Category Archives: Conscious Universe

If the Universe Is One Consciousness, the Creator Is You

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Created April 19, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The world’s most acclaimed quantum mechanics and relativity physicists including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, John Wheeler, and Stephen Hawking dealt with consciousness in ways that have not, to my knowledge, been looked at by philosophers for their possible implications.

Physicists are a very useful subset of philosophers—especially when physicists deal with things beyond the physical.

Originally, physicists were not willing to deal with the non-physical; they left that to the metaphysicists and metaphysicians. Over time, two things changed:

    1. Energy, which, being invisible, was not considered physical, was reassigned to be covered by physicists.
    2. Metaphysics became lumped with superstition and religion as being outside the field of science.

Then, Einstein came along and included the observer in his thought experiments, allowing consciousness to be included in the mathematics of relativity. Heisenberg showed that the observer influenced the outcome of the experiment.

Einstein was convinced that quantum mechanics was not a complete description of reality, and he attempted to prove it by means of the EPR Paradox, which continues to be debated with a lot of difficult math by many brilliant scientists, without any final resolution. The closest thing to a resolution might be the little-known analysis by Belgian physicist Diederik Aerts which showed that quantum mechanics could not describe two separate physical systems – suggesting that the universe/multiverse cannot be more than one single system.

Einstein wanted a complete description of reality and found it hard to reconcile that with what he called “spooky action at a distance”. All of his early thinking had been based on the classical physics in which action at a distance had been ruled out and replaced by the idea of the exchange of invisible particles/wavicles in the space between objects which accounts for the illusion that they are acting upon one another. This exchange of invisible particles is a simple extension of the colliding billiard balls picture of reality which underpins all of physics all the way back and to this day.

Magnetism and gravity were satisfactorily explained using this concept. However quantum entanglement suggests that either space/distance is an illusion, or that the billiard balls being exchanged between the once-connected-physically-but-now-separated items are allowed to move much faster than the speed of light, in fact, with instantaneity.

Physicists are still debating these things today. The debates disappear if the universe happens to be one single consciousness. One Single Consciousness (OSC) is the one theory (proposed in 1976 by me as The Theory of the Conscious Universe, “TTOTCU”) I know of which explains all of the experimental and observed evidence.

The closest that physicists have come to my TTOTCU theory is Wheeler’s concept of the Participatory Anthropic Principle. This states that consciousness is the factor which converts probability waves into concrete states of physical and energetic reality. I’m pretty sure he thought of TTOTCU and recognized that he would be taking a big chance to embrace it. Instead, his theory was that matter and energy existed before consciousness, but only as probability waves, never frozen into specific forms and events, until the universe somehow evolved life forms with consciousness that now gave the universe the ability to be specific.

I find it easier to swallow TTOTCU than Wheeler’s bootstrap. In my bootstrap, the Nothingness recognizes itself as experiencing the receipt of information (i.e. a consciousness, a self) and then discovers it can imagine and create information for its own consumption. And that it can spin off avatars which can either remember their original identity or not, depending on what the universe’s game might be at the moment.

Nevertheless, since I am only a philosopher and not a physicist (as I had originally intended), I was greatly heartened to read the last book written by Stephen Hawking in which he included Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle in his own summation of reality. This gave me a leg to stand on despite the disparagement of philosophers by some scientists who call us “scientists without laboratories”.

So my Mission in life as I interpret it is to, as best I can, bring into popular awareness two things, TTOTCU and metacognition operational methodologies which have worked for me. Since I am a scientist at heart I do not proclaim that these ideas are facts, but that they are real possibilities. The entire universe/multiverse may be a single consciousness. In which case, you and I are missionaries from that consciousness into this created world which exists within the imagination of the one consciousness, a singularity which exists above time and space.

Just accept for the sake of argument that this could be the true situation. Look at where we are as a species. We have been fooled into thinking that all of this physical stuff around us is what is real, and that it all came about by the collisions of matter and energy bits, accidentally. Therefore, that there is no higher meaning or purpose to life or existence, there is nothing to stand in awe and wonder of.

Naturally, with that as the prevailing worldview (most people act as if this is what they believe, although some of us partition off our faith in a specific religion as something we also believe, but when we come out of the temple we soon begin hating and competing again) it is obvious why we have established authoritarian governments to protect us from criminals, and although seeming to be getting away from that for the past couple of thousand years it is once again flooding back front and center to apparently about half of us even in the most democratic nations.

In other words, if TTOTCU happens to be correct, but almost no one on the planet accepts that in their gut yet, we are all betting on the traditional view of materialism and accidentalism, living in fear, complaining, blaming, and having fun mostly in escapist ways. This seems to us on a subconscious level to be the most rational approach given that there is no way of knowing whether TTOTCU is reality or bunk. Or is there a way of knowing?

I find that by maintaining awareness that TTOTCU might be the reality, I am constantly receiving new information in my mind that surprises, inspires, and delights me. When I fall from this state into one of fear and negativity and attachment to outcomes, I become cut off from that Muse. I detect pragmatic value by keeping my mind open to the TTOTCU possibility. This is where metacognition comes in. You too can experiment with entertaining the TTOTCU possibility in your own lives and seeing if there are any pragmatic benefits you receive as a result.

Cooperation with others becomes the basic operating principle in a world that recognizes the possibility of TTOTCU.

Game theory comes in here as well. In game theory one inspects each alternative one has within some defined “game”, and then imagines what the outcome will be from taking this route or that one. My assertion from decades of self-experimentation is that it causes more “wins” to keep one’s mind open to the very real possibility that we are all a single consciousness. It causes fewer “wins” to rule TTOTCU out as bunk.

Negativity is self-defeating. This is consistent with Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle. We get out what we put in. It is not as simple as “manifesting” whatever we set our minds to, that is an oversimplification that goes much too far and ignores the interaction among all of the different “dinner orders” being requested by all the particles of consciousness – you and me and each of the rest of us. But it is true that Garbage In, Garbage Out – the love you take is equal to the love you make – if you put in negativity you will get back negativity – if you put in constructiveness and well wishes to all, you get back a happier world.

We call the objects we humans create “artifacts” or “artefacts”.

Einstein felt strongly that the universe is a Godifact, but preferred other terms such as Nature, and the intelligence behind Nature, the Creator.

Intention node is another name for avatar. I have also called us attention nodes, particles of consciousness, psions. Quantum theory appears to require that everything is definitely one connected system. Consciousness is something each of us avatars has, and perhaps someday our memory blocks will be released and we will remember our true identity, and even remember the moment we first realized ourself.

Gold In Gold Out

Negative In Negative Out

Positive In Positive Out

Love In Love Out

Opportunities = what we today feel are the insurmountable problems about to destroy us and the planet – our own doing – we understandably (because of not knowing the TTOTCU lens is a real possibility) are down in the dumps about our condition. As long as we continue to be stuck in that old way of looking at things, we will just make things worse. We need to exercise our courage and our free will to open our minds to a new position of clarity and openness to entirely new ideas, and to see us as lucky to be the generations alive today at the turning point in history, where we take ourselves in hand and set up the new system of the world.

Love to All,
Bill

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Science, Spirituality, and “Woo-Woo”

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Created April 5, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

“Woo-Woo” is defined as “unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.”

I’m grateful that there is not yet a derogatory term for “theories of universe grounded in science which are not in conflict with spirituality”.

As you may know, my books do not assert the existence of God, but point out that we could all be part of a single consciousness, a consciousness which could have the qualities we as a species have generally intuited for God – omnipresence, omnipotence, and benevolence.

My main emphasis in these books is that we should keep an open mind, and in our decisions and actions take into account the possibility that this is the truth—that we should be empirically scientific toward our own experiences, and objectively observe if the one-consciousness lens is useful in understanding what goes on in our lives.

Rather than filtering out our hunches and inspirations, our blatant experiences of telepathy and empathy (understanding, emotional telepathy), and our spiritual intuitions. EOP, Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, is the instantaneous dichotomistic bucketing of everything into good vs. bad based on accumulated imitative conditioning, without giving any fresh thought to any matter.

As a species we have been driven into the EOP condition by a combination of Acceleritis, accelerating information overload, plus the dominant unsupported assumption of Western science since circa 1800 that the material world is all that exists and that it came about by accident.

In that science thus constrained, the importance of consciousness has been generally belittled.

Stellar exceptions: William James, Jung, Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking — who in his last book held up Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle as part of Hawking’s own worldview. By the implications of their thinking, these renowned scientists all opened the door to the possibility of a universe which is a consciousness. None of them, however, took it that far.

Einstein, like Thales and Spinoza, had spiritual feelings aimed at the universe and at the intelligence which had created it. By bringing the observer into his thought experiments, Einstein snuck consciousness back into science’s picture of reality, thus discovering relativity.

These great thinkers were resuscitating animism, originally emerging as the first natural religion, essentially the feeling that the Creator is in everything. The native Americans shared these same spiritual feelings.

Animism never went on to become a formalized religion, that was pantheism, its next stage of evolution toward today’s dominant monism – which within Hinduism still contains a pantheistic pantheon as masks of the One, as established by the Upanishads.

Neither Spinoza nor Einstein saw any conflict between their animism and Judaism. This is key. What it says is that not only is it possible that we are part of a field of consciousness which invented matter-energy-spacetime, it also says that there is no distance between that and the beliefs and values of the world’s religions, that it is all internally consistent, integrity exists, science is its mental emanation, spirituality is its emotional emanation.

Will we then all become more positive about life and about each other? It would be natural, once we get out of the habit of implicitly putting down all spirituality because of some Woo-Woo extremists.

But Thales, Spinoza, Einstein, and many other people have experienced that moment, that rush, of spiritual realization, when one suddenly gets it— that there could be a scientific God.

We might not be limited to this world, this one lifetime.

One suddenly has a sense of cosmic resonance, of the importance of being.

We know that consciousness exists. We know that with much more certainty than we know that matter exists since we experience matter through our senses, which are part of our consciousness.

So it would be illogical to deny the possibility of a much larger consciousness.

Woo-Woo is another form of EOP. Oversimplification. It is not necessarily something that happens to people as a result of their own spiritual realizations, it might have been transmitted to them by friends and associates and/or by social media or books they’ve read.

Because Woo-Woo is essentially authoritarian and faith-based, it is a belief system and does not rely upon scientific support. It tends to be open-ended i.e. pretty much anything goes.

Back in the 70s when psychedelics first reached a mass audience, both spiritual realizations and Woo-Woo began to spread through the world culture. Two parallel and related processes.

Today there are about a thousand times more books published per year about Woo-Woo than in the 70s. They are almost all well-intended. A few are cryptopolitical propaganda. The field does much more good than harm, in my estimation.

Getting people to be less negative is a good thing. It would be better to do that with less exaggeration and fewer black-and-white generalizations. But game theory proves that optimism is more utilitarian than pessimism. Yes, Woo-Woo goes too far, but I wouldn’t waste time putting people down. Better to help Woo-Woo folks metacognize, recognize, and master their own egos, reopen their minds to all possibilities, and move up into the Observer and Flow states, and out of Woo-Woo followership.

Mixing Woo-Woo with politics is a sure sign that it is the most naïve, imitative form of Woo-Woo. Spirituality is above politics. If we are all one thing, factions are a mental illness.

Takeaway:

Don’t believe anything except your own experience, be observant and keep an open mind, test and learn, see if this one-consciousness lens is useful to you, realize Oneness as an ever-constant possibility.

My Best to all,
Bill

 

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The Difference Between “Predreaming” and “Manifesting”

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Created March 29, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Predreaming

A recent article in The New York Times by Tara Isabella Burton, a fine writer of both non-fiction and fiction with a doctorate in theology from Oxford’s Trinity College, puts down a specific spiritual belief she refers to as “manifesting”. She writes:

“Today’s culture of wellness — predicted to be an $8.5 trillion industry by 2027 — is suffused with the pseudoscientific language of positive thinking, manifesting, useful and toxic “energy” and, above all things, the power and the potential of the self to create its own reality. If we can dream it, much of contemporary wellness language tells us, we can have it — so long as we focus our energy hard enough.”

She also associates “manifesting” with some other huge things, including besides the wellness culture: spirituality, capitalist individualism, positive thinking, denying aid to the poor on the grounds that they are not using their God-given powers of manifesting, and even Trumpism. She cites Google evidence that searching for the word “manifesting” spiked 6X when the pandemic began.

Burton traces how a faith healer’s book in the late 19th Century triggered a spate of similar books which became so powerful that they inspired Mary Baker Eddy to found the Christian Scientist movement, and transformed Capitalism into a religion:

“In this way, the capitalist pursuit of profit was swiftly recast as a religion whose only tenet was desire… New Thought offered a convenient economic theodicy: a way of explaining and justifying wealth inequality as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, with the wealthy at the top and the suffering at the bottom. And it’s notable that manifesting, New Thought’s modern descendant, should rise to prominence at a moment when economic inequality is once again at an all-time high.”

In her description of “manifesting” she consistently communicates the idea that it is simply wanting X (generally, money) and focusing all our energies on it.

I rarely use the term “manifesting” but until now have never thought of it in a bad light, so I’m grateful for Burton’s very readable and intelligent article. I see now that “manifesting” has taken on a more narrow meaning that I thought it had.

I have always used my own term, Predreaming, which came to me in a moment of inspiration, as if from “upstairs”.

My definition of Predreaming is rather lengthy but I will quote it here from Chapter Seventeen of You Are The Universe:

Chapter 17
Predreaming

Just a reminder: all of this is theory, largely based on my own experiences. For readability the scenario is described as I imagine the details, and is intended to be the most parsimonious, plausible explanation that accounts for all phenomena.

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.

One of the ways we have been (under-)using our “ordering power” in a constructive way is called “prayer”.

Prayer tends to be a heightened (i.e. more effective) form of predreaming to the extent that all four aspects of consciousness tend to be involved: thinking, feeling, perception (in this case, vivid visualization of the target situation), and intuition.

Intuition will tend to be present in prayer to the extent that the evolving mini-personality who is praying feels the target situation being prayed for would be good for other attention nodes, not just for him or her. Then the praying node has the intuition that “God has no reason not to answer the prayer”.

Now this is not synonymous with the Butler definition of “manifesting” where all you need is desire and focusing. There are a few differences.

    1. Scientific support – it has been proven that previsualization improves performance.
    2. A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and "God" by Bill HarveyTheoretical support – as documented in A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” , John Wheeler, Einstein and Hawking are the Newtons of our day, and they have left the doors open for consciousness to be a far more important component in reality than most present-day scientists – with Wheeler creating the Participatory Anthropic Concept which comes very close to supporting “manifesting” but especially “predreaming”.
    3. With predreaming comes the concept of considering not just oneself, but how the desired state is a win/win from an enlightened point of view to a reality which is a single Consciousness.
    4. The other vital side of predreaming is to avoid projecting negative situations, which appears from her argument that is not a component of “manifesting” under her definition. This comes with a battery of methods for truncating negativity at all times. Expressing woe, past a certain point, extends woe into the future, with an accelerating curve as you dwell on it.
    5. The connections Butler draws between “manifesting” in social media and religious groups that have embraced Trumpism is another difference. The students of predreaming that I know are not affiliated with any of that.
    6. Predreaming is only one aspect of adopting a lens of the world as a single Consciousness. Another is Noia, the science and art of looking for helpful clues from the Universe – The One Self. There are many aspects helpful to Observer state and Flow state.

My experiential learning in testing and developing predreaming, the way I do it, has led to the strong conviction that it is working.

Seemingly being challenged sparks new thinking, it is wonderful to be challenged politely!

Butler has convinced me that the misunderstanding and misuse of one’s ability to “contribute mentally and physically to the happenings of reality, with positive emotion and functioning intuition” (shorter definition of predreaming), lead to unfortunate outcomes that spill over onto the rest of us evolving mini-personalities. Ego is the main reason this occurs, which is exacerbated by  Acceleritis. Too many “manifesters” are focused on money and act exclusionary, and justify this on religious grounds so they feel righteous and unable to waver or consider any polite logical challenges, because no one is better or smarter than God, and “God is in my hand.”

In reality, God – The Original Consciousness that acts though each of us and everything – wants us all to enjoy learning how to find our way back inside his POV. “Manifesters” will not get the results they want no matter how much they focus, because it would harm more of us than help. God doesn’t use free will that way, and doesn’t want us to, either. God has no reason not to love us, God IS us.

Wheeler et al explain the mechanics, by which these Consciousness-driven actions manifest.

Manifesters beware of “using the dark side of the Force”. Make sure the types of simplified thinking*  Dr. Butler describes don’t describe you. You will appreciate how much your manifestation rate increases.

I’ll close with this superb closer of Tara Isabella Burton’s article:

“After all, if reality is only ever what we make it, then those who possess the fewest scruples about conforming to the truth are the ones who will have the most power to shape the future.”

There is “a Darth Vader”. That’s the powerful people hypnotizing those follower folks, who deserve better, who have put themselves into magical superstitious thinking they think is spiritually driven, but it’s drawing down upon their spirituality account, to fool them like the metaphorical Devil, the ego.

Try predreaming and let me know if it works. Make sure to hold down the ego. Thanks!

*I refer to it as Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). Here’s how my AI [https://app.soopra.ai/bill/chat] explains it:
“Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is a term I coined to describe a state of mind where, due to sensory overload or stress, we simplify our thinking process. In EOP, we tend to see things in black and white, make immediate decisions based on precedent, and have little foresight. It’s like an emergency mode our minds go into when overwhelmed, but the challenge is that it can limit our ability to fully process information and make optimal decisions. It’s a state we want to avoid or minimize for more effective thinking and decision making.”

Love to all,
Bill

 

Perspective

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Created March 8, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Perspective is very helpful in dealing with the present historic moment…These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us…
It’s time to be that best version of yourself.
Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

My friend arrived and put down his bag and took off his scarf and coat and sat on the banquette seat I’d saved for him. I asked him in a cheery voice how he was, expecting his usual enthusiastic answer, and he made ambiguous body language.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, still upbeat.

“Overwhelmed,” he admitted.

“By…”

“By the cold, all the news, and age!” he specified.

I contemplated his answer. “I’m with you on all of that.”

“I was just reading The New York Times, and every story is bad news. I used to be able to find one or two ‘good news’ stories in every issue.”

“I’ve been advising cutting down on the news and all other media that brings you down.” He nodded in violent agreement. We ordered lunch.

“How do you deal with those things?” he asked.

“You know, my take on the universe is that we are all one unkillable consciousness. That on Earth you and I are part of a free will experiment the conscious intelligent universe is doing. It is that Intelligence which looks out our eyes as us.” He nodded, chewing, having heard this from me before, in other language.

“I feel certain that the test we are undergoing will teach us wisdom of immense value. I write to help bring an end to suffering. I feel great sadness for those suffering, but I can’t let that affect my effectiveness on their behalf.”

He knew me from a long way back and knew that was what I say whenever there’s an opening. Never the exact same words, but always the same idea we are One Consciousness. He also knows that is my best guess as to what is really going on and that I live my life within this picture of reality.

If I’m wrong, then so is Einstein; neither of us believe that this complexity has all put itself together completely by accidental collisions, without the inescapable logical necessity of prior Intelligence.

We ourselves are a micro model of the Conscious Intelligent Universe – we are a consciousness so we know intimately what such a thing is.

And we know therefore that it is possible for there to be a consciousness.

Therefore it is totally illogical to state that a much larger version of the same thing “cannot possibly exist.”

My view of reality has an equal chance of being either true or false.

The same is true of any other view of reality now on the table.

Until your next death, when you gain important evidence, or simply cease to be able to experience knowing. Maybe then you’ll find out my “guess” or “prophecy” was right or not.

In any case, the real question is how to deal with the frightening omens and general sense of alarm. How to remain on a positive course, and learn from the challenges now appearing.

Stoic philosophers were the first to write down their ideas for dealing with horrific circumstances, and the Spartans largely demonstrated stoicism in action, except when they didn’t. At least they proved that it is humanly possible to zoom back far enough out of oneself to grok the universe is going to do stuff and we are supposed to rise to the occasion and to control our inner reaction to whatever befalls us externally.

Epictetus didn’t link his exhortations to any cosmological theory, he relied upon common sense. He implied that who knows what the universe really is, what we know is that we undergo severe trials here in reality and we need to understand the best way to deal with them. We can choose to take a different emotional reaction to our favorite cup being broken. It works with practice, will does develop.

Perspective is very helpful to me in dealing with the present historic moment.

This is as big as WWII. Even if we avert war but remain at battle stations for the rest of our lives.

Or, we come out of this into a reasonable facsimile of utopia.

These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us.

This is the cold water in the face wakeup call that God – the Conscious Intelligent Universe – is watching, and it’s time to be that best version of yourself. Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

Love to all,
Bill