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
