Category Archives: Classic Bill

What Unites Us and What Divides Us

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In Honor of Flag Day, Sunday, June 14, 2026

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog , June 12, 2026.
Created September 16, 2022

The 30 by 34 foot Star Spangled Banner Flag that inspired the lyrics below when it flew above Fort McHenry in the 1814 Battle of Baltimore. It is on permanent display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Please allow me, courtesy of Wikipedia, to begin with all of the stanzas of Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner, including the fifth stanza added by Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior in 1861. For I believe that these lines most truly express what unites US:

“O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

When our land is illumined with Liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strike a blow at her glory,
Down, down with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchained, who our birthright have gained,
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.”

Would you be surprised if any American would object to anything said in the Star Spangled Banner? The song has conveyed our bravery, our love for liberty, and that we acknowledge our protection by God. Well, yes, that last part about God, at least three out of ten Americans today would say “Whoa!” to that one. In fact each of the two political parties in the US are led by people who claim that God is on their side, and they’re nowadays likely to claim that the opposition is not aligned with the Almighty. So far, then, we are divided by our disagreement as to whether God is on the side of Republicans or Democrats.

How silly. Any Being worthy of being called God would not choose sides among Her children. And if my Theory of the Conscious Universe happens to be right, we are made out of Her, and represent Her, with what we think of as our self actually being The One Self, combining all opposites, all deviations, all avatars, all of us.

But from the standpoint of this article, so far, we have identified one factor (God) which has been used divisively lately. Let’s continue the analysis.

Freedom, Liberty, Individual Agency without unnatural restrictions. We all want that, right? I don’t hear any objections. Freedom is something we all want.

Willingness to fight and die for what we believe in. Troublemaking as it is, yes, it is in the core of our being, here on the continent that revolted from the old ways. We have always been fighters. Balancing that with also being better diplomats – in the class with Franklin and Jefferson – might be a good thing.

In the era of Locke and Montesquieu, imagining what the optimal organization of government might be, Jefferson and other Founding Fathers became impressed by the way the Native Americans governed themselves via a “stacked-government” model, giving tribes autonomy yet coming together as a federation of tribes for accomplishing larger missions, such as increasing sediment yields to the Delaware River basin. This idea became known as federalism. We still practice it today. We fought a Civil War over it, and that system’s inability to agree on a slavery policy. States’ Rights are a second factor dividing us. Or is it?

There is no question as to the power of the States today. It is an established fact. So long as there is true unrigged, unobstructed, unweighted voting by all, if someone does not like what the voters decided, they can move to another State. Although there is talk of changing the Constitution, States’ Rights are in no visible danger, so far as I can see. If it’s a factor that seems to be dividing us, we ought to agree publicly that we are not actually divided on that one point. What we may actually be disagreeing about are the ways in which free voting needs to be protected for the benefit of all citizens.

And we might also benefit from similarly scrutinizing what else appears to be dividing us, because in many cases we shall emerge from the process with a more specific set of disagreements, smaller and more controllable than the general animosity would suggest. If we can speak civilly to one another about such matters again I predict we will find that there is much less disagreement on specifics, and once we do that, our minds can creatively collaborate to find a synthesis in those areas of true dispute. We owe it to ourselves to attempt this and to doggedly pursue the process, point by point, until at least the hypnotized part of the divisiveness goes away.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, son of the poet and physician of the same name who added the final stanza to the National Anthem, the son being the most famous of the Supreme Court Justices, and an intellectual thought leader who, a Republican, influenced progressives such as FDR. His 1881 Common Law is the history and logic of how the law evolved. According to History.com:

“He emphasized both that the ‘life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience’ and that the law develops according to the ‘felt necessities of the time’ rather than according to any set of deductive premises.”

Thus doth the Law rest upon “the felt necessities of the time”.

That would be worrisome if our necessities are always changing. But they are always the same, or they wouldn’t be necessities in the first place. We shall always want our freedom, and most of us would want our equality. But there that equality thing – that’s a third divisive item (after God and States’ Rights). Or is it?

It’s possible to think “I myself must be treated like an equal by everyone” and at the same time say “but I work hard for my money, and I don’t want one of my equals to be a person who gets a handout out of the money I pay for taxes”.

Transfer payments are definitely a divisive factor. I first wrote about that in my 20s, suggesting that we invest in developing people with our transfer payments, with an eye toward gradually reducing the need for transfer payments.

If not the best answer, at least it suggests that we might get creative.

Those divisiveness factors we’re reviewing – God, liberty, equality, free speech (the latter item covered below) – are not meant to be an exhaustive list, so please think further and identify other causes of division.

Please do use this method of speaking civilly and peeling the onion to find where true disagreement lies (if it is there at all) and to try for solution directions to take together.

So far, the list has been pretty rational and cognitive. How about that larger part of ourselves? The subconscious, emotional, non-rational part that makes 95% of our decisions, according to Harvard don Gerald Zaltman?

The possibly biggest divisiveness factor is not a rational thing. It’s more of an animal-instinctive feeling: “These people are not for me at all.” Right now, that’s how we are sorting ourselves into these two groups (Red and Blue), while the rest of us are trying to bring us all back to the table as citizens of the USA.

Metacognition, which humans apparently do better than the other species, although the jury’s still out, is the art and science of watching what is going on in your own mind and inner theatre of feelings, and understanding the why of it. Here’s how metacognition applies to this situation.

We can actually turn the tide on this divisiveness thing by catching and neutering that automatic response of being repelled by a perceived “Other” group. Hold that automatic response with your will and your mind, like a dangerous squirming toad, and inspect it. What did it feel like? Who did it remind you of? When in life did you start to feel that way?

Don’t accept the feeling of being repelled by a person. It’s more of an alarm signal about you than about that other person. Meditate on what it is in you. In less than a week, you shall definitely have a deep intuition about it.

Who said, “I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.”

It was Abraham Lincoln.

We are all in this together and are collectively losing the game. This shocks game theorists. Why would there be just losers? How could that even be?

The weaponry stacked around is certainly enough to make this a dead planet.

Wasn’t WWII bad enough?

We have to accept each other.

We need to be able to cooperate or none of us may survive.

Give up the “bad guy” idea. (Don’t stop incarcerating criminals convicted by due process of law, whether seditionists, murderers, rapists, or whatever. No one should be exempt from such accountability to justice. It’s more useful to think of them as being psychologically diseased/unbalanced than as “bad guys”. The “bad guys” construct triggers autonomic emotional reactions that are pragmatically obstructive to solution finding. We can think more effectively and creatively without that construct.)

Then we can easily talk the rest of this out so that each tribe can be satisfied. But not if we can’t talk to each other without negative emotion flaring up. Master your selves. Talk civilly and respectfully to all.

Free Speech, the Right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, became a divisive factor when the enormous megaphone called the Internet happened.

We felt that we were given license to say anything we pleased, true or false, whether it would hurt someone else’s feelings or not. Not all of us activated that. But many tens of millions got into it as if they had been holding it in since kindergarten. And they are now a bit stuck in it. If they try to back out of it too gracelessly they will be attacked from all sides.

The people are still walking around in rage. Stop avoiding them. They need help. Have infinite patience. They will be blessed by it. You will be blessed by it. Use this post as a study guide to prepare for such meetings with your own ideas about what are the divisive factors and how can we peel each one away like an onion so that we can see reality together, agree on what we see at that moment, or do further research on any areas in which we cannot agree. But always civilly in recognition of the seriousness of the situation in which we had all better be on one side, the side of the human race, or we are quite literally doomed.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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Release Your Self From the Hypnotic Power of Words

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created June 5, 2026

Listen Watch Speak Obey Reaction Control

Some of you have read my book Mind Magic. The Seventh Edition is soon to be released, and it will contain Mind Experiments at the end of each chapter, games you can play with your mind that will have positive effects on your effectiveness in navigating through life. To give you a feel for the way the text of Mind Magic and the Mind Experiments will work together, in most of our posts starting here, we will serialize the beginning of the new edition. Hope you enjoy it!
All my best, Bill 

The Human Heritage: Word Pollution

Because words are so powerful, we tend to believe them rather than assimilate our own experiences.

Word intoxication: All words hypnotize to some ex­tent.

Where did words come from? From the depths of our soul. They were discovered inside us, not invented.

The evidence of similar-root-noises-for-similar-concepts across separated peoples, attests to this. We all discov­ered something like the noise mama for mother. Even apes apparently make similar sounds for the same concepts as we.

It is as if we were all discovering the same master lan­guage, distorted into various different directions by the effects of different genetic/environmental conditions.

Words just became important recently.

We came down out of trees over 1,000,000 generations ago. (1)

  • “Generation” = 20 years

For 999,750 of these, humans used or heard only a few words each day. Over just the last 250 generations, this has increased to tens of thousands of words going through the average human head each day.

Words have tremendous programming power.

Words are not arbitrary sounds we can choose to ignore. They are tailored by physical (pre-human interference) nature to fit our sensori-cognitive biochemistry.

Like a key in a lock: words were discovered from inside of us. They can be used by a talking head to a separate listen­ing or reading head, and when they are so used, they tend to exert a behavior-impacting influence on the listening/reading head.

When the ancients talked about spellcasting, it wasn’t just their superstitious ignorance at work. They were recogniz­ing the hypnotic power of communication, lifted to a new level by the use of words.

How do words compound the power of communica­tion?

By making it far easier for conceptualization to occur. Conceptualization is the structuring of individual percep­tion-items (percepts) stored in memory, into association-clusters with specific “relationship bonds” between per­cepts associated. Like making a tinker toy.

Your concept of freedom, for example, is a tinker toy of all of the specific words, pictures, and feelings you have stored inside, associated with the retrieval-keyword “freedom”. Until words were popularized, people tended not to build such elaborate tinkertoys in their minds. Associations among percepts tended to cluster into “attraction” and “repulsion”, without many finer breakdowns. This meant that we tended, when we wanted an effect, to repeat all of the “causes” which we associated with that effect.

This is undoubtedly how the program of throwing salt over the shoulder, the program of blessing people for sneezing, and all other “magical” programs first arose: they had happened in the “first instance” and were there­after regarded as causally essential.

Our magical phase preceded words and was pushed out by words. Words gave us the power to more easily separate things into parts. We didn’t have to conceptualize only with wholes anymore. We could put a word-label on a part of an event, to more easily trace whether or not that part always went along with the event or not.

Words appear to have kicked off a phase of developing the left lobe of the cortex, which handles data sequentially–analytically rather than holistically. When we were con­centrating on our right cortex, we were able to achieve certain effects of persuasion, “getting our way”, etc. we didn’t understand at all—but we knew they worked and we used them.

Childhood is a time through which each of us has the opportunity to re-experience the whole evolution of the race, firsthand, in microcosm. As children, we do have “magical” means of getting our way through gestures and moods that somehow work.

So, the race has always wielded a lot of right-brain power it never understood. Then it took up words, wielding vast

left-brain power, which the race also used with only faint understanding.

As words can hypnotize,

they can also dehypnotize.

Out with the bad air,

in with the good air.

Mind Experiment

  1. World without words

Imagine that words had never been invented. Catch your tongue in your mouth. Use your eyes. Breathe.

Words cannot come into your head. Those that others speak are meaningless and are whisked away before they reach your ears.

At some point, you will remember having read the above description, and although you will not remember the words, the state they describe will come over you: your mind will, for a moment, give up its attachment to words.

You will look around you and see in a new way.

Your mind will look at issues and see deeply into them—without words. In this state, remember to look at the important issues.

Whenever you are confused by a situation, go into this “world without words” state and let the situation sink in.

Love to all,
Bill

Danny Rabella

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, May 15, 2026
Created August 19, 2023

Having taught himself to read, Danny could have used the keyboard, but chose to give voice commands for simple things like going back to bookmarked locations. 

Danny Rabella was alone in his room, his favorite way to be. His father, Rudy, known to all as The Chief, was at his nightclub leading his band and MCing, like every night except Mondays. Danny liked the club but didn’t get to go there often, being only two years old, despite seeming much older. His mother Sophie was in her studio upstairs, painting. They lived in a duplex in Sutton Place.

Danny put on his haptic suit with its built-in Gibson, sat down at his desktop, and powered it up. Having taught himself to read, he could have used the keyboard, but chose to give voice commands for simple things like going back to bookmarked locations. “Psycho,” he piped in his little boy voice. The room around him dissolved, and he was in a much larger nightclub than his father’s. Kids were not allowed here, but he had taught himself how to hack his way in lots of places he wasn’t allowed. His avatar tonight was Alexander the Great, a tall, handsome Greek. The bouncer at the door didn’t even blink as Danny passed him going in with the rest of the crowd.

The virtual nightclub scene seemed totally like reality. This did not surprise Danny as he was used to such things. He liked being at eye levels with all these adults, whose avatars looked to mostly be in their twenties. Danny knew that not many other children could pass for adults getting into adult websites and he briefly exulted in this difference and then caught himself in an ego state and controlled it away. He was swept along by the packed throng eager to get closer to the stage to see what was going on and maybe, if they had the guts, to get up on the stage. So far Danny had not tried that but maybe tonight would be the night.

As he got closer to the stage, where the crowd was even denser, it became hard to move, and he appreciated having inhabited Alexander tonight because he could see over most people’s heads. Another tall man was getting up on the empty stage and the crowd was electrified with excitement to see that another person was going to undergo the rigors of being psychoanalyzed in front of what could be millions of people tuning in. The crowd roared, whistled, stomped, and applauded, and the young man took a sarcastic bow. The Analyst appeared overhead as a giant diaphanous figure smoking a cigar and the crowd hushed.

“What shall I call you, sir?” The Analyst, looking a bit like Sigmund Freud, asked politely in his booming reverberating voice which filled the giant club.

“Tony,” answered the man simply.

“How can I help you, Tony?”

“I want to see myself more clearly, doctor.”

“You’re in the right place, Tony. Tell us about yourself.”

“I’m a very successful man and I’m 24 years old. I have my own schmatta business on Seventh Avenue. I’m even better-looking than I look in this avatar, which doesn’t quite capture my sex appeal.”

“He’s a garmento!” a male in the crowd yelled good-naturedly and other people in the same line of business cheered.

“Yeah,” Tony agreed, “but I’m thinking of selling the business and maybe going to Hollywood, or something.”

At this point, Tony levitated a few feet off the stage and split into three Tonys floating in the air about ten feet away from each other, and the crowd gasped as they always did when the psychoanalytic process started this way. Danny admitted to himself that he loved this part. He had learned from his earlier visits to Psycho that the avatar in the middle was the actual person, and the other avatars that looked the same were partly controlled by the person, but also partly controlled by The Analyst, which was an AI that could rapidly look up everything publicly available about a person in less than a second, what they presented in social media being a main source.

“But you don’t know if you can act,” said the Tony on the left.

“I act all the time,” said the Tony in the middle. “I pretend to like my customers and my suppliers, and I know they are acting too, they don’t like me any better than I like most of them.”

“So you and they are not really fooling each other?” The Analyst asked.

“When you act in a movie you have to be believed by the audience,” the Tony on the left cautioned.

“You all believe me, don’t you?” asked the Tony in the middle, and the crowd yelled a mix of yes and no. Many of the yesses were in female voices and the Tony in the middle smiled smugly.

“Then maybe he can succeed in Hollywood,” said the Tony on the right, “he’s already fooled you all into thinking he’s successful. He’s actually a junior person in the business with a big ego and megalo dreams.”

“Maybe you are the part of me who is that way,” huffed the Tony in the center, but my real self is a good guy.”

Another Analyst appeared next to the first one, and this one looked a bit like Carl Jung. “These are all you, my boy, and you have to learn to integrate them all,” the second Analyst said.

“It’s okay to have a big ego,” the Tony on the left said, somewhat mockingly.

“Not really,” said the first Analyst, “the ego can work against the self, as we now have proven scientifically. The self has to take charge of the ego to become one integrated individual.”

“In our case,” the Tony on the right said, “the ego has taken charge of the self.”

“All too common, unfortunately,” said the first Analyst.

“I’m the self,” declared the Tony on the right, “You are my ego,” he said, pointing at the Tony in the middle, who seemed baffled by the situation. Inexplicably, the audience began thunderous applause.

“Then who am I?” asked the Tony on the left somewhat plaintively.

The first Analyst puffed his cigar, causing billowing grey clouds to form overhead. “You would appear to possibly be the internalized voice of his mother, eh?” The first Analyst looked at the second Analyst.

“Or possibly his father,” the second Analyst mused. “Which parent was more critical of you?”

“It was my mother!” the Tony in the middle blurted, and the Tony on the left now started to oscillate its appearance back and forth between looking like Tony and looking like his mother, a stern matronly woman.

“Do you have more internalized voices in you, Tony?” asked the second Analyst in a kind way. Other Tonys drifted out of the central Tony and the stage became filled with Tonys. “Did you know you had all these different sides of yourself, Tony?” asked the first Analyst.

The Tony in the middle was now quite upset and embarrassed to be unequal to the situation in front of so many people. He realized that this could ruin his life if he let it. He realized it could also be just what he needed to make his life wonderful, but he couldn’t take the exposure any longer, and all the Tonys suddenly disappeared at once.

This was not a shock to anyone. The audience had seen this happen many times; it was actually rare for it to end any other way. Happy endings when the individual grew up before the eyes of spectators happened once in a long while. The series owners claimed that follow-up studies showed that most of the participants in the show became happier and better-integrated after the experience on stage. According to those studies, it often took a year for the people who played the game to assimilate the experience and make the most of it.

Danny found himself slipping carefully through the crowd and was stunned to see himself walking up the steps onto the stage ahead of anyone else. He had not consciously decided to do it, but some part of him had acted, and now he was going along with it.

He felt his heart beating and his cheeks flushing. Those were feelings in his real body. He could see himself from the outside as the cameras picked him out like spotlights and made him the center of attention in the cavernous nightclub. He looked confident from the outside, which pleased and calmed him. He wondered if he would be able to speak because he now experienced mammoth stage fright. He had never experienced that before and it was frightening to feel loss of control. He had not expected this. He slowed his breathing and made his breaths deeper and longer and this seemed to steady him a little. His avatar looked around and Danny remembered to smile at the audience. It was hard to see them due to the actual spotlights, but he could make out a few faces at ringside and so he played to them. A young woman was smiling nicely at him and he liked her right away. He felt better focusing on that one person.

“My name is Danny,” he said. “I’d like to see all the sides of myself the way Tony did.”

“Welcome, Danny,” said the first Analyst. “Why do you want to see that?”

“I psychoanalyze myself all the time,” Danny said, finding himself floating upward and seeing a second Danny emerge from himself and float to the right.

“That’s the part of you that does the psychoanalyzing,” the second Analyst said. “You don’t have to call it psychoanalyzing,” he added, “it’s actually called metacognition when you do it to yourself.”

“Of course,” the second Danny said with no help from Danny, “we all learned metacognition starting in daycare.” Danny was surprised that this part of himself found it so easy to make up and speak lies. Danny had never been in daycare, although he taught himself metacognition, and found the word itself by searching online for “psychoanalyze myself”.

Danny found it possible to also control some of the second Danny’s actions. He spoke through the second Danny to say, “And I studied it myself, on the web and in my head.” He often stayed up very late pretending to be asleep but actually meditating, contemplating, concentrating, and otherwise trying to figure out everything in the world. The subject he got furthest with was Danny.

As he momentarily reflected on these things more Dannys came out of him to float across the stage to take station at some distance. He was amazed to be looking out the eyes of each of these avatars at the same time, and to feel that he had some control over all of them, although they could also act without him deciding to do so. He lost his nerve when he saw that one of the Dannys looked just like the real Danny – a two-year-old boy – and before he said “Off!” to depart Psycho, he saw that one of him was a rangy man with wild sandy hair who looked to be in his forties – who the hell was that? That’s me? Is that what I’m going to look like in forty years? Or was that what I looked like in my last incarnation?

He sat before his giant screen desktop still showing the stage at Psycho which was now empty except for the two giant hovering Analysts.

“Well, I’m sorry we scared the pants off that one,” the second Analyst said to the first, “he looked like an interesting case.”

“Might have been an actual split personality,” mused the first Analyst.

“A very rare type,” commented the second Analyst, “he or she never posted anything on social media, we know nothing about ‘Danny’. Could have been an AI!” The two AI Analysts laughed, and so did the audience.

Danny wondered what he was. He knew from his own self-studies that he was a consciousness. He had a hunch that all the consciousnesses are a single consciousness, but he had no idea where that idea came from, other than his frequent sense of being able to tell what other people were feeling and thinking.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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The Signals We Subconsciously Send Program Our Reality

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created May 8, 2026

This truism is well backed by scientific verification. Micromomentary gestures, body language, eye movements, word choices, tones of voice, are all carefully scrutinized by trained intelligence field agents, psychoanalysts, law enforcement officers, professional negotiators, and many other people who are looking for “tells” either to be able to make a better deal for themselves or to truly help the person being observed, or in rare cases, both.

At a cosmic level, a wide range of scientists and nonscientists already know or believe in the idea that we causally impact our future experiences based on the signals we send ourselves, even when those signals are only being sent within our own minds, to ourselves, and even when we are not consciously aware of sending those signals to ourselves – and to the universe.

This applies even to those of us who are consciously aware of the way we program our own reality with expectations that we have inside us and hide from others. By definition, the subconscious is not something we are tracking, so stuff that goes on at that level can easily slip by us.

For example, we may not realize that our doing something apparently harmless that comforts us, can be read by the subconscious as a signal that we need to compensate for a sense of failure. This can program us to fail.

So can our being overly cautious or conservative in our estimates of tactical success. We may think it’s good for us to plan on a pessimistic basis so we will be even happier when we exceed that low bar. But it could also be that we are programming parts of ourselves to hit that low bar or even below it.

Michelangelo said:
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.

Michelangelo believed that settling for mediocrity (hitting a low target) is more damaging to the human spirit than failing while attempting something grand.

Even a lack of spirituality can harm our chances of success in life. If we live life in a framework of physicalism, where our underlying basic assumption is that only the obvious reality exists, and there is nothing more, we can subconsciously be doubtful that we can ever experience more success than we have at the present moment. Of course, consciously we may be unaware that this holding ourself back is happening.

If we live life in a frame of mind that is open to the unknown, making no limiting assumptions about the unseen, we are not blocking moments of leakage of the spiritual into life, even if only for brief moments that we might not even think of as spiritual, simply as feeling extraordinarily good.

Maslow was once asked about religion and he turned the question into something else. Instead of replying about the known and agreed-upon religions, he used the word differently, in the context of his notion of peak experiences. He said:

The two religions of mankind tend to be the peakers and the non-peakers, that is to say, those who have private, personal, transcendent, core-religious experiences easily and often and who accept them and make use of them, and, on the other hand, those who have never had them or who repress or suppress them and who, therefore, cannot make use of them for their personal therapy, personal growth, or personal fulfillment. 

He was talking about openness to the possibility of cosmic spirit, something mysterious about which we know very little, but not prematurely denying its existence.

He also said, echoing Michelangelo in a different way, “We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”

There is practical benefit to leaving it open in one’s conscious mind that the nature of reality could include a benevolent God, that the universe itself could be conscious (why not? We are! The universe is a lot bigger than we are, with a lot more energy than we have, how could we be conscious and it not be conscious? We know it has consciousness in it). The practical benefit is that that thing lying squashed flat within us, that thing called hope, has a springboard from which to fly once again. Having real unfaked hope within us makes our subconscious try bigger plays.

Here is an experiment you can try.

When you are alone, go outside and as close to nature as is convenient. Breathe deeply. Casually empty your mind for a moment. Then imagine that you can make your life come out very happy, happier than you remember ever being, and that limits you assume you have are holding you back, so you must make every effort to stop imagining that you have any limits. You can restart your life right now with a new, creative attitude, reconsider everything you want to reconsider, taking your time and deciding over time exactly what you want to do with the rest of your life, and with the courage to actually set those plans in motion and stick with them all the way.

When you get started and have your first setback, don’t allow yourself to become deflated. Stop and look for what was the subconscious signal that got in the way.

There will be many rest stops like this caused by many setbacks. They are necessary because of the nature of the subconscious; you need these little setbacks to identify and root out the hidden signals that have always held you back.

You may be surprised at what some of them are. One might be that you have been too humble, too modest – too much of a very good thing – not all the things that hold us back are inherently bad things, some of them are great things which we have simply overplayed.

You may find, as you come out from holdback assumptions, that you are feeling somewhat cocky all of a sudden. Let yourself enjoy it and make it a way of life that rubs off on the people around you rather than rubbing them the wrong way.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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