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Be Indomitable

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, November 8, 2024.
Created February 16, 2024

Being indomitable is consciously favoring the approach mode.

The day my mother died, Jewish customs would have been for the whole family to do nothing else but “sit shivvah” for several days. Therefore, they were shocked when my father, MC and orchestra leader in a big NYC nightclub, went to work that night. His eyes briefly met mine, and without his having to say it out loud, his eyes told me what they had both always taught me about moments like these. The show must go on.

In moment-to-moment living, we each have our ups and downs. It occurs to some of us that we are being dominated by the inputs we receive from moment to moment, without having the ability to resist the invisible strings on our puppet selves being pulled by outside forces, and this stiffens our resolve to not be jerked around by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We then go inside to find or to build the control systems that will make us each master of our own self, impervious to outside control by anyone and anything.

This discovery of one’s inner abilities to overcome one’s own negative emotions and not to be excessively carried away by one’s own positive emotions goes back long before spoken or written language, long before humans were able to clarify the processes involved enough to pass along how-to instructions. One of the earliest schools of philosophy on record is stoicism. This philosophy was all about understanding and inculcating these control abilities in human beings. Epictetus, in my estimation the greatest stoic philosopher of them all, was born as a slave. Enslavement gave him a fertile ground of unhappiness to deal with, and instead of caving into a life of misery, he faced squarely up to his situation and found out how he could modify his reactions to that situation. His book The Enchiridion, when I first discovered it as a teenager, blew my mind because stuff I had been working on within myself had actually existed before.

The need to become more fatalistic and resilient may not be greater than ever before in human hisandherstory but it is certainly much greater now than ever before in my lifetime. I need not list the litany of threat vectors currently present on our dance card. Possibly the one that is most disheartening is the attitude of young people who feel they have been gypped, and those who feel that way do so, not without good reason. The world needs a lot of fixing and we are just the species that can do that fixing in the highest and most heroic manner. Soon there will be a realization of a need to shift into that mindset, rising to the challenge. As we did, as a species, in WWII. That same right stuff still resides within us. It’s time to call upon it, to draw it out, to become the indomitable selves that we are and have always been. It’s what we are here to learn how to do, and to demonstrate that we have learned it. Then perhaps we can graduate to the next classroom.

I find it very interesting to learn from latest neuroscience the underlying computational functions of the brain. My special interest comes from a lifetime of introspection with concentration in which I have always attempted to understand how I make decisions and to improve upon the methods I observe myself using. Now in the light of current neuroscience I can link up my experiential evidence with the revelations of fMRI and EEG. For example, Richy Davidson, one of my many neuroscientist mentors, back in the 1980s when we had a company together, discovered that emotional valence could be measured based upon asymmetrical energy use in the left and right lobes of the frontal cortex, a method that is still prominent today. In the brain, this valence is understood to be based on the concept of approach versus avoidance. Positive emotion comes along with approach, whereas negative emotion is part of avoidance.

Being indomitable is consciously favoring the approach mode.
Stepping forward to engage with the challenges.
Fixing rather than worrying.

One cannot simply decide to do this, and then it is done. The effort involved is primarily one of self-discipline. This is hardest in the beginning and then becomes easier and easier with practice.

Whatever we choose to focus on internally becomes a stronger force in our lives.

When one is thrown into the pool as a babe, one swims, and instinctively swims with the current if there is one. Given little time to think the modern child is rushed into play with other children, sports and then studies, with daily doses of media, creating masses of questions and thoughts from all these impressions. Processing time to contemplate all of this is not built into the daily regime of our culture yet. In a subtle and generally unnoticed way, the child proceeding into adulthood adopts a somewhat defensive coping lens as the main way of thinking. What could go wrong, fear, plans to deal with feared situations, doing this planning in snatches between externally assigned priorities which must be coped with moment to moment.

The most dangerous aspect of this condition is that if a person spends most of their time focused on what could go wrong, they are actually mentally rehearsing for those things to go wrong. To repeat, whatever we choose to focus on internally becomes a stronger force in our lives. If we are focusing on the downside scenarios we are increasing the probabilities of those scenarios occurring.

How does this happen? There is a continuum of explanations, schools of thought. Physicalists (believers in materialistic accidentalism) may admit that this occurs but insist that it is because the individual is giving off micromomentary signals which telegraph their fears in a way that provokes others to manipulate them, all on an unconscious level. Two of our greatest physicists of all time, Wheeler and Hawking, posit what Wheeler named the Participatory Anthropic Principle, by which our consciousness helps cause reality. This theory rests on Wheeler’s theory that underlying what we dub as physical (“its”) are “bits” of information, and that both consciousness and matter/energy are therefore reducible to information, out of which everything is made. This is a short step away from my theory that a single self-aware consciousness is where all this information resides.

In both versions of reality, physicalism and cosmopsychism, there is adequate support for the true existence of the programming of reality by the thoughts and feelings of the individual. However one explains it, it is there, and ignoring it and giving in to wallowing in pessimism, what we might call brain avoidance rather than brain approach, is self-sabotaging.

So here we all are as a species wallowing in pessimism. Remaining this way cannot have a happy ending. The stoic response to this situation is to unlock concern about the probable bad landing ahead, to fatalistically accept it could easily happen, but to make oneself focus courageously on bringing about the happy landing anyway. Once understanding the way the feedback loop works, this is the only sane response, taking active conscious control of where the mind is allowed to go.

Realism requires that a small allocation of time is spent on making contingency plans for how to avoid the undesired outcome, and how to deal with it should it occur, so long as first and last the mind is mentally rehearsing and pre-experiencing the desired future of the individual. Meaning that contingency planning should be done seriously and carefully but not dwelt upon, instead gotten over with, so as to resume consciously telling the universe the way the movie happy ending is to be for oneself.

Chemicals and electrical trickery is used within the brain and body which makes it hard to get out of bad moods such as fear, anxiety, grief, resentment, and so on. It helps me to realize that the sodium pentothal and other psychometric drugs used to interrogate and brainwash are the same sorts of chemical agents my own brain whips up to give me these overwhelming feelings that dissolve my ability to focus on fixing. Knowing this enables me to see my brain as trying to force me into feeling certain ways I know to be against my best interests, and gives me the gumption to force back those feelings.

“Yes, that could happen, but why do I care so much?”

“Yes, that could happen, and I’ve prepared myself to deal with it if it does happen, including not showing it’s gotten to me, but meanwhile, I might as well enjoy every second to the max, and it may never happen and I may get away with it to the very end.”

“Or if it eventually does happen, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I had fun without fear for such a long time, I got away with all of that, and so if it all ends badly at least I will know that I did what was right, what was good, and I can authentically admire myself for it.”

Self-admiration is a much healthier thing to experience than pride. Pride is not self-admiration because it goes too far and mixes it with vanity. This is caused by the needy defensive stance of the ego which is the sense of not having caught up with integrating all the clashing parts of myself (integrity).

There are other practical ways one can increase the ability to remain in the approach mode. Time alone especially in nature, paying attention internally, seeing the good, counting the blessings, seeing the beauty all around, remembering all the good in people, being grateful, opening the mind to all possibilities, recapturing the awe and wonder of existing as a consciousness in a vast universe, realizing the wellsprings of creativity inside which can be tapped to solve anything, remembering all of the love one has for this person and that thing, and understanding the scientific possibility that we are all one benevolent loving self, manifesting as many for the fun and learning. All of these are powerful inhibitors of the avoidance reaction.

You may still decide to avoid certain things that you conclude just bring you down, but you will do so indomitably rather than fearfully. You will find a smile on your face when you look in the mirror rather than a grim visage. Your sunny disposition will draw and uplift other people making it faster for this wave of indomitability to ripple out across the pond until herd immunity to fear and pessimism has been achieved.

Each of us shall then be a mensch.

Love to all,
Bill

The Feeling of Being Guided by a Higher Power to Do Good

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Powerful Mind Part 46

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – August 23, 2024
Created January 26, 2024

A 2023 Pew survey found that 45% of Americans “have had a sudden feeling of connection with something from beyond this world.”

“Have you ever wondered what life is all about?” I asked the precocious two-year-old.

“All the time,” she replied.

This is the kind of conversation that parents should initiate as early as possible in a child’s upbringing.

But since this is a rarity, we tend to grow up shoving our awe and wonder out of our conscious minds, because we don’t have time to dally. It’s all coming at us too fast, especially in recent centuries. A conscious mind process forms which Freud named the Ego and the Superego.

The Ego presents itself as the active conscious mind and so we all think of it as our self. It’s really more of a chosen spokesperson for the much greater totality of the real self that is our individuality.

The Superego is that part of the Ego (in my estimation) that second-guesses ourselves, our inner critic. Freud considered the Superego a separate functionality in which society’s demands are embedded as the conscience.

H.L. Mencken said, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that somebody may be watching.”

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may be the part of the brain playing a major role in the manifestations Freud labeled the Superego. It is probably also the structure supporting what Daniel Kahneman labeled as System 2, explicit thinking. Interestingly, Observer state (my term for metacognition) is very useful, and I associate it with the executive control network mediated by the frontal brain; but in Flow state, which is even more effective than Observer state, the frontal regions of the brain give up control to more primitive parts of the brain (“hypofrontality”), and the Ego and inner critic disappear, as intuition and practice meld everything into a sense of oneness that does itself effortlessly.

When one begins to shift into Flow state as a way of life, it transcends the Ego, as if the Ego had been training wheels which you can now take off your bike. You can now sense and live from the real you, your full self, not the defensive Ego, but from the joyous Muse within you, it was you all along, although it may also be the Self of the Universe living through you.

By now, many people know about the Flow state, and it has become formally recognized by the scientific and medical communities. However, there are some aspects of that state which are still taboo subjects. These are the spiritual intuitions which often accompany the Flow state.

We’ve already discussed Noia, my term for the intuitive feeling that invisible forces are trying to help us by getting us to notice certain stimuli which appear to be giving us information relevant to our current situation and/or thought process. U.S. Andersen, whom I’ve cited earlier, writes about surrendering control to what he calls the Secret Self, and he is talking about the same thing I’ve often referred to as the Universe, or the Muse within. The religion of Islam also preaches the same notion of releasing control to Allah.

It’s conceivable that one should first use the conscious mind and intuition to practice at life and gain a degree of proficiency at it before giving up the inner critic continuously second-guessing oneself, i.e. the Ego. Without practice, the Flow state might not come on so easily just by making a decision to release conscious control. Instead, one might be fooled by impulses coming from the Ego that one thinks are coming from higher guidance.

I know from my personal experience that the latter misclassification has dramatically fooled me many times in my life, especially as a youngster.

I think now that many spiritual people think they are being guided to make political choices by higher powers when it might actually be the Ego masquerading as God.

Even those of us who experience some Flow state every day are (wisely) hesitant to speak much about a feeling of being guided from above. It’s the sort of statement that can cause one can wind up being pigeonholed as a nut.

U.S. Andersen embraces this sense of being guided by the Universe to do things that will develop us as individuals and enable us to provide more value to others. Having been a successful pro football player and businessman perhaps he was less concerned about how people labeled him.

In this book Powerful Mind being serialized here, I’ve already recommended that you keep an open mind about whether the Universe might be a single Self, and you one avatar of The One. It is definitely a scientific possibility that cannot be ruled out. Whether or not in Flow state, I now take it as almost a certainty, because of my experiences. But I do not urge you to believe anything, merely keep an open mind to all possibilities, and notice what your own experience teaches you.

Set your sights high. Visualize how you want your life to be without undershooting out of fear of being heartbroken by failure. Don’t be attached to any outcome, just visualize the outcomes you want, and curtail negativity, and enjoy your life each moment. Turn negativity into learning and creatively adapting to circumstance. Don’t fight what is, go with it and steer toward the positive.

As Bob Dylan wrote, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Each of us is serving by the work we choose to do, we are serving people, they pay us money for what we do for them. In your life’s best dream—your visualization that you will refresh daily—you have to be doing the work that gives you joy and gets you into the Flow state, otherwise you are not on the path to your dream. If you have to make a difficult switch in your life, do it in the way that gives you and others joy rather than stress, and make changes patiently.

Leave open the possibility that you are working for the Universe and that it will guide you along the way to your dream; look for possible messages in everything, but don’t talk yourself into wishful thinking, stay balanced and open-minded, use all of your faculties, all of the instruments in your inner orchestra.

Attune yourself to what is happening to you – become one with it – and go with its flow, except where you feel the need to go around certain parts of it that simply don’t feel right.

Believe in yourself and your ability to tackle any problem life throws your way, just know that you have to put everything else aside and patiently, without time pressure, use single-pointed focus on that one problem. Other side thoughts will arise but note them in writing and put them aside for later. You can tackle everything but take it one at a time, don’t rush, and you’ll see that you can solve everything you need to.

The feeling of being guided by a higher power to do good is a wonderful feeling. Make sure you are being an empiricist about it, that other people are sincerely thanking you, that you are really doing good in general, not just for selected others, with some other folks actually being harmed by your actions, but doing good for everybody. That and a feeling of joy in your life are the two essential checkpoints that you are on the path to your dreams.

Key #12:

Continuously focus on, bring out, and enjoy the Good

The 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Powerful Mind Key

New Mental Strategy

Blogpost Link

#1

Trial-doubt your own last thought/feeling.

#2

Study, edit, and reset your automatic reactions.

#3

Constructively and kindly express what you are really feeling.

#4

Root for the Universe, not just for your current vehicle.

#5

Self-rating is irrelevant.

#6

Be sure of what YOU want and enjoy the journey to your dreams, without attachment to outcomes.

#7

Take Observer position, note your feelings without owning them.

#8

When there is too much going on, rotate attention to make sure every workstream is covered.

#9

Consciously determine how much to take your time.

#10

Patiently determine the most constructive use of each salient inner experience.

#11

Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse.

#12

Continuously focus on, bring out, and enjoy the Good.

Love to all,
Bill

Superfluous Superstructure of the Self

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June 7, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

We all pay some attention to our inner lives. But for some of us this means sustained micro-observation and for most of us it is occasional flashes in between slavish addiction to the endless rushes of information coming in through our five fascinating physical senses.

This tsunami of infobits roaring in has itself escalated over time, causing even more outward focus.

But even 2500 years ago, Aristotle made the same observation, commenting that the unobserved life is not worth living. He was trying to get more people to turn inward. His teacher’s teacher Socrates had started the whole thing by his exhortation “Know Thyself”. (Socrates had inspired Plato with whom Aristotle studied.)

The greatest philosophers and psychologists of all time were all practiced at inner micro-observation. This was especially true in ancient India, and for example, metacognition is at the core of Buddha’s teachings. In the modern era this includes William James, perhaps the best of them all at concentrated introspection, as well as Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow. Freud however was more of a rationalist, deducing things logically, whereas Jung was more of an intuitionist, taking the original feelings arising in his cognition without embellishing them with rational overlays as much as Freud did.

A long time ago by introspection I realized that thoughts do not arise as thoughts but as feelings, and then the cognitive affective processes embellish those feelings with attributed meanings, interpretations, often involving images, metaphors, and words, at which point they are truly what we all call thoughts.

This has recently been discovered by science, decades and millennia after the same insight was available to each of us by micro-inner-observation.

It will help you attain metacognition to imagine that your inner space has a map. At the pure core of your being imagine that you have a center, something like an energy or a gas, that you can sense. In higher states of consciousness such as the spiritual level of Flow state you can see this self of yours as light, often bluish. Most of the time you can only feel it.

Imagine now in this map that there is another part of yourself that you yourself have built over time, a superstructure that is overlaid on top of the central sphere of your selfness. Suspend disbelief for the sake of argument, and for the moment consider my theory that this part of you is akin to an artificial intelligence (AI) that has a physical underpinning of neurons and their interconnections in your brain and nervous system, specific neurons and interconnections which were caused by your experiences, especially where there were degrees of emotion and assimilated “learning”. The word “learning” is in quotes because much of this was mis-learning.

The entire superstructure taken together corresponds to what Freud termed the Ego.

This superstructure uses a substantial part of your mental energy but the return on that energy investment tends to be negative. The expenditure of this incremental cognitive load tends to do you a lot more harm than good.

Freud said that this appurtenance was called into being when the baby first experiences frustration at not getting what it wants or needs. It functions as the security officer (Worf in Star Trek) and press agent, business manager, negotiation agent, sales rep for what Freud called the Id, and I refer to above as your core beingness.

The reason I say Freud was more of a rationalist is that when I introspect into my Id or core essence self I do not find the animal selfishness and limitation to hardwired instinct that Freud said I would find there. Instead I find a happy lightness of being that is not needy but is caring and fascinated.

Try this experiment and I feel that you will totally get what I’m saying and can add it to your personal strength arsenal.

  • Take your place in your core, the pure witness, the observer.
  • From that vantage point, simply observe the feelings that arise in your superstructure.
  • You will sense the apparent duality in you at that point, probably a realization of your own indifference and yet interest in these ego feelings.
  • This higher feeling is the most important key to metacognition.

You may have experienced this many times in your life, and it may have come about by temporarily hitting bottom. When you have been pushed around by life and have not seen the lesson the universe intended, you may in your frustration, resentment and rage just say to yourself that you give up, you just don’t care anymore.

When this happened to Bucky Fuller – heartbroken by unrequited love – he decided to commit suicide. Once he did that he was in his core self, looking at all of the superstructural self he had built, disillusioned in a good way by all that stuff, having just given it all up. He now discovered no reason to end his life, for a new better version of it was just beginning. He then became the Bucky Fuller genius we all remember.

You can practice this core self-perspective any time you want, for a few seconds or minutes or extended periods, even continuously for the rest of your life.

The essence of the feeling is that you are above all the nigglings in your superstructure. It’s only habit which has made you so vulnerable to those sudden feelings of worthlessness, fear, anxiety, defeatism, hatred, envy, resentment, and so on which have become automatic and super powerful.

Habits reinforced by hundreds of thousands of repetitions in your life do not pack up and go away right away. They will sometimes come back and even overpower you sometimes. But once you have learned to identify with your core and not your superstructure you are on the high road to true freedom. Keep practicing this Observer state and you cannot lose.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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Interconnectedness

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May 31, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

God bless Jerry Zaltman. In my May 17th blog post, I reported that Harvard’s pioneer neuroscientist who introduced the field of subconscious measurement by his creation of the patented ZMET system, is joining with me in a project to introduce methods in schools for thinking more constructively, objectively, clearly, and creatively. In laying the groundwork for this project, Jerry is finding that others are already moving in the same direction, which is inspiring.

Today I received notice from Jerry of a new paper in the Journal of Education for Business  – Mental health among college students: Relationships with Actively Open-Minded Thinking, Spirituality, and Psychological Wellbeing – by educators at two US state universities, Arkansas and Idaho, which proves that:

“Mental health, like many other physical diseases, can contribute to a significant loss of output in our economy. Higher education institutes can play a significant role in enhancing the mental wellbeing of college students. In support of this endeavor, this research investigates how actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and spirituality (SP) relate to psychological wellbeing (PWB). Data revealed that both AOT and SP have a positive impact on most dimensions of PWB and in some instances, SP acts as a moderator. Our study highlights the importance of SP in the PWB of college students.”

One might wonder how spirituality being taught in public and state schools jibes with the separation of church and state. This paper however addresses spirituality at its core essence as a feeling and as a concept of interconnectedness. The spiritual feeling an individual has is that person’s sense of being connected with others, and possibly even with the universe itself. The Founders who insisted on freedom of religion would probably not deny the teaching of this concept and the feelings that surround it.

In the paper, the authors compare spirituality in this meaning to holistic thinking, starting from the big picture of how a specific subject is connected with other subjects, before drilling down to a micro level within that subject of interest. In this they consciously align with what they call the Eastern philosophical approach, contrasting it with the Western approach of starting from the micro level and studying a subject and possibly never getting to seeing the connections between that subject and all other subjects.

Back in the 70s, someone came up with the idea of adding one more level to Piaget’s model of the evolution of human cognitive processes, Systems Stage, which would appear above Formal Operational Stage in the model. This is where holistic thinking comes in, seeing everything as part of a single interconnected whole.

Prior to that the term “Systems Thinking” was coined by Professor Jay Forrester in 1956 when he founded the Systems Dynamic Group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

The idea that we are all interconnected was reintroduced in a new way in the modern era by one of Piaget’s influencers, Carl Gustav Jung, who published the idea of the Collective Unconscious in 1916.

Today in the Standard Interpretation of Quantum Physics it is recognized that particles become entangled by association with one another and after that they are able to share information instantaneously regardless of the distance they are apart.

This lays the groundwork for physics to one day include the entanglements of consciousness as part of its quantum entanglement theory. John Wheeler has already established a framework for including consciousness in the quantum physics model, called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (1983), which Stephen Hawking referenced and tacitly endorsed in his final book.

This Principle explains that consciousness, which observes, transforms non-determined probability waves into concrete realities by its act of observation. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God”, I carry Einstein’s, Wheeler’s, and Hawkings’ ideas further by speculating that a single consciousness is all that exists, and that one of the ways it operates is to “look out from” a multitude of apparent selves (all of us including everything in the universe), and that Wheeler’s Quantum Foam is the substance of that Original Consciousness.

Science consists of theory and experimentation. Experimentation is the way that theories are proven, altered, or disproven. One wonders what sorts of experiments could be run in order to study the relationship of consciousness to quantum physics.

Another brilliant neuroscientist and perhaps the first of the neurophysicists, Dr. Richard Silberstein, is the first to carry out experimentation into the possible quantum entanglement of consciousness.

Science Explores Telepathy from a New Angle

Robert A. Heinlein wrote many great books, one of which is called Time for The Stars. The story is about achieving interstellar travel but needing a way to stay in touch with Earth, a method that is not limited to the speed of light, because when traveling light years away, messages would take years to go back and forth, which is not conducive to providing learning to the people at home.

In the story, the solution found is that some identical twins are able to telepathically communicate with each other, and that these messages happen instantaneously regardless of distance.

My great friend and highly respected neuroscientist, Dr. Richard Silberstein, never read that Heinlein novel. But he got the same idea. He read scientific papers which led him to have the idea. Having invented and patented an improved brain measurement system (steady state tomography, SST) he applied that method (commercially available through the company that Richard founded, Neuro-Insight) to conduct an experiment with monozygotic (MZ, coming from a single egg, “identical”) human twins.

The experiment was written up in the respected neuroscience journal Frontiers in Neuroscience paper published about a month ago.  There is now strong statistical evidence that information was transmitted mind to mind in a significant number of cases within the design.

If and when science was to announce that telepathy is real, that too could have a potentially positive impact on the moods and emotions of the masses.

It would say —

We can be more than we think we can be.

Here’s a ten-minute video piece on Connectedness: Sanity Is an Acquired Taste: Connectedness

My best to all,
Bill

 

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