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Avoid Limiting Yourself and Seek Truth and Value

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Welcome to this week’s Pebbles in the Pond Blog, written by Bill Harvey
November 6, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS: The 50th Anniversary Edition Excerpt Series: Part 14

Avoid describing ourselves in unqualified terms.
Telling ourselves or someone else that we are a particular way tends to make us more that way, limiting our freedom to create who we are at any given moment.

If we believe we are a certain way because of our past experiences, we give those experiences power to dictate who we are. If we see how our past experiences have influenced us, this recognition is enough to free us from those effects; we can start anew at that moment.

Treating each second as the first second of our lives, and potentially as the last, when we hear ourselves describing ourselves, we then say, “That’s how I was. How do I wish to be from now on?”

Predict and eschew the predictable, culture-conditioned response. We don’t always have to get angry in situations where anger is expected of us; nor always contradict when contradiction is expected of us; nor always agree when agreement is expected of us. Instead, we avoid predictability except where it is necessary for the good of the Universe.

Avoid mimicry
We don’t have to be like our friend to be their friend.

Nor must we submit to the prevailing worldview. We may often be in the company of a group with a shared worldview; this creates a powerful impetus for us to fall prey to their worldview without even realizing it. They may value material success, wit in a specific vernacular, particular types of appearance and customs, and so on, and we may find ourselves accepting their negative judgment of us against their standards. This will first manifest in a tightening of free self-expression, formless negative emotion, and perhaps even mild mimicry on our part.

The option is to remind ourselves that our worldview differs from theirs and that ours is the only one we submit to. We can prepare ourselves to accept rejection from them with equanimity. And be honest with them, for they have no power over us; no one has any power over us because we are independent of even what is done to our body; it is not who we are; we are inaccessible to any but ourselves.

While seeking to determine whether anything useful can be derived from this confrontation between worldviews, we do not seek to establish ours as superior. It can be helpful to gently ask relevant questions and answer theirs; otherwise, we do not expostulate. Too much cannot be communicated in a single meeting. We accept the contact assignment the Universe has given us as having good potential purpose; then we see what happens.

We do not internalize their statements or identify with their worldview. Likewise, we do not accept judgment or care about irrelevancies. We consider no viewpoint sacred, not even our own.

Objectively seek truth and value.
Others who are anxious to have things be a certain way carry psychic momentum, which can be imparted to us without our even realizing it. Mindful of this, we don’t let ourselves be carried off by the momentum of others.

Instead of stampeding with our predisposition to help, we give ourselves time to think things through. What others think they want from us may not give them what they really want. We don’t allow ourselves to be influenced by the expectation that our hesitation will be misread as not caring, knowing that doing so would enslave us.

Once we let ourselves be affected by others’ momentum, we may not realize it is happening, because momentum interferes with observation. Thus, being transparent to momentum from the outset is advisable.

Mind Experiments

Since last week’s questionnaire asks you to describe yourself in unqualified terms, the next experiment corrects for this. Click here to download and print.

1. Give yourself the direction you need.

Now, add arrows to your responses on the questionnaire included in last week’s blog post, including any new adjectives you added, to indicate how you would prefer to answer. “No arrows” means you like your current responses and want them to stay the same.

Using arrows tells your robot which way to go at decision points. Check back months or years later to verify, to your delight, that the robot complied!

You might use the space below to note changes you’d like to make and how you plan to implement them over time.

Notes: You can keep those in your journal with the questionnaire

2. Unconstrained self-expression

When it does not risk a loss of value to the Universe, begin to relax the programs that “constrain the way you speak to ensure easy understandability”.

For example, when responding to your family about minor matters, see what happens if you simply open your mouth and speak, or mime an answer, gesture, or point rather than speaking at all.

Since the environment is low-risk, the play element may operate freely without concern for “meeting standards”.

3. De-narrowing unique/devalued child-things

To hold onto your parents, peers, and so on (something you felt you desperately needed at the time), you mimicked them and stopped doing what they and everyone else didn’t do. Thus, you were tricked into throwing away your unique experiment—temporarily.

Relive the moments when something YOU did or said was devalued. Did they lead you to give up the use or manifestation of a part of yourself?

Visualize bringing that part of you back into your life. Then energize it or not, as you like.

To be continued next week.

Our best wishes to all,
THEI Team

The Originality Moment

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Welcome to this week’s Pebbles in the Pond Blog, written by Bill Harvey
October 30, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS: The 50th Anniversary Edition Excerpt Series: Part 13

Start life anew with a clear slate each moment.

De-mechanizing oneself by broadening the range of creative possibilities

The consistency program in our heads is concerned with maintaining the apparent internal consistency of all our thoughts and actions. In this endeavor, it will naturally come into conflict with our changing behavior patterns, i.e., with learning. It will seek to keep us making the same mistakes in the same ways so as not to reveal past mistakes for what they now seem to be. However, our past actions were justified by what we believed then; no one ever takes a wrong action on purpose.

Our inconsistency over time in no way reduces the net value of the universe; our consistency programs need to be reminded of this fact.

If we find ourselves “out on a limb” doing something we are no longer entirely comfortable with, it may be the result of our consistency program. This is the time to stop what we’re doing and reconsider all alternatives, not doing anything merely for the sake of consistency.

The tendency to be consistent stems from the implicit assumption that if we have no preference about how to act in a given circumstance, the most logical course is to act as we have before. While this assumption may appear logical, its effect is to give power to precedent.

This is undesirable because it limits experimentation and exploration. Much precedent has been established casually.

As we proceed largely by trial and error, much precedent represents error and, as such, should certainly not be institutionalized.

Action to be consistent with precedent reinforces the precedent, developing it into a habit or programmatic addiction.

Programmatic addiction “freezes” us into stasis, halting the evolutionary march of becoming. We should ideally retain all power over our current behavior, yielding none to the past or others.

Acting consistently with precedent is another form of hasty closure and, as such, minimizes fresh thought, reducing the potential for understanding. Learning to identify which of our thoughts and actions are inspired by our consistency programs, we subject them to objective critical review as if the past did not exist, and therefore as if no precedent existed.

Start life anew with a clear slate each moment.

We can do this by spontaneously thinking and acting to break established patterns of thought and behavior unless, in a given instance, there are valid reasons not to do so.

Awareness of our power to change ourselves.

It’s common to focus on our past performance as a predictor of how we will act in the future, despite our contrary resolutions. This is because there is no feeling of change inside when we make a resolution; thus, we feel instinctively that the resolution has not changed anything nor will it.

Since we have no confidence in our resolutions, they have no effect. Then we say to ourselves, “I told you so!” and continue to behave as before with less hope than ever of willing and effecting change.

Resolutions, therefore, must not be made lightly, for their non-effect will weaken the effectiveness of future resolutions.

After considering all aspects of an issue, we resolve to do only what we are determined to do, and then let nothing stop us unless and until our mind is changed by new inputs and resolutions.

Aware that we will not feel anything inside when we make a resolution to change, we therefore do not expect to feel anything inside, and we do not take the absence of such a feeling as evidence that we are no different.

We are different: we have the invisible determination to act differently and the total invisible power to carry out this determination, aware that both the determination and power may be invisible yet real.

We can help prove this to ourselves by acting immediately on our resolutions, even if the situation only allows us to do so in small ways. This will prove that we are now different and will make our invisible will visible.

Mind Experiments

1. Springboarding from mistakes rather than patching them over

Real learning cannot occur while the ego is in command because the ego is attached to seeing itself as “right already” and thus cannot admit mistakes (and therefore cannot learn from them). The ego eschews the humiliation-evolution opportunity to preserve its illusions.

Pick a day and, for that day, focus on being honest and creative (not “consistent” and “resistant to change”). The more of your own mistakes you find that day and the more creatively you respond to them, the better.

2. Creative new approaches

One day, read this blog post upon waking and apply it to everything that happens that day. Try some creative new approaches in every area of your life that day. Enjoy.

When you are re-experiencing, check how you were feeling and what you did about it—then contemplate how this has affected the rest of your life by lulling you into fixed coping styles.

3. How do you see yourself now?

Fill out the questionnaire below. If you like, Click here to download and print.  Feel free to add your own adjectives and check them as appropriate.

To be continued next week.

Our best wishes to all,
THEI Team

Guiltless Housecleaning

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Welcome to this week’s Pebbles in the Pond Blog, written by Bill Harvey
October 23, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS: The 50th Anniversary Edition Excerpt Series: Part 12

It's time for a guiltless housecleaning

In last week’s post, we explored how to dismantle counterproductive tendencies by tracing their origins, setting realistic, gradual goals for self-control, and shrinking the gap between action and self-awareness until we can catch ourselves before we act. We also examined how our old coping mechanisms—”senators” or past influences—fight to survive long after they have outlived their usefulness.

This week, it’s time for a “guiltless housecleaning” of our internal system.

To compensate for these tendencies, it’s wise to regularly review our favorite programs for signs of vestigiality. But in light of their past service, we do not blame any program for being counterproductive as we remove it. Housecleaning should be guiltless.

We will remove a program when it no longer fits our developing gestalt; until that point, the program fit, and neither we nor the program were to blame for our union.

Avoiding the temptation to be harsh with the programs we remove, we look upon them not as enemies but as “mischief programs”. They were necessary stepping stones to where we are now; we can love them for this while defusing their power over us for the upcoming phases.

As we remove our extraneous programming, we will be simplifying the number of variables impinging upon any set of circumstances. Thus, we will solve the circumstances for best action more quickly and accurately.

In attempting to identify our unconscious programming, we need to be prepared for the pervasive to be invisible: the things we do most continuously will be hardest for us to detect and analyze.

Mind Experiments

1. De-energizing parental-dynamic-compensating parasite circuits

You may not yet know this, but you can “return in time” and re-experience any memory quite vividly just by putting the time and energy into it.

2. Do this—return to the first time you saw your parents perform the first act on your list, from Mind Experiment 2 from last week: De-energizing parental-dynamic parasite circuits.

Then do it for each other act on the list—go back to the first time they played that one in front of you.

To the extent that your rational mind believes that this built-in memory ability is impossible for you, the process will be delayed, but the subconscious processes will still work on it, will flash you hints from time to time, and eventually, you’ll suddenly re-experience a key moment: from then on, it will be easy—you will systematically re-experience each unassimilated moment in your memory and clear it.

When you are re-experiencing, check how you were feeling and what you did about it—then contemplate how this has affected the rest of your life by lulling you into fixed coping styles.

Our best wishes to all,
THEI Team

Observe Oneself More and More Closely

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Welcome to this week’s Pebbles in the Pond Blog, written by Bill Harvey
October 16, 2026

Click here for an update about Pebbles.

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS the 50th Anniversary Edition Excerpt Series: Part 11

For each manifestation, we ask ourselves why we did it, tracing the causes as far back as we can. Then we decide whether we want to give rise to such a manifestation again in light of our goals. If we do not wish to, we resolve not to.

Given our past experience with self-control, it’s useful to predict how successful we are likely to be in suppressing such manifestations. Thus, we set realistic goals for reducing unwanted manifestations gradually, rather than resolving to do the impossible all at once, which would only lead to discouragement and weakened self-belief.

If we always resolve to do something we believe we can do, even though it is only a little better than we have done in the past, we will gradually build self-belief, allowing us to confidently raise our sights a little more each time.

The effect of this process is to telescope the delay between action and thought so that at first we will find ourselves realizing soon after an inappropriate action that it was inappropriate and why. Then we will recognize these things instantly after the action; then we will catch ourselves in mid-action; and then we will catch ourselves before action. (Actually, these four types of experiences will always continue to occur, but the latter types will become more frequent and the former less frequent.)

Some of the programs we will decide to remove are programs we once consciously established, and which were useful to us at the time, but which have long since become counterproductive based on changing circumstances and our own increased capabilities.

It is an inherent characteristic of any developing system that heroes emerge and are heroes only within the context that stimulated their creation; as these heroes overcome and change such contexts, the heroes themselves become the context to be changed. Thus, both coping systems and governments begin as useful and gradually become counterproductive. This is the nature of the evolutionary process itself.

However, any system tends to be self-perpetuating: programs may be visualized as power centers in our heads, trying to survive despite their vestigiality. Thus, they will get some senators to speak in their favor, and in honoring them for their past service, we will hesitate to remove them. (Senators = mini-personalities that have been implanted in us by the internalized influence of others… at least two from Mom (her Mom and Dad); at least two from Dad (his Mom and Dad); etc. Each senator is a “parasite circuit” capable of “taking over our minds” by making us think its suggestions are ours.)

Mind Experiments

Revisit the Mind Experiments from Part 10

1. Identify your senators.

Pick a day, and on that day, listen to the conversations in your head and see if you can pick out the separate voices, e.g., the one that says, “You’re getting ripped off by” whomever you’re with, the one who’s always putting you down, etc.

Who are they?

2. De-energizing parental parasite circuits

Make a list of your father’s and your mother’s priorities. Then, side-by-side, list your own. By comparing yours to theirs, detect which of your priorities aren’t really your priorities but do influence your actions just as if they were, because of the hypnotic conditioning of your robot by long association with their robots at a time when you were maximally impressionable/imprintable.

Note: You might use a format like this; draw arrows wherever you see connections.

3. De-energizing parental-dynamic parasite circuits

How did your parents play together? What were some of their acts—make a list.

Then, for each act, see occasions you have played out each one’s role in your own life.

Love to all,
THEI Team

Please note: The Pebbles in the Pond blog written before Bill Harvey passed will continue to be posted here. However, the email notifications you have been receiving in your inbox will now come from a new email address: billharveyblog@humaneffectivenessinstitute.org . You may have to set this to be recognized as “not spam” so it appears in your primary or main email. We send these out every Friday morning.
In case you missed the last 2 posts, here is the link to last week’s blog, Edit Your Head Files. Here is the link to the post from two weeks ago, Celebrating Bill Harvey.