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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

 

Do It Your Way

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Powerful Mind Part 14

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, January 31, 2025
Created June 9, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 13

Every human being is unique. A combination of genes and experiences that has never existed before and will never exist again. You are one of these unique creatures.

Then, why would your conversation, for example, sound like everyone else’s?
It’s partially because much of our learning is by imitation. That’s OK as a starting point, but then a fully realized individual will assimilate all of the different body movements and ideas that have been taken in imitatively. Not continue for an entire lifetime frozen into those imitated attitudes and behaviors.

Everyone has had the experience of having a friend or acquaintance who always says exactly the same things in any given type of situation. That person is playing tapes from his or her mind.

Everyone has had the version of this experience involving some unfortunate people who have lost some part of their short-term memory, and continue telling you the same stories, over and over again.

Imagine for a second that you, yourself, are a little bit that way. Not because of memory loss but simply habit.

How many times a day do you say the same word?

A few of us have been lucky enough to see monkeys, like in a zoo, or maybe even in the wild. Monkeys learn by imitation and you can see their learning take place, you can watch as they copy another monkey or a person – maybe even you are that person they are copying. Monkeys are closely related to humans, sharing a common ancestor, and seeing the way monkeys imitate can tell us a lot about ourselves, and get us to question all of our beliefs and ideas and attitudes, because maybe they became “ours” during a similar process.

It’s fun not to be a predictable person. That often requires giving fresh thought to a question rather than simply popping out the thing you always say about that question. That freshness is fun too. It isn’t a mistake to be playful in life, as long as your conduct suits the occasion. All of life is the playfulness of consciousness expressing itself.

It’s easiest to see how imitative behavior is formed when observing children, they are in the thick of it. Often, they don’t know the complete meaning of what they are saying, they are just repeating something they’ve heard. The problem is that this can continue way into adulthood.

You can imitate
Everyone you know
I told you so
—The Beatles, “I Dig a Pony”

We all value our freedom. We have a sense of free will: we observe ourselves making a decision, and we feel it inside when we have reached that decision. We know that we could have gone the other way. Therefore, we must have free will.

Some thinkers have pointed out that these feelings could be illusory, and that one could have predicted that decision from the outside, having observed your past behavior. It follows logically from this, that if you want to have free will and freedom of action, you need to study which actions you have been taking and try to discern why you have been taking those actions. Especially, was there someone else who influenced you to begin that pattern of action. Only after careful self-analysis can you know for sure that you are establishing your own self as an independent thinker and action-taker, not someone who has been other-directed for a lifetime.

Self-analysis starts with self-observation. You need to be aware of what you are doing from moment to moment, and why and how you are doing it. That is studying yourself as if from the outside. Each impulse that arises in you to do something is a phenomenon to be studied objectively. You don’t need to use words in your mind to ask yourself “Why would I do that” before following the impulse and allowing your body to take the action, or ignoring the impulse.

The level of detail is important when you are observing yourself. You will want to focus on the details, not jump to one general conclusion right away. How do your eyes move and what happens to your breathing when you are thinking about a given subject. Your expression and body as you walk into a room – what are you projecting to others – and why, at that moment?

Study not only things that seem to be important but also things which seem to be trivial. When you get out of bed in the morning, how do you swing your feet to the floor, and how long have you been doing it that way? Does the position you sleep in remind you of anyone else – e.g., your father or mother? It’s important to actually experience the feeling of discovering these things about yourself. How much of you has been simply copied from your models, and how much has been independently considered by the real unique you?

You don’t have to be like your friend in order to be his or her friend. Be your self. But first you must discover who that self is.

In some cases, you might come back to the same conclusions and ways of being as before. In other cases you may realize the way you do certain things – for example, the way you laugh sometimes is false and you’ve never liked that about yourself, you were mimicking someone else, and you’ve been doing it for a long time, and you’re going to learn how to break that habit by patiently catching yourself. At first, whatever program you are trying to delete from your repertoire will win over your will power, but as you persevere, you will gradually become dominant and the habit will eventually be totally broken, only to return in moments of extreme stress, until you lick it there too. Breaking conditioning is not easy but it can be done by this simple patient method.

But you have to be guiltless about your robot winning sometimes, especially in the beginning. Don’t let it depress you and don’t lose confidence. Accept that you will need to retrain your autonomic systems by not losing your cool, steadfastly and with resolve repeating the cancellation of those impulses as soon as you can in each situation. In some cases, you will have blurted something but you can explain and change your response to what you yourself truly feel in the moment. In other cases, you can stop it before a word leaves your mouth, but after you somehow telegraphed that you were about to say something. In the same way, you can truthfully explain the deconditioning you are going through, in order to become the person you are meant to be. There is no shame in metacognition, it’s a valuable skill that has never been given the attention in schools that it deserves. It will make you more effective and happier after your inner world housecleaning is done.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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If You Assume the Worst, You Yourself Will Bring It About

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Powerful Mind Part 36
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – January 24, 2025
Created November 10, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 35

The latest findings of neuroscience suggest that we as individual human beings interpret our own emotions as they happen. The physical signals we receive may suggest not only the degree to which our emotions are aroused, they may even suggest the valence as either being positive or negative emotion, but then there is a cognitive interpretation layer we impose to further characterize to ourselves the emotions we are feeling.

In my own introspections I had also come to that same conclusion long ago, that my mind had the ability to clarify the emotions I was experiencing. In some cases, I felt overwhelming arousal and initially took that to be fear and panic, but then applying Observer state (metacognition) I was able to refine that classification into positive excitement and anticipation rather than negative fear. This was the way I learned to deal with stage fright when my showbiz parents put me on stage at age four.

The general reason why it is important to be able to bring emotional self-interpretation into play is to avoid making things worse.

There is a proven feedback loop between our expectations and the results we get. If we fear failure, it increases our probability of failure.

This goes beyond psychology. In physics, the greatest theorists including Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking have postulated what Wheeler called the Anthropic Participatory Principle, the ability of consciousness to collapse probability waves into concrete objects. Einstein did not go quite as far but could not describe relativity without including an observer (consciousness) in his equations.

Knowing that our inner emotional content has significant impact on the outcomes in our lives, and that we have the interpretation layer at our disposal in order to clarify exactly which emotions we are feeling, we face the choice of either:

A. Continuing to relinquish control over how we interpret our emotions, leaving that up to our brain’s default network to settle that as it will, and accepting the consequences.
B. Exercising our willpower to focus our minds on self-observation and clarifying our emotions based on the pragmatic principle that outcomes will be better to the degree that we classify our emotions more positively.

The ideal mental framework if we choose the “B” option is (1) gratitude for being alive and for the life we have been given, despite perceived imperfections (2) resolute confidence that we shall attain our dreams someday so long as we stay positive toward ourself and toward everyone else.

That’s the gratitude attitude that gives you the greatest chance of success at whatever you do. The word “someday” implies that we ought not be impatient or overly attached to the experience of success, but instead should enjoy the passage of time, the journey rather than the destination. This total package of attitudinal viewpoints is the master cocktail for maximizing success.

The implication is that in any given moment, if you sense your own emotions, the interpretation of those emotions should be the priority. If you are also besieged by your own tumble of thoughts and questions in your mind about various subjects, you might write down the fewest possible trigger words which will serve to remind you of those questions so that you can tackle them later on.

When I was very young, I took a very different path. I greatly esteemed thinking over feeling, for a very long time, and so I paid priority attention to my thoughts and questions of an intellectual and rational nature. I considered my emotions more as animal instincts to be conquered than as valuable signals. I was in my late teens by the time I realized that many of my intellectual questions were reduced to aesthetic preferences, i.e. feelings.

My undervaluing of feelings led me to take on a general preference for melancholy in the form of “glamorous cynicism”. I actually felt most comfortable being in a negative mood. Later on, this became a hard-to-break habit but one which I eventually overcame. I had to see the way the negative mindset had ruined a number of great opportunities before I could wake up to, and bring in, the feeling side of the game to my self-recommended life systems (“psychotechnology”).

As we begin the description of Key #10 here, we are entering into the complexities of what goes on in the mind, from the subjective viewpoint of you, the experiencer. In this environment, every instant is besieged by qualia (subjective inner phenomena) some of which purport to describe the “outside” world (perceptions) and some of which report signals from the “inner” world (thinking, feelings, intuition, memories, imaginings, images). Operating according to the current norm for homo sapiens on Earth, all of this washes over you and what you pay attention to and do about it all, seems to do itself without much help from you, even when some of it is stuff that you do consciously but automatically, like saying thank you. But some of it riles you up and you over-react negatively and some of it peps you up and you possibly over-react positively… all of it feeling fairly out of control, but you’re used to it, so it doesn’t induce panic most of the time.

Key #10 is completing the granular dissection of Observer state so that you are more fully prepared to deal with life with a far greater degree of conscious control.

We started with the feelings because they are the most powerful and least controllable qualia we experience. Remember the Gratitude Attitude in order to not be overtaken by your feelings, but to leverage your feelings so that you may channel their energies in the directions of your ultimate dreams.

Best to all,
Bill

Starting Over

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Powerful Mind Part 43
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, December 27, 2024
Created January 5, 2024
Read Powerful Mind 42


A useful exercise from time to time is to pretend that all of your experience to date has not happened, you have no preconceived notions of anything, and you are going to restart your life in this very moment.

After making this proclamation to yourself, since you no longer have any agendas, the first thing to do is to simply observe what is going on inside you, in the supposed absence of all previous records.

You might sense words in your mind, or perhaps only feelings. What are those feelings and/or words? The ones that come back first after the reboot?

Why did those arise first?

If they are feelings, they might be left over from your previous life, the one before the restart. Or they may be your first feelings in this new life. You’ll find yourself able to make some pretty confident guesses. Either the feelings will be negative, and stem from your previous life, or perhaps they might be positive, excited at the chance of starting all over.

Let’s say they are negative. You say to yourself (without words, they are unnecessary) that you’re breaking the rules of the game by carrying over feelings from the past. How come your past life led you to store up these bad feelings with such power over you that they were able to break confinement by your will?

You might answer yourself by reminding yourself that you never had been able to overcome negative feelings by your willpower alone.

OK, but that was then, this is now. You are reborn as a blank slate. You will get off on the right foot this time, and are absolutely determined to have a strong enough will to break the hammerlock of negative emotions over you.

Sustain the moment for as long as necessary and put all other things aside while you win the internal battle.

Notice words that arise in your mind. Which senator* are they coming from? What is the general mood of that senator? Are the words taking the side of your will to overcome negative emotions, or are they taking the side of the negative emotions?

As the exercise progresses you will see that the robot has not crossed over with you into a new blank slate, the robot has all of the baggage it has always been carrying, and intends to keep using it to manipulate you. This will give you a clearer and more comprehensive view of the robot than anything you have read in my writings. You will see what you and all of us are up against. It is almost like needing to fight off the mind of an invading demon that is trying to take us over completely and has almost entirely succeeded already.

However, you will always have the upper hand if you remain cool and open-minded and not give in to negative emotions, defeatism, or attachment. Simply observe these inner battles from above them. You’ll need to give up all of the attachments you had formed in your earlier life, before the restart.

The things you deeply love and care about, which are good for you and others, will always come back and seek a place in your heart, and you can welcome them back, but in a stoic manner: meaning you will not make yourself suffer by not experiencing these things enough, you will be grateful for what little of them you get.

There are resolution moments where we take life-turns and we can actually feel the difference inside, where something that once had power over us, no longer does.

Afterward, we might experience backsliding, and at such times focus our consciousness on sticking with our new resolution. Do not cause yourself to suffer, nor accept suffering at the hands of others, but remain resolute and compassionate to everyone and everything. It is possible to balance in an open-minded way and to help others without being carried off by oversensitivity to the suffering of others. You can do more good in the world by staying over the weather.

Use your newly developed inner visibility to study what brings you up and what brings you down, and curtail downward emotions immediately. Accept whatever is happening as reality and deal with it as constructively and patiently as possible without becoming caught up in it. Your free will, your personal freedom, your resolute will, is the most important thing that you have, more important than your negative feelings, your will is the protector of your positive feelings of love and joy and wonder.

Do not confuse willpower with stubbornness. Stubbornness is the opposite of open-mindedness. Taking intractable positions means you are not open to considering other ideas. This means you are attached to certain ideas and things without recourse to new facts, new learning. That is being stuck. That is Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) of the robot. Your consciousness should remain open to all possibilities while taking necessary actions based on your current best estimate of reality.

When you are having fun, such as when you do your passion work, will bring you up, not only emotionally but also cognitively and in terms of effective body movement. This is Flow state.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was very young and experienced Flow state for the first times (on stage), it was very impactful on me. I had discovered another level of reality that felt very magical, although I was sure that it had a basis in science. My parents who had taught me everything about life from much earlier in my life than other parents discussed everything with their children, had never taught me about Flow state. Did they know it existed? I didn’t trust myself to know exactly how to explain it even to them and so I never did. Eventually, Jack Carter, the comedian I respected most, recognized what I was saying to him in a private conversation, and said that in showbiz it was called being “on”.

As I grew up I formed certain ideas about Flow state, which I thought about a lot because it was my aim to get into and stay in Flow state as much as possible. One idea I had was that every impulse received during Flow state was perfect. One could do no wrong. It took me years to see through that mistake. Actually, the foolish impulses continue to arise during Flow state but the ability to instantly discriminate the right impulses to follow has become impeccable, for as long as the state lasts.

With my wrong model of Flow state, I was always quickly taking myself out of Flow. Because I would act on decoy impulses thinking I could do no wrong.

Nowadays in Flow, I listen to the endless babble of my robot pretending to be me, following up on an inspired idea I just had as if with further improvements on it, when these follow-on remarks really added nothing of value.

As a note to neuroscientists studying states of consciousness, my original hypothesis was that only one set of instructions was being sent to my conscious mind, and the perfection of Flow state was therefore determined by the subconscious layer that sent my conscious mind these instructions. My current hypothesis (or observation) is that the impeccability of action is not at the generative layer but in the discrimination function. In Flow state, the conscious mind and body act as a single unit, confidently choosing correctly from among the sea of impulses constantly arising, with the self and other seeming to be of a single piece. It all feels like play or doing what comes naturally as opposed to striving.

Whether you are starting over to evade a bad mood, enjoying creating something in Flow state, or whatever you are doing, the ability to focus your attention and notice what is going on in and around you is what is going to get you through to the highest outcomes, even as you prevent yourself from becoming attached to those outcomes.

Your ability to see yourself inside continuously will reveal to you many important learnings. You will see that discomfort generalizes. If something makes you feel uncomfortable, soon other things will also be making you feel uncomfortable. You will see that being interrupted discomforts you, and that you quickly tire of it. This whole distraction culture which we have created continuously interrupts thoughts and feelings you are having, which contributes to the development of EOP as a form of “thick skin” to coexist with all the interruptive distractions going on almost all of the time. Acceleritis (information overload) has created a world of broken thoughts. We reduce the pain of this with EOP, but that actually makes things worse.

Be on the lookout for certain signs that you are in EOP. Procrastination is one of those signs. Something needs to be done but we put it off. If we stop and focus on it, the sense that it is overwhelmingly difficult melts away as we patiently and open-mindedly analyze it.

Circling is another form of procrastination. This is when your mind is in a loop, it keeps going around and around through the same path of steps, without adding new insights in the endless circling. Might be a good time to start your life over at times like that.

May your 2025 be filled with happy surprises!

Love to all,
Bill

 

*Senator

A Bill Harvey construct explained in Mind Magic. The bio-AI in your brain is referred to as “the robot”. The robot makes predictions and sometimes asserts motor control. From your own subjective point of view, it is not easy to discern your own free will from the will of the robot. To the extent that you act on impulses, you will be giving up maximum control to the robot. When you hear yourself thinking certain thoughts they may be coming from the robot. There the robot appears not as a single unified voice but as a huge auditorium filled with senators, who speak with apparent certain knowledge, but each senator speaking from a different persona. This is apparently an artifact of the brain’s bio-AI system. The AI clusters the verbal and visual inputs of others and this forms the senators, reducing the data to a manageable number of types. Back ↑