Tag Archives: EOP

Mind Dwell Hath Consequences

Leave a reply

Powerful Mind Part 45
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 11, 2024.
Created January 19, 2024
Read Powerful Mind 44

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will eventually appear in your external experience...

Quote from You Are the Universe: Imagine That, Chapter 17 – “Predreaming” by Bill Harvey

My wife Lalita is an avid reader, she reads a couple of books a week. The other day she came across a book she had to mention to me, because of the similarity of its title to my book Mind Magic. The book is called The Magic in Your Mind. It was written by U.S. (Uell Stanley) Andersen, an American football player and businessman. I was fascinated and looked it up and then bought it and am reading it.The book asserts that our imagination controls what happens to us in our lives. This is not a new idea, nor is it just an idea: since antiquity, rare human beings have discovered this way of using their mind, verified that it works, and written about it. The earliest trace of it is in the Vedas going back to memorized but not written texts possibly as early as ~1700 BC or even earlier, finally converted to written form ~500 BC.

In the Sermon On The Mount (~27 CE), Jesus quotes Proverbs 23 Verse 7 “As a man thinketh, so shall he be”.

The Law of Attraction was the book by William Walker Atkinson (1906) which might have inspired Jose Silva to create the Silva Mind Control Method (1977) – or Jose might have discovered it again by himself. In between these books (1961) was when Andersen published his book. The Secret was then published by Rhonda Byrne in 2006. Any of these writers might have been inspired by earlier books, and/or themselves discovered the phenomena and the ways of using them.

I’m finding the writing in Andersen’s book to be inspired and exalting to read. Even though I know these things, the way he explains them is beautiful and lofty. His poetic metaphors and allusions have the ring of truth. I wish I had found his book before he passed away in 1986, it would have been great fun to have conversations with him.

When I was writing Mind Magic in 1972 (published in 1976), I purposely avoided metaphysics and cosmology, because I wanted the book to have universal appeal, including atheists and people of all religions. The methods in Mind Magic are positioned as “useful fictions” and as “lenses” which had been invented by me and tested in my life. The reader is invited to try them and see for themselves that they are pragmatic, i.e. the methods work.

My book You Are The Universe – YATU (2014) I went the other way and rooted my mental methodologies in a picture of the Universe as One Self playing all roles, thus each of our minds is actually the universal mind enjoying the view from one avatar’s perspective. In that book (YATU) I report on my own (mundane and extraordinary) experiences and theorize about how reality works, in order to explain those experiences. And I theorize why The One Self is playing this game.

Chapter 17 of YATU is called “Predreaming” and is all about how to use the mind to cause the future you want, and how to avoid accidentally “ordering poison from the menu” by careless use of these same faculties. An excerpt:

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will
eventually appear in your external experience on the Universal
Computer Screen we call material reality.
You are tuning in these material experiences, ordering them,
Attracting them to you, by dwelling on them.
It makes no difference if your dwelling on them consists of
prayer to get them (your desires), or dread of getting them (your
fears).
The “dwelling-on” places the order, in either case.
Oblivious to our inherited “ordering power”, almost all of us are
using it against ourselves.

The difficulty of using this Predreaming method is not the intense visualization of your most precious dreams actually coming true in real life, that part is fun, it’s almost like daydreaming with purpose. The hard part is keeping your mind from repeatedly drifting into emotively imaging dreaded eventualities that are exactly what you most ardently desire to not happen.

In my novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, the character Templegard is the only soldier-spy tested by U.S. Army Intelligence who is able to not think of a green monkey. For most of us, even those of us with relatively high degrees of mental self-discipline, it’s almost impossible to not think of something. The trick is to not avoid thinking of X, but to focus on thinking of Y, and that will work, but requires practice at first.

Any negativity in the mind will tend to bring negativity into your actual life. This is why in previous chapters of Powerful Mind we have oft mentioned quickly turning off internal alarms and moving on to solutions for whatever is causing those alarms. Negativity is a very useful alarm system but when we are in Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) we tend to wallow in the alarm that is going off, rather than turning it off, thanking it, and moving on to planning how to deal with the thing that is causing the alarm to go off.

The more intensely you detail the future you want to happen the better. This same attention to detail is valuable in preparing contingency plans for what you will do if the very things that you do not want to happen, happen anyway. Not only planning what you will say or do or what your face and body language will communicate, but experiencing it in your imagination, what it will look like and feel like from being inside yourself in that future moment.

Once you have pre-experienced the worst eventualities you will find that some of their sting has been burned out. This will make it easier to casually turn aside if they pop up again in your mind. You will feel prepared and less concerned that such a thing might happen to you. Stoic, courageous, and fatalistic. Resolved.

This can be done every night before going to sleep as regards what might happen in the day ahead. First disarm the undesired outcomes by preparing for them, then put them aside and focus on predreaming the outcomes you do want to happen. If you are comfortable praying, go right ahead. I think of praying as asking for cosmic fire support. I don’t feel comfortable asking the Universe for help in trivial self-serving matters, I feel comfortable asking for the Universe to help in instances where the outcomes I want are beneficial to all concerned, although in the short run some may be more benefitted than others.

Andersen argues that we should strive to change our identification with our ego to our identification with the Universe. This is unquestionably right in my opinion however it can run into friction with one’s atheism or specific religious beliefs (many Jews for example are uncomfortable equating themselves with God). This is why I rephrase his exhortation to identify with our Muse, the “voice” (some guidance might not involve words) inside that gives us the best advice. It comes down to the same thing as Andersen’s advice. And in Mind Magic, the final chapter is all about Identifying with the Universe. Here in Powerful Mind, I’m refining that only slightly into identifying with your Muse, as operationally easier to put into practice. You will by doing so tend to let lower thoughts float downstream without acknowledging them or identifying with them. You’ll instead tend to wait for the Muse and invite it space in which to be heard (or the advice felt and comprehended without words).

More on Key #12 in upcoming posts. In the meantime, ration negativity, and keep track of what percent of your time you detect it inside; and enjoy purposeful daydreaming about the future you want with all of your powers of imagination.

Listen to my latest interview about my book THE GREAT BEING
Moments with Marianne with Bill Harvey KMT radio interview about THE GREAT BEING book

In this 15-minute interview with Marianne Pestana on KMET ABC News Affiliate, I talk about THE GREAT BEING, my latest book in the Agents of Cosmic Intelligence series.
Listen here.

 

 

 

You may know that I’ve been publishing a sci-fi series called Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, an alternative history of the Universe, in which some of the main characters put into practice the mental methodologies I’ve compiled into my nonfiction books. All of this is aimed at enabling the human race to become more effective and to undo the messes made in the past. By contradistinction to AI, Artificial Intelligence, I think of this as HI, Human Intelligence. I feel that it’s obvious we should be putting at least as much time, money, and effort into HI as into AI – especially if we are fearful of what AI can do to subjugate us.

The books in the series so far take place long ago or in the near future, but what was missing until now is how the Universe began, and what happened on Earth before ~3000 BC. That is now in The Great Being, which is chronologically the first book in the series.

Two reviewers have already written reviews of The Great Being and they really “get” what the whole series is aiming at. I’ve waited for this feeling of someone really getting it for a long time and it is heartwarming to say the least. Here are excerpts and links to the reviews. — Bill

Reviews of The Great Being Warm the Cockles of My Heart

Indie reader approved

4.2 stars. A compelling and thought-provoking work of science fiction. Harvey’s sprawling, hugely ambitious exploration of consciousness, free will, and the eternal dance between light and darkness is intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant. The novel’s central message—that all beings, no matter how lost or misguided, are ultimately part of a greater cosmic unity—is a hopeful and uplifting one…Read the full review. — Indie Reader

IR Independent Review

A singularly unique and eye-opening work of visionary fiction, Blending realms of historical, religious, spiritual, and mythological traditions, this is an ambitious and epically creative read … The full value will be more readily apparent to those readers who can see the threads of allegory, legend, and science woven into one unified whole. Enlightenment and radical self-awareness are powerful undercurrents within the narrative; the role of dogmatic thinking, hierarchical power structures, and the tyranny of knowledge are explored in various ways through the characters’ revelations, opinions, and personalities. The story within a story here is one of psychological development and the real-life pursuit of higher modes of thinking … A wide-reaching and insightful assessment of human civilization and behavior…Read the full review.—Self-Publishing Review / Independent Review of Books

bluelink review

Tonally amusing, aesthetically fearless, and packed with witty observation and divine incident … By turns accessible, erudite, and hallucinogenic, it is an intriguing philosophical romp that cleverly fuses psychedelic science-fiction and fantasy elements with organized religion’s creationist ideologies and the scientific theories of evolutionism … An ambitious, entertaining novel packed with spiritual curiosity, one that will greatly appeal to fans of intelligent science fiction and alternative history stories alike… Read the full review. —BlueInk Review

booklife by Publishers WeeklyBlending spiritual philosophy, alternate history, pre-historic adventure, and brisk life-after-life storytelling, The Great Being is above all a beginning. First comes creation itself, which gets started with the knockout opening line (“The Nothingness felt surprise upon realizing itself.”), … This is the fourth entry published but the first chronological chapter. It shares the swift pacing, spiritual seeking, twisty plotting, and sharply human dialogue of the earlier books, though its focus feels tighter… Read full review, —BookLife by Publisher’s Weekly.  

kirkus reviewsIn Harvey’s retelling of the creation myth, heavenly agents combat a growing rebellion unfolding on Earth … this story deftly explores human nature—the uplifting qualities and dour traits alike … enthralling tale of humanity’s origins and cosmic espionage… Read full review, — Kirkus Reviews

Midwest Book ReviewA real standout…The radically inviting nature of this story brings with it the opportunity to view life and God in an entirely different light…Designed to awaken and introduce new interpretations of spirituality and life meaning. As readers who may not have expected such nuances come to absorb the greater gift of The Great Being‘s message, they will find the radically inviting nature of this story brings with it the opportunity to view life and God in an entirely different light … The story evolves with a reinterpretation of myths, events, and concepts that doesn’t just invite, but demands discussion and insights on the parts of all kinds of spiritual thinkers as the story evolves a unique and compelling flavor of discovery … One of Bill Harvey’s great talents lies not just in his storytelling ability, but his focus on translating life events and history with new interpretations … Readers interested in transformative reading… will find The Great Being‘s message to be one of hope, discovery, and new ways of viewing the universe [and] will find The Great Being a standout. Read the full review. — Diane Donovan for Midwest Book Review

THE GREAT BEING is available in print and Kindle. Read an excerpt.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

Become All You Really Are

Leave a reply

Powerful Mind Part 41
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog. October 4, 2024
Created December 22, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 40

Who are you, really? You probably play many roles in life, and try to live up to what others expect of you in each role. Your body language now moves by itself without you even noticing it, but each move was pressed into you like a piece of movable type impressing into clay, by your subconscious emulation of your role models.

My unofficially adopted older brother Bill Heyer opined that my book Mind Magic might be re-titled Really See Yourself. He was talking about your real self underneath those acquired roles and conditioned habits.

The movement in psychotherapy today to consider the inclusion of psychedelics in treatment – which goes back to antiquity and is related more to rites of passage than to treatment of mental diseases – reflects the common experience of those who have seriously experimented with LSD, psilocybin and other mind-altering chemicals of suddenly being able to see themselves, their imitative robotic selves and the true experiencer self under the layers of conditioning. This is generally a life-altering experience, and it is for the better, for minds that have been strengthened enough to withstand the extreme disorientation and to be able to integrate it into a constructive total picture of reality.

This degree of self-realization does not however require drugs, putting the 12 Keys into practice will take you to the same place in a more gradual way.

In your day-to-day life, you have seen yourself on some occasions as having a lot to offer the world, and at other times you may have seen yourself as worthless, but these mood swings are part of the package, not evidence of what your true value is. Your true value in my estimation of reality far exceeds your most grandiose views of yourself. Because my best guess is that deep down inside each of us is an avatar of the universe itself, what the human race has always called God.

In my theory summarized in A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” all that exists is a single consciousness at play, a single Experiencer that multiplies itself in order to behold and interact with itself from many viewpoints.

Those philosophers who accept the idea of the universe possibly being conscious but reject the idea that this consciousness is benevolent, base their position on the existence of suffering. They conclude that the existence of suffering proves that there cannot be a loving God. My fiction series Agents of Cosmic Intelligence is designed to demonstrate one of many scenarios in which there can be a benevolent conscious universe and suffering can exist in that universe as a learning experience resulting from enabling eternal avatars to have free will. It is we the avatars who cause the suffering by errors we make from which we learn more and more, lifetime after lifetime.

You may be an avatar of the universe. My theory may be wrong. Nothing of this is scientifically provable yet. However, if you open your mind to all possibilities you can gather evidence through your own experience. If you do not foreclose the possibility, you may hear in your mind “advice” that appears to be coming from wisdom you yourself didn’t know you possessed, and which works spectacularly well in the real world. This may come in the form of words or of a wordless hunch that comes true. When you are not blocking these possibilities by arbitrary or conditioned fixed-position skepticism, you might be surprised to notice how often you get these accurate intuitions. Jung included intuition as one of the four functions of consciousness, along with perceptions/memories, thinking, and feeling.

Intuitions can be explained without necessarily invoking extrasensory perception. For example, the totality of experiences stored in memory might be the source of these hunches we cannot explain, which we name as subconscious processing.

Many of us succeed in opening our minds to all possibilities to a degree that enables us to experience unusual and often useful events, such as knowing before picking up the phone whom the call is coming from, what someone is about to say, why one friend always flinches when you lift your right arm expressively, where a particular industry will be in a few years, exactly what to say to relieve a person who is torturing himself or herself, and to see through fakery. And much more.

All you truly are is probably so much greater than what you think.

Ego wants to believe that but for the wrong reasons. Ego is essentially a defensive system, what Hobbes was talking about when he described how we will pick fights with people out of fear. Ego is the operating system of the biological AI inside our brains and nerve networks. In higher states of consciousness when one perceives Oneness directly, feeling at one with the universe and loving everything and everybody while retaining realistic understanding of weaknesses in others which render them not to be trusted in the present moment, the ego has been bypassed and the conscious mind is focused in itself.

Empiricism has devolved in current practice into measuring the things we can measure with instruments. Its original meaning was to observe what actually happens in reality and that includes within one’s own psyche. William James was among the last of the great psychologists to employ introspection as a methodology, and more recently Maslow and Csikszentmihalyi brilliantly drew upon introspection as a supplement to the observation of behaviors. Introspection helps explain behavior. You can use that yourself. If you do something that you yourself cannot explain why you did it, introspection can ultimately reveal why some part of you, perhaps ego attachments, perhaps Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), caused you to do it.

The civilization culture we take for granted has dwarfed our concept of ourselves. Acceleritis is the word I coined to describe how information overload has forced us into EOP and to call attention to the fact that it is all still accelerating, that unless we learn the trick of really seeing ourselves and everything else without conditioned filtration, we are going to be more gnomish in the future than we are today. We can see evidence all around us of civilization on the brink of falling apart, people becoming more distrustful of one another and more pessimistic, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom that we will live out if we don’t take charge of our own consciousness now.

We used to have a mythos that awed and inspired us, and many of us still retain a fragment of that in religion or inclusive idealism. We recommend keeping an open mind about anything being possible unless and until it is proven otherwise by multiple replications of the scientific method. That open-mindedness allows awe and wonder to coexist with logic and reason. Until we know for sure what the universe is and what consciousness is, based on science as proven as quantum physics and relativity, we make our decisions day to day based on not knowing if we are an avatar of the universe whose consciousness shall live forever, or an animal that will die permanently, we have to make those moment to moment decisions to be optimal in the context of both possibilities.

In that existential situation it is not unreasonable to talk to God in your own mind if you feel like it. The conscious universe of which you are a part is a real possibility, no law of existing science precludes it. Many respected scientists take a premature stand against anything even remotely close to God, and in our respect for them, many of us downgrade the possibility of God, although this is what a follower does by blindly and loyally following everything an authoritarian says. Take back your right to think for yourself without being swayed by what others, even brilliant scientists, think. Take back your autonomy. You can do this without invoking faith, wishful thinking, superstition, or belief, just by remembering with extreme clarity that nothing has been proven yet either way.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He also pointed out that what we don’t know is vast compared to what little we do know so far. Under these conditions, it is a mistake to adhere rigidly to one or the other indefensible position. At some point in your life (you might be one of the rare people lucky to have already reached this stage) your own experiences might compel you to take the position that you know that God exists, and you will make all your decisions in the context of that certainty. But there’s no need to rush it. Best to stick to empiricism, your own experience, and to not foreclose any possibilities without sufficient evidence that such foreclosure will benefit you permanently.

We are embarked on Key #11. Stay open to the possibilities that you may have extrasensory perception, precognition, even the possibility that the universe is trying to help you and is sending you messages. Remove the blocks.

More to come on this.

My best to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

Embrace the High Path

Leave a reply

Powerful Mind Part 22
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – September 20, 2024
Created August 4, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 21

This begins the introduction to Powerful Mind Key #4.

Don’t Ignore the Ultimate Questions

Why is there a universe at all? Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing here? “What’s it all about, Alfie?” (from the song “Alfie” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the 1966 film Alfie.)


Read “Alfie” lyrics

As little children first realizing these questions for ourselves, we are awed. We might experience an oxytocin rush, with the hair at the base of our neck standing up and chills up and down our spine.

The vast majority of us eventually give up on these questions as unanswerable. We don’t see how those ultimate questions relate to our day to day lives. However, they do relate to our everyday lives. In ways that we are not aware of, the hidden assumptions we make about these ultimate questions leave us with very little motivation to act nobly, and so our lives tend to devolve into a form of quiet desperation (Thoreau) I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).

Coming full circle, returning back to our childhood perspective of awe and wonder, is to be reborn. The benefits will be at least as strong as each of the Keys we have already shared and those to follow.

As a starting point let’s go back to the greatest, most advanced and sophisticated scientists we have ever produced, in all of the recorded history of the only civilization on Earth of which we have present knowledge: Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking.

In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” (I refer to it as “ATOE”) I present a more complete account of the final theories of Einstein and Wheeler, which I’ll therefore only very briefly summarize here.

Einstein felt certain that the universe is evidence of an intelligence far greater than our own. An intelligence that our own intelligence can learn to understand! This gave Einstein those oxytocin thrills all his life through childhood and adulthood.

Wheeler postulated that the universe originally existed as probability waves, and evolved consciousness which collapses the probability waves into the matter energy spacetime universe that we who have consciousness all experience. He coined the term “Anthropic Participatory Principle” to mean that we who have consciousness are participating in the creation of the universe of which we are a part.

Both scientists were comfortable in making the obvious assumption that the universe can be thought of and described as one thing, of which we the observers and co-creators are intrinsic parts. That acceptance by philosophers and scientists that the universe can be cognized as a single thing is a thread running through all history of thought, going back to long before the Rig Veda in the East and Thales in the West.

When considering the ultimate questions, it helps to begin there, letting one’s mind envision the universe as one thing.

“Visualize the whole universe as one thing
Every individual of every species
Every idea
Every event
Every moment of time
Every percept
Every lump of matter and energy
All parts of one thing.”
  —Mind Magic, Page ix

In his last book Brief Answers To The Big Questions, in which he shares his final thoughts, Stephen Hawking writes: “In 1980, I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance that we would discover a complete unified theory in the next twenty years. We have made some remarkable progress in the period since then, but the final theory seems about the same distance away.”

Perhaps this is because we have been averse to considering certain possibilities due to biases we don’t realize we have.

For one thing, except for Wheeler, and to some extent Einstein with his thought experiments involving “the observer” (consciousness in the act of taking measurements), consciousness has been left out of all the proposed unified field theories of the last 100 years.

What if consciousness is the missing piece without which no one will ever discover a complete unified theory of physics?

Wheeler is the one of these three giants who came closest to achieving the inclusion of consciousness in his overarching theory of reality. In his stated view, the universe came first, and consisted of quantum foam in which virtual particles flickered in and out of existence, and then, as if to be appreciated, this universe developed an audience: consciousness in sentient living things.

Hawking refers to the Anthropic Principle a number of times in his final book. He points out that there might be an infinite number of universes, and in our universe, all of the conditions are conducive to the development of intelligent life, but we shouldn’t make too much of that, because we are the intelligent life forms lucky to have been born into one of the universes whose conditions supported the development of intelligent life. So of course to us we would assume consciousness to be a necessary ingredient to achieve a universe of actual hard events rather than mere probabilities. But Hawking wants us to leave open the possibility that other universes might exist too, with intelligence and consciousness never developing in them, perhaps collapsing probability waves into concrete things and determined events by some other means besides consciousness.

What if consciousness came first? This is one direction that has not been sufficiently explored by the greats of physics.

If consciousness came first, to me, everything falls neatly into place. A number of science writers in this 21st Century have written articles asking if we might all be living in a giant computer simulation. This is a very similar idea to my Theory Of The Conscious Universe, which is summarized in ATOE and explained in the most speculative detail in my book You Are The Universe. As Wheeler noted, information appears to be more basic to the universe than matter energy spacetime; he called this his “Bits Before Its” principle. Information is the stuff that goes through computers, and through consciousness.

We may be on the edge of the next great leap in physics, a world in which the universe is accepted to be intelligent, and each of us is an intrinsic part of that universe. This worldview, which I believe will be verified scientifically down the road a bit, will totally change the way we relate to one another. Even having an open mind about this possibility will have positive effects on how people deal with each other, and how well the world works.

When you look inside yourself, you may see that you have already formed certain assumptions contradictory to this view of a unified conscious universe. Living in the times that we are living through right now, with so much divisiveness and violent competition and hatred, the idea that we might all be parts of a single consciousness may seem preposterous, and we have been quick to slap the labels “superstition” and “magical thinking” on all such ideas – except when people like Einstein and Wheeler talk that way.

Opening the mind to such a possibility leads to self-questioning about how does one act if we ourself might actually turn out to be part of one consciousness? We actually have several choices.

  1. “Reject”: reject these ideas entirely and go on with your life as before (you already know this is not my advice from past blogposts).
  2. “Hedge”: continue to follow your past patterns (you already know this is not my advice from past blogposts) but just in case it might turn out to be true that we are all one thing together, try a little harder to get along with others.
  3. “Embrace”: embrace the high path. Act the way you would if you are betting on the One Consciousness Universe. Take yourself seriously. Act with purpose. Leave the world a better place than you found it. Pay close attention to your own subtle hunches. Reconsider everything carefully and mindfully. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Take responsibility. Protect others. Set a good example. Rise above negativity.

Divinity

 What is the meaning of the word “divinity”? The dictionaries give circular definitions, and come close to being more specific by using words like “godlike” and “holiness”, but fall short of explaining what it means to be godlike or holy or divine.

Teleology (from the Greek for “targeting”) is a word which philosophers use to suppose that the universe might have a preferred direction as to where it is going. This presupposes the consciousness and intelligence of such a universe.

Although Wheeler specifically assumed that the universe began without consciousness, his discussion of the Participatory Anthropic Principle (see ATOE) implies that the universe purposely moved toward the development of consciousness. What it seems like Wheeler overlooked is that intelligence and consciousness must have been present from the beginning in the universe, if teleology was evidenced by the universe’s preference for developing consciousness somewhere within its parts later on.

I don’t think Wheeler overlooked that. I think he didn’t want to go up against the orthodoxy to that degree. Science for the last few hundred years has implicitly avoided anything besides a materialistic conception, and this is the main reason why it has avoided dealing with consciousness this long.

What is divinity if not the universe having purpose?

If the universe has purpose, then we as parts of the universe, we too have purpose. We too are divine.

Self Divinity

 Self Divinity is the predisposition to treat oneself with the utmost respect, and to also do the same for all others, including animals and even inanimate objects. This is one facet of taking the High Path.

It’s hard to imagine that having such a predisposition could get us into more trouble on a practical level than we are already in. On the other hand, most of us recognize that we are all already in deep trouble, and perhaps treating others and oneself as divine could help dig us out of the deep troubles we’ve created for ourselves by centuries of rapid weapon advancement and widespread labelling of everything but materialism as superstitious magical thinking.

No course in personal effectiveness could be complete while making a wide detour around these sensitive subjects. And so we will go deeper into this 4th Key.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

The Patterns of Your Life

Leave a reply

Powerful Mind Part 28
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – August 30, 2024
Created September 15, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 27

Look back over your life and see what you can about what you apparently wanted most at different turning points in your adventure.

Now that we are embarked on Key #6, which focuses you on a deep dive study of what you really want out of life, it will be helpful and fun for you to look back over your life and see what you can about what you apparently wanted most at different turning points in your adventure.

This is a task best approached in an alone space where you have made yourself temporarily invulnerable to interruption and distraction. Now that you have made the commitment to using your mind in the most powerful ways possible, you’ll find that having a daily alone space is almost essential. If others ask why you need to be alone for 20 or more minutes each day, “meditation” is the simplest explanation, although our forms of meditation in the 12 Keys encompass what in ancient India and around the world forever have been known as meditation, contemplation, and concentration – three forms of applying the mind in very special and important ways.

Neuroscience has identified one of the networks of the brain as the Default Network, which is the type of brain pattern most people use most of the time. It is essentially random chatter, and having observed it in myself, most of my life I have called it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), because it avoids deep thinking in favor of following attraction and repulsion impulses. In popular science it is identified with Kahneman’s construct of System1, which Daniel himself admitted might not be an actual system in the brain.

A second real system in the brain (which corresponds somewhat with Kahneman’s System2) is called the Executive Control Network, and it is associated with metacognition and what I call the Observer state. A third is called the Saliency Network, and it is associated with whatever is the most relevant pressing matter to you at the moment, and which will bring on transition to the Executive Control Network in situations in which that will tend to be most useful to dealing with whatever is most salient to you at the moment.

Meditation, contemplation and concentration are modes of cognition that depend mostly on the Executive Control Network. Piaget’s Formal Operational Level is his theoretical stage at which children are able to pick apart problems and systematically pursue and test solutions, and this would appear to be a stage in which the child has begun to regularly employ the Executive Control Network.

Depending upon your physical exercise regimen, it may be possible to combine your alone space with your exercise. This is not always the case because often our mental exercises will work best if you can write down flashes you have, and in some cases doodle something, such as the schematic of your life we are about to describe.

Take a fresh sheet of paper and allow yourself to doodle on it any way you feel like. In this case we are going to be looking back over your life to see what we can infer about what wants motivated you most during certain phases, so you might want to use the pad you are writing on in landscape aspect, so that you have the whole length of the pad for the vector of your life. You might want to add a scale at the bottom showing the ages from birth, and 1 year old, at the left, running up to your present age at the right.

In that framework you will find bubbling up in your mind stuff that would fall somewhere along that trajectory, and you can make an oval with words in it to mark what was going on at a certain age. Before you begin, let’s review the 15 motivations that my own empirical research at RMT (Research Measurement Technologies) has detected in human beings.

The 15 RMT Motivational Types

    1. Security – Feeling safe, rather than insecure; to no longer feel fear
    2. Belonging – Being part of a group; know that one is not alone in the world; to have support
    3. Achievement – A sense of accomplishment; to do something significant in one’s life
    4. Aspiration/Learning – Wanting to know more; to reach a higher level of understanding
    5. Competency – Wanting to be really good at something
    6. Fitness – Wanting to have a strong and attractive, healthy body
    7. Status/Prestige – Recognition from others; consensus validation of one’s own importance
    8. Wealth/Success – Affluence; freedom to spend on whatever one wants; ignore others’ criticism
    9. Heroism/Leadership – Acting heroically anytime; to speak up and take responsibility for situations
    10. Experience/Sex/Good Life/Hedonism/Epicureanism – Wanting interesting and fun experiences; to have a good time, enjoy the best of life, and see the world
    11. Power – Being able to control other people and situations to one’s liking
    12. Love – Wanting to love someone and be loved by the same person
    13. Creativity – Being creative in arts, business, crafts, nonprofits, sciences, technologies, or any field
    14. Self-Knowledge – Knowing oneself — who you are deep inside; mastery of one’s mind and emotions
    15. Self-Transcendence/Service to Humanity/Enlightenment/Spiritual Awakening/Nobility – Making a positive difference in the world; to take care of other people.

Taking my own life as an example, during my pre-school years I can recall incidents suggesting these motivations: Security, Belonging, Achievement, Aspiration/Learning, Competency – the first five on the list – plus Love, Creativity, and Self-Knowledge. My parents put me on stage and after many robotical performances (motivated by a desire for Competency) I experienced the Flow state, which was a turning point in my life. Aspiration/Learning what Flow state was, became a burning desire.

During kindergarten and elementary school I can see in my own memories that Status/Prestige became more important to me than it had been earlier. Power became important because these were the streets of pre-gentrification Brooklyn at a time of bullies, knives, and zipguns.

I spent a lot of time alone, thinking, and observing my own thinking and feeling. I had early thoughts about how I might help fix the world, which in those years had just used atomic bombs for the first time, and I knew this was the biggest future threat. I had the idea to gain power to effect positive change by going to West Point, becoming a General, surviving and winning WWIII, and then being elected President, where I felt I could right the many wrongs I saw, heard about, and read about, implying that I had begun to manifest the motivation of Self-Transcendence (Altruism).

At age 12, with a knife to my throat, I told the kid with the knife “I don’t believe you’re crazy, so I don’t believe you’d cut me, so I’m not scared.” That turned out to work. I feel that Heroism/Leadership was motivating me then, and perhaps earlier.

At the same age I had two out of body experiences and the onset of puberty. As if these were not enough, I also heard a voice in my mind say “I am God and so is everyone else.” This made no sense since I was in my own mind an atheist dedicated to pure science. Experience/Sex/The Good Life bloomed motivationally, I wanted to have a wide range of experiences and see the world.

By 16 I had graduated high school and my father had obtained for me two Congressional recommendations to West Point, but I was a year too young to be admitted. I went to Brooklyn College for a year and joined the Air Force ROTC. Leadership spiked as one of my top motivations for a while. However the ROTC turned me off as regards West Point and so I changed course and studied philosophy and psychology, the two subjects I had thought about every day of my life from my earliest memories. I also began to care about Fitness and got into the best shape of my life.

Graduating and taking the first job offer (Grey Advertising) Wealth/Success leapt up as a priority motivation. Aspiration/Learning and Competency once again became predominant motivations as I sopped up all the lore of marketing and advertising and media as fast as I could.

That’s probably enough about me, to give you an idea of how you can look at your own life through the lens of what motivated you at each stage. This will give you more grist for the mill to figure yourself out today, and where you go from here, what you want out of life now, and how you are going to get it. Enjoy the journey inside!

Love to all,
Bill