Category Archives: Important Ideas

The Ego Level is the Source of Today’s Threats

Created June 24, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In my view of the world, each of us moves up and down through levels of consciousness, from one moment to the next through our day. These levels were entirely theory for thousands of years, something I did not know when I discovered them in myself around age 5.

I never wanted to be on stage, but my showbiz parents were firm. “You were born in a trunk,” my father told me, a showbiz metaphor for being born into a showbiz lineage. Later I found out that his father, whom I never met, had been a “song and dance” man in London vaudeville. My maternal great grandfather Wulf, for whom I was named, had been a Ukrainian trapeze artist who was still performing, which included hanging by his teeth to his trapeze, at age 80. Something I’m still metaphorically doing today.

On stage I robotically performed by lines and moves as trained, until I started to have strange experiences which greatly improved my performances. Much later I realized this was the Flow state, a term coined by a former advisor to “my” nonprofit The Human Effectiveness Institute, the famed Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago at the time.

That’s when I realized we all continuously shift from level to level. Introspection was the only tool I had since I could find no books in any bookstore in Bensonhurst that mentioned levels of consciousness. As time went on, I was able to discern specific clues as to which level I was in.

For example, fear and defensiveness were inner signs that I was in a lower state. Rushing and nervousness were outer indicators that my inner feelings were of anxiety and sense of impending failure.

Intuitively I saw ways in which I could diagnose what was causing me to be in these lower states. This involved staying awake in bed at night so I could uninterruptedly focus on these things. Without knowing the real meanings of the words meditation, contemplation, concentration at that time, I see now that was what I was doing most of those nights.

This led me to create my own system for myself to overcome these lower states. I came to realize that the really important thing was to get back up into the Flow state and maintain it for longer and longer periods. All of the petty fears and desires I had were trivial by comparison to that goal.

Much later, as I studied psychology books, I began to form theories about all of this stuff going on inside me and how it related to what I was reading about the theories and experiments in the field of psychology, and more recently, neuroscience.

When I read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents I realized that Ego as he defined it – an intermediary point of view emerging when the baby first feels thwarted about its needs going unattended, and begins to center its life on an inner persona acting as the “press agent” for the self – everything suddenly snapped into place. Those lower states inside me were in fact being generated by this apparently ruling part of my being, the Ego. For me to get into Flow I needed to get out of Ego and into my true self, The Me That Was Born.

As we look around us today at the havoc that the world has descended into, it appears obvious to me that the true threat vector behind all the madness is the Ego. The Ego of a Trump. The Ego of a Putin. The Ego of many other Hitlers in waiting. The Egos of the insurrectionists, blinded by the voice of their Fuhrer (leader). Hitler was a powerful speaker and mass hypnotist and Trump was a TV star and President of the United States, not a powerful speaker, but those media and title qualifications were enough to cause the mass hypnotism of millions of people living stuck in the lowest Ego states.

Without those lowest Ego states in the followers and leaders, none of this would be happening.

Not that reading my manual Mind Magic would miraculously dispel all the ills of the world, by freeing each reader from her or his Ego forever, it usually does make a nice dent. That’s what keeps me going, the evidence that I can make a positive difference if I can write and communicate more clearly about all of this to more people.

I am aware that a minority of the population reads non-fiction books, and a larger minority read fiction books, so in order to cover more territory, I’m putting these same ideas into both fiction and non-fiction.

In my latest novel released this week, PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices, the focus is on the action and only in service to the plot do my mind methods appear. The fact that the protagonists are psychics gives me leeway to get deeply into what is going on inside the characters, because it has a direct bearing on the plot.

The main protagonist, Ed Templegard, is normally a very high being, often in the Flow state, and motivated by the idea of protecting people. But he gets brought down to the Ego level without his fully realizing it. He wants to stop Perse but Perse is too strong for him. He wants Nastassia but she is far away. These things degrade his level of consciousness and throughout the story he is gradually discovering that, fighting it, and eventually – oops no spoiler here.

The education system which starts at home will over time incorporate more and more of the things we all really need to know about living life. Not just what is taught today, but also what people today are left to come to understand for themselves – something which happens all too rarely. The current state of play 2022 is compelling evidence that teaching about levels of consciousness has to become part of the foundations of our learning objectives from birth onward.

Love to all,

Bill

How I Came to Write my Latest Novel, PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices

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Created June 17, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In the 1982-83 time period the U.S. Army invited me to speak at West Point and to Delta Force and other elite units at Carlisle War College including some Generals. One night in a big outdoor jacuzzi with Army guys we attempted remote sensing. They admitted that this was part of top-secret work going on that these men were involved in indirectly.

The darkly satirical movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats” starring George Clooney was based on a treatment by the late U.S. Army Colonel Jim Channon, Commander of the Army’s First Earth Battalion, whose name I changed to Tim Shannon in Pandemonium. Jim brought me into all this when he looked me up after reading my book Mind Magic. He had led the search for psychics for the Army. The First Earth Battalion had been Jim’s idea. It was part of his cover as he penetrated the New Age Movement on the lookout for psychic talent. That was how he came to read MM.

Two years earlier, my first meeting with Delta Force had been in a Manhattan apartment owned by people involved with Arica Institute, and its leader Oscar Ichazo was in the meeting. In a conversation I was having with one of the Delta officers he said “since the failed rescue mission in Iran we’ve been investigating every crazy idea that could possibly help win the cold war, including making a pact with the devil.” These experiences contributed to my screenplay Triple Agent which is now book one of Pandemonium.

I began to have unusual experiences in early childhood. My showbiz parents had insisted I perform onstage where I first experienced the Flow state, which of course I didn’t know as such at the time.

Offstage in an informal gathering when I was about five, I got into a rapid improv comedic exchange with the late great comedian Jack E. Leonard in which my repartee cracked up those gathered; but I could not hear what I was saying—it came out of me automatically.

When I was twelve, I had two out of body experiences, and heard a voice in my mind saying “I am God and so is everyone else.”

Each day, I have hunches that turn out to be right. When my company Next Century Media was working in Hollywood with the studios in the 90s, Oliver Stone dubbed me the “media visionary”. The predictions I made about today’s media in my newsletter in the 80s-90s have all come true.

In Pandemonium as in all my other books my reason for writing is to share my “mind moves” with as large an audience as possible so that everyone can drop the block against “psychic” (intuitive) powers and use them, and beyond intuitive powers, can be as effective as possible in all aspects of their lives by discriminating between the impulses of the ego versus the impulses of the true connected self, achieving and maintaining access to Flow state more often.

Pandemonium: Live to All Devices is one in a series called AGENTS OF COSMIC INTELLIGENCE, an alternate view of history in which the same characters appear in different eras. The First Son was published in 2018 and The Message will be published later this year. One thread that runs through all of my books is that there is a scientific explanation for the spiritual contention that there is a God—that everything in the Universe is part of a single Consciousness. AGENTS is a fictional representation of what could be reality. You Are The Universe: Imagine That is a non-fiction book which details my Theory of the Conscious Universe, which is also summed up in a ten-minute video called CONNECTEDNESS.

I feel that as a writer my job in the world of today is to reopen people’s minds to the awesome possibilities of who we really are and what life really is. In the present epoch our world culture is split into people who have totally lost their sense of wonderment and magic versus those who believe in a specific religion which they feel is the only true religion. Too many of the latter group tend to feel in conflict with people outside their religion, thus without realizing it, being hypocritical to their own religion’s essential tenets.

The absence of the sense of the numinous in our everyday lives has left us quick to anger and hate and superficial in our insights into ourselves. My writing may not have any effect on all this although thousands of letters and emails on file attest to some people having been positively affected. Even though I might not have as much effect as I might like, this is still what I feel called to do with my life.

In AGENTS I’ve strived to filter out my own desire to teach so that what comes through is an adventure without obvious pedagogy. I know from my own experience reading the books of Robert A. Heinlein starting when I was five, I learned a lot about life and how to live and be a competent person, but while I was reading his stories, I was just raptly having wonderful fun. Only very rarely did RAH stick his head through the page to openly teach. I hope I avoid that even better than Heinlein did, although I’ll never be the writer he was.

The subtitle of Pandemonium, “Live to All Devices”, reflects the media technologies introduced in the story—virtual reality television where people widely separated around the globe can appear as if they are in the same place, “Gibsons”, electronic tiaras people wear which make augmented reality into virtual reality, floating see-through chatbots that look human—all media to come in the next decade. I say this with some certainty given how accurately I’ve been able to predict new media technologies over past decades. My day job is in the media industry, where I’ve just won an Emmy® Award for the “pioneering development” of privacy-protected big data for television, something I did through my company Next Century Media in the 1990s.

I had hoped that my day job and my passion work as a writer would dovetail someday, and that’s happening now. “My” latest technology startup, Research Measurement Technologies (RMT), has a way of understanding a person’s motivations based on the content they consume, so you can send a person content that you can be pretty certain will delight them. I’m working with partners to create some of the future media tech in Pandemonium. Advising large corporations who are my clients, I have long pushed them in the direction of replacing intrusive advertising with inspiring and useful content sponsored by advertisers in the ad pods on television and the ad spaces on digital, and after many years it seems to be the time for this revolution to actually gain traction.

The big ideas which make life rich and full can represent a much larger share of media time, and when this shift takes place, the negative effects of media can be supplanted by effects more positive and transformative than any of us realize is possible.

Love to all,

Bill

What It Takes to Get Back on Track

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Created May 27, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Each day the news becomes more worrisome. I don’t remember ever experiencing a time like the one we are passing through now.

One thing that will be necessary if we’re going to turn this all around is a new emphasis on reinventing ourselves, each one of us.

That’s because the roots of our current history are embedded in each individual consciousness. Disunity, divisiveness, power hunger, anger, hate, violence, fear are all manifestations of ego. We’ve let our egos get too big.

At the same time, we’ve lost sight of the ultimate goal of coming to a mystical understanding of the universe and our role in it. Awe and wonder are browbeaten out of us even before we leave childhood by the pervading cynicism that has become the sine qua non of sophistication. Non-cynics are derided just for backsliding from the cynical stance of our Age.

Even our top scientific minds who retain their awe and wonder at nature remain trapped in the unproven assumption that consciousness is an afterthought in the universe. Somehow the scotoma (blind spot) is so large that otherwise brilliant minds do not connect the dots between the “observer” essential to Relativity Theory and consciousness. The leading quantum physicists of today, many of whom who were mentored by John Wheeler, colleague of Einstein and Bohr, first to coin the term “black hole”, do not get it that in his ultimate view of the universe, consciousness and matter are equally important, as if their minds cannot conceive of it, or simply that they would rather stay in the acceptable range for sake of their careers. The latter behavior brings us back to the ego dominated culture in which we now all live, where going along with the herd is the prime directive, in order to get what you want.

But at the same time this involves compromising quite a bit with what we, deep down, really want as unique individuals. The percentage of us who live out their dreams and earn their living pursuing their passion work are a dismally tiny percent of the population everywhere on Earth. As it has been since as far back as history remembers. When something has always been a certain way, it is invisible, taken for granted, never even thought about, no alternative ever imagined.

When I say the present world must start from a reinvention of ourselves, each person for themself, what do I really mean?

Self-improvement is a term that means something different to each person. Most books on the subject are about losing weight and exercising. The relative few that are not mainly about the body are about the important subjects of meditation, yoga, mindfulness, and positive thinking.

The invisible elephant in the room is that these are the 101 of the subject. They are introductory, and barely scratch the surface. For most people, these primers equip the person to give the right answers (ego again) to continue to be perceived as up-to-date in conversations. But these surface readings and parrotings on the subject tend to not fundamentally change mental or outward behavior.

In the words of a reader of Mind Magic, Benjamin Zabriskie, writing in his Amazon Review:

Dismiss thoughts that don’t benefit you. Deny social impetus that would otherwise dominate you. Perceive new realities at your whim. Stop time and think. Leave this earthly realm behind and explore the diverse worlds of the hearts and minds of all living things. Restructure your actions, thoughts, perceptions and desires into exactly the shape that suits your goals.

Not for the weak-hearted, nor the easily scared, this book is THE owners manual for the mind. This book presents nearly impossible challenges to even the most powerful and dedicated seekers. I’ve never known a single person that actually finished the work contained in this book.

When I took up my asceticism, I decided to give my extensive book collection to the local library. After paring down hundreds of books I was left with only 3 essential manuscripts. Mind Magic: The Science of the Microcosm is one of those incredible spiritual powerhouses. Only recently did I finally give my copy away to a young man in need of self-understanding.

In other words, what the world needs now is for people to do a very deep soul searching beyond anything they have ever experienced before. It is multidimensional and goes far beyond the pop-psyk books lining the shelves.

It’s cognitive and emotional, intuitional and perceptual. It’s a complete rebuild, rethink, start from scratch.

One of the hundreds of specific techniques explained in full in the manual is to eschew ego moves. To detect and interrupt your own automatic inner impulses to toot your own horn in ways that have become perfectly socially acceptable and which everyone practices continuously to maintain their own egos.

This is part of a chapter that is broader in scope, entitled Avoid Hasty Closure, which in general means to edit your actions and do so by reflecting continuously on where each of your own thoughts and impulses is coming from. Is it authentic and real in the moment, or is it the ego robot playing one of its tapes?

If everyone in the world took responsibility for what they can actually really do to help us all out of the present existential dilemma, namely to reinvent themselves, with very serious methodical principles, we would have at least a better chance for survival as a species and with the ability to choose to live in a place where we feel that our rights are respected. A better chance to avert the robotic pendulum swing back to despotic centralism, which itself is the unavoidable manifestation of a culture in which ego is king.

Another chapter focuses on visualizing the universe as one thing, including oneself and everyone else, consciousness and matter and energy and time and space all one thing. Wheeler’s scientific assessment of this singularity, the one thing we call the universe, is that it is in constant self-reinvention, even able to reinvent the actual past (read the link above for the details). Whether other scientists agree or disagree is irrelevant, Mind Magic does not advise believing anything, it advises simply keeping a truly open mind.

The amazing thing about simply keeping an open mind about what we the universe are, allows you to once again experience the inspiring awe and wonder, and the sense of transcendent possibility, of living a real mystery unfolding, the transcendent feeling.

Highly recommended: article in Renew magazine, published by United Healthcare Group, “The Power of Awe”, documenting the widespread research now establishing the health benefits of awe, which can also be seen here.

One of the benefits found in these many articles of the feeling of awe, is that it also comes with a greater sense of feeling of connectedness with other people. That would surely help as we are otherwise pulling apart in all directions.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to become sharper.”

–William Butler Yeats

Love to all,

Bill

The Two Future Scenarios We Must Choose Between

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Created May 13, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

One of these scenarios is very easy to visualize. It’s the downside scenario of war. We’ve seen the way this works and are extremely familiar with it. We can picture it, including sitting under a mushroom cloud ourselves, something I’ve been visualizing all my life.

The upside scenario is not nearly as easy to visualize. We as a race have not expressed much about that scenario. We seem morbidly attracted to dwelling upon the negative.

And yet we seemed to be making some progress there for a while.

In 2003, the late Mark W. Zacher, a pioneer in the study of global governance, wrote a paper published by Cambridge University Press called “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force”. In it, he cited nearly 100 academic authors in establishing his case that “coercive territorial revisionism” was on the decline since the end of WWII. Many of the scholars he referenced indeed painted the same picture.

Alas, today we see that this relatively halcyon period appears to have come to an end. WWII-size battles reducing beautiful cities to rubble in Europe are now happening again. Do we have to go back into the old game? Is it built into us that there will never be an end to people fighting for ground?

In the development of species, the hardwired instinct for territoriality behavior goes back at least as far as the first reptiles and perhaps even further back. But humanity, possessed of more obvious intellectual credentials than other Earth species, in discovering what instincts are, could use its brains to conquer instincts – or can we?

Why is it that Putin and his supporters feel the urgent need to own more land when they already are such a massive piece of geography? Opinions in the press suggest that he is driven to re-establish the U.S.S.R. And why would that be what drives him? Why would he not set equally lofty goals for leading the human race into space, or building larger particle accelerators than the west, or some other goal that is more original? The goal of simply taking over the neighborhood goes way back, it’s imitative behavior, it may make us remember a person in history but not necessarily in a positive way. It’s been done before. Why not show off by doing something new?

Why would China place such importance on taking back Taiwan which had previously been called Formosa? There are so many other things for China to do, and they are already doing most of them, and doing well at them. If the specter of war were swept off the table China should be among the most confident and hopeful nations on Earth. Why bother with adding another small swath of land to their country? When one takes land by force it’s only a matter of time before someone else is there attacking you to take that land back. It’s almost guaranteed to become a perpetual motion machine keeping war in the lives of your descendants for many generations if not forever.

The human race has so many better things to do rather than return to the old bullying game. It’s gotten so old. First, we have to bring the pandemic down to permanent containment, which implies far-reaching progress in being able to anticipate the directions mutations could take, and getting the jump on them before they go there. Then we have to bring everyone up to par in quality of life. Then we have to bring education up to an unprecedented level that is individualized to each person’s gifts and aspirations, lifelong education that starts in the home from birth and lasts throughout the individual’s lifetime. The list goes on and on after that, so many things to do to make us all feel a sense of purpose, of meaning.

Underneath everything else all of us are driven by a search for meaning. We didn’t make it any easier for ourselves when we made it unhip to allow for the possibility of God. Even in a world that avoids God like the devil, a person can still live a meaningful life by simply bringing her/his gifts out for the enjoyment of others. Putin and Xi each have huge canvases on which they are free to paint beautiful pictures the world can adore, why settle for the bad guy role, even if lies and censorship can make people keep their mouths shut? Why is that the way that Putin and Xi can make themselves the happiest?

If we didn’t have such a rich roster of activities into which we could happily throw ourselves, then maybe I could understand playing the war game, but that game has worn thin its welcome. We’ve had a good run since the end of WWII – not without enough violence for anyone with a taste for that stuff – but staying away from major wars. Why break the winning spree now? Just because they can? I suspect that is the real explanation.

But no one’s hands are clean. The rest of us have not done enough to paint the picture of what life could be like if there is world cooperation on the broadest scale. Dystopias have more drama in them, and more opportunity for action scenes, while utopias are easy to put down because cynicism is hip. So few if any utopian movies or television series or novels. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” came as close to a utopian vision of a united Earth culture as we’ve seen on television. Lost Horizon by James Hilton (1933) was a novel and then a movie which showed how a sequestered culture could live in harmony (the story of mythical Shangri-La).

When Joe Biden was elected, I wrote a series of fictional stories here in Pebbles in which Joe reached out to Vlad and Jinping and detailed how cooperation could be attained and how lovely that would be for everybody, with me hoping that was in his plans. My c dream soon collapsed, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. If we don’t detail the upside scenario we will continue to slide down into this downside scenario we’ve been stuck on for too long. Someday soon we may never again have the option of revisiting this upside visualization opportunity, there may not be a someday if we don’t start now.

Love to all,

Bill