Category Archives: Classic Bill

Celebrating Bill Harvey,
a man whose life’s work touched so many

Leave a reply

Bill Harvey
March 1942—September 2026

Today, we, the THEI team, are writing to let you know that Bill Harvey, gifted writer and speaker, innovative researcher, creative inventor, and our beloved friend, has passed.

We will miss his physical presence immensely, and yet he will live on through his work. Bill’s wish was for us to carry on the mission of The Human Effectiveness Institute by making his writings available to all. Bill created a large body of work—some not yet published—which he intended to share with you.  We look forward to making that happen by posting some of Bill’s “new” writings here on Pebbles and, when possible, making them available as printed and/or eBooks.

Bill Harvey loved life. He loved everything he did and always looked for ways to serve and uplift humanity. He radiated joy and enthusiasm for all aspects of life, and he wanted everyone to experience that same joie de vivre.  This led him to establish The Human Effectiveness Institute in 1976. And even at the very end of his life, 50 years later, he remained enthusiastic about discovering what would come next.

Also in 1976, he wrote his first book, Mind Magic, which reflected his desire to help people experience life from a higher viewpoint. Universities, colleges, and even the US military have used Mind Magic as a course text to train people to use their minds more effectively.

Bill was a writer at heart. He loved to write and made time to do so daily.  He wrote more than 10 books, some of which have received awards. He wrote nonfiction, science fiction, and children’s books, as well as numerous published media research papers and articles.

An acclaimed leader in media and advertising research, Bill was also a futurist and an inventor with four issued US patents. He consulted for hundreds of companies, including many in the Fortune 500.

In addition to awards for his books, Bill received awards for his contributions to media research and advertising, including an Emmy in 2022 for his pioneering work in technology. In practical terms, his invention helps diverse audiences with a wide range of interests to get all the types of programs they enjoy the most.

His most recent start-up company, RMT Labs, merges neuroscience, marketing, and media. He brought together a stellar team of professionals who are well-positioned to continue RMT Labs’ early successes.

Bill deeply loved his country and wanted to see everyone get along. He often wrote about how we could and should do that and posted these ideas in his blog, Pebbles in the Pond. He also wrote to presidents and congressional representatives to share his ideas.

A natural public speaker, Bill was invited on many radio talk shows, podcasts, and live engagements. You can view some of those speaking engagements on his YouTube channel,
Bill & the Universe, The Bill Harvey Media Channel.

We have been deeply moved by the beautiful tributes from around the world for Bill and would like to share two of these with you.

We are especially grateful to Bill’s industry colleague and friend, Jack Myers, for the eloquent and heartfelt tribute he posted on his Myers Report. Here are some excerpts:

I cannot think of Bill as simply gone. He believed that consciousness extends beyond the boundaries we ordinarily place around it, and that every human life is part of a larger spiritual universe. I believe Bill would want us to understand his passage in that light…

To the media and advertising community, Bill was one of our most original and respected thinkers … continually challenging accepted assumptions. He asked the industry to … recognize that what is easiest to count is not always what counts most. … He understood that … communication carries a responsibility to elevate…

It’s his larger body of work for which I believe he most deserves to be remembered. His work in media was one expression of a much larger inquiry: How do our minds work, what prevents us from seeing clearly, and how can we become more conscious, creative, compassionate, and effective human beings?

Bill did not offer spirituality as an escape from reality. He presented it as a way of entering reality more fully. He believed we could learn to observe our own thinking, quiet the forces that distort it, reach the flow state, and use our minds rather than allowing our minds to use us.

He wrote about the discipline required to imagine ourselves inside another person’s experience. Empathy, for Bill, was not a slogan. It was a demanding exercise of consciousness and one of our responsibilities as human beings. His invitation was simple and profound: “Share warmth. Love to all.”

Bill spent his life exploring doorways into higher consciousness. Now he has passed through a doorway none of us can fully comprehend. … I will remain grateful for the intelligence, generosity, and spiritual light he shared with us. The best testimonial we can offer Bill is to keep his work alive. Read his books. Revisit his columns … Question your assumptions. Observe your own mind. Bring more imagination, warmth, and consciousness into every decision. (Read the full tribute here.)

∞

The following is excerpted from a tribute to Bill by Josh Chasin, posted on LinkedIn, which he delivered at an industry summit this week:

How do you describe the measure of a man who loved measurement, but who was himself immeasurable?

I cannot conjure a mental picture of Bill where he isn’t positively beaming, the light of life and love and wonder emanating from him like a beacon. He didn’t just make us better or smarter … He made us happier.

Perhaps the greatest legacy Bill could ask for would be that that smile, and that light, lives on in all of us. (Read the full tribute here.)

As mentioned earlier, we will be posting more of Bill’s writings here, in his continuing blog, Pebbles in the Pond.

Next week, we will continue serializing the revised 50th anniversary edition of Bill’s 1976 book, Mind Magic: The Science of Microcosmology.

To learn more about Bill, please read his books and the reader testimonials, available on the THEI website.

We also invite you to share your experience of Bill and his books, videos, and podcasts below in the comments. We would love to hear from you.

We hope you’ll revisit Pebbles in the Pond often to read new content from Bill.

We wish you all the best.

As Bill often signed off –
Love to all,

The THEI Team
Karen L. Harvey, Advisor
George Niver, CEO
Christine Niver, Art Director
Yana Lambert, Publishing Director

Awakening Real Will

Leave a reply

“Losing oneself and becoming a rolebot” and how to undo this

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
September 18, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 9

Losing oneself and becoming a rolebot and how to undo this

People run on programs.
Programs are action patterns. For example. the way we get out of bed in the morning is an action pattern. Observe how you do it for a few days in a row, and you’ll see the pattern. The way you throw off the covers, swing your feet to the floor, how your body feels, what you think about, your mood, the people you think about, the emotions that strike you, and your attitude as you stand up, etc.

All this is an action pattern. Nothing is exactly the same from day to day, but everything stays within a relatively narrow range of variation. This is because there are now sets of interlacing programs in our biocomputers upstairs. They bring us through this action pattern daily without us having to consciously think about each move.

These automatic programs run 99% of our lives.

Of course, we all override the autopilot at times.
For example, when some potential danger snaps us into full alertness, we don’t make a move without thinking about it first. For example, when we are able to rise above “automatic-pilot” anger. For example, at moments of “peak realization”, “expanded consciousness”, or “satori”. But most of the rest of the time, although we repress knowledge of the fact religiously, we have no free will in what we do, because the body’s and mind’s movements follow conditioned paths from which deviation is improbable.

We always react to the same types of situations in the same ways. The programs go through their steps while we sleepily look on, along for the ride.

We consciously participated in creating these programs.
Some of the “autopilot” program punchcards in our heads were keypunched by our “conscious-mind-pilot”. For example, when we discovered how well we looked smiling that way, we decided offhandedly to keep doing it that way (at least at those times). Then our “conscious-mind-pilot” forgot about it.

The “autopilot” does it faithfully to this day whenever those times come up. Good “autopilot”!

On the other hand, the great preponderance of our “automatic pilot” programming appears to be of the Pavlovian variety, whereby we grew up addicted to certain shallow rewards without this being anyone’s conscious intention.

Mind Experiments

1. Watch action patterns.

  • Pick a day. On that day, from the moment you awaken, stay alert all day and watch your actions down to the smallest gesture.
  • When you seem to be observing an action pattern that appears significant to some part of your mind, ask yourself: “Why did I do that?” (Or, “Why am I doing this?”)

2. “Autopilot addictions” meditation

  • What were your mother and father “addicted” to (attached to getting or avoiding)?
  • How about your peers at school and others known to have influenced you: to what were they “addicted”?
  • To what extent do you now automatically mirror any of these addictions?

3. Meditate on the extent to which you “need” approval.

  • Whom do you “need” approval from? Why?
  • Clue: What do you work hardest at? Who would approve of you the most for working so hard at it?

Love to all,
Bill

Avoid Hasty Closure

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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