Category Archives: Classic Bill

Synopsis

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

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. 3

Created March 24, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 2, click here.

Latest brain science has validated the existence of states of consciousness above the normal waking state — called the Flow state, or the Zone. For example, Master Marvin Chun of Yale, a leading neuroscience expert, says that activity which looks in a scan like a continuous background of random self-chatter goes away when the brain goes into the high performance Zone — Flow state. One of the 12 simple keys in this book will increase your ability to turn off your own mental chatter at will.

Imagine if books like this become popular and more and more people use these techniques along with meditation. These techniques are the analogue of meditation for the rest of the waking day when one is not alone with eyes closed, meditating. Imagine the leaders of nations and corporations using these techniques, and making more effective and sustainable decisions.

There is a spiritual level within Flow state. In that state, you are clearly connected to the rest of the Universe. Life feels “numinous”, magical. You know that your own consciousness is in some way a part of a single Consciousness that is the Universe. You can see that what is called God is in fact a scientific reality. You realize there can be no death. Some people reach this state just once, and come back from it refreshed and energized. Some reach this state permanently.

As an individual becomes connected with this universal consciousness or Cosmic Mind, there are so many beautiful stages. Your ability to pick up on things as-if-telepathically increases. You are able to read messages that are meaningful for you in things going on around you, whether snatches of other people’s conversations, lyrics in songs on the radio, or billboards on the highway, as if the Universe knew that you needed that idea just then. Without trying, you seem to have just the right answer for people who come to you with emotional problems. You are living in each moment drawing out its sweet nectar without thinking of the next one. Even things that would have upset you are now just interesting puzzles to unwrap like gifts.

This is not a religious book. I believe that all religions are true — many paths to one God — and that the latest thinking in Quantum Mechanics will lead to a synthesis between QM and religion in which the word “faith” will be used less often because everyone will speak from certain knowledge.

This is a practical guidebook to help you tune your mind more effectively. It provides tools for internal information processing optimization — similar in a way to the media optimization tools I’ve helped invent for the marketing industry. Tools for sublimating negative emotion into learning and into action. Leaving only positive emotion. And leading to higher levels of consciousness.

These more effective levels of consciousness are what we are designed to experience all the time, and we would, except for the Information Overload. Techniques are needed to bolster the mind against the unavoidable daily overload. These are the techniques you will find in this book. They are designed to bring back the magic of reality. And to kick off an upward spiral in your positive creativity.

Powerful Mind creates a mood conducive to mental optimization. The content is all about mental optimization and the resulting better decisions — decisions that work better in the real world.

Using the techniques in Powerful Mind has made a positive difference in the lives of thousands of people. I’d like you to let me know what your experience was from reading the book — I look forward to hearing from you.

Get ready for an unusual and fun experience.

Hope you enjoy the book.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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Powerful Mind Pt. 2

Created March 17, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 1, click here.

States of Consciousness

Flow state, or “being in the Zone”, is a shift of gears in the brain that happens when you are doing something you love — your life’s work — your true work. Your contribution to the Universe. What you leave behind for others to share. In Flow state everything seems to do itself while you watch blissfully. Flow state then gradually carries over to everything that you do.

Ironically, if you do an optimization model to figure out how to end war and make the world fun all the time, it comes down to matching each person with the thing they do best, and bringing that work out as a social value. Whether it is a great car mechanic, administrator, teacher, dancer, whatever it is that is your gift. We would all be having too much fun to want to fight wars. The value of the goods and services we produce would be increased to more than enough to go around. After all, Earth is still rich in resources and it is not too late to bring her back to mint condition. There is no end to our technological inventiveness. We just need to rechannel it positively, together.

Logically, since each of us is a unique package of Nature, a combination of genes which never existed before and will never exist again, we are like a precious piece in a cosmic museum. Irreplaceable.

Therefore, born with certain specific innate potentialities. The game of Life is to find these and capitalize on them. Get better and better, entering the Flow state. Leading to… leaving something behind. Making a difference.

Throughout history, many people have experienced the Flow state and some seem to live in it continuously. But is it out of reach for the average person?

You would think so just based on what you see around you. What if everyone is capable of Flow state but there’s something in the way?

The Cause of Poor Global Performance

There has been an acceleration in the amount of information the average person has been asked to process each day. This is actually the strongest possible deterrent to the Flow state.

The brain we have now is the same brain the first of our species had 200,000 years ago. Life back then was far simpler. There were fewer dimensions of life to cope with. The number of communications received each day was in the dozens. Today it is in the thousands. Advertising and marketing messages alone number around 1700 per day for the average American adult.

Every incoming message or experience we consciously notice generates questions for the inquisitive biocomputer that is the brain. When those questions never get answered, the brain starts to clog up. Emotionally-charged messages produce negatively creative defense reactions we are not even aware of. It’s been so long since we faced all the questions in our mind we go into an “Emergency Oversimplification Procedure” (EOP) to just get through each day. You can’t get into Flow state from EOP, though.

Making Powerful Mind

It’s possible to train the mind to stay focused through complexity, and to maintain emotional equipoise through stressful circumstances. It’s possible to get out of EOP. It’s possible to experience Flow. Over time it is a process. Eventually you might be able to live continuously in Flow — others do. Or spend half your time in it, getting better every day at moving toward Flow all the time.

Powerful Mind is your guide to a new level of mind Flow, using one simple key at a time. You will discover self-limiting behavior patterns in yourself and, remarkably, change them with little effort, because of your clarity. You will rediscover what you love doing and get flashes of inspiration about it. You will have the power and the will to persevere resolutely with confidence in reaching your goals. You will move into greater control of your life.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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