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Make the Attainment of Higher Consciousness a Way of Life

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Powerful Mind Part 8

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created April 28, 2023. Updated May 23, 2025

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Make the Attainment of Higher Consciousness a Way of Life

Observer State

The Observer state is a state most commonly experienced today by meditators. When a meditative state has been achieved, a person is in the Observer state. In this state, the usual background assumptions are not being made. They have been placed on hold. It is as if the person has agreed to set them aside for a while, during which meditation will be practiced.

In the meditative state, when thoughts or feelings arise, the meditator does not take ownership of these thoughts or feelings, but observes them as if they were outside himself or herself. Similarly, if one of the usual background assumptions comes into consciousness, it is observed but with the same kind of detachment. Meditation can be seen as an oasis or taking a mini-vacation from the usual “stuff”.

In this state, one “sees things as they are,” stripped of the usual interpretations of good, bad, or fear-producing. Often this allows brief moments of Flow state in which there are wordless realizations of what causes us to have certain types of recurring dissonant experiences, e.g. being victimized by a boss, hurting one’s spouse, not getting deserved recognition, causing ourselves to fail just when we are close to succeeding, not enjoying each day, doing tasks just to get them over with, and all of the other ways in which we stop ourselves from being happy — along with an awareness of how we invite that recurring experience. These “Aha!” moments are Flow state and could not have reached conscious attention if the person had not created a blank slate on which the mind could write. That, in a nutshell, is the Observer state.

 The core message of Powerful Mind (my new book coming out this Fall) is that the Observer state need not be limited to periods of meditation, and that it is better to spend as much time as possible in the Observer state, which leads to spending as much time as possible in the Flow state. 

We are not content to merely impart this message, as important as it may be. We are even more concerned with imparting the techniques that will get you there. 

Our assertion is that we all can and should make attaining the higher states of consciousness (Observer state and Flow state) a way of life. Doing so makes us more effective, more creative, makes us more of the individuals that we really are and less like programmed robots, puts us more in touch with love and the life of the spirit, and more engaged and present in the moment.

We enjoy living large, not in the sense of being materially rich showoffs, but in the sense of being enriched by the moment-to-moment wonders of being alive.  Making the attainment of higher consciousness a way of life leads to success in everything else. That’s why placing higher consciousness in the forefront of our moment-to-moment attention is so valuable.

The Chattering Mind Is Not The Whole Self

Chatter in the mind is another differentiator between EOP (Emergency Operating Procedure) and the Observer state. In EOP, the inner dialog is more or less constant. In the Observer state, this talking to oneself attenuates and eventually disappears completely. In its place arises a process of thought that is much faster and much more attentive to subtleties. Ultimately, one can see each thought or feeling as it arises, before it is turned into words, and so there is no longer the necessity of turning it into words to explain it. 

Often in discussions of how to meditate, one hears “first you must still the mind”. This is not bad advice, but those words alone do not automatically equip the meditator to achieve such stillness. In Powerful Mind, you will learn simple methods to achieve such stillness. For example, instead of trying to force stillness directly, you will be guided to observe your mind as if from outside. This has two effects: firstly, it provides a certain detachment or distance: you are looking at the mind’s content more like lab specimens under a microscope. Secondly, as you start to use words in your mind, you notice it immediately and stop in mid-sentence.  Our technique is operational, action-oriented. The reader is equipped with an actionable strategy that, in the end, achieves the stillness so difficult to achieve directly, except by experienced meditators. 

What does the Observer state have to do with creative effectiveness? We hypothesize that the Observer state is a more efficient and effective information processing mode. It is characterized by no delays caused by putting things into words. Instead, the mind gets the point of each thought while it is still an unformed feeling or image in your mind, before the energy of translating it into words is expended. The intellect races ahead on an accelerated basis and everything in our internal and external experience is apprehended simultaneously and in relative perspective. Wisdom is more likely to occur. Wisdom is the tendency to right action. Right action is effectiveness.

In this state we call Mindquiet — an aspect of the Observer state — the mind moves from idea to idea so much faster that one often feels the desire to write down a “breadcrumb trail” (the metaphor in the Hansel and Gretel story) so as to remember the many important discoveries made. Whether you call this “journaling” or simply “taking notes”, the best way to do this is to use the fewest possible words, or else you will lose the Observer state and wind up back in EOP. We call these “trigger words”, the one or two words that will bring back the whole idea. 

Because you are likely to have many new and valuable ideas about yourself while reading Powerful Mind, and especially in applying its techniques in your own life, we suggest you always carry a writing implement, whether paper and pen or an electronic device.

In the Observer state, one has temporarily suspended preferences about outcomes. Again, it is like a vacation. You may still care a lot (perhaps too much) about making more money or whatever, but you have parked those desires for a while. It is like re-opening your mind for the sake of a temporary experiment, a “what-if” period, a game that you are playing. You reserve the right to come back later and reinstate the drive to make money, or whatever, but for now it is “unlocked” instead of “locked in”.  

Set Aside the Egocentric “Defender” State

With the chronic dilemmas set aside, fear and the mantle of self-protectiveness — the egocentric “defender” state — drops away in an autonomic cascade. One is simply observing without classifying good vs. bad, keeping an open mind, giving oneself permission to make decisions later. The usual unconscious knee-jerk reactions are unplugged. 

And with the intellect no longer using up all its energy in self-chatter, and the feelings no longer set to knee-jerk reaction mode, the chances of slipping into Flow state are multiplied manyfold. These appear to be among the underlying mechanisms by which Observer state potentiates Flow state. 

Although the objective is to be in the Observer state whenever you are not in the Flow state, as you start the process of breaking out of EOP, it is especially important to take advantage of special opportunity moments during the day, which you will thereafter always want to benefit from.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

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The Breakdown in Society Has a Cause: EOP

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Powerful Mind Part 7

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Updated May 16, 2025; Created April 21, 2023 

Read Powerful Mind Part 6               |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

It is our conviction that the way we use our minds is the source of the breakdown in society we see all around us. Our work is devoted to communicating to as large an audience as possible, the antidote to this contra-survival mental processing paradigm.

In the interest of practical simplicity, our system of training, which we call Powerful Mind, reduces the complexity of our theory of psychology to three states: a lower Ego state characterized by what we call EOP or “Emergency Oversimplification Procedure”, the access state that we call the Observer state, and a higher state called the Flow state.

The Observer state (the temporary or permanent ability to objectively challenge one’s own prior thought or feeling)  is attained far more easily than the Flow state (automatic “perfect” performance). And it is impossible to get directly into the Flow state from the lower Ego state. This is why the Observer state is important.

In this and subsequent posts, we’ll deep dive into each of these three states. Let’s start with EOP.

To current generations, EOP is the “normal everyday waking state of consciousness”. In this state, we are energized by a set of background assumptions that we do not question, and which we have lost awareness of to some extent because they have been taken for granted from long habit.

These assumptions include:

  • There is almost always a sense of dilemma, something we have to fix, perhaps something as simple as a to-do list which we approach as something to get done and put behind us, not something to enjoy and take our time with;
  • We must earn the approval of other people in order to feel good about ourselves—as if our own self-approval is not enough;
  • We could run out of money;
  • We are under time pressure because of the foregoing assumptions;
  • Because of time pressure, it is important to quickly classify things into good vs. bad;
  • There is too much to think about and more to think about every second, and therefore it would be impractical to think it all out—better to just make the decisions we cannot avoid making based on what is going on around us;
  • It is virtually inconceivable that we could make profound changes in our experience of life on a second-to-second basis, i.e., in our consciousness;
  • There is no underlying connection between our own consciousness and any other consciousness;
  • It is in our best self-interest to act as if science has already discovered everything important there is to know about the nature of reality;
  • We will live our lives in the best way if we simply accept on faith one set of beliefs by choosing an existing widely-approved religion or dogma;
  • If we want to fit in, we must limit our conversation to materialistic topics and not talk too much about the mind, the nature of reality, or spirituality;
  • If we are male, we must limit the expression of our feelings, especially outside our family or in public;
  • We should ignore our hunches as worthless unless they are supported by clear and present visible proof;
  • If we are male, we must treat the intuition as something feminine, which only women should have, like feelings

All of these assumptions playing in the background cause us to live lives of “tacit fear” — we are not really aware that we are always afraid. We may be intellectually aware of the fact that we have all been brainwashed by our culture (like the people in Orwell’s 1984), but we set that thought aside. EOP is all about setting thoughts aside, even though the same thought may come up thousands of times.

Suddenly realizing that you have been living a life of fear might make you angry at yourself, the world in general, and me for telling you. Anger and fear are both strong alarm systems to get our attention, like an alarm clock. They work most effectively when you get the insight as to what is making you afraid or angry, and turn off the alarm clock by focusing your will on that issue until it is resolved. That way, without distraction or crippling lack of self-belief, you can shift focus to creative and effective solutions to conquer fear, anger, and what is causing these alarms to go off.

The traditional psychological term for the center of consciousness that rules this normal waking state is “Ego”. Freud describes the Ego as the center of consciousness that is created the first time a baby is frustrated in getting something it wants. The Ego is a kind of “press agent” and “chief security officer” (think of Whorf in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, or an attack dog that trusts and loves only its one master) that considers the self to be threatened by the surrounding environment and people and must therefore cope with that threat by defensive measures often taken in advance. As psychologist Eric Berne pointed out in his book Games People Play, in every conversation and every relationship we have, it’s as if we’ve rehearsed our responses, as if we are always playing out the same script, playing the same tapes, not being creative, spontaneous and authentic, in the moment.

For example, some people play the “Yes, but” game in every dialogue they have. They pretend to accept what the other person has said, but then negate it one way or another — the game being to find the words to use to neutralize the other person’s input. These people have become closed to new ideas, often because they are too paralyzed with information overload to be open and receptive.

There are many ways that getting stuck in a rut like this are exhibited in a person’s life. They are all symptomatic of EOP. All of us have had experiences which we never quite figured out and overcame. These create defensive patterns going forward, yet we are not really aware of what we are doing and don’t even notice our own fixed defensive games.

Once we get into the Observer state, we can see our own conditioning and consciously change our behavior to become more flexible and open-minded, able to learn from new experiences and from other people’s input. We immediately become less negative and more objective about ourselves. We stop projecting failure.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

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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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How Did We Each Become Such a Rolebot?

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Powerful Mind Part 15

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 7, 2025
Created June 16, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 14,

From our earliest experiences, people were telling us how we should be. For the first five years of our life, possibly the first 25, and unfortunately probably until the last breaths we take, we are very malleable creatures. The plasticity of our brains is widely known: we are constantly building new neural connections, which can then take on a life of their own, able to cause some of what we say to ourselves internally. We are particularly impressionable when we first come into the world for on our own, we know nothing, except the obvious physical needs as they arise, and so our instinct is to look for incoming advice.

Given these basic conditions, it’s understandable that even besides hard-wired primate mimicry programming in our genes, we would be largely shaped by each other. Other mechanisms more recently discovered such as mirror neurons enable our empathy with each other, serving a pro-species-survival behavior pattern of cooperation which has enabled us to erect the many artifacts of what we call civilization.

Freud, in what I feel is his most important book, Civilization and Its Discontents, comments based on his pioneering experiences of psychoanalysis with patients, how he perceives a common thread across neurotic people (today I believe he would classify us all that way), a pattern created by the thwarting of inner motivations by the constraints placed upon us by our particular form of societal civilization. From his sample, he concluded that the main problem was the limitation which most societies on Earth (his sample was mostly European upper class) place upon free sex. Free in the sense of being able to have sex with all the people that seem sexy to you. Had his sample been representative of the population of the planet, his focus on sex may or may not have remained the same. The total number of ways in which our behavior has been shaped by our laws and social conventions is far more all-encompassing than as relates to sex.

As each of us grows up we generally accede to the demands placed upon us to achieve acceptance and a sense of belonging.

This is one of the fifteen primal motivations discovered by my research. The scrip we pay for belonging is conforming. Sometimes that conforming is comfortable and sometimes it rankles us inside, but we go along with the game for safety and support within the herd. Freud’s wider point was that excessive conforming leads to neurosis, an early stage of insanity (disconnection from reality). Just as there are pre-cancerous states, there are also pre-insanity states.

Neuroscience and psychoanalysis both have many explanations to the phenomenon of our tendency to be influenced from the outside. My own method, concentration introspection, goes back much earlier than either of these two potent modern mind sciences, spanning millennia from the Rig Veda through the work of Freud, Jung, William James, Abraham Maslow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and John H. Flavell, who gave it a new name, metacognition, in the 1970s. All of these methods sheds more light on how it is that each of us is capable of being influenced in extraordinarily powerful ways from the outside – typically, without our realizing the full significance of the process, and its spread of effects.

From my recent media work, in collaboration across many industries and academia, where there is much to be learned from the scientific work of others, we now know that McLuhan was more right than he himself knew. He said the medium itself was more powerful than the messages which came through the media. He was referring to television and never claimed to have seen the digital future we now live in. And yet, the latest evidence about digital media shows that McLuhan’s concept is proven right in media he never anticipated.

The latest evidence is that the forced conventions of scrolling, mouse control, skippable and unskippable ads, and relentlessness of ads begging for attention, have caused the constraining of attention windows: digital media users fall into a pattern of giving only a second or two of attention to ads they do not ignore entirely. This is quite different from television, where under ideal circumstances of ad-context resonance, 15 seconds of immersive attention can occur when the viewer’s subconscious motivations resonate with the ad’s subconscious motivators.

So our present external world has taken a very strong hand in your life and mine so far.

It will take a lot of metacognition, introspection with concentration, for you to bring on the Observer state in your own castle. The state in which you can intuitively catch yourself thinking something for which you actually have no compelling evidence, but thinking that way has become habitual to you. And what you have been taking to be your very own self when you take your own counsels internally, is actually the residue of all of the imprints that have been made on you by the horde of stimuli you have experienced.

Clearing out excessive other-directedness from your self is a form of purifying the mind.

This purification is central to all of Eastern philosophy. Most of what is generally taken as mysticism is actually codified metacognition, using metaphors recognizable and meaningful in those cultures. Even astrology started as a way of evoking metacognition.

This is another example of how our society shapes us. I just wrote “even astrology” because it is a subject that has been denigrated in our present society. And even I follow society’s rules. I just understand what I am doing and why I am doing it, rather than playing a programmed set of roles, and not even realizing that I actually have a true self underneath all the roles. Realizing your true self from the inside is a freeing experience, and leads to a life living at least sometimes in the Flow state, the state of continuous impregnable happiness and effectiveness, bringing forth your unique gifts to the world.

Allocating just twenty minutes a day to studying yourself objectively (the socially acceptable term is “meditation”) is guaranteed to improve your life, even if it’s already perfect.

You don’t have to sit in a specific position. The main point is to observe your self, observe the workings of your mind. Stay on it, don’t get distracted from it. Watch what is going on in your mind as you unwind. What do you start thinking about first. Why that?

As soon as you realize you’ve been distracted, go back to the task. Have a way of taking ultra-brief notes – key phrases that will bring you back to where you just were. That way you can go on having revelations without worrying about remembering the ones you had a moment before.

Don’t filter things out that you feel like writing down because they might seem obvious to others. You are the only one who will ever see these notes. Unless you decide to publish some of them. Don’t do editing during metacognition, editing is for later. Metacognition is reconnaissance, the Observer state, assimilation of implications can come later, hence the notes.

Love to all,
Bill