The Prevalence of Self-Inflicted Wounds

Created July 15, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

We’re not happy about Putin for very good reason. Yet he is one of us and we can learn from his mistakes. Might be a tad easier than learning from our own mistakes, until we get the hang of the latter, which is a good thing to do.

Here he was trying to contain NATO and instead his actions taken in that regard had a boomerang effect. Making him more unstable and dangerous no doubt.

Let us consider my argument that there is a common cause, or mechanism, within all of us that is responsible for his having done that.

And that same phenomenon in you connects to the things you have done in your life which were akin to shooting yourself in the foot or other necessary appendage.

What is that thing that is dragging us all down, then?

It is a miscalibration of one function of the mind.

This function has been miscalibrated by the history (we ought to say hisandherstory) through which we have passed as if through a gauntlet.

The long and short of it: thugs took over and still rule in most places. Here in the few democracies the thugs are actually a mixture of all kinds of people, which is an improvement. We average citizens like that someone else is watching the unbelievably complex store. When we are born, we are immersed in a degree of complexity that is baffling to our capacity, and then it gets ever more intense. It was not always that way. My theory is that the Acceleritis started with written language. Nowadays Acceleritis has reached fever pitch, with the average person multitasking during virtually every second of the day.

That was how this particular mental function came to become miscalibrated.

Well, what is that darn function, then?

Freud gave it a name which I’ll cite in a moment. But first let’s talk about why the function was validly necessary.

In a world in which many agents have free will and one is only a single member of this cloud, it is inevitable that there will be conflicts of interest.

This function is specifically designed to be useful in preventing and overcoming these conflicts of interest.

Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, one of his greatest books, said that this function starts up when the baby has its first experience of needing something and not having that something delivered instantly.

At that point, he wrote, a new function of mind arises, to deal with such situations.

He called it the ego.

He characterized it as a managerial function, to get the self what it wants or needs through the use of specific tactics that were not inherent in the original self.

What existed of the self/mind before that point he called the id. I call the id the Me That Was Born. Same thing whatever you call it.

I also call the ego by another name. I call it the robot. Because I see it as a set of coded instructions that creates further coded instructions, mediated by electrochemical reactions in the nervous system, which arise subsequent to birth and therefore are not the original self.

I see the original self as an extremely valuable thing, of cosmic significance, and worth distinguishing from the programs that the original self subconsciously creates.

So the ego is sort of the patient’s caregiver, the client’s press agent, the client’s advocate, the function that tries to make sure that the self gets credit where it is due.

Miscalibration of the Ego

In a supposed “normal” world, in which the input stream does not overwhelm the central processor immediately, causing inforush paralysis and then Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the ego would be as pragmatically useful as the thumb.

However, when the ego is confronted by excessive information, it becomes a danger. One moves quickly into a hasty acceptance of supplied defaults. This is how mental self-enslavement occurs. The ego over-reacts and exaggerates threats, causing hormonal changes we sense as our own fear or anger whenever something – even trivial – appears potentially capable of challenging our security. It’s the survival-driven fight or flight reaction in situations which do not rationally justify such a reaction, when reacting that way is childish and vain.

In an ideal and yet pragmatically possible future, individuals will pull themselves up by their bootstraps to deal with information overload, without giving in to the impulses sent from the ego.

What can you do?

Be on guard. Getting stressed out is a sign that you slipped gears and are internally dominated for the moment by the ego in you. Take that sense of dilemma as a signal to stop, breathe, press the reset button hard, reject recent emotional reactions, go to neutral. Look at the situation objectively and scientifically.

Let’s take an example. Say that you’re having a conversation with your significant other. Assume that they say something that bugs you. While noting your hormonal release effects and keeping them separate from your true self, notice the fact that “feeling like making sharp retorts to unworthy statements” shrinks you back into the contracted ego you.

Understanding Your Ego

In its inflamed state due to the inforush, your ego makes bad decisions trying to serve your interests. It’s only a biological AI, so it’s imperfect, not built for the volume of complexity rushing at you each second. In order to be master of your own castle you have to be aware of these things and to take control of them.

You can’t allow yourself to be pulled under by the force of your amygdala and the rest of your limbic alarm system. You must maintain control of the ship despite these powerful waves washing you in hormonal takeover.

The secret is that your vulnerability lies in your attachment to certain outcomes. You have become obsessively hypnotized and enslaved by terror of certain outcomes (e.g., death, mortification, loss of loved ones, terrible illness, etc.) and desire of others (money, fame, etc.). Only by confronting these feelings on the stage of your consciousness can you gradually readjust the control to favor your true self.

My book Mind Magic was written to provide more detailed instructions. With or without my further advice, it was always you that it comes down to, you must do this for yourself in any case, no matter what tools you select to help you, this is the challenge that the Universe presents to you at this moment of truth in a world at climax.

Love,

Bill

Setting Up a New Command Center in Your Mind

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Created July 8, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

If you are horrified by what is going on in the world today and wish you had the power to make it better, here’s how to get that power and to start using it for the good.

Nothing can be achieved until you are master of your “self”.

A battlefield shortcut methodology to achieve self-mastery is summarized in this post.

Imagine that you are installing a new spot in your mind to which you can return at will. A place you can go to whenever you really need effectiveness, and to get away from all bugaboos you use to torture yourself.

Furnishing the New Command Post

First, understand what this place is. It’s a new/old perspective point where you rise above all that has come before and start anew every time you arrive there. You’ve visited that terrain before, perhaps, at times when you just threw up your hands and gave up on everything. You may have felt it oddly freeing rather than a continuation of despair in a new guise. It is definitely identifiable by the freedom you feel to modify, override, replace, erase even the things for which you’ve been desperately striving for a long time. You can think of it as the Reset Button. The wellsprings of unbounded creativity live in this place.

Another attribute of the Command Post is that you feel a fondness for your own most noble impulses. And an impatience with your own whining tendencies. Keep that feeling alive to you every moment.

You may also feel that everything you thought you knew is really half-knowledge, that you’ve been going along with everyone else because resistance would have been futile, but from here in the Command Post you are able to dispassionately observe things as if experiencing them for the first time.

Now that you’ve acclimated to the subconscious/feeling aspects of the new Control Center, here are the recommended conscious furnishings:

Apply your new perspective to see the humor in the things that have been your personal albatrosses. And through that same lens to continuously see the humor in all things, even if at some times expressing that to others may be insensitive, and make a point of remembering that last point, i.e., it’s sometimes better to keep that perception of humor to yourself. At other times the other people around you will benefit from that perspective. You’ll need to see which way your noblest self feels at that moment and act accordingly.
Remove all barriers to feeling the love that you feel for the things and entities that you love. Start with yourself. Get in touch with the love you feel for yourself. See what you feel is loveable about yourself. Now migrate carefully from there to plumbing the depths of your spirit to what it is you are here on Earth to accomplish. Once you have a feeling for your life’s purpose, write it down in the form of a vow, an intention, what you intend to do, despite the challenges in the way. However, recognize that the actual outcomes will not be 100% under your control so that you cannot equate the intention with any guarantee of success. All you guarantee is that you are going to give it your very best shot every moment. However, it comes out will be up to the total system, the Universe. Here in the Command Post you shall never give in to feeling attached to how it will all come out.
What logically flows from the prior furniture you’ve just installed, is the supportive, empowering intention to not waste your own computing power on nonsense. Respect the power and value of your own being, your own mind for example, and don’t simply tolerate the situations in which you find your mind in the default network of simply hopping from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, aimlessly and without hookup to your reason for being, your self-assigned mission.
Install a mirror. Make sure to look in that inner mirror while hanging out in the Command Module.
Install a periscope. Use it to take a long view of what is going on in the rest of the world which appears to exist outside you. Understand the difference between the frame of mind you are now in (in the Command Center) and the frame of mind of all the hysterical people racing around out there. Make a vow, a strong intention, to catch yourself when you slip back into that default network conditioned by the culture into which you were born, and to remind yourself that you’re better than that, and move back into your Command Center.
Form a talisman and put it on. It will be your philosopher’s stone, the tool you use know whether to flow with your natural first inclination, or to wait and check things out before allowing your motor control to obey your first natural impulse from within. This talisman of discrimination will enable you to easily move into the Flow state much more often, and also prevent you from making disastrous mistakes. The way it works is you carefully and continuously use the mirror to detect negativity in what you are about to say or do. Negativity is a sign of non-Flow-state impulses. Letting through impulses directed by love is the sign of oncoming Flow state.Now that you’ve set up your Command Center, spend as much time there as possible, while doing what you have to do based on prior agreements, and/or while carrying out your mission.

How This Relates to Dealing with the Horrors of the Present

From your new Command Post you will be in the best possible condition to help others deal with the fears and angers endemic to the current world situation in which all of the malingering ancient errors have been magnified by the latest technology, and compounded together into an enormous traffic snarl affecting all the minds on the planet. Around you people will begin to feel better and will become more able to make effective decisions to exercise damage control over their own lives and the lives of the people they love. This will ripple outwards.

The people who are most carried away by their self-inflicted wounds will find themselves losing the support of those who have cleared away most of the debris in their minds. This may initially make them even more dangerous but ultimately they will have to take stock of what is happening and make some new decisions. We are social animals. We are all codependent. We have tremendous influence over each other. This has been part of the problem but if we play our cards right, from our personal Command Centers, we can make it part of the solution.

Love,

Bill

Happy Independence Day! Maintaining Our Independence

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Created July 1, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

246 years ago, we became a country. 530 years ago, we began to colonize this beautiful terrain we call the United States of America. The colonists who came here were fleeing tyrannies and religious persecution, and seeking opportunities for living free lives, willing to face dangers and cognizant of the need to stick together for mutual protection. Among them were freethinkers whose hunger for knowledge had driven them to read widely most of the ideas written down by sages throughout the thousands of years human beings have been writing things down. The Founders respected the philosophy of Jesus Christ and the philosophy of Freemasonry, and some described themselves as deists, acknowledging the logic of a supreme creator. They tended to be openminded pragmatists, realists, and were excited at the prospects of science.

One of the principles of the American Revolution and its concomitant design of a new working model for governments, was to prevent any one person from gaining too much power. Another principle was the separation of church and state. The system was set up to be self-optimizing by innovative use of checks and balances. Our forefathers knew that any system could be gamed and that success would depend upon the good will and good intentions of honest people voted into office.

Because they were practical people, they knew they could not go hog-wild with new and unfamiliar ideas and still bring together the majority of American colonists. They would not have stood a chance of pulling it off if they proposed freeing slaves and giving every human being a vote. In 1776, colonist nuclear families were strong and could be self-sufficient survival units when they needed to be. Just as marketers today consider households a significant unit. Back then the unit had more unity than it does today. Giving the vote to the man or men in the household was a way of giving the vote to the household. The land to be settled was virtually infinite from the viewpoint of the 2,500,000 colonists in 1776 (there were also 600,000 Native Americans at that time) so it was assumed that everyone who wanted to vote could easily become a land owner. With the specific proposals the Founders made to the American people, as it was, they just barely made it. It was touch and go, many colonists weren’t sure whether they were loyal English folks or ready to risk their lives for a set of enticing ideas.

But here we are today. We made it through that gauntlet and have toughed it out through gauntlet after gauntlet since then.

We now face possibly the most terrible gauntlet we have ever faced: the system has been gamed from within.

A small number of people interested in power have conspired for a long time to set this up. It looks like one organized conspiracy but in all likelihood it’s a chain of ideologically linked separate cabals going back almost to the beginning. George Washington had urged us to never form parties but 20 years into it, we were in the two-party system, and over the years the things Washington warned us against – the party becoming more important to some people than the country – became ugly reality. Gerrymandering and filibustering became practices, despite their inherent conflict with the Constitutional principles not to mention common sense. Jefferson had the right idea that education was the key lever by which human beings could become the sane, ethical people presumed by the design of the freedom-based government. However, the content of that education was never developed to the point of sufficient efficacy to ensure sane, ethical graduates.

So, we are blessed to have been left, still today, being the ones who have that problem to solve. We are the ones to whom the prize of overcoming our own worst tendencies belongs. If not us, then to our children or grandchildren, but it must start with us, for we must teach our progeny what they need to know and do to finally put an end to the old corrupt ways that have always been so easy to fall back into.

To the average person, this challenge is so daunting that the almost universal reaction is to give up. I’m reminded of those Simon & Garfunkel lines in the song “Mrs. Robinson”:

Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at this, you lose

This is why so many people don’t vote. They feel it’s not going to do any good. The powerphiliac perpetrators of minority rule are pleased that so many people don’t vote, it makes their plans easier to achieve.

As Americans, it’s our duty to fulfil the mission set for us in 1776. Whether we win or lose, it would be cowardly to not even try. We must all vote.

That’s not all.

Bias and Binarism

Life was always complicated, but never to this degree. The easy way out human beings always take when overwhelmed by complexity is to fall back on binarism: reducing everything to good guys and bad guys. Simplistic but satisfying as a way of achieving fake closure, this popular form of reductionism makes the world black and white. Objects in the world are sorted into one or the other. Stuff in the bad bucket is irredeemable. Oneself of course is always in the good bucket. This is another comforting factor of binarism.

Washington put down parties because they could cause counterproductive divisiveness within the nascent nation. He realized the tendency of people to operate based on attraction-repulsion and to form two poles, although being a practical person he did not go off on a philosophical rampage about it.

The illogic of the party system is that it’s based on the goodness of having a bias. A bias for change or against it. This is illogical because any bias is a fixed presumption which is likely to not perfectly fit every single situation. A better strategy is to be openminded and take everything on a case-by-case basis, looking at facts without bias. Yet political parties enshrine bias, like a superstition.

The situation in America today is caused by these things:

Persistent underlying binarism between people driven by lust for power and people driven by lust for life.
Pandemic binarism as part of a general self-dumbing-down strategy to cope with excess complexity (“Acceleritis”).
Anger and hatred for a suspected enormous group of bad guys who are presumed responsible for all the bad things on this list.
The subconscious gravitation of people into “belonging” groups.
The almost universal assumption that we are all in this bar brawl on our own and there is nothing actually connecting us together making us all one.
Massive frustration at the innumerable obstacles one faces each day and at the difference between one’s dreams and reality.
A sense of not being able to make a difference, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The party system, putting bias in the good bucket.

“You better free your mind instead.”
–John Lennon

America is working it out. Go with the flow with an open mind, not foreclosing the future based on ancient schisms. Hit the reset button. Make your mind a clean slate. Consider each piece of evidence that hits your senses as if being born again right now. Now, that’s Independence Day!

Science Fiction

As you may know, I’m writing a science fiction series to try every angle into empowering the minds of fellow beings with freeing thoughts and ways of being. Chuck Young, founder of Ameritest which is now part of Dynata, holder of patents for innovations in measuring the effects of communications, and wide-ranging genius, read my new novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, and wrote an interesting review of it containing sophisticated allusions to literature, philosophy and science, I thought you might enjoy.

Happy July Fourth Holiday!

Love,

Bill

The Ego Level is the Source of Today’s Threats

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Created June 24, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In my view of the world, each of us moves up and down through levels of consciousness, from one moment to the next through our day. These levels were entirely theory for thousands of years, something I did not know when I discovered them in myself around age 5.

I never wanted to be on stage, but my showbiz parents were firm. “You were born in a trunk,” my father told me, a showbiz metaphor for being born into a showbiz lineage. Later I found out that his father, whom I never met, had been a “song and dance” man in London vaudeville. My maternal great grandfather Wulf, for whom I was named, had been a Ukrainian trapeze artist who was still performing, which included hanging by his teeth to his trapeze, at age 80. Something I’m still metaphorically doing today.

On stage I robotically performed by lines and moves as trained, until I started to have strange experiences which greatly improved my performances. Much later I realized this was the Flow state, a term coined by a former advisor to “my” nonprofit The Human Effectiveness Institute, the famed Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago at the time.

That’s when I realized we all continuously shift from level to level. Introspection was the only tool I had since I could find no books in any bookstore in Bensonhurst that mentioned levels of consciousness. As time went on, I was able to discern specific clues as to which level I was in.

For example, fear and defensiveness were inner signs that I was in a lower state. Rushing and nervousness were outer indicators that my inner feelings were of anxiety and sense of impending failure.

Intuitively I saw ways in which I could diagnose what was causing me to be in these lower states. This involved staying awake in bed at night so I could uninterruptedly focus on these things. Without knowing the real meanings of the words meditation, contemplation, concentration at that time, I see now that was what I was doing most of those nights.

This led me to create my own system for myself to overcome these lower states. I came to realize that the really important thing was to get back up into the Flow state and maintain it for longer and longer periods. All of the petty fears and desires I had were trivial by comparison to that goal.

Much later, as I studied psychology books, I began to form theories about all of this stuff going on inside me and how it related to what I was reading about the theories and experiments in the field of psychology, and more recently, neuroscience.

When I read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents I realized that Ego as he defined it – an intermediary point of view emerging when the baby first feels thwarted about its needs going unattended, and begins to center its life on an inner persona acting as the “press agent” for the self – everything suddenly snapped into place. Those lower states inside me were in fact being generated by this apparently ruling part of my being, the Ego. For me to get into Flow I needed to get out of Ego and into my true self, The Me That Was Born.

As we look around us today at the havoc that the world has descended into, it appears obvious to me that the true threat vector behind all the madness is the Ego. The Ego of a Trump. The Ego of a Putin. The Ego of many other Hitlers in waiting. The Egos of the insurrectionists, blinded by the voice of their Fuhrer (leader). Hitler was a powerful speaker and mass hypnotist and Trump was a TV star and President of the United States, not a powerful speaker, but those media and title qualifications were enough to cause the mass hypnotism of millions of people living stuck in the lowest Ego states.

Without those lowest Ego states in the followers and leaders, none of this would be happening.

Not that reading my manual Mind Magic would miraculously dispel all the ills of the world, by freeing each reader from her or his Ego forever, it usually does make a nice dent. That’s what keeps me going, the evidence that I can make a positive difference if I can write and communicate more clearly about all of this to more people.

I am aware that a minority of the population reads non-fiction books, and a larger minority read fiction books, so in order to cover more territory, I’m putting these same ideas into both fiction and non-fiction.

In my latest novel released this week, PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices, the focus is on the action and only in service to the plot do my mind methods appear. The fact that the protagonists are psychics gives me leeway to get deeply into what is going on inside the characters, because it has a direct bearing on the plot.

The main protagonist, Ed Templegard, is normally a very high being, often in the Flow state, and motivated by the idea of protecting people. But he gets brought down to the Ego level without his fully realizing it. He wants to stop Perse but Perse is too strong for him. He wants Nastassia but she is far away. These things degrade his level of consciousness and throughout the story he is gradually discovering that, fighting it, and eventually – oops no spoiler here.

The education system which starts at home will over time incorporate more and more of the things we all really need to know about living life. Not just what is taught today, but also what people today are left to come to understand for themselves – something which happens all too rarely. The current state of play 2022 is compelling evidence that teaching about levels of consciousness has to become part of the foundations of our learning objectives from birth onward.

Love to all,

Bill