Category Archives: Happiness Now

Oversimplifications Do Not Achieve a Happy Mind

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog: August 2, 2024

Achieve a happy mind.

Widespread mental emotional handicaps are not a new thing. Depression, anxiety, violent impulsiveness, sociopathy… they have been with us a long time.

So have inventions or discoveries of ways to improve one’s own use of the mind and feelings. They go back to antiquity. Counting to ten and taking deep breaths when losing one’s temper, for example, probably goes back before written language. In the first millennium of written language appear cogent ideas about better ways of using the mind that could have been passed down by oral tradition for generations. The Rig Veda had been sung for centuries by the time Vyasa first wrote it down. The advice given was quite sophisticated and the lessons taught about cooperation and consideration of consequences before action still to this day have not been learned by billions of us.

The Stoics such as Epictetus wrote down methods in considerable detail and I was amazed to read his Enchiridion written more than two millennia before my book Mind Magic with some of the same ideas, similarly expressed. Buddha’s and Christ’s teachings from millennia ago, as we all know, are at the highest levels of sophistication concerning what we permit to go on in our minds.

It’s not just the sophistication, it’s also the detail in which the method is described to the learner. The mind is extremely tricky and contains a robotical element which one must learn to deal with properly. The presence of this bio-AI was detected by the ancients and is described in the Old Testament as the “hardening of the heart”, which is only one of the ways the robot manifests. However, until Mind Magic in my lifetime of study of the mind and writings about the mind old and new, I have not seen detailed instructions for integrating the bio-AI into a useful member of the mind’s internal community, which is why I wrote Mind Magic. To date I have read many of the most popular as well as many of the least known self-help books and I have not found anything remotely detailed in terms of specific operational instructions as in Mind Magic.

This line of thought was triggered by an experience I had two days ago. I was having a Zoom call with one of my AI expert collaborators and he demonstrated to me a system that within a minute or two took the text of Mind Magic and turned it into a course, complete with tests. This of course was amazing and I am still duly impressed. The one fly in the ointment was the tests. They seemed to oversimplify the teachings into summary words containing no learning value, words like “Meditate”, “Contemplate”, “Use Mindfulness”, “Do Shadow Work”, “Use Affirmations”, “Law Of Attraction”, etc. The AI had scoured the Internet and found things like the ideas in Mind Magic and had assumed that all of the various books and scholarly papers were all giving the same generic advice. That is like summarizing the Old Testament or the words of Jesus into “Be Good” and implicitly assuming that advice was going to solve the whole thing and the person would emerge with a happy mind and life.

I have yet to look at the rest of the course and I expect that most of it will retain the detailed instructions so that all I’ll have to do is to retrain the AI how to pose the questions better. Yet it got me thinking about all of the generalizations and oversimplifications being made across the self-improvement field.

Overall impact of the New Age Movement since the 1970s has been quite positive despite shortcomings. There is a general sense of awareness and tendencies toward openness and respect for others that I did not perceive around me growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, where many kids carried knives and zipguns. The Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” is emblematic of the good that has been done by the human development movement which started in the 1960s. To some extent this has been the humanism movement supporting the logic of goodness as a way of life while the organized religions gradually slipped out of perceived relevancy in the modern world. Without the rise of the human potential movement the world today could be in even darker place, or we might have gotten to present straits much sooner.

Motivational speakers can, without passing on any detailed methodologies for better use of the mind and feelings, achieve short-term and even a sprinkling of long-term effects simply by their confidence, presentation ability, body language, and inspiring stories. Practically any self-help book can have some positive effect. However, without detailed instructions, especially concerning the multiple phenomena one finds in one’s mind, including the robot – which has now been called the inference engine and the prediction engine by Dr. Karl Friston – oversimplified advice will not achieve states of higher consciousness, and can even feed the ego to believe that one is in the Flow state when one is not. The term for this in the 1970s was Spiritual Materialism.

In every phase of life we see that there is a longing to keep things simpler than they actually are. This reductionism is one of the most dangerous temptations that we face. Oversimplifying something complex seems to be a good idea in the short run but then one bangs into the walls that have been ignored away. They didn’t really get removed by ignoring them. Instead, they stopped you when you needed to keep going and now you have to stop and rethink everything. Better to do all that thinking at the outset.

Look for methods, and test those that appeal to you. Identify platitudes and appreciate them as positive reminders, without pretending that they are sufficient on their own to solve problems.

My best to all,

Live chat with my avatar now.

Kiss & Make Up

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Created April 29, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Where this is all going at the moment is taking us backward about a century and has the earmarks of possibly ending all life on Earth. If you have great weapons lying around, eventually you use them. Particularly in a climate riven by hate, rushed by complexity, and distracted by messageweight.

The lostness of the despiritualized world causes every one of us to harbor an inner backbeat of inadequacy. It’s hard to go from there to Flow state. Although disseminating information and positive emotive content that are essentially Flow state lessons, is our job at The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI), we may not have enough time for that to work out.

Short of the Flow state for all, in the interim until we get to the latter altitude, let’s settle for Kiss & Make Up.

Although our bodies grew large, we are still babies, apparently in our terrible twos. We use grander language and have learned to wave our arms better, but our tantrums are still tantrums.

Presupposing no real change in consciousness effectiveness, even in our present babyish ways we can certainly understand when a party has gone wrong, how we all blame each other when it does, and there is not going to be a happy ending, our Moms are already getting into the fight, the free for all is turning scary and going nowhere but more widespread to the whole neighborhood. We all know how this movie ends, like several Hitlers taking half the world with sophisticated propaganda (that’s what has been going on for a few years already) and then starting on the other half with thermo, bio, and chemical weapons.

Going back to that earlier point about pandemic sense of inadequacy. Although we all have it, some of us have more of it than others. The cultures which become aggressive are the ones who feel inferior, and the only way they can think of to overcome that state is to blame and attack someone else. This is an extreme state of the ego.

Then as they become aggressive, the nicer people in the world (the ones with a lower dose of inadequacy bias) obviously tend to lose their tempers. You know how that works when you are feeling inadequate, people yelling at you are the perfect trigger to go into unstoppable rage. Again, a warped neuronal network has evolved called an ego, which cannot accept any blame. The spiral is self-accelerating downward. You yell at me and I yell at you.

The message our parents tried to teach us in such situations is to Kiss & Make Up.

Easy to say, but hard to do quickly on a global level. Where do you start? It’s a roller coaster, and everyone tells you to act tough, no one really wants to seem like we’re afraid of some other nation or even a horde of them. How do you walk the tightrope between condemnation and collaboration, can it really be done?

The purpose of my quartet of articles was to demonstrate, in a fictional way, a path to take us back into empathetic communication, where we first actually change ourselves profoundly so that we want to be friends with Putin et al. The articles depict a series of conversations between Biden, Putin, and Xi, with Biden initiating an attempted Kiss & Make Up.

Look, we’re one species. We have to stick together against all the other species in the universe with whom we may soon be in contact (not to mention against the viruses), as the billionaires take us into space. If an alien showed up on your doorstep, you’d be ready to hug every member of the other party that you currently hate, and Putin too. We’re all brothers and sisters. We’ve been out of sorts with each other for too long now. It’s time to Kiss & Make Up.

If you can’t find the words, for inspiration go to the quartet of articles. They will give you ideas relating to your estranged family and friends.

Aside from the articles, here’s an outline of how you might start to think about it:

Start with former friends and family members with whom you had a political falling out. Why does each one think the way she or he does? You know these people well, you can intuit the right answers. And why by contrast do you think the way you do?
What are the underlying differences – make a list.
What is something you can say positively about the other’s positions, which you also feel is true.
Then you be the first to apologize for the way you handled the situation and how it made it all the worse.
They will tend to apologize back if you’ve been authentic and displayed courageous willingness to show vulnerability.
That’s when you hug or Kiss & Make Up.

Let’s make a note to all get this done before Memorial Day, so we can have another Summer Of Love.

Love to all,

Bill

Things We Do Automatically That Do Us No Good

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Created February 4, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

We take certain things for granted because everyone else does these things, and we find ourselves just “naturally” doing them as well.

One example is hating. It has no beneficial effect on our own lives to “hate” specific things or people. If we don’t want those things or people in our lives, we can simply avoid them, not think about them, fill our lives with what we do want.

Hating doesn’t add any more efficiency or effectiveness to our own life. Like all negative emotions it has deleterious effects on our physical and mental health. It might give us bad dreams. It might be entangled with other thoughts and emotions in ways that are not obvious. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of precious mental emotional resources. It doesn’t add anything positive to our life. And yet we do it.

Habit. Conditioning. Imitative behavior. Fitting in with everyone else by doing what they all do. These are some of the reasons why it never occurs to us to think rationally about hating.

Hate comes from fear. We are afraid that this person or these people are going to do things that will harm the lives of myself and my loved ones, but we feel powerless to stop that from happening, so our robotical mind leaps to the hasty conclusion that our only recourse is to hate them. Hate therefore is an inner subconscious admission of powerlessness. It is better to retain a footing of having some actionable power that merely needs to be figured out and then carried out. Hate excuses us from thinking creatively about actions that might be taken. Even if such actions seem unlikely to make a difference, there is honor in focusing on action, there is dishonor in giving up and simply hating.

The other thing that stops us from thinking about stopping something like hating, is that we may assume that it’s impossible to stop an emotion, it just arises by itself, that we have no control over it.

That’s untrue. In the Observer state and in the Flow state, we can make decisions and keep to them. We are in a higher state of functioning when we are in in those states. They are apparently our natural states, and our crippled state in which we have no control over ourselves is not our natural state. We have wound up in this dwarfed version of ourselves by collectively drifting into a society that does not support our self-expression in our passion work, nor even enable us to discover what our passion work is. An accelerating society that cannot keep up with its own inventiveness.

It is never too late. We are in a position to lift ourselves out of substandard conditions. First of all, we all want it, that will help. However, we’re not in a state of unity, the kind of unity felt by billions of freedom-loving people during World War II. In that state of unity, and coming from the right place and from the good, we prevailed. We need that same unity today in order to set things right, to wind up even better than we ever were before, doing our favorite “work” which to us is “play”, not having strife with others, not having fear nor hate nor all of the other negative emotions which are so rampant today.

You are the only one who can find the hidden switch in yourself to decide to give up over reacting to everything and everyone, to forgive yourself and everyone and start fresh with everyone.

All the world needs now is forgiveness. We have drifted into hate by our loyalty to one group or another. Loyalty is a good thing. Too much of a good thing is where bad things come from. If we wish to express ourself by the groups we belong to, that’s good, but we should think big. Like loyalty to God. Like loyalty to the human race. Like loyalty to the United States of America.

Once we get stuck on loyalties of a more fragmented nature, the likelihood that it can cause harm to our lives begins to increase. The things that made us join one political party may have been right at the time, but things change, the people involved change, the agendas change, and inflexible loyalty under those conditions isn’t fair to ourselves, it’s not thinking rationally about what really moves us forward as an individual.

Judgment of others is not necessary. One can leave them to what they want to be. Hate is preceded by judgment. Neither one is necessary to our own evolution. They are both a waste of time.

Jesus said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

Your mind can be cleansed by you yourself and it will perform better when released from irrelevancies and poisons.

If you find yourself unable to forgive yourself, ask yourself, have you learned the lesson from the situation about which you can’t forgive yourself? If the answer is no, you must figure out the lesson, and then forgive yourself, knowing that you can react the right way the next time such a situation arises. (Not forgiving yourself after learning what to do next time is a waste of time and evidence of neurosis.) This is rational self-management, like you would expect a manager to exercise over a business. This is where the higher states of consciousness operate.

If you can’t find it in your heart to forgive Republicans, or Democrats, you can’t apply the same procedure. You can’t guarantee that all Democrats or all Republicans have learned their lessons from whatever it is you hold against them. You need to forgive them in advance of such reformation. This is simply because you can only take responsibility for yourself, you can’t control others. Then what is the justification for forgiving them? Because judgment is not yours to pass. “Judgment is mine,” saith the Lord. Live and let live. You know how hard it is to be a human being in this world as it is now. You can help others by forgiving them. If you run up against someone who is unquestionably doing terrible things, and you feel it’s up to you to stop them, then do that, while still forgiving them and stopping hating them because those things don’t help.

“Even forgive a murderer? Even forgive a mass murderer?” Yes, why not, all you are doing is cleansing your own heart, mind, body, and soul, it will make you more effective, and forgiving does not require condoning.

Why make such a profound change in your behavior now, after all these years of life? Because the world is in terrible danger. Civilization is fraying. Species becoming extinct one after another. We need two things to change fast: Unity to work cooperatively and respectfully with one another, not wasting time with insults. Unity within our self, finding our ideal self and sticking to it to the exclusion of old habits. It’s the Supreme Test.

Who could be placing us into the situation of a Supreme Test? It could only be a Supreme Being.

Let’s rise to the occasion and take action toward unity instead of making little excuses, blaming and hating others, and dodging the work we have to do on ourselves to become the Supreme Self within us.

Make It a Clean Break

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Created December 27, 2021

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog post.

We’ve been accultured to think of making New Years Resolutions. As a prospective pro-survival mechanism, it’s not a bad one. We slip back into old habits and it’s psychologically handy to have a once-a-year official restart to give us a jolt of extra energy to stick with our resolutions to not let this backsliding continue… this new year and forever after.

It’s refreshing to have a powwow with oneself, list the things worth changing, and vow to have the will power and determination for the rest of your life to stick with your own program all the way.

The first thing that may come up is a confidence-besieging attack presentation of why you are laughable to even think of making resolutions because you can never keep them.

In order to pass this gate, you need to change your judgment of your past history. You’re probably still carrying all the bad feelings about things you did. You still see yourself as having some good moments and some bad moments but not being proud enough of where you have gotten yourself. All of that is just one way of looking at it that you have been stuck in.

You need to pause and erase all those self-judgments and just look at it as if watching the life of another person. That objective view is the Observer state. You will know you are there when all the guilt and self-anger have disappeared and you are really indifferent to what you are looking at. This is reality. All the rest is made up in our minds, and we get stuck in it. The people around us affect us deeply and vice versa and so we reinforce and modify each other’s biased inner views and predispositions. Taking all of us away into a made-up world each culture makes up for itself.

What’s it all about, Alfie? What will be the things you see about yourself possibly needing to change? What will this teach you about your deepest motivations, that you maybe haven’t told yourself about lately on a conscious level?

Once you’ve had this contemplation with yourself, you’ll see your own life in its largest perspective. Where you are headed, what you’ll be striving for in terms of effects on the world and/or on yourself. You’ll see the “Why” in why you exist in this life and not in any other. You’ll know the passion work you want to be doing starting as soon as possible.

Once the new year begins, you will fairly quickly have a moment which feels as if your resolutions aren’t working at all. You will be tempted every time this happens to just forget about all that resolution stuff and live your life. But you’ll know in advance that this is the biggest trap to be well prepared for. Remember that line from a song (“That’s Life”), Pick yourself up and get back in the race.

All of this will be much easier if you’ve been practicing the Observer state already. That state is like a muscle it gets stronger with use. Soon you will astound yourself at how indifferent you are able to be, when alone and in your mind, about things which used to obsess you positively or negatively.

Look at the world and strip away all of the things that you’ve read or heard said, all of the thinking and guesswork and subjectivity, and just look at what is – the facts brought to you by your own senses, your own experiences, your own truthsense.

Maintaining that state of mind for as many seconds of the day as you can come back to it and sustain it despite interruptions and distractions will help you stay the course and carry out your resolutions.

Your sense of humor will also help you get back on the horse each time you fall off. Once you are able to leap back on within a second, you’ll start to have Flow state experiences more regularly.

You’ll know that even in this exalted state, above the level in which most of humanity walks around, a part of your own mind is still babbling even though your body takes actions which you realize are not the actions the babbler was just saying it was going to do, and those actions are obviously the right ones.

In these dis-associative moments, you could have an alarm reaction that you are going crazy and your personality is splitting. Deepen your breathing and wait for the alarm to wind down, just keep watching yourself. What you’ve experienced is what I call The Robot, and which I and many others also call it the Ego.

In my explanation of the Ego, it’s the neuron net we build in our brain as a result of our experiences. Teachers of meditation also refer to it as the “monkey mind”. It’s the loudmouth in our minds, and so we often assume it speaks for our true essence self, the Me That Was Born. The Ego is the source of hierarchical thinking, selfishness, possessiveness, and other predispositional biases which work against ourselves and other’s best interests, leading to violence, inequality, and a shallow degree of freedom.

Free will entails a certain degree of trial and error. Our history shows that we are accelerating in terms of our exploration of our own ideas and their material realization. I call this Acceleritis. It is the master culture in which all of the individual cultures of the planet fit (the vast majority), or being counter to the master culture, adapt or perish.

The Ego becomes most useful and least destructive when an individual reaches true maturity, and thus becomes a mensch. This is the same as spending virtually all one’s time in Observer state, and often in Flow state.

As you look to 2022 and make your plans for it, feel free to make best use of these states of mind suggested here.

Wishing you all the best of everything in 2022!

Love, Bill