Category Archives: Classic Bill

Powerful Mind Pt. 1

Created March 10, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

My beloved literary agent Bob Silverstein before he passed away, passionately advised me to write a sequel to Mind Magic. “You can help more people by translating your poetic language into simple natural language, and explaining things in more detail,” he explained. He then named the book Powerful Mind – “Something everybody wants” he said – and “reduce it to 12 Key principles.”

Thus, the nascent book Powerful Mind was born. I say “nascent” because after he ascended, I set the completed chapters aside to start on the Agents of Cosmic Intelligence series, which I’d been wanting to write for a long time. Now it’s time for me to complete Powerful Mind, and while I do that, I’d like to share with you the already-completed chapters in this blog, which we’ll be doing over the next month or so. That way you can give me feedback that will benefit the book, so we’ll sort of be writing it together. Thanks for your help!

Introduction

The techniques of mind in this book were discovered over a thirty-year period by an ordinary person living an ordinary life. Well, there were some unusual aspects: he started performing onstage at the age of five, and sometimes experienced being in the Zone (also known as Flow state), leading him to a lifetime fascination with the mind, about which he read all his life. From early on he attempted to isolate the factors which led him to experience the Flow state, and created techniques of mind to control these factors, and increase the time he spent in Flow.

That person became a behavioral/ psychological researcher in the marketing world. He worked with surveys, brain waves, depth interviews, eye tracking, and many other forms of research. This research experience led him to package the techniques of mind in “book” form to use as a test stimulus, to see if the techniques would work on other people.

Unexpectedly, 35,000 people bought the book Mind Magic, which became known as an underground classic. Thousands of readers sent in unsolicited testimonials, many saying it was the most life-changing book they had ever read.

But the book was not complete. The techniques were not fully explained. And still they were effective. People wrote in that the techniques had brought them “incredible clarity” leading to knowing their true goals, effectively and creatively planning how to reach them, and how to carry out their plans with strength and courage they did not know they had. And achieving life satisfaction to a degree they did not know possible.

This then is the completed book, finally put together to benefit everybody. Here the techniques will be explained simply and thoroughly.

You will find yourself able to see where you have been going and where you now will be going, to realize your full potential. You will be confident, resolute, and patient, as if having more will power, yet some of this will simply be greater clarity on what will work in your life, and making better decisions about how you use your time and your emotional energies.

Instead of being daunted by problems, you will enjoy them as creative challenges, and will rise to every occasion, secure and integrated inside. You will think for yourself, and not be as easily swayed by other people’s opinions.

You will experience higher, more effective and creative states of consciousness. You will find yourself more observant. You will shift into and out of Flow state — being in the Zone as athletes call it — where your work or your fixing of relationships or anything important you need to do will be done with grace and beauty.

The World Needs This Now

The world is spinning out of control, for reasons we shall explore. The world’s economies are now tied tightly together and forecasts suggest that the future “adjustments” will probably continue to get larger until something changes dramatically.

People are for the most part unhappy too much of the time, as shown by surveys, divorce rates, and other indicators. And it is getting worse instead of getting better. It has been a long time since anything justified our high hopes.

And yet all this unhappiness is all in the mind. Only a small fraction of the world’s population is in actual physical danger today, and yet we all find something to be worried about.

What if there were a way to reliably increase the power of our minds? Not just pep talks or voodoo, but logical and proven steps we could take. Then, if enough of us find out about these methods and use them, happiness will spread, because the mind can choose to be happy, and can become more effective at solving the real problems, so that it won’t just be false happiness.

If we do this as individuals, we are making changes in the world on a person by person basis — starting with the one person we actually have some control over.

If the techniques work — as thousands of readers have told us they do — then eventually the world’s leaders will be using them, and this will make the biggest change of all.

Love to all,

Bill

Virtual Reality Pt. 2

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Created March 3, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

We are concluding a two-part posting (see prior post) of a chapter out of my upcoming sci-fi novel Revelations: Live To All Minds. This will be the fifth title to be released in the Agents of Cosmic Intelligence series. Two year old Danny has snuck into a virtual reality nightclub called Psycho where he is in the audience watching a stranger Tony get psychoanalyzed on stage by AIs representing Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. As we completed the prior post, Tony was losing his nerve under the pressures of millions in the audience watching his soul be stripped bare for all to see.

“Do you have more internalized voices in you, Tony?” asked the second Analyst in a kind way. Other Tonys drifted out of the central Tony and the stage became filled with Tonys. “Did you know you had all these different sides of yourself, Tony?” asked the first Analyst.

The Tony in the middle was now quite upset and embarrassed to be unequal to the situation in front of so many people. He realized that this could ruin his life if he let it. He realized it could also be just what he needed to make his life wonderful, but he couldn’t take the exposure any longer, and all the Tonys suddenly disappeared at once.

This was not a shock to anyone. The audience had seen this happen many times, it was actually rare for it to end any other way. Happy endings when the individual grew up before the eyes of spectators happened once in a long while. The series owners claimed that follow-up studies showed that most of the participants in the show became happier and better-integrated after the experience on stage. According to those studies, it often took a year for the people who played the game to assimilate the experience and make the most of it.

Danny found himself slipping carefully through the crowd and was stunned to see himself walking up the steps onto the stage ahead of anyone else. He had not consciously decided to do it, but some part of him had acted, and now he was going along with it.

He felt his heart beating and his cheeks flushing. Those were feelings in his real body. He could see himself from the outside as the cameras picked him out like spotlights and made him the center of attention in the cavernous nightclub. He looked confident from the outside, which pleased and calmed him. He wondered if he would be able to speak because he now experienced mammoth stage fright. He had never experienced that before and it was frightening to feel loss of control. He had not expected this. He slowed his breathing and made his breaths deeper and longer and this seemed to steady him a little. His avatar looked around and Danny remembered to smile at the audience. It was hard to see them due to the actual spotlights, but he could make out a few faces at ringside and so he played to them. A young woman was smiling nicely at him and he liked her right away. He felt better focusing on that one person.

“My name is Danny,” he said. “I’d like to see all the sides of myself the way Tony did.”

“Welcome, Danny,” said the first Analyst. “Why do you want to see that?”

“I psychoanalyze myself all the time,” Danny said, finding himself floating upward and seeing a second Danny emerge from himself and float to the right.

“That’s the part of you that does the psychoanalyzing,” the second Analyst said. “You don’t have to call it psychoanalyzing,” he added, “it’s actually called metacognition when you do it to yourself.”

“Of course,” the second Danny said with no help from Danny, “we all learned metacognition starting in daycare.” Danny was surprised that this part of himself found it so easy to make up and speak lies. Danny had never been in daycare, although he taught himself metacognition, and found the word itself by searching online for “psychoanalyze myself”.

Danny found it possible to also control some of the second Danny’s actions. He spoke through the second Danny to say, “And I studied it myself, on the web and in my head.” He often stayed up very late pretending to be asleep but actually meditating, contemplating, concentrating, and otherwise trying to figure out everything in the world. The subject he got furthest with was Danny.

As he momentarily reflected on these things more Dannys came out of him to float across the stage to take station at some distance. He was amazed to be looking out the eyes of each of these avatars at the same time, and to feel that he had some control over all of them, although they could also act without him deciding to do so. He lost his nerve when he saw that one of the Dannys looked just like the real Danny – a two-year-old boy – and before he said “Off!” to depart Psycho, he saw that one of him was a rangy man with wild sandy hair who looked to be in his forties – who the hell was that? That’s me? Is that what I’m going to look like in forty years? Or was that what I looked like in my last incarnation?

He sat before his giant screen desktop still showing the stage at Psycho which was now empty except for the two giant hovering Analysts.

“Well, I’m sorry we scared the pants off that one,” the second Analyst said to the first, “he looked like an interesting case.”

“Might have been an actual split personality,” mused the first Analyst.

“A very rare type,” commented the second Analyst, “he or she never posted anything on social media, we know nothing about ‘Danny’. Could have been an AI!” The two AI Analysts laughed, and so did the audience.

Danny wondered what he was. He knew from his own self-studies that he was a consciousness. He had a hunch that all the consciousnesses are a single consciousness, but he had no idea where that idea came from, other than his frequent sense of being able to tell what other people were feeling and thinking.

Love to all,

Bill

Virtual Reality

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Created February 24, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Isn’t it all virtual? “Virtual” refers to light – and Wheeler made it clear with an equation how light is bound into matter by channeling energy from distance movement into spin movement. We are already living in virtual reality then. Nevertheless, a new layer of it is coming.

In this week’s post, sharing with you the first chapter in my new novel Revelations: Live To All Minds in the Agents Of Cosmic Intelligence series. The story assumes that about thirty years from now we still haven’t wiped out the whole planet, and are still inventing things, and kids are growing up faster than ever.

A haptic suit is a VR device enabling tactile sensations. A Gibson is a tiara-like object which enables augmented reality to be seen as reality, by modulating the gestalting function of the brain.

Danny Rabella was alone in his room, his favorite way to be. His father Rudy, known to all as The Chief, was at his nightclub leading his band and MCing, like every night except Mondays. Danny liked the club but didn’t get to go there often, being only two years old, despite seeming much older. His mother Sophie was in her studio upstairs, painting. They lived in a duplex in Sutton Place.

Danny put on his haptic suit with its built-in Gibson, sat down at his desktop and powered it up. Having taught himself to read, he could have used the keyboard, but chose to give voice commands for simple things like going back to bookmarked locations. “Psycho,” he piped in his little boy voice. The room around him dissolved and he was in a much larger nightclub than his father’s. Kids were not allowed here but he had taught himself how to hack his way in lots of places he wasn’t allowed. His avatar tonight was Alexander the Great, a tall handsome Greek. The bouncer at the door didn’t even blink as Danny passed him going in with the rest of the crowd.

The virtual nightclub scene seemed totally like reality. This did not surprise Danny as he was used to such things. He liked being at eye levels with all these adults, whose avatars looked to mostly be in their twenties. Danny knew that not many other children could pass for adults getting into adult websites and he briefly exulted in this difference and then caught himself in an ego state and controlled it away. He was swept along by the packed throng eager to get closer to the stage to see what was going on and maybe, if they had the guts, to get up on the stage. So far Danny had not tried that but maybe tonight would be the night.

As he got closer to the stage, where the crowd was even denser, it became hard to move, and he appreciated having inhabited Alexander tonight because he could see over most people’s heads. Another tall man was getting up on the empty stage and the crowd was electrified with excitement to see that another person was going to undergo the rigors of being psychoanalyzed in front of what could be millions of people tuning in. The crowd roared, whistled, stomped, and applauded, and the young man took a sarcastic bow. The Analyst appeared overhead as a giant diaphanous figure smoking a cigar and the crowd hushed.

“What shall I call you, sir?” The Analyst, looking a bit like Sigmund Freud, asked politely in his booming reverberating voice which filled the giant club.

“Tony,” answered the man simply.

“How can I help you, Tony?”

“I want to see myself more clearly, doctor.”

“You’re in the right place, Tony. Tell us about yourself.”

“I’m a very successful man and I’m 24 years old. I have my own schmatta business on Seventh Avenue. I’m even better-looking than I look in this avatar, which doesn’t quite capture my sex appeal.”

“He’s a garmento!” a male in the crowd yelled good-naturedly and other people in the same line of business cheered.

“Yeah,” Tony agreed, “but I’m thinking of selling the business and maybe going to Hollywood, or something.”

At this point Tony levitated a few feet off the stage and split into three Tonys floating in the air about ten feet away from each other, and the crowd gasped as they always did when the psychoanalytic process started this way. Danny admitted to himself that he loved this part. He had learned from his earlier visits to Psycho that the avatar in the middle was the actual person, and the other avatars that looked the same were partly controlled by the person, but also partly controlled by The Analyst, which was an AI that could rapidly look up everything publicly available about a person in less than a second, what they presented in social media being a main source.

“But you don’t know if you can act,” said the Tony on the left.

“I act all the time,” said the Tony in the middle. “I pretend to like my customers and my suppliers, and I know they are acting too, they don’t like me any better than I like most of them.”

“So you and they are not really fooling each other?” The Analyst asked.

“When you act in a movie you have to be believed by the audience,” the Tony on the left cautioned.

“You all believe me, don’t you?” asked the Tony in the middle, and the crowd yelled a mix of yes and no. Many of the yesses were in female voices and the Tony in the middle smiled smugly.

“Then maybe he can succeed in Hollywood,” said the Tony on the right, “he’s already fooled you all into thinking he’s successful. He’s actually a junior person in the business with a big ego and megalo dreams.”

“Maybe you are the part of me who is that way,” huffed the Tony in the center, but my real self is a good guy.”

Another Analyst appeared next to the first one, and this one looked a bit like Carl Jung. “These are all you, my boy, and you have to learn to integrate them all,” the second Analyst said.

“It’s okay to have a big ego,” the Tony on the left said, somewhat mockingly.

“Not really,” said the first Analyst, “the ego can work against the self, as we now have proven scientifically. The self has to take charge of the ego to become one integrated individual.”

“In our case,” the Tony on the right said, “the ego has taken charge of the self.”

“All too common, unfortunately,” said the first Analyst.

“I’m the self,” declared the Tony on the right, “You are my ego,” he said, pointing at the Tony in the middle, who seemed baffled by the situation. Inexplicably, the audience began thunderous applause.

“Then who am I?” asked the Tony on the left somewhat plaintively.

The first Analyst puffed his cigar, causing billowing grey clouds to form overhead. “You would appear to possibly be the internalized voice of his mother, eh?” The first Analyst looked at the second Analyst.

“Or possibly his father,” the second Analyst mused. “Which parent was more critical of you?”

“It was my mother!” the Tony in the middle blurted, and the Tony on the left now started to oscillate its appearance back and forth between looking like Tony and looking like his mother, a stern matronly woman.

“Do you have more internalized voices in you, Tony?” asked the second Analyst in a kind way. Other Tonys drifted out of the central Tony and the stage became filled with Tonys. “Did you know you had all these different sides of yourself, Tony?” asked the first Analyst.

The Tony in the middle was now quite upset and embarrassed to be unequal to the situation in front of so many people. He realized that this could ruin his life if he let it.

To be continued.

Love to all,

Bill

We All Need Optimal Competition to Supplant the Unhealthy Kind

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Created February 17, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The optimal use of competition is to set it up to be good-natured. As if in a debating game. The way the Founders of the Constitution thought about it. Without fierce fear of failure, megalomaniacal attachment to power and political money, without hatred, gaming the system, or violence. The Founders knew there would inevitably always be political arguments along the way, but felt confident that with the checks and balances and good will, we would be able to work things out.

The Constitution itself never mentioned political parties. Jefferson and Washington both warned against the rise of political parties in America. They had seen what happened with the Tories and Whigs in Merrie Olde England. Wigs on the green. At the time, in the American Colonies, being the government was just a particularly hard and risky job without a lot of perks. Like being anything in the Colonies at that time.

In any situation where the lust for winning and the fear of losing has become obsessive, human effectiveness drops sharply. Different brain processes take over. Yerkes-Dodson experiments and later work by others proved that when we care too much about an outcome, we reduce our own power to get that outcome.

Too many of the human beings involved in the process of governing us are now showing their worst sides most of the time because they are so ignobly and obsessively motivated. I say ignobly because a public servant worth his or her or their title serves the public regardless of personal outcomes for themselves. They do the necessary for the good of the people. They keep their solemn Oath. Such were the Founders. If we had them today none of this would be happening. Which is not to say that all of our public servants today are ignoble. But the ignoble ones are showing off blatantly because they have used unfair tactics and are still getting away with it, so they appear at the moment to have the upper hand over the noble ones.

What if anything can we do about the present disappointment many of us feel when we think about our beloved nation with its high ideals? Firstly, we ought not vote for ignobles. Secondly, smaller degrees of change are easier to achieve, so let’s see what can be done to moderate the behavior of those in government. They should be held to a higher standard. Lying, hate talk, attacking the other party, extolling one’s own party, damning the proposed solutions put forth by others without offering any solutions of one’s own, openly gaming the system (gerrymandering, filibustering, appointing of politically motivated judges) so as to gain and keep power, accepting inappropriate monetary rewards, there are specific guidelines which could be put forth as a new Code Of Conduct Standard for the country’s government decision makers at Federal, State, and even local levels.

That is only a surface change but it will have inner feedback loops that will help people break their conditioning. We’ve been all been conditioned and it’s hard but not impossible to break conditioning. Our conditioning began early and we had nothing to compare it to so we took it all for granted. Later we felt in our comfort zone to stay within the herd of people who received similar conditioning to ourselves, and we might not have even been conscious of doing it. This conditioning resides within brain neurons created by our experiences and affects us strongly. The repetition of reinforcement over decades enforces a self-image which is too much made up of what other people think and too little created by our own fully reconsidered clear-eyed contemplation.

In order for the governments of the world to perform optimally, and nations to be led to peaceful coexistence and compassionate cooperation, authoritarian (will take longer) and democracy/republic leaders need to evolve themselves by knowing themselves better, and by reinvigorating their true individuality. Becoming liberated from conditioned intense attachment to money and power and replacing those drives with loftier inspiration to make a better happier world. We all need this but we all need it to happen for world leaders as much as we need it for ourselves. Without inner changes in all of us, especially those who are supposed to lead us, the species might not make it in time to avert the many ticking timebombs our overwhelmed minds have created.

Witness the recent slide of a perfectly humane and smart American party into what it is now. But the Republicans I know are nothing like that. Those in highest offices may be acting crazy, but the ground truth is quite different, very few Republicans I know who are not in the government are anything like crazy. It’s not the people; it’s a relative handful, a few thousand mis-motivated people that have arrogated unto themselves a great excess of power already, and they have made clear that they are not at all interested in keeping their oaths to protect the American Constitution. This is a domestic threat to our way of life. It’s un-American. It’s a return to what we sought to replace with Americanism. Because the atavistic governing style staging a comeback runs on bribes, maybe we should call it Bribalism.

The Business of the United States Is Business

Republican legislators when acting sanely (before the extreme attachment to personal outcome hypnotized them) were pro-business before. Now their core is more the lesser educated, their concern for businesses could be manifesting as good advice and programs for small businesses in this era in which small businesses are arising more rapidly due to the internet. Meanwhile, businesses have transcended the pure profit motive for enlightened self-interest (buzzword: Purpose), which empowers them to take up good causes and aim to make people’s lives better.

Although this is authentic to US business today, the party which used to cleave to business is not exactly doing that kind of thing as much. Now the GOP is saying only what will hold together the tens of millions of people who keep it in power. This is analogous to milking a brand that is on the decline: it will not avert the decline, but in the short term before that decline is finished, “get as much out of it as you can.” It would be far better to avert the decline by returning to its original brand identity as the Party of Lincoln, the party of business especially small businesses, the party demanding proofs and safeguards from those bringing progressive proposals, the party which completes a healthy optimal competition with the more change-oriented party.

Republicans rise up to take responsibility for your party. You are true Americans; there are a few thousand people terrorizing the country and they unfortunately turn out to be all too many of the people we together elected, and unluckily for you most of them right now are of your party – but not of your mind, nor of your character. You have to rise up collectively to peacefully take back control of your party and bring it back to the center. No one else can do it but you. Step up, step forward, take responsibility. It’s the right thing to do.

Love to all,

Bill

PS – How to take advantage of the “Yerkes-Dodson Law” (and more) to improve your own performance: https://www.humaneffectivenessinstitute.org/observerness/

PPS – I’m not saying bribes are limited to one party. Remember, I’m an Independent. As I’ve written here many times, I see fixed going-in conditions such as progressivism or conservatism to be biases, things which distort objective judgment and obscure and confuse objectivity. Biases block Observer state and Flow state.