Category Archives: Classic 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

The Human Heritage: Word Pollution

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
July 9, 2026

This is the second in the new MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS book excerpt series. The first one, Release Your Self from the Hypnotic Power of Words, was published on June 5.

 

Humans come into the world. We find out certain things: for example, we find out that fire burns us. This “finding out” we call knowing: when someone has a true picture in his or her mind— “true” meaning that the picture cor­responds to the external reality—we call this knowing. So, if we have a picture in our mind of fire burning our hand, we say that we know that fire can burn us.

So far, language does not yet exist. We can know without language by holding true images in our mind. There is no “believing.” “Believing” comes into the picture when lan­guage is invented.

With language, one person who knows something can pass on this knowledge to another person who has not yet discovered it for themself. The latter person, in accepting the former’s knowledge as true, “believes” it. As we all now know, this “believing” often leads to the holding of untrue pictures in people’s minds.

The cure is to cut down on believing—tend to only hold pictures in one’s mind of the things one has seen oneself.

Belief was never much of an issue before words.

Belief = be lief = be for me. I believe him = he be’s for me on that. He was there. He saw it. He sees it for me. He sees it—I see him see it.

Cosmic humor: Most belief is founded on the form, not the content, of the words believed in.

Disidentifying with the feeling of belief

At almost every instant, you are likely to experience the feeling about a given postulate: “It is so.” Look for that feeling, and when it arises, remind yourself: “It may not be so.” Be willing to act based on your judgment as to whether something is more likely to be true or to be not true; but do not believe that it is either true or not true. In this way, belief is unnecessary to action.

Be especially wary of the feeling of belief at times when you have a thought and then do not contradict it. Simply, the experience of non-contradiction suggests to the belief program that it energizes itself. Thus, you must guard against the tendency to believe any thought you generate. This can best be done by remembering to say to yourself (but not in words), “It may not be so” in response to every thought.

TRUTH - INTELLECTUALLY - ACTIONABLY

The definition of Truth at the intellectual level is what can be made to sound reasonable based on the words you use. Intellectual reason can find some truth and some falsity in every statement, depending upon how it is interpreted.

The definition of Truth at the action level is what works when you actually try it in reality . . . i.e., what the uni­verse reinforces.

We need to make action decisions each second. We need to make intellectual statements a few times a day. The two are usually unrelated.

Few people living in the Scientific Age have realized that the Scientific Method can be applied to Life . . .

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.

Where did they come from? Why do (did)

I believe that?

In this game, one remem­bers where each belief came from.

Easy if you take them slowly, one at a time.

No longer needing to have beliefs

In this stage, one faces the situation of no longer really having any beliefs, yet realizes that this is true freedom to learn. Often accompanied by brief ecstasy.

It may not be so.

To do this experiment, simply pick a period of time, and in that time watch your thoughts, remembering to realize that each thought might be right or it might be wrong.

This is one of the most universal forms of meditation.

The way it usually goes, you keep getting sucked into iden­tifying with some thought or another and forget to doubt it—then catch yourself and back out of auto-agreement with the thought.

Over time, you begin to see how your idea-generation process, your conviction-decision process, and your other mental processes work. Then you will have control over these processes rather than being controlled by them.

Love to all,
Bill