Author Archives: Kristin Dragos

A July 4th Message from the Father of Our Country

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, July 3, 2024.
Original post: July 2, 2021

The address of Gen Washington to the People of America

Washington’s Farewell Address

For at least two decades from July 4, 1776, George Washington was the most trusted person in the United States of America.

The Walter Cronkite of his times.

He served as President when, to him, the job was a burden rather than a prize.

He was the glue of authenticity and integrity that gave our country its chance to build a foundation that would last.

For two decades, he made parties unnecessary, because all differences could be resolved in him.

And then, when the party divisions arose with their bitterness and hate, he stood down and would not accept another term as President. He was 64. Average life expectancy for an American male was 36.

In departing, he was sure to warn us about the forces that were arising to counter the most innovative governmental structure in history.

We now find ourselves at a time in which the trajectory of the party story has arced over in its ballistic orbit to what could be the end of our Noble Experiment.

Things that were never part of the original USA plan such as parties, filibuster, gerrymandering, and anti-voting laws, are positioned to bring an end to majority rule. Filibuster has already technically ruined the majority rule principle which is the very essence of Democracy which gives each of us as individuals the sense of freedom we so cherish.

Both Hamilton and Madison spoke out strongly against requiring a supermajority to pass laws – which is what the filibuster is, requiring a 60% supermajority. Hamilton called the supermajority concept “poison” and said that it “goes against the fundamental principle of free government”, by allowing the minority to frustrate and tyrannize the majority. We certainly see this today if we observe without bias. And Madison agreed.

Only plutocratic power mongers would dream up these hacks in the first place. We innocently let them in and their festering has now reached the place where they turn the USA into the Orwellian dystopia.

If we let them.

In this post, I will read you some excerpts from George Washington’s final address, his last guidance to the children of the country he helped create and lead through its fragile infancy. I’ll also provide the link to the full going away letter he left for all of us, which is read annually to both houses of Congress.

I hope it revitalizes your true loyalty to our true bedrock principles, and helps bring the unity we need now more than we have ever needed it before.

Washington begins by humbly and diffidently explaining why he will not accept another term in office:

Transcript Excerpts of President George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796)

Friends and Fellow Citizens:

The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.


Later in his address, he warns of the dangers of the political parties just then sprouting up in America:

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.

He goes on to warn against the danger of one branch of government becoming dominant:

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. 

To me, the humility, authenticity, and kindness of the Father of our Nation comes through loud and clear in these his last words of advice, to us his children, endowed to carry on the idealism of the Founders. This is what a true U.S. President sounds like.

Let his spirit re-inspire us to our original Mission and Values, and help us return to unity with forgiveness and a renewed dedication to work together for the good us all of us.

What you feel when you read these words of George Washington… you are feeling what it is to Be An American.

This American Noble Experiment is worth preserving!

Commemorating and honoring that Beacon for The World,

HAPPY AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE DAY 2024!

A song from the heart of Ray Charles in 2022, 50 years after first singing this rendition of it on the Dick Cavett Show.

I hope you agree with me that this post should be sent to as many Americans as possible. If we each send it to 10 or more people asking them to send it to ten or more people, by the sixth round at least a million people will have received it.

My best wishes to all,
Bill

 


Image source: George Washington, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Religion and the Founding of the American Republic exhibition.

Accept What Has Been and Focus on Action Options

Created September 29, 2021

If something is upsetting you, as soon as you realize you’re not in your best headspace, excuse yourself and go out for a walk or lock yourself in the bathroom or get away from the rest of humanity as best you can for five minutes. Bring something to write with and something to write on just in case. Relax your body as best as you can and take slow deep breaths.

Put your finger on what is bothering you. Then before you get yourself mad or scared or both again, accept that is reality, that situation is what it is, you can’t change the past.

Once you accept that the bothersome scenario is part of reality at least until now, focus on what you can do about it. Don’t expect that to be one quick easy answer that you can immediately cause to happen which will turn the situation around 100% overnight. More likely it will require patience, preparation, waiting for right moments, adapting to changes in your initial plan.

There will be some things you can do immediately, such as not showing that you are affected by the ongoing troublesome situation. That requires fine acting which you will find that you become good at the more your practice it. That is very disarming to people who may have been trying to get your goat and who revel in your discomfort, if that syndrome is part of your particular focusable challenge at the time.

That’s the devilish thing about negative emotion: it makes you less capable of solving whatever caused the negative emotion. Picture anything or anyone that bugs you as some kind of poisonous animal that stings you with a paralyzing toxin so it can take its time having its way with you. You’ll find that it still bugs you but if you can turn off the warning signal (negative emotion) like an alarm clock, you neutralize the paralyzing toxin, because with your rational mind, courage and determination, you can think more clearly and creatively, and find ways to either befriend the poisonous creature or get it out of your life.

You will be paralyzed and uncreative as long as you continue to not accept the situation, and over and over in your mind and emotions wish it away by dwelling on it without effective thought of solutions.

In light of all that, please experience this 36 second video for a method that will allow you to more quickly get past negative reaction into positive constructive creative action:

 

My father Ned Harvey (the larger person in the picture) was fond of sayings that had impressed him during the course of his life. One was “What cannot be cured, must be endured.” I looked it up and found that it was from a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy by Oxford don Robert Burton in 1621.

Whatever situation you find yourself in I define as “The Given”, in the sense of a mathematical puzzle in which you start from some fundamental empirical data you have gathered and are trying to make sense of. If you can’t press a button and simply turn it off, you have to heroically accept that it is what it is, and get past all whining to a courageous facing of the task of dealing with it. That’s when you fatalistically stand above the crowd and can see the creative possibilities for you to judo the situation, to make the best of it or even to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat by a flash of inspiration that takes the very stuff of the problem and turns it into a great new discovery that can help not only you but others too.

For this, you need to always be on your own side, looking for the positive handle, and rising above your own negativity, defeatism, and melancholy with more ability to do that than the average person. You need to be in touch with your own determination. You need to forgive yourself for anything you may still be punishing yourself for, admitting that you may be the Universe itself expressing itself through you at this outpost in the multiverse, and standing up to life like the champion that you are.

Love to all,

Bill

Constructively Judo Your Dissatisfaction

Created September 23, 2021

Dissatisfaction is rampant. It has never been as dominant a theme before in the USA. We descendants of tough colonists and immigrants with the guts to leap into the relative unknown are a hardy breed. We have always overcome, at least until Vietnam. That was kind of a turning point. It wasn’t our fault. We were acting idealistically, continuing the world leadership that had come to us during the world wars. Over the succeeding half century, we learned again and again that our success with force can only be counted upon to work when we use it in self-defense and deterrence. As soon as we project it in other ways – even with the best of intentions – it’s like the tar baby in the Disney classic “Song of the South”: every punch and kick only get us more stuck in the trap.

At an individual level Covid and politics and climate change and “losing world leadership” – if that has really happened – are nothing compared to our own personal life dissatisfactions. Like Edward G. Robinson’s character in the movie “Key Largo”, who always wants “MORE!”, our minds are always comparing what we have now to what we once had or to our dreams of what we must attain or we shall be sad and bitter all our lives (that is the way we blackmail ourselves – one of the negative tricks of the mind discussed earlier in this free Course).

Comparison is one of the negative tricks of the mind we must watch out for. When we stop comparing what is happening in the moment to our expectations, we can really enjoy life.

That doesn’t mean giving up one’s dreams – in fact it makes us more effective so the chances of our dreams coming true are increased. It means to turn down the volume knob on the melancholy that we are not there yet and that we don’t seem to be making fast enough progress – not as fast as so-and-so – there’s those comparisons again.

The positive tricks of the mind are superior in every way to the negative tricks of the mind.

“Tricks” is often used as a pejorative word. Scientists, who tend also to be highly creative people (all of us are much more creative than we typically realize), make up much better words. “Metacognition”, coined by John H. Flavell now of Stanford, means being cognizant of one’s own thinking patterns, and implies the ability to thereby take better control of those thought processes (that taking over was named “metaprogramming” by John Lilly in the same era as Flavell’s coinage – 1960s-1970s).

The job of the Human Effectiveness Institute is to compile empirical generalizations for the most prevalent applications of metaprogramming – or in lay terms, compile positive “mind tricks”. Hence our first book being called MIND MAGIC although it is empirically based science, proven to work (see a small sample of our testimonials to the right on this page). Collectively, our suggestions enable users to become better and better at metacognition and metaprogramming so that they rise into semi-permanent “altered states of consciousness” described by William James and called “peak experiences” by Abraham Maslow.

I say semi-permanent to mean that as we grow into true human maturity – become menschen – we all go through our ups and downs, but the long-term trend is to greater resiliency in the face of upsets, less tendency to dwell upon our dissatisfactions, far greater tendency to make real, positive changes in our lives that remove those dissatisfactions.

In the last few posts of this Course you are taking with me, we talked about finding your own determination, likening it to a hidden switch inside of you. Determination is a constructive judo-ing of your dissatisfied energies. Finding the hidden switch is discovering that you can channel (find a positive outlet for) your dissatisfaction, despair, heartbreak, hate, anger, envy, outrage, passive and active aggressiveness, and all of the other negative emotions into a titanium Will, and you can apply that Will constructively and positively in ways that keep you from sinking into the pits, and make you uplifting to yourself and to the world around you. Reach around inside yourself wordlessly right now for that subconscious hidden switch while you watch, experience, and internalize this 82-second video, please:

I’m not going to take it anymore, go ahead and dish it out, it won’t affect me. I’m going to have my own joy no matter what you do to me… that’s the attitude best suited to going through life – especially through this dramatic period we are now passing through.

Hang on to that joy – if you don’t feel it yet, try counting your blessings, thanking God or the Universe for all the things you possess right now, that you have not lost, that would leave terrible holes in your life and in you if they were to depart. Enjoy those things while you have them! If you are emanating the opposite of joy – as we see people all around us doing right now – you are wasting the good things you have in your life right now. That you take for granted. Revel in the good things in your life whenever you feel yourself slipping back from determination, courage, and the Will to grapple against all odds to do the right thing and to help the world back on course.

Metacognition implies the Will to take over one’s own life. You are always at a perfect age to do that.

Love to all,

Bill

You’ll Know You Are in the Flow State

Created September 17, 2021

You’ll know you’re in the Flow state when your mind sees the futility of saying anything to itself, because words can never tell the whole truth about what you are already sensing and need no words to sense.

When it first happened to me, I was merged with the audience, with my father, the band, the stage, everything was me dancing together and doing itself perfectly as I watched and enjoyed the experience mightily.

Interestingly, the moment was captured by a photographer:       

My mother Sandy was watching from the wings. You can see her to my right where the curtain to backstage is slightly open.

Flow state as first named and described by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has of course been around in the human race since as far back as we go, and we see that animals get into it too, such as when we see squirrels playing 50 feet above the ground jumping confidently from branch to branch. The Flow state is one of the things we love to watch during the Olympics or any TV live sports. Incredibly perfect performances account for a goodly percentage of the most watched and shared Youtube videos.

As Mihaly (he had been an advisor to The Human Effectiveness Institute) spelled out, the Flow state happens when one is not emotionally attached to (dependent on) winning, but is simply playing for fun.

Echoing the Buddha’s exhortation to attain nonattachment. This is not just coincidence. Buddha was one of the many saints in history who knew of the higher states of consciousness as real phenomena, and compassionately spent their lives trying to get as many people as possible to take the idea seriously.

We have never needed more for people to go inside and take themselves over. And it has never been less likely that we can accomplish this at the mass level at which sanity is needed quickly.

I link sanity and the higher states of consciousness – Observer state and Flow state – on purpose. All around us today we see high degrees of irrational behavior, in the U.S. higher than ever seen before in my lifetime at least. Psychology as a nascent science has never drawn a bright line where sanity ends and insanity begins. Neurotic behavior is not as extreme as psychotic behavior, and people in public office can apparently stay in office no matter how far from rationality (enlightened self-interest) they stray, as long as we can write them off as neurotics and not psychotics. We forgive neuroticism because we acknowledge to ourselves in moments of clarity that we ourselves and possibly everyone has some degree of neuroticism.

Attachment is certainly one of the driving factors in neuroticism. People become irrationally attached to something while they are young and impressionable and then it becomes so much a part of who they think they are that it can become invisible to themselves, even as it causes obsessive compulsive, paranoic, manic depressive, and even schizophrenic behavior. Belonging is a deep motivation, so is power, so is social acceptance, and any of these and more are among the mechanisms which take away our Flow state and our Observer state and turn us into Devoted Followers.

Attachment is the main blocker of our feeling the innate joy of being alive. Theoretically, like those nearly-flying squirrels, just the fun of all the things we can choose to do each moment by being alive should make us incredibly grateful and happy. It’s all a creative game. It’s the most exciting movie of all: LIFE. Yet count the long faces as one walks down any street.

A part of us inside is purposely blocking joy. It is attachment. It is saying: “No I won’t let you feel joy because I want X and I may not get it!” Please let this 87-second video experience flow into your open mind:

Once you have found the hidden switch of your Will, you will have the determination to not waste time working against your own best interests, such as by wallowing in shame, guilt, fear, anger, blame, hate, or any other alarm system. Those systems, like an alarm clock, have a very valid function, and they call our attention to something that we need to deal with intelligently, and like an alarm clock, it is not intelligent to proceed without turning them off first. We must use these negative feelings exactly like an alarm clock. They have called your attention to a real-world challenge you have. Okay, how are you going to solve it? What is it in your realistic power that you can actually DO to win in the situation? It isn’t by wallowing in the alarm clock.

Be on your own side. Get to the solution stage and don’t get stuck in the problem recognition stage. This is enlightened self-interest. This is sanity. This is rationality.

Help your children learn this trick. Show them the video. Get themselves to take their own side using their intelligence and their courage to face the world’s challenges as creative challenges. Get them to see the potential fun in looking at everything that bugs them, that new way. Constructively. Not pausing to take potshots at others, wallowing in blame or other excuses. Teach them to take responsibility not only for themselves but for the people around them. Make it better, tell them. Like the lyric in the Beatles’ song “Hey Jude” – “Take a sad song and make it better.”

Tell them about the Flow state. They will like that part. They will make that part of their bucket list. Remind them not to get attached to getting into the Flow state, because that will block it. Just take each moment as an opportunity to make things better and to enjoy the fun of every challenge. Then Flow will come on its own.

My best to all, Bill