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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.
Created October 6, 2023. Updated March 21, 2025

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 though 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 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 will power 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

Study Thyself

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Powerful Mind Part 17

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 21, 2025
Created June 30, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 16

“Know Thyself” goes back to the Delphic Oracle Temple in Sixth Century B.C. Greece then known as Hellas. The saying is attributed by legend to Apollo and by historians to a group of seven sages of whom the best known is Thales, who postulated that the universe itself contains a natural force that brought about all of existence, and was the first human on record to have predicted the exact timing of an eclipse. Socrates based much of his philosophy on these two words.

In general use at the time, the phrase was interpreted as knowing one’s own capabilities and limits. Plato altered the meaning to knowing one’s own soul. Judeo-Christian philosophers added the meaning of knowing one’s own relationship with The Creator.

In the context of metacognition, in my view, to know oneself means to have undergone the strenuous and time-consuming process of studying oneself as if “one is an observer from the outside, with a means of seeing, feeling and hearing what is going on within oneself,” including what lies below the conscious mind. And with the help of this objective pseudo-outside view, one has successfully edited one’s own thoughts, feelings, and automatic reactions, and thus achieved an inner integrity, a oneness, a simplification, and an autonomous focus. When these conditions have been met, I would call such a person, one who knows themself.

Note the mention of “what lies below the conscious mind.” This has become a hairy subject in psychology. The heavy emphasis placed on hewing to the a priori assumption of materialism within the social structures of academic scientists, while any a priori assumption is anathema to the concept of objective science, has caused psychologists as well as all other types of scientists to veer away from language which undermines their social standing within their fields. The words “unconscious” and “subconscious” – which had been the core of the Freudian/Jungian revolution in psychology – are now taboo. Words such as “preconscious” are preferred, but the safest way to discuss the subject is to use the lengthier construction “events that do not reach the threshold of conscious awareness.”

This latter workaround actually has some value in my estimation. It calls attention to the fact that qualia (subjective experiences within the psyche) can succeed or fail to leap over the line into conscious awareness. This is important to the inner explorer because it is a cue to strive to pay sufficient inner attention to become conscious of more of the arising qualia: thus making more of the subconscious, conscious.

One who achieves this degree of self-knowledge will experience moments of inner clarity when a fear or anger reaction starts to subtly arise and one catches and squelches it within less than a second.

In Parts 14, 15, and 16 of Powerful Mind, we have reviewed how each of us became substantially unfree, subtly enslaved to imposed views, and we covered the method of close self-analysis, and resolute perseverance in disciplining the mind and becoming an original person.

We leaned heavily on the metaphor of “the robot” to help your inner senses grasp the true relationship between the parts of yourself which have become automatic (the robot) and the essence of who you really are (the real you). One exercise we recommended is to check your level – are you trapped in the robot right now, or are you in the Observer state?

As we look back at the last few posts we see an opportunity to add one further recommendation as to how to know where you are.

If you sense some dilemma you seek to resolve, the likelihood is that you are in the robot. When you are in the Observer state, you are solving problems as they arise and there is no feeling of any dilemma.

One of the main objectives of Powerful Mind is to reduce all of the vast complexity of purifying and mastering one’s mind, to a set of a dozen principles, each of which can be stated in a few words.

The first of these principles, or Keys as we call them, was described in Powerful Mind Parts 10-13, and is:

Doubt your own last thought/feeling.

This is the method that most directly confronts the robot. As we specified in that section, this Key must be applied with balance and perspective to avoid sinking into a robotic Hamlet information analysis paralysis. If you find yourself having lost all confidence in your own intuitions, you will know then that the robot has judoed you and is still running the show. The doubt is meant as a momentary wipe – the “arc” we have spoken of earlier – a distance between the arising of an impulse to believe something specific, and your confirmation of your approval or the denial of your approval of that impulse. If too much time goes by without reaching closure you are being indecisive and need to shut out the world for 20 minutes or so in order to really study the situation and reach your best judgment as to an action plan which can later be improved as you learn more.

The second Key which we have been working on in Powerful Mind Parts 14-17 is:

Study, edit, and reset your automatic reactions.
This is radical new mental strategy #2,
The second simple key to the doorway
Of the upper mind.

Whereas the first Key is a permanent one, useful at all times, when applied correctly with balance, this second Key is one that is most important for the first year or so of the rest of one’s life, after making the decision to clear out the debris of other people’s influence, and re-evaluating everything from one’s own autonomous, empirically-driven, pragmatic and aesthetic intuitions. After the first year or so, you may see yourself needing to use this Key a bit less often, and that, if it happens, will be a good sign.

Love to all,
Bill

How Did We Each Become Such a Rolebot?

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Powerful Mind Part 15

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 7, 2025
Created June 16, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 14,

From our earliest experiences, people were telling us how we should be. For the first five years of our life, possibly the first 25, and unfortunately probably until the last breaths we take, we are very malleable creatures. The plasticity of our brains is widely known: we are constantly building new neural connections, which can then take on a life of their own, able to cause some of what we say to ourselves internally. We are particularly impressionable when we first come into the world for on our own, we know nothing, except the obvious physical needs as they arise, and so our instinct is to look for incoming advice.

Given these basic conditions, it’s understandable that even besides hard-wired primate mimicry programming in our genes, we would be largely shaped by each other. Other mechanisms more recently discovered such as mirror neurons enable our empathy with each other, serving a pro-species-survival behavior pattern of cooperation which has enabled us to erect the many artifacts of what we call civilization.

Freud, in what I feel is his most important book, Civilization and Its Discontents, comments based on his pioneering experiences of psychoanalysis with patients, how he perceives a common thread across neurotic people (today I believe he would classify us all that way), a pattern created by the thwarting of inner motivations by the constraints placed upon us by our particular form of societal civilization. From his sample, he concluded that the main problem was the limitation which most societies on Earth (his sample was mostly European upper class) place upon free sex. Free in the sense of being able to have sex with all the people that seem sexy to you. Had his sample been representative of the population of the planet, his focus on sex may or may not have remained the same. The total number of ways in which our behavior has been shaped by our laws and social conventions is far more all-encompassing than as relates to sex.

As each of us grows up we generally accede to the demands placed upon us to achieve acceptance and a sense of belonging.

This is one of the fifteen primal motivations discovered by my research. The scrip we pay for belonging is conforming. Sometimes that conforming is comfortable and sometimes it rankles us inside, but we go along with the game for safety and support within the herd. Freud’s wider point was that excessive conforming leads to neurosis, an early stage of insanity (disconnection from reality). Just as there are pre-cancerous states, there are also pre-insanity states.

Neuroscience and psychoanalysis both have many explanations to the phenomenon of our tendency to be influenced from the outside. My own method, concentration introspection, goes back much earlier than either of these two potent modern mind sciences, spanning millennia from the Rig Veda through the work of Freud, Jung, William James, Abraham Maslow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and John H. Flavell, who gave it a new name, metacognition, in the 1970s. All of these methods sheds more light on how it is that each of us is capable of being influenced in extraordinarily powerful ways from the outside – typically, without our realizing the full significance of the process, and its spread of effects.

From my recent media work, in collaboration across many industries and academia, where there is much to be learned from the scientific work of others, we now know that McLuhan was more right than he himself knew. He said the medium itself was more powerful than the messages which came through the media. He was referring to television and never claimed to have seen the digital future we now live in. And yet, the latest evidence about digital media shows that McLuhan’s concept is proven right in media he never anticipated.

The latest evidence is that the forced conventions of scrolling, mouse control, skippable and unskippable ads, and relentlessness of ads begging for attention, have caused the constraining of attention windows: digital media users fall into a pattern of giving only a second or two of attention to ads they do not ignore entirely. This is quite different from television, where under ideal circumstances of ad-context resonance, 15 seconds of immersive attention can occur when the viewer’s subconscious motivations resonate with the ad’s subconscious motivators.

So our present external world has taken a very strong hand in your life and mine so far.

It will take a lot of metacognition, introspection with concentration, for you to bring on the Observer state in your own castle. The state in which you can intuitively catch yourself thinking something for which you actually have no compelling evidence, but thinking that way has become habitual to you. And what you have been taking to be your very own self when you take your own counsels internally, is actually the residue of all of the imprints that have been made on you by the horde of stimuli you have experienced.

Clearing out excessive other-directedness from your self is a form of purifying the mind.

This purification is central to all of Eastern philosophy. Most of what is generally taken as mysticism is actually codified metacognition, using metaphors recognizable and meaningful in those cultures. Even astrology started as a way of evoking metacognition.

This is another example of how our society shapes us. I just wrote “even astrology” because it is a subject that has been denigrated in our present society. And even I follow society’s rules. I just understand what I am doing and why I am doing it, rather than playing a programmed set of roles, and not even realizing that I actually have a true self underneath all the roles. Realizing your true self from the inside is a freeing experience, and leads to a life living at least sometimes in the Flow state, the state of continuous impregnable happiness and effectiveness, bringing forth your unique gifts to the world.

Allocating just twenty minutes a day to studying yourself objectively (the socially acceptable term is “meditation”) is guaranteed to improve your life, even if it’s already perfect.

You don’t have to sit in a specific position. The main point is to observe your self, observe the workings of your mind. Stay on it, don’t get distracted from it. Watch what is going on in your mind as you unwind. What do you start thinking about first. Why that?

As soon as you realize you’ve been distracted, go back to the task. Have a way of taking ultra-brief notes – key phrases that will bring you back to where you just were. That way you can go on having revelations without worrying about remembering the ones you had a moment before.

Don’t filter things out that you feel like writing down because they might seem obvious to others. You are the only one who will ever see these notes. Unless you decide to publish some of them. Don’t do editing during metacognition, editing is for later. Metacognition is reconnaissance, the Observer state, assimilation of implications can come later, hence the notes.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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 – January 24, 2025
Created November 10, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 35

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, 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