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Being Real

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Powerful Mind Part 19

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Updated July 11, 2025. Created July 14, 2023

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In Powerful Mind 18, we talked about the consistency program, one of the elements of your robot (mechanized, oversimplified coping patterns) that constrains your freedom of expansive choice in every situation. There are other constraints on your free will and creativity in every moment, and one of them is social pressures.

We are social animals, we have built huge hives called cities, and we huddle in them together, or if we choose to live closer to nature, we still highly value the ability to go out and mingle. This is a natural form in which love expresses itself as belonging; we belong to each other and with each other, and we enjoy it. This is part of our reality and can have positive and negative outcomes on our ability to express what is in us. It is of more long-lasting positive value to learn how to channel situations so as to be free in every moment to be who you are, even if it does not seem to fit in at an obvious level.

It’s natural to seek rapport by acknowledging the beliefs you have in common with the people around you. It may feel risky and unnecessary to expose your differences. But it need not be risky, if done right. Instead of expressing disagreement, try the Socratic method: ask questions, and consider the answers objectively, temporarily suspending whatever you may believe based upon your accumulated past experiences.

A contrarian is one who has established a fixed script to argue against practically everything said in earshot. This is the robot with its oversimplified and fixated habit patterns.

Being yourself and not glossing over inner secret disagreements you may have while appearing to go along with the crowd is an act of courage. But it need not be risky if carried off with savoir faire, kindness, and respect.

Open-mindedness is an attractive quality and encourages people to be themselves too. Locked-in ideological dogmas are among the more dangerous side effects of allowing enslavement to one’s robot. Enslavement creeps. You start by enslaving yourself to robot reactions in order to avoid the psychic dissonance and feeling of helplessness at the complexity of life. That then becomes enslavement to other people because you are trying simplistically and superficially to become accepted by them.

The trick with being real is that it is not a stand-alone principle; it must be executed simultaneously with a complementary principle, screening out negativity. If you open up yourself without screening out negativity, the results will be undesirable. You will be expressing not only the real you, you will also be letting out the ventings of your robot. The real you does not want negativity, does not want to add more negativity to the world, would far prefer to never experience negativity, ever. So why do we so often express negativity, sometimes without realizing what a negative expression sits there on our face? It is a robotical phenomenon, not coming from our True Will. Call it a chemical reaction or Pavlovian conditioning or anything else you want; it is part of the problem not part of any solution.

When called upon to comment on a subject you know to be important to the people you are with, and you know going in that you differ from them on certain aspects of this subject, reveal your open-mindedness up front, and mention some of the things that have occurred to you about the subject about which you are still sorting things out. Handled this way, you are inviting your friends to discuss the subject open-mindedly, which is more fun for everybody. Everyone might learn something. This method of respectful discourse is the foundation on which great civilizations have been built. When this format of openhearted discussion is lost, these civilizations have crumbled. That’s how important it is to be real and yet positive at the same time. When you disagree, you can still express positivity by the way you do it, with respect and open-mindedness.

One of the best ways to move toward resolution of ideas which are being debated is by setting up experiments and objectively recording and interpreting the outcomes. This is the method of science and deserves to be applied to daily life, including politics and governance. Fact-based decision-making based on empirical observation of test results, safely testing concepts in action. This can be done at the level of small local organizations or on a global scale.

By avoiding giving your usual response, you open up the chances of creativity and learning, you rethink things. By avoiding social pressures to simply pretend to agree, yet maintaining friendliness and respect as you speak your mind, you make the world a better place, you add to the net value of the universe.

Every rule in the Powerful Mind series  (these posts will become the book Powerful Mind) has its exception cases. All 12 Keys work best when balanced together, customized to the current situation you face. This integration is best done intuitively without attachment to outcomes and without fear or anger. Living in this open way rests upon a foundation of courage. Winston Churchill identified courage as the most important virtue because all the other virtues rest upon it.

 See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

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The Breakdown in Society Has a Cause: EOP

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Powerful Mind Part 7

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Updated May 16, 2025; Created April 21, 2023 

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It is our conviction that the way we use our minds is the source of the breakdown in society we see all around us. Our work is devoted to communicating to as large an audience as possible, the antidote to this contra-survival mental processing paradigm.

In the interest of practical simplicity, our system of training, which we call Powerful Mind, reduces the complexity of our theory of psychology to three states: a lower Ego state characterized by what we call EOP or “Emergency Oversimplification Procedure”, the access state that we call the Observer state, and a higher state called the Flow state.

The Observer state (the temporary or permanent ability to objectively challenge one’s own prior thought or feeling)  is attained far more easily than the Flow state (automatic “perfect” performance). And it is impossible to get directly into the Flow state from the lower Ego state. This is why the Observer state is important.

In this and subsequent posts, we’ll deep dive into each of these three states. Let’s start with EOP.

To current generations, EOP is the “normal everyday waking state of consciousness”. In this state, we are energized by a set of background assumptions that we do not question, and which we have lost awareness of to some extent because they have been taken for granted from long habit.

These assumptions include:

  • There is almost always a sense of dilemma, something we have to fix, perhaps something as simple as a to-do list which we approach as something to get done and put behind us, not something to enjoy and take our time with;
  • We must earn the approval of other people in order to feel good about ourselves—as if our own self-approval is not enough;
  • We could run out of money;
  • We are under time pressure because of the foregoing assumptions;
  • Because of time pressure, it is important to quickly classify things into good vs. bad;
  • There is too much to think about and more to think about every second, and therefore it would be impractical to think it all out—better to just make the decisions we cannot avoid making based on what is going on around us;
  • It is virtually inconceivable that we could make profound changes in our experience of life on a second-to-second basis, i.e., in our consciousness;
  • There is no underlying connection between our own consciousness and any other consciousness;
  • It is in our best self-interest to act as if science has already discovered everything important there is to know about the nature of reality;
  • We will live our lives in the best way if we simply accept on faith one set of beliefs by choosing an existing widely-approved religion or dogma;
  • If we want to fit in, we must limit our conversation to materialistic topics and not talk too much about the mind, the nature of reality, or spirituality;
  • If we are male, we must limit the expression of our feelings, especially outside our family or in public;
  • We should ignore our hunches as worthless unless they are supported by clear and present visible proof;
  • If we are male, we must treat the intuition as something feminine, which only women should have, like feelings

All of these assumptions playing in the background cause us to live lives of “tacit fear” — we are not really aware that we are always afraid. We may be intellectually aware of the fact that we have all been brainwashed by our culture (like the people in Orwell’s 1984), but we set that thought aside. EOP is all about setting thoughts aside, even though the same thought may come up thousands of times.

Suddenly realizing that you have been living a life of fear might make you angry at yourself, the world in general, and me for telling you. Anger and fear are both strong alarm systems to get our attention, like an alarm clock. They work most effectively when you get the insight as to what is making you afraid or angry, and turn off the alarm clock by focusing your will on that issue until it is resolved. That way, without distraction or crippling lack of self-belief, you can shift focus to creative and effective solutions to conquer fear, anger, and what is causing these alarms to go off.

The traditional psychological term for the center of consciousness that rules this normal waking state is “Ego”. Freud describes the Ego as the center of consciousness that is created the first time a baby is frustrated in getting something it wants. The Ego is a kind of “press agent” and “chief security officer” (think of Whorf in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, or an attack dog that trusts and loves only its one master) that considers the self to be threatened by the surrounding environment and people and must therefore cope with that threat by defensive measures often taken in advance. As psychologist Eric Berne pointed out in his book Games People Play, in every conversation and every relationship we have, it’s as if we’ve rehearsed our responses, as if we are always playing out the same script, playing the same tapes, not being creative, spontaneous and authentic, in the moment.

For example, some people play the “Yes, but” game in every dialogue they have. They pretend to accept what the other person has said, but then negate it one way or another — the game being to find the words to use to neutralize the other person’s input. These people have become closed to new ideas, often because they are too paralyzed with information overload to be open and receptive.

There are many ways that getting stuck in a rut like this are exhibited in a person’s life. They are all symptomatic of EOP. All of us have had experiences which we never quite figured out and overcame. These create defensive patterns going forward, yet we are not really aware of what we are doing and don’t even notice our own fixed defensive games.

Once we get into the Observer state, we can see our own conditioning and consciously change our behavior to become more flexible and open-minded, able to learn from new experiences and from other people’s input. We immediately become less negative and more objective about ourselves. We stop projecting failure.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

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A Clearer, More Effective State of Consciousness

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Powerful Mind Part 6

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog,
Updated May 9, 2025; Created April 14, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 5               |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

The Observer State

A clearer, more effective state of consciousness —
only seconds away from your daily state of consciousness.
Just knowing it exists can benefit you

This blog post is about states of consciousness. We will focus on one particular state of consciousness we call the Observer state. The Observer state is more powerful than the state most of us are in most of the time, and leads to the Flow state, which is more powerful still in terms of your ability to make an impact on others around you and on the world. We speak about both states as being “The Upper Mind”. The purpose of this book is to show you the simple yet easily missed doorways into the Upper Mind.

Why is it important to think about consciousness at all?
Because life is all about consciousness.

We do not exist without consciousness. While modern science has made brilliant progress in almost every other sphere of reality, too little is known about consciousness.

Yet all the ills of the world are rooted in ignorance of how consciousness works. We have made the world we see around us. It all started in our minds. Every day, we do things we regret because we listen to and act on whatever our minds dish up to us. We need our minds to perform better, to become powerful, to gain insight into ourselves and others, to come to better decisions on a moment-to-moment basis.

The extreme anti-heroes who have become powerful on the world stage, who have driven much of our history so far, might not have chosen paths of destruction if their genius had been creatively channeled, if they had not lost touch with their compassion and love.

If we collectively knew our own minds better, we would not go to war, but rather we would find creative win/win solutions — the ones we get to in the end anyway, after all the bloodshed. The path to a better world lies through the terrain of consciousness.

One day, when we all really do know our minds better, the world will be a relative paradise compared to the way it has been throughout all recorded history.

As the great science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells said, “History is a race between education and destruction.”

If we can make our minds powerful now, we can gain the maturity as a race necessary to not destroy ourselves, given the extreme weaponry we have now at our disposal and our habitual disregard of our destructive effect on the environment (the air we breathe, the water we drink).

Because war is a pattern repeated throughout recorded history, we tend to assume this is the way it has to always be. And yet, “recorded history” literally means since the onset of written language. In short, written language and the thinking processes that go with it have led to acceleritis, information overload, and Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), which blocks the upper mind and leads not only to war but also to crime and personal cruelty born of our disconnection from innate compassion. Our minds need to become more powerful in order not to be confused by the information overload so much that we are easily led and manipulated into a life nearly devoid of positive feelings, squandering the opportunity of life.

Each of us knows intuitively that the only thing we can change is ourselves. This is the only way we can make a better world.

Powerful Mind seeks to reveal specific information and techniques for attaining specific states of consciousness. We will be talking about waking states of consciousness, not about sleeping states. Sleeping states are important too, but in the interest of focus, we’ll leave these to another book.

A Broader View of What Science Is

Around 400 BC, in the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, one branch of philosophy called “epistemology” focused on understanding “how can we know?” Over time, different schools of thought evolved about how we can know: rationalists believe that we can know things directly through our intellect; authoritarians believe we know by listening to authority figures who tell us what we know; empiricists believe that we know by direct experience, by testing things in the real world; intuitionists believe we can know directly through a mysterious faculty.
Science developed out of empiricism, basing what we consider to be “truth” on factual experience, testing, and validation. In the case of science as practiced in the West, especially in the last few hundred years, that “experience” is usually the taking of measurements using instruments with dials and displays from which one takes readings. The person taking the readings is the “observer” often mentioned in relativity and quantum mechanics, the latest forms of science. In the East, science is also based on experience, and there the experience can often be inner experience where dials and displays are not involved. This is still science and still based on empirical experience.

This Eastern willingness to accept internal evidence explains why science in the West has not validated the existence of the more effective states of consciousness. Starting toward the end of the 19th Century, inner experience or introspection fell out of favor in psychology, after William James, the last of the giants of psychology to accept inner evidence directly. The more externally-oriented culture of the West created a blind spot. In psychology, work shifted to behaviorism, the focus on externally quantifiable actions, along with the study and social application of conditioning to alter these actions.

Eastern epistemology actually fuses empiricism and intuitionism. No conflict is seen between these ways of knowing because they both involve experiencing reality for oneself.

Although based on empiricism, Western science became authoritarian and elitist in its epistemology: the common person was excluded from “knowing” by the reduction of all science to mathematics, a difficult language to master. Science at its cutting edge moved out of the sphere of something the common person could totally visualize and comprehend.

Science and States of Consciousness

Regarded academically as a “soft science”, traditional Western psychology recognizes only three states of consciousness: dreamless sleep, dream sleep, and waking consciousness. Eastern psychology, since the fifth century B.C., recognized ten states of waking consciousness: the normal everyday waking state, the access state which precedes meditation, and eight progressively deeper states of meditation. Oscar Ichazo, a modern student/teacher of consciousness techniques and founder of the Arica Institute in 1968, fuses ideas from consciousness explorers throughout history (plus his own) to propose fifteen waking states of consciousness ranging from psychosis, through six levels of neurosis, three levels corresponding to the Eastern access state, and five levels of higher consciousness.

It is revealing that Western psychology reduces waking consciousness to a single state. William James was the first prominent Western psychologist who warned against “prematurely closing the book” on the existence of other states of waking consciousness. More recently, Mihaly Czikszenthmihalyi (pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”), former head of the University of Chicago Psychology Department, coined the term “Flow state” (known in show business as “Being On”, and in sports as “The Zone”), and conducted valuable research into this state, which was published in his 2008 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

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User’s Manual For The Mind

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Powerful Mind Part 4
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, April 18, 2025
Originally posted March 31, 2023

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Most people would agree that it would have been handy to have been given a User’s Guide when born. Remember the takeoff on the Emergency Broadcast System?

This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life, you would have received further instructions as to what to do and where to go.

Such a guide would have to start very simply, since the child at birth will not process anything complicated. It might start out like this:

Hi! Your name is ________. But YOU are much more than your name. You are a living being in a vast, mostly-unknown universe. You are a member of the dominant life form on the planet. You became dominant because you’re the smartest. That means you know how to use your mind.

Q. So what IS your mind? Are you and your mind the same thing?

A. Yes and no. You are your mind. But remember, “mind” is just a word; it depends on how you define it exactly.

One way of defining “mind” – the way we define it – is everything you experience, your consciousness, your awareness. Other definitions say the “mind” is just the “intellect” and does not include the feelings, intuition, perceptions, imagination, memory, willpower, or ESP we might experience. If you follow either of these definitions then You are more than your mind, as defined, since you do have all these other things.

Q. Waah! Want Mama! All these other what things? You’re saying I’m made up of all these things, and I won’t even know what these things are that make up who I am.

A. No problem, let’s go over the list. These are among all the good things you have, going in:

  1. You will have the persistent sense of being you – we call that the “Self”.
  2. You will have attention.
  3. You will have feelings – some good, some not so good; you may learn how to re-set yourself back to good feelings, by solving specific small and larger challenges in your life; over time you may learn how to re-set to good feelings faster. Confidence is a feeling, as is lack of it. This list of feelings goes on. You’ll see.
  4. You will have five physical senses – sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.
  5. You will have hunches – intuition. By following these hunches and using the rest of what you have, you will be able to predict the future, but only imperfectly.
  6. You will have memory.
  7. You will be able to generate imagined stories and experience them, called dreams when you are sleeping, and imagination when you are (relatively) awake.
  8. You will decide that things have to be a certain way and you will do things that tend to cause that outcome; this is called willpower.
  9. Free will. This means you can make up your own mind. And you can do whatever you decide to do, but you must accept the consequences, meaning it will be wise to think out consequences before you act. You’ll need something else for that, something that none of these first eight parts of you can do.
  10. Hence, the intellect. This part of you is the thinker, the part of you that can take apart a situation into pieces and thereby better understand it. This part can also make plans, always a good thing to do before taking action. This is also the part you are hearing or seeing whenever you hear or see words in your head. And it’s the part that most helps the intuition when it comes to making predictions.
  11. Motor control (and body). You will be able to move the body you are currently inhabiting as you will it (unless you become intoxicated or are otherwise physically challenged). You use this body of yours, and the motor control that you have over it, to take actions in the world that appears to exist outside and around you, to relate to what appear to be other selves.
  12. ESP. You will discover for yourself whether these exist for you or not. These are Extra Sensory (meaning “extra” to the first five) Perceptions. Telepathy, precognition (greatly improved ability to make accurate predictions), telekinesis, gaining additional influence over outcomes “as if by magic”.
  13. Spirit. This is the part of you that feels like a part of Something much larger. There is much for you to discover by exploring this asset, and the same can be said for all thirteen of your assets, aspects, faculties, manifestations, whatever you choose to call them.

Q. This is a mindblower – what a trip! How can I manage 13 parts of myself and keep it all coordinated?

A. Don’t overthink it. The rational mind is not designed to consciously control all parts of you. If you try to use the rational mind that way, you won’t even be able to catch a ball. Be spontaneous and natural, so long as you are careful at all times to not hurt other people’s feelings or their bodies. You will have to discriminate carefully and quickly, all the time, to decide which of your impulses to follow, and which ones to hold in check. If you are unsure or there is any negative feeling, don’t act too quickly. Be spontaneous and go with your own flow, but be prepared to take control and stop yourself from getting yourself in trouble. This means both hands on the wheel of yourself. Pay attention. And never forget to be on your own side.

At the first unpleasant feeling, stop what you’re doing, and figure out why that was unpleasant, and how to make it more pleasant “next time”. Don’t take the alternative course of just bypassing those little clues, suffering the unpleasantness without understanding it fully. These imperfections pile up and eventually, you are looking at a full-scale problem, and what seems like a million unanswered questions in your head.

In reality, if your life goes along like most people’s lives in the 21st century, you will probably reach a point of pile-up and possible breakdown, and fortunately, that challenge will bring you back to start over, to figure things out for yourself.

Always come back to who you are. We pick up mannerisms and other behavior patterns from other people and these conditioned behaviors are like a short circuit between motor control and memories. Memories of what you have seen other people do or say program your body without your agreeing to it consciously. Be alone and use all parts of yourself to figure out what has gone wrong and how to fix it.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

Live chat with my avatar now.

 

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