-making and its real-world outcomes, without being helplessly dragged along by past inner scripts which have become lodged in our minds.

There is a subtle sense of time pressure in our culture – often not that subtle. Under these conditions (I call Acceleritis), it’s natural that one would want to be able to make fast decisions, especially about things which do not immediately seem to be all that important.

When one’s mindset is set that way (I call it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), one way to speed up decision-making is simply to be consistent with one’s past behavior.

We become imitations of ourselves, especially imitators of our remembered experiences. It would be more effective if you’re going to imitate, to remember back to your best moments, and to emulate whatever you did at those moments. Although, that would still be sub-optimizing.

The best practice is to be real in the moment, filtering out only negativity.

What does that mean – being real in the moment? It means exposing your true current feelings in a positive way. Not remembering back. Not imitating yourself or anyone else. Just acting naturally, without the inner sense of being at risk. Not self-protective. Not defensive. Just yourself, but editing out any negativity. Translating what may feel negative on the inside so it’s just an objective statement of facts on the outside.

This is easy to say but not easy to do. Bringing autonomous auto-reactions under one’s own conscious control is a major life achievement.

There are tricks you can use, such as applying your sense of humor.

Such as not imitating yourself or anyone else.

Such as by not choosing to be consistent with what you said yesterday or ten seconds ago, choose instead to re-inspect what you were espousing, and learn about your current self-administration by doing that inspection. You’ll recognize this to be Key #2. The Keys all work together and there are many overlaps among them. Here we are beginning our journey into Key #3 and we can see how Key #2 helps achieve Key #3. See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Consistency is a program in your mind. Supported by networks of neurons that interact in consistent ways. The universe has not given us a keyboard so that we could manipulate and change these neuronal patterns directly and so we shall have to build it someday, but in the meantime these Keys are the closest proxy we have for that keyboard. Which is not to dis-include the equivalent of Keys contributed by other thinkers on the subject, many of whom today are scientists, and many of whom today are spiritualists (which to them/us is an inner science).

Feed your mind voraciously while keeping it steadily open.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

Study Thyself

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Powerful Mind Part 17

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 21, 2025
Created June 30, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 16

“Know Thyself” goes back to the Delphic Oracle Temple in Sixth Century B.C. Greece then known as Hellas. The saying is attributed by legend to Apollo and by historians to a group of seven sages of whom the best known is Thales, who postulated that the universe itself contains a natural force that brought about all of existence, and was the first human on record to have predicted the exact timing of an eclipse. Socrates based much of his philosophy on these two words.

In general use at the time, the phrase was interpreted as knowing one’s own capabilities and limits. Plato altered the meaning to knowing one’s own soul. Judeo-Christian philosophers added the meaning of knowing one’s own relationship with The Creator.

In the context of metacognition, in my view, to know oneself means to have undergone the strenuous and time-consuming process of studying oneself as if “one is an observer from the outside, with a means of seeing, feeling and hearing what is going on within oneself,” including what lies below the conscious mind. And with the help of this objective pseudo-outside view, one has successfully edited one’s own thoughts, feelings, and automatic reactions, and thus achieved an inner integrity, a oneness, a simplification, and an autonomous focus. When these conditions have been met, I would call such a person, one who knows themself.

Note the mention of “what lies below the conscious mind.” This has become a hairy subject in psychology. The heavy emphasis placed on hewing to the a priori assumption of materialism within the social structures of academic scientists, while any a priori assumption is anathema to the concept of objective science, has caused psychologists as well as all other types of scientists to veer away from language which undermines their social standing within their fields. The words “unconscious” and “subconscious” – which had been the core of the Freudian/Jungian revolution in psychology – are now taboo. Words such as “preconscious” are preferred, but the safest way to discuss the subject is to use the lengthier construction “events that do not reach the threshold of conscious awareness.”

This latter workaround actually has some value in my estimation. It calls attention to the fact that qualia (subjective experiences within the psyche) can succeed or fail to leap over the line into conscious awareness. This is important to the inner explorer because it is a cue to strive to pay sufficient inner attention to become conscious of more of the arising qualia: thus making more of the subconscious, conscious.

One who achieves this degree of self-knowledge will experience moments of inner clarity when a fear or anger reaction starts to subtly arise and one catches and squelches it within less than a second.

In Parts 14, 15, and 16 of Powerful Mind, we have reviewed how each of us became substantially unfree, subtly enslaved to imposed views, and we covered the method of close self-analysis, and resolute perseverance in disciplining the mind and becoming an original person.

We leaned heavily on the metaphor of “the robot” to help your inner senses grasp the true relationship between the parts of yourself which have become automatic (the robot) and the essence of who you really are (the real you). One exercise we recommended is to check your level – are you trapped in the robot right now, or are you in the Observer state?

As we look back at the last few posts we see an opportunity to add one further recommendation as to how to know where you are.

If you sense some dilemma you seek to resolve, the likelihood is that you are in the robot. When you are in the Observer state, you are solving problems as they arise and there is no feeling of any dilemma.

One of the main objectives of Powerful Mind is to reduce all of the vast complexity of purifying and mastering one’s mind, to a set of a dozen principles, each of which can be stated in a few words.

The first of these principles, or Keys as we call them, was described in Powerful Mind Parts 10-13, and is:

Doubt your own last thought/feeling.

This is the method that most directly confronts the robot. As we specified in that section, this Key must be applied with balance and perspective to avoid sinking into a robotic Hamlet information analysis paralysis. If you find yourself having lost all confidence in your own intuitions, you will know then that the robot has judoed you and is still running the show. The doubt is meant as a momentary wipe – the “arc” we have spoken of earlier – a distance between the arising of an impulse to believe something specific, and your confirmation of your approval or the denial of your approval of that impulse. If too much time goes by without reaching closure you are being indecisive and need to shut out the world for 20 minutes or so in order to really study the situation and reach your best judgment as to an action plan which can later be improved as you learn more.

The second Key which we have been working on in Powerful Mind Parts 14-17 is:

Study, edit, and reset your automatic reactions.
This is radical new mental strategy #2,
The second simple key to the doorway
Of the upper mind.

Whereas the first Key is a permanent one, useful at all times, when applied correctly with balance, this second Key is one that is most important for the first year or so of the rest of one’s life, after making the decision to clear out the debris of other people’s influence, and re-evaluating everything from one’s own autonomous, empirically-driven, pragmatic and aesthetic intuitions. After the first year or so, you may see yourself needing to use this Key a bit less often, and that, if it happens, will be a good sign.

Love to all,
Bill