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Mind Discipline

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Created March 1, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Intellectual knowing is not the same as embodying
that knowledge in one’s actions.

Today there is fortunately an outpouring of articles and books on the subjects which a half century ago were rarely discussed outside of the kinds of books which were carried only by so-called metaphysical bookstores back then.

People with vast curiosity tend to study a wide spectrum of subjects. That describes me starting around age 4 when I fell in love with reading and writing. That also describes many people I know who have read many of the same esoteric books that I have, and some who have learned many things from the same writers. And many people whose reading has been far more inclusive than mine.

In conversations, I have noted that some of my great friends can quote wisdom but often are unaware that their actions do not conform to the bits of wisdom which they quote.

In some cases, this can be analyzed as intellectual versus emotional learning. The rational mind can be aware of important principles of how to live the good life, and yet on an emotional level, they are leaning away from those principles even as they espouse them.

Take a simple example: “There is no use crying over spilt milk.” Like all aphorisms, we tend to underestimate the amount of wisdom this aphorism contains. This is because familiarity breeds contempt. I know at least one person who can teach this to others but always lets disappointing news disturb her.

I know a man who has studied vast amounts of wisdom literature and understands all of it fully, yet his attitudes override the levels of tolerance which all wisdom literature teaches.

I know another man who is a walking encyclopedia of the history of applied psychology who does not pick up on his audience’s reactions.

Clearly there is a gap in the mind between knowing something and believing it to be true and valuable, yet not being able to “carry it off” in reality.

This gap is where discipline needs to be applied.

The reason that self-discipline is needed is that our day-to-day, moment-to-moment life is practiced with a mix of automatic and “manually overridden” (conscious, on-purpose, granularly formed) responses to external events.

Because we are used to that mix and never think much about it, we tend to overlook automatic responses which slip through despite the fact that they disagree with principles we espouse. Besides, “who has the time?” The Acceleritis culture is driving us all at top speed by giving us too many stimuli at practically all times. In moments when all media are turned off, we are not really escaping because that’s when the backed-up cognitive load dumps into our consciousness with unanswered questions and unassimilated half-learning, stuff we noticed but didn’t have time to think about why we noticed it, what it was saying to us that stuck so much in our minds.

My old friend Daniel Goleman has written many books about emotional intelligence, a phrase he coined long ago to describe the quality of a consciousness to integrate intellectual learning with emotional signals from inside and outside, and to perfect one’s actions taken, illuminated by this higher order of inner integrity.

Today I wish to emphasize another aspect of gaining emotional intelligence: self-discipline. Mental and emotional, intuitive and perceptual self-discipline.

The logical way to approach this topic is to start with the desired end state. First one ought to discern the ultimate goal of one’s own life, what you are here to do. The way the game is set up—this is not easy—and many people give up and let their game piece be pushed around by external forces. This is the first important place to apply mental and emotional, intuitive and perceptual self-discipline. You have to make the time to select the dream vision you wish to make come true over the course of your life. What your gift to the world shall be, your body of work you will leave behind to benefit posterity.

A guess is better than not having a targeted end state.

Discipline then has to be applied that respects yourself, you have set a goal, now you have to make it come true, you have to believe in it, you can’t be wishy-washy about it, that is a denial of self-respect.

You can’t allow yourself to waste time. To waste time is to waste your life. Time is a precious limited quantity. You must make best use of each second. Otherwise, you are admitting to yourself that you are not really laser-focused on your mission, you are programming yourself for failure to achieve your mission, you obviously do not take yourself seriously.

That’s why you can’t allow yourself to cry over split milk. Because not only is it a waste of time, it negatively programs you and the others around you. You are causing negative effects, and harming yourself and your mission, by giving in to the automatic reaction of the amygdala. This takes enormous self-discipline which can be gained by practice, and by never taking your eye off your mission.

At the same time, you can’t rush past noticing the cascade effects inside yourself, you must pay the time and attention to see your own automatic reactions that slipped through and screwed something up, so you can figure out what clues to look for next time, so you stop that particular automatic reaction from slipping through again.

One exercise is clearing the mind of all emotions. Any psychologist will tell you that emotions are the physical body manifestations that are connected with the inner feelings you have – so as you discipline away all the emotional clutter you have just been experiencing, it will happen in your body as well as in your mind – it will change your breathing, your heart rate, skin moisture, pupil aperture, and many other things. But you start with an inner act of will to cancel all inner events and return to a state of complete neutrality and emptiness. Starting over. Rebooting. I find that for me this is most effective when I walk into our meditation room, get down on the floor, breathe deeply, empty whatever is in me, and start my life over with a blank slate.

I hope you will refocus on your own mission and try this rebooting exercise whenever needed, and let me know how it goes.

Love to all,
Bill

Synopsis

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Created February 9, 2024

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

There was a Big Bang.

On Earth, one primate species 14 billion years later took over the planet from all other species.

Nature had provided this chosen species with opposable thumbs, extra brain frontal cortex, relative hairlessness, bipedalism, and took away their tails, encouraging them to stop swinging through the trees, encouraging them to take over the ground.

The species took over by inventing tools. This included axes, arrows, flint, fire, the wheel, planting, domestication, more advanced weapons, oral language, written language, art, architecture, media, and a few other things.

And proceeded to kill off other species at an alarming rate.

Meanwhile, those dominant primates also eyed each other as ripe for elimination or takeover. And proceeded to take over as many as they could until eventually, their bloated empires collapsed, to be replaced by other empires.

They mostly did this by organizing along military lines. The supreme leader of a culture was usually called a King, and typically started out as the toughest soldier of them all or the son of the former King.

Through all this, the domination cultures all tended to brainwash their subjects. This was only partially on purpose, mostly it was automatic. Those below tended, in one way or another, to fawn upon those higher up, and to believe or at least conform to whatever they said.

Thinking for oneself was generally never a popular entertainment. But it popped up over and over again, and there were always individuals who stepped outside of the main game, and made observations that often got them in trouble.

A time-lapse photography map of empires over centuries shows balloons blowing up and deflating, one after the other, endlessly.

Initially, these expansions of one culture of dominants over other cultures of dominants were over land, and then as shipbuilding became part of the toolkit, over oceans as well.

Although symbolic counters for lending and borrowing – money – had been a fairly early invention, during the great expansionism over oceans, rarefied ideas about money were put into practice, such as stock markets and bond markets. These provided ambitious dominants to rise to positions of greater power in ways they didn’t have before, and opened up the game and also opened up many minds to think outside the classical domination game.

This led to the idea of democracy, a social compact among equals, creating systems of self-governing, thus replacing Kings.

Kings obviously did not want that to happen and continued to do things to retain their special place at the top of the heap. One of the things they did in some cases was to stop calling themselves Kings, and make up other titles, even copying titles used in democracies, merely changing the labels but not the spirit of the domination relationship.

From the very beginning there was a strong intuition that they were not alone, but rather, presided over by an unseen great being of unlimited power and intelligence who had somehow created them. This became formalized within structures fitting into the master game of that species, centered around domination. Those structures were named religions.

Most of the time religions and everything else were used within the domination schemes.

Abraham, Angiras, Lao Tsu, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, Baha’u’llah, and hosts of other prophets communicated with the Universe itself and brought invaluable insights to the dominant species.

The dominant species fitted these inputs into its schemes.

Nevertheless, many of the domination species felt the truth in the information brought back from divine contacts with the unseen superpower, and practiced kindness as a first principle, in sharp contrast with the behavior of the race in general.

Not only that, but their spirituality also gave them a sense of peace, acceptance, and at times, joy. This inspired great art, music, architecture, and deep thinking. And you might suspect where deep thinking would naturally lead…

Along came Science.

Science saw what was perverted about religion and decided to fight it. They themselves felt the sanctity of nature and were disgusted by knowledge being shaped for domination. They did not seem to notice all the good being done by the truly spiritual individuals within religions.

They mounted strong arguments against the existence of anything resembling God, although they felt the divinity of nature, but did not have approved language to express it.

Matter seemed to them to be the obvious fundamental substrate of the universe.

Denying the existence of a conscious overseer and creator, they explained the existence of the universe as an accident.

At first, disbelief in a conscious creator spread mostly among scientists and people impressed by science.

Then there was Einstein. He felt no compunctions. He expressed his intuitions caring not what the reactions might be. He openly stated that his religion was his immense respect for the intelligence existing in nature itself. He denied the logical explanatory power of accidentalism.

Nevertheless, the masses of dominants, who were themselves dominated by the most extreme dominants of the race, and had been kept under control partly by the religions, started to break away from the religions.

Instead, they chose charismatic dominants of various kinds to whom to ascribe degrees of divinity. This played into the hands of the Kings who had always claimed to be divine themselves, and would-be Kings who did not want to wind down the domination game, but simply to win it.

The masses of the species who had gone along in docile fashion generally did not see themselves as slaves, except when they were explicitly labeled that way and bought and sold as property, or rented out as in the sex slave trade.

This all came to a head about 100 years ago, when a contemporary of Einstein named Hitler made a play to take over the world, armed with some of the best weapons of the time. Democracies and a mixed bag of other cultures joined forces to prevent this world domination attempt. The USA was first to build a working atomic bomb and used it to end the world war and establish its leadership of the world. This was seen by everyone else as just another form of domination, rather than as a whole new game. And some American leaders have always been infected by the undertone of domination running through the entire species culture from the beginning.

This was followed by a long era of optimism that the world was heading in the direction of happiness and plenty for all. That optimism generally held up despite endless violence and suffering in many places in the world, still playing the old game. The old-game countries continue to seek to take over the democracies in one way or another.

Four years ago the pandemic changed everything. It gave many people free time to think about life. The media which used to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission in the USA but which had gone completely out of control by digital disruption now included social media, meaning that anyone could say anything they wanted and those statements could be escalated to reach vast audiences by players of the old game. We swung into a period of pessimism which is the exact opposite of where most heads and hearts were at for about 75 years. We are still in that dark cloud. It’s hard to see in here. Most of us are not used to this degree of pessimism.

How we break this ancient cycle is to wake up to its underlying existence. As my friend Harvey Kraft says,

“The past was about domination. The future is about liberation.”

We need to free ourselves from patterns of our own mental and emotional behavior that we don’t realize exist. Patterns that have been pounded into us from birth go back thousands of years and are so built into everything around us that we can’t notice them.

Each of us is a unique nature package that has never existed before and will never exist again (even if reincarnation is real, each life is different). That is the gift of life given to us by the Universe. Why do we need to dominate others, isn’t that gift enough in itself to make for a meaningful and fun life?

What good would it do to have more money and power than everyone else, but to realize that you don’t have love in your life, and that you are not thrilled with the creations you channel?

In order to finally evolve out of the primitive war game and into a world of collaboration, learning, creativity, kindness, love, and open-mindedness, we need to retrain our minds, including our feelings and imagination not just our intellect and knowledge. HI – Human Intelligence – is what we need more than anything else.

What is such training like? How can you get some of it yourself right now?

Click here for a free booklet that is a sample of the kind of training needed.

Love to all,
Bill

The Supreme Depression

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Powerful Mind Part 37

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 25, 2024
Created November 17, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 36

You don’t have to let everything in, you can let love and joy in without reservation, and filter everything else out, not allowed in, rise above it!

We call the economic depression of 1929-1939 “The Great Depression”. I call the psychological depression period we are now in “The Supreme Depression”.

From my readings, it appears to me that the current Supreme Depression is far more psychologically damaging to the human race than was The Great Depression. In The Emotional Life of The Great Depression, John Marsh (Oxford Press, 2019) describes the negative feelings evoked during The Great Depression as despair, fear, panic, righteousness, and anger, all of which had been chronicled by many historians. It was the righteousness and anger which Hitler and Mussolini manipulated to bring themselves to power.

However, Marsh also adds that there were positive feelings during that period, mostly after 1932, three years into the ten-year depression, as a result of the election of FDR, and they were hope, awe, and love. From our observations about our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, we know that the economic depression made us stronger in many ways.

Our current Supreme Depression is similar but different. The economic situation is cloudy and volatile, but there has been no market crash affecting the USA, our economy here is still standing, and many people’s incomes have kept steady with inflation, while many people keep getting richer, although it’s also edge city for many people in America. In the rest of the world, economic conditions are worse in many places and better in a few.

Moving from economics to psychology, however, the modern world has never seen such widespread doom and gloom thinking, hatred, cynicism, gullibility, and willingness to give up personal freedoms in exchange for perceived greater physical safety. The Great Depression was a walk in the park by comparison, and yet enabled so-called “strongmen” to almost take over the world. The Supreme Depression could enable the new crop of charismatic tyrants to enslave us. Many influential journalists and politicians worldwide assume that dystopia is here to stay and will soon be consolidating its grip everywhere, there are now new digital media that make it easy to have a screen and perhaps earpods washing one’s mind with negativity for nearly every waking minute.

Everyone knows that polls can be wrong. Nevertheless, poll results are a guarantee of attention, because everyone is so attached to the political party propaganda war and frightened of the outcomes. What people say in surveys has a low degree of predictivity of their actual behavior. The response rate to polling surveys is generally under 10% and sometimes hits a high of as much as 13%, meaning that the random sample that was predesignated is not random anymore, 13% of us willing to take part in polls are (mis-) representing the other 87% of us. Even people in the research business who know these things are drawn as if by an addictive substance to reading the poll results.

Negativity is such a powerful influence that it doesn’t need absolutely continuous access to your mind in order to poison your attitude. Negativity even for only 10% of your waking minutes can ruin your day and your life, let alone the constant diet of negativity which has become our lives.

Chaim Oren reports that a rabbi once told him “Optimists and Pessimists are both right.” Meaning that the pessimist is going to experience exactly what he or she expects, and so is the optimist. We draw to ourselves whatever our mind projects onto the world. As I’ve pointed out here perhaps too many times, even the greatest physicists agree that our consciousness affects the probability waves of matter and energy around us and how that magma manifests as definite and concrete events in our timeline. Our mind sharpens possibilities into actualities that we experience. Allowing our minds to be constantly poisoned by negativity is absolutely self-defeating, not to mention unpleasant.

What can we do about this, once we have become serious about opening our minds to the greater possibilities of our own life?

It might seem like a hard pill to swallow, but we can actually turn off the negative noise. We don’t have to read or watch the negative news. We don’t have to stay on a social media page that offers no solutions only problems and invective. We don’t have to be hooked on downers for the rest of our lives. Paraphrasing Tim Leary, now would be an ideal time to “Tune In (to our true selves), Turn On (our subtle inner guidance systems), and Drop Out (of the negative media inputs that only weaken us).”

There is of course the fear of missing out. How can we be good conversationalists if we don’t know the latest events? Isn’t that burying our heads in the sand? If you enjoy the news then continue to tune into it at your usual times, but if you find yourself getting into a negative mood, be aware of it and of your freedom to switch away.

GPT4 and the other new LLM (Large Language Model) AIs can come in handy here. Ask your favorite AI to summarize the latest news events that might point to positive outcomes ahead. Ask what new solution ideas to world problems were announced today. You can stay well-informed and decide which articles to read based on using what I call a Hate Filter, that is, asking an AI the right questions, designed to keep you in the know and inspired by new discoveries and solution ideas, not trapped in a bubble of hopeless cynical negativity. If you are pessimistic about the world, that will not translate into your being able to make the most of your opportunities in life.

You don’t have to let everything in, you can let love and joy in without reservation, and filter everything else out, not allowed in, rise above it!

The way to take charge of your new life which starts right now is to stop allowing yourself to be given these daily injections of hypnotic suggestions that bring down your effectiveness and immune response. Use that time to contemplate and plan your new life, to meditate and apply metacognition to rule your mind castle, and to use media to find the ideas and knowledge and fun that relate to your purpose and meaning in life, to your gifts and passion work, to the dreams and aspirations that you used to have, the subjects that have always fascinated you, and to ideas that once inspired you that you have put aside. Not all of them may still be relevant to you, but some will be and will give you new surprises and whole new canvases to paint your life on.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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Powerful Mind Pt. 13

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Created June 2 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 12, click here.

Perhaps there is nothing after death. Perhaps consciousness goes on after death of the body. There are many ways in which this could be possible. Consciousness is information being internally communicated within an experience of “self”. That “self” might change after death, or not. Science has not ruled any of this out. Most of us tacitly assume that these things are unscientific because religion has considered them and as we all know, science and religion have historically been at odds. So the mind leaps to the hasty closure that these considerations about the self, consciousness, death, and so on are unscientific, questions that science cannot answer. Instead it is this hasty closure process that is itself unscientific. Science is all about holding to open-minded objectivity until there is evidence one way or another.

Here’s an experiment:
Consider that you do not “know” anything. Wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Reconsider all of your old beliefs. Do this systematically, in times you are alone. Treat it as a game. Come back to the game from time to time until you feel you have exhausted the game and reached its end.

When possible, write down as single words or very short phrases some of your beliefs, things you have believed are true up until this moment of reconsideration. Don’t try to get them all at once — more will come to you over time and you can add them to this list as they arise. All you really need to get started is any one belief you hold. For example, “Government is corrupt”, “Big Business is corrupt”, “We have but one life to live”, “Look out for yourself”, and so on.

Cross-examine yourself as to where this belief came from and what evidence you have to justify believing in it.

Ask yourself if you can imagine proving this belief one way or the other. What would be necessary? Imagine the scene in which you have proof that it is true, then imagine the scene in which you have proof that it is false. What would such proof consist of?

If you can’t prove the belief is true or false right now, ask yourself if you have a need to hold on to this belief. Does it serve a useful function? Does this belief do something for you?

Contemplate where the belief came from. One of your parents? Someone who had a great influence on you? Do you maintain this belief to gain the sense of having that person’s approval now? (As ridiculous as that is, but more on that later.)

Try on for size the possibility that you no longer need to have this belief, nor do you need to actively disbelieve it. See how that feels inside.

When you have run this game through to its goal you will have reopened your mind to all possibilities and will no longer have any of the keys in your mental computer keyboard stuck down. You will be able to take events as they come and see them as they are without imposing on them any prejudgments or forcing them into any preconceived molds. You will hear what the other person is really saying rather than hearing what you expect them to say.

You will have outsmarted hasty closure.

Common Sense

Following are common practices known for millennia to most everyone, though few actually practice them as a result of Acceleritis. They differ from the techniques described above in that these are relatively obvious. What is not obvious is their great value in supporting the quest for higher states of awareness:

Planning/Preparation

In a hurried rushing world, impatience is almost guaranteed. You can tell yourself not to be impatient but this admonition will have no force if life catches you unprepared for each day’s challenges. Don’t let yourself go to sleep until you have contemplated the likely events of the next day and prepared yourself with contingency tactics for different ways things could go with the people and situations you could meet with the next day. This way you will be as prepared as you can be, and this will make it more likely that you can actually achieve some degree of patience tomorrow. With adequate preparation the night before, you will be less distractable and therefore more likely to shift into Flow state, where you will be traveling at the “speed of life”.

Priority Order

At most times you will have more than one item competing for your attention: new emails, someone pops into your office, and besides all that you were trying to work on something. This causes frustration and helps fuel impatience. It’s best to focus all attention on one thing at a time, to get the highest quality, most lasting result. This implies a fast selection process to determine which item deserves attention first. The way you make this decision reveals a lot about you. Are you trying to curry favor, or are you overhauling a company; are you doing the easiest things, or giving priority to helping people?

If you can agree with yourself how to prioritize, it will put most of your daily attention and time on achieving the things that are most significant in life.

Patience/Quality/Appreciation

Did your mother or father ever say to you, “Take a deep breath and count to ten”? This is actually very practical advice. It is a way of avoiding hasty closure. And it is a way of instilling patience in yourself. It’s also helpful to remember that life is like a pearl necklace. It’s made of moments — the pearls — and all we ever have is the present moment in which to extract enjoyment and to show our quality. Making each moment precious. This is the real value of patience. We give our all to the moment, we are at our best, and we are taking as much pleasure out of the moment as we can. With the more difficult moments, that pleasure may not seem so pleasant; the pleasure then is in being interested in what is going on, and seeing what we can learn, which may make future moments of this kind more actually pleasant.

Objective Skepticism (Reasonable Doubt)

In science and in law, the only thing that ultimately counts is proof. Too bad so many of us do not realize this is also true in life itself. Before deciding that something is good or bad, or what to do about it, make sure you question yourself to see if you have anything proven to go on. Don’t accept evidence that wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. If you don’t have proof, proceed cautiously, and on the fair basis of “innocent until proven guilty”. Don’t accept hearsay. Make sure that your own empirical experience is your basis for proof of anything.

And don’t forget to breathe. Just breathe.

These platitudinous-sounding bits of common sense advice really work. Don’t avoid getting their benefit simply out of intellectual snobbery.

Yet these gems of ancient wisdom do not do the whole job. They effectively support, but do not change your consciousness. For that, you must profoundly change the way your mind does business.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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