Thanks For the Memories

Created November 24, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

This time every year I write a column about gratitude.

Gratitude has a lot going for it as an emotion and as an attitude. The mood of gratitude encompasses both an attitude mix (gladness and recognition of a benefactor) which can be expressed in words, as well as emotions which can only be spoken of metaphorically or described physiologically. The whole package not only makes us feel good, it emanates outward to those around us and makes them feel good too. According to the Mayo Clinic, a daily gratitude practice increases feelings of wellbeing and calm while decreasing stress levels.

We are spoiled by life. It is so taken for granted that we cease to realize we might never have existed, and so we see no need to feel gratitude just having had life for as long as we have had it.

Spoiled brats that we are, we never put two and two together: how can we be so intensely attached to continuing to live, without seeing how that implies how much we worship living.

Perhaps for many of us who have taken on the multi-century pandemic doubts about a Supreme Creator, since we doubt that there is anyone to be grateful to, we assume that a generalized gratitude feeling might be irrelevant. But that is short sighted: rationally we can direct gratitude to the people that raised us, shaped us, helped us get to where we are today.

Science of any stripe would not go so far as to prohibit feelings of gratitude toward Nature, most scientists would say that it’s none of their business, has nothing to do with science, and humanist scientists would say that to deny loving Nature and being part of it is anti-life.

When I was very young and thinking about these things – childishly siding with science and the Yankees, rather skeptical about God at the time – I could not rule out the possibility of God. A moment came during these contemplations when I had admitted to myself that God could exist and might be listening in to my thoughts right now. Strangely I felt a huge sadness descend upon me and I felt that God must feel very sad and rejected to see how lost His creation is, as if I were to turn and slap my mother, how would she feel, that must be how God feels, if He exists, I thought. In my mind I comforted Him before laughing at myself and moving on.

I’m grateful for all my memories including my worst moments, they have taught me so much. If I hadn’t made those mistakes then, I’m afraid to think about who I would be now, still driven about by mechanically conditioned behaviors. Learning from our own mistakes is salvation from being a robot.

I’m grateful for all the people I’ve meet and am to meet.

Most of us reading this ought to be more grateful that they are living in a democracy. We proud Americans savor the fact that the USA was one of the significant leaders in bringing democracy to what is now one in five human beings alive on Earth today. Pretty lucky you made it into the one in five this time around.

To you readers who are not living in a free country, what are you to be grateful for? You are living. You are in some degree of equilibrium with your environment. If you are a warrior, you remain free inside. If you are truly to win over the situation you must not let your own principles be corrupted by it. Be grateful you have the strength and adaptability to survive. Be grateful for all of these things, and for the things to come. Be grateful for these amazing younger generations we all share, the young are a global community, they see the truth, they see what must be done, and they will free us all.

Be grateful for all that.

A song which comes to mind:

[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clqt-nJy0SQ&feature=emb_title” lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.humaneffectivenessinstitute.org/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]

Happy Thanksgiving!

Love,

Bill

We Can’t Afford Widespread Neurosis Anymore

Leave a reply

Created November 17, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

It’s pretty obvious that the human race is somewhat out of control.

It could be that, in the past, it was even more out of control than it is now.

But if we look only at the time period since we learned how to make atom bombs, we are now at an “Out-Of-Controllness” level that is at an all-time high within the defined period.

Maybe we were more out of control during the Crusades, but we couldn’t do as much damage then.

Now as compared to prior to 1945, we have done vast destruction to the environment threatening our own survival, have caused innumerable species to go extinct ahead of us, and are still playing party politics and other warped games as if there are no consequences. That’s how much damage we continue to do every day, and we haven’t even started with the atom bomb toy yet.

Enough self-criticism. Now, what are we going to do about it?

The hub of the problem is the way we don’t use our minds.

We don’t use our minds as they were elegantly designed to be used, the way Socrates used his mind, the way Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Lincoln used their minds… we have many good role models to choose from, as we come back from a race of neurotics.

What is a neurotic? WebMD tells us that “Neurotic means you’re afflicted by neurosis, a word that has been in use since the 1700s to describe mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. At its root, a neurotic behavior is an automatic, unconscious effort to manage deep anxiety.”

Acting irrationally is the core of being a neurotic. But don’t we all? Isn’t it irrational to get emotionally overwhelmed by certain situations? The point of the mind is that it has more than just reason as its powers. It has intuition, feelings, perceptions, conditioned motivations, “realized self” motivations, a subconscious, and more. We act based not only on reason but on all of these functions. And that’s the way it should be. However, we ourselves have very little insight into the way we function so it is all kind of a sloppy process. Until we start practicing what Aristotle called “the contemplative life” which modern science calls meta-cognition: the mind inspecting the mind. This is The Way out of neurosis.

The process needed for the entire human race is a cleansing of the spirit, a self-governed “mind wash” available to each individual. Right now, most people don’t even know that they need it. Most people who know they need it don’t want to admit it (they are the ones closest to leaping over the gap if they could transcend denial).

The estimable Norman Hecht sent me a very insightful New Yorker article which makes the point that Trump may be on his way out but that does not remove the appetites of the core that supported him. And what are those appetites? Fear-driven racism and extreme irrational behavior. And what class of behaviors do those fall in the range of?

Right. Those are neuroses. The class of mental/emotional/physical diseases medical science has been tracking since the 1700s.

Eastern psychology noticed those behaviors going back far earlier than writing, based on memes embedded in time-binding songs that can be tracked back to about 10,000 BC thanks to Herotodus, Plato, et al. We have known about these syndromes for a very long time and have never addressed the removal of the problem.

We talk about schemes to save the environment but not to save ourselves from mental emotional self-destructive behavior. Because that is the reason why neurosis is important to remove, because neurosis works against what the individual is motivated to achieve, which is why it is irrational.

If we continue to ignore the primary cause of all of our lethal threat vectors, and try to use outmoded and failed methods to reach reconciliation with China and the others with whom we are now engaging in reptilian combat rehearsal, we are in for a very bad future, as Fareed Zakaria points out in a recent article.

The international conversation as well as the domestic conversation both have to change if we are to show ourselves truly on the road to recovery from mass neurosis. This fictional conversation between the world leaders is closer to the direction we must go than is our present course.

Step one is to come to a clear understanding that there are other, better, ways to use our minds than the general method in use today. Neuroscience calls it the DEFAULT NETWORK. It is a random walk and results in random noise across the corpus callosum. From there we must go to the Observer state, the state of expert meta-cognition. Ram Dass and Daniel Goleman were generous in their comments on my methodology.

My approach is not the only way to free the mind. Psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, psychedelics under supervision with proper setting and mindset, innumerable approaches exist to move out of the default network, what my manual Mind Magic calls EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). And into a state of relative free will and autonomy, with full insight into your own conditioning which therefore neutralizes the effect of the conditioning.

Yep, you got it right, this is a rather unusual proposition: upgrade the mental/emotional competency of the entire world population. I totally agree, it’s over the top for me to suggest that such a thing is worth putting time into, when the amount of neurosis and its ingrained nature by this point appears insurmountable no matter how many of us want to change the world.

I just don’t like the alternative.

I say let’s give it a go, shall we?

Love to all,

Bill

USA: Nine of the Most Probable Scenarios

Leave a reply

Created November 7, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

On the eve of the most important election in at least the last 100 years, three writers have compellingly described a scenario in which the US at the time of the 2024 election goes into a period of guerilla civil war driven by the burning desire by some to forever live in a state of White supremacy. The writers cite history including very recent events around the world linked by a fear of losing White majority. They centrally point out that the playbook was put into the form of a novel called The Turner Diaries written by a neo-Nazi in 1978.

Barbara F. Walter writes:

Pages of The Turner Diaries were found in Timothy McVeigh’s truck after he attacked a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Patrick Crusius, the alleged El Paso Walmart gunman, and John Timothy Earnest, the accused shooter at a synagogue in Poway, California, echoed the book’s ideas in their manifestos. A member of the Proud Boys can be seen on video during the insurrection on 6 January 2021 telling a journalist to read The Turner Diaries.

The US is not yet in a civil war. But a 2012 declassified report by the CIA on insurgencies outlines the signs. According to the report, a country is experiencing an open insurgency when sustained violence by increasingly active extremists has become the norm.

In this early stage of civil war, extremists are trying to force the population to choose sides, in part by demonstrating to citizens that the government cannot keep them safe or provide basic necessities. The goal is to incite a broader civil war by denigrating the state and growing support for violent measures. Voter suppression bills have been introduced in almost every state since 6 January. Election deniers are running for office in 48 of the 50 states and now represent a majority of all Republicans running for Congressional and state offices in the US midterm elections this week.

Civil wars almost never happen in full, healthy, strong democracies. They also seldom happen in full autocracies. Violence almost always breaks out in countries in the middle – those with weak and unstable pseudo-democracies. We are already seeing elements of this in Europe, where rightwing anti-immigrant parties such as the Sweden Democrats, the Brothers of Italy, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the National Rally in France and the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in Austria have all seen their support increase in recent years.

Regulate social media, and in particular the algorithms that disproportionately push the more incendiary, extreme, threatening and fear-inducing information into people’s feeds. Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers and enemies of democracy. The result would be a drop in everyone’s collective anger, distrust and feelings of threat, giving us all time to rebuild.

Stephan Marche writes:

Any failure to recognise electoral outcomes, even in a few states, could result in a contested election in which nobody reaches the threshold of 270 electoral college votes. In that case, the constitution stipulates a “contingent election” – acclimatise yourself to this phrase now – in which each state gets a single vote. That’s right: if no candidate in an American presidential election reaches the threshold of 270 electoral college votes, the state legislatures, overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans, pick the president, with each state having one vote.

Christopher Sebastian Parker writes:

Election-related violence generally takes place when the following four factors are present: a highly competitive election that can shift power; partisan division based on identity; winner-takes-all two-party election systems in which political identities are polarised; and an unwillingness to punish violence on the part of the dominant group. All four are present in America now, and will be more amplified in 2024.

These disturbing notions caused my mind to imagine the various ways this situation might be headed off at the pass. Of course, I agree with Barbara F. Walter that social media must be regulated to permit free speech that is respectful and does not concoct baseless fantasies to stir fear and loathing. This is not too much to ask.

But I do not have the feeling that social media regulation to permit “free fair speech” removing lies and hatemongering is sufficient to move us out of the reap of the whirlwind that these writers portray in their respective articles. More action is needed to curtail the tragic downfall of the USA which to some intelligent observers is near at hand.

What action would that be? My immediate urgent recommendation is that you vote, and do so with these possible scenarios in mind.

What I am also doing here is laying out a few ways this could go.

Scenario A and B: It goes down exactly as these writers describe. The US is taken over by one party, which although a minority, retains power and uses it, leading to an ongoing civil war (Scenario A), or to a pogrom to ethnically cleanse America (Scenario B).

Scenario C: Before the 2024 election, a national referendum is held, leading to a three-tier federated USA. Instead of just States and Federal government, the USA modifies its Constitution to allow a middle federation level consisting of Blue States and Red States. The Supreme Court might be in this level, so that the Blue States have one Supreme Court and the Red States have another. The Federal level would have as its main areas of control the State and Defense Departments, plus the Intelligence agencies. In order to keep all of us safe from outsiders, centralized power would be necessary. The main point of this scenario would be to neuter the need for violence against ourselves.

The Red States might choose, the way South Africa did in the 20th Century, to continue to be a White Supremacist place for as long as possible. In this scenario, three things are predictable: non-White people would move out of Red States and some Whites into them – and some businesses would also move. Global companies would tend to move into Blue states – because operating globally they have to sell to everybody and most of those bodies are not White. Thirdly, the younger generations who are more inclusive in their thinking would lobby within the Red states to eliminate the supremacist tenor, and in time, they would become the leaders, and the bicolor State system would someday be repealed.

In Scenario D, following the midterms and the continuing trend away from peaceful democracy and into violent takeover, most of the people in the country decide to go the other way in 2024, keeping extremists out of power, and the FBI and all other relevant governmental agencies eliminate the domestic terrorists by force.

In Scenario E, Scenario D happens sooner, in the midterms.

In Scenario F, the current situation continues with no clear winners for a long time, but does not totally descend into the depths of hell, just ongoing sporadic violence and we all get used to it and blasé about it, like we adapted to the pandemic, and like we adapted to WWII.

Scenario G is the end of freedom for awhile practically everywhere on Earth, as a small but powerful White minority, skewed toward people with much money and/or addiction to violence, seize a degree of control unprecedented in US history (but highly precedented in all other history) and make life uncomfortable for tens or hundreds of millions of people. In this scenario the situation ends in violent overthrow of the government by a second American Revolution which re-establishes a full American democracy.

Scenario H is just like Scenario G except Americans are not able to do it on their own. Instead, the rest of the non-White world eventually takes over America and any other remaining bastions of White power. In one variation of Scenario H, the entire White race is eliminated. Today there is no faction seeking to eliminate the White race. I can see no significant probability of such a thing ever happening, except if Scenario H White Supremacy Hegemony takes over the world.

There can be other scenarios, these are just a few to choose from when you vote tomorrow.

May God protect us.

Norm Hecht comments helpfully, adding a ninth Scenario I:

“Thank you.

I hope and believe that the major Republican donors will drive the party to more sanity. The Democrats have seemingly no young bench strength, but losses next Tuesday may force sensible change to the middle and youth. We can only pray for the 2024 Presidential election will have younger moderates on both sides. Should the Democrats move to the center the increasingly large number of unaffiliated independents are likely to join the Democrats. Then the Republicans will be forced to move to the center to avoid being a permanent minority party.

Just a few thoughts.”

We’re all in this together. It can come out good for all of us, it just takes creativity and sufficient respect to enable communication.

And your vote as the starting point.

Love to all,

Bill

Note: I rearranged certain quoted sentences for flow in this context, and inserted the link on the word “feeds” because I thought the research project I linked to is very relevant to what Barbara F. Walter was saying.

Materialistic Authoritarians Manipulated Jesus’ Demise

Leave a reply

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