Cherchez L’Opportunité – Look for the Opportunity

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Pronounced Share-Shay Lopportooneetay.

Created March 22, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Seize the opportunities.

Whenever things go wrong, it’s natural for you to think about damage control. And you should. More about the nuances of damage control later on below. But it’s not natural to think “Where in this mess are there any opportunities?” That is the real focus of my column here today.

Yesterday I was recording a Zoom conversation with my partner in crime Natalie Johnston for our TikTok shortform (typically ~2 minutes) series “Ask Bill” which we’re now also posting in YouTube as a longform (typically ~45 minutes). Natalie who has her own international coaching business, said “people think of things happening TO them, when they should actually be thinking of things happening FOR them.”

Natalie and I agree on our view of the nature of reality, which is that unseen forces are actually trying to help us, a principle I call Noia, as the opposite of paranoia, the suspicion that someone is out to get us. In the Noiac view of life, everything that happens, including stuff that seems very bad, has a positive purpose. It’s like an Easter egg hunt, finding the good that is cosmically intended by what on the face of it is some sort of defeat.

First let me clarify what I mean by unseen forces. My best guess about the nature of reality is that there is just One Consciousness that is living through each item in the Universe (the part of the One Consciousness that we apprehend). So naturally It would be trying to help us because It IS us.

We live in a part of the Universe where fallibility is enabled. We traditionally think that there is another part of the Universe where everything is always perfect all the time. This latter part (traditionally called Heaven in English) might, over the course of eternity, become boring. Which explains the motivation for having this other part, where “God” (the One Consciousness that is all that exists) can play and learn from mistakes, and drama and humor are vibrantly alive.

In my picture of reality, you are God, temporarily stripped of memories from before this life, playing a learning game to (often painfully) reconstruct everything you knew back when you were cognizant of being God. At which point (perhaps after many reincarnations) when you have rediscovered your real identity in every way, you win the game, and are back in your full Self again, adding another layer of experience driven wisdom to enhance what You were before.

The One Self and other friendlies pull strings behind the scenes to supplement the free will you have been given. Hence Noia, and Natalie’s exhortation to think of things happening FOR you. And my exhortation to look for clues as to what the positive opportunities are in every pratfall you take.

For example, you lose your job. Might this be clearing a space for an even better use of your time? Is there some other type of work that you’ve been dreaming about but considered it too risky a move to give up the security? This pink slip might be what you need more than anything in the world to bring out your gifts to the world in constant Flow state and happiness.

For example, you have a new boss who makes your life a living hell. Is this the Universe prodding you to take the risk, give up the security, and quit? Or is it an opportunity to learn how to deal with such situations and become master of them? For sure it is some kind of opportunity, and inner contemplation is the way to discern your optimal action. Seize the opportunities.

For example, you dream of a certain vacation, perhaps that villa on the sand that you love and which has become wildly expensive, and you finally get to go, and it rains continuously. Instead of being brought down by the situation, what could the Universe be trying to tell you? Is it time to start that new novel you’ve been threatening to write? The rain you notice is falling straight down, so that you can sit at one of those tables on the beach with the thatched roofs, sipping a piña colada while you peck away at the keys? No sun in your eyes making the screen hard to see.

For example, you make a thoughtless remark and are publicly humiliated. What is the opportunity? I used to call it the Humiliation Evolution Opportunity. Humiliation is one of the worst possible experiences, and yet it is always telling us something about ourselves which needed improvement, so it is a powerful learning opportunity. In Noiac thinking, you might in subsequent contemplation look back from that moment of mortification and notice that there were light warning taps happening in your life that you missed seeing, which were earlier attempts by the Universe to get you to learn something, and after trying the velvet glove, the Universe ultimately had to hit you with the iron fist to get your attention.

Could it be that you had become too used to being praised and treated deferentially, and this was allowing your ego to sneak back into your control chamber, and you needed to be taught humility just a little bit? Or had you forgotten to consider other people’s feelings enough? Whatever it is that caused the humiliation will benefit you more when you unpack the lesson, than the humiliation will harm you. In Noiac thinking, one trusts God to only give us pain as a way of preventing us from far greater pain.

You can see that Noiac thinking installs a longer term view of things. This in itself is a benefit because the present Acceleritis culture imposes short-termitis.

Going back to damage control, there are better and worse ways to implement it. Let’s say you experience humiliation. The first thing to do is to neutralize the bodily and emotive reaction and keep it invisibly inside, your outside façade the same as it was before the bad moment. Your internal chemical-electrical reactions depend upon cognitive and affective attachment that you have formed to always being right, always winning, always being looked up to – all of these things are mere ego vanities, and they have no positive value, they are part of your robot, not part of the real you.

The second thing to do is to take responsibility for having said or done something wrong, and authentically apologize, without making too much of it, and move on.

Later when you are alone, contemplate what you should have said or done in place of the thing that caused your humiliation. Install a mnemonic device that will let you know when you are coming up toward a moment like the one that you mis-played resulting in your embarrassment.

Natalie and I in our conversation yesterday created a podcast as well as TikTok and YouTube videos, it’s called “What Is Reality?” and I’ll send you a link when it’s ready.

If you’d like any advice, or to debate any of my suggestions above, please visit my Soopra AI which is always available to you to bounce things off a really amazing simulation of me. My schedule is never too full for any of you who want to talk to the real me. Natalie Johnston can also be reached if you’ve been thinking about a life coach, and Jenny Baltazar is a life coach specializing in grief. They are both amazing coaches and people.

Love to all,
Bill

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,
Bill

Perspective

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Created March 8, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Perspective is very helpful in dealing with the present historic moment…These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us…
It’s time to be that best version of yourself.
Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

My friend arrived and put down his bag and took off his scarf and coat and sat on the banquette seat I’d saved for him. I asked him in a cheery voice how he was, expecting his usual enthusiastic answer, and he made ambiguous body language.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, still upbeat.

“Overwhelmed,” he admitted.

“By…”

“By the cold, all the news, and age!” he specified.

I contemplated his answer. “I’m with you on all of that.”

“I was just reading The New York Times, and every story is bad news. I used to be able to find one or two ‘good news’ stories in every issue.”

“I’ve been advising cutting down on the news and all other media that brings you down.” He nodded in violent agreement. We ordered lunch.

“How do you deal with those things?” he asked.

“You know, my take on the universe is that we are all one unkillable consciousness. That on Earth you and I are part of a free will experiment the conscious intelligent universe is doing. It is that Intelligence which looks out our eyes as us.” He nodded, chewing, having heard this from me before, in other language.

“I feel certain that the test we are undergoing will teach us wisdom of immense value. I write to help bring an end to suffering. I feel great sadness for those suffering, but I can’t let that affect my effectiveness on their behalf.”

He knew me from a long way back and knew that was what I say whenever there’s an opening. Never the exact same words, but always the same idea we are One Consciousness. He also knows that is my best guess as to what is really going on and that I live my life within this picture of reality.

If I’m wrong, then so is Einstein; neither of us believe that this complexity has all put itself together completely by accidental collisions, without the inescapable logical necessity of prior Intelligence.

We ourselves are a micro model of the Conscious Intelligent Universe – we are a consciousness so we know intimately what such a thing is.

And we know therefore that it is possible for there to be a consciousness.

Therefore it is totally illogical to state that a much larger version of the same thing “cannot possibly exist.”

My view of reality has an equal chance of being either true or false.

The same is true of any other view of reality now on the table.

Until your next death, when you gain important evidence, or simply cease to be able to experience knowing. Maybe then you’ll find out my “guess” or “prophecy” was right or not.

In any case, the real question is how to deal with the frightening omens and general sense of alarm. How to remain on a positive course, and learn from the challenges now appearing.

Stoic philosophers were the first to write down their ideas for dealing with horrific circumstances, and the Spartans largely demonstrated stoicism in action, except when they didn’t. At least they proved that it is humanly possible to zoom back far enough out of oneself to grok the universe is going to do stuff and we are supposed to rise to the occasion and to control our inner reaction to whatever befalls us externally.

Epictetus didn’t link his exhortations to any cosmological theory, he relied upon common sense. He implied that who knows what the universe really is, what we know is that we undergo severe trials here in reality and we need to understand the best way to deal with them. We can choose to take a different emotional reaction to our favorite cup being broken. It works with practice, will does develop.

Perspective is very helpful to me in dealing with the present historic moment.

This is as big as WWII. Even if we avert war but remain at battle stations for the rest of our lives.

Or, we come out of this into a reasonable facsimile of utopia.

These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us.

This is the cold water in the face wakeup call that God – the Conscious Intelligent Universe – is watching, and it’s time to be that best version of yourself. Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

Love to all,
Bill

Mind Discipline

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Created March 1, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Intellectual knowing is not the same as embodying
that knowledge in one’s actions.

Today there is fortunately an outpouring of articles and books on the subjects which a half century ago were rarely discussed outside of the kinds of books which were carried only by so-called metaphysical bookstores back then.

People with vast curiosity tend to study a wide spectrum of subjects. That describes me starting around age 4 when I fell in love with reading and writing. That also describes many people I know who have read many of the same esoteric books that I have, and some who have learned many things from the same writers. And many people whose reading has been far more inclusive than mine.

In conversations, I have noted that some of my great friends can quote wisdom but often are unaware that their actions do not conform to the bits of wisdom which they quote.

In some cases, this can be analyzed as intellectual versus emotional learning. The rational mind can be aware of important principles of how to live the good life, and yet on an emotional level, they are leaning away from those principles even as they espouse them.

Take a simple example: “There is no use crying over spilt milk.” Like all aphorisms, we tend to underestimate the amount of wisdom this aphorism contains. This is because familiarity breeds contempt. I know at least one person who can teach this to others but always lets disappointing news disturb her.

I know a man who has studied vast amounts of wisdom literature and understands all of it fully, yet his attitudes override the levels of tolerance which all wisdom literature teaches.

I know another man who is a walking encyclopedia of the history of applied psychology who does not pick up on his audience’s reactions.

Clearly there is a gap in the mind between knowing something and believing it to be true and valuable, yet not being able to “carry it off” in reality.

This gap is where discipline needs to be applied.

The reason that self-discipline is needed is that our day-to-day, moment-to-moment life is practiced with a mix of automatic and “manually overridden” (conscious, on-purpose, granularly formed) responses to external events.

Because we are used to that mix and never think much about it, we tend to overlook automatic responses which slip through despite the fact that they disagree with principles we espouse. Besides, “who has the time?” The Acceleritis culture is driving us all at top speed by giving us too many stimuli at practically all times. In moments when all media are turned off, we are not really escaping because that’s when the backed-up cognitive load dumps into our consciousness with unanswered questions and unassimilated half-learning, stuff we noticed but didn’t have time to think about why we noticed it, what it was saying to us that stuck so much in our minds.

My old friend Daniel Goleman has written many books about emotional intelligence, a phrase he coined long ago to describe the quality of a consciousness to integrate intellectual learning with emotional signals from inside and outside, and to perfect one’s actions taken, illuminated by this higher order of inner integrity.

Today I wish to emphasize another aspect of gaining emotional intelligence: self-discipline. Mental and emotional, intuitive and perceptual self-discipline.

The logical way to approach this topic is to start with the desired end state. First one ought to discern the ultimate goal of one’s own life, what you are here to do. The way the game is set up—this is not easy—and many people give up and let their game piece be pushed around by external forces. This is the first important place to apply mental and emotional, intuitive and perceptual self-discipline. You have to make the time to select the dream vision you wish to make come true over the course of your life. What your gift to the world shall be, your body of work you will leave behind to benefit posterity.

A guess is better than not having a targeted end state.

Discipline then has to be applied that respects yourself, you have set a goal, now you have to make it come true, you have to believe in it, you can’t be wishy-washy about it, that is a denial of self-respect.

You can’t allow yourself to waste time. To waste time is to waste your life. Time is a precious limited quantity. You must make best use of each second. Otherwise, you are admitting to yourself that you are not really laser-focused on your mission, you are programming yourself for failure to achieve your mission, you obviously do not take yourself seriously.

That’s why you can’t allow yourself to cry over split milk. Because not only is it a waste of time, it negatively programs you and the others around you. You are causing negative effects, and harming yourself and your mission, by giving in to the automatic reaction of the amygdala. This takes enormous self-discipline which can be gained by practice, and by never taking your eye off your mission.

At the same time, you can’t rush past noticing the cascade effects inside yourself, you must pay the time and attention to see your own automatic reactions that slipped through and screwed something up, so you can figure out what clues to look for next time, so you stop that particular automatic reaction from slipping through again.

One exercise is clearing the mind of all emotions. Any psychologist will tell you that emotions are the physical body manifestations that are connected with the inner feelings you have – so as you discipline away all the emotional clutter you have just been experiencing, it will happen in your body as well as in your mind – it will change your breathing, your heart rate, skin moisture, pupil aperture, and many other things. But you start with an inner act of will to cancel all inner events and return to a state of complete neutrality and emptiness. Starting over. Rebooting. I find that for me this is most effective when I walk into our meditation room, get down on the floor, breathe deeply, empty whatever is in me, and start my life over with a blank slate.

I hope you will refocus on your own mission and try this rebooting exercise whenever needed, and let me know how it goes.

Love to all,
Bill