Category Archives: Forgiveness

Turning a New Page in History

Created April 9, 2021

taken by Robert Brett

When they finally turned in, Joe, Vlad and Jinping had slept well, dreaming of better days ahead.

A limo brought them down to Pfeiffer Beach just before sunrise. Although the air was brisk and the water cold, the three went for morning swims. By the time they were in beach chairs swaddled in terrycloth robes, Secret Service men and women brought them Ramos Gin Fizzes helicoptered down from the Buena Vista bar in San Francisco, Joe’s without the alcohol.

To the sandpiper looking at them from the water’s edge, they somehow looked like FDR, Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, Joe sitting in the middle as FDR had done at Yalta. But the sandpiper knew nothing of such things.

Joe made sure his hands were dry before picking up his tablet.

“I want to read you something,” he said with a mischievous smile, “See if you can tell who said these things.” They looked back with amusement.

“We should foster a new type of international relations featuring ‘win-win cooperation’,” Joe read, “and we should forge a partnership of dialogue with no confrontation, and a partnership of friendship rather than alliance. All countries should respect each other’s sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity; respect each other’s development path and its social systems, and respect each other’s core interests and major concerns… What we hope to create is a big family of harmonious coexistence.”

Joe looked at them expectantly. Vlad just shook his head. “Obama?” he guessed.

“I said that,” Jinping recalled clearly, “in 2017 at the Belt and Road Forum.”

“Very much the spirit of what we discussed yesterday,” Joe observed, and both men cautiously nodded.

The sun appeared over the mountains. They watched it rise.

“Hexagram 35,” Joe said, referring to the I Ching. Hexagram 35 is Progress, the rapid easy progress of the sun rising in the sky, symbolizing ever widening expansion and clarity.

Jinping nodded. “A lot of wisdom in it. The culmination of Chinese learning over millennia.”

“What did you mean by ‘a partnership of friendship rather than alliance’?” Vlad asked Jinping.

“Alliance is generally a defensive maneuver,” Jinping posited. “NATO formed in fear of Russia, for example. Alliance means we will stand by you if you are attacked. If we create the right world, alliances will be unnecessary.”

“That will require trust,” Joe pointed out. “We three are self-disciplined and can therefore adapt faster than the average person. Most people will be cynical when they read about this meeting, and will take a lot of convincing over time. They will judge by our actions. Events will conspire to make it as hard as possible for us to stick to what we have been discussing.”

“That sounds very realistic,” Vlad murmured.

“When you said ‘All countries should respect each other’s sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity’, how would you relate that to Taiwan?” Joe asked politely.

“We are one people,” Jinping said. “The island you call Taiwan is occupied by the losers of the Chinese Civil War. Imagine if the Confederacy fled to an island close to the American mainland. What would you do?”

“But those people do not want to be reunited, they like being sovereign, as all people do,” Joe pointed out. “Your own words seem to confirm that you agree with this principle.”

“The real world is very messy,” Vlad commented. “Principles are fine in abstract philosophizing, but every situation in life is unique, and cannot be solved by a simple set of pre-established rules.”

“If your Most Favored Nation offer requires us to not secure our territorial integrity, it’s not going to last very long, and then we’re back where we were before yesterday’s unusual meeting,” Jinping said darkly.

“The way to feel secure is to have ‘friendship rather than alliance partnerships’ with all your neighbors, isn’t that your point?” Joe suggested.

“Although I can’t imagine you lose sleep worrying that anyone is going to invade China,” Vlad teased Jinping.

“My recommendation is that you just put on hold your recent initiatives in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and so on, and give us a chance to work together to solve the universal problems threatening our entire species,” Joe said. “You can resume them at any point you decide that they are more important than conquering mutating viruses, environmental collapse, world debt, suffering, fear, hate, and all of the crises we’ve brought on ourselves, and can most swiftly solve by our ‘partnership of friendship’.”

“I make no promises here and now,” Jinping said slowly, “but will consider carefully what you’ve said. I think we have made some real progress toward the ability to communicate clearly with each other.”

“Yesterday you enunciated four things your scenario planners say are the keys to working together,” Vlad began, addressing Joe. “Elbow room, offending the sensibilities of other nations, not making aggressive moves against each other, and how we the superpowers deal with everyone else.” Joe nodded, and Vlad went on. “What’s your definition of ‘aggressive moves’?”

“Fooling with each other’s media, stirring up troublemakers in each other’s country, having them enlist in the military in order to gain training and combat experience, reinforcing their authoritarian notions, outright attacks of course,” Joe paused, thinking if he had missed anything.

“Give all that up… I can’t work under those conditions,” Vlad said sternly and then smiled, admitting he was merely joking. “You know I don’t believe we have been doing any of those things, and in any case am happy to promise you that we will abide by these limitations going forward. But what about spying on each other? Is that going to be classified as an ‘aggressive move’?”

“No,” Joe said, “my advisors talked me out of that. Spying has been considered okay for the entire history of the human race. I would hope that once our actions have led to real trust in the world – God knows how long that will take us, but we must go there – our motivation to spy on one another will go way down.”

“What did you mean by ‘elbow room’?” Jinping asked.

“Expansionist moves usually come from the sense that one does not have enough land to contain one’s growing population,” Joe replied. Both men shook their heads. They both control enormous land masses, and see themselves as having population growth pretty much under control. “I see your point gentlemen, that one need not trouble us. I think we’ve discussed all of the points now except the one about everyone else in the world,” Joe said.

“What would you have us do about them?” Vlad asked.

“They of course deserve the same treatment we are promising each other,” Joe said, and the two men reluctantly nodded. “And they need help more than we do. We have to make sure they get the vaccines as soon as possible. That will prove that the three of us are serious and will begin the healing back of trust in the world.” They seemed to accept that notion but said nothing.

“Let’s go back to the elbow room thing,” Vlad said. “Most of the population growth is coming from everybody else, and eventually it’s going to get to be a very crowded world. For that reason, as well as a hedge against failure to cure the environment, and need for more natural resources, not to mention the positive effect on science and technology, we must continue our exploration of space.”

“I urge us to do that, together,” Joe agreed. “By combining forces, we can drive our science and technology much faster. We should not be in a space race against each other, nor should we picture colonizing planets in the name of one country who got there first. If the planet does not have a sentient race, we should feel free to live there without harming any species or the environment itself, as one humanity, not as countries.”

The other two men merely gaped at these ideas, taking them in, not prepared to argue against them, but reserving severe doubts.

“You know,” Joe said, “these apparent spacecraft that have been observing us, have far more advanced technology than we do.” Their eyes widened. Talking about UFOs had been tabu for years. “They may be concerned about us coming into space. We may appear to them to be warlike and immature. We don’t know if they represent a threat to us. One way or the other, we have to start thinking of ourselves as one humanity, for a long list of good reasons, real threats like mutating viruses and carbon dioxide, as well as possible threats that have not yet shown themselves.”

“Can’t rule anything out,” Jinping murmured. “But I for one am more concerned about corrupt people, terrorists foreign and domestic, and suggest we focus on the known problems.” Joe and Vlad nodded.

“You know the ‘bad guys’ among us are so very numerous,” Joe said, “Trying to violently exterminate them would make the world a far more horrible place than it is now. We have to uplift them out of their wrongheaded ideas.”

“That is very consistent with Chinese philosophy, as you have recently studied I believe,” Jinping observed, addressing Joe, who smiled agreement.

“Russian philosophy has always been multicolored,” Vlad said, “and leans toward integration with science and religion. We are very practical, we want to embody our philosophy directly into our daily lives. I was impressed yesterday with your ideas about training the most lost of our people. Turning that into real world experiments is an interesting challenge to tackle together, among the three of us, and with everyone else.”

There was a moment of soft silence and a feeling of momentary harmony. Joe stood up. “One last swim before we go back?” he proposed, and the two men stood up eagerly.

Our story does not end here. You can follow the story as it evolves in the real world.

Best to all,

Bill

Rugged Individualists Do Not Become Followers

Created January 14, 2021

It’s often been said that Americans are rugged individualists. As compared with the world average, I would agree with that as an American average.

It’s also been recently media-drummed into our heads that only far-right Americans are rugged individualists, and that the rest of us – all of us who are not far right – are socialists/collectivists.

This is a Big Lie that apparently has been successfully installed in the minds of (my estimate post insurrection) 40 million Americans – and I estimate that another 40 million de-installed that program around January 7.

The strange behaviors we see all around us lately make it really easy for me to establish my case as to how powerfully the media affect us.

This post continues the current series “On the Road to Flow” aimed at helping you stay in higher levels of consciousness (Observer and Flow states) which the great psychologist of individualism Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences”. He also coined the term “Self-Actualized” to describe human beings who had truly identified and exalted their individuality. And thereby found themselves in more continuous peak experiences.

Today’s post comes at this from two angles:

  1. How to become a true patriotic American rugged individualist by not being taken over and made a mind-slave of the media you’ve consumed.
  2. How to become a true rugged individualist by ferreting out and removing the remnants of your early conditioning.

Increasing Discrimination Applied to New Media Input

We continue to be programmed all the days of our lives, until we truly wake up to Observer state and Flow state levels, after which we are far less prone to being programmed by media and others. Until we reach those levels of peak experience and semi-Enlightenment, we are easily able to be taken over by charismatic tyrants, Big Lies, code words and symbols, and the sense of belonging and power we get by aligning with charismatic tyrants.

We go along with that programming while we are in the unconscious trance called Normal Waking Consciousness because it makes us feel less bad. But we can be swept up like pawns, used and thrown away by the charismatic tyrant, and then possibly incarcerated by Law & Order against which we (our true inner spirit) unintentionally transgressed (followers wind up trapped in scapegoating someone the master wishes to punish). Of course, our Ego was totally involved in the intention. And there is no way to absolve an individual of the consequences of acts caused by the AI rather than the me-that-was-born. That would be too easy an excuse. The Universe does not offer that escape clause. Nor do human councils assembled with the intention for justice.

The terrible Capitol Insurrection is a very strong advertisement for the need humanity has to truly wake up to the way their heads work and how to stay master of it.

Removing Conditioning from Past Influences

In the Flow state, one’s attention is single-pointed and all-encompassing, it sees and acts upon everything in your inner sensorium and in your so-called outer world at once – your entire phenomenal experience bubble in one go. In fact, if one were to break that concentration by thinking about it, that would:

  1. Take you down out of Flow into Observer state.
  2. Have you commenting on how unusual it is to be Flowing as if dancing with a perfect dance partner who is the entire outside world as it is experienced by you at this moment.

But when you are not in the Flow state nor even in the Observer state, when you are in that most common of states, Normal Waking Consciousness, your attention is decidedly not single-pointed. And you are not merged with the outside world at all.

One of things you have been unwittingly conditioned into habitually doing in that Normal Waking state, is to constantly rate how well you did a moment ago.

For one thing, this blocks you from going into Observer or Flow state, because it takes you out of the Now into the Past. This squanders your scarce resource of attention, except when it is necessitated, such as by your suspecting you have just made and must instantly correct a horrendous gaffe.

In the great majority of such moments however there is no compelling evidence of such urgency to continuously rate yourself.

This is merely one example of the pernicious invisible conditioning we all go through in life – despite everyone’s best intentions.

From Chapter 4 of MIND MAGIC:

This self-rating program

Is another internalized voice

Which originally belonged to other individuals

Who used it as a reward-punishment device

To condition you to perform in the ways

They wanted you to perform.

When you did what they wanted,

They said “(your name) good boy/girl”;

When you didn’t do what they wanted,

They said “(your name) bad boy/girl.”

This program now has independent life in your head.

You’ll note that MIND MAGIC is written in a peculiar way, almost like poetry. I call it “Inner Head Language”. I find that it works best in changing my own behavior. It may be that its child-like simplicity is for some reason more accessible to the theorized AI in our brains. As if the Ego conditioning comes from a time we were very young, when this was the only language we understood then, so the code in our heads is written in that language.

To read the full chapter of MIND MAGIC on this subject please click here.

To get the whole book free please click here. (Free offer expires upon herd immunity to Covid-19.)

All my best,

Bill

Practicing Forgiveness

Original post December 1, 2015

There are a great many benefits when we stop blaming and instead open ourselves to forgiveness. Blame is an investment of mental and emotional energy that pays no return. The same energy can be redeployed to deliver a positive return.

I am faithful to what I see as the common core of all religions, not as religions but as scientific truth. My hypothesis and conviction is that there is only One of us. And if there is only One Spark of Being populating all of us, then anyone who has offended us has done so because his or her experiences have led that originally perfect tabula rasa into a condition in which giving offense is possible and perhaps inevitable. This awareness makes it much easier to forgive.

If, for example, my friend, whose mother belittled him because of her own childhood conditioning, has become carping, surely I can understand and forgive that. If I am him, living a different life with different experiences that have made me less carping than he is but imperfect in other ways, I can have an empathetic understanding.

[dropshadowbox align=”center” effect=”lifted-both” width=”83%” height=”” background_color=”#f9d798″ border_width=”1″ border_color=”#b3b3af” ] To forgive all, be all. — Bill Harvey from Mind Magic, page 233. [/dropshadowbox]

If we can forgive everyone including ourselves for all the influences that drive each of us to become what we perhaps only temporarily are, it may free us from having to continue to be exactly the same today as we have always been.

What has already happened could not have been otherwise, since all events are merely the resultant of their causes, which are themselves events dependent on a constellation of prior causes. Everything happens for a reason.

We can become a more potent cause for positive future events by being less critical of whatever happened that caused us to feel resentful, and instead reimagine the situation, decide what should have happened and then seek to do that in similar future situations. We can do nothing about the past. The goal is to simply set new policies to put into practice going forward.

Guiding others to adopt more useful new policies requires gentility; often it is best to simply ask the right questions to have the desired effect. Honesty and gentleness are essential tools in this endeavor.

To forgive a person, for a time in your imagination, be that person.*

If you are having difficulty forgiving someone, create space for an empathetic perspective: set some time aside and imagine living through that person’s role from the beginning to now, seeing if we could have played any parts better, and which blocks are likely to have prevented them from seeing or taking these options Then figure out how to help the person get past those blocks. This of course also works for self-forgiveness.

Communicating in some way what is in our heart, and then letting go and forgiving, will at a minimum stop tying up some of our energies deep in our psyche.

Instead of squandering our energy by blaming or being unforgiving, seeing situations with an open heart and an empathetic perspective can lead us to more positive outcomes where we can realize solutions that are a much better investment of our time and energy.

Thought you might also enjoy today’s latest short video commenting on advertisers taking charge of audience measurement.

Best to all,

Bill

*From Mind Magic, p. 233.

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village.