Tag Archives: Kabbalah

Never Growing Up

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.

Self - Wisdom - Understanding - Flow...

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,

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My new book POWERFUL MIND has some great reviews

An innovative too for self-discovery

“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, ★★★★

Updating Your Life Plan

Powerful Mind Part 30

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, September 26, 2025
Created September 29, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 29 | See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

“Comedian George Carlin once quipped, ‘Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.’” This is a quote from a Gallup report, which found that 60% of workers are dissatisfied with the work they are doing.

The pandemic gave us the space we needed to realize that we were not getting enough satisfaction out of the life we were living, and a person’s work is central to a person’s life – “Lieber Und Arbeit” (Love And Work) as Freud put it – the two key tentpoles (which in my book You Are The Universe I show is actually the bottom of the Tree Of Life in Kabbalah).

But even before the pandemic, many of us already knew that we had placed ourselves in the wrong spot, maybe even the wrong line of work. The education system has not prepared us to know what our true gifts to the world are, the passion work that would keep us in the Flow State more often. For some time, I’ve been recommending individualized education to bring out the best in each of us, and to know the occupational optimization answers for each of us. Ironic that the Latin word educare means “to draw out” and yet our education systems around the world pound information in rather than draw anything out.

I’ve also written about work study internships for a day, starting at very early ages, maybe as early as seven years old, where kids can pick and choose which of the participating companies and departments they would like to try out for a day.

Since the pandemic, tens of millions of people around the world have been contemplating changes in their lives, focused especially around the kind of work they do, and where and how they do it. A big part of it is not the occupation itself but the culture of the company. Too many companies treat employees as expendable cogs and not as partners and allies. If AI were used to enable the whole personnel of a company to insert anonymous or otherwise ideas and suggestions with true protections against repercussions (today’s HR departments promise that but do not deliver it often enough), and if the C suite got continuous AI summaries, a maximum of 25 words per hour 9-5, the C suite might realize that the wisdom bubbling up is unbelievably brilliant and right. Global consultant Chaim Oren and I discuss these points in this podcast: How to Thrive in the Age of Crisis.

Be sure you know what work YOU want to do, and that it isn’t someone else who caused you to believe you wanted that. Then make a plan to get from where you are to that work. Consider the moves carefully so as not to waste the goodwill you have built up in the field in which you have been working. Don’t leave people in a bad place by abruptly pulling out; take care of the people and company you now serve, as you make your transition. If you do it that way, some of them may help you get to where you want to be. Maybe there are ways to intersperse what you now do with elements of what you want to be doing. This is a great testbed for early learning.

This will take time, so you mustn’t add to your existing stress by becoming discouraged at how it seems Sisyphean and that you’ll never get there. Here’s the key trick: life is an adventure. You may have lost that sense of adventure before, perhaps long ago and without realizing it. But now that you have taken control of your own life and are steering it toward making your true dreams come true, you must sit back and become grateful for this big second chance you have given yourself, and that however it comes out, you are at least going to enjoy the adventure, the true adventure of your life as it was always meant to be, now that you have the real target in your sights. You are going to enjoy getting there, even if you never do get all the way there!

Remind yourself of this every time you feel dissatisfaction returning. Like all negative emotion, that is just an alarm reaction designed to wake you up to some threat vector. Turn off the emotional alarm, thanking it for ringing, and set to learning whatever lesson has to be learned so that the source of that dissatisfaction may be reasonably solved to no longer cause you negativity.

This means that while you are on the adventurous path to your new life, no matter what happens, failure, censure, whatever, it isn’t going to get you down. You are at least pursuing your passion work, that’s what matters, and enjoy each second of the journey by learning from what appear to be signs that you will never attain your dreams. The outcomes are not the point. The pursuit is the point, as long as what you pursue is the highest use of the real you to the species and to the universe, in your own lights.

Remember that what you feel projects out and makes impressions that change the “external” world, so that the more quickly you turn off your own negativity, and keep envisioning (“predreaming”) the life scenario you want, the more likely you are to achieve it all. But beware of the trap of caring too much about the outcomes. Do what you can to obtain the outcomes you want, and let the chips fall where they may, and use negative feedback to refine your methods, but not bring you down.

Key #6

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

Here’s a little secret: Dissatisfaction is wrong predreaming, it brings you what you don’t want to happen.

Attachment to outcomes is a misunderstanding. It’s ego. It’s the need to prove yourself to other people, belonging, status/prestige, wealth/success, all those lower motivations that you were conditioned to be needy about. The established psychological principle of Yerkes-Dodson obtains: highest performance comes when there is just the right amount of desire to win, and performance falls off sharply when there is too much attachment to the outcome.

Enjoy the adventure!

Love,

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Upon Enlightenment, One Stays Infinite All of the Time

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Originally posted February 2, 2012

Growing up in a Western culture, one hears and reads the phrases, “seeking Enlightenment” and “the path of Enlightenment”, sees movies like Lost Horizon and The Razor’s Edge, and eventually questions whether maybe there is something real going on.

What is this Enlightenment they speak of so often and so seriously in the East, and which comes up in Western discourse more humorously and as part of entertainment fiction? Is it something real that we in the West ought to wake up and discover?

Enlightenment is a stage in a process. Sages in antiquity observed human beings going through a progression during their lives. Enlightenment is the stage most rarely reached, and self-evidently to those reaching that stage, the final stage in the process.

In other words, the idea of Enlightenment is derived from observation, just like the observation of modern science.

All of the earlier stages in the progression end in dissatisfaction, and are characterized by chasing after a different something in each stage. In this final stage of human personal evolution, Enlightenment, there is no longer any chasing and no longer any dissatisfaction.

Modern Western science in fact has rediscovered the progression. Maslow was the first to crystallize thinking in the West about this built-in human pattern, which he expressed as “The Hierarchy of Needs”. One born in extreme poverty for example seeks satisfaction of his/her physiological needs all of the time, until somehow working oneself out of that extreme poverty. When this happens the physiological needs start to get taken care of easily and the individual begins striving for the next needed thing which is safety and security according to Maslow’s model. Stage three is belonging/social/love needs, then self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. As each need becomes more automatically satisfied in a person’s life, the person expands the sphere of wants to include these new areas, in these various stages.

Maslow was aware of the ancient sources, and his five-stage model was his own intuitive and observation-based attempt at a more scientific reintegration of the seven-stage chakra system of ancient India. Yet it is possible the latter original system could be the more precise. We shall come to it in a moment.

More recently than Maslow, SRI International (originally founded by Stanford University as Stanford Research Institute) used a survey and statistical clustering techniques to discern 23 underlying factors driving human behavior, i.e. values. (The study of human values is called axiology.) From further reclustering they developed a scale similar to Maslow’s but with more levels and two ways to get to self-actualization — a Westernized reduction of Enlightenment — at the top.

One recent interpretation of Maslow’s description of self-actualization lists these words: Vitality, Creativity, Self-Sufficiency, Authenticity, Playfulness, Meaningfulness. These are some of the characteristics that in the East would be attached to Enlightenment, but they are not the essence of it.

The essence of Enlightenment is that one no longer strives for anything. It is no longer necessary. One no longer sees any lack, therefore no need for desire. Love is strongly present, and the intuition is working at such a level as to cause ESP/Psi researchers to note statistically significant above-average accuracy rates. The Enlightened being brings a sense of peace wherever he or she goes, affecting others as iron filings around a magnet. Such a being appears to be continuously in great joy, and this is also infectious to those around. These observations have been replicated time and again by scientific/journalistic/scholarly Westerners who have traveled to the East and have seen and met such Enlightened human beings, some of whom are now in America. Some of us have experienced those states but the condition has not become permanent. That is not yet Enlightenment.

The first known system for reaching Enlightenment, embedded in Hinduism — one of the earliest institutionalized schools of thought — has four stages through which an individual passes as he/she evolves personally. Huston Smith in his classic The World’s Religions describes these four stages as Pleasure, Success, Duty, and the pursuit of Enlightenment. The latter stages may not be reached in a lifetime, and Hinduism allows for the self to come back again and again to complete this course. Huston significantly describes the fourth stage as the attempt to make oneself “superhuman”. Indeed the Enlightenment stage that is sought appears to be a stage above the human both when one is experiencing it — even if for impermanent flashes — and when one is observing it in someone else.

Flow State as we have described here before has its own sub-stages within it, the highest of which corresponds to Enlightenment. All stages of Flow State appear to be super-human when one is experiencing them. In martial arts, one appears to have become invulnerable. In performing arts as well as martial and athletic arts, everything seems to be happening perfectly without any effort on one’s own part. During Flow State, the Universe appears to be favoring you. More than luck, it feels like the fix is in. This has a supernatural, numinous feel to it.

At the highest stage of Flow State, i.e. Enlightenment, one is no longer seeking Enlightenment, service/duty, success, pleasure, or anything else. All of those are finite and would require stepping down from the infinite, from the sense of letting go, having let go, long past trying to control, stopping oneself from the endless flowing with the Universe in a love relationship, that is Enlightenment. And in fact there is no going back, because by definition Enlightenment is when the world can no longer suck you back down into dissatisfaction with some element of it and re-attach you egoistically to striving to save the world, reduce suffering, one of the last of the finite attachments from which one reaches through to the permanent state of Enlightenment.

Back in the day, I had my own interpretation of the natural stages of personal evolution, which I had based on the seven major chakras. This Sanskrit word meaning “wheel” and “turning” refers to seven intuitively perceived organs of a subtle nonphysical body within each of us. Perhaps the Enlightened sages/saints of ancient India, Tibet, China and the rest of the Far East were actually able to see something that really exists, a body of consciousness within our body of matter, and perceive its organs — and perhaps not. In any case, inspired by this model, I conjectured a progression of personal evolution in, naturally, seven stages.

Those seven steps along the way being: Security (physical safety as well as money), Pleasure (including sex), Power (including consensual validation), Love, Creativity, Self-Knowledge, and Service. When I conceived this model I was not thinking clearly about Enlightenment actually being the eighth stage, and I confabulated it with the seventh or Service stage. But as I’ve since found, trying to be of service to the world is not yet Enlightenment. One still gets caught in EOP while in the seventh stage. The ego still brings you down out of Flow State while you are caught up in the drama of trying to make a positive difference in the world.

There are other esoteric traditions in which I perceive ideas similar to those of Hinduism, Maslow, and SRI, i.e. the idea of there being a characteristic sequential pattern of development for human motivations. Although I’ve not read any other student of Kabbalah as making this same interpretation, in studying the Tree Of Life I see a progression as follows:

Until one gets one’s love and work in balance, one does not rise from the mask/persona/personality/projected image to others (“Yesod”) into one’s essence/truth with oneself (“Tif’eret”).
Until one balances severity and mercy, one is not enabled to have flashes of insight/intuition/inspiration coming as if from above or from some hidden wellspring of wisdom (“Da’at”).
Until one balances wisdom (knowing what’s right) with understanding (forgiveness), one’s consciousness will not be able to rise to transparency with the One Consciousness (“Keter”) — aka Enlightenment.

Recall that these ideas going back thousands of years — and still being reinterpreted and reinvented by new minds today — have also been validated by SRI’s field research: surveys reveal the same underlying axiological structures as predicted by Hinduism and Maslow, and possibly by the Jews in Kabbalah. There are people just motivated to survive physically from one day to the next (“Survivors”), and there are Belongers, Achievers, and Self-Actualizers. This is no longer just theory. In the last century science has rediscovered some ancient principles and validated them. Or perhaps re-validated them, since wise people long ago were convinced by the ability to make good verifiable predictions (“science”) regarding the innate progressive nature of human motivation.

As Huston Smith says, for all the harm religions have done, there is also all the good. And he refers to the wisdom wealth of the world that is stored up in religions. In fact, one does not have to be religious to reach Enlightenment, but it may help, if only by gaining contact with good ideas that are more practical and psychological/philosophical than theological.

We may look back and say that Hinduism for example was not a religion after all, but an observation-based science focused on the life of the self. Hinduism also postulates that the Infinite is within each of us, a statement Logical Positivism declared meaningless gibberish but which The Theory of The Conscious Universe re-words in terms of information theory so as to thwart dismissal by Logical Positivism. We may look back and say that Abraham was in an Enlightened flash of Flow State when he heard the One Self and made a covenant with It. In other words, it may all be true. What all religions believe may actually be real, in a way that denies none of the essentials of any religion, but which reflects the simple fact that there is only One Consciousness, and the rest is detail.

When the One Consciousness fully realizes Itself as The One Consciousness, within the life of one of us, that is what Enlightenment is. It is real, and yes, we ought to wake up and discover it.

Wishing you Stay Infinite,

Bill

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The Season to Celebrate the Miraculous

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Volume 3, Issue 43

The Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year when the sun appears at its lowest altitude above the horizon and darkness abounds, has been celebrated with festivals of light since Neolithic times. Earliest cavemen and cavewomen prior to the dawn of reason could have felt that the world was coming to an end, and might have sought to propitiate Nature, the Sun, and divinity in general, with encouraging firelight, signaling the request to bring back the great light.

The primary axis of Stonehenge, which could have been built as far back as 3000 BC, is aligned to point to the Winter Solstice sunset. Newgrange in Ireland, built around 3200 BC in the Neolithic period, is similarly aligned to point to the Winter Solstice sunrise.

Wikipedia lists an impressive array of holidays in all countries and religions oriented around the Winter Solstice.

Probably no other person in history has inspired more works of art in all media than Yeshua Ben Joseph (Hebrew equivalent to Jesus, son of Joseph), remembered as Jesus Christ, after whom Christmas is named — Christmas being the signature Winter Solstice celebration in the Western World for the past 2000 years.

The Founders of the United States of America, who considered themselves deists, nevertheless esteemed most strongly the philosophy of this high being. So does practically every other person who has come into contact with his teachings.

Among Jesus’ key ideas are that God loves us as a father would, and that we should treat each other as we’d like to be treated. None of his quotations in the Bible contradict my theory that we are all part of One Being. Certainly a single being playing many roles would love all of them as himself, and in a role conscious of this existential unity, would treat everyone else very well indeed, knowing all to be part of the One Being.

Jesus also emphasized that even our thoughts count. “As a man thinketh so shall he be.” My theory posits that the matter-energy timespace universe is projected from consciousness, and that even in our roles as humans — a reduced form of the Original Self — our thoughts, feelings, intuitions and perceptions, in a closed feedback loop, influence what subsequently happens in the matter-energy timespace universe.

Jesus gave us useful psychotechnology — tips on how to arrange our thoughts, feelings, intuitions and perceptions so as to be capable of forgiveness, such as seeing how we ourselves are just as righteously to be judged as we judge the flaws of others: Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone… and Thou hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

It is impossible to think of Jesus without thinking of miracles. While many miracles are attributed to Jesus, the church over the centuries has investigated other claimed miracles and certified a number of them as such. Travelers to the devout country of India often return claiming to have personally observed miracles.

The Jewish Winter Solstice holiday of Chanukah celebrates the miracle of the oil lasting eight days although there was only enough barely for one day. This occurred when the Jews had retaken the Temple in Jerusalem from the Syrian-Greek Seleucid Empire, and found almost all the oil desecrated (160 BC). The Jewish celebration of an eight-day festival of light goes much further back in antiquity, probably to Neolithic times, and is mentioned for example in a Talmudic document written during the Babylonian Captivity, which ended in 538 BC. In that document Adam is said to have sat for eight days in fast and in prayer anticipating that the world was going back to the darkness of chaos and confusion. When he saw the light returning he said “Such is the way of the world,” and observed eight days of festivity. The actual timing of Chanukah each year is based on both the Sun and Moon and therefore its exact timing is not synchronous with the Winter Solstice.

What is a miracle? Something that does not usually happen. Doctors today regularly bring the dead back to life, as in certain surgical operations where the body must be brought down to very low temperatures, and Google is not alone in believing that life can be extended indefinitely, achieving immortality. Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be miraculous to those who have not grown used to that technology.

The existence of the universe is itself a miracle. Why should anything ever have come into existence? How can something come out of nothing? Logically, all that should ever have existed is nothingness. In our theory, and in Kabbalah, the great bootstrap operation of all time occurred when the Nothing (ain) became aware of itself (ain soph) at which point light streamed out in all directions from this point of self-awareness (ain soph aur). The Original Self, living through each of us, is The Nothing’s Imagination. (I wrote a book about this for my grandson Nicholas — look for The Nothing’s Imagination in 2014.)

Flow state is a miracle. Seeing other people seem to go into slow motion. Suddenly out of the blue knowing how a friend’s characteristic mannerism came into existence and having him validate it. The many synchronicities — odd seemingly-meaningful coincidences — that occur more frequently than would seem the result of random chance. My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That! (coming soon), contains reports of some of the miracles I have witnessed.

This season celebrating the return of the light force is a time to reconsider the miraculous. Even though the universe I postulate is “just” extremely advanced technology — supremely advanced psychotechnology specifically — this does not vitiate the meaningfulness of having an attitude of awe and wonderment such as one holds toward the idea of miracle. It’s really a choice. Do you want to live your life with the childlike thrill you once had, alive in your life once more, or would you prefer to be blasé about existence, including your own?

It’s always your choice.

Happy Holidays! Celebrate the miraculous.

My best to you all,