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User’s Manual For The Mind

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Powerful Mind Part 4
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, April 18, 2025
Originally posted March 31, 2023

Read Powerful Part 3              |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Most people would agree that it would have been handy to have been given a User’s Guide when born. Remember the takeoff on the Emergency Broadcast System?

This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life, you would have received further instructions as to what to do and where to go.

Such a guide would have to start very simply, since the child at birth will not process anything complicated. It might start out like this:

Hi! Your name is ________. But YOU are much more than your name. You are a living being in a vast, mostly-unknown universe. You are a member of the dominant life form on the planet. You became dominant because you’re the smartest. That means you know how to use your mind.

Q. So what IS your mind? Are you and your mind the same thing?

A. Yes and no. You are your mind. But remember, “mind” is just a word; it depends on how you define it exactly.

One way of defining “mind” – the way we define it – is everything you experience, your consciousness, your awareness. Other definitions say the “mind” is just the “intellect” and does not include the feelings, intuition, perceptions, imagination, memory, willpower, or ESP we might experience. If you follow either of these definitions then You are more than your mind, as defined, since you do have all these other things.

Q. Waah! Want Mama! All these other what things? You’re saying I’m made up of all these things, and I won’t even know what these things are that make up who I am.

A. No problem, let’s go over the list. These are among all the good things you have, going in:

  1. You will have the persistent sense of being you – we call that the “Self”.
  2. You will have attention.
  3. You will have feelings – some good, some not so good; you may learn how to re-set yourself back to good feelings, by solving specific small and larger challenges in your life; over time you may learn how to re-set to good feelings faster. Confidence is a feeling, as is lack of it. This list of feelings goes on. You’ll see.
  4. You will have five physical senses – sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.
  5. You will have hunches – intuition. By following these hunches and using the rest of what you have, you will be able to predict the future, but only imperfectly.
  6. You will have memory.
  7. You will be able to generate imagined stories and experience them, called dreams when you are sleeping, and imagination when you are (relatively) awake.
  8. You will decide that things have to be a certain way and you will do things that tend to cause that outcome; this is called willpower.
  9. Free will. This means you can make up your own mind. And you can do whatever you decide to do, but you must accept the consequences, meaning it will be wise to think out consequences before you act. You’ll need something else for that, something that none of these first eight parts of you can do.
  10. Hence, the intellect. This part of you is the thinker, the part of you that can take apart a situation into pieces and thereby better understand it. This part can also make plans, always a good thing to do before taking action. This is also the part you are hearing or seeing whenever you hear or see words in your head. And it’s the part that most helps the intuition when it comes to making predictions.
  11. Motor control (and body). You will be able to move the body you are currently inhabiting as you will it (unless you become intoxicated or are otherwise physically challenged). You use this body of yours, and the motor control that you have over it, to take actions in the world that appears to exist outside and around you, to relate to what appear to be other selves.
  12. ESP. You will discover for yourself whether these exist for you or not. These are Extra Sensory (meaning “extra” to the first five) Perceptions. Telepathy, precognition (greatly improved ability to make accurate predictions), telekinesis, gaining additional influence over outcomes “as if by magic”.
  13. Spirit. This is the part of you that feels like a part of Something much larger. There is much for you to discover by exploring this asset, and the same can be said for all thirteen of your assets, aspects, faculties, manifestations, whatever you choose to call them.

Q. This is a mindblower – what a trip! How can I manage 13 parts of myself and keep it all coordinated?

A. Don’t overthink it. The rational mind is not designed to consciously control all parts of you. If you try to use the rational mind that way, you won’t even be able to catch a ball. Be spontaneous and natural, so long as you are careful at all times to not hurt other people’s feelings or their bodies. You will have to discriminate carefully and quickly, all the time, to decide which of your impulses to follow, and which ones to hold in check. If you are unsure or there is any negative feeling, don’t act too quickly. Be spontaneous and go with your own flow, but be prepared to take control and stop yourself from getting yourself in trouble. This means both hands on the wheel of yourself. Pay attention. And never forget to be on your own side.

At the first unpleasant feeling, stop what you’re doing, and figure out why that was unpleasant, and how to make it more pleasant “next time”. Don’t take the alternative course of just bypassing those little clues, suffering the unpleasantness without understanding it fully. These imperfections pile up and eventually, you are looking at a full-scale problem, and what seems like a million unanswered questions in your head.

In reality, if your life goes along like most people’s lives in the 21st century, you will probably reach a point of pile-up and possible breakdown, and fortunately, that challenge will bring you back to start over, to figure things out for yourself.

Always come back to who you are. We pick up mannerisms and other behavior patterns from other people and these conditioned behaviors are like a short circuit between motor control and memories. Memories of what you have seen other people do or say program your body without your agreeing to it consciously. Be alone and use all parts of yourself to figure out what has gone wrong and how to fix it.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

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Noia

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Powerful Mind Part 42

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created December 8, 2023. Updated April 11, 2025

Read Powerful Mind 41              |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

In the 1970s, I coined the term “Noia” as the opposite of paranoia when I discovered that the prefix “para” derives from the Greek meaning of “beside”. What is beside paranoia, I asked myself. Paranoia is the unhealthy fear that someone/everyone is out to get you. I decided that “noia” then might be the healthy suspicion that someone is out to help you.

The reason I was thinking this way is that by the 1970s, I had noticed that often information was coming to me seemingly by accident that was unusually relevant to my current life situation at the time. I would be trying to solve some problem, for example, and since I almost always have music on, a line in a song would come along at just the right moment to bear an uncanny resemblance to my line of thought.

This can be easily explained as random coincidence aided by priming effect and being observant. Priming effect is the increase in saliency of a stimulus to a person caused by a prior stimulus.

However, it did not seem like random coincidence to me because it occurred too often. It seemed more like someone who could read my thoughts and feelings was trying to help me reach my goals. Since my goals have always been to leave the world a better place than I found it, perhaps the universe is trying to help me because I am trying to help the universe, I thought.

Looking back at my life through that lens as a way of further studying the phenomenon, it appeared that I had been given the most open-minded and compassionate parents possible, and gifted with an independence of thought, and lucky in so many ways. I also saw that my love of science had blinded me to consider that there might be a germ of truth in religion and/or in other superstitious behaviors, as I thought of magic, reincarnation, and so many other things.

Having the label of “noia” to slap on things was useful to me in prying open my mind to pay closer attention and not to filter or bias what I perceived by having strong preconceived notions. I started to notice how frequently each day I experienced noiac events.

That led to my noticing what I noticed, and asking myself, “Why did I notice that?” In the bulk of cases this unearthed insights helpful to me in whatever I was doing during that period of my life. It was as if another entity with my interests at heart was causing me to notice things that contained or stimulated pathways of thought that would take me to places I needed to go.

You might say that this helpful entity was my own subconscious. But then, what was my subconscious? Could it be the part of my consciousness that is common to all of us and all things? Jung had thoughts like these and also had many other notions that had been of significant utilitarian value to me, so maybe there was something in it. In the 70s I became aware that my affection for science had gone too far and I was myself being unscientific by ruling things out prematurely, and that I ought to go back to the roots of empiricism rather than stay in the current herd culture of scientism which allows scientists to carve out a large chunk of human experience as being superstition without conclusive proof supporting that negation position.

The next step after open-mindedness in this expanded empirical outlook is the control of attention.

In the Acceleritis-dominated culture we live in, taking control of your own attention is one of the hardest possible things to do. There are all of these distractions taking you away from moment to moment. Unfortunately, this environment captures young people from the get-go. They have almost no chance to escape it because it hits them very early on. It’s the ocean around the fish which the fish takes for granted. As if life could not even exist without perpetual distraction.

Young people in the age of smartphones build their lives around this device, and no age group is immune to its hypnotic power. Before June 2007, it was the television set that took us away, and now the norm is to have both devices on at all possible times.

Nevertheless, each and every one of us has the potential to retake our castle. Concentration, meditation, contemplation are the training grounds that build a controllable attention. Twenty minutes a day of practicing these three things can become a 24/7 lifestyle that is far more beneficial than we expect it to be.

One experiment that is worth doing over and over again in the daily alone space – and in other opportune moments – is to get away from devices (soft music without lyrics in the background is fine), put your body in a comfortable position that it can remain in for a long time without discomfort, close your eyes, and simply pay all of your attention to what is transpiring in your mind.

As you get better at this, you will see that you are gaining the ability to watch the arising of a thought or feeling. Focus your attention on being able to see a thought or feeling or other qualia (subjective experience) such as an image, or even a momentary smell, any experience that occurs in your psyche.

Separate the part of you that is the pure experiencer from the part of you that is expressing itself in displaying that thought or feeling to you. If you like baseball, you might picture these two aspects of yourself as the pitcher and the batter.

Sometimes you will experience qualia that teaches you something that you are grateful to learn and you fear you might forget. It’s good to have something to write with and write on right next to you so you can put down one or a few words that will help you recapture the sense of the message. Best to use the exact words that triggered your sense of valuable information.

Often the pitcher will be your ego pitching something at you that is negative, tied to an attachment of yours, and that matches your notion of Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the reductionistic state into which people are forced by Acceleritis. This ego is a biological AI whipping up a compote of memories and tossing them at you in a fastball.

Under normal conditions, you might swing and miss but with your eyes closed and in a meditative space, it will be easier to observe these qualia dispassionately without being caught up in it the way you would normally be taken over by it.

The more you play ball with your robot (ego bio-AI), the more you will notice about its behaviors. You will begin to sense that the robot contains many different programs that I have previously referred to as “senators”. These are all points of view you have experienced, mostly coming from other people you have met or watched or listened to on devices.

The game is made more difficult by the fact that sometimes the robot is right. Sometimes, the oversimplified lesson extracted from prior experience is accurately predictive. You sense your own immediate aversion to a person who has not yet done anything counter to you – you suspect it might be because they remind you of someone who has done you dirty in the past – and it turns out that this person is actually trying to take advantage of you. You wonder whether it was the robot who gave you the good inner advice or if the Noia was the benefactor who gave you that precognitive hunch. It could be either. The robot is not always wrong in the net advice it is giving you, but it’s undependable and it tends toward negativity and extremism. Both negativity and extremism are life poisons. They aren’t helpful. Discriminating among your mental and emotional arisings is the only game in town and it can be won against all odds.

Increasing internal visibility is an important aspect of Key #11. More in Powerful Mind Part 43.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

My best to all,
Bill

We Each Have a GPT4 Within Us

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Powerful Mind Part 39

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created December 8, 2023. Updated April 4, 2025

Read Powerful Mind 38             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

No computer system before the current Large Language Models (LLMs) has been able to fool humans into thinking that the computer is human or the intellectual equal – which is the Turing test, proposed by one of the pioneers of modern computers, Alan Turing, in March 1946. What is amazing about the LLMs is how human their texts sound.

What is even more amazing is that all they are doing is a version of autocompletes – when your computer or smartphone fills in the next word or words you are going to key in. GPT4 and the other LLMs are gigantic versions of the same algorithm. The vast amount of training data is what makes them sound like us and be right so much of the time.

Unbeknownst to us, we have always had a similar function in our own brains. The reason it remained unknown to us for so long is that it passed the Turing test. We took it as our own words to ourself.

This function predicts what we will say next, based on what we have said in the past (which are the training data), and on what we just said to ourselves a moment ago (which is the prompt to be autocompleted).

On occasion, the robot (as I call the inner biological AI) might escalate what you just said to yourself (the prompt), using terms you had used in the past (training data) in association with that word you just used. “Escalate” means taking your prompt and making a more extreme statement as a follow-up. In this way, the inner AI may contribute to our recognized collective leanings into extremism throughout recorded history and never more so than today.

The problem is we take all of our thoughts at equal value. The ones we ourselves say to ourselves, and to the ones that are predictions by our robot. We didn’t know about this robot thing, so we presumed that any thought in our mind was propelled solely by our own free will. However, we find this to not be the case. There is another word source which accesses memory systems and – like today’s LLM chatbots – predicts/suggests what to say next.

Why is there such a system? Apparently pro-survival, it reminds the self how to promptly respond to incoming signals of each specific type. However, it will tend to self-past-consistency and so it will potentially underestimate where the self has evolved to at the current moment.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), otherwise known as the default network, these snuck-in inputs will be taken as the self’s own.

In Observer state, otherwise known as the executive control network, the self senses that it is now going off a bridge too far and pulls itself back.

However, even in Observer state, for the past few millennia we have not known that the human brain has these predictive abilities, and they are right now being discovered by science. Using introspection, I discovered the robot and wrote about it in my 1976 book Mind Magic.

From my own direct experience, I link the robot with Freud’s concept of the Ego. In Civilization and its Discontents he writes that the ego first arises when the baby feels needy and frustrated. It acts as the self, but it is actually a self-protective layer of mind on top of the id, the original self. In childhood I was able to understand my own actions through this lens of distinguishing the different voices in my mind.

Science is now confirming that the robot, as I wrote about it in Mind Magic, is a real thing, not just a metaphor. It’s as if a cosmic chunnel is being built from two ends, science and introspection, and they are actually connecting.

The verification for these psychotechnologies – the 12 Keys among others – by science is coming at just the right time. The upcoming generations feel handed a raw deal and fearful about their future, and they spend most of their time in EOP like the majority of us, ill-equipped for the likely challenges. Psychotechnology can achieve maturity of thought processes relatively quickly.

When Observer state is achieved it enables objective formal operational and systems thinking. One starts from understood and believed-in goals, then proceeds ethically and thoughtfully to achieve those goals. Each individual in this converted state is on a Mission with a known purpose. Having a Mission makes the individual less willing to give in to useless inner negativity and more self-disciplined about taking prompt but unhurried action aimed at carrying out the Mission.

The individual achieves meaning without the same constant dependency on media diversions. Moving toward of a future of one’s own shaping, life is exciting enough on its own. In Observer state, each challenge is a learning experience on the way to the goal.

Further psychotechnology balances this drive with resilient nonattachment to outcomes. Yerkes and Dodson proved that optimal arousal causes superior performance vs. maximal arousal. Czikszentmihalyi proved that there is a state above Observer state which he famously called Flow state. Yale’s Neuroscience Master Chun notes that the random chatter between lobes disappears in Flow state.

Spiritual psychotechnology opens up the individual to the possibility of cosmic connection, and how to recognize and work with it.

Worry and Fix

Two little words. And yet a philosophy can be built on them.

A 50,000-foot view of what goes on in our minds is a mix of these two things. We’re always either worrying or fixing.

A great many people worry almost constantly. This appears to leave them little time for fixing.

A few of us have learned to minimize time spent worrying and maximize time spent fixing.

The two strategies are poles apart in terms of success rates. And inversely poles apart in terms of popular adoption.

But why would people choose to waste time worrying when they could be fixing?

People generally do not believe they have the power to make a difference in their own lives, let alone to change the world. They feel swept along by forces much stronger than themselves, some coming from the outside and some coming from the inside.

The traitorous thoughts coming from the inside are the ego, the aspect of self which resists community mindmeld; it is always in a cold war against the others perceived to be separate beings, essentially competitors, rivals. Everyone else is the potential rival.

Everyone else is also the threat vector coming at the ego from the outside. Inside and outside sources appear to agree on the dangerous nature of the others. Everyone else.

In higher states of consciousness – specifically Observer state and Flow state – these paranoid delusional biases are identified instantly by a person. In Observer state one is conscious of one’s own judgment swings and even fine-tuning adjustments taking place from moment to moment.

In the higher states, there is no worry because every challenge is accepted with valor and all time is spent on fixing, building, creating. Worries streak in, and last only fleeting minutes, while the focused mind dissects them, and establishes new rules of engagement (fixing).

The present environment is geared toward producing hyper-over-stimulation/distraction. This is the result of Acceleritis over the past six millennia. We became stimulation junkies and invented technodrugs to feed that addiction.

At one time not so very long ago, in the West, we felt very confident and competent. In the East and South, where most of current growth has come from, there was great hope.

Now uncontrolled thoughts and feelings have stampeded the herd. This is all utterly unnecessary.

We have the skills and resources to fix everything, even at the advanced state of ruin we have already made of the planet and its species.

But not without working together.

If we continue to wallow in delusional hate fantasies while Rome burns, well. You know how that ends.

Can we all please wake up from the nonsense and get to cooperating to fix the mess we made?

Further methods of attaining inner clarity (Key #10) in Part 40.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

My best to all,
Bill

The Consistency Program

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Powerful Mind Part 18

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 28, 2025
Created July 7, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 17

“Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Essay on Self-Reliance: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’ His point was that only small-minded men refused to rethink their prior beliefs. Or, put another way, he thought that today’s intuition could trump yesterday’s conclusions.” — Paul Rosenzweig, LAWFARE

Wise people have been aware of this excess invocation of consistency for some time, but their admonitions have been little grasped as cultural necessities. Why is that?

Decision-making is the basis for all action by conscious agents of any species.

Almost all decision-making is implicit, meaning the same as subconscious in this context. And because that literally means it takes place below the level of conscious awareness, it becomes understandable that many mental bad practices can persist for millennia.

Wise folks can and do tell us the right ways to live, and yet, even if it sounds good to us, we can’t seem to put their wisdom into practice.

That’s because it is harder to change mental habits than the wise have realized in the past. Those wise in today’s age are probably quite aware of the importance of this difficulty in taking control of one’s actions such that one is able to optimize real-world decision-making and its real-world outcomes, without being helplessly dragged along by past inner scripts which have become lodged in our minds.

There is a subtle sense of time pressure in our culture – often not that subtle. Under these conditions (I call Acceleritis), it’s natural that one would want to be able to make fast decisions, especially about things which do not immediately seem to be all that important.

When one’s mindset is set that way (I call it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), one way to speed up decision-making is simply to be consistent with one’s past behavior.

We become imitations of ourselves, especially imitators of our remembered experiences. It would be more effective if you’re going to imitate, to remember back to your best moments, and to emulate whatever you did at those moments. Although, that would still be sub-optimizing.

The best practice is to be real in the moment, filtering out only negativity.

What does that mean – being real in the moment? It means exposing your true current feelings in a positive way. Not remembering back. Not imitating yourself or anyone else. Just acting naturally, without the inner sense of being at risk. Not self-protective. Not defensive. Just yourself, but editing out any negativity. Translating what may feel negative on the inside so it’s just an objective statement of facts on the outside.

This is easy to say but not easy to do. Bringing autonomous auto-reactions under one’s own conscious control is a major life achievement.

There are tricks you can use, such as applying your sense of humor.

Such as not imitating yourself or anyone else.

Such as by not choosing to be consistent with what you said yesterday or ten seconds ago, choose instead to re-inspect what you were espousing, and learn about your current self-administration by doing that inspection. You’ll recognize this to be Key #2. The Keys all work together and there are many overlaps among them. Here we are beginning our journey into Key #3 and we can see how Key #2 helps achieve Key #3. See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Consistency is a program in your mind. Supported by networks of neurons that interact in consistent ways. The universe has not given us a keyboard so that we could manipulate and change these neuronal patterns directly and so we shall have to build it someday, but in the meantime these Keys are the closest proxy we have for that keyboard. Which is not to dis-include the equivalent of Keys contributed by other thinkers on the subject, many of whom today are scientists, and many of whom today are spiritualists (which to them/us is an inner science).

Feed your mind voraciously while keeping it steadily open.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill