Category Archives: Classic Bill

Avoid Hasty Closure

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The mechanism of “making up one’s mind too fast due to overload panic” and how to avoid this

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
September 4, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 7

Hasty closure is the mechanism of "making up one's mind too fast due to overload panic"

Built into each human being before birth is an information- processing program whose apparent purpose is to make us need to understand our external and internal experiences. It works as follows: certain experiences (or “perceptions” or “percepts” – these words are all used interchangeably) trigger a feeling of dissonance in the mind; you pay closer attention to and think about these until you have a feeling of having absorbed their information, at which point the feeling of dissonance goes away, and we say that you have achieved closure.

Hasty closure can be defined as those instances in which it would have been useful for us to think further before closure.

Not all percepts trigger dissonance, but there are too many percepts available relative to our current capacity. Thus, most external and internal percepts are automatically screened out by a process of instant closure which avoids dissonance entirely.  For such percepts, we are not even given the opportunity to decide how much thought they merit; they do not reach our conscious attention and, therefore, receive no conscious thought.

Obviously, whenever we achieve instant closure by not even noticing a percept that contains valuable information for us, this is also an instance of hasty closure.

Thus, there are two types of hasty closure:

Type A: Instances in which we notice an object or a thought, think about it, reach our conclusions, and put it out of our minds too hastily.

Type B: Instances in which we do not even notice an object or a thought which contains useful information for us.

The types of percepts that will tend to be screened out most frequently by this second type of hasty closure will be percepts on which we have achieved closure in the past.

Thus, as we experience more and more different types of percepts, fewer and fewer percepts will trigger dissonance; we will stop looking at things we have seen before, and we will stop thinking about things we have reached conclusions about before. In this respect, the mind acts as if there is never any need to reopen old issues, although relevant new information may now be present in memory with which to look at old issues from new angles.

Eventually, we end up looking only at a narrow range of percepts that are relevant to our interests; this tends to block potential change or expansion of our interests.

Know that percepts that do not trigger dissonance and which therefore yield instant closure, do so as follows: Images of things we have seen before are stored in memory. When we are about to see something, our minds automatically search our memory for a comparable object (note the distinction between seeing something and our minds having already seen it). If our mind finds something similar enough, it projects the stored image onto the new object so that we do not ever see the new object but are merely dimly aware that a familiar type of object is there.  Dissonance is not triggered, and this allows our attention freedom to concentrate on remaining percepts for which our minds have not found a suitable match.

As a result, we mostly do not perceive our environment. Instead, we perceive mostly what we expect to perceive, i.e., we usually see our mind’s prediction. Since most objects have more relevant detail than we have ever noticed, this process robs us of the opportunity to add detail to our image of most objects.

In some cases, the mental projection that we see is significantly different from the reality we do not see.

Example:

You are in a hurry. You glance at a book title. You glance away quickly. A moment later, you think, “ ‘Fellow’s Folly’ is the name of that book, the same as a song I know; the author must also know that song.” You glance back at the book title and read it carefully: “Free Four.”

What has happened is that your visual system was scanning for relevant clues since time did not permit a larger sampling of visual observations from each scanning sector. It picked out the two words starting with an F. After you looked away, your mind experimented with alternate predictions, based upon what you had in your “F___  F___” file drawer, i.e., what memories you had of word pairs with initial F’s on each word. It then verbalized to you what seemed to it to be an interesting prediction.

You looked back to test the prediction and found that it had been wrong.

Another entity in your place might not have looked back to test the prediction because, as a result of even less attention to head action, that other entity would think that it saw “Fellow’s Folly” and would have accepted the supposition that the book’s author named the book after the song as fact.

In this way, most entities “see the prediction” and not the bulk of the reality around them, in a continuous stream of such incidents as described above.

Society increases the tendency towards hasty closure by creating time pressures, communicating expectations, causing negative emotion, encouraging black-and-white positions, and valuing sophistication.

Creating time pressures
To some extent, we have been programmed by the expectations of others.  Most of our actions have been expected of us, and we have engaged in some of them for this reason alone.

At birth, we encountered an organized group of others who taught us that we had been created to fill a slot in their organization (our current society). During our most receptive early period, we probably met no one outside this organization. Thus, we may now spend most of our time working for this organization.

Under such conditions, our capacity for attention to matters not strictly organizational is severely reduced. Our closure goal is intensified; we cannot tolerate dissonance that distracts us from the organization’s tasks. If we are also trying to spend time on non-organizational goals, we may also regard dissonance as distracting us from these latter goals.

Thus, we will strive too hard for closure and achieve it too hastily on many occasions. This is the result of the organization’s infringement on our time.

Mind Experiments

  1. Notice the things you notice and don’t notice.
    Whenever it turns out that you didn’t notice something you might have noticed, tell your senses, “What to always check for,” such that you would have noticed the thing you just missed. For example, let’s say you realize you don’t know whether a particular man you just met has a mustache. So, you tell your senses, “Always check whether they have a mustache.” Notice patterns in the things you hadn’t been noticing and now do. Which dimensions are and aren’t you observant in?
  2. Notice the things that your eyes jerk to
    As if your body were under someone else’s control, and you were trying to figure out that person.  The phenomena described in Chapter 1 can be demonstrated to oneself by moving the objects in one’s room: such objects and any other things out of place are what the eyes automatically go to. This shows that the senses have a model of the typical situation and are checking for deviations. This is an important “energy-saving biocomputer system” built into us. However energy-saving it can be under natural circumstances, this system tends to screen out the value element from our sensory experience due to information overload. As a result, we hardly see anything around us—just enough from a strictly practical standpoint, but not sufficient to satisfy aesthetic criteria as well.
  3. Distinguishing between your prediction and the actual appearance
    1. The phenomena described in this chapter can also be demonstrated to oneself as follows: When seeing a face (especially if you’ve never looked closely at it before), casually glance away and look at the image of that face in your mind. Then, if appropriate, casually look at the actual face again (for a few moments so the image clears; inappropriate if tension-producing).
    2. Compare the first impression with the full impression. The distortions you put into the first impression have meaning. Were you putting the person in a category?

Love to all,
Bill

 

Meditation

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
August 28, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 6

Read Part 5 

Remaining focused through complexity can be learned

Meditation as automatic clear-out process

The number of “not-perfectly-familiar-so-as-to-be-invisible” sensory impressions falling on the individual per second determines how much unresolved experience will be created by a culture. Subtract out that culture’s propensity for meditation (“putting the biocomputer on ‘automatic clearout’”), which is the fastest process for resolving unresolved experiences, and what is left is the weight of residual unresolved experiences.

In our culture, the high sensory glut and low incidence of meditation create such a backlog of unresolved activity in the brain that these electronic “tensions held” become a distracting screen, and we go into a kind of hypnotic trance. We handle the trivial moment-to-moment stuff and lose sight of the highest long-range possibilities of our lives.

Meditation is the assimilation of information.

It does to sensory food what the liver does to physical food. Unassimilated food turns gangrenous. So do unassimilated experiences.

In meditation, the mind unclutches; super-efficiently, experience is assimilated; patterns are recognized; action implications become clear. The resulting clarity eliminates the tension of unassimilated experiences that caused the mind to clutch up in the first place.

Humans exist by processing information.

That information is our inner and outer sensory experience, including words we are told. All this tends to program us, if we don’t process the information in a certain way nature intended. If we do process it the natural way, we program ourselves.

The natural way of processing assumes a reasonable ratio of input volume : meditation time. In today’s reality, this ratio has become highly unreasonable.

Input volume - Meditation - yesteryear and now

Assimilation = higher pattern recognition

Picture a pyramid of many stories, each one containing books . . . a pyramid library. The basic structure of any field of information may be regarded cybernetically as a pyramid. (With thanks to Fred Klein, 1973.)

This is how it is organized:

Pyramid of Unresolved Experiences

    • On the lowest floor (also the largest), are the specific detail books, covering diverse facts from all fields of knowledge.
    • The books on the second floor cover the same fields of knowledge, but from a “theoretical overview” perspective. We can imagine a whole rack of books on the first floor telescoping upward to a point in one book on the second floor.
    • The third floor brings whole fields together.
    • The fourth floor brings everything together into philosophic viewpoints.
    • The fifth floor contains books written about the fundamentals of philosophy itself.
    • The sixth floor contains a single book.
    • In the capstone of the pyramid is a single word

Each floor contains the same material as the floor below, but in integrated, reduced form, i.e., from a higher, more universal perspective, ignoring more and more of the “incidental details.”

This pyramid model is to be applied to any field of information. One’s perspective can be on any floor or in the capstone. However, this is not simply a matter of putting one’s perspective in the capstone. It has to “float up,” so to speak, as a result of the assimilation process.

The many unresolved experiences in one’s Life need to be meditated on. As a result of this process, one gradually “floats upward” out of “a lot of chaotic thoughts/feelings” into a sense of “everything falls into place.”

We have involuntarily shut down our inner and outer senses against the information overload.

Most of our minds are on “hold.” The brain is holding many messages for you, taking up much mindspace, mind-energy, and mind-time, giving you these same messages repeatedly. While with your conscious control over that same brain, you repress and dodge these messages.

You haven’t answered your messages in how many years? There’s a message for each person you haven’t forgiven. And for each pain in your body. And for every other symbol of something unresolved in your Life. And for every question you’ve asked that you’re still unsure about the answer to, that is relevant to your “maze.”

In effect, the brain knows it has the information you need, and it is trying to give it to you. Meanwhile, a set of functions often called the “subconscious” or “unconscious’ gives you away in various social situations, i.e., embarrasses you in various ways to get you to confront some of these messages. But we are not observant because we have involuntarily shut down our inner and outer senses against the sensory overload.

Skepticism is the anus of our mind clenching to keep out the information overload.

The severest human shortfall caused by information overload is the limitation of possibility.

One of the most overwhelming surprises one gets in deep meditation is how complicated it really is to figure out the right action in a typical everyday situation. This is certainly the key subconscious deterrent to really being: it is too complex now.

Too many variables
⇓
The limitation of possibility
⇓
“Magic of Life” extinguished. ⇓

We all move too fast.

We pretend that we are capable of functioning in this haze of complexity. This is a hysterical reaction. What happens to most of us is that under the pressure of time, we take automatic positions on things based on our programming. Without realizing it, most people are trying a desperate, short-cutting approach to existence.

We label this a hysterical “panic” reaction because it continues to persist for a lifetime in most cases, although it proves itself unworkable every day.

The realistic reaction belongs to the yogi under the tree. The yogi doesn’t act on an idea until he has meditated out all its possible connections to other ideas in his ken. Thus, the actions never snag.

Each other’s windup toys

All information has some intrinsic command effect on the brain. Even rhythms may be soothing or create a wide range of other moods. Our brains are being washed in information with some command effect over us, from waking to sleep each day (and during sleep). Ours is the Age of Background Brainwashing.

We don’t even notice that it is there or why we buy those products or snub those strangers. How little of our behavior is under our own control; how much was programmed from outside!

We become shorthand human beings.

There is always a subtle time pressure. “Don’t you dare waste my time!” is the unspoken rule. Thus, when someone asks a question, we tend to flip back something that “sounds like something we would say in such a situation”. We usually give no fresh thought to the matter.

It is the automatic pilot. Free will is switched off. Creativity is a forgotten ideal. The robot is playing its tapes.

This is the eventual result of a narrowing process that takes place via communication exchanges when we are very young. We encounter such a large number of understandings (with many “iterations” to “unwind” each one) that eventually, we stop trying to express what is inside of us and content ourselves with flashing cliché signals which everyone understands.

The capacity to remain focused through
complexity is a key survival characteristic
for humans today.

The point of staying focused is that it enables you to:

  1. Catch more of the incoming stimuli;
  2. Catch more of your total reaction to these stimuli;
  3. Identify the real priority items;
  4. Simultaneously continue or change motor activity gracefully as needed;
  5. Make decisions when needed—without “distraction-resulting-in-only-partial-attention” to any of these.

The true yogis know how to do this. Remaining focused through complexity is a thing that can be learned and trained.

Mind Experiment

1. Adaptive or programmed?

For one day, keep track of yourself from moment to moment, watching to see whether you are behaving in a more programmed or adaptive fashion.

Note the kinds of situations through which you flow adaptively, creatively, and spontaneously, and those through which you move in fixed mechanical ruts.

2. Massage to remove tension

Removing tension from the body yields more energy for use by the mind. Thus, massage can help induce meditative states.

Love to all,
Bill

 

The Present: Word Pollution Overload

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
July 31, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 4

Read Part 3 

How the tonnage of words and other input has increased past the overload point, causing hysterical imitation in the place of real life.

Meditation as accelerated information-processing

Information Overload: A cybernetic explanation for the state of the world (1)

Over millennia, up to about 300,000 years ago, we humans evolved a neuronic net, which we call a cerebral cortex. We are still learning how to use this new facility, and currently, it is running amok and hypnotizing us, due apparently to an overload of “question-producing” sensory input per average second.

This overload appears to have been brought about by the successive waves of the media revolution, which began with the printing press and have reached tidal wave proportions with today’s Internet, television, radio, magazines, newspapers, books, records, outdoor signs, movies, plays and so on.

The world was very different 600 years ago. We estimate that about seven weeks’ worth of sensory “question-producing” stimuli 600 years ago is what we now get in a day—about fifty times the pressure to learn and adapt.

Just as an “Ice Age” appeared to stimulate humans to discover “travel” and master fire, this media revolution, while it has paralyzed the brains of our leaders as well as ourselves, also appears to be a stimulus for humans—to evolve the capacity to remain focused through complexity.

Cybernetically contemplating the brain

In order to appreciate how “question-producing” sensory overload can have such a powerful effect, one must cybernetically contemplate the brain. The neuronic net we call the cerebral cortex contains about 80 billion neurons, each capable of relating in many different ways to thousands of other neurons around it. (2)

Let us visualize this as transparent, as if it were a force field rather than matter, so that we can look through it in our minds. When sensory input comes in, it moves from neuron to neuron. At each neuron, it encounters other information, and sometimes, the contact results in a cognitive association between the new input and a memory.

Brain researchers can tell that the incoming sensory data is “filtered” (as if through a grid) as it moves in through layers of neurons, each of which checks the data from slightly different “viewpoints.”

This is how the brain updates many of its files based on each new piece of data passing through. Something we see on the street may trigger “notes to oneself” in several different “files” without our being consciously aware of all this (because there is so much going on so fast inside and outside).

Because of the many logical connections between each bit of incoming sensory stimuli and each bit we have already stored as memory, a cyclopean computer update takes place in our brain each second our eyes are open on anything other than a totally familiar scene.

Yogis estimate that 70% of the energy we consume is consumed through the eyes.

Today’s media revolution proves that what we let into our eyes and ears is much more of a factor in our well-being than what we allow into our stomachs. We have gotten used to treating our precision electronic circuitry most carelessly, by feeding it sustained hyper-overload with scarcely a letup—as if our neuronic nets were more like Sherman tanks.

There’s your brain there every moment like a secretary tugging at your sleeve asking you where to file something, and your answer requires a decision. But meanwhile, outside your eyes—the world still wants you to do this and that (and it asks questions, too!).

Before the media revolution, people just took their time, thought things through pretty carefully and slowly, and worked out all the details. Today, there are too many details. The brain shifts into a different kind of functioning entirely.

The brain represses dissonance. It accepts that questions needn’t be answered. And it lets itself regard certain questions only long enough to identify them as having been looked at before; then it puts them away with a “characteristic-habitual-decision-feeling” as if the matter were solved…

We call this phenomenon “hasty closure”. In other words, we let ourselves fool ourselves into ignoring things we should be understanding because we “simply haven’t got time.” (Actually, we don’t know where to begin.)

A different kind of functioning entirely

When people are hypnotized by the things they are told, their resulting emotional motivations drive them at a hectic pace, precluding meditating on their own experience. They “click into Emergency Oversimplification Procedure”—another way humans can process information other than the way that is normally best.

In this emergency oversimplification procedure, our biocomputers follow a grosser logic. For one thing, in EOP, everything must be either black or white. And it must be decided immediately, based on precedent.

We also have little foresight in EOP. In meditation, we can see where things will lead years hence and so avoid entanglements we won’t want then. The mind has little agility for this maneuver in EOP.

Mind Experiment

  1. For one entire day, concentrate on not jumping to conclusions.
  2. Am I in EOP?

For one entire day, keep checking to make sure you’re not in EOP, and if you are, get yourself out of it.

Signs of EOP:

  • Black/white thinking
  • All force goes to precedent
  • Things you see are auto-categorized
  • Negative or no feeling
  • Speediness
  • Engaging in activities to get them out of the way

How to get out:

  • Breathe…
  • Let your body relax wherever it is holding tension.
  • Regain your sense of humor.
  • Change the scene for a moment.
  • Use your body (walk, go outside, etc.).
  • Remember your long-range objectives and how they translate to immediate goals in the NOW.
  • Remember your agreements.

But most of all, find out what YOU want to do NOW. Then, balance that with your agreements.

Let yourself enjoy a long, slow, new, creative approach to all situations. There’s no hurry.

  1. Cybernetic = from the Greek for “Helmsman.” The Science of Guidance Systems, human or otherwise.
  2. Most neurons can either “fire” or “not fire.” Some, called “microprocessors,” have a wider repertoire. However, even the two-way neurons can have a range of meanings depending upon which other neurons are firing.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Application of the Scientific Method to Personal Life

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
July 24, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 3

Read Part 2 

It all boils down to whose advice to follow?

In the usual unscientific approach to personal life, if someone gives you a piece of advice, you either believe it or disbelieve it. In the scientific approach to personal life, you neither believe it nor disbelieve it. What you might do is test it.

This also covers advice from “your own thoughts”. It even covers “advice” from “your own feelings”. In other words, your own feelings might steer you right, might steer you wrong—you can’t assume one or the other because there have always been instances of both. You can only “test” a particular feeling by seeing its results:

1) First in a simulation run in your head of what could happen if you were to “run with” this feeling;

2) Then, possibly, by “going with” the feeling in real Life and seeing what the consequences are.

So, it all boils down to whose advice to follow? There is the advice of the mind, the advice of the heart, the advice of the gut, the advice from others, the advice from books, memories, etc., etc.

The only way to know is to try experiments. Be sure you remember which advice you are testing at the moment, so you know why you are getting certain results (there is a tendency to forget).

Example:

Let’s say somebody, maybe a parent of yours, when you were small, said to you “Hey—dig it—unselfish actions pay back better.” Let’s say you had a flash of real under­standing and decided to try this advice. You would have found that it works.

In trying out this advice in practice, conscious of what you were doing and willing to see the advice succeed or fail in all objectivity, you were living that moment by the Scientific Method.

This is the way a “guru” lives each second, watching the evidence of experience very closely (inner and outer expe­rience), stepping back a pace from all the opinions.

The Guru has/is savoir-faire.

What impresses people about gurus? They seem to know how to do everything right, like certain fictional heroes, and people in history’s favor. This implies the existence of a Best Operating Procedure that they have discovered.

The thing about a guru is that he/she is watching very closely. This way, he/she learns. A flash to the wise is sufficient.

This is what neurosis is.

Neurosis is the mouse endlessly trying the dead end. Not learning. Living with unsatisfactory stuff in one’s Life per­manently, as if it inherently cannot be overcome.

Unlimited willingness to refine one’s position

In the usual unscientific approach to Life, one attempts to get one’s positions unshakably firm as soon as possible, and then defends against any changes to these positions with demonic energy.

In the scientific approach to Life, one is always eager to take one step further in any particular analysis.

Thus, one is always making provisional action decisions for this time, now; keeping an open mind about later; suspending belief and disbelief. One’s positions, this way, gradually evolve, based on day-to-day learning from experience.

Unfortunately, most of the race has forgotten how to do this.

Mind Experiment

What do you believe?

List your beliefs on one or several sheets of paper using only the left-hand side of the page. (Or on your laptop or tablet if you prefer. We recommend paper, so you don’t need to bother with formatting, auto-correct, etc.) Use question marks next to any beliefs you’re not sure you fully believe.

If you’re not sure where to start, you might start with beliefs about God, an afterlife, the purpose of life, and what is good and what is bad.

Scientific Method applied to your life—One way

Put yourself on the Witness Stand.

Now also be the Prosecutor cross-examining the Witness. The Witness is about to defend their beliefs (listed in 2a) with evidence.

This means that the Witness looks back at their life to find incidents that prove these beliefs are correct, that they describe reality objectively.

You can start with the beliefs you listed first and work down the page, or put rank-order priority numbers next to the beliefs and then take them in priority order.

“Evidence” means evidence that realistically could be made to stand up in a court of law.

This game can be played in odd moments over the course of a week or more.

What if they said it differently?

This is a game played during life action. It’s played when­ever anybody says anything that upsets you.

What you do is pretend that you are them and realize that you have offended someone. Then you restate the offend­ing words so that they are not offensive.

You might then ask the person if the inoffensive statement of their words was what they meant.

Example:

Other person: “You’re not going to wear that pink tie…?”

You: “You mean, you like some other tie better?”

The point is that specific words trigger emotions based on past associations, but you can change the words to clear out the emotions.

Later, you can clear out the past associations, and then no words can manipulate your emotions.

Unselfish actions pay back better.

In this game, you look into your past to find the most unselfish actions you took and evaluate the results that came from those actions.

You can also do the same for the most selfish actions.

Which paid back better?

Which advisors are conflicting?

This is an experiment to do when you find yourself inter­nally divided as to which way to go in a situation.

You ask yourself:

—What do my thoughts say I should do?

—What do my feelings want to do?

—What does my body want to do?

—What does my intuition say to do?

—What would my father want me to do?

—What would my mother want me to do?

—What did the books I’ve read say to do under these circumstances?

—What does society say you’re supposed to do in this situation?

—What would the person I respect the most do in this situation?

—What would God’s preference be in this situation?

Then, you note which of these advisors conflicts with which.

This pattern of conflict may be a habitual one in your head or may just apply to one type of situation.

Entraining a daily cycle of assimilation and new provisional action decisions

At the end of each day, you relive it before sleep, identify­ing which moments do not fully please you or about which you have some vague lingering concern.

You allow yourself time to contemplate and learn from these moments by taking the role of your own Coach and coaching yourself as to how to play such a moment better in the future.

When you know how to flow through that situation so that it will be no problem next time, i.e., when you have made certain Provisional Action Decisions as to what to try next time, there is a feeling of peace.

If your Provisional Action Decisions do not work out next time, you revise them and keep up this process until every aspect of your life works smoothly.

Then you get bored and get into wider experiences, which produce displeasing moments for which you need to develop new Provisional Action Decisions, i.e., new the­atre, to flow through smoothly.

And a new cycle begins.

Love to all,
Bill