Category Archives: Mind Magic

The Future Psychology

Created September 30, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Why think about the future of psychology, aren’t the rush of current discoveries enough? We are close to proving ESP. What else do you want?

A common phrase in marketing nowadays is “early wins”. It means when you have a Big Idea, it’s good to have some immediate tangible benefits.

Physics has had a never-ending run of early wins going back as far as you can go. Rubbing two sticks together was an early win of physics, the discovery of how to cause fire. The unbroken string continues through television and atom bombs, space travel, the Internet, virtual reality, cyborgism and perhaps cyborgasm.

What has psychology done for us lately? People continue to benefit from psychotherapies of all kinds. Research continues on all fronts. Nothing quite so spectacular as physics in the pragmatic big picture.

Could there be?

Why should we postulate a possible breakthrough by which psychology can become as relevant to the average person as physics?

Because what could be more important to us than us, ourselves? Any tangible improvement in our abilities to function effectively has more value than our pastimes. (Like love and war, television and VR.)

What if that shift de-necessitated war – naturally, coming from insides of us, out. No longer needing that psychotic entertainment form.

It has to emerge naturally or it is just another feeble hope that everyone will play nice forever, despite having been killer apes since before the beginning. We have to de-evolve away from the bloodlust by natural causes, stuff like psychotherapy and yogic meditation is where the new wave will come from in psychology.

The new wave will center on the notion of helping the human race improve cognitive and all other functional capabilities of consciousness. Therefore its metrics will be guided by experimental performance trials and verified increases in individual effectiveness. Analytics will be set up to deconstruct effectiveness into separate components including such types of effectiveness as creativity, imagination, hunches, system1, system2, etc.

Should new wave psychologists focus more on the structure of the mind, or on its functions? In consciousness, structure is function. However, connecting the physical neurological manifestations which happen concurrently with experiential qualia, is one horizon at which to aim. Many are working in this field which has been ably led by Dr. Richard Davidson since he and Daniel Goleman and their famous friends including Ram Dass started the trail. Richy has identified the brain signatures of meditative states and made the connection to beneficial health effects.

“Interventions” is a term used to signify third party actions with a goal in mind. The new wave psychologists will ultimately wind up testing all sorts of interventions to determine the Efficacy Lift Score (ELS) for each one. The epigrams in my book Mind Magic will be in that long conveyor belt of interventions worth testing.

Although the general drift will be to assuage but not be dominated by one’s own ego, the ego always has a way of sneaking back in. In this case the ego will cause there to be hierarchical thinking related to levels of consciousness, where people will strive to give the appearance of having a higher level of consciousness than the others. That will be unfortunate but it will be managed with appropriate forethought.

The idea that some of us are in a more effective state of consciousness, and the experience that we ourselves have, of going up and down in level of effectiveness, leads to the notion that there are organically-defined states or levels of consciousness in a ladder, and that this will turn out to be a scientific fact.

In an earlier post, I theorized what this ladder might look like, based on the work of Abraham Maslow and of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, and my own experiences, shown here and more detail in that post:

Given the human tendency to oversimplify, objective research into levels of consciousness may be tarred as elitist. That too can be clarified. It’s desirable not only for the one person but for all of us, for the one person to be effective. Wanting to make everyone more effective is not an elitist thought.

You have the opportunity to get ahead of the crowd. Test alternative interventions to see if they increase your effectiveness by watching these short videos, here or here.

In next week’s edition: A Brief History of Levels of Consciousness Research.

Love to all,

Bill

Believing What We Want to Believe

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Created September 9, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The human race is driving itself insane. What is the root cause of this? I postulate that it is an overpowering desire for hard answers to questions for which we may not have scientifically objective hard answers for hundreds or thousands of years more of the current slogging forward and slipping backward.

So we manufacture black and white answers and defend our somewhat arbitrary/aesthetic positions by aligning with like-minded people, and demonizing all others, who are assumed to all be the polar opposite of what we stand for.

In Mind Magic, Chapter One “Avoid Hasty Closure” provides psychotechnology (mind tricks) to overcome this “mind takeover to relieve aggravated cognitive dissonance”. “If everyone read this one book” (as one reader wrote), it could have significant effect on bringing down the omnipresent Berlin Wall of psychoneurotic divisiveness.

Just telling people to be good does not do it. They need to know the mental and emotional corridors to explore to achieve a steady state of metacognition and self-metaprogramming (which I call the Observer state). Once established in this equilibrium, the mind takes it to the next level on its own (Flow state, the Zone). Flow state itself has levels, and at the higher levels the intuition (hunches) become very accurate (likely to be verified empirically).

Religions were started by people in these latter higher states of Flow. Some of those who became disciples of those religions developed themselves along similar lines. Other followers of specific religions have taken a different path. They are followers in name only, and have lost the essence of what their claimed religion stands for.

These latter people who are religious in name only, are doing that for the purpose of aligning with other like-minded people who have chosen one authority to believe, having the false comfort of mental closure, and also now having a scapegoat group of people on which to blame everything that is not right about the world. Although they may claim to believe everything their one authority said, their actions prove they are being hypocritical, and that they are repressing awareness of their own hypocrisy.

Not that Christianity is the only religion that suffers from false followership, a new article very carefully and authoritatively connects the dots to help Christians get themselves into alignment with Jesus rather than with any political faction. Written by Michael Gerson, Republican speechwriter and journalist, who was steeped in Evangelical Christianity from birth, and was named by TIME Magazine as one of the top 25 most influential Evangelicals in America, this article strikes me as potentially the most important article ever written. If all Christians read it and truly grok it, it will put their feet back on the path. I hope that writers with comparable levels of authority and learning regarding their own religion are able to emulate Michael’s article.

Blaming a religion itself for those who have perverted that religion is not a very intelligent thing to do. This is the same black and white oversimplistic reductionism to which we all flee in Hasty Closure state, because we find that something in us cannot bear not having at least provisional answers upon which to base one’s life and one’s actions. It’s not unreasonable to feel that way but a better response is open mindedness.

All true religions have taught the same moral lessons. Compassion, do unto others, kindness, respect, love. When in the name of religion, a person acts oppositely from these ethical compunctions, and hides that hypocrisy even from themselves, this to me goes beyond neurosis into true psychosis, i.e., a dangerous diseased condition, not just a tolerable level of neuroticism.

The fact that there were and are still religiously driven equivalents of Crusades, the Inquisition, and sexual molestation by clerics, that is not the fault of the religion, it is the fault of the followers in name only.

Religions are losing adherents faster than cable/satellite companies are losing cord-cutters. In the US for example Pew finds that the percent of people who are religiously unaffiliated has doubled to roughly 3 in 10 since 2007.

In another article, Pew explains why this is happening and relates it to a perceived dichotomy (more of the same black/white mindtrap) between religion and science. Science may have ruled out a white-bearded old man version of God, but it certainly has not ruled out the possibility that our own selves are offshoots of One Self (my Theory of the Conscious Universe).

Leading scientists including Einstein, Wheeler, Planck, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Wigner and many others have put forth scientific possibilities aligned with my notion, which also aligns with all religious writings.

The human race is becoming more open to the idea of animal intelligence and therefore animal rights (as I predicted in a 1972 sci-fi novel Ouroboros). For example, the reading public has recently discovered how intelligent octopi are. Upon closer scientific study it has become now widely known that each octopus tentacle has its own brain. This suggests that each octopus tentacle may have an independent sense of self.

Perhaps the main groupmind of these brains is the controlling sense of self, who can live through the each of the multiple sub-minds. And perhaps the main self can focus in on the one arm that is presently sucking on the most delicious shrimp.

How is that different from my theory that there could be One Self above us all into which we all feed? Is it mere coincidence that the latter lens integrates and depolarizes science and religion?

By opening one’s mind to include this possibility, one can regain a new oneness with everyone, and a new genuine, authentic oneness with one’s own birth religion or chosen religion. And by embodying the scientific method as the way to run one’s life (Foment Empiricism, as Scott McDonald says), one gains a new respect for science by practicing it in each moment oneself.

This lens overrules the impatient Hasty Closure black/white ache in one’s mind. By making sure that one does not jump to conclusions just to have a fake sense of certainty. Having a fake sense of certainty is what allows us to desire civil war to punish all the bad people who disagree with us politically. That fake sense of certainty is the insanity I spoke of in the first sentence of this article.

Coming back to intuition… Kurt Vonnegut in his satirical wisdom said that humans tend to cluster into two types of groups: karass, which is the real group we are destined to be with, and to whom we are brought together by unseen forces (“meant to be”, “bashert”, “kismet”), and granfalloon, a false karass. Suppose he was right. Granfalloons then might in some cases be political parties. In his brilliant article, Michael Gerson contrasts Jesus with Trump, and shows how scripture makes it clear that Jesus warned his disciples to stay away from politics. How can we know when we are following a true intuition and not simply believing what is convenient to believe?

The highest true (empirically verifiable) intuitions tend to give one a sense of peace, a sense that all is oneness, naturally oneness loves it parts, the universe is doing all this benevolently, there will be a happy ending, and from the ending we shall look back and see how the way that reached that end was perfect as it was. How the learning could not have otherwise been achieved. That it all happens for a reason.

Freud called this “the oceanic feeling”. Jung called it the “collective unconscious”. Kashmir Shaivism calls it “The Supreme Self”. The earliest Greek philosophers when they looked inside, and acted so as to foment empiricism, found that mind has hidden powers (intuition), and used them to think about what reality really is. Thales, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, and later many poets and natural philosophers including Berkeley, Newton, Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes, and endless more sages throughout hisandherstory, all came to the same conclusion that consciousness is primary, at least as important as the apparent matter-energy-time-space display which we all apprehend.

How can an empiricist postulate that the only thing he/she as an empiricist can swear exists (consciousness), is merely a derivative of a physical brain which is not directly known to the empiricist who needs a surgeon to inspect his/her brain? Unscientific, yet scientists sometimes assume that their intuition is superior to that of other people who sense a Friendly Larger Presence. Let scientists be the first to have open minds!

Love to all,

Bill

We’ve Been Given More Powers Than We’ve Been Able to Control

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Created August 19, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The people who channeled the Bible and similar spiritual masterpieces had amazing precognition. The story of Adam and Eve for example shows how something in the human race makes us overeager for knowledge that gives us more power. How did they know that was going to happen? It wasn’t all that obvious when the catapult was the highest technology. It is all too obvious today that prophecy came true. We’re wiping out species on a wholesale basis and it certainly appears as if we want ours to be the next one to go.

In the Bible it is positioned as something that happened in the past. But it appears to have been a channeling of a situation whose reach was going to last thousands of years.

If we accept statistical evidence science has already proven that ESP exists, and that some people have more of it than others. Types of ESP tested, all of which are shown statistically to be real, are telepathy, clairvoyance (remote sensing), precognition (foreseeing), and retrocognition (being able to sense things that happened in the past). All of these are forms of obtaining information without the five physical senses. Received knowledge.

ESP being a real thing, distributed like everything else unevenly across the human population, could be something we all experience but refuse to categorize as ESP. Hunches, for example.

Ironically, ESP was usually lumped with magic as a bad thing by the religions, whose founders used ESP to have their spiritual revelations.

Within each religion there are secret (esoteric) sects that use ESP within their broader spiritual practice. Kabbalah within Judaism is one example. The word Kabbalah itself comes from the Hebrew word for received knowledge. In the Tree Of Life, the Kabbalistic map of the spiritual universe, there are ten spheres, plus one invisible sphere, which is where the ten visible spheres combine as one. The invisible one (called Da’at) in my own interpretation is where ESP transmission occurs, where knowledge is received without the use of the senses.

Although Kabbalah is associated with religion and magic, those are misperceptions. Kabbalah is a pragmatic science based on introspection and devout recognition of One Supreme Self that lives in relationship with us. Da’at is a construct useful in mapping one’s own states of mind as they change from moment to moment.

As elucidated in Chapter 20 of You Are The Universe, an individual is able to move his or her consciousness into what Kaballah calls the Da’at state after satisfying preconditions: balancing love vs. work, mercy vs. severity, and wisdom vs. understanding in his or her life (BH interpretation of Kaballah). You Are The Universe is an explanation in detail of my Theory of the Conscious Universe, cognizant of and embracing science as a first principle. In the book, I also hypothesize that Da’at, as conceived by ancient Kabbalists, is the state where Flow state happens. (In last week’s column I likened Flow state to ESP based on the otherworldliness and numinosity of how it feels to experience either of those states.)

What I’m saying is that people thousands of years ago knew ESP existed. They experienced it. Perhaps we were as small a percentage of the population then as we are now.

This does not mean I go around reading everybody’s mind all the time. These windows of Flow state occur when certain conditions are met, and last until those conditions change. The tools in Mind Magic are designed to maximize those conditions (Observer state, which is a full shift into metacognition). These are the same preconditions as prescribed by Kaballah, expressed very differently. Kabbalah uses a high level view of one’s life stages to express its teachings. Mind Magic uses operational second by second tactics.

Kabbalah does not go as far as to say that we are avatars of that One Supreme Self, however that idea goes back to the earliest writings in India and is finally fully articulated in 11th Century Kashmir Shaivism. Following the same road of introspection, reasoning, and received knowledge, I came to the same conclusions between age 12 and 27, and wrote the first draft of The Theory of the Conscious Universe when I was 30. Much later, I was told about Kashmir Shaivism by my wife Lalita on our second meeting, March 25, 2001.

The feeling of having an open mind to the idea that The One Self is us is a spiritually enhancing feeling. Even if you have doubt, if you don’t rule this out, it changes your life. Your decisions. Your actions. The way you feel each moment. How you relate to others, given that it might be you in there in them. I highly recommend you having these good feelings and letting them make you more buoyant. And make you more open to receiving knowledge. And to receiving and giving love.

Interesting synchronicities will happen. I take these as God winks. My term “noia” means the opposite of paranoia: the feeling that someone is out to do you some good. You will feel lots of noia if you open your mind to the possibility that the entire universe is One Consciousness, playing a game. It’s at least as plausible a scientific explanation for reality as Materialistic Accidentalism or any specific religious creation story. And yet when you wear it as a lens it makes life fuller and happier. Why not try it on?

Love to all,

Bill

The Ego Level is the Source of Today’s Threats

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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