Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created April 2, 2026
The big problem with Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) – the pandemic, which almost no one realizes has made most of us borderline psychotics – is perhaps more accessibly explained as never growing up. Still thinking and acting childishly, but in a bigger physical body.
In the still male-dominated civilization we have inherited, this manifests as little boys becoming bigger boys but still playing with the same sorts of toys. Even before the ages when violent video games became the main toy, little boys and girls were privy to watching the television/streaming shows which glorify the heroes who are experts in violence. These are the characteristics of heroes that we teach children: they can punch out every bad guy. They are also good with guns and can throw knives with uncanny accuracy. Not just the heroes but also many of the heroines, particularly of the Marvel variety.
How could it end up any differently when violence dominates the news and, in a somewhat more controlled way, is inherent in sports? On top of reality shows, dramas, etc.
President Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex. That has evolved now into the military-technology complex. The four biggest technology companies, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, are each now the size of a mid-sized country in terms of annual gross revenues produced, and are projected to become the size of large countries soon.
“Everybody wants money and fame,” my great friend Zoe Kalar despairs. Her action to make this situation better has been to spend years building a better social media called 8. Standing for the infinity symbol standing up. Encouraging creativity and love, and AI-protected against hate. With millions of people and growing, backed by over a hundred caring advertisers.
Violence, money, and fame ought not occupy such large shares of our timespace. A more civilized civilization would spend more of its timespace with authenticity, respect, taking responsibility, creativity, love, doing good, and having uplifting and thought-provoking fun experiences. Although our rational minds might universally agree with this last statement, our rational minds are not in control of our actions.
Not growing up consists of acting out the conditioning received from others without realizing it. Not observing and learning from one’s own behavior and feelings what is really driving you. Not taking control over from that robot. Not choosing your own autonomous life and values. Not discovering your true gifts and developing them to Flow state levels. Living a meaningless life.
A brilliant article by Cal Newport in The New York Times recounts how physical exercise went from being something done regularly by 24% of Americans to 60% of the U.S. population between 1955 and 1971, and he lays out a plan for inducing a similar uptick in cognitive exercise. I’ve been trying to do the same thing all my life. I just wrote a note to Cal that reading and setting time aside for contemplation and staying away from social media are all definitely parts of the exercise needed, and I sent him copies of my two books of cognitive exercise, Mind Magic and Powerful Mind. I mentioned to him my diagnosis that long before today’s tech, our species was already on a long downhill decline in the use of our amazing brains and minds, as a result of mass conditioning to prescribed ideologies, and the absence of a culture supportive of daily periods of solitary contemplation.
The ancient Kabbalah schematic called the Tree of Life was, in my estimation, a coded understanding of the process of growing up.
Cautionary note: This is my intuitive interpretation, and may be considered unorthodox or revisionist by serious teachers and students of Kabbalah.
There are 5 levels of the self, going down the middle from top to bottom. We are born and at first simply experience the life of the body, not necessarily remembering anything from the day before. Soon the ego is born, the first time we do not get something we need, and a manager appears in our minds to rectify such situations in the future (Freud’s idea, which I agree with). We might live 100 years and not go any further than that.
Or, under the right circumstances, most of us can also shift at times into a state in which we are non-self-protectively simply being genuine. That is the “self” in the sphere right above the ego. The Tree of Life implies (to me) that we must achieve a balance between love and work in our lives in order to achieve a stable evolution from ego to self.
Most non-Americans have a view that Americans are all workaholics. This is supported by a lot of good evidence, although it might not apply to all of us. That would definitely constitute an imbalance which would set us back in growing up. In addition, our culture does not make it easy for us to align the work we get paid for with what our passion work would be, and there is no cultural inducement for us to spend any time trying to figure out what our passion work would be. These things tend to keep us from growing up to all that life offers.
Nevertheless, most of us have experienced some time in the self, and many of us get a bit of that each day for most days of the year.
Then, in order to keep growing up, we need to balance mercy and severity. This is very difficult. In the USA, we have split into two subcultures: one of which is overbalanced in the direction of severity, and the other, which is overbalanced in the direction of mercy. Because of the male domination and glorification of violence by most of our stories and heroic role models, severity appears more attractive, and this appears to be reaching a peak at the moment.
Whenever we, as individuals, have escaped from ego into self, and also achieve a balance between severity and mercy, we rise to yet a higher level of consciousness: the Flow state. Here, everything we do is automatically the right thing, for as long as the state lasts, often broken by ego thoughts and feelings, cutting the connection.
Once we have reached that penultimate state, we are called a mensch in the Jewish subculture.
At that point, there is one final balance to be achieved, between wisdom, “knowing what the right action to take is,” and understanding, “accepting the situation and forgiving those who do not take right action.”
When that final balance has been achieved, the human has spiritually merged with the One Consciousness of the Universe, the Self, capital S.
In India, such a person is called a sadguru, a true guru. This confers the additional power to lift others simply by one’s presence. This is the end goal of growing up. In Eastern philosophies, the purpose of reincarnation is to achieve this end goal, which is likely to take more than a single incarnation if one is born on a planet as a member of a very young species which has not yet learned to make the best use of all of its potentials.
Love to all,
My new book POWERFUL MIND has some great reviews
“A compelling, optimistic, and original approach to mental focus, Powerful Mind is an innovative tool for self-discovery and creative liberation. Succinctly outlined and intuitively structured, this book is replete with rational advice, using a radical but commonsense approach. It takes a rare and adroit thinker to incorporate myriad worldviews and welcome diverse readers, regardless of ideological allegiance, but Harvey shows himself to be precisely that. The book is a masterfully structured, intellectually affirming, and potentially paradigm-shifting read.”
~ Self-Publishing Review, ★★★★
