Category Archives: Mind Magic

Who Am I?

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Created December 10, 2021

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog post.

When you hear yourself talking to yourself in your mind and using your name, what do you think?

As in:

Bill, you know you are not going to forget an idea like that, you don’t have to write it down, stop acting crazy.

Perhaps you dialog with yourself:

Why am I addressing Bill as if I were someone else? I am Bill.

No, I Am That I Am. As I always have been and will be. I know the past and future. But I – in many forms – am changing it every day, thank Myself! Otherwise I’d be alone for eternity. I give spinoffs self-control so I can laugh at myself as they/I muck things up, and through my I’s I can feel a wide range of emotions with incredible intensity, because I think I have skin in the game.

Who is Bill, then? I asked, my vision having been suddenly altered so that I now seemed to be hovering within the back of Bill’s head.

Our car this time!

An idea that has never occurred to you? Or one that since the 60s has gripped you? That it could all be the one videogame, all that exists, and that naturally who each of us is, is a faithful microcosm of The One Self, an avatar in a videogame but with no memory of your real life. As in the movie Total Recall.

With earthly videogames, we don’t so totally lose ourselves in our character. This will become less and less of an unsound barrier as virtual reality (VR) evolves. We already have feelies and have known how to add smellies for decades. With a little plastic straw in your mouth soon you can have tasties.

So VR fans will see God sooner than most of us.

“The human body serves as a receptacle for the divine, allowing it to enter into the world,” writes Michel Quinot, quoting the Patristic tradition. The writer has deep knowledge into, and feeling for Orthodox theology and its art, and a way of writing that shifts one into that thrilling feeling about life.

He writes: “God… is said to have clothed himself in flesh in order that man might be clothed in divinity.”

Let’s say that part of it is true.

Before stipulating any other religious belief beyond that, why is that part so hard to take seriously?

“That part” being that you, reading this now, are and have always been the author of the Universe, the Universe Itself.

We recent/still apes have the concept of VR videogames in which the player can lose self into the character being played. Something unimaginably larger than yourself in terms of information processing power could easily exist.

You have an awareness of yourself, so it’s not a leap to assume this even more powerful likely-to-exist mind could also possess this gift.

At minimum, more powerful minds than ours are a near certainty somewhere in the Universe.

So stepping from imagining that supermind, to where I perceive truth lies, please step up to imagining that you are the Universe.

What is looking out your character’s eyes is the Universe, not a part of it but the whole Universe is looking out your eyes.

Same for every other character in the improv play.

Life is an improv play.

And also an improve play. The trajectory of the story is from spiritual and physical rags to riches, by our own dedicated self-improvement.

Not just a book fad since the 60s. That’s the main thing we’re here to do. We’re also allowed to have fun and free will. And pleasure and wealth of all kinds.

Since we now all know this, can we now all start having fun together instead of what our characters have cooked up for Us?

Best to all,

Bill

A Method for Gaining Inner Control

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Created December 3, 2021

On an average day, what percent of your waking hours are spent in a really good mood?

Let’s try a scientific experiment together to see whether this method can increase that percentage.

The experiment will run from now through whenever you decide the experiment is over.

During the experiment, you’ll try out the method espoused here. What you’ll be looking for is any change in the degree to which your days become filled with good moods.

First, some needed background. The things that bring us down from our really good mood tend to fall into two types:

  1. Things our conditioned brain classifies as threat vectors.
  2. Things that our brain sees as annoying irrelevant distractions that are sapping our efforts to deal effectively with the threats.

Our outwardly focused Western civilization tends to leave us with little interest in studying what is going on inside of us from one second to the next. Most of us in the West are used to clumping together everything that goes on in our minds and emotions as one thing.

This hidden assumption gives us no leverage with which to gain inner control. Then, if and when we come to the conclusion that we need to gain control of ourselves, we fall back upon yelling at ourselves in our mind, a strategy with very low success potential.

Although we can chunk our inner experiences into more than two buckets, this method simplifies the inner glory of our existence into just two buckets.

Let’s call one state the Self, and the other state the Ego.

The Self is your “Me That Was Born” – the way you were before you had any experiences outside of the womb. The Self is an experiencer, an entity that has personal subjective experience, both of events within the psyche called qualia, as well as your experience of “external” events. The Self is pure consciousness without an object, until events call the Self’s attention.

The Ego is part of your mind/body/soul’s autonomic nervous system. It is robotic, like a kneejerk. It is the result of your “inner” and “outer” experiences. It is the conditioned neural pathways that have been laid down in your physical brain.

You may not know it yet (until now), but you can be controlled from either place – your Self or your Ego. Your inner feelings and clues can reveal to you in which seat you are sitting at any given moment.

If you are feeling either calmly neutral or positive, taking in what is going on and playing with it for fun or because it’s your passion work, you are in your Self.

The hints that you have been sucked into control by the Ego are anger, fear, irritation, comparison of self with others, tension, wanting something it doesn’t look like you’ll be getting, feeling under time pressure, feeling inadequate or cocky. The list goes on but you get the idea.

The first principle of this method is simply to remember to check the hints to see where you happen to be from time to time during the day and night.

When you start to get really good at this – remembering to check your state often – the easy part is then knowing which state you are in. The tricky part is how to back out of the Ego, and that’s where the method comes in.

The method works best when you can maneuver yourself into being alone for a few minutes. This is the beauty of bathrooms. When else are we allowed to grab a few minutes of alone time?

I see you sitting on the bathroom throne, wearing your clothes. You close your eyes, rotate your shoulders backwards, your back is straight. You check every part of your body for tension and relax it there and everywhere. Breathe deeply and slowly.

Focus on the part of you that is the observer, that doesn’t care what happens. It sounds impossible but that is the real you, your core, your essence. The closer to it you get the less you are attached to what happens with whatever the current threat vectors are. You may not experience this on the first serious try – or you might.

You’ll experience this state as fatalistic, accepting of whatever life deals out, and happy to play by those rules or seek to change them, but not troubled. You are above all that stuff.

Way back before there was human language, it’s possible that our brains had threat-related reactions only a few times a year. But as our own creativity continues to make life more complicated every day, we now tend to have threat/Ego reactions multiple times every minute – a pre-existing unnoticed pandemic I call Acceleritis.

The Ego will fight back by arguing that you can’t risk being fatalistic you have to try harder to win or you will wind up in the gutter and no one will like you.

The Ego can be very convincing. All you have to do is to deal with the holding of your position in the Self, in what I call Observer state, the state right before Flow state.

Yes, this is a method that will lead to your more frequent flights of Flow state.

It’s a good thing when the Ego calms down and starts to converse sanely with the Self about the matters that are driving it wild. The Self’s innate intuition gives answers which in some cases actually convince the Ego, at least for that moment. In time, the Ego becomes reabsorbed as a useful extension of the Self, as God intended it, before we screwed it up with Acceleritis. Too much creativity. Too much of a good thing.

But we can have our cake and eat it too, by this method. We can continue the reckless adventuring into making real whatever comes into our heads, and if we also always practice the method, we can better see future consequences before taking each turn in the road, which will reduce the wreckage we are making of the other species and the planet itself, and our own species making itself suffer the most. Who needs it? Let’s stop it.

This is the way to do it.

That, and prayer.

Love to all,

Bill

Believe In Yourself

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Created October 29, 2021

What do those words mean?

The underlying precept is that, even under rare conditions of constant parental attention, life still tends to wound us.

Incidents in which we underperformed abound.

No matter what good we do, somehow, we have a tendency to never forgive ourselves for those times we caused our own eternal shame.

What is it that makes us take the side of the accuser against ourselves?

Conscience.

Freud classified Conscience as a societally-induced phenomenon. “SuperEgo” is the name he gave it.

What I call “The Me That Was Born”, Freud calls the “id”.

What I call “the Robot”, Freud calls the “ego”.

What I call conscience, Freud calls the “SuperEgo”.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud intuits deep causal connections between societal change and inner acculturation conditioning, and he calls out the ultimate interference of newer mental/emotional aspects with the original experiencer.

That idea of inner structure where three different centers of power exist has implications that have never been fully explored by later science. The Human Effectiveness Institute has brought this back to light.

If you are beating yourself up on a subconscious level, you are raising huge frictional resistance against your achieving peak experiences.

Try this mind experiment. Take Freud literally for a moment and see if you can actually experience that there are at least those three points of view within YOU.

The YOU that has always been there taking it all in.

The YOU that is your own press agent and protector.

The YOU that is constantly critiquing your performance after the fact and even during action. And especially before action. Just always critiquing you, putting you down, ya got nuthin.

Coming from someone who knows you better than yourself, because it IS yourself, you are strongly affected by it.

It is wounding.

Therefore, you repress it.

That makes it subconscious. The dwelling ground of the suppressed.

But it is your drumbeat. Every breath you take, every step you make. Constantly bringing down your estimate of yourself.

The only way to battle this internal demon is to call upon facts. Your noblest deeds. Your tendency to learn over time, albeit slowly.

You cannot continue to filibuster. You must agree to talk with yourself about the most internally divisive issues that undermine the collective YOU.

Don’t wait for the government to make psychiatric treatment free for everyone. Do it yourself.

One way or the other, don’t get caught in the trap of stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time. You have to be on your own side. Otherwise, you’re just going to spin your wheels and get stuck in the mud.

You do have to forgive yourself. Whatever incidents still cause you to beat yourself up, write the list down, and don’t lose it.

One at a time, when you feel like it and life lets you, just deeply relive the one on the list you feel like attacking at that moment. Give it a whole day or three days or a week, however long it takes, until you totally realize what decisions you made later in life that you made better, because you had been taught that painful lesson at that time.

When you’ve gone through the entire list, you will feel initially drained. When you recover from the strong cathartic, you will be wonderful and feel every bit of it.

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Best to all,

Bill

Reopening Your Mind to All Possibilities

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Created October 22, 2021

We all have heroes and heroines. That’s a very good thing. But life is complicated, there can be harmful things that come out of good things, and vice versa. The harmful aspect I’m thinking about right at the moment is that we can become violently protective of every single thing our idol ever said.

The idolized person if they were still around would probably wish this inflexibility were not the case, especially if that unbudgeable position were being invoked in his or her name.

We must allow for the possibility that we can see further than the role model could see, because we sit upon their shoulders.

Imagine your role model might be proud of you for thinking for yourself, even it led to a degree of difference from something that person once said.

Each of us is always growing up, and things we said a long time ago might not be something we would bother to defend today.

Science is not a person, and individual scientists may have varying degrees of personal evolution, hence can have biases, but science as a whole has never claimed to have completed its quest and found the explanation for everything, including our existence in the first place. That basic existential question nowadays is labelled “The Hard Question” in physics. It includes the question of why there are laws of nature, because laws imply a lawmaker, order implies a mind of far greater powers than our own, the beautifully-ordered complexity of the universe having come about accidentally, having struck Einstein and many other scientists as hard to believe.

Yet to the average person there is the assumption that science has closed the books on that question, that any sort of great mind or spirit behind and responsible for nature cannot possibly be true.

Science has never declared that. It would be hard to call it science if it were to do that. Science is about objectively searching for truth by means of intuitive hypotheses based on observation and inductive logic, then conducting experiments to isolate variables one at a time so as to verify or eliminate hypotheses based on deductive logic. Without that process, a scientist taking a strong position on a subject is just another biased person stating his or her beliefs. The fact that in one sphere of life s/he is a scientist doesn’t make them an expert on every subject under the sun. The psychological halo effect, however, gives more weight to the words of a person to the degree that they have stood out in any way within their society. Nowadays that even includes the hate heroes polluting the media. Whether famous as a gang leader or a scientist, their words have much more impact than those of the average person.

The Hard Question to physicists is actually a fighting matter for most human beings. Many wars have been fought over such matters. Today some of the energy in the schism derives from people who are ardently loyal to one church, one way of answering The Hard Question. In the U.S. there is an overlap between people who are fighting mad, fiercely patriotic, and devoted to explicit orthodoxy within a specific religion. Even beginning to come close to what intends to be an open-minded consideration of The Hard Question may be offensive to some readers, so I hasten to say that I have no strong revisionist position about any religion, and that my personal hypothesis actually can coexist 100% with every major religion on Earth. (Readers who do not see how that could be possible are invited to get a free sample of my novel The First Son.)

The top physicists – Einstein and Wheeler for example – both allowed for the possibility of a lawmaker behind nature’s laws. Neither of them unfortunately studied consciousness as deeply as they studied physics and mathematics (and as deeply as Einstein studied philosophy). They both realized and used the power of intuition, and if they had been disposed to study psychology as deeply, they could have come to the same hypothesis as mine, that all that exists is a single consciousness, a single lawmaker, and each of us is that entity temporarily self-assigned to one role in the total performance. This view would have satisfied Einstein’s inability to accept and explain the existence of free will, and his rejection of the possibility of a God who could care about individual humans.

You may get a good feeling out of viewing this 2-minute video of a father and daughter having a conversation about the existential question:

Let the real magic of life back into your life. Without adopting any worldview, allow yourself to enjoy the lack of closure on the largest question, and to be awed by the significance of the question: our lives are a mystery. We are in the most important movie that could possibly ever exist. Get used to keeping your mind open until you see what would be considered legal evidence or scientific evidence – which will be rarely. Learn to enjoy (it is admittedly an acquired taste) not feeling 100% certain about anything, so long as you’re able to make decisions effectively, harking to your preferred hypotheses.

If you’d like a ten-minute video explanation of my hypothesis, it’s here.

For a set of wonderful Einstein quotes curated by one of my heroines Yana Lambert please click here.

We don’t need to get negative about any subject so long as we are internally flexible to consider lots of different points of view, while always choosing to do things the way we like, and allowing for the possibility that we are not as separate from each other as we presently look.

You want to be able to land on your feet if it turns out to be that we are all one thing together. It’s scientifically possible. Decisions made with that possibility in mind will work out better for you and everyone, and that is a pre-scientific pragmatic validation of sorts.

Love to all,

Bill