Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created May 8, 2026
This truism is well backed by scientific verification. Micromomentary gestures, body language, eye movements, word choices, tones of voice, are all carefully scrutinized by trained intelligence field agents, psychoanalysts, law enforcement officers, professional negotiators, and many other people who are looking for “tells” either to be able to make a better deal for themselves or to truly help the person being observed, or in rare cases, both.
At a cosmic level, a wide range of scientists and nonscientists already know or believe in the idea that we causally impact our future experiences based on the signals we send ourselves, even when those signals are only being sent within our own minds, to ourselves, and even when we are not consciously aware of sending those signals to ourselves – and to the universe.
This applies even to those of us who are consciously aware of the way we program our own reality with expectations that we have inside us and hide from others. By definition, the subconscious is not something we are tracking, so stuff that goes on at that level can easily slip by us.
For example, we may not realize that our doing something apparently harmless that comforts us, can be read by the subconscious as a signal that we need to compensate for a sense of failure. This can program us to fail.
So can our being overly cautious or conservative in our estimates of tactical success. We may think it’s good for us to plan on a pessimistic basis so we will be even happier when we exceed that low bar. But it could also be that we are programming parts of ourselves to hit that low bar or even below it.
Michelangelo said:
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.
Michelangelo believed that settling for mediocrity (hitting a low target) is more damaging to the human spirit than failing while attempting something grand.
Even a lack of spirituality can harm our chances of success in life. If we live life in a framework of physicalism, where our underlying basic assumption is that only the obvious reality exists, and there is nothing more, we can subconsciously be doubtful that we can ever experience more success than we have at the present moment. Of course, consciously we may be unaware that this holding ourself back is happening.
If we live life in a frame of mind that is open to the unknown, making no limiting assumptions about the unseen, we are not blocking moments of leakage of the spiritual into life, even if only for brief moments that we might not even think of as spiritual, simply as feeling extraordinarily good.
Maslow was once asked about religion and he turned the question into something else. Instead of replying about the known and agreed-upon religions, he used the word differently, in the context of his notion of peak experiences. He said:
The two religions of mankind tend to be the peakers and the non-peakers, that is to say, those who have private, personal, transcendent, core-religious experiences easily and often and who accept them and make use of them, and, on the other hand, those who have never had them or who repress or suppress them and who, therefore, cannot make use of them for their personal therapy, personal growth, or personal fulfillment.
He was talking about openness to the possibility of cosmic spirit, something mysterious about which we know very little, but not prematurely denying its existence.
He also said, echoing Michelangelo in a different way, “We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”
There is practical benefit to leaving it open in one’s conscious mind that the nature of reality could include a benevolent God, that the universe itself could be conscious (why not? We are! The universe is a lot bigger than we are, with a lot more energy than we have, how could we be conscious and it not be conscious? We know it has consciousness in it). The practical benefit is that that thing lying squashed flat within us, that thing called hope, has a springboard from which to fly once again. Having real unfaked hope within us makes our subconscious try bigger plays.
Here is an experiment you can try.
When you are alone, go outside and as close to nature as is convenient. Breathe deeply. Casually empty your mind for a moment. Then imagine that you can make your life come out very happy, happier than you remember ever being, and that limits you assume you have are holding you back, so you must make every effort to stop imagining that you have any limits. You can restart your life right now with a new, creative attitude, reconsider everything you want to reconsider, taking your time and deciding over time exactly what you want to do with the rest of your life, and with the courage to actually set those plans in motion and stick with them all the way.
When you get started and have your first setback, don’t allow yourself to become deflated. Stop and look for what was the subconscious signal that got in the way.
There will be many rest stops like this caused by many setbacks. They are necessary because of the nature of the subconscious; you need these little setbacks to identify and root out the hidden signals that have always held you back.
You may be surprised at what some of them are. One might be that you have been too humble, too modest – too much of a very good thing – not all the things that hold us back are inherently bad things, some of them are great things which we have simply overplayed.
You may find, as you come out from holdback assumptions, that you are feeling somewhat cocky all of a sudden. Let yourself enjoy it and make it a way of life that rubs off on the people around you rather than rubbing them the wrong way.
Love to all,
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