Who Am I?

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Created December 10, 2021

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog post.

When you hear yourself talking to yourself in your mind and using your name, what do you think?

As in:

Bill, you know you are not going to forget an idea like that, you don’t have to write it down, stop acting crazy.

Perhaps you dialog with yourself:

Why am I addressing Bill as if I were someone else? I am Bill.

No, I Am That I Am. As I always have been and will be. I know the past and future. But I – in many forms – am changing it every day, thank Myself! Otherwise I’d be alone for eternity. I give spinoffs self-control so I can laugh at myself as they/I muck things up, and through my I’s I can feel a wide range of emotions with incredible intensity, because I think I have skin in the game.

Who is Bill, then? I asked, my vision having been suddenly altered so that I now seemed to be hovering within the back of Bill’s head.

Our car this time!

An idea that has never occurred to you? Or one that since the 60s has gripped you? That it could all be the one videogame, all that exists, and that naturally who each of us is, is a faithful microcosm of The One Self, an avatar in a videogame but with no memory of your real life. As in the movie Total Recall.

With earthly videogames, we don’t so totally lose ourselves in our character. This will become less and less of an unsound barrier as virtual reality (VR) evolves. We already have feelies and have known how to add smellies for decades. With a little plastic straw in your mouth soon you can have tasties.

So VR fans will see God sooner than most of us.

“The human body serves as a receptacle for the divine, allowing it to enter into the world,” writes Michel Quinot, quoting the Patristic tradition. The writer has deep knowledge into, and feeling for Orthodox theology and its art, and a way of writing that shifts one into that thrilling feeling about life.

He writes: “God… is said to have clothed himself in flesh in order that man might be clothed in divinity.”

Let’s say that part of it is true.

Before stipulating any other religious belief beyond that, why is that part so hard to take seriously?

“That part” being that you, reading this now, are and have always been the author of the Universe, the Universe Itself.

We recent/still apes have the concept of VR videogames in which the player can lose self into the character being played. Something unimaginably larger than yourself in terms of information processing power could easily exist.

You have an awareness of yourself, so it’s not a leap to assume this even more powerful likely-to-exist mind could also possess this gift.

At minimum, more powerful minds than ours are a near certainty somewhere in the Universe.

So stepping from imagining that supermind, to where I perceive truth lies, please step up to imagining that you are the Universe.

What is looking out your character’s eyes is the Universe, not a part of it but the whole Universe is looking out your eyes.

Same for every other character in the improv play.

Life is an improv play.

And also an improve play. The trajectory of the story is from spiritual and physical rags to riches, by our own dedicated self-improvement.

Not just a book fad since the 60s. That’s the main thing we’re here to do. We’re also allowed to have fun and free will. And pleasure and wealth of all kinds.

Since we now all know this, can we now all start having fun together instead of what our characters have cooked up for Us?

Best to all,

Bill

A Method for Gaining Inner Control

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Created December 3, 2021

On an average day, what percent of your waking hours are spent in a really good mood?

Let’s try a scientific experiment together to see whether this method can increase that percentage.

The experiment will run from now through whenever you decide the experiment is over.

During the experiment, you’ll try out the method espoused here. What you’ll be looking for is any change in the degree to which your days become filled with good moods.

First, some needed background. The things that bring us down from our really good mood tend to fall into two types:

  1. Things our conditioned brain classifies as threat vectors.
  2. Things that our brain sees as annoying irrelevant distractions that are sapping our efforts to deal effectively with the threats.

Our outwardly focused Western civilization tends to leave us with little interest in studying what is going on inside of us from one second to the next. Most of us in the West are used to clumping together everything that goes on in our minds and emotions as one thing.

This hidden assumption gives us no leverage with which to gain inner control. Then, if and when we come to the conclusion that we need to gain control of ourselves, we fall back upon yelling at ourselves in our mind, a strategy with very low success potential.

Although we can chunk our inner experiences into more than two buckets, this method simplifies the inner glory of our existence into just two buckets.

Let’s call one state the Self, and the other state the Ego.

The Self is your “Me That Was Born” – the way you were before you had any experiences outside of the womb. The Self is an experiencer, an entity that has personal subjective experience, both of events within the psyche called qualia, as well as your experience of “external” events. The Self is pure consciousness without an object, until events call the Self’s attention.

The Ego is part of your mind/body/soul’s autonomic nervous system. It is robotic, like a kneejerk. It is the result of your “inner” and “outer” experiences. It is the conditioned neural pathways that have been laid down in your physical brain.

You may not know it yet (until now), but you can be controlled from either place – your Self or your Ego. Your inner feelings and clues can reveal to you in which seat you are sitting at any given moment.

If you are feeling either calmly neutral or positive, taking in what is going on and playing with it for fun or because it’s your passion work, you are in your Self.

The hints that you have been sucked into control by the Ego are anger, fear, irritation, comparison of self with others, tension, wanting something it doesn’t look like you’ll be getting, feeling under time pressure, feeling inadequate or cocky. The list goes on but you get the idea.

The first principle of this method is simply to remember to check the hints to see where you happen to be from time to time during the day and night.

When you start to get really good at this – remembering to check your state often – the easy part is then knowing which state you are in. The tricky part is how to back out of the Ego, and that’s where the method comes in.

The method works best when you can maneuver yourself into being alone for a few minutes. This is the beauty of bathrooms. When else are we allowed to grab a few minutes of alone time?

I see you sitting on the bathroom throne, wearing your clothes. You close your eyes, rotate your shoulders backwards, your back is straight. You check every part of your body for tension and relax it there and everywhere. Breathe deeply and slowly.

Focus on the part of you that is the observer, that doesn’t care what happens. It sounds impossible but that is the real you, your core, your essence. The closer to it you get the less you are attached to what happens with whatever the current threat vectors are. You may not experience this on the first serious try – or you might.

You’ll experience this state as fatalistic, accepting of whatever life deals out, and happy to play by those rules or seek to change them, but not troubled. You are above all that stuff.

Way back before there was human language, it’s possible that our brains had threat-related reactions only a few times a year. But as our own creativity continues to make life more complicated every day, we now tend to have threat/Ego reactions multiple times every minute – a pre-existing unnoticed pandemic I call Acceleritis.

The Ego will fight back by arguing that you can’t risk being fatalistic you have to try harder to win or you will wind up in the gutter and no one will like you.

The Ego can be very convincing. All you have to do is to deal with the holding of your position in the Self, in what I call Observer state, the state right before Flow state.

Yes, this is a method that will lead to your more frequent flights of Flow state.

It’s a good thing when the Ego calms down and starts to converse sanely with the Self about the matters that are driving it wild. The Self’s innate intuition gives answers which in some cases actually convince the Ego, at least for that moment. In time, the Ego becomes reabsorbed as a useful extension of the Self, as God intended it, before we screwed it up with Acceleritis. Too much creativity. Too much of a good thing.

But we can have our cake and eat it too, by this method. We can continue the reckless adventuring into making real whatever comes into our heads, and if we also always practice the method, we can better see future consequences before taking each turn in the road, which will reduce the wreckage we are making of the other species and the planet itself, and our own species making itself suffer the most. Who needs it? Let’s stop it.

This is the way to do it.

That, and prayer.

Love to all,

Bill

Thanks For the Memories

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Created November 23, 2021

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 boosts the immune system and improves sleep.

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:

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Love, Bill

Message For Rescuers

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Created November 19, 2021

How did QAnon and yoga get together? What can we learn from this to do a better job of rescuing?

In rare times like these, all of us want to come to the rescue.

If we were in better control of what goes on in our heads, we would act like adults and try to keep voices down and talk out the solutions in an efficient manner.

But we are typically motivated by so many conflicting demands that the “adult” part is supplanted by the impatient black and white judging, oversimplifying ego. Everything is quickly classified into one of two categories, and the response is either loud support or loud attack. The ego is a binary system, a neural net of the coping systems we built growing up (Human Effectiveness Institute theory).

Now in rebecoming our true selves we need to replace that neural net with a new one that is conducive to Observer state and Flow state, where we are each maximally effective and happy. Each weekly dose here is intended to help you get there.

You can think of it as taking off the training wheels to life. The ego got you through this far but it won’t take you the rest of the way.

Famously a worldwide spiritual grassroots movement began to break out into the open around 1969, the Summer Of Love. For a while it was called the human potential movement. One of my merry friends Marie called it “weirdness”, perhaps prophetically. Later it wore the label New Age.

Today it’s become one of the biggest growth categories in the economy, mostly related to physical wellness and fitness, nutritional supplements, environmental sustainability, doing good, reaching higher states of consciousness, marijuana, psychedelic medicine, higher performance, social justice, attitude adjustment, and seeking spiritual enlightenment.

Most people participate in this to lose weight, learn the right foods to eat, get chiropractic adjustments or therapeutic massages, learn to meditate, learn yoga, be counseled by a guru or coach, and because their inner instincts draw them toward this positive magnet. These people affect the rise and fall of specific product categories more and more each year.

So how did some of these wellness rescuers get on the side of QAnon?

It was the hidden assumption of binaryism which comes along with the ego. Everything in one of two buckets, period.

Therefore: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. To many of us intenders to be rescuers, the big pharma companies got locked in the bad box a long time ago and that key is stuck down on the keyboard. So, some spiritually motivated yoga teachers and alternative healers assumed that QAnon which attacked big pharma must be a good thing. And since they also spoke about aliens and saucers and God, “it sure sounds like they are one of us!”

Only for the first second, for most people who take closer looks at things. But most of us don’t take closer looks, because we are locked in the grip of the Emergency Oversimplication System which is our coping mechanism for dealing with information overload, the hidden pandemic I call Acceleritis.

There is a more worrisome connection as well. The God connection. QAnon tend to be fundamentalists but represent all beliefs. The wellness movement is also spiritual, also representing all religious heritages. One of the ideas that has popped up from time to time since antiquity, is the idea that we create our own reality, that our perceptions are biased by our prior beliefs and expectations. Jane Roberts’ Seth books brought this idea back writ large, suggesting that we literally create our own realities, that our hopes and dreams and nightmares are projected from us into the mindstuff around us, shaping it into events which then occur because of what we wanted to happen or not happen, drawn to us by what was later called The Law Of Attraction.

A substantial portion of the American citizenry today accept the possibility of such forces at play, while an equally substantial portion dismiss that as magical thinking. Epistemologically one ought to keep an open mind on that subject. But this was another link that drew some of the wellness rescuers into lockstep with QAnon. QAnon consists of people who believe that they can make it so just by saying it often and loudly enough, they they can create their own reality, because today we are unmoored in utter relativism, a period of “it is true because I said it.”

So, to a person involved in the wellness movement, a person in the QAnon movement might seem to be walking the walk of “manifesting their wills” in our consensual reality (mind controlling future events).

When actually what QAnon was doing was more like propaganda and “perception is reality” manipulation.

If some of the QAnon had actually been attempting to use magic or perverted religion to predream the coup outcome they wanted on January 6, those experimenters hopefully now realize that they have been over-estimating their own degree of evolution egotistically, and fell into the trap of believing their own wishful thinking because they wanted to believe it. Their mind techniques were not validated in that experiment.

Maybe the wellness rescuers who aligned with QAnon have learned from their mistake. One takeaway would be to learn not to make oversimplified generalizations like assuming that every single big pharma executive is unethical.

How do we prevent this sort of thing from happening again?

Wellness agents and conservative rescuers (and I don’t mean QAnon) must hold themselves to a higher standard. People may be deifying them and taking their every word as truth. That carries a heavy responsibility to not make firm declarative statements outside of one’s field of study, without intensive study in advance. While everything Seth said may be true, science has proof of many things and such evidence ought to be treated with respect.

The most important thing for the wellness rescuers and the conservative rescuers to do, in order to first do no harm, is to transcend their own egos. This can only be achieved by internal investigations. One must go inside and see what really happens in there. How do I actually function? Which of my thoughts and feelings and impulses appears to be coming from ego? Which of my inner experiences appear to be coming from a higher place?

The environment is very threatening and robs us of confidence, we are frustrated hence angry and repressing fear, redirecting the fear venomously outward as cutting remarks against the people one is blaming for all these bad inner feelings. When actually one can only blame oneself for those bad inner feelings, because by rising above the ego you can transmute those bad inner feelings into positive, constructive action that arouses no resistance from anyone.

Those are the innovative solutions we need now. That’s your assignment, all you rescuers of every stripe. Filter out ego and negativity and then do what your spirit moves you to do.

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country.

May you experience much Flow state ahead.

Love, Bill