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Bringing on the Observer State by Observation

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Powerful Mind Part 31

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 3, 2025
Created October 6, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 30             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

“How observant of you!” We have all heard people say this from time to time, to us or to someone else. There is wisdom in everything that is said, often much deeper wisdom than even the person who says it is aware of. Old sayings, especially.

The Observer state is more than being an observant person, although that is one aspect of the state.

We are embarking here on explaining Key #7, which is about the perceptions, the five senses, and the internal sense, the mind with its thoughts and feelings. Feelings include more than emotions; emotions are the bodily manifestations of our feelings. Thoughts are more than us talking to ourselves in our minds; thoughts include images, memories, hunches, and ideas we understand without using words in our mind.

These sensory systems bring us information about the world outside and inside.

Key #7 is about how to use these tools to further your Mission, and take care of yourself and other people better, by getting into the Observer state. Key #7 focused on how to do that using more powerful methods of observation. Other Keys aim to get you there by other strategies.

To review, the default network in the brain, what we call EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), is the most common state of most human beings. The mind wanders, impulses arise, and you choose which impulses to act upon based on the past. A prominent brain function which neuroscientist Karl Friston refers to as the inference engine, acts like an AI to keep track of every event in your past and makes associations between event type, action taken, and result; and then sends you impulses to take specific action that would have been best, in that event type, in the past. I have called it the robot since the previous century, and lately have been calling it the Bio-AI.

This is, of course, not a perfect way to make decisions. What if the event you are now embroiled in has never appeared in your life before, and the default events that are most similar and which the inference engine therefore uses as proxies for your current situation, are really not close enough? What if none of the actions you took in the past were really all that effective? As explained in the chapters relating to Key #2, consistency is not really the best policy.

The inference engine is part of the old brain, going back millions of years. 200,000 years ago, our species evolved a frontal cortex specifically as an improvement on the earlier decision “optimization” system. This new part enables the executive control network in the brain, although all brain systems are distributed in many parts of the physical brain. This network is where you want to work from. The best way to shift gears to that network is through conscious metacognition, that is, by observing your own thinking and feeling. This will get you into the Observer state.

You can easily slip out of the Observer state into EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). The reason it is easy to slip out is distraction. The environment in what we call modern civilization is extremely distractive, unless you live alone in a cave. Another reason is long habit. Getting mad at yourself only makes things worse. Maintain your sense of humor; it’s another way of maintaining your sense of perspective. Perspective allows us to realize that minor slippages are usually unimportant in the greater scheme of things and are valuable learning experiences if you use them that way. The old sayings that captured this include “don’t sweat the small stuff”, “no use crying over spilt milk”, and “practice makes perfect”. Key #4 also helps with this, reminding you not to keep score (because it trivializes you) but rather stay focused in the present.

Ego

Metacognition and the executive control network do not assure the onset of the Observer state. Observer state is where you can identify impulses arising in you which come from ego. It’s not always obvious. And you’re in the Observer state when you can ignore such impulses, not act upon them.

Ego is a form of neediness, also known as attachment, where you experience negative feelings because something you have become needy of is withheld.

If something you were born actually needing is withheld – like oxygen, food, water, certain temperature levels, health – it’s natural to have negative feelings, and would not fall into the category of ego.

Most of ego is related to esteem – the desire that other people esteem you. Such dependencies weaken you and get in the way of achieving a powerful mind.

One of the things you will be looking out for as you amp up the power of inner and outer observation is your own subtle neediness. Observer state is the powerful will that enables you to surmount those attachments. Renunciation of that neediness doesn’t mean stopping yourself from enjoying those things when they come your way, but you must have the willpower to stop yourself from running after more of the same.

It will seem like the universe is testing your resolve (and that might be what is actually happening).

You make your will stronger by exercising it. Especially when you can discipline yourself. Be careful not to exercise your will by being domineering with other people.

As a first step toward internalizing Key #7, keep an eye out inside for signs of neediness and analyze what it exactly is. Imagine scenarios in which your ego gets the stroking you want and scenarios in which your ego is crushed and humiliated. You will sense progress when you realize you don’t care about that stuff so much anymore – the sting will have been taken out of such mortification incidents. You will have become a mensch.

Be vigilant from the start of each day to the end. It’s optional, but very helpful to keep a journal noting when ego arose in you and what you felt and did about it.

After this useful preparation, we shall begin to more directly address observation in the next post.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

The Patterns of Your Life

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Powerful Mind Part 28
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – September 12, 2025
Created September 15, 2023

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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 Powerful Mind 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 System 1, 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 System 2) 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 once 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 one 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; knowing that one is not alone in the world; having 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 healthy, strong, and attractive 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 zip guns.

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 from 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, 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

Keeping Score Is Mundane Thinking

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Powerful Mind Part 26
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, August 29, 2025
Created September 1, 2023

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We have been conditioned to rate how well we have performed for other people. Our parents told us we were “a good boy” or “a good girl” at times, and “bad boy” or “bad girl” at other times. Gradually, we became more aware of which things would get us which rating, and played to that scorecard. Now, all these many years later, that same approval-seeking program still has independent existence in our minds.

It is what it is. Good and bad are just labels we paste on real things. This labeling has positive outcomes when it helps guide us toward benefiting living things and away from disadvantaging them. But the way we are constantly labeling ourselves moment to moment is a neurotic pattern that is mostly counterproductive.

We also carry around a certain amount of unforgiven guilt, probably as deeply repressed as we can make it. We regret some things we did in our past, and some part of us refuses to ever forgive ourselves for it. Even if we act out such a forgiveness, it tends not to take the first few times.

These related behaviors use up a certain amount of cognitive capacity that holds us back from Flow state. Our thinking remains petty because of these old wounds and ongoing concern with how well we are performing moment to moment. These are just more attachments we have, conditions we have counterproductively established that do not permit us to feel good about ourselves, nor enjoy the now, unless we can prove ourselves to ourselves every moment. As if we can never be good enough.

Self-rating is irrelevant. We need to relieve ourselves of the burden of constant self-judgment. This is really the ego, presenting the masks that we think people want to see from us. Just more other-directed conditioning, that is preventing us from exercising free will and being in Flow.

Observer state enables us to clear the slate of all mundanities arising within our robotic false selves, as they arise. Like shooting down a missile while it is just leaving the launching pad. We actually have enough attention to be able to pay close watch on what is going on both inside us and around us at the same time. But not if we are unable to control our own attention. If we are living in fear, that fear can cause us to be distracted by sounds or movements in the periphery of our vision.

This is why for thousands of years, empiricists in all world cultures have trained themselves and others to be able to concentrate, and to ignore distractions and stay single-pointed. Without the ability to concentrate, metacognition becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, and Flow state is likely to never occur.

Among the exercises practiced in some cultures is the burning out of fear, by meditating next to a corpse or in a graveyard. My preferred method is to imagine the feared event happening, and working out what one will do if it happens. Once you see yourself having the guts to ride through the feared situation with your head held high, the fear abates.

Getting rid of fear is part of getting rid of distractions, attachments, and other common habits of people who do not know about the higher states of consciousness they are giving up to hang onto these primitive mental ways.

Instead of keeping score on yourself, just let those impulses float away downstream.

Those scorings will otherwise either pump up your ego, making it more capable of distracting and fooling you, or they will undermine your confidence. Either way, they will detract from your future performance. In effect, when you give yourself a bad score at moment #1, you are increasing the odds of giving yourself an even worse score at moment #2.

It is more logical and practical for you to recognize the value of the mistake you just learned from, because it makes you much less likely to make the same kind of mistake again, so in effect, you ought to be rewarding yourself for having gotten that mistake out of the way as soon as possible.

But the best path is the one that lets all the scoring disperse as quickly as it tries to grab your attention. With a little practice this is not so difficult. That’s why this is the shortest chapter in this serialized book, Powerful Mind.

If something is happening, going with the flow of it is generally the best practice, unless you are certain it is not who you are to go along with that. If something is happening that is against your highest principles, you should not go along with it. What you might do is ask a question without seeming to take sides. This gives you the most potential leverage to correct the situation, although others with similar principles might misunderstand your actions. Not being attached to what others might think of you temporarily or permanently frees you to do the most good by your own lights.

Control

You are what you control. Your body and mind may not currently be entirely under your control. Deeply habituated ego conditioning may control your emotional reactions faster than you can stop them. This can feel frustrating and you might be tempted to blame yourself for it. However, if you do not currently control those things, it would be unfair to blame you. Leave aside the blame and simply persevere to take over your own castle knowing that in the end it cannot stop you from taking over.

Equilibrium

Balance and moderation are two of the great virtues taught by classical Greek Philosophy, Taoism, and, to some extent, by all spiritual traditions, as well as inner exploration psychologies. The ability to deal with every moment is maximized by not overreacting, taking everything in stride, not throwing people out of your heart based on something said or unsaid, not being so fervent about your high principles that you get sucked into attachment to them, and passionate rejection of what seems like opposite principles. Everything is connected. Dichotomies exist in the mind, but what is, is one connected whole.

Key #5

Self-rating is irrelevant.
This is radical new mental strategy #5,
the fifth simple key to the doorway
of the upper mind.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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Oneness

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Powerful Mind Part 25

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, August 22, 2025
Created August 25, 2023

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There is no separation between you and the scene you inhabit.

There is no separation between you and the scene you inhabit, you are not doubting nor second-guessing yourself, everything is flowing by itself, and it’s all perfect, you are having a peak experience you will remember forever, and enjoying it to the hilt.

This is the way you will feel when you’re in the Flow state of ecstasy. In this level of Flow, your body and your feelings are both in Flow, and you love and are grateful omnidirectionally.

There is a Flow state one step below that, where only your body is in Flow, but even in that level, your mind and emotions are not getting in the way. Your body’s actions are perfect and are doing themselves. Your mind and emotions are not gloating about it, because you are immersed in a state of play and are detached from the attachment to any outcomes, such as winning. This is the Flow state of action.

One step up from ecstasy, Flow is mental Flow, where words come into your mind that are drenched in meaning and significance and yet exhibit artistic brevity of the highest order, and seem to be coming from above. You know that you are reading the minds and feelings of other people. Your ability to anticipate accurately is greatly increased. You have visions of possible futures, and how they can be steered toward or away from. You can grok eternal truths at a deeper level.

The Flow states nest into one another so that when you are in mental Flow, you are also in ecstasy and in the Flow state of action.

Above the mental Flow state, I’ve experienced two other levels, both spiritual in nature. One step up from mental Flow state, you directly sense the consciousness of the universe as an embracing love. You can detect the presence of the universe consciousness with you, right there, and you know that it knows everything going on within you, you are in direct communication.

In the highest level, there is a degree of control which you appear to have over events around you. Or the universe has the control and is using it to support your work.

“I am with a couple of friends and one of them is exhibiting her characteristic tendency of wanting to guess what I am about to say even before I say it. However, every time she interrupts, there is a loud thunder-like sound coming from somewhere that drowns her out. The other friend and I cannot stop laughing. The interruptive friend tries to outguess the thunder-like sound by waiting in silence and then suddenly speaking before the thunder gets her, but the thunder is always faster on the draw.”

— You Are the Universe, page 250

You probably agree that, if I am not imagining all the above, these are states of consciousness that you would like to experience. Many of you probably can verify the truth of some of the above, having experienced it yourself, and if that applies in your case, you probably agree that you would like to experience those states more often.

That is the whole point of my highest passion work, to make it possible for more of us to spend most of our time in Observer state and Flow state.

Observer state is the entry point into Flow state. In Observer state, we are able to discern our own ego impulses from the inspirations of our own highest self.

Below the Observer state, there are a variety of ego-dominated states in which we are somewhat or very obsessed with our own selfish desires and in fear of not getting or not keeping the objects of our desires. Some of us in these lower states are somewhat or completely sane, while others in those states are somewhere on the neurotic-psychotic spectrum.

I find it pragmatic to lump all of these lower states into what I call EOP, Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, a pandemic coping strategy which arises autonomically in the presence of information overload and what appear to be unanswerable questions, such as “Who Am I? What Is This Universe?” The mind “decides” (typically below the level of consciousness) that there is no point wasting time thinking about such things, and the mind instead chooses among and subscribes to popular pre-packaged ideologies, choosing based on similarities to what one has been conditioned to believe by early experiences.

One does not reach individuality but convinces oneself of the opposite. One does not see that rooting for one party over another, or one religion or non-religion over another, is the avoidance of thinking for oneself by buying into some established belief system.

Exercise

For a moment, turn off your inner dialog, and see the world around you. Let yourself feel the love you feel toward each of the things you can see around you, how grateful you are to have those things, including your family, your pets, your work, your home, your “toys”, nature, your memories, life itself.

Identify with the whole scene you apprehend, not just with your current vehicle. See yourself as your consciousness (including that which appears within the perceptual field of your consciousness), and your current body as something you love, and which is like your car but even closer to you than that.

Accept the fact that there is not much you can know with absolute certainty right now, but you still have to go on making the best decisions you can. Accept that it is totally not going along with the crowd for you to identify with the universe, nor will you win the support of the masses by keeping an open mind about life after death. Nevertheless, in the privacy of your own mind, you can decide to remove the block against currently unpopular notions.

It turns out that this is essential to spending more time in the higher states of effectiveness. Eschewing the mundane view of life. Being an individual with your own views of life and openness to possibilities still on the fringe of scientific verification.   

Be on the lookout for slipping back into mundane thinking and feeling. It will happen to you; it happens to all of us. The conditioning and the repetition have their own powerful momentum.

Realize and feel good about it when you click back into individualism.

When you sense you are not in a joyous state, realize that you’ve slipped back into attachment to lower things, a mundane state of mind.

Remember this song [lyrics and music] at those times.

Be grateful to the intelligence which caused the miracle of the universe which gave you life as a native part of that same intelligence which manifests as the universe.

When the universe is convinced that this is authentic on your part, it will be disposed to give you these higher powers. The universe wants all of its parts to succeed because, in reality, everything is one consciousness, so benevolence begins at home, and protecting other parts by not sharing higher powers with those parts that are dangerous is just good sense.

Tyrants and other dangerous people in our hisandherstory have been allowed to use their free will but have not been given Flow state. Hitler, if given Flow state, would now be our planetary ruler.

It would be wise for we ourselves to limit even mere earthly powers given to people who do not authentically exhibit love, compassion, and forgiveness.

Key #4

Root for the Universe, not just for your current vehicle.
This is radical new mental strategy #4,
the fourth simple key to the doorway
of the upper mind.

What does it mean to “root for the Universe?” It means, in practice, nurturing and trying to benefit everyone and every living thing.

Being self-sacrificing is sometimes the right tactic, but not as a general practice; you too are part of The One.

Note that this strategy will make you feel good and will gain you more loving friends, even if it turns out that, counter to Einstein, the universe turns out to be a non-intelligent accident. However, if you are merely faking it in order to get those benefits, it will not work, which in itself is an interesting bit of evidence of the consciousness of the universe.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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