Category Archives: Classic Bill

Science, Spirituality, and “Woo-Woo”

Created April 5, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

“Woo-Woo” is defined as “unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.”

I’m grateful that there is not yet a derogatory term for “theories of universe grounded in science which are not in conflict with spirituality”.

As you may know, my books do not assert the existence of God, but point out that we could all be part of a single consciousness, a consciousness which could have the qualities we as a species have generally intuited for God – omnipresence, omnipotence, and benevolence.

My main emphasis in these books is that we should keep an open mind, and in our decisions and actions take into account the possibility that this is the truth—that we should be empirically scientific toward our own experiences, and objectively observe if the one-consciousness lens is useful in understanding what goes on in our lives.

Rather than filtering out our hunches and inspirations, our blatant experiences of telepathy and empathy (understanding, emotional telepathy), and our spiritual intuitions. EOP, Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, is the instantaneous dichotomistic bucketing of everything into good vs. bad based on accumulated imitative conditioning, without giving any fresh thought to any matter.

As a species we have been driven into the EOP condition by a combination of Acceleritis, accelerating information overload, plus the dominant unsupported assumption of Western science since circa 1800 that the material world is all that exists and that it came about by accident.

In that science thus constrained, the importance of consciousness has been generally belittled.

Stellar exceptions: William James, Jung, Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking — who in his last book held up Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle as part of Hawking’s own worldview. By the implications of their thinking, these renowned scientists all opened the door to the possibility of a universe which is a consciousness. None of them, however, took it that far.

Einstein, like Thales and Spinoza, had spiritual feelings aimed at the universe and at the intelligence which had created it. By bringing the observer into his thought experiments, Einstein snuck consciousness back into science’s picture of reality, thus discovering relativity.

These great thinkers were resuscitating animism, originally emerging as the first natural religion, essentially the feeling that the Creator is in everything. The native Americans shared these same spiritual feelings.

Animism never went on to become a formalized religion, that was pantheism, its next stage of evolution toward today’s dominant monism – which within Hinduism still contains a pantheistic pantheon as masks of the One, as established by the Upanishads.

Neither Spinoza nor Einstein saw any conflict between their animism and Judaism. This is key. What it says is that not only is it possible that we are part of a field of consciousness which invented matter-energy-spacetime, it also says that there is no distance between that and the beliefs and values of the world’s religions, that it is all internally consistent, integrity exists, science is its mental emanation, spirituality is its emotional emanation.

Will we then all become more positive about life and about each other? It would be natural, once we get out of the habit of implicitly putting down all spirituality because of some Woo-Woo extremists.

But Thales, Spinoza, Einstein, and many other people have experienced that moment, that rush, of spiritual realization, when one suddenly gets it— that there could be a scientific God.

We might not be limited to this world, this one lifetime.

One suddenly has a sense of cosmic resonance, of the importance of being.

We know that consciousness exists. We know that with much more certainty than we know that matter exists since we experience matter through our senses, which are part of our consciousness.

So it would be illogical to deny the possibility of a much larger consciousness.

Woo-Woo is another form of EOP. Oversimplification. It is not necessarily something that happens to people as a result of their own spiritual realizations, it might have been transmitted to them by friends and associates and/or by social media or books they’ve read.

Because Woo-Woo is essentially authoritarian and faith-based, it is a belief system and does not rely upon scientific support. It tends to be open-ended i.e. pretty much anything goes.

Back in the 70s when psychedelics first reached a mass audience, both spiritual realizations and Woo-Woo began to spread through the world culture. Two parallel and related processes.

Today there are about a thousand times more books published per year about Woo-Woo than in the 70s. They are almost all well-intended. A few are cryptopolitical propaganda. The field does much more good than harm, in my estimation.

Getting people to be less negative is a good thing. It would be better to do that with less exaggeration and fewer black-and-white generalizations. But game theory proves that optimism is more utilitarian than pessimism. Yes, Woo-Woo goes too far, but I wouldn’t waste time putting people down. Better to help Woo-Woo folks metacognize, recognize, and master their own egos, reopen their minds to all possibilities, and move up into the Observer and Flow states, and out of Woo-Woo followership.

Mixing Woo-Woo with politics is a sure sign that it is the most naïve, imitative form of Woo-Woo. Spirituality is above politics. If we are all one thing, factions are a mental illness.

Takeaway:

Don’t believe anything except your own experience, be observant and keep an open mind, test and learn, see if this one-consciousness lens is useful to you, realize Oneness as an ever-constant possibility.

My Best to all,
Bill

 

Quote images from Quotefancy.com

Perspective

Created March 8, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Perspective is very helpful in dealing with the present historic moment…These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us…
It’s time to be that best version of yourself.
Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

My friend arrived and put down his bag and took off his scarf and coat and sat on the banquette seat I’d saved for him. I asked him in a cheery voice how he was, expecting his usual enthusiastic answer, and he made ambiguous body language.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, still upbeat.

“Overwhelmed,” he admitted.

“By…”

“By the cold, all the news, and age!” he specified.

I contemplated his answer. “I’m with you on all of that.”

“I was just reading The New York Times, and every story is bad news. I used to be able to find one or two ‘good news’ stories in every issue.”

“I’ve been advising cutting down on the news and all other media that brings you down.” He nodded in violent agreement. We ordered lunch.

“How do you deal with those things?” he asked.

“You know, my take on the universe is that we are all one unkillable consciousness. That on Earth you and I are part of a free will experiment the conscious intelligent universe is doing. It is that Intelligence which looks out our eyes as us.” He nodded, chewing, having heard this from me before, in other language.

“I feel certain that the test we are undergoing will teach us wisdom of immense value. I write to help bring an end to suffering. I feel great sadness for those suffering, but I can’t let that affect my effectiveness on their behalf.”

He knew me from a long way back and knew that was what I say whenever there’s an opening. Never the exact same words, but always the same idea we are One Consciousness. He also knows that is my best guess as to what is really going on and that I live my life within this picture of reality.

If I’m wrong, then so is Einstein; neither of us believe that this complexity has all put itself together completely by accidental collisions, without the inescapable logical necessity of prior Intelligence.

We ourselves are a micro model of the Conscious Intelligent Universe – we are a consciousness so we know intimately what such a thing is.

And we know therefore that it is possible for there to be a consciousness.

Therefore it is totally illogical to state that a much larger version of the same thing “cannot possibly exist.”

My view of reality has an equal chance of being either true or false.

The same is true of any other view of reality now on the table.

Until your next death, when you gain important evidence, or simply cease to be able to experience knowing. Maybe then you’ll find out my “guess” or “prophecy” was right or not.

In any case, the real question is how to deal with the frightening omens and general sense of alarm. How to remain on a positive course, and learn from the challenges now appearing.

Stoic philosophers were the first to write down their ideas for dealing with horrific circumstances, and the Spartans largely demonstrated stoicism in action, except when they didn’t. At least they proved that it is humanly possible to zoom back far enough out of oneself to grok the universe is going to do stuff and we are supposed to rise to the occasion and to control our inner reaction to whatever befalls us externally.

Epictetus didn’t link his exhortations to any cosmological theory, he relied upon common sense. He implied that who knows what the universe really is, what we know is that we undergo severe trials here in reality and we need to understand the best way to deal with them. We can choose to take a different emotional reaction to our favorite cup being broken. It works with practice, will does develop.

Perspective is very helpful to me in dealing with the present historic moment.

This is as big as WWII. Even if we avert war but remain at battle stations for the rest of our lives.

Or, we come out of this into a reasonable facsimile of utopia.

These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us.

This is the cold water in the face wakeup call that God – the Conscious Intelligent Universe – is watching, and it’s time to be that best version of yourself. Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

Love to all,
Bill

Mind Discipline

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

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