Category Archives: Classic Bill

Never Growing Up

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created April 2, 2026

 

The big problem with Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) – the pandemic, which almost no one realizes has made most of us borderline psychotics – is perhaps more accessibly explained as never growing up. Still thinking and acting childishly, but in a bigger physical body.

In the still male-dominated civilization we have inherited, this manifests as little boys becoming bigger boys but still playing with the same sorts of toys. Even before the ages when violent video games became the main toy, little boys and girls were privy to watching the television/streaming shows which glorify the heroes who are experts in violence. These are the characteristics of heroes that we teach children: they can punch out every bad guy. They are also good with guns and can throw knives with uncanny accuracy. Not just the heroes but also many of the heroines, particularly of the Marvel variety.

How could it end up any differently when violence dominates the news and, in a somewhat more controlled way, is inherent in sports? On top of reality shows, dramas, etc.

President Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex. That has evolved now into the military-technology complex. The four biggest technology companies, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, are each now the size of a mid-sized country in terms of annual gross revenues produced, and are projected to become the size of large countries soon.

“Everybody wants money and fame,” my great friend Zoe Kalar despairs. Her action to make this situation better has been to spend years building a better social media called 8. Standing for the infinity symbol standing up. Encouraging creativity and love, and AI-protected against hate. With millions of people and growing, backed by over a hundred caring advertisers.

Violence, money, and fame ought not occupy such large shares of our timespace. A more civilized civilization would spend more of its timespace with authenticity, respect, taking responsibility, creativity, love, doing good, and having uplifting and thought-provoking fun experiences. Although our rational minds might universally agree with this last statement, our rational minds are not in control of our actions.

Not growing up consists of acting out the conditioning received from others without realizing it. Not observing and learning from one’s own behavior and feelings what is really driving you. Not taking control over from that robot. Not choosing your own autonomous life and values. Not discovering your true gifts and developing them to Flow state levels. Living a meaningless life.

A brilliant article by Cal Newport in The New York Times recounts how physical exercise went from being something done regularly by 24% of Americans to 60% of the U.S. population between 1955 and 1971, and he lays out a plan for inducing a similar uptick in cognitive exercise. I’ve been trying to do the same thing all my life. I just wrote a note to Cal that reading and setting time aside for contemplation and staying away from social media are all definitely parts of the exercise needed, and I sent him copies of my two books of cognitive exercise, Mind Magic and Powerful Mind. I mentioned to him my diagnosis that long before today’s tech, our species was already on a long downhill decline in the use of our amazing brains and minds, as a result of mass conditioning to prescribed ideologies, and the absence of a culture supportive of daily periods of solitary contemplation.

The ancient Kabbalah schematic called the Tree of Life was, in my estimation, a coded understanding of the process of growing up.

Self - Wisdom - Understanding - Flow...

Cautionary note: This is my intuitive interpretation, and may be considered unorthodox or revisionist by serious teachers and students of Kabbalah.

There are 5 levels of the self, going down the middle from top to bottom. We are born and at first simply experience the life of the body, not necessarily remembering anything from the day before. Soon the ego is born, the first time we do not get something we need, and a manager appears in our minds to rectify such situations in the future (Freud’s idea, which I agree with). We might live 100 years and not go any further than that.

Or, under the right circumstances, most of us can also shift at times into a state in which we are non-self-protectively simply being genuine. That is the “self” in the sphere right above the ego. The Tree of Life implies (to me) that we must achieve a balance between love and work in our lives in order to achieve a stable evolution from ego to self.

Most non-Americans have a view that Americans are all workaholics. This is supported by a lot of good evidence, although it might not apply to all of us. That would definitely constitute an imbalance which would set us back in growing up. In addition, our culture does not make it easy for us to align the work we get paid for with what our passion work would be, and there is no cultural inducement for us to spend any time trying to figure out what our passion work would be. These things tend to keep us from growing up to all that life offers.

Nevertheless, most of us have experienced some time in the self, and many of us get a bit of that each day for most days of the year.

Then, in order to keep growing up, we need to balance mercy and severity. This is very difficult. In the USA, we have split into two subcultures: one of which is overbalanced in the direction of severity, and the other, which is overbalanced in the direction of mercy. Because of the male domination and glorification of violence by most of our stories and heroic role models, severity appears more attractive, and this appears to be reaching a peak at the moment.

Whenever we, as individuals, have escaped from ego into self, and also achieve a balance between severity and mercy, we rise to yet a higher level of consciousness: the Flow state. Here, everything we do is automatically the right thing, for as long as the state lasts, often broken by ego thoughts and feelings, cutting the connection.

Once we have reached that penultimate state, we are called a mensch in the Jewish subculture.

At that point, there is one final balance to be achieved, between wisdom, “knowing what the right action to take is,” and understanding, “accepting the situation and forgiving those who do not take right action.”

When that final balance has been achieved, the human has spiritually merged with the One Consciousness of the Universe, the Self, capital S.

In India, such a person is called a sadguru, a true guru. This confers the additional power to lift others simply by one’s presence. This is the end goal of growing up. In Eastern philosophies, the purpose of reincarnation is to achieve this end goal, which is likely to take more than a single incarnation if one is born on a planet as a member of a very young species which has not yet learned to make the best use of all of its potentials.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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My new book POWERFUL MIND has some great reviews

An innovative too for self-discovery

“A compelling, optimistic, and original approach to mental focus, Powerful Mind is an innovative tool for self-discovery and creative liberation. Succinctly outlined and intuitively structured, this book is replete with rational advice, using a radical but commonsense approach. It takes a rare and adroit thinker to incorporate myriad worldviews and welcome diverse readers, regardless of ideological allegiance, but Harvey shows himself to be precisely that. The book is a masterfully structured, intellectually affirming, and potentially paradigm-shifting read.”
~ Self-Publishing Review, ★★★★

Which Level of Consciousness Do You Want To Be In?

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created February 20, 2026

Flow state, the Zone, where everything does itself perfectly, you exceed your expectations of performance limits.

You have undoubtedly noticed that you are not always at your best. Almost nobody is. Sometimes we have very smart ideas, at other times our minds are dull, and at other times we think we are thinking very intelligently, only to discover that we were way off and should have known better from various earlier experiences and supposed learnings.

We generally assume that this is the way things are and that there is no way to improve our own mental/emotional performance, with some exceptions. We might read a self-betterment book or article once in a while. We might take a supplement that is for making our memory and other faculties work better. If someone we trust gives us earnest advice, we might listen with an open mind, and take it to heart, try to be better in the way suggested. We might even meditate or do yoga.

All of this is admirable. But is it enough? Have we pulled out all the stops to maximize our own performance at the game of life? Should we? Is it worth it? If it were so important, wouldn’t everybody be doing it?

The game isn’t set up that way. Particularly today, when so many people have more than one job in order to make ends meet and maintain the all-important lifestyle, who’s got the time for the luxury of being a perfectionist in any area of life? With two media bombarding you during most waking moments (sometimes only one), who can focus on anything anyway? And if you had a moment to spare, would you want to fill it with something that seems very hard and complicated?

Of course not. Nor should you. Fortunately, upping your consciousness does not have to be hard, nor complicated. And it can make you feel better fast and all the time. This post is all about the lazy person’s way of hacking consciousness. Winning with minimum effort. What a relief!

First, a quick, simplified map of the three levels of consciousness you can be in:

  1. Flow state, the Zone, where everything does itself perfectly, you exceed your own expectations of performance limits, and are as happy as a child at play at their favorite game. This is where you want to be as much as possible. Peak experience as Maslow called it.
  2. Observer state. Here you have no external dependencies – whatever happens, you remain impassive. You have no internal dependencies – you are able to also remain unmoved by emotional alarms going off inside of you. All by force of will, courage, determination, and sheer grit. That’s all you need to ACCEPT WHAT IS. Also known as Stoicism. You take the blows, self-inflicted or otherwise, and do not cave in. As if you didn’t care at all about anything. The way heroes are characteristically depicted in all stories since stories began. You also keep an eye on things inside and out and carefully discriminate courses of action, waiting as long as practical before making each decision, like George Washington and Davy Crockett. Including decisions about what and who to believe. All the old locked-down decisions are unlocked again in Observer state. You coolly observe in detail everything all over again with a completely open mind and no biases from all previous experiences.
  3. EOP – Emergency Operating Procedure – you keep up by moving as fast as you can to get all the things done that have been heaped upon you by yourself and others, get them all over with, and you defer enjoyment until after the list has been mostly ticked off when you can indulge in effortless escapism without having to think about your life or about anything serious. During this time, you experience endless moments of irritation about one little thing or another. You may or may not realize that it is your ego that is causing the irritation, and that you are dependent on others to keep you in a good mood, at which they usually fail.

Those are the three choices, in the briefest summary. The wisest choice among these is to spend as little time as possible in the lowest state. It is achievable by establishing the Stoic mindset as your main point of view. You don’t want to be cast around by outside forces; you want to be your own person, able to stand alone when necessary. You don’t want dependencies, you don’t even want to be dependent on your own internal clamor of bad feelings and babbling voices.

You want to identify with the SELF that is your inner essence, the pure EXPERIENCER, and take everything else with a grain of salt.

Is that all there is to it? Just that one principle will keep you in the two upper states of consciousness?

Not quite.

There is one other basic rule. Do not add any negativity to whatever negativity has gone before.

Stop your negative facial expressions and body language, and internal wallowings, and above all, any hurtful statements. Don’t add any negativity to the sauce of life; there’s plenty already. It will bring you and everyone else down, except for the Stoics in the crowd.

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

The Feeling of Being Guided by a Higher Power to Do Good

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Powerful Mind Part 46

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – January 30, 2026
Created January 26, 2024

Read Powerful Mind 45              |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

A 2023 Pew survey found that 45% of Americans “have had a sudden feeling of connection with something from beyond this world.”

“Have you ever wondered what life is all about?” I asked the precocious two-year-old.

“All the time,” she replied.

This is the kind of conversation that parents should initiate as early as possible in a child’s upbringing.

But since this is a rarity, we tend to grow up shoving our awe and wonder out of our conscious minds, because we don’t have time to dally. It’s all coming at us too fast, especially in recent centuries. A conscious mind process forms, which Freud named the Ego and the Superego.

The Ego presents itself as the active conscious mind, and so we all think of it as our self. It’s really more of a chosen spokesperson for the much greater totality of the real self that is our individuality.

The Superego is that part of the Ego (in my estimation) that second-guesses ourselves, our inner critic. Freud considered the Superego a separate functionality in which society’s demands are embedded as the conscience.

H.L. Mencken said, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that somebody may be watching.”

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may be the part of the brain playing a major role in the manifestations Freud labeled the Superego. It is probably also the structure supporting what Daniel Kahneman labeled as System 2, explicit thinking. Interestingly, Observer state (my term for metacognition) is very useful, and I associate it with the executive control network mediated by the frontal brain; but in  Flow state, which is even more effective than Observer state, the frontal regions of the brain give up control to more primitive parts of the brain (“hypofrontality”), and the Ego and inner critic disappear, as intuition and practice meld everything into a sense of oneness that does itself effortlessly.

When one begins to shift into Flow state as a way of life, it transcends the Ego, as if the Ego had been training wheels which you can now take off your bike. You can now sense and live from the real you, your full self, not the defensive Ego, but from the joyous Muse within you. It was you all along, although it may also be the Self of the Universe living through you.

By now, many people know about the Flow state, and it has become formally recognized by the scientific and medical communities. However, there are some aspects of that state which are still taboo subjects. These are the spiritual intuitions which often accompany the Flow state.

We’ve already discussed Noia, my term for the intuitive feeling that invisible forces are trying to help us by getting us to notice certain stimuli which appear to be giving us information relevant to our current situation and/or thought process. U.S. Andersen, whom I’ve cited earlier, writes about surrendering control to what he calls the Secret Self, and he is talking about the same thing I’ve often referred to as the Universe, or the Muse within. The religion of Islam also preaches the same notion of releasing control to Allah.

It’s conceivable that one should first use the conscious mind and intuition to practice at life and gain a degree of proficiency at it before giving up the inner critic continuously second-guessing oneself, i.e., the Ego. Without practice, the Flow state might not come on so easily just by making a decision to release conscious control. Instead, one might be fooled by impulses coming from the Ego that one thinks are coming from higher guidance.

I know from my personal experience that the latter misclassification has dramatically fooled me many times in my life, especially as a youngster.

I think now that many spiritual people think they are being guided to make political choices by higher powers when it might actually be the Ego masquerading as God.

Even those of us who experience some Flow state every day are (wisely) hesitant to speak much about a feeling of being guided from above. It’s the sort of statement that can cause one to wind up being pigeonholed as a nut.

U.S. Andersen embraces this sense of being guided by the Universe to do things that will develop us as individuals and enable us to provide more value to others. Having been a successful pro football player and businessman, perhaps he was less concerned about how people labeled him.

In this book, Powerful Mind, being serialized here, I’ve already recommended that you keep an open mind about whether the Universe might be a single Self, and you one avatar of The One. It is definitely a scientific possibility that cannot be ruled out. Whether or not in Flow state, I now take it as almost a certainty, because of my experiences. But I do not urge you to believe anything, merely keep an open mind to all possibilities, and notice what your own experience teaches you.

Set your sights high. Visualize how you want your life to be without undershooting out of fear of being heartbroken by failure. Don’t be attached to any outcome, just visualize the outcomes you want, curtail negativity, and enjoy your life each moment. Turn negativity into learning and creatively adapting to circumstance. Don’t fight what is; go with it and steer toward the positive.

As Bob Dylan wrote, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Each of us is serving by the work we choose to do; we are serving people, and they pay us money for what we do for them. In your life’s best dream—your visualization that you will refresh daily—you have to be doing the work that gives you joy and gets you into the Flow state, otherwise you are not on the path to your dream. If you have to make a difficult switch in your life, do it in the way that gives you and others joy rather than stress, and make changes patiently.

Leave open the possibility that you are working for the Universe and that it will guide you along the way to your dream; look for possible messages in everything, but don’t talk yourself into wishful thinking, stay balanced and open-minded, use all of your faculties, all of the instruments in your inner orchestra.

Attune yourself to what is happening to you – become one with it – and go with its flow, except where you feel the need to go around certain parts of it that simply don’t feel right.

Believe in yourself and your ability to tackle any problem life throws your way, just know that you have to put everything else aside and patiently, without time pressure, use single-pointed focus on that one problem. Other side thoughts will arise, but note them in writing and put them aside for later. You can tackle everything, but take it one at a time, don’t rush, and you’ll see that you can solve everything you need to.

The feeling of being guided by a higher power to do good is a wonderful feeling. Make sure you are being an empiricist about it, that other people are sincerely thanking you, that you are really doing good in general, not just for selected others, with some other folks actually being harmed by your actions, but doing good for everybody. That and a feeling of joy in your life are the two essential checkpoints that you are on the path to your dreams.

Key #12:

Continuously focus on, bring out, and enjoy the Good

The 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Powerful Mind Key

New Mental Strategy

Blogpost Link

#1

Trial-doubt your own last thought/feeling.

#2

Study, edit, and reset your automatic reactions.

#3

Constructively and kindly express what you are really feeling.

#4

Root for the Universe, not just for your current vehicle.

#5

Self-rating is irrelevant.

#6

Be sure of what YOU want and enjoy the journey to your dreams, without attachment to outcomes.

#7

Take Observer position, note your feelings without owning them.

#8

When there is too much going on, rotate attention to make sure every workstream is covered.

#9

Consciously determine how much to take your time.

#10

Patiently determine the most constructive use of each salient inner experience.

#11

Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse.

#12

Continuously focus on, bring out, and enjoy the Good.

POWERFUL MIND 12 Simple Keys
will be out in February

POWERFUL MIND 12 Simple Keys by Bill Harvey

Love to all,
Bill

Mind Dwell Hath Consequences

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Powerful Mind Part 45
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, January 23, 2026.
Created January 19, 2024

Read Powerful Mind 44              |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will eventually appear in your external experience...

Quote from You Are the Universe: Imagine That, Chapter 17 – “Predreaming” by Bill Harvey

My wife Lalita is an avid reader; she reads a couple of books a week. The other day, she came across a book she had to mention to me, because of the similarity of its title to my book Mind Magic. The book is called The Magic in Your Mind. It was written by U.S. (Uell Stanley) Andersen, an American football player and businessman. I was fascinated, looked it up, bought it, and read it. The book asserts that our imagination controls what happens to us in our lives. This is not a new idea, nor is it just an idea: since antiquity, rare human beings have discovered this way of using their mind, verified that it works, and written about it. The earliest trace of it is in the Vedas, going back to memorized but not written texts possibly as early as ~1700 BC or even earlier, finally converted to written form ~500 BC.

In the Sermon On The Mount (~27 CE), Jesus quotes Proverbs 23:7: “As a man thinketh, so shall he be.”

The Law of Attraction was the book by William Walker Atkinson (1906), which might have inspired Jose Silva to create the Silva Mind Control Method (1977) – or Jose might have discovered it again by himself. In between these books (1961), was when Andersen published his book. The Secret was then published by Rhonda Byrne in 2006. Any of these writers might have been inspired by earlier books, and/or themselves discovered the phenomena and the ways of using them.

I’m finding the writing in Andersen’s book to be inspiring and exalting to read. Even though I know these things, the way he explains them is beautiful and lofty. His poetic metaphors and allusions have the ring of truth. I wish I had found his book before he passed away in 1986; it would have been great fun to have conversations with him.

When I was writing Mind Magic in 1972 (published in 1976), I purposely avoided metaphysics and cosmology because I wanted the book to have universal appeal, including atheists and people of all religions. The methods in Mind Magic are positioned as “useful fictions” and as “lenses” which had been invented by me and tested in my life. The reader is invited to try them and see for themselves that they are pragmatic, i.e., the methods work.

In my book You Are The Universe – YATU (2014), I went the other way and rooted my mental methodologies in a picture of the Universe as One Self playing all roles, thus each of our minds is actually the universal mind enjoying the view from one avatar’s perspective. In that book (YATU) I report on my own (mundane and extraordinary) experiences and theorize about how reality works, in order to explain those experiences. And I theorize why The One Self is playing this game.

Chapter 17 of YATU is called “Predreaming” and is all about how to use the mind to cause the future you want, and how to avoid accidentally “ordering poison from the menu” by careless use of these same faculties. An excerpt:

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will
eventually appear in your external experience on the Universal
Computer Screen we call material reality.
You are tuning in these material experiences, ordering them,
Attracting them to you, by dwelling on them.
It makes no difference if your dwelling on them consists of
prayer to get them (your desires), or dread of getting them (your fears).
The “dwelling-on” places the order, in either case.
Oblivious to our inherited “ordering power”, almost all of us are
using it against ourselves.

The difficulty of using this Predreaming method is not the intense visualization of your most precious dreams actually coming true in real life; that part is fun, it’s almost like daydreaming with purpose. The hard part is keeping your mind from repeatedly drifting into emotively imaging dreaded eventualities that are exactly what you most ardently desire to not happen.

In my novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, the character Templegard is the only soldier-spy tested by U.S. Army Intelligence who is able to not think of a green monkey. For most of us, even those of us with relatively high degrees of mental self-discipline, it’s almost impossible to not think of something. The trick is to not avoid thinking of X, but to focus on thinking of Y, and that will work, but requires practice at first.

Any negativity in the mind will tend to bring negativity into your actual life. This is why in previous chapters of Powerful Mind, we have oft mentioned quickly turning off internal alarms and moving on to solutions for whatever is causing those alarms. Negativity is a very useful alarm system, but when we are in Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), we tend to wallow in the alarm that is going off, rather than turning it off, thanking it, and moving on to planning how to deal with the thing that is causing the alarm to go off.

The more intensely you detail the future you want to happen, the better. This same attention to detail is valuable in preparing contingency plans for what you will do if the very things that you do not want to happen, happen anyway. Not only planning what you will say or do or what your face and body language will communicate, but experiencing it in your imagination, what it will look like and feel like from being inside yourself in that future moment.

Once you have pre-experienced the worst eventualities, you will find that some of their sting has been burned out. This will make it easier to casually turn aside if they pop up again in your mind. You will feel prepared and less concerned that such a thing might happen to you. Stoic, courageous, and fatalistic. Resolved.

This can be done every night before going to sleep, as regards what might happen in the day ahead. First, disarm the undesired outcomes by preparing for them, then put them aside and focus on predreaming the outcomes you do want to happen. If you are comfortable praying, go right ahead. I think of praying as asking for cosmic fire support. I don’t feel comfortable asking the Universe for help in trivial self-serving matters; I feel comfortable asking for the Universe to help in instances where the outcomes I want are beneficial to all concerned, although in the short run, some may be more benefitted than others.

Andersen argues that we should strive to change our identification with our ego to our identification with the Universe. This is unquestionably right in my opinion, however, it can run into friction with one’s atheism or specific religious beliefs (many Jews, for example, are uncomfortable equating themselves with God). This is why I rephrase his exhortation to identify with our Muse, the “voice” (some guidance might not involve words) inside that gives us the best advice. It comes down to the same thing as Andersen’s advice. And in Mind Magic, the final chapter is all about Identifying with the Universe. Here in Powerful Mind, I’m refining that only slightly into identifying with your Muse, as operationally easier to put into practice. You will, by doing so, tend to let lower thoughts float downstream without acknowledging them or identifying with them. You’ll instead tend to wait for the Muse and invite it space in which to be heard (or the advice felt and comprehended without words).

More on Key #12 in upcoming posts. In the meantime, ration negativity, and keep track of what percent of your time you detect it inside; and enjoy purposeful daydreaming about the future you want with all of your powers of imagination.

My new book, on which this blog series is based,
POWERFUL MIND 12 Simple Keys
will be out in FebruaryPOWERFUL MIND 12 Simple Keys by Bill Harvey

Love to all,
Bill

 

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