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 ↑

Conduct Your Inner Orchestra

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Powerful Mind Part 40
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog December 13, 2024.
Created December 15, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 39

Simplify the task of conducting your inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it.

The reason homo sapiens have settled into this pandemic coping pattern I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is that the mind – with its jumble of thoughts, feelings, images, memories, imaginings all coming too fast one atop the other – is initially very difficult to orchestrate. That might not have been the case before written language when the number of question-producing experiences we had each day was likely to have been a mere handful. Since written language, there has been an explosion of inventions (including tools, weapons, and media) bringing us more and more information per day. As you know I call this Acceleritis, the probable cause of EOP, which, fifty years later, neuroscience is now discovering as the default network.

The purpose of Key #10 is to simplify the task of conducting this inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it as in the case of EOP.

Let’s review the ground we’ve covered so far regarding Key #10:

    • Interpret your feelings constructively – seek to learn from bad feelings – transform all inner experiences into future operating guidelines
    • Be grateful for existing – use willpower to maintain a permanent attitude of positivity – filter out negative hypnotic suggestions
    • Edit your headstream – test your inner drafts – update your senators (your inner AI ego robot) (Keys #1 & #2)
    • Balance your own arousal so that it is optimal for performance – detached from addiction to specific outcomes
    • Go with the Flow as long as it remains 100% positive – gently and Socratically share any concerns with others only if that feels more helpful than a wait-and-see attitude
    • Note your own mental chatter without taking it as how you really feel (Key #7)
    • Do not have a closed mind with regard to the possibility that you and the universe are one connected consciousness
    • Minimize time spent worrying by detecting worry and immediately turning it into fixing

This may seem like too many things to consider at once, all the time. You are absolutely right. That’s why we went with EOP in the first place. So don’t try to explicitly juggle all these balls, just let them sink into the core of your being. How then to simplify one’s inner life so as to stay in Observer and Flow states as much as possible?

Optimizing Rituals

We all have our rituals, things we do each day. Our life is organized around these daily patterns. These little certainties impart a sense of order and keep our life from flying apart in troubling times.

In order to remove the feeling that twelve Keys, each of them filled with complexity, is too much to internalize workably, here are some suggested additions to your daily ritual which can pragmatically overcome this sense of being daunted by the size of the task of self-mastery.

Check for Joy

The first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, or even opening your eyes, remember your life’s mission and check for your own joy. You ideally will be eager to jump out of bed and seize the day, but if you’re not, contemplate what is bothering you.

I’ve noticed that sometimes I’m out of sorts for a day or more right before my subconscious mind delivers an idea that changes everything. It’s almost like birthing pains. The idea itself that finally emerges fills me with joy again. Often it’s something that’s been right in front of my face sometimes for months or years and seems utterly obvious in retrospect.

If joy is absent at the start of your day, see if you can get an angle on the possible cause even before you get out of bed. Maybe your dreams will offer clues. Obligations may cause you to need to keep moving but you can continue to dissect why your passion mission is not enough to motivate your joy today, while bathing and/or showering and otherwise getting ready for the day. This is usually a very productive time for diagnosing your own mood.

Be on the lookout for the root of your lack of joy being some attachment you have allowed to persist. You might be attached to doing things in an orderly way and the pressure of incoming assignments and requests may have destroyed any hope of order. All you can do is to focus on prioritizing and being decisive until order is re-established. Scheduling when you are going to get something done, and being extremely conservative about how long each task will take, can get you back into feeling that you can be patient, systematic, and thorough.

Some or many of these tasks might be questions in your own mind and feelings about what to do about specific situations, or about abstract principles. It relieves stress to keep a list of these unanswered questions so you can come back to them without being attached about getting them all resolved asap. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It helps to have the sense that you have added one new thought or idea about each such question every time you contemplate it.

Passion Projects

Be aware of your own passion projects and how each one figures into your overall mission. Keep a list of those and see how you change their ranking over time.

Each person you love is one of those passion projects. Each goal in your life is on that list.
In the day-to-day tumble of obligatory and voluntary events, having the mission and passion projects to remind you of the meaning of your life is restorative.

Glance at the list once a day. This is effectively a form of Key #8, rotating your attention to cover every passion project. This will have the effect of springing out good new ideas or reminders that should have higher priority for sooner action on one or more of your passion projects.

Daily Alone Space

While keeping up with the tsunami of responsibilities, duties, chores, assignments, and unexpected events, days tend to pass without allowing any space for strategic thinking. This is why it’s mission-critical that you give yourself an uninterruptable 20 minutes or more each day to meditate and contemplate how your life is going. You can do this while doing yoga or exercise or while sitting up straight cross-legged or in a chair. Slow deep breathing helps. Often the best time each day for this is around 5 pm, but it can be any time you can carve out that particular day.

Simply watch the material your mind brings up and decide what is important enough to think about. You may find that you are displeased with something that you yourself did. If so, forgive yourself by understanding why the event happened as it did, and make a plan as to handle it if a similar situation presents itself in the future – as it undoubtedly will.

Remind yourself to be grateful that you screwed up in this relatively minor way this time, because that provoked your learning from it and deciding upon how to handle such things in the future, when they might be far more important to your life and mission. Just in case the universe is conscious and actually let this small goof happen so you could be armed to not make the same mistake in a situation of much greater importance, thank the universe or God whichever way you prefer to address the Totality Of Existence.

Last Thoughts Before Sleep

Before you let yourself fall asleep, prevision the next day the way you’d like to see it come out. Obviously, a glance at your schedule before getting into bed will make this much easier and more effective.

As you do this you may find yourself rehearsing what you will say and will catch things that you realize would be stepping on a land mine. Rephrase those of course. You will then find yourself feeling more confident about the morrow and this will take you into a fine sleep.

You may also see how certain meetings or events could take a bad turn. Rehearse your optimal gentle, Socratic, constructive, win/win response to such pushbacks. But do not dwell upon those downside possibilities once you have prepared yourself for them. Before you go to sleep once again prevision the day the way you would prefer it to go, strengthen your intentions and your resoluteness with courage, and enjoy a beautiful night’s sleep.

Those are the daily rituals we suggest upon rising, after work, and before going to sleep.

Learn & Teach

As you progress through life, look at the whole process as one of learning, and share your learnings when people ask for that. You may also sometimes cautiously try sharing what seems to you to be a piece of learning that the other person needs even though they have not asked for help. But be prepared to immediately abandon the idea if the other person doesn’t want to hear it.

Mindquiet

There may be times when despite how much you have learned and how much time you spend in Observer state, everything is just coming at you too fast, from the outside as well as the inside. It’s best at those times, if you can, to excuse yourself and go into a bathroom stall where you can be alone, and exercise your will to blank out the flow of inner thoughts and feelings. Just breathe slowly and deeply and wait and watch the blankness of your inner world. Big Picture integrations, summarizations of where you are at may soon present themselves to your psyche. Often it will resolve into a single main challenge you face. This clarity and focus will equip you to flow with the situation courageously and effectively.

Key # 10:

Patiently determine the most constructive use of each salient inner experience

What this Key says is that whatever is going on inside of us, some of it is obviously more important, let’s call that the salient part. Don’t bother with minor imperfections but go for the Big Picture items that cry out to be dealt with first. Look patiently at those salient items without allowing the feeling of urgency to take you over. Treat that feeling of urgency as part of the auto-completing bio-AI in your brain, not as you yourself.

Contemplate each salient item as something to learn from, and the impetus for you to give yourself new guidelines. Don’t be attached to reaching closure on the new solution, let its picture resolve in its own time. Maintain a list of items that are still cooking and use strikethroughs when they have resolved themselves so that you can look back at your trail up the mountain.

My best to all,
Bill

Respect Everything

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – November 29, 2024
Created February 23, 2024

We have not found any other way to effectively turn off the hate so why not try respect?

Open-mindedness is one of the most important principles of metacognition (continuously studying one’s own mind as if from the point of view of an outsider) according to Dr. Gerald Zaltman, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard, and metacognition at Harvard Business School. Without open-mindedness one tends to be locked into positions one has taken in the past, even though there might be new relevant evidence that could be considered.

If one is truly open-minded, then that person can also see the possible truth in positions 180 degrees away from their own. An atheist can see that it is possible that an intelligence created the universe. A progressive can see that there might be useful truth in some things that a conservative says.

How little we know, as Hoagy Carmichael’s and Johnny Mercer’s song tells us (from the 1944 Hemingway-based movie To Have and Have Not). Arthur C. Clarke put it another way, he said that of all the things that we can someday know, what we know now is an infinitesimally small percentage.

We have changed our scientific perspectives many times along the way, and we continue to change them. The wisest among us have this perspective and their epistemology naturally embraces open-mindedness. Although in most of his work a physicalist, the great Stephen Hawking in his final book quoted John Wheeler’s Participatory Principle which states that our consciousness helps create reality. This opens the door to overthrowing physicalism and establishing consciousness as the principal underlying reality.

These are great thoughts from great people. Open-minded to the very end, despite their decades of study and theorizing.

Compare that to the average person. The average person takes very strong stands based on, really, very little. They fall into a very deep rut as to what they believe and the beliefs they hate. Most of their assumptions are not something they themselves learned from their own life experiences, but heard about from others influential in their lives. This reflects an unconscious epistemology of Authority rather than Empiricism. The very selfsame unconscious epistemology that leads to Authoritarianism. Blind followership, in other words.

Without open-mindedness, a person drifts as if by animal instinct to be attracted to types of people, e.g. tough guys, or pretenders of that ilk. This is a survival instinct in many species (e.g. pecking order) and when human beings behave animalistically they are not rising to the occasion of having exclusive cognitive capabilities proprietary to our species.

The lack of open-mindedness impels us to be negatively motivated. We know what we are fighting against. We are less sure of what we are fighting for. This is most apparent in the current political climate. It would be most noble and most fun for governments to spend 100% of their time focusing on creative solutions. Instead, they appear to spend most of their time knocking down the ideas of others. Yet we must respect all of them if we are to be open-minded. Respect does not imply agreement or support. It simply reflects the recognition that we all deserve respect. Even those who do not respect us. Noblesse oblige.

Open-mindedness and respect go together. If one is open-minded, one tends to listen respectfully to the thoughts and feelings of others. If one is respectful, one tends to listen to others with an open mind, and to use metacognitive strength to hold at bay the screaming voices in one’s own mind reflexively denouncing what the other person is saying.

If all of reality is a single consciousness, the larger parent of that part of the consciousness we take to be our own, then respecting everything makes complete sense. We have been conditioned by centuries of majorities of thinkers we respected who could not see how ancient conceptions of God could be squared with the findings of science.

What came out of nowhere in the last half Century were new conceptions of God that fit neatly in with quantum physics and relativity. Just replace the word “God” with “the original consciousness field” and everything makes sense, the Participatory Principle, relativity, quantum entanglement, the Heisenberg effect, Bits Before Its, the jigsaw puzzle falls into place.

What Wheeler called the quantum foam could simply be the original consciousness field. The way Wheeler described the quantum foam, which pre-existed The Big Bang in his theory, was that virtual particles spontaneously arose from it and fell back into it. Sounds a lot like consciousness, with ideas and feelings arising from it and often disappearing back into it before we could grasp them.

Since we cannot prove that point right now, it comes down to being open-minded about it. For some of us who have noticed that our hunches, at least the dispassionate ones, often have great validity, we can decide to run our lives betting on cosmopsychism, as scientists are now calling it. When that struck me as more of a revelation than a hunch circa 1969 I called it The Theory of the Conscious Universe. I had a feeling that everything was conscious, it was an experience, more like a perception than an idea. I also dimly recalled that I had always had that perception as a child but it went away a long time before, slipping away quietly.

If we retain the realization that the world might be a very different sort of place than it appears, and take that possibility seriously, we naturally become more open-minded and respectful toward others, who may actually be ourselves at a different place in the game.

Whatever the truth might be, we can perhaps know it with certainty the next time we die.

In the meantime, if we can all agree that the world needs a bit of a makeover right now, which I think is a pretty pervasive take on things, we can exercise our will to take a stronger hand in the game by rising to a state of open-mindedness and respect for all things, as all things may be a part of our One Self.

This includes respect for our own current self. The popular term “self-esteem” is not quite as healthy as self-respect, because “esteem” implies a vain ego, and “respect” does not.

If we respect others, we shall find that it has increased our level of self-respect. It is a magnanimous position to take. We have taken unconditional responsibility to behave properly.

If we can apply respect in our daily lives, it will automatically tune down the hate. We have not found any other way to effectively turn off the hate so why not try respect?

Love to all,
Bill

Be Indomitable

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, November 8, 2024.
Created February 16, 2024

Being indomitable is consciously favoring the approach mode.

The day my mother died, Jewish customs would have been for the whole family to do nothing else but “sit shivvah” for several days. Therefore, they were shocked when my father, MC and orchestra leader in a big NYC nightclub, went to work that night. His eyes briefly met mine, and without his having to say it out loud, his eyes told me what they had both always taught me about moments like these. The show must go on.

In moment-to-moment living, we each have our ups and downs. It occurs to some of us that we are being dominated by the inputs we receive from moment to moment, without having the ability to resist the invisible strings on our puppet selves being pulled by outside forces, and this stiffens our resolve to not be jerked around by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We then go inside to find or to build the control systems that will make us each master of our own self, impervious to outside control by anyone and anything.

This discovery of one’s inner abilities to overcome one’s own negative emotions and not to be excessively carried away by one’s own positive emotions goes back long before spoken or written language, long before humans were able to clarify the processes involved enough to pass along how-to instructions. One of the earliest schools of philosophy on record is stoicism. This philosophy was all about understanding and inculcating these control abilities in human beings. Epictetus, in my estimation the greatest stoic philosopher of them all, was born as a slave. Enslavement gave him a fertile ground of unhappiness to deal with, and instead of caving into a life of misery, he faced squarely up to his situation and found out how he could modify his reactions to that situation. His book The Enchiridion, when I first discovered it as a teenager, blew my mind because stuff I had been working on within myself had actually existed before.

The need to become more fatalistic and resilient may not be greater than ever before in human hisandherstory but it is certainly much greater now than ever before in my lifetime. I need not list the litany of threat vectors currently present on our dance card. Possibly the one that is most disheartening is the attitude of young people who feel they have been gypped, and those who feel that way do so, not without good reason. The world needs a lot of fixing and we are just the species that can do that fixing in the highest and most heroic manner. Soon there will be a realization of a need to shift into that mindset, rising to the challenge. As we did, as a species, in WWII. That same right stuff still resides within us. It’s time to call upon it, to draw it out, to become the indomitable selves that we are and have always been. It’s what we are here to learn how to do, and to demonstrate that we have learned it. Then perhaps we can graduate to the next classroom.

I find it very interesting to learn from latest neuroscience the underlying computational functions of the brain. My special interest comes from a lifetime of introspection with concentration in which I have always attempted to understand how I make decisions and to improve upon the methods I observe myself using. Now in the light of current neuroscience I can link up my experiential evidence with the revelations of fMRI and EEG. For example, Richy Davidson, one of my many neuroscientist mentors, back in the 1980s when we had a company together, discovered that emotional valence could be measured based upon asymmetrical energy use in the left and right lobes of the frontal cortex, a method that is still prominent today. In the brain, this valence is understood to be based on the concept of approach versus avoidance. Positive emotion comes along with approach, whereas negative emotion is part of avoidance.

Being indomitable is consciously favoring the approach mode.
Stepping forward to engage with the challenges.
Fixing rather than worrying.

One cannot simply decide to do this, and then it is done. The effort involved is primarily one of self-discipline. This is hardest in the beginning and then becomes easier and easier with practice.

Whatever we choose to focus on internally becomes a stronger force in our lives.

When one is thrown into the pool as a babe, one swims, and instinctively swims with the current if there is one. Given little time to think the modern child is rushed into play with other children, sports and then studies, with daily doses of media, creating masses of questions and thoughts from all these impressions. Processing time to contemplate all of this is not built into the daily regime of our culture yet. In a subtle and generally unnoticed way, the child proceeding into adulthood adopts a somewhat defensive coping lens as the main way of thinking. What could go wrong, fear, plans to deal with feared situations, doing this planning in snatches between externally assigned priorities which must be coped with moment to moment.

The most dangerous aspect of this condition is that if a person spends most of their time focused on what could go wrong, they are actually mentally rehearsing for those things to go wrong. To repeat, whatever we choose to focus on internally becomes a stronger force in our lives. If we are focusing on the downside scenarios we are increasing the probabilities of those scenarios occurring.

How does this happen? There is a continuum of explanations, schools of thought. Physicalists (believers in materialistic accidentalism) may admit that this occurs but insist that it is because the individual is giving off micromomentary signals which telegraph their fears in a way that provokes others to manipulate them, all on an unconscious level. Two of our greatest physicists of all time, Wheeler and Hawking, posit what Wheeler named the Participatory Anthropic Principle, by which our consciousness helps cause reality. This theory rests on Wheeler’s theory that underlying what we dub as physical (“its”) are “bits” of information, and that both consciousness and matter/energy are therefore reducible to information, out of which everything is made. This is a short step away from my theory that a single self-aware consciousness is where all this information resides.

In both versions of reality, physicalism and cosmopsychism, there is adequate support for the true existence of the programming of reality by the thoughts and feelings of the individual. However one explains it, it is there, and ignoring it and giving in to wallowing in pessimism, what we might call brain avoidance rather than brain approach, is self-sabotaging.

So here we all are as a species wallowing in pessimism. Remaining this way cannot have a happy ending. The stoic response to this situation is to unlock concern about the probable bad landing ahead, to fatalistically accept it could easily happen, but to make oneself focus courageously on bringing about the happy landing anyway. Once understanding the way the feedback loop works, this is the only sane response, taking active conscious control of where the mind is allowed to go.

Realism requires that a small allocation of time is spent on making contingency plans for how to avoid the undesired outcome, and how to deal with it should it occur, so long as first and last the mind is mentally rehearsing and pre-experiencing the desired future of the individual. Meaning that contingency planning should be done seriously and carefully but not dwelt upon, instead gotten over with, so as to resume consciously telling the universe the way the movie happy ending is to be for oneself.

Chemicals and electrical trickery is used within the brain and body which makes it hard to get out of bad moods such as fear, anxiety, grief, resentment, and so on. It helps me to realize that the sodium pentothal and other psychometric drugs used to interrogate and brainwash are the same sorts of chemical agents my own brain whips up to give me these overwhelming feelings that dissolve my ability to focus on fixing. Knowing this enables me to see my brain as trying to force me into feeling certain ways I know to be against my best interests, and gives me the gumption to force back those feelings.

“Yes, that could happen, but why do I care so much?”

“Yes, that could happen, and I’ve prepared myself to deal with it if it does happen, including not showing it’s gotten to me, but meanwhile, I might as well enjoy every second to the max, and it may never happen and I may get away with it to the very end.”

“Or if it eventually does happen, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I had fun without fear for such a long time, I got away with all of that, and so if it all ends badly at least I will know that I did what was right, what was good, and I can authentically admire myself for it.”

Self-admiration is a much healthier thing to experience than pride. Pride is not self-admiration because it goes too far and mixes it with vanity. This is caused by the needy defensive stance of the ego which is the sense of not having caught up with integrating all the clashing parts of myself (integrity).

There are other practical ways one can increase the ability to remain in the approach mode. Time alone especially in nature, paying attention internally, seeing the good, counting the blessings, seeing the beauty all around, remembering all the good in people, being grateful, opening the mind to all possibilities, recapturing the awe and wonder of existing as a consciousness in a vast universe, realizing the wellsprings of creativity inside which can be tapped to solve anything, remembering all of the love one has for this person and that thing, and understanding the scientific possibility that we are all one benevolent loving self, manifesting as many for the fun and learning. All of these are powerful inhibitors of the avoidance reaction.

You may still decide to avoid certain things that you conclude just bring you down, but you will do so indomitably rather than fearfully. You will find a smile on your face when you look in the mirror rather than a grim visage. Your sunny disposition will draw and uplift other people making it faster for this wave of indomitability to ripple out across the pond until herd immunity to fear and pessimism has been achieved.

Each of us shall then be a mensch.

Love to all,
Bill