Category Archives: Observer State

The Difference Between “Predreaming” and “Manifesting”

Created March 29, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Predreaming

A recent article in The New York Times by Tara Isabella Burton, a fine writer of both non-fiction and fiction with a doctorate in theology from Oxford’s Trinity College, puts down a specific spiritual belief she refers to as “manifesting”. She writes:

“Today’s culture of wellness — predicted to be an $8.5 trillion industry by 2027 — is suffused with the pseudoscientific language of positive thinking, manifesting, useful and toxic “energy” and, above all things, the power and the potential of the self to create its own reality. If we can dream it, much of contemporary wellness language tells us, we can have it — so long as we focus our energy hard enough.”

She also associates “manifesting” with some other huge things, including besides the wellness culture: spirituality, capitalist individualism, positive thinking, denying aid to the poor on the grounds that they are not using their God-given powers of manifesting, and even Trumpism. She cites Google evidence that searching for the word “manifesting” spiked 6X when the pandemic began.

Burton traces how a faith healer’s book in the late 19^th Century triggered a spate of similar books which became so powerful that they inspired Mary Baker Eddy to found the Christian Scientist movement, and transformed Capitalism into a religion:

“In this way, the capitalist pursuit of profit was swiftly recast as a religion whose only tenet was desire… New Thought offered a convenient economic theodicy: a way of explaining and justifying wealth inequality as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, with the wealthy at the top and the suffering at the bottom. And it’s notable that manifesting, New Thought’s modern descendant, should rise to prominence at a moment when economic inequality is once again at an all-time high.”

In her description of “manifesting” she consistently communicates the idea that it is simply wanting X (generally, money) and focusing all our energies on it.

I rarely use the term “manifesting” but until now have never thought of it in a bad light, so I’m grateful for Burton’s very readable and intelligent article. I see now that “manifesting” has taken on a more narrow meaning that I thought it had.

I have always used my own term, Predreaming, which came to me in a moment of inspiration, as if from “upstairs”.

My definition of Predreaming is rather lengthy but I will quote it here from Chapter Seventeen of You Are The Universe:

Chapter 17
Predreaming

Just a reminder: all of this is theory, largely based on my own experiences. For readability the scenario is described as I imagine the details, and is intended to be the most parsimonious, plausible explanation that accounts for all phenomena.

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will eventually appear in your external experience on the Universal Computer Screen we call material reality.

You are tuning in these material experiences, ordering them, attracting them to you, by dwelling on them.

It makes no difference if your dwelling on them consists of prayer to get them (your desires), or dread of getting them (your fears).

The “dwelling-on” places the order, in either case.

Oblivious to our inherited “ordering power”, almost all of us are using it against ourselves.

One of the ways we have been (under-)using our “ordering power” in a constructive way is called “prayer”.

Prayer tends to be a heightened (i.e. more effective) form of predreaming to the extent that all four aspects of consciousness tend to be involved: thinking, feeling, perception (in this case, vivid visualization of the target situation), and intuition.

Intuition will tend to be present in prayer to the extent that the evolving mini-personality who is praying feels the target situation being prayed for would be good for other attention nodes, not just for him or her. Then the praying node has the intuition that “God has no reason not to answer the prayer”.

Now this is not synonymous with the Butler definition of “manifesting” where all you need is desire and focusing. There are a few differences.

1. Scientific support – it has been proven that previsualization improves performance.
2. Theoretical support – as documented in A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” , John Wheeler, Einstein and Hawking are the Newtons of our day, and they have left the doors open for consciousness to be a far more important component in reality than most present-day scientists – with Wheeler creating the Participatory Anthropic Concept which comes very close to supporting “manifesting” but especially “predreaming”.
3. With predreaming comes the concept of considering not just oneself, but how the desired state is a win/win from an enlightened point of view to a reality which is a single Consciousness.
4. The other vital side of predreaming is to avoid projecting negative situations, which appears from her argument that is not a component of “manifesting” under her definition. This comes with a battery of methods for truncating negativity at all times. Expressing woe, past a certain point, extends woe into the future, with an accelerating curve as you dwell on it.
5. The connections Butler draws between “manifesting” in social media and religious groups that have embraced Trumpism is another difference. The students of predreaming that I know are not affiliated with any of that.
6. Predreaming is only one aspect of adopting a lens of the world as a single Consciousness. Another is Noia, the science and art of looking for helpful clues from the Universe – The One Self. There are many aspects helpful to Observer state and Flow state.

My experiential learning in testing and developing predreaming, the way I do it, has led to the strong conviction that it is working.

Seemingly being challenged sparks new thinking, it is wonderful to be challenged politely!

Butler has convinced me that the misunderstanding and misuse of one’s ability to “contribute mentally and physically to the happenings of reality, with positive emotion and functioning intuition” (shorter definition of predreaming), lead to unfortunate outcomes that spill over onto the rest of us evolving mini-personalities. Ego is the main reason this occurs, which is exacerbated by Acceleritis. Too many “manifesters” are focused on money and act exclusionary, and justify this on religious grounds so they feel righteous and unable to waver or consider any polite logical challenges, because no one is better or smarter than God, and “God is in my hand.”

In reality, God – The Original Consciousness that acts though each of us and everything – wants us all to enjoy learning how to find our way back inside his POV. “Manifesters” will not get the results they want no matter how much they focus, because it would harm more of us than help. God doesn’t use free will that way, and doesn’t want us to, either. God has no reason not to love us, God IS us.

Wheeler et al explain the mechanics, by which these Consciousness-driven actions manifest.

Manifesters beware of “using the dark side of the Force”. Make sure the types of simplified thinking* Dr. Butler describes don’t describe you. You will appreciate how much your manifestation rate increases.

I’ll close with this superb closer of Tara Isabella Burton’s article:

“After all, if reality is only ever what we make it, then those who possess the fewest scruples about conforming to the truth are the ones who will have the most power to shape the future.”

There is “a Darth Vader”. That’s the powerful people hypnotizing those follower folks, who deserve better, who have put themselves into magical superstitious thinking they think is spiritually driven, but it’s drawing down upon their spirituality account, to fool them like the metaphorical Devil, the ego.

Try predreaming and let me know if it works. Make sure to hold down the ego. Thanks!

*I refer to it as Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). Here’s how my AI [https://app.soopra.ai/bill/chat] explains it:
“Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is a term I coined to describe a state of mind where, due to sensory overload or stress, we simplify our thinking process. In EOP, we tend to see things in black and white, make immediate decisions based on precedent, and have little foresight. It’s like an emergency mode our minds go into when overwhelmed, but the challenge is that it can limit our ability to fully process information and make optimal decisions. It’s a state we want to avoid or minimize for more effective thinking and decision making.”

Love to all,

Acceleritis Theory Validated

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Created March 14, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The amount of information being processed daily by the average human being has been accelerating ever since the invention/discovery of written language.

In my 1976 book Mind Magic I postulated that the amount of information being processed daily by the average human being has been accelerating ever since the invention/discovery of written language.

And I theorized that this was the cause of a mental/emotional state I called Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). This is a state of consciousness in which questions are set aside, experiences are not assimilated, personal effectiveness is reduced, creativity is blocked, the awe and wonder of life is invisible, one subscribes to black vs. white thinking imposed by others, one has prerecorded responses used all the time, new learning and growth are stultified. One is coping but not mastering life. One is a conditioned robot.

In 2011, in this article, I started using the term “Acceleritis” to describe the condition of information overload acceleration over time.

Recently my wife Lalita gave me a birthday present of a new book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. In this book, the author documents social scientists’ work, essentially proving that my theory is correct. Both the author and the scientists whose work he cites add greatly to the picture, and I highly recommend reading this book for that reason, and because it also is a great read.

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

Hari concludes that external forces have caused our inability to concentrate, rather than being caused by a lack of willpower on our part. He divides the book into chapters to review these external causes one by one. And he starts with the digital devices which are so obviously part of the problem. One citation is a 2016 study which found that we touch our phones an average of 2,617 times every 24 hours.

Interestingly, he also cites studies which use data from digital platforms to prove that acceleration is going on. For example, a 2019 paper in Nature Communications, “Accelerating Dynamics of Collective Attention”, studied the major digital platforms and found that over time, topics spiking in public interest last shorter and shorter times before wearing out. For example, trending hashtags in Twitter (now X) remained in the top 50 for 17.5 hours on average, but by 2016 that had dropped to 11.9 hours. Similar accelerations were found in Google and Reddit but not in Wikipedia. The appearance and disappearance of new phrases were analyzed across millions of books in Google Books published since 1880 and the pattern looked a lot like Twitter’s (now X).

(In a recent meeting I was asked if they should be worried because their ad recall scores appear to be dropping over a period of years. I explained that day-after TV ad recall scores averaged 26% when I first got into the business and were now 4%, so they shouldn’t take it personally.

I also mentioned that attention to ads and everything else has shortened dramatically during my tenure, and in our biggest media type today, digital, it is 1-2 seconds.

Since that meeting I’ve seen results of a neuro study where eye tracking showed that, out of hundreds of viewable social media ads, 90% of them got 1 second of attention or less – and this was in a laboratory forced viewing environment.)

Hari also interviewed Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famous psychologist who coined the term Flow state, and had been an advisor to The Human Effectiveness Institute, and the author makes the connection between the state of distraction blocking Flow state, and advises slowing down, getting more sleep, staying off devices in much the way you’re used to reading in my posts here.

The amount of research covered in this book is impressive, and the writing is excellent. Where my own work is additive to this superb body of work lies in two main areas. (These may be addressed later in Hari’s book which I am not quite halfway through. I’ll let you know.)

One is the art and science of introspection. It’s important to spend as much time in Flow state and this is accomplished by first learning how to bring on the Observer state. Mind Magic and Powerful Mind are my two books on that subject. Powerful Mind was serialized in this blog last year and the book version will be out this year.

The other is our culture’s lack of an inspiring sense of mission for the vast majority of people. This is what causes the desire for distraction and the willingness to be led like sheep down any path that gives us a pleasant diversion from lives devoid of purpose and meaning. This is the source of the awful notion of killing time.

My recommendations as to how to develop an inspiring sense of mission are also included in the latter two books, and in my science-spirituality-synthesis nonfiction books A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” and You Are The Universe: Imagine That. The essence of my message: it is quite possible that we ourselves are part of a consciousness of such power that it earns the word “God”, and that if we watch for clues, we find we are being guided by events toward sharing our gifts with the world.

Because my view of reality is so different, I felt it would be necessary to also write fiction books which illustrate what I mean by getting into various characters’ heads. Hence Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, my series of four (so far) sci-fi/alternate history novels. In fact, Episode 1, The Great Being, was just published and became available on this site and Amazon yesterday.

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

If you have questions, please feel free to have a conversation with my Soopra AI.

Love,

Powerful Mind Pt. 4

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Created March 31, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 3, click here.

Chapter 2

The Observer State

A clearer, more effective state of consciousness —
only seconds away from your daily state of consciousness.
Just knowing it exists can benefit you

This entire book is about states of consciousness. In this chapter we will focus on one particular state of consciousness we call the Observer state. The Observer state is more powerful than the state most of us are in most of the time, and leads to the Flow state, which is more powerful still in terms of your ability to make an impact on others around you and on the world. We speak about both states as being “The Upper Mind”. The purpose of this book is to show you the simple yet easily missed doorways into the Upper Mind.

Why is it important to think about consciousness at all? Because life is all about consciousness. We do not exist without consciousness. While modern science has made brilliant progress in almost every other sphere of reality, too little is known about consciousness.

Yet all the ills of the world are rooted in ignorance of how consciousness works. We have made the world we see around us. It all started in our minds. Every day we do things we regret because we listen to and act on whatever our minds dish up to us. We need our minds to perform better, to become powerful, to gain insight into ourselves and others, to come to better decisions on a moment to moment basis.

The extreme anti-heroes who have become powerful on the world stage, who have driven much of our history so far, might not have chosen paths of destruction if their genius had been creatively channeled, if they had not lost touch with their compassion and love.

If we collectively knew our own minds better we would not go to war but rather we would find creative win/win solutions — the ones we get to in the end anyway after all the bloodshed. The path to a better world lies through the terrain of consciousness. One day when we all really do know our minds better the world will be a relative paradise compared to the way it has been throughout all recorded history. As the great science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells said, “History is a race between education and destruction.” If we can make our minds powerful now, we can gain the maturity as a race necessary to not destroy ourselves, given the extreme weaponry we have now at our disposal and our habitual disregard of our destructive effect on the environment (the air we breathe, the water we drink).

Because war is a pattern repeated throughout recorded history, we tend to assume this is the way it has to always be. And yet, “recorded history” literally means since the onset of written language. In short, written language and the thinking processes that go with it have led to acceleritis, information overload and Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), which blocks upper mind and leads not only to war but also to crime and personal cruelty born of our disconnection from innate compassion. Our minds need to become more powerful in order not to be confused by the information overload so much that we are easily led and manipulated into a life nearly devoid of positive feelings, squandering the opportunity of life.

Each of us knows intuitively that the only thing we can change is ourselves. This is the only way we can make a better world.

Powerful Mind seeks to reveal specific information and techniques for attaining specific states of consciousness. We will be talking about waking states of consciousness, not about sleeping states. Sleeping states are important too, but in the interest of focus we’ll leave these to another book.

A Broader View of What Science Is

Around 400 BC, in the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, one branch of philosophy called “epistemology” focused on understanding “how can we know”? Over time, different schools of thought evolved about how we can know: rationalists believe that we can know things directly through our intellect; authoritarians believe we know by listening to authority figures who tell us what we know; empiricists believe that we know by direct experience, by testing things in the real world; intuitionists believe we can know directly through a mysterious faculty.
Science developed out of empiricism, basing what we consider to be “truth” on factual experience, testing and validation. In the case of science as practiced in the West, especially in the last few hundred years, that “experience” is usually the taking of measurements using instruments with dials and displays from which one takes readings. The person taking the readings is the “observer” often mentioned in relativity and quantum mechanics, the latest forms of science. In the East, science is also based on experience, and there the experience can often be inner experience where dials and displays are not involved. This is still science and still based on empirical experience.

This Eastern willingness to accept internal evidence explains why science in the West has not validated the existence of the more effective states of consciousness. Starting toward the end of the 19th Century, inner experience or introspection fell out of favor in psychology, after William James, the last of the giants of psychology to accept inner evidence directly. The more externally-oriented culture of the West created a blind spot. In psychology, work shifted to behaviorism, the focus on externally quantifiable actions, along with the study and social application of conditioning to alter these actions.

Eastern epistemology actually fuses empiricism and intuitionism. No conflict is seen between these ways of knowing because they both involve experiencing reality for oneself.

Although based on empiricism, Western science became authoritarian and elitist in its epistemology: the common person was excluded from “knowing” by the reduction of all science to mathematics, a difficult language to master. Science at its cutting edge moved out of the sphere of something the common person could totally visualize and comprehend.

Science and States of Consciousness

Regarded academically as a “soft science”, traditional Western psychology recognizes only three states of consciousness: dreamless sleep, dream sleep, and waking consciousness. Eastern psychology since the fifth century B.C. recognized ten states of waking consciousness: the normal everyday waking state, the access state which precedes meditation, and eight progressively deeper states of meditation. Oscar Ichazo, a modern student/teacher of consciousness techniques and founder of the Arica Institute in 1968, fuses ideas from consciousness explorers throughout history (plus his own) to propose fifteen waking states of consciousness ranging from psychosis, through six levels of neurosis, three levels corresponding to the Eastern access state, and five levels of higher consciousness.

It is revealing that Western psychology reduces waking consciousness to a single state. William James was the first prominent Western psychologist who warned against “prematurely closing the book” on the existence of other states of waking consciousness. More recently, Mihaly Czikszenthmihalyi (pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”), former head of the University of Chicago Psychology Department, coined the term “Flow state” (known in show business as “Being On”, and in sports as “The Zone”), and conducted valuable research into this state, which was published in his 2008 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill

We All Need Optimal Competition to Supplant the Unhealthy Kind

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Created February 17, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The optimal use of competition is to set it up to be good-natured. As if in a debating game. The way the Founders of the Constitution thought about it. Without fierce fear of failure, megalomaniacal attachment to power and political money, without hatred, gaming the system, or violence. The Founders knew there would inevitably always be political arguments along the way, but felt confident that with the checks and balances and good will, we would be able to work things out.

The Constitution itself never mentioned political parties. Jefferson and Washington both warned against the rise of political parties in America. They had seen what happened with the Tories and Whigs in Merrie Olde England. Wigs on the green. At the time, in the American Colonies, being the government was just a particularly hard and risky job without a lot of perks. Like being anything in the Colonies at that time.

In any situation where the lust for winning and the fear of losing has become obsessive, human effectiveness drops sharply. Different brain processes take over. Yerkes-Dodson experiments and later work by others proved that when we care too much about an outcome, we reduce our own power to get that outcome.

Too many of the human beings involved in the process of governing us are now showing their worst sides most of the time because they are so ignobly and obsessively motivated. I say ignobly because a public servant worth his or her or their title serves the public regardless of personal outcomes for themselves. They do the necessary for the good of the people. They keep their solemn Oath. Such were the Founders. If we had them today none of this would be happening. Which is not to say that all of our public servants today are ignoble. But the ignoble ones are showing off blatantly because they have used unfair tactics and are still getting away with it, so they appear at the moment to have the upper hand over the noble ones.

What if anything can we do about the present disappointment many of us feel when we think about our beloved nation with its high ideals? Firstly, we ought not vote for ignobles. Secondly, smaller degrees of change are easier to achieve, so let’s see what can be done to moderate the behavior of those in government. They should be held to a higher standard. Lying, hate talk, attacking the other party, extolling one’s own party, damning the proposed solutions put forth by others without offering any solutions of one’s own, openly gaming the system (gerrymandering, filibustering, appointing of politically motivated judges) so as to gain and keep power, accepting inappropriate monetary rewards, there are specific guidelines which could be put forth as a new Code Of Conduct Standard for the country’s government decision makers at Federal, State, and even local levels.

That is only a surface change but it will have inner feedback loops that will help people break their conditioning. We’ve been all been conditioned and it’s hard but not impossible to break conditioning. Our conditioning began early and we had nothing to compare it to so we took it all for granted. Later we felt in our comfort zone to stay within the herd of people who received similar conditioning to ourselves, and we might not have even been conscious of doing it. This conditioning resides within brain neurons created by our experiences and affects us strongly. The repetition of reinforcement over decades enforces a self-image which is too much made up of what other people think and too little created by our own fully reconsidered clear-eyed contemplation.

In order for the governments of the world to perform optimally, and nations to be led to peaceful coexistence and compassionate cooperation, authoritarian (will take longer) and democracy/republic leaders need to evolve themselves by knowing themselves better, and by reinvigorating their true individuality. Becoming liberated from conditioned intense attachment to money and power and replacing those drives with loftier inspiration to make a better happier world. We all need this but we all need it to happen for world leaders as much as we need it for ourselves. Without inner changes in all of us, especially those who are supposed to lead us, the species might not make it in time to avert the many ticking timebombs our overwhelmed minds have created.

Witness the recent slide of a perfectly humane and smart American party into what it is now. But the Republicans I know are nothing like that. Those in highest offices may be acting crazy, but the ground truth is quite different, very few Republicans I know who are not in the government are anything like crazy. It’s not the people; it’s a relative handful, a few thousand mis-motivated people that have arrogated unto themselves a great excess of power already, and they have made clear that they are not at all interested in keeping their oaths to protect the American Constitution. This is a domestic threat to our way of life. It’s un-American. It’s a return to what we sought to replace with Americanism. Because the atavistic governing style staging a comeback runs on bribes, maybe we should call it Bribalism.

The Business of the United States Is Business

Republican legislators when acting sanely (before the extreme attachment to personal outcome hypnotized them) were pro-business before. Now their core is more the lesser educated, their concern for businesses could be manifesting as good advice and programs for small businesses in this era in which small businesses are arising more rapidly due to the internet. Meanwhile, businesses have transcended the pure profit motive for enlightened self-interest (buzzword: Purpose), which empowers them to take up good causes and aim to make people’s lives better.

Although this is authentic to US business today, the party which used to cleave to business is not exactly doing that kind of thing as much. Now the GOP is saying only what will hold together the tens of millions of people who keep it in power. This is analogous to milking a brand that is on the decline: it will not avert the decline, but in the short term before that decline is finished, “get as much out of it as you can.” It would be far better to avert the decline by returning to its original brand identity as the Party of Lincoln, the party of business especially small businesses, the party demanding proofs and safeguards from those bringing progressive proposals, the party which completes a healthy optimal competition with the more change-oriented party.

Republicans rise up to take responsibility for your party. You are true Americans; there are a few thousand people terrorizing the country and they unfortunately turn out to be all too many of the people we together elected, and unluckily for you most of them right now are of your party – but not of your mind, nor of your character. You have to rise up collectively to peacefully take back control of your party and bring it back to the center. No one else can do it but you. Step up, step forward, take responsibility. It’s the right thing to do.

Love to all,

Bill

PS – How to take advantage of the “Yerkes-Dodson Law” (and more) to improve your own performance: https://www.humaneffectivenessinstitute.org/observerness/

PPS – I’m not saying bribes are limited to one party. Remember, I’m an Independent. As I’ve written here many times, I see fixed going-in conditions such as progressivism or conservatism to be biases, things which distort objective judgment and obscure and confuse objectivity. Biases block Observer state and Flow state.

Chapter 17 Predreaming

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

Chapter 17
Predreaming