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Conduct Your Inner Orchestra

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Powerful Mind Part 40
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, December 12, 2025.
Created December 15, 2023


Read Powerful Mind 39       |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Simplify the task of conducting your inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it.

The reason homo sapiens have settled into this pandemic coping pattern I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is that the mind – with its jumble of thoughts, feelings, images, memories, imaginings all coming too fast one atop the other, is initially very difficult to orchestrate. That might not have been the case before written language, when the number of question-producing experiences we had each day was likely to have been a mere handful. Since the advent of written language, there has been an explosion of inventions (including tools, weapons, and media), bringing us more and more information per day. As you know, I call this Acceleritis, the probable cause of EOP, which, 50 years later, neuroscience is now discovering as the default network.

The purpose of Key #10 is to simplify the task of conducting this inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it as in the case of EOP.

Let’s review the ground we’ve covered so far regarding Key #10:

    • Interpret your feelings constructively – seek to learn from bad feelings – transform all inner experiences into future operating guidelines
    • Be grateful for existing – use willpower to maintain a permanent attitude of positivity – filter out negative hypnotic suggestions
    • Edit your headstream – test your inner drafts – update your senators (your inner AI ego robot) (Keys #1 & #2)
    • Balance your own arousal so that it is optimal for performance – detached from addiction to specific outcomes
    • Go with the Flow as long as it remains 100% positive – gently and Socratically share any concerns with others only if that feels more helpful than a wait-and-see attitude
    • Note your own mental chatter without taking it as how you really feel (Key #7)
    • Do not have a closed mind with regard to the possibility that you and the universe are one connected consciousness
    • Minimize time spent worrying by detecting worry and immediately turning it into fixing

This may seem like too many things to consider at once, all the time. You are absolutely right. That’s why we went into EOP in the first place. So don’t try to explicitly juggle all these balls, just let them sink into the core of your being. How then to simplify one’s inner life so as to stay in Observer and Flow states as much as possible?

Optimizing Rituals

We all have our rituals, things we do each day. Our life is organized around these daily patterns. These little certainties impart a sense of order and keep our life from flying apart in troubling times.

In order to remove the feeling that the 12 Keys, each of them filled with complexity, is too much to internalize workably, here are some suggested additions to your daily ritual, which can pragmatically overcome this sense of being daunted by the size of the task of self-mastery.

Check for Joy

The first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, or even opening your eyes, remember your life’s mission and check for your own joy. You ideally will be eager to jump out of bed and seize the day, but if you’re not, contemplate what is bothering you.

I’ve noticed that sometimes I’m out of sorts for a day or more right before my subconscious mind delivers an idea that changes everything. It’s almost like birthing pains. The idea itself that finally emerges fills me with joy again. Often it’s something that’s been right in front of my face, sometimes for months or years, and seems utterly obvious in retrospect.

If joy is absent at the start of your day, see if you can get an angle on the possible cause even before you get out of bed. Maybe your dreams will offer clues. Obligations may cause you to need to keep moving, but you can continue to dissect why your passion mission is not enough to motivate your joy today, while bathing and/or showering and otherwise getting ready for the day. This is usually a very productive time for diagnosing your own mood.

Be on the lookout for the root of your lack of joy being some attachment you have allowed to persist. You might be attached to doing things in an orderly way, and the pressure of incoming assignments and requests may have destroyed any hope of order. All you can do is to focus on prioritizing and being decisive until order is re-established. Scheduling when you are going to get something done, and being extremely conservative about how long each task will take, can get you back into feeling that you can be patient, systematic, and thorough.

Some or many of these tasks might be questions in your own mind and feelings about what to do about specific situations, or about abstract principles. It relieves stress to keep a list of these unanswered questions so you can come back to them without being attached to getting them all resolved asap. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It helps to have the sense that you have added one new thought or idea about each such question every time you contemplate it.

Passion Projects

Be aware of your own passion projects and how each one figures into your overall mission. Keep a list of those and see how you change their ranking over time.

Each person you love is one of those passion projects. Each goal in your life is on that list.
In the day-to-day tumble of obligatory and voluntary events, having the mission and passion projects to remind you of the meaning of your life is restorative.

Glance at the list once a day. This is effectively a form of Key #8, rotating your attention to cover every passion project. This will have the effect of springing out good new ideas or reminders that should have higher priority for sooner action on one or more of your passion projects.

Daily Alone Space

While keeping up with the tsunami of responsibilities, duties, chores, assignments, and unexpected events, days tend to pass without allowing any space for strategic thinking. This is why it’s mission-critical that you give yourself an uninterruptable 20 minutes or more each day to meditate and contemplate how your life is going. You can do this while doing yoga, exercising, or while sitting up straight, cross-legged, or in a chair. Slow deep breathing helps. Often, the best time each day for this is around 5 pm, but it can be any time you can carve out that particular day.

Simply watch the material your mind brings up and decide what is important enough to think about. You may find that you are displeased with something that you yourself did. If so, forgive yourself by understanding why the event happened as it did, and make a plan as to handle it if a similar situation presents itself in the future – as it undoubtedly will.

Remind yourself to be grateful that you screwed up in this relatively minor way this time, because that provoked your learning from it and deciding upon how to handle such things in the future, when they might be far more important to your life and mission. Just in case the universe is conscious and actually let this small goof happen so you could be armed to not make the same mistake in a situation of much greater importance, thank the universe or God, whichever way you prefer to address the Totality Of Existence.

Last Thoughts Before Sleep

Before you let yourself fall asleep, prevision the next day the way you’d like to see it come out. Obviously, a glance at your schedule before getting into bed will make this much easier and more effective.

As you do this, you may find yourself rehearsing what you will say and will catch things that you realize would be stepping on a land mine. Rephrase those, of course. You will then find yourself feeling more confident about the morrow, and this will take you into a fine sleep.

You may also see how certain meetings or events could take a bad turn. Rehearse your optimal, gentle, Socratic, constructive, win/win response to such pushbacks. But do not dwell upon those downside possibilities once you have prepared yourself for them. Before you go to sleep once again, prevision the day the way you would prefer it to go, strengthen your intentions and your resoluteness with courage, and enjoy a beautiful night’s sleep.

Those are the daily rituals we suggest upon rising, after work, and before going to sleep.

Learn & Teach

As you progress through life, look at the whole process as one of learning, and share your learnings when people ask for that. You may also sometimes cautiously try sharing what seems to you to be a piece of learning that the other person needs, even though they have not asked for help. But be prepared to immediately abandon the idea if the other person doesn’t want to hear it.

Mindquiet

There may be times when, despite how much you have learned and how much time you spend in Observer state, everything is just coming at you too fast, from the outside as well as the inside. It’s best at those times, if you can, to excuse yourself and go into a bathroom stall where you can be alone, and exercise your will to blank out the flow of inner thoughts and feelings. Just breathe slowly and deeply, and wait and watch the blankness of your inner world. Big Picture integrations, summarizations of where you are at, may soon present themselves to your psyche. Often, it will resolve into a single main challenge you face. This clarity and focus will equip you to flow with the situation courageously and effectively.

Key # 10:

Patiently determine the most constructive use of each salient inner experience

What this Key says is that whatever is going on inside of us, some of it is obviously more important, let’s call that the salient part. Don’t bother with minor imperfections, but go for the Big Picture items that cry out to be dealt with first. Look patiently at those salient items without allowing the feeling of urgency to take you over. Treat that feeling of urgency as part of the auto-completing bio-AI in your brain, not as you yourself.

Contemplate each salient item as something to learn from, and the impetus for you to give yourself new guidelines. Don’t be attached to reaching closure on the new solution, let its picture resolve in its own time. Maintain a list of items that are still cooking and use strikethroughs when they have resolved themselves so that you can look back at your trail up the mountain.

My best to all,
Bill

Ride the Psychic Foam

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Powerful Mind Part 38

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, updated November 21, 2025
Created December 1, 2023. 

Read Powerful Mind 37             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Key #10 is about how to ride the bucking bronco that is your mind. Your mind, which is constantly throwing up inner words, feelings, and impulses that – if allowed – can enslave your mood.

When my late partner Len Matthews, a wonderful human being, read my book Mind Magic, he initially disagreed with the idea that he should “dis-identify with the thought senate” (paraphrasing the title of Chapter 9). He said, “I’m proud of my ideas, I want to call them my own.”

I pointed out the subtitle of that chapter, “Not Throwing Your Authority Behind Untested Head Spewings”. This, I explained, allowed for cases in which a person can take pride and ownership of ideas after having tested those ideas thoroughly enough, with which he agreed.

Therefore, Key #10 is about how to test one’s inner drafts before adopting them as one’s own official policy.

Not viewing the situation that way, the vast majority of the human race throughout history, and perhaps more so today due to the Distraction Culture produced by Acceleritis, tend to assume that the inner soundtrack is one’s very own self expressing positions that have been fully ratified by all sides of oneself.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the pandemic coping condition for information overload, most of the time the mind is operating in what neuroscientists call the Default Network. This is an idle stream of consciousness that keeps switching tracks based on associations, and includes daydreaming as well as commentary on what one is doing in the external world of consensual reality, sometimes involving other people.

In the Observer state, neuroscientists say that the brain is operating from the Executive Control Network, and the mind is in a state of metacognition, able to observe with a degree of detachment what the inner wordstream is saying. It is that degree of detachment which Mind Magic Chapter 9 (read an excerpt) aimed to achieve in readers. By having that degree of detachment, one can inspect what one’s mind just said, to see if it is consistent with one’s general viewpoint, or if it appears to be an outlier, perhaps a remnant of who you used to be. Or just a first reflexive reaction of anger at someone in language you might have used as a child or as a teenager, but would not normally use aloud today.

By helping children to learn these ways, they shall more quickly become able to be in control of their own impulses.

When I was a child, like all other children, I had a very hard time guessing which of my impulses to act upon and which ones to just let drift away. Perhaps I had more trouble with it than most children. Because on stage and in other rare moments, I had experienced the Flow state, in which simply letting myself flow with all of my impulses seemed to work fantastically well. At the time, this is what I muddily thought. It was only much later on that I realized that in Flow, one does not always act on every impulse; in fact, in making that assumption, I had caused myself to be taken out of Flow after very short periods of it. This took years to discover. In the meantime, I had absurd experiences of following impulses which turned out to be ridiculously wrong and impossible to defend afterward.

In that chapter of Mind Magic, one of the metaphors used is to consider the mind to be a vast senate of viewpoints, installed based on people you have met who may have impressed you in one way or another, which set up a robot simulating that person within one’s own mind, presumably mediated by a specific pattern of electrochemical flow among specific neurons. In a lifetime, one may meet, or hear, speak, or read the words of tens of thousands of people, including in media. Thousands of them may leave permanent impressions as biological “AI” outposts within one’s mind. This, then, is the senate.

The Executive Control Network may be viewed as the inner True Self, trying to sort through what may be conflicting impulses arising simultaneously like virtual particles in the quantum foam, within one’s own microcosm. The great physicist John Archibald Wheeler postulated that in nothingness before the Big Bang, there had always existed quantum foam, with virtual particles arising and disappearing. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God”, I posited that the quantum foam itself is consciousness, the original substrate of the universe. Whether or not this is true, we might not as a species know for millennia, although as individuals some of us may decide to adopt it as a working hypothesis for life, as I do.

By installing Key #10 in one’s own mind, one gives oneself the psychic distance to edit one’s own headstream.

More than that, one can take the time to teach errant senators how to behave properly. For example, one day recently, I heard myself think something mean about a person I love. With Key #10, it’s not enough to just correct oneself and move on: you are advised to carry on an inner dialog with the senator who said that, and to find out how that part of you thinks and feels. Does the part of you who just said that mean thing not love this other person? Or was that just an old reflex from your childhood when you first started to use mean words like that? If the latter turns out to be the case, as it did, that senator (or neuron grouping) can learn that it’s no longer appropriate to use such language even to oneself, it’s no longer fitting within the person you have become. In this way, the mind is eventually cleansed, and impurities have been removed from it.

One of the inner signals that one learns to pay attention to is any trace of negativity. By now, using the other Keys 1-9, we have already changed our mental habits enough to realize that we prefer to be happy and to know how to quickly tune out of anything that makes us unhappy.

Negativity is what makes us unhappy; therefore, we have already started to learn how to tune away from negativity to positivity, to find one’s creativity interested and challenged by the “dare” of negativity to find creative solutions to remove all causes of negativity from one’s life as quickly as possible in each case.

More methods for riding one’s psychic froth in the next installment.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Happy Thanksgiving

My best to all,
Bill

 

Thanksgiving greeting background image source: freepik.com

If You Assume the Worst, You Yourself Will Bring It About

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Powerful Mind Part 36

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – November 7, 2025
Created November 10, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 35             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

The latest findings of neuroscience suggest that we, as individual human beings, interpret our own emotions as they happen. The physical signals we receive may suggest not only the degree to which our emotions are aroused, but they may even suggest the valence as either being positive or negative emotion, but then there is a cognitive interpretation layer we impose to further characterize to ourselves the emotions we are feeling.

In my own introspections, I had also come to that same conclusion long ago, that my mind had the ability to clarify the emotions I was experiencing. In some cases, I felt overwhelming arousal and initially took that to be fear and panic, but then, applying Observer state (metacognition) I was able to refine that classification into positive excitement and anticipation rather than negative fear. This was the way I learned to deal with stage fright when my showbiz parents put me on stage at age four.

The general reason why it is important to be able to bring emotional self-interpretation into play is to avoid making things worse.

There is a proven feedback loop between our expectations and the results we get. If we fear failure, it increases our probability of failure.

This goes beyond psychology. In physics, the greatest theorists, including Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking, have postulated what Wheeler called the Anthropic Participatory Principle, the ability of consciousness to collapse probability waves into concrete objects. Einstein did not go quite as far, but could not describe relativity without including an observer (consciousness) in his equations.

Knowing that our inner emotional content has significant impact on the outcomes in our lives, and that we have the interpretation layer at our disposal in order to clarify exactly which emotions we are feeling, we face the choice of either:

A. Continuing to relinquish control over how we interpret our emotions, leaving that up to our brain’s default network to settle that as it will, and accepting the consequences.
B. Exercising our willpower to focus our minds on self-observation and clarifying our emotions based on the pragmatic principle that outcomes will be better to the degree that we classify our emotions more positively.

The ideal mental framework if we choose the “B” option is (1) gratitude for being alive and for the life we have been given, despite perceived imperfections, (2) resolute confidence that we shall attain our dreams someday, so long as we stay positive toward ourself and toward everyone else.

That’s the gratitude attitude that gives you the greatest chance of success at whatever you do. The word “someday” implies that we ought not be impatient or overly attached to the experience of success, but instead should enjoy the passage of time, the journey rather than the destination. This total package of attitudinal viewpoints is the master cocktail for maximizing success.

The implication is that in any given moment, if you sense your own emotions, the interpretation of those emotions should be the priority. If you are also besieged by your own tumble of thoughts and questions in your mind about various subjects, you might write down the fewest possible trigger words which will serve to remind you of those questions so that you can tackle them later on.

When I was very young, I took a very different path. I greatly esteemed thinking over feeling, for a very long time, and so I paid priority attention to my thoughts and questions of an intellectual and rational nature. I considered my emotions more as animal instincts to be conquered than as valuable signals. I was in my late teens by the time I realized that many of my intellectual questions were reduced to aesthetic preferences, i.e., feelings.

My undervaluing of feelings led me to take on a general preference for melancholy in the form of “glamorous cynicism”. I actually felt most comfortable being in a negative mood. Later on, this became a hard-to-break habit, but one which I eventually overcame. I had to see the way the negative mindset had ruined a number of great opportunities before I could wake up to, and bring in, the feeling side of the game to my self-recommended life systems (“psychotechnology”).

As we begin the description of Key #10 here, we are entering into the complexities of what goes on in the mind, from the subjective viewpoint of you, the experiencer. In this environment, every instant is besieged by qualia (subjective inner phenomena), some of which purport to describe the “outside” world (perceptions) and some of which report signals from the “inner” world (thinking, feelings, intuition, memories, imaginings, images). Operating according to the current norm for homo sapiens on Earth, all of this washes over you and what you pay attention to and do about it all, seems to do itself without much help from you, even when some of it is stuff that you do consciously but automatically, like saying thank you. But some of it riles you up and you over-react negatively, and some of it peps you up and you possibly over-react positively… all of it feeling fairly out of control, but you’re used to it, so it doesn’t induce panic most of the time.

Key #10 is completing the granular dissection of Observer state so that you are more fully prepared to deal with life with a far greater degree of conscious control.

We started with the feelings because they are the most powerful and least controllable qualia we experience. Remember the Gratitude Attitude in order to not be overtaken by your feelings, but to leverage your feelings so that you may channel their energies in the directions of your ultimate dreams.

Best to all,
Bill

Staying Focused Through Complexity

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Powerful Mind Part 34

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 24, 2025
Created October 27, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 33             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

By this point in our journey, your priorities are to be your highest self and spend as much time as possible doing your passion work, while avoiding distractions, especially from your own doubts and fears.

But there are so many other distractions to deal with, including people you love popping into your life at odd moments. By now, your Savoir faire may include noting that these are assignments from the Universe that deserve your attention even when the timing is frustrating.

Because we have collectively dreamed up this ultra-distracting culture we now live in, in which we are being exposed to multiple media simultaneously for most of our waking moments, and in which emails, texts, phone calls, and innumerable other messages are incoming at all times, these challenges may often overcome our resolve, and make us feel as if we are never going to be able to stay in Flow or even in Observer state. Plus, we may be balancing the work we use to make money with the work that is our passion to which we are ever so gradually transitioning.

The reality is that multitasking is something we all overestimate our own talent for. We are all at our best when we immerse completely in one single-pointed attention stream at a time. The implication: we need to schedule our time in advance, leaving at least twice as much time as needed to complete a given task, but making advance arrangements (like turning phones and email audio notifications off, and closing doors with Do Not Disturb signs) so that we can really focus on one task at a time, enjoying it to the hilt, and treating it as the most important thing in the world for the allotted time.

But the reality is that we will not always have the luxury of controlling our own space. Sometimes we will be out in the world of action mixing with dozens of other people we know. Sometimes we will be doing that while operating heavy machinery (e.g., a car). Let’s take a hypothetical situation in which you are driving a car, involving looking forward, occasionally in the rear view mirror, occasionally in the side view mirrors, and keeping in mind where you are going, which might involve listening to cues from a GPS. You will also be monitoring your own mind and feelings, but your salience network is prioritizing safety above all else.

This means that if you are daydreaming idly in default network, you will switch consciously back into Observer state, where you may detect flash-forwards to the upcoming meeting to which you are driving, and noting useful ideas that you might bring up in that meeting. You may also hear yourself rehearsing a specific dialogue that suddenly gets you in trouble in your mental picture of the meeting. You also make a mental note to avoid that line of dialogue, and perhaps you come up with a good phrase to use if someone else brings up that sensitive topic.

But you do not allow your useful inner predreaming to distract you from primary attention to the movements of cars and the changing of traffic lights, and to intuitions you may have of what another driver is going to do.

Let’s make the situation even more complex. Let’s say you’re driving a fairly large car with one passenger to the side and three more in back. One of these people is your business partner, whose apparent main goal in life is to diminish you in the eyes of others, which he does with amazing manipulative powers, projecting boundless self-confidence. The others in the car are important clients. Your partner is leading a discussion about an idea you have had, which he is criticizing, and the others are taking his views seriously and asking questions.

You note your ego’s reaction to this and set it aside, merely listening while maintaining safety on the road.

A method which can help in circumstances such as these is the rotation of attention. You might not be able to safely see each person while driving, but you can pay special attention to listening to what each person says, and you might ask for the views of someone who is staying silent. By rotating your surplus attention rather than trying to focus on everything at once, you may find that you can remain in the Observer or Flow state, get everyone safely to your destination, and perhaps, with right timing, make some short statement which restores the awareness of why you brought up that new idea in the first place, and why it still is worthy of testing further.

Better to let the idea rise or fall without intervention and return to it at some apropos later point, than to get emotionally hooked into the game your rival is playing. Safety and staying above your own ego are the natural priorities in the situation.

Key #8


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

 

Your own inner world is one workstream. The road ahead and the three mirrors are four other workstreams while driving. Each person in the car with you – or the radio – each of these is another workstream. Your equipment (mind, intuition, perceptions, feelings) is not at its best when dealing with multiple workstreams, and the tactic that optimizes you when multiple workstreams are unavoidable is rotation of attention focus. At least for brief instants, you are taking a full grab of each workstream. But the one or more workstreams which contain existential danger (like when driving) must never be without some degree of attention, even as you grab information from split-second peeks elsewhere.

Best to all,
Bill