Welcome to a special Pebbles blogpost.
Created October 23, 2024

Socrates took being a citizen to be a solemn matter.

He felt a responsibility to act in the proper manner for a citizen. He even agreed that the State had the right to put him to death, despite knowing it was their error.

Perhaps it is no longer the modern way to make such commitments to ideas.

Unless you are immune to reality, you are probably attuned enough to be voting in this election.

No election before ever had such significance in the history of the world. Many millions of people are getting very involved in this election. Many who are still undecided are preparing for it by studying the solutions that each candidate is talking about and trying to be objective in comparing these proposed solutions.

It’s the kind of thing you want to be a part of. Even if you never voted before, and never do it again.

Everything you experience teaches you things.

Here are my suggestions on how to get the most out of this election in terms of having a peak experience, knowing you are part of history.

Really feel alive. Take deep breaths. Look at the sky.

When you are in the voting booth (or voting in advance), here are the steps:

1.   Look and feel deep inside yourself, who you really are in yourself, not your parents, not anybody else. What do you want out of your future? For yourself, and all of the people you care about.

2.   Focus on one candidate. Let yourself imagine what it’s going to be like on that timeline if this one wins. How it will affect you, and all the people you care about.

3.   Do the same with the other candidate.

4.   Vote.

Love to all,

 

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June 14, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

Life rushes at you from the first moment. You never can quite catch up. There are always things that you remember later that you forgot to remember for long periods of time. You learn to live with this. You come to accept that things arising within you that seemed very significant for a moment can get lost inside you.

It’s the things that really get to you hurtfully that you cling to. These are the flashing red lights on your inner dashboard and you obsess about them for hours or much longer until you finally come to grips with them in one way or another. When you find the inner method that works to put the hurt aside you keep using it even if you’re not quite sure how you did it. As long as you remember the inner attitude, the inner face you put on to yourself that enables you to shut the hurt away, that’s all you think you need, a little strange inner anesthesia you somehow instinctively come to discover and use. You never even imagine you might actually be able someday to figure out how you yourself work inside.

As you grow up things become a little clearer to you, to the degree that you actually pay some attention to your inner life. This is of course what we now, thanks to Dr. John Flavell in the 1970s, call metacognition.

Dr. Abraham Maslow never actually conducted empirical research and experimentation in order to come to the magnificent intuition of the hierarchy of needs. He might have come across the ancient India chakra system of seven levels which is highly reminiscent of the hierarchy of needs (which originally had five levels and later in his life he added the spiritual sixth level).

What research he did was of the lives of self-actualized people, others like himself who had graduated from being motivated mostly by the esteem of others and self-esteem, to what he called the level of self-actualization, relaxing into the playful outward flow of inner creativity coming from the soul of the individual’s being, simply letting this happen without having any specific outcome goal for where it might all lead, the doing of it being fun for its own sake, autotelic as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it, simply doing something for its own sake.

Maslow also studied himself very closely. He was expert at metacognition, introspection with concentration, meditating on himself. This and studying the lives of other self-actualized people like Einstein and Freud was the way he came to his towering insight into how what drives us evolves as we mature, if we do.

His focus was on motivations, needs, the drivers which are the causes of our behavior, the reasons why we are attracted to X and repelled by Y. And how this magnetic setting shifts over the course of a fulfilled lifetime.

Piaget was not looking at motivations at all. His interest was into the way our use of our cognition apparatus shifts as we go through childhood into adulthood.

Long before I came across these amazing teachers, I was obsessed with studying myself and both what seemed to drive me and how I was using my inner tools. I figured out a lot of it and then started to see that others, like Maslow and Piaget, Csikszentmihalyi and Freud, Jung and Epictetus, and so many others, had come before me had already figured the same things out the same way.

In my outer life, about 25 years ago, while introducing the first set top box data to research standards (measuring the TV audience via the cable/satellite box), I discovered 265 psychological variables which appeared to drive 76% of our television program viewing choices. Then, about five years ago, I was studying those 265 variables and I began to see how I could cluster them based on the semantic proximity between certain words and concepts, first into 86 clusters I called Need States, and then into 15 superclusters I called Motivations. Once I saw the 15 Motivations I realized there was a great unexpected relationship with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

It appeared that whereas Maslow got to the hierarchy of needs by a “top down” approach, we had gotten to the same place by a big data “bottom up” approach. Our bottom-up approach resulted in finding more granularity than Maslow had posited. There was not a single level of esteem, there are several levels of esteem, and also a few levels of self-actualization, and so on. Maslow’s progression inspired the way I present the 15 levels, the sequence in which I envision individuals grow into higher and higher levels of motivation. But what do I mean by “higher”? I mean “more noble”.

Looking at the 15-level version, we can see that the top four levels are different than the eleven lower levels. The bottom eleven are all about taking care of oneself, whereas the top four are also about taking care of others, and are therefore more unselfish, noble, ethical. The highest of the 15 levels which I call Self-Transcendence (and is the sixth level Maslow added toward the end of his life and called the Spiritual level) is the fullest realization of this nobility.

When I say in the title above “Be Your Better Self” what I am saying is —

Be aware of what drives you, and when you can see that it is all of these 15 things but to varying degrees and not always the same weight given to each level, you will realize that you have control over what drives you.

You can catch yourself doing something which you are doing simply to gain status/prestige. Do you want to be someone who is driven by that not-so-lofty goal?

Taking control of your own drivers was given the name Self-Metaprogramming by John Lilly, in a conversation with Oscar Ichazo in the 1970s.

Once you take responsibility and control for determining your own motivations consciously, a flow of ideas begins to open up between your conscious and your subconscious – more of your subconscious is now conscious. The yogic tradition believes that ultimately it can all be conscious, with nothing left below the level of the conscious mind. This is what enables advanced yogis to control even autonomic functions such as metabolic rate. For the definitive analysis of the most advanced states of consciousness read Daniel Goleman’s classic The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience.

As you exercise conscious choice over your drivers, choosing to be driven by the highest motivations, more of your true essence will come out, and the influence of others which built the superfluous superstructure in your mind will recede, you will enter Flow state uninfluenced by the many distracting and contradictory inner voices and concerns about the lower motivations.

We are today at a very unique moment in history where much of human consciousness across the planet is dominated by pessimism, fear, anger, and hatred. And yet most human beings continue about their way doing little acts of kindness for each other every day. The pervasive mindset of world terror doesn’t seem to notice the supply of inner goodness we all keep demonstrating, because if it did notice, it would make the pessimism seem less justified.

Pessimism is its own punishment and it increases the probability of the feared scenario coming true.

When you are your better self you do notice and appreciate the goodness in us, and thereby you bring it out in all of us you connect with.

Give up the hatred of the people in the political party you abhor. They are just people like you.

George Washington warned us not to go with political parties at all. He said they would tear us apart. Let’s listen to his advice and stop making political parties the dominant game, they are just one aspect of the way we self-govern today, and maybe we’ll evolve even better ways to heed the first principles on which our nation was founded.

Recognize that anger and hatred inside is coming from your superfluous superstructure which was conditioned into you from the outside, and seize the moment to override the superstructure from the core essence of your own individuality and beingness. Both anger and hatred are permutations of fear which the superstructure of our mind finds more acceptable than fear. But giving in to such shallow mind games is to let oneself be run as if by autocompletes in a robotic coping system that continues to paint over the divine core of our being.

Choose to bring out the best of yourself. Focus on the top four levels of yourself. If something else bubbles up from the lower levels, don’t express those things right away. Give yourself time to decide about them before sharing them with others. Only express what will be constructive and uplifting.

My best to all,

 

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Created October 31, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The Sadducees were the materialistic and authoritarian traditional ruling class of wealthy aristocrats, high priests and merchants, and a self-identifying sect within Judaism that denied things that other Jews believed in, including the existence of the spirit; the Sadducees denied resurrection, denied redemption in a future life, and “believed in unrestrained free will —meaning God had no role in the personal lives of humans. Everyone was master of his or her own destiny”. They were known for their main belief which was in wealth. A significant recurring income stream they sought to protect was payment for the rituals performed in the great temple, including animal sacrifice. Jesus reinterpreted and reinvigorated the Jewish beliefs of the other sects, Pharisees and Essenes, focusing on the heart, mind, and spirit rather than on material wealth, and drew heavily upon the thoughts of Hillel, making kindness to others the number one priority of Jewishness.

If voting had existed there, Jesus would have not encouraged his followers to vote for the Sadducees no matter how seductive their arguments might have sounded. The brilliant Republican Evangelical American writer Michael Gerson has written an inspired article about this subject. Although I have quoted the article once before, it seems to me timely to share his words with you here, as we are heading into a season both of voting and of remembering the spiritual ideas that have uplifted us:

Jesus rejected the role of a political messiah. In the present age, He insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.

Instead of ignoring the cries of the ill, poor and abused, they would honor the unerasable image of God we see in one another. Believers don’t accept a society divided by rank or dominated by the illusion of merit — they seek to subvert such stratification in constructive ways, to prioritize justice and common provision for people in need.

Do the dark pleasures of resentment and anger simply have a stronger emotional appeal than the virtues of compassion and self-sacrifice?

Or maybe it just feels impossible to judge your own upbringing and cultural background. It is hard to question the aggressive, predominant views of your community or congregation. It is far easier to seek belonging, even if it means accepting a lie or ignoring a wrong. Thus, moral courage is often a solitary stand.

Today Do Not Make the Dream Go That Way

India’s sages taught and still teach that our expectations program our material experiences. Our minds create our reality. This is not a solipsistic process (except in schizophrenia), we all do it together to create the consensus reality. This is not far from what physicist John Wheeler said in his theory of the Participatory Anthropic Principle.

This can be empirically verified, and is intuitive common sense, but its implied advice is not taken and acted upon by the population at large. The advice would be to consider every moment how one’s thoughts and feelings were programming reality, and whether one really wanted to do that. Perhaps we can learn how to cooperate better in mentally and emotionally pre-creating the reality we all want. There are some common elements virtually all of us agree on, such as peace, love, happiness, family, community, honor, hard work, education, creativity, art, individuality, public safety and its correlate, violence reduction… the list goes on.

To simplify, the imaginings billions of us are having at this exact second, of the bloody mess seemingly growing by the day all around the world, increases the probability of those even more disastrous escalation situations actually coming about. We have to steer away from that dream, not throw more fuel on its fire. All the negative hand-wringing conversations not only don’t move us toward solutions, they actually move us more into the feared outcome.

Then the news media have difficult choices to make but, so far, quickly decide to tell it like they see it. This is twisting the dial to a larger fire on the stove.

It is sane – once knowing these facts – to decide resolutely to stop going along with an assumption that this is hole we are doomed to swirl down in – and to switch channels in our minds and hearts to imagining how it could all end peacefully, with respectful dialog. And then to make the imaginings tangibly real together by hard work and respect for our seemingly antithetical viewpoints – which may not be as polarized as we have collectively settled into thinking they are. By avoiding unpleasant conversations about the details of what are the desired outcomes and paths, we are locking in the brain-dead animosity amplification approach as the standard operating system of the human race. How passé.

Imagination is more important than has been publicly stated, except in song. Zaltman said that 95% of decision making is subconscious. A powerful driver in that realm is the imagination. That is the seat of creative power in the subconscious. There are other powerful drivers there, including the intuition, which boils up insights from the subconscious and God knows where else.

Know Thyself was Socrates’ summary advice to human beings.

The meaning is scientific in its specificity. Know Thyself means Know what are your powers of mind, and how do they drive you (as we find things today), and then, now that you know who you are and are therefore in control, how to use those assembled powers, and why? The epithet is known in today’s science as metacognition and as self-metaprogramming.

This is the central purpose of every life. The percentage of us who find ourselves is an unknown number. The whole subject is abstruse because the world culture is polarized away from the spiritual and immaterial.

Jesus was talking about the same subject. Working upon oneself to be able to have sufficient control of one’s own mind and heart to be able to not even think about wrong actions or desires.

Working upon oneself was classically Jewish, with their concept of menschdom.

Hinduism calls it nivritti.

Islam means surrendering the little soul to the One Actual Soul of the Universe. This is actually the Flow state outcome of working on oneself. The working is done in an intermediary state we (The Human Effectiveness Institute) call Observer state. Werner Ehrhardt called it the “clear” state. Oscar Ichazo called it 96. Buddhism calls it the access state (the entrance doorway through which Flow is accessible). Jews call it being a mensch. I call it Observer state. It’s a state of being that pops up across time and space and cultures and is a commonsense reality. Nevertheless, its science status is zero. That tells you a lot about a culture. What it wants to find out and what it doesn’t consider worth trying to find out about. Scotoma means blindspot and they occur on all levels.

Esoteric literature throughout hisandherstory has been tabu, and yet all it was in essence is a package of spiritual intuition and powers of mind. The reason it was tabu was because that was the market that authoritarian high priests in all religions were going after. It all comes down to who really knows the most about: What happens after death. Whether ESP is achievable or not. Whether there is a benevolent God. What is our relationship to God. Whether God has given us license to do anything we want, or a path to stay upon.

These considerations appear to be academic and irrelevant to our lives. That’s the mindset we inherited. The same mindset is re-conditioned every day in every way.

Einstein had a strong intuition. One of his hunches that he was certain about, was that the universe was created by an incredible intelligence. Science to him was a way of gaining insight into the beautiful thinking of that supreme intelligence.

Yet Einstein balked at the notion of a personal God, a God who cared one whit about Einstein.

My only disagreement with Einstein is on that point. A supreme intelligence would have all of the faculties we have and infinitely more, which means that Being would be conscious and self-aware, in fact, supremely self-aware.

If the Being had infinite computing power, it could live through an infinite number of avatars simultaneously, paying attention to and caring about each one of us. As one cares about the protagonist in a movie perhaps, or more likely as one cares about one’s child.

There is nothing supernatural about that idea. It is eventually verifiable. It is in resonance with quantum theory and relativity. It changes everything though because it makes consciousness the most important thing in the universe.

If in fact we are in a massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMRPG) called existence, and the basic stuff of which the universe is made is consciousness, with matter being a supremely advanced haptic feedback system, then causality stemming from our expectations and perceptions having an actual shaping effect upon events, is not a long throw from there.

This again is also quite close to what the pre-eminent physicist John Wheeler said, that consciousness triggers probabilities to crystalize into facts.

Which means that at least in some cases you yourself are causing the very things that cause you the greatest suffering, partially by just expecting it, and partially by subconscious failure rehearsal.

The more we can all communicate with each other in a hopeful, realistic way, the sooner these new dark ages shall be forced back into inky shadows.

Love to all,

Bill