Welcome to this week’s Pebbles in the Pond Blog, written by Bill Harvey
October 23, 2026
MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS: The 50th Anniversary Edition Excerpt Series: Part 12
In last week’s post, we explored how to dismantle counterproductive tendencies by tracing their origins, setting realistic, gradual goals for self-control, and shrinking the gap between action and self-awareness until we can catch ourselves before we act. We also examined how our old coping mechanisms—”senators” or past influences—fight to survive long after they have outlived their usefulness.
This week, it’s time for a “guiltless housecleaning” of our internal system.
To compensate for these tendencies, it’s wise to regularly review our favorite programs for signs of vestigiality. But in light of their past service, we do not blame any program for being counterproductive as we remove it. Housecleaning should be guiltless.
We will remove a program when it no longer fits our developing gestalt; until that point, the program fit, and neither we nor the program were to blame for our union.
Avoiding the temptation to be harsh with the programs we remove, we look upon them not as enemies but as “mischief programs”. They were necessary stepping stones to where we are now; we can love them for this while defusing their power over us for the upcoming phases.
As we remove our extraneous programming, we will be simplifying the number of variables impinging upon any set of circumstances. Thus, we will solve the circumstances for best action more quickly and accurately.
In attempting to identify our unconscious programming, we need to be prepared for the pervasive to be invisible: the things we do most continuously will be hardest for us to detect and analyze.
Mind Experiments
1. De-energizing parental-dynamic-compensating parasite circuits
You may not yet know this, but you can “return in time” and re-experience any memory quite vividly just by putting the time and energy into it.
2. Do this—return to the first time you saw your parents perform the first act on your list, from Mind Experiment 2 from last week: De-energizing parental-dynamic parasite circuits.
Then do it for each other act on the list—go back to the first time they played that one in front of you.
To the extent that your rational mind believes that this built-in memory ability is impossible for you, the process will be delayed, but the subconscious processes will still work on it, will flash you hints from time to time, and eventually, you’ll suddenly re-experience a key moment: from then on, it will be easy—you will systematically re-experience each unassimilated moment in your memory and clear it.
When you are re-experiencing, check how you were feeling and what you did about it—then contemplate how this has affected the rest of your life by lulling you into fixed coping styles.
Our best wishes to all,
THEI Team