Category Archives: Emergency Oversimplification Procedure

The Consistency Program

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Powerful Mind Part 18

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 28, 2025
Created July 7, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 17

“Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Essay on Self-Reliance: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’ His point was that only small-minded men refused to rethink their prior beliefs. Or, put another way, he thought that today’s intuition could trump yesterday’s conclusions.” — Paul Rosenzweig, LAWFARE

Wise people have been aware of this excess invocation of consistency for some time, but their admonitions have been little grasped as cultural necessities. Why is that?

Decision-making is the basis for all action by conscious agents of any species.

Almost all decision-making is implicit, meaning the same as subconscious in this context. And because that literally means it takes place below the level of conscious awareness, it becomes understandable that many mental bad practices can persist for millennia.

Wise folks can and do tell us the right ways to live, and yet, even if it sounds good to us, we can’t seem to put their wisdom into practice.

That’s because it is harder to change mental habits than the wise have realized in the past. Those wise in today’s age are probably quite aware of the importance of this difficulty in taking control of one’s actions such that one is able to optimize real-world decision-making and its real-world outcomes, without being helplessly dragged along by past inner scripts which have become lodged in our minds.

There is a subtle sense of time pressure in our culture – often not that subtle. Under these conditions (I call Acceleritis), it’s natural that one would want to be able to make fast decisions, especially about things which do not immediately seem to be all that important.

When one’s mindset is set that way (I call it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), one way to speed up decision-making is simply to be consistent with one’s past behavior.

We become imitations of ourselves, especially imitators of our remembered experiences. It would be more effective if you’re going to imitate, to remember back to your best moments, and to emulate whatever you did at those moments. Although, that would still be sub-optimizing.

The best practice is to be real in the moment, filtering out only negativity.

What does that mean – being real in the moment? It means exposing your true current feelings in a positive way. Not remembering back. Not imitating yourself or anyone else. Just acting naturally, without the inner sense of being at risk. Not self-protective. Not defensive. Just yourself, but editing out any negativity. Translating what may feel negative on the inside so it’s just an objective statement of facts on the outside.

This is easy to say but not easy to do. Bringing autonomous auto-reactions under one’s own conscious control is a major life achievement.

There are tricks you can use, such as applying your sense of humor.

Such as not imitating yourself or anyone else.

Such as by not choosing to be consistent with what you said yesterday or ten seconds ago, choose instead to re-inspect what you were espousing, and learn about your current self-administration by doing that inspection. You’ll recognize this to be Key #2. The Keys all work together and there are many overlaps among them. Here we are beginning our journey into Key #3 and we can see how Key #2 helps achieve Key #3. See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Consistency is a program in your mind. Supported by networks of neurons that interact in consistent ways. The universe has not given us a keyboard so that we could manipulate and change these neuronal patterns directly and so we shall have to build it someday, but in the meantime these Keys are the closest proxy we have for that keyboard. Which is not to dis-include the equivalent of Keys contributed by other thinkers on the subject, many of whom today are scientists, and many of whom today are spiritualists (which to them/us is an inner science).

Feed your mind voraciously while keeping it steadily open.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

Starting Over

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Powerful Mind Part 43
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, December 27, 2024
Created January 5, 2024
Read Powerful Mind 42


A useful exercise from time to time is to pretend that all of your experience to date has not happened, you have no preconceived notions of anything, and you are going to restart your life in this very moment.

After making this proclamation to yourself, since you no longer have any agendas, the first thing to do is to simply observe what is going on inside you, in the supposed absence of all previous records.

You might sense words in your mind, or perhaps only feelings. What are those feelings and/or words? The ones that come back first after the reboot?

Why did those arise first?

If they are feelings, they might be left over from your previous life, the one before the restart. Or they may be your first feelings in this new life. You’ll find yourself able to make some pretty confident guesses. Either the feelings will be negative, and stem from your previous life, or perhaps they might be positive, excited at the chance of starting all over.

Let’s say they are negative. You say to yourself (without words, they are unnecessary) that you’re breaking the rules of the game by carrying over feelings from the past. How come your past life led you to store up these bad feelings with such power over you that they were able to break confinement by your will?

You might answer yourself by reminding yourself that you never had been able to overcome negative feelings by your willpower alone.

OK, but that was then, this is now. You are reborn as a blank slate. You will get off on the right foot this time, and are absolutely determined to have a strong enough will to break the hammerlock of negative emotions over you.

Sustain the moment for as long as necessary and put all other things aside while you win the internal battle.

Notice words that arise in your mind. Which senator* are they coming from? What is the general mood of that senator? Are the words taking the side of your will to overcome negative emotions, or are they taking the side of the negative emotions?

As the exercise progresses you will see that the robot has not crossed over with you into a new blank slate, the robot has all of the baggage it has always been carrying, and intends to keep using it to manipulate you. This will give you a clearer and more comprehensive view of the robot than anything you have read in my writings. You will see what you and all of us are up against. It is almost like needing to fight off the mind of an invading demon that is trying to take us over completely and has almost entirely succeeded already.

However, you will always have the upper hand if you remain cool and open-minded and not give in to negative emotions, defeatism, or attachment. Simply observe these inner battles from above them. You’ll need to give up all of the attachments you had formed in your earlier life, before the restart.

The things you deeply love and care about, which are good for you and others, will always come back and seek a place in your heart, and you can welcome them back, but in a stoic manner: meaning you will not make yourself suffer by not experiencing these things enough, you will be grateful for what little of them you get.

There are resolution moments where we take life-turns and we can actually feel the difference inside, where something that once had power over us, no longer does.

Afterward, we might experience backsliding, and at such times focus our consciousness on sticking with our new resolution. Do not cause yourself to suffer, nor accept suffering at the hands of others, but remain resolute and compassionate to everyone and everything. It is possible to balance in an open-minded way and to help others without being carried off by oversensitivity to the suffering of others. You can do more good in the world by staying over the weather.

Use your newly developed inner visibility to study what brings you up and what brings you down, and curtail downward emotions immediately. Accept whatever is happening as reality and deal with it as constructively and patiently as possible without becoming caught up in it. Your free will, your personal freedom, your resolute will, is the most important thing that you have, more important than your negative feelings, your will is the protector of your positive feelings of love and joy and wonder.

Do not confuse willpower with stubbornness. Stubbornness is the opposite of open-mindedness. Taking intractable positions means you are not open to considering other ideas. This means you are attached to certain ideas and things without recourse to new facts, new learning. That is being stuck. That is Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) of the robot. Your consciousness should remain open to all possibilities while taking necessary actions based on your current best estimate of reality.

When you are having fun, such as when you do your passion work, will bring you up, not only emotionally but also cognitively and in terms of effective body movement. This is Flow state.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was very young and experienced Flow state for the first times (on stage), it was very impactful on me. I had discovered another level of reality that felt very magical, although I was sure that it had a basis in science. My parents who had taught me everything about life from much earlier in my life than other parents discussed everything with their children, had never taught me about Flow state. Did they know it existed? I didn’t trust myself to know exactly how to explain it even to them and so I never did. Eventually, Jack Carter, the comedian I respected most, recognized what I was saying to him in a private conversation, and said that in showbiz it was called being “on”.

As I grew up I formed certain ideas about Flow state, which I thought about a lot because it was my aim to get into and stay in Flow state as much as possible. One idea I had was that every impulse received during Flow state was perfect. One could do no wrong. It took me years to see through that mistake. Actually, the foolish impulses continue to arise during Flow state but the ability to instantly discriminate the right impulses to follow has become impeccable, for as long as the state lasts.

With my wrong model of Flow state, I was always quickly taking myself out of Flow. Because I would act on decoy impulses thinking I could do no wrong.

Nowadays in Flow, I listen to the endless babble of my robot pretending to be me, following up on an inspired idea I just had as if with further improvements on it, when these follow-on remarks really added nothing of value.

As a note to neuroscientists studying states of consciousness, my original hypothesis was that only one set of instructions was being sent to my conscious mind, and the perfection of Flow state was therefore determined by the subconscious layer that sent my conscious mind these instructions. My current hypothesis (or observation) is that the impeccability of action is not at the generative layer but in the discrimination function. In Flow state, the conscious mind and body act as a single unit, confidently choosing correctly from among the sea of impulses constantly arising, with the self and other seeming to be of a single piece. It all feels like play or doing what comes naturally as opposed to striving.

Whether you are starting over to evade a bad mood, enjoying creating something in Flow state, or whatever you are doing, the ability to focus your attention and notice what is going on in and around you is what is going to get you through to the highest outcomes, even as you prevent yourself from becoming attached to those outcomes.

Your ability to see yourself inside continuously will reveal to you many important learnings. You will see that discomfort generalizes. If something makes you feel uncomfortable, soon other things will also be making you feel uncomfortable. You will see that being interrupted discomforts you, and that you quickly tire of it. This whole distraction culture which we have created continuously interrupts thoughts and feelings you are having, which contributes to the development of EOP as a form of “thick skin” to coexist with all the interruptive distractions going on almost all of the time. Acceleritis (information overload) has created a world of broken thoughts. We reduce the pain of this with EOP, but that actually makes things worse.

Be on the lookout for certain signs that you are in EOP. Procrastination is one of those signs. Something needs to be done but we put it off. If we stop and focus on it, the sense that it is overwhelmingly difficult melts away as we patiently and open-mindedly analyze it.

Circling is another form of procrastination. This is when your mind is in a loop, it keeps going around and around through the same path of steps, without adding new insights in the endless circling. Might be a good time to start your life over at times like that.

May your 2025 be filled with happy surprises!

Love to all,
Bill

 

*Senator

A Bill Harvey construct explained in Mind Magic. The bio-AI in your brain is referred to as “the robot”. The robot makes predictions and sometimes asserts motor control. From your own subjective point of view, it is not easy to discern your own free will from the will of the robot. To the extent that you act on impulses, you will be giving up maximum control to the robot. When you hear yourself thinking certain thoughts they may be coming from the robot. There the robot appears not as a single unified voice but as a huge auditorium filled with senators, who speak with apparent certain knowledge, but each senator speaking from a different persona. This is apparently an artifact of the brain’s bio-AI system. The AI clusters the verbal and visual inputs of others and this forms the senators, reducing the data to a manageable number of types. Back ↑

Which One Is the Real You?

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Powerful Mind Part 20 

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – December 6, 2024.
Created July 21, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 19

The real you is the way you were awed and inspired by things when you were very young…

There can be a feeling of having lost one’s bearings when you’ve interrupted your ongoing persona, the consistent automatic System 1 process of carrying forward your own personal (necessarily somewhat infantile and childlike) coping patterns installed early in your life, without enough System 2 chipping in its own ideas back then.

At least before your new renaissance, it was easy to get through the day, and now that you are reconsidering everything in a new light, you may be stumped in the moment how to react.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman established these two constructs, System 1 and System 2. In System 1 the gut (controlled by the cerebellum) makes low-attention snap decisions, often based on precedent, engaging what Jung called the feelings and intuitions, what Freud called the subconscious, and which current psychology often refers to as the implicit mind. In System 2, the conscious mind (controlled by the frontal cortex) is employing focused attention to dissect options and make a decision, corresponding to what Jung and many others called thinking, reason, or the intellect, and current psychology refers to as explicit thought.

In our theory, we further divide System 1 into Flow state, Observer state, and Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). Flow state happens automatically and one’s actions flow effortlessly as if doing themselves. This is high effectiveness System 1. Observer state can emerge within System 1 until it evokes System 2 Observer state, which occurs as soon as the Observing self begins to interpret what it observes. All three of these states, which vary enormously in their effectiveness, can therefore occur within System 1. And all three effectiveness states can also occur within System 2.

What this means on a practical level is that one needs to quickly discriminate between the things that one does automatically that work well, and those which do not work well. If you are reacting automatically and things are going smoothly and you feel no sense of dilemma or negativity, it is probably Flow state. If you have an impulse to do something which is habitual but something inside tickles you with a subtle fleeting warning hunch and you are paying enough attention to catch it and hold back the impulse at least momentarily, you are probably in Observer state.

It is normal when you are shifting out of consistency with your past accumulated coping habits, and you are being real with positivity and constructiveness, there will be times when you wonder how to be real when you don’t really know the true you.

You have memories of taking strong sides with one thing or another and you are now a bit unmoored from those presumed certainties, which is a good thing when you are reconsidering everything. But for a while you could find yourself without a clear enough concept of what you stand for, what you’re here for, what purpose you are called to serve in this life. All of that wondering and uncertainty is a good thing. Something to welcome in with gratitude. It means you have grown up from the practices automatically formed back when you knew ever so little. You are ready to redefine your compass and where you are going. We will talk much more about this when we get to Key #5, however here in the midst of installing Key #3, the process starts of rediscovering your dream destiny.

The real you is the way you were awed and inspired by things when you were very young, and there were certain types of things that you loved doing, which are evidence of your true mission in this life, the gifts that you have to bring to the world.

Letting your memories go back as far as you can and looking for the most positive memories is a very pleasant way of getting the job done. Clues from your positive experiences will tell you who is the real you, what your heart desires for you to spend the rest of your life doing.

It’s normal once you’ve recaptured some of the essence of your calling that two things will happen that seem part of the good stuff but are actually relapses to EOP:

    1. You envision your success at doing your thing, and the trappings of success become more important to you than the joy of carrying out your métier. This is merely a more clandestine way of still being trapped in attachment to external outcomes, wealth, fame, respect, an overflow of aspirants for your affections, power, control, security, status, social acceptance. Remember: The joy of the mission is enough in itself to make your life a happy one that adds to the happiness of others, even if there is scant evidence of your having significant external effects.
    2. You perceive that the new life you wish to make for yourself competes for time with the things that you have been doing which are tangential or irrelevant or even at odds with the life you want to now live. This strikes you as a frustrating dilemma, bringing you down into EOP. Remember: You may not notice you are in EOP so make sure to recall  that a sense of dilemma is a clear indication of EOP. You want to set that aside and consider things from a detached viewpoint that is not dependent on external things, i.e. you want to slip back into the Observer state.

From the Observer state you can creatively solve the issues about how do you phase in your new life as the real you, and dial down the EOP life you have been living. This is a practical matter because we need money to live in the world as it is today and has been for all of recorded history (which goes back a very short time distance). If you yearn to spend your days doing X, you’ll have to start by using evenings and weekends for X, and it will take some time to begin to be able to make money in a new way, so again, the only way to win is to be independent of any dependencies on external outcomes, and simply enjoy the happiness of doing more of what you really want to do, even if it never gets anywhere in terms of public acclaim. This will be the beginnings of your becoming established in the real you.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,
Bill

ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Depression on the Rise

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Created May 10, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The inability to pay attention is a symptom of EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). My theory of Acceleritis postulates that the amount of question-producing stimuli experienced by the average person per day has been increasing ever since the start of written language. This produces information overload and the tendency to hasty closure – making up one’s mind too fast. It also causes reduction in considering the ultimate questions because we are too busy keeping up with the pace demanded of us by those around us, including media. The natural awe and wonder at life and the universe every child feels, fades away.

Do you let people complete whole sentences without jumping in to say something?

In EOP, one has little patience, because everything is happening too fast, and a part of oneself that wants to do everything perfectly is perpetually frustrated by this. Which makes us rush others to complete their thoughts.

Many people who have not yet been formally diagnosed as ADD or ADHD also have it.

In a recent New Yorker article, writer Nathan Heller cites a study by medical software company Epic which found an over-all tripling of ADHD diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, skewing even higher among younger people.

Inability to sustain attention doesn’t necessarily get optimally controlled by drugs, which often have side effects that bring down individual effectiveness in other ways. Metacognition would be a more successful medical strategy. Meditation could be more effective than medication in the long run. The optimal combination might include a gradual reduction of the drug and finally its removal.

50–70% of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also have ADHD according to the American Psychiatric Association:

“Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are both associated with internalizing problems like depression and anxiety, and the two often co-occur. A recent study found that ADHD is more strongly linked to depression than autism. ADHD traits are also a stronger predictor of depression symptoms than autistic traits.

Youth with ADHD and autism are at high risk of experiencing mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Depression is one of the most common mental health problems in young people with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) like ADHD and ASD. Depression in NDDs can be more severe, have an earlier age-at-onset, and have a worse prognosis than in the typically developing population.

Some factors that might be driving the relationship between ADHD and mental health problems include: Genes linked to ADHD, Stressful life events, Environmental factors, and Social cognitive factors.”

Gallup in May 2023 reported that in 2017, 18-29-year-olds in the U.S. were about average in terms of being diagnosed with depression, but by 2023 that level had increased +68% in just six years, to over one in three people in that age group. The whole population is experiencing an increase in depression. Metacognition is not just a nice to have anymore. It is a must.
Rising trends: lifetime and current depression rates

Today science is finally looking objectively at the use of psychedelic drugs for their potential benefits in dealing with medical problems of cognition and affect. The Harvard professors who brought this up in the 60s spelled out the necessary setting and mindsets necessary for such experiments to have the most beneficial effects.

Millions of people today are using cannabis, MDMA, psilocybin, etc. mostly for mood elevation, and can be taught to also use them for self-reflection, under medical guidance respecting the setting and mindset best practices established by the former Harvard professors, much-maligned Timothy Leary and much-beloved Richard Alpert (Ram Dass).

Use of drugs is not a necessity for the achievement of self-awareness, even for those with neurodevelopmental disorders. To demonstrate that semantic and semiotic interventions without chemicals can have beneficial effects, you might try reading parts of this free booklet, The Navigator, from The Human Effectiveness Institute to someone you know who is having any kind of hard time.

Another exercise you might suggest to a person suffering from any of these variations of extreme EOP is to try doing this exercise:

    • Get out along in nature.
    • Find a flower (or any interesting object).
    • Contemplate it.
    • Maintain eye contact with that object.
    • Gently focus your attention upon it.
    • Allow it to permeate your mind.
    •  Notice what you notice about it.
    •  Sustain this attention for at least one full minute without checking the time.
    •  If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the object of contemplation.
    • When you’ve had enough of the object, keep your eyes focused on it for a little while longer while using your peripheral vision – without moving your eyeballs – to see how much of the background you can see to the left, to the right, up, and down.

This exercise will also begin to bring attention under your conscious control.

Love to All,
Bill

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