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Never Growing Up

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created April 2, 2026

 

The big problem with Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) – the pandemic, which almost no one realizes has made most of us borderline psychotics – is perhaps more accessibly explained as never growing up. Still thinking and acting childishly, but in a bigger physical body.

In the still male-dominated civilization we have inherited, this manifests as little boys becoming bigger boys but still playing with the same sorts of toys. Even before the ages when violent video games became the main toy, little boys and girls were privy to watching the television/streaming shows which glorify the heroes who are experts in violence. These are the characteristics of heroes that we teach children: they can punch out every bad guy. They are also good with guns and can throw knives with uncanny accuracy. Not just the heroes but also many of the heroines, particularly of the Marvel variety.

How could it end up any differently when violence dominates the news and, in a somewhat more controlled way, is inherent in sports? On top of reality shows, dramas, etc.

President Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex. That has evolved now into the military-technology complex. The four biggest technology companies, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, are each now the size of a mid-sized country in terms of annual gross revenues produced, and are projected to become the size of large countries soon.

“Everybody wants money and fame,” my great friend Zoe Kalar despairs. Her action to make this situation better has been to spend years building a better social media called 8. Standing for the infinity symbol standing up. Encouraging creativity and love, and AI-protected against hate. With millions of people and growing, backed by over a hundred caring advertisers.

Violence, money, and fame ought not occupy such large shares of our timespace. A more civilized civilization would spend more of its timespace with authenticity, respect, taking responsibility, creativity, love, doing good, and having uplifting and thought-provoking fun experiences. Although our rational minds might universally agree with this last statement, our rational minds are not in control of our actions.

Not growing up consists of acting out the conditioning received from others without realizing it. Not observing and learning from one’s own behavior and feelings what is really driving you. Not taking control over from that robot. Not choosing your own autonomous life and values. Not discovering your true gifts and developing them to Flow state levels. Living a meaningless life.

A brilliant article by Cal Newport in The New York Times recounts how physical exercise went from being something done regularly by 24% of Americans to 60% of the U.S. population between 1955 and 1971, and he lays out a plan for inducing a similar uptick in cognitive exercise. I’ve been trying to do the same thing all my life. I just wrote a note to Cal that reading and setting time aside for contemplation and staying away from social media are all definitely parts of the exercise needed, and I sent him copies of my two books of cognitive exercise, Mind Magic and Powerful Mind. I mentioned to him my diagnosis that long before today’s tech, our species was already on a long downhill decline in the use of our amazing brains and minds, as a result of mass conditioning to prescribed ideologies, and the absence of a culture supportive of daily periods of solitary contemplation.

The ancient Kabbalah schematic called the Tree of Life was, in my estimation, a coded understanding of the process of growing up.

Self - Wisdom - Understanding - Flow...

Cautionary note: This is my intuitive interpretation, and may be considered unorthodox or revisionist by serious teachers and students of Kabbalah.

There are 5 levels of the self, going down the middle from top to bottom. We are born and at first simply experience the life of the body, not necessarily remembering anything from the day before. Soon the ego is born, the first time we do not get something we need, and a manager appears in our minds to rectify such situations in the future (Freud’s idea, which I agree with). We might live 100 years and not go any further than that.

Or, under the right circumstances, most of us can also shift at times into a state in which we are non-self-protectively simply being genuine. That is the “self” in the sphere right above the ego. The Tree of Life implies (to me) that we must achieve a balance between love and work in our lives in order to achieve a stable evolution from ego to self.

Most non-Americans have a view that Americans are all workaholics. This is supported by a lot of good evidence, although it might not apply to all of us. That would definitely constitute an imbalance which would set us back in growing up. In addition, our culture does not make it easy for us to align the work we get paid for with what our passion work would be, and there is no cultural inducement for us to spend any time trying to figure out what our passion work would be. These things tend to keep us from growing up to all that life offers.

Nevertheless, most of us have experienced some time in the self, and many of us get a bit of that each day for most days of the year.

Then, in order to keep growing up, we need to balance mercy and severity. This is very difficult. In the USA, we have split into two subcultures: one of which is overbalanced in the direction of severity, and the other, which is overbalanced in the direction of mercy. Because of the male domination and glorification of violence by most of our stories and heroic role models, severity appears more attractive, and this appears to be reaching a peak at the moment.

Whenever we, as individuals, have escaped from ego into self, and also achieve a balance between severity and mercy, we rise to yet a higher level of consciousness: the Flow state. Here, everything we do is automatically the right thing, for as long as the state lasts, often broken by ego thoughts and feelings, cutting the connection.

Once we have reached that penultimate state, we are called a mensch in the Jewish subculture.

At that point, there is one final balance to be achieved, between wisdom, “knowing what the right action to take is,” and understanding, “accepting the situation and forgiving those who do not take right action.”

When that final balance has been achieved, the human has spiritually merged with the One Consciousness of the Universe, the Self, capital S.

In India, such a person is called a sadguru, a true guru. This confers the additional power to lift others simply by one’s presence. This is the end goal of growing up. In Eastern philosophies, the purpose of reincarnation is to achieve this end goal, which is likely to take more than a single incarnation if one is born on a planet as a member of a very young species which has not yet learned to make the best use of all of its potentials.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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My new book POWERFUL MIND has some great reviews

An innovative too for self-discovery

“A compelling, optimistic, and original approach to mental focus, Powerful Mind is an innovative tool for self-discovery and creative liberation. Succinctly outlined and intuitively structured, this book is replete with rational advice, using a radical but commonsense approach. It takes a rare and adroit thinker to incorporate myriad worldviews and welcome diverse readers, regardless of ideological allegiance, but Harvey shows himself to be precisely that. The book is a masterfully structured, intellectually affirming, and potentially paradigm-shifting read.”
~ Self-Publishing Review, ★★★★

Which Level of Consciousness Do You Want To Be In?

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created February 20, 2026

Flow state, the Zone, where everything does itself perfectly, you exceed your expectations of performance limits.

You have undoubtedly noticed that you are not always at your best. Almost nobody is. Sometimes we have very smart ideas, at other times our minds are dull, and at other times we think we are thinking very intelligently, only to discover that we were way off and should have known better from various earlier experiences and supposed learnings.

We generally assume that this is the way things are and that there is no way to improve our own mental/emotional performance, with some exceptions. We might read a self-betterment book or article once in a while. We might take a supplement that is for making our memory and other faculties work better. If someone we trust gives us earnest advice, we might listen with an open mind, and take it to heart, try to be better in the way suggested. We might even meditate or do yoga.

All of this is admirable. But is it enough? Have we pulled out all the stops to maximize our own performance at the game of life? Should we? Is it worth it? If it were so important, wouldn’t everybody be doing it?

The game isn’t set up that way. Particularly today, when so many people have more than one job in order to make ends meet and maintain the all-important lifestyle, who’s got the time for the luxury of being a perfectionist in any area of life? With two media bombarding you during most waking moments (sometimes only one), who can focus on anything anyway? And if you had a moment to spare, would you want to fill it with something that seems very hard and complicated?

Of course not. Nor should you. Fortunately, upping your consciousness does not have to be hard, nor complicated. And it can make you feel better fast and all the time. This post is all about the lazy person’s way of hacking consciousness. Winning with minimum effort. What a relief!

First, a quick, simplified map of the three levels of consciousness you can be in:

  1. Flow state, the Zone, where everything does itself perfectly, you exceed your own expectations of performance limits, and are as happy as a child at play at their favorite game. This is where you want to be as much as possible. Peak experience as Maslow called it.
  2. Observer state. Here you have no external dependencies – whatever happens, you remain impassive. You have no internal dependencies – you are able to also remain unmoved by emotional alarms going off inside of you. All by force of will, courage, determination, and sheer grit. That’s all you need to ACCEPT WHAT IS. Also known as Stoicism. You take the blows, self-inflicted or otherwise, and do not cave in. As if you didn’t care at all about anything. The way heroes are characteristically depicted in all stories since stories began. You also keep an eye on things inside and out and carefully discriminate courses of action, waiting as long as practical before making each decision, like George Washington and Davy Crockett. Including decisions about what and who to believe. All the old locked-down decisions are unlocked again in Observer state. You coolly observe in detail everything all over again with a completely open mind and no biases from all previous experiences.
  3. EOP – Emergency Operating Procedure – you keep up by moving as fast as you can to get all the things done that have been heaped upon you by yourself and others, get them all over with, and you defer enjoyment until after the list has been mostly ticked off when you can indulge in effortless escapism without having to think about your life or about anything serious. During this time, you experience endless moments of irritation about one little thing or another. You may or may not realize that it is your ego that is causing the irritation, and that you are dependent on others to keep you in a good mood, at which they usually fail.

Those are the three choices, in the briefest summary. The wisest choice among these is to spend as little time as possible in the lowest state. It is achievable by establishing the Stoic mindset as your main point of view. You don’t want to be cast around by outside forces; you want to be your own person, able to stand alone when necessary. You don’t want dependencies, you don’t even want to be dependent on your own internal clamor of bad feelings and babbling voices.

You want to identify with the SELF that is your inner essence, the pure EXPERIENCER, and take everything else with a grain of salt.

Is that all there is to it? Just that one principle will keep you in the two upper states of consciousness?

Not quite.

There is one other basic rule. Do not add any negativity to whatever negativity has gone before.

Stop your negative facial expressions and body language, and internal wallowings, and above all, any hurtful statements. Don’t add any negativity to the sauce of life; there’s plenty already. It will bring you and everyone else down, except for the Stoics in the crowd.

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

Become All You Really Are

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Powerful Mind Part 41

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog. December 19, 2025
Created December 22, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 40       |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Who are you, really? You probably play many roles in life, and try to live up to what others expect of you in each role. Your body language now moves by itself without you even noticing it, but each move was pressed into you like a piece of movable type impressing into clay, by your subconscious emulation of your role models.

My unofficially adopted older brother, Bill Heyer opined that my book Mind Magic might be retitled Really See Yourself. He was talking about your real self underneath those acquired roles and conditioned habits.

The movement in psychotherapy today to consider the inclusion of psychedelics in treatment – which goes back to antiquity and is related more to rites of passage than to treatment of mental diseases – reflects the common experience of those who have seriously experimented with LSD, psilocybin and other mind-altering chemicals of suddenly being able to see themselves, their imitative robotic selves and the true experiencer self under the layers of conditioning. This is generally a life-altering experience, and it is for the better, for minds that have been strengthened enough to withstand the extreme disorientation and to be able to integrate it into a constructive total picture of reality.

This degree of self-realization does not however, require drugs; putting the 12 Keys into practice will take you to the same place in a more gradual way.

In your day-to-day life, you have seen yourself on some occasions as having a lot to offer the world, and at other times you may have seen yourself as worthless, but these mood swings are part of the package, not evidence of what your true value is. Your true value in my estimation of reality far exceeds your most grandiose views of yourself. Because my best guess is that deep down inside each of us is an avatar of the universe itself, what the human race has always called God.

In my theory summarized in A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God,” all that exists is a single consciousness at play, a single Experiencer that multiplies itself in order to behold and interact with itself from many viewpoints.

Those philosophers who accept the idea of the universe possibly being conscious but reject the idea that this consciousness is benevolent, base their position on the existence of suffering. They conclude that the existence of suffering proves that there cannot be a loving God. My fiction series Agents of Cosmic Intelligence is designed to demonstrate one of many scenarios in which there can be a benevolent conscious universe and suffering can exist in that universe as a learning experience resulting from enabling eternal avatars to have free will. It is we, the avatars, who cause the suffering by errors we make from which we learn more and more, lifetime after lifetime.

You may be an avatar of the universe. My theory may be wrong. Nothing of this is scientifically provable yet. However, if you open your mind to all possibilities, you can gather evidence through your own experience. If you do not foreclose the possibility, you may hear in your mind “advice” that appears to be coming from wisdom you yourself didn’t know you possessed, and which works spectacularly well in the real world. This may come in the form of words or of a wordless hunch that comes true. When you are not blocking these possibilities by arbitrary or conditioned fixed-position skepticism, you might be surprised to notice how often you get these accurate intuitions. Jung included intuition as one of the four functions of consciousness, along with perceptions/memories, thinking, and feeling.

Intuitions can be explained without necessarily invoking extrasensory perception. For example, the totality of experiences stored in memory might be the source of these hunches we cannot explain, which we name as subconscious processing.

Many of us succeed in opening our minds to all possibilities to a degree that enables us to experience unusual and often useful events, such as knowing before picking up the phone whom the call is coming from, what someone is about to say, why one friend always flinches when you lift your right arm expressively, where a particular industry will be in a few years, exactly what to say to relieve a person who is torturing himself or herself, and to see through fakery. And much more.

All you truly are is probably so much greater than what you think.

Ego wants to believe that but for the wrong reasons. Ego is essentially a defensive system, what Hobbes was talking about when he described how we will pick fights with people out of fear. Ego is the operating system of the biological AI inside our brains and nerve networks. In higher states of consciousness, when one perceives Oneness directly, feeling at one with the universe and loving everything and everybody while retaining realistic understanding of weaknesses in others, which render them not to be trusted in the present moment, the ego has been bypassed, and the conscious mind is focused on itself.

Empiricism has devolved in current practice into measuring the things we can measure with instruments. Its original meaning was to observe what actually happens in reality, and that includes within one’s own psyche. William James was among the last of the great psychologists to employ introspection as a methodology, and more recently, Maslow and Csikszentmihalyi brilliantly drew upon introspection as a supplement to the observation of behaviors. Introspection helps explain behavior. You can use that yourself. If you do something that you yourself cannot explain why you did it, introspection can ultimately reveal why some part of you, perhaps ego attachments, perhaps Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), caused you to do it.

The civilization culture we take for granted has dwarfed our concept of ourselves. Acceleritis is the word I coined to describe how information overload has forced us into EOP and to call attention to the fact that it is all still accelerating, that unless we learn the trick of really seeing ourselves and everything else without conditioned filtration, we are going to be more gnomish in the future than we are today. We can see evidence all around us of civilization on the brink of falling apart, people becoming more distrustful of one another and more pessimistic, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom that we will live out if we don’t take charge of our own consciousness now.

We used to have a mythos that awed and inspired us, and many of us still retain a fragment of that in religion or inclusive idealism. We recommend keeping an open mind about anything being possible unless and until it is proven otherwise by multiple replications of the scientific method. That open-mindedness allows awe and wonder to coexist with logic and reason. Until we know for sure what the universe is and what consciousness is, based on science as proven as quantum physics and relativity, we make our decisions day to day based on not knowing if we are an avatar of the universe whose consciousness shall live forever, or an animal that will die permanently, we have to make those moment to moment decisions to be optimal in the context of both possibilities.

In that existential situation, it is not unreasonable to talk to God in your own mind if you feel like it. The conscious universe of which you are a part is a real possibility; no law of existing science precludes it. Many respected scientists take a premature stand against anything even remotely close to God, and in our respect for them, many of us downgrade the possibility of God, although this is what a follower does by blindly and loyally following everything an authoritarian says. Take back your right to think for yourself without being swayed by what others, even brilliant scientists, think. Take back your autonomy. You can do this without invoking faith, wishful thinking, superstition, or belief, just by remembering with extreme clarity that nothing has been proven yet either way.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He also pointed out that what we don’t know is vast compared to what little we do know so far. Under these conditions, it is a mistake to adhere rigidly to one or the other indefensible position. At some point in your life (you might be one of the rare people lucky to have already reached this stage), your own experiences might compel you to take the position that you know that God exists, and you will make all your decisions in the context of that certainty. But there’s no need to rush it. Best to stick to empiricism, your own experience, and not foreclose any possibilities without sufficient evidence that such foreclosure will benefit you permanently.

We have embarked on Key #11. Stay open to the possibilities that you may have extrasensory perception, precognition, even the possibility that the universe is trying to help you and is sending you messages. Remove the blocks.

More to come on this.

Here’s a little video holiday present for you.

Happy Holidays!

Card design and concept by Christine K. Niver. Photo by Bill Harvey of the view from his home office.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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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