Created June 2 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 12, click here.

Perhaps there is nothing after death. Perhaps consciousness goes on after death of the body. There are many ways in which this could be possible. Consciousness is information being internally communicated within an experience of “self”. That “self” might change after death, or not. Science has not ruled any of this out. Most of us tacitly assume that these things are unscientific because religion has considered them and as we all know, science and religion have historically been at odds. So the mind leaps to the hasty closure that these considerations about the self, consciousness, death, and so on are unscientific, questions that science cannot answer. Instead it is this hasty closure process that is itself unscientific. Science is all about holding to open-minded objectivity until there is evidence one way or another.

Here’s an experiment:
Consider that you do not “know” anything. Wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Reconsider all of your old beliefs. Do this systematically, in times you are alone. Treat it as a game. Come back to the game from time to time until you feel you have exhausted the game and reached its end.

When possible, write down as single words or very short phrases some of your beliefs, things you have believed are true up until this moment of reconsideration. Don’t try to get them all at once — more will come to you over time and you can add them to this list as they arise. All you really need to get started is any one belief you hold. For example, “Government is corrupt”, “Big Business is corrupt”, “We have but one life to live”, “Look out for yourself”, and so on.

Cross-examine yourself as to where this belief came from and what evidence you have to justify believing in it.

Ask yourself if you can imagine proving this belief one way or the other. What would be necessary? Imagine the scene in which you have proof that it is true, then imagine the scene in which you have proof that it is false. What would such proof consist of?

If you can’t prove the belief is true or false right now, ask yourself if you have a need to hold on to this belief. Does it serve a useful function? Does this belief do something for you?

Contemplate where the belief came from. One of your parents? Someone who had a great influence on you? Do you maintain this belief to gain the sense of having that person’s approval now? (As ridiculous as that is, but more on that later.)

Try on for size the possibility that you no longer need to have this belief, nor do you need to actively disbelieve it. See how that feels inside.

When you have run this game through to its goal you will have reopened your mind to all possibilities and will no longer have any of the keys in your mental computer keyboard stuck down. You will be able to take events as they come and see them as they are without imposing on them any prejudgments or forcing them into any preconceived molds. You will hear what the other person is really saying rather than hearing what you expect them to say.

You will have outsmarted hasty closure.

Common Sense

Following are common practices known for millennia to most everyone, though few actually practice them as a result of Acceleritis. They differ from the techniques described above in that these are relatively obvious. What is not obvious is their great value in supporting the quest for higher states of awareness:

Planning/Preparation

In a hurried rushing world, impatience is almost guaranteed. You can tell yourself not to be impatient but this admonition will have no force if life catches you unprepared for each day’s challenges. Don’t let yourself go to sleep until you have contemplated the likely events of the next day and prepared yourself with contingency tactics for different ways things could go with the people and situations you could meet with the next day. This way you will be as prepared as you can be, and this will make it more likely that you can actually achieve some degree of patience tomorrow. With adequate preparation the night before, you will be less distractable and therefore more likely to shift into Flow state, where you will be traveling at the “speed of life”.

Priority Order

At most times you will have more than one item competing for your attention: new emails, someone pops into your office, and besides all that you were trying to work on something. This causes frustration and helps fuel impatience. It’s best to focus all attention on one thing at a time, to get the highest quality, most lasting result. This implies a fast selection process to determine which item deserves attention first. The way you make this decision reveals a lot about you. Are you trying to curry favor, or are you overhauling a company; are you doing the easiest things, or giving priority to helping people?

If you can agree with yourself how to prioritize, it will put most of your daily attention and time on achieving the things that are most significant in life.

Patience/Quality/Appreciation

Did your mother or father ever say to you, “Take a deep breath and count to ten”? This is actually very practical advice. It is a way of avoiding hasty closure. And it is a way of instilling patience in yourself. It’s also helpful to remember that life is like a pearl necklace. It’s made of moments — the pearls — and all we ever have is the present moment in which to extract enjoyment and to show our quality. Making each moment precious. This is the real value of patience. We give our all to the moment, we are at our best, and we are taking as much pleasure out of the moment as we can. With the more difficult moments, that pleasure may not seem so pleasant; the pleasure then is in being interested in what is going on, and seeing what we can learn, which may make future moments of this kind more actually pleasant.

Objective Skepticism (Reasonable Doubt)

In science and in law, the only thing that ultimately counts is proof. Too bad so many of us do not realize this is also true in life itself. Before deciding that something is good or bad, or what to do about it, make sure you question yourself to see if you have anything proven to go on. Don’t accept evidence that wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. If you don’t have proof, proceed cautiously, and on the fair basis of “innocent until proven guilty”. Don’t accept hearsay. Make sure that your own empirical experience is your basis for proof of anything.

And don’t forget to breathe. Just breathe.

These platitudinous-sounding bits of common sense advice really work. Don’t avoid getting their benefit simply out of intellectual snobbery.

Yet these gems of ancient wisdom do not do the whole job. They effectively support, but do not change your consciousness. For that, you must profoundly change the way your mind does business.

Love to all,

Bill

Created May 12, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 9, click here.

Key One: Outsmart Hasty Closure

How to override the mechanism of
“making up one’s mind too fast due to overload panic”

The way Powerful Mind works is not so much that it requires you to do things; it changes the way you apprehend things. It exposes your conditioning so you can overrule it. You begin to have more insights, without the automatic brain function of pigeonholing and ignoring familiar experiences. To get back to your natural mind under the layers of conditioning, you have to be willing to re-examine everything. It’s a new way of seeing, with the truly naked eye, stripped of habits and assumptions. It’s a re-start of life.

By looking at everything a little more closely, you will still come back to the same deep intuitive positive feelings you have always had, but you will uproot and discard the lingering negative feelings by understanding them all the way through. Changing something in your daily pattern just ever so slightly, you will have removed a pebble in your shoe. That particular cause of negativity will start to shrink and eventually disappear.

This chapter is all about how to do that. It comes down from the sweeping objectives and high level principles set forth in the first four chapters, to rules of action applicable in each micro moment. As your mind offers up its plethora of thoughts and feelings, you need to discern the really valuable ones in the present moment, filtering out the rest for later contemplation. If an idea or a feeling is important it will come back — you needn’t be overly concerned about forgetting things that are truly important. But keep writing down trigger words whenever you have the feeling that a specific thought is worth coming back to.

Now let’s talk about hasty closure.

Built into each human being before birth is an information-processing program whose apparent purpose is to help us understand our external and internal experiences.

It works as follows: certain experiences or perceptions trigger a feeling of dissonance in the mind; you pay closer attention to and think about these
until you have a feeling of having absorbed their information, at which point
the feeling of dissonance goes away and we say that you have achieved closure.

Hasty closure can be defined as those instances in which it would have been useful to you to think further before closure.

Why would Nature build such a program into our brains? Do other animals also have such a program?

Nature does such things to increase our survivability. Sometimes Nature experiments, as Darwin pointed out, building in programs and/or characteristics that may have been intended to increase survivability, but actually do not, and which may even lower the species’ chances of survival. In those cases, the species dies out.

We can see some evidence of this program in other animals besides ourselves, as for example when you play with a cat or dog and trick it in some way — it looks like the animal is trying to figure out what happened. Of course, we may just be anthropomorphizing (projecting human ways onto non-humans) and what looks like the animal’s search for closure might be something else.

The brain’s drive for closure is something that has been proven scientifically by the field of gestalt psychology. That branch of psychology has experimentally demonstrated over and over again that the brain fills in gaps in pictures based on expectations derived from prior experiences and even based on belief systems imposed by conditioning.

We can all validate this for ourselves based on our own experiences. When you look at clouds, don’t you often see objects in their shapes? This is a form of perceptual gestalting — the brain trying to make sense of something, putting things seen into categories. An automatic function of the brain is “guessing” at what is out there. If we are moving rapidly we may see a sign and think we know what it says, but then if we look more carefully, it actually says something different. Yet the brain threw up a “guess” at what the sign said, rather than just leaving it a blur. These are “autonomic” (automatic pilot) attempts at perceptual closure. There are also autonomic attempts at intellectual closure.

I often — pretty much every day, many times each day — find myself feeling an urgency to understand something, to explain it to myself, so that I experience the feeling of closure, which comes as a sense of sudden release and the willingness to go on to something else.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced the same thing, perhaps not as often or maybe more often — we are all different, with an underlying commonality. Trying to remember the word for something is one simple example. Isn’t it a bit strange how important it seems to get to the end of the process, where you finally remember the word? This is universally obvious evidence that we are programmed to want to achieve closure.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill